JULIAN: Ruffles?
EVELYN: I think I got my centuries mixed up. Time’s a confusing thing. But I felt sorry for Caitlin.
JULIAN: In the beginning, there was a girl in another time who was transported to a future time and she was miserable.
EVELYN: Exactly. Anyway. There wasn’t really anyone at the party that I liked. I’d got there late, and everyone was pretty much out of it. So, I was just about to leave, when I saw the stairwell up to the roof, and up I went. And then, because that’s how things always go – and then, there you were.
JULIAN: I was there?
EVELYN: Yes. You were sitting on the roof. You were by yourself, drinking wine, wearing black trousers and a shirt and a monocle, because you said it was the only thing you could find to make yourself look different. It made one of your eyes look ridiculously large, and I couldn’t help laughing.
JULIAN: Sounds about right.
EVELYN: What?
JULIAN: That the first thing you’d do was mock me.
EVELYN: Very funny. [Pause] And you did look very funny, you must admit.
JULIAN: I can’t admit. I don’t remember.
EVELYN: How can you not remember? It was our beginning. On the roof of Caitlin’s house. I said that I was a girl who’d stepped out from the future, and that I’d come to tell you that the party downstairs was awful, just so you’d be forewarned.
JULIAN: And I said that it wasn’t a forewarning, because I already knew that, which is why I was on the roof in the first place.
EVELYN: So you do remember!
JULIAN: No. I’m just guessing. Because you said that I was by myself, on the roof, drinking wine.
EVELYN: Well, that’s exactly what you did say. You said that you knew the party was terrible but that it was calm up in the open, so you thought you’d sit there for a while. You handed me the wine bottle, and told me to take a seat, and I did. There were pigeon nests further along, and the occasional puddle. It wasn’t flat, either, the roof. It sloped down, like it was about to fall off.
JULIAN: Roofs do tend to slope, you know.
EVELYN: I know that.
JULIAN: Sounds like a stupid thing to be doing, really, climbing a roof like that in the dark, drunk.
EVELYN: Yeah, well, it’s the kind of thing we did back then. And, anyway, you went there first.
JULIAN: That’s true.
EVELYN: So. We sat, in the wet, near the birds’ nests, slugging wine out of a bottle in this new rooftop world of ours. Wine that probably didn’t even belong to us, and we looked out across the city. There was a park on the other side of the street, past the terraced houses, leading up to the university. Rows of trees along the paths. So many of them, lined up. Like they could uproot themselves and walk. It was dark, but not pitch black because of all the streetlights. The sky was orange, really orange. Like it was on fire. And I said, ‘The sky looks like it’s on fire.’ And you said, ‘I know. I hope the trees don’t burn.’ And we sat there, watching the sun rise. And I thought: I like you. I like you a lot.
[Pause]
JULIAN: I do remember the orange.
EVELYN: You do?
JULIAN: Yeah, I do. Not an orange light, though. Oranges. I remember oranges.
EVELYN: What, the fruit?
JULIAN: Yes, the fruit. I don’t remember the roof, or the wine, or the monocle. I remember our beginning being in a supermarket.
EVELYN: I hate supermarkets. Why would I have met you in a supermarket?
JULIAN: Don’t bash our beginning, Evelyn. We met in the fruit aisle.
EVELYN [laughing]: No we didn’t!
JULIAN: Yes, we did. I was hungover, and you were hungover. It was a Sunday afternoon, and we’d only just woken up. Or, I assumed you’d only just woken up. It certainly looked that way.
EVELYN: Charming.
JULIAN: And I was practically sleepwalking. I’d been writing an essay the night before, and I’d decided to drink whisky to make the essay writing easier, only that didn’t work. It just meant that the essay took longer to write.
EVELYN: What was the essay on?
JULIAN: M.W.I.
EVELYN: What’s that?
JULIAN: The Many Worlds Interpretation. Where every time you make a decision, the other options you didn’t choose play out somewhere. Somewhere else. In some other world. So, somewhere there’s a you who didn’t go up onto the roof. There’s a Caitlin who wasn’t sitting by herself. And there’s also a me who didn’t drink whisky whilst essay-writing, and so wasn’t hungover, and therefore didn’t feel the need to go and get orange juice and bacon and bread to try and make myself feel better. Anyway. On that particular day, in that particular beginning, in that particular world, I was hungover. And so were you, I think. And we were both in a supermarket. You were filling a basket with oranges. Only oranges, nothing else, and people were staring at you.
EVELYN: It’s not nice to stare.
JULIAN: Well, I was staring, too. You were piling about a dozen or so into a basket. There wasn’t any orange juice left, because the supermarket got deliveries on Mondays so most of the shelves were empty. So, I thought, ‘Hey, I’ll just buy oranges and make the juice myself.’ Only you were hogging all the oranges.
EVELYN: You were going to make orange juice yourself, when you were hungover? Did you even own a juicer as a student?
JULIAN: I wasn’t exactly thinking straight.
EVELYN: I guess not.
JULIAN: So, anyway, I went over to you and said: ‘I’d like some oranges, too, please.’ And you just looked at me, like I’d said something stupid, and you said, ‘Go ahead. It’s a free country.’ And I felt like saying that it isn’t a free country, because all decisions are predetermined and all of them happen, all of the time, just in different places in different worlds. But I couldn’t say that.
EVELYN: You mean, you chose not to say that.
JULIAN: Well, I …
EVELYN: So, that’s free will right there. You chose not to say those things to me.
JULIAN: Another me, somewhere else, did say those things to you, though.
EVELYN: Yeah, and another me probably looked at you in disdain and walked off and never saw you again.
JULIAN: Well, I didn’t say anything back, and you left four oranges in the box, and I picked them up and put them in my basket, and then I followed you to the till.
‘What are you going to do with all of those oranges?’ I asked you.
‘I’m building a sculpture with them,’ you said. ‘It’s an art project.’
‘You’re building a sculpture with oranges? A sculpture of what?’
‘The sun,’ you said. ‘A huge burning star. I’m going to use a glue gun. It might not work.’
‘Won’t the art … decay?’
‘That’s life,’ you said. ‘Things are born. And then they die.’
EVELYN: I don’t remember any of this.
JULIAN: Well, that’s what you said. That your art class was doing a project on the beginning of the world. Something pretentious about creating things about creation. And I said, that’s a coincidence, and I told you about my essay. About beginnings and endings and the possibility of other worlds.
EVELYN: And that was our beginning?