	Sliding Sideways
	================


"It's like I'm sliding sideways through time and space," 
Quentin explained.

 Vivienne nodded encouragingly.

 "You might have seen that movie Sliding Doors with 
Gwyneth Paltrow," he continued. "Maybe, in this 
continuum, it stars Renee Zellweger." 

"I'm sure it was Uma Thurman."

"Whoever." Quentin took another sip from his beer. 
"Sliding sideways, she was. Only for me, it's happening all 
the time."

"All the time?" Vivienne asked, raising an eyebrow. "How 
can that be?"

"It's like Stephen Hawkings explains. You know, that we 
live in an infinity of parallel universes. Only that while most 
people stay in one spacetime continuum all their lives, I'm 
constantly sliding through all of them. I don't go backwards 
and forwards in time. I just go forwards, but the universe 
I'm in changes around me. And I've got no control of it any 
more than most people have any choice about which 
parallel universe they spend the whole of their lives in."

Quentin paused to assess Vivienne's reaction. Was she 
humouring him? He often felt the urge to confess his 
predicament. He knew that the Quentin who would live 
with the confession was the Quentin whose body he was 
currently occupying and who would, no doubt, be 
thoroughly confused by the memory of this occasion. 

Vivienne tapped her cigarette on the ashtray. "Go on," she 
urged him. 

"Are you sure?" Quentin asked. 

Most women he spoke to on this matter would now ask 
"What you on?" Or they would pretend not to have heard 
anything. He was more anxious than he should be. Why 
should he care what Vivienne thought about the Quentin 
she had just met? Not all Quentins were especially kind to 
him for the moment of his residency. He had several times 
suffered venereal disease, war wounds, and an 
uncomfortably generous waistline.

"Yes. It's fascinating," said Vivienne, puffing smoke from 
her cigarette and running a long fingernail along the rim of 
her wine glass.

"I've seen so many different worlds," Quentin continued. 
"There are those where the Cold War persisted with the 
Soviet Union under President Andropov until the present 
day. There are those where President Kennedy was not 
assassinated at Houston. There are those where the Sex 
Pistols never existed. There's even one where some Arab 
terrorists flew Boeing 747s into the World Trade Center."

Vivienne raised her eyebrows. "I can't believe that! It's like 
imagining that Sir John Lennon never became the world's 
best selling novelist."

"I've seen that. He was assassinated, in fact," Quentin 
admitted. "I've even been in a universe where the richest 
man in the world was that geek who runs Microsoft."

"I can't believe that either! How could IBM, Sun or Lotus 
allow that to happen?"

"It's like everything since the time I was born in the early 
1960s that could happen has happened. Everything before 
then is the same in all the universes I've inhabited, but after 
that it sort of diverges."

"No nuclear wars?"

"Not ones I've survived, though there was a small one in 
the Middle East in the 1970s that led to universal 
disarmament. It's amazing what difference a few radioactive 
craters can make to a world!"

"I can imagine!" Vivienne said. 

There was a curious sparkle in her eyes that suggested to 
Quentin that she was genuinely fascinated. She showed 
none of the amused scepticism that usually accompanied 
the most sympathetic ears to his predicament. Was she 
simply very good at hiding her real thoughts? Or was she 
playing him along?

"I once decided to write an account of my life," Quentin 
continued. "I had this 4GHz computer running this 
operating system called Winix. It was fantastic! And this 
was a few years back, whereas the best computers 
hereabouts aren't a quarter as fast. Anyway, I wrote all day 
and all night, while the wife I had, a pretty woman I've not 
seen since, kept moaning about me staying up. Then I 
thought I'd review what I'd written. And you know what?"

"What?" wondered Vivienne, raising her eyebrows in 
apparent interest.

 "I didn't recognise what I read at the start of my account. 
It was like someone else had written it with totally different 
memories. It was then it occurred to me that there is a sort 
of continuum of Quentins, just like me, also sliding 
sideways through space and time. In fact, maybe everyone 
has a host of selves like me, perhaps an infinity of them in 
the infinity of parallel universes. And maybe people like me 
are everywhere."

"Fascinating!" remarked Vivienne, stubbing out her 
cigarette.

Quentin scrutinised Vivienne closely. Despite her apparent 
encouragement, Quentin was still half-expecting a sarcastic 
rejoinder. Did she really believe him? She was an attractive 
woman, who carried around with her a self-assurance that 
would normally manifest itself in contempt towards a man 
like him, any man, who told a story that must seem 
ridiculously far-fetched.

"You think I'm mad, don't you?" he asked her, as she 
brushed her black shoulder length hair off the sharp 
shoulders of her Giuseppe Marconi suit.

"Not at all," Vivienne said with a smile. "In fact, I think I 
might be falling in love with you."

"Now, you are taking the piss!" remarked Quentin. 

How likely was that? He wasn't a bad-looking bloke and 
the Quentin he was now had reasonable dress sense with 
well-groomed hair and an expensive Ben Jones leather 
jacket. But no one had ever said that to him before after 
such a short time. And certainly not after he had divulged 
his most intimate truths.

Vivienne shook her head. "I'm not taking the piss, Quentin. 
Although it's a bit of an exaggeration to say I'm in love as 
such, you are just the man I've always wanted to meet. All 
my life, in fact."

Quentin blushed. "I simply don't believe that..."

"You're right. You're not the only one 'sliding sideways' 
through space and time, as you call it. It's my life as well, 
you know, although I don't have a term for it. It's just I've 
never met anyone the same as me in that way."

Quentin shook his head violently and squeezed his eyes 
tight. When he opened them, Vivienne was still there. 

"You mean you're like me? Every day you wake up and live 
in a slightly different world, subtly changing and mutating?"

Vivienne nodded. She opened her cigarette packet and put 
another Marlboro Gold Tip in her mouth. 

"It's not always gradual. That's why I asked about nuclear 
war. I spent a whole week in a kind of post-apocalyptic 
world. It was horrible! I had to eat rats and wear a lead-
lined coat. That Ronald Reagan went just a little too far 
with his threats against the Soviets in the Pakistani missile 
crisis..."

"I remember that. It was touch and go, as far as I 
remember."

"And then President Brezhnev, the senile git, called 
Reagan's bluff and it was fireworks!  I wasn't there for the 
crisis, but I was there several years later. The thing is it 
happened suddenly. One moment I was living in this 
student squat in Hackney, the next minute in some nuclear 
wasteland. And when I came out of it, that was sudden as 
well. I was walking through some woodland trying to avoid 
some thuggish scavengers, and when I emerged at the end, 
it was by a motorway, only instead of it being empty and 
overgrown with mutant grass, there were cars driving along 
it, just like there'd never been a nuclear war. As I guess 
there never had been. I was fucking delighted, I can tell 
you!"

Quentin shook his head again. "And I thought the Cuban 
Crisis might have become the big one!" he exclaimed.

"I've never met anyone else who knows what it's like, not 
so much living in a nuclear wasteland, but living each day in 
a different world. I thought I was the only one."

"So did I!" admitted Quentin. 

At last! After all these years, here was proof that there were 
others who knew what he knew and lived the life he lived.

"So, how did you first discover things were like that?" 
Quentin asked. "I was in my teens. There are so many 
changes as you grow up, you don't realise that some are not 
the kind of changes that happen to everyone. You know, 
milk teeth falling out, your shape changing as you grow 
older, puberty, all that stuff."

"I think it was in my teens, too."

"When I tried telling people they thought I was mad. I was 
even taken to see a psychiatrist. But I discovered that 
pretty soon after I told people, they forgot about it. Other 
people, my parents, my friends, my teachers, didn't have the 
same memories as me. Eventually, I realised that it was the 
Quentin I'd been before and made the confessions who'd 
have to live with the consequences of it, not me. It was like 
I could start afresh every day. I discovered I could do 
whatever I fucking liked and I'd never need worry about 
living with more than the memory of it."

"Me too!" exclaimed Vivienne, drawing on her cigarette. 
"It's so fucking liberating! In fact, I've several times done 
things, just because I knew I could. I stripped naked in a 
pub. Just because I could. I sucked a stranger's cock in 
public because I knew I wouldn't suffer for it. I've had sex 
with anyone I fancied."

Quentin raised his eyebrows. "Well..." he remarked, "I've 
been a bit bolder than I might have been. Like I've been 
tonight, you know, approaching an attractive woman like 
you knowing that if you rejected me it'd be the Quentin I'm 
inside now who'd live with the rejection. I've been 
unfaithful to the several different wives and girlfriends I've 
had, who, after all, I didn't really know very well and didn't 
always like. I've often done things I can't claim to be proud 
of. No Groundhog Day redemption for me, I'm afraid. But 
I've never been as bold as you."

Vivienne shrugged. "I guess us spacetime travellers all have 
different ways of coping with the freedom we've been 
granted," she mused. "The Viviennes whose bodies I've 
occupied have all been pretty different: all the different 
ways I could have been, and, of course, somewhere in 
space and time actually am. Some Viviennes I've been were 
pretty tight-arsed and that's when I've probably been most 
wicked. The current Vivienne's got a boyfriend who works 
in the City, but she seems pretty free and easy. Which suits 
me! None of that 'Christ, Viv! What's got into you?' that 
I've heard so many times."

Quentin finished his glass of beer and pulled out a twenty 
pound note, with its head of King Charles the Third on the 
back, and waved it at the barmaid. "What do you want?"

"I'll have another glass of house dry white," Vivienne said.

"And I'll have another pint of Blackwell's. I've never heard 
of that beer before this week, but it seems to be the most 
popular round here."

"It's the little things that are most confusing," Vivienne 
commented. "I was amazed to see that there's no Jubilee 
Line here. And no one's ever heard of Madonna. She never 
made it big in this world. And who'd believe that Colin 
Powell would become President of the United States!"

The two of them threaded through the crowded bar to 
some seats by the jukebox on which was playing a selection 
of old pop songs, some familiar, some surreally different in 
detail and some totally unfamiliar. Quentin studied Vivienne 
with an approving eye as they sat down. 

She was a little younger than him, probably in her mid to 
late thirties. She was a woman who, being so slender and 
assertively pretty now, must have been quite a head-turner 
when she was younger. She crossed her long slender legs, 
almost all her stockinged thigh on display under her 
fashionably short skirt, and her blouse coquettishly 
unbuttoned under her smart jacket. 

Vivienne smiled. She flashed a healthy dental display behind 
her wide reddened lips. She pulled out another cigarette 
from her packet and lit it.

"I still can't believe it's true!" she said, unable to disguise 
the excitement in her voice. 

"So, where do you live and what do you do?" wondered 
Quentin. A fairly obvious question really, but he knew the 
answer wouldn't be so obvious.

"I can never be sure," Vivienne confessed. "When I woke 
up this morning I was living in a semi on the other side of 
town, but whether I still live there I don't know. The times 
I've gone to where I thought was home only to find that the 
keys don't fit in the door! And when I wake up, I'm never 
sure where I'll be, who I'll have been sleeping with and 
where I'm supposed to be working. I think I work as a 
project manager for Pineapple Computers, but I didn't 
bother going to work. What use would I be if I did? I don't 
know anything about the job and I'd be useless at any 
meeting. So, I just went to see a film, Martin Scorsese's 
Lord of the Rings, and mooched about at Sunbucks."

"Same with me," Quentin replied. He lit a cigarette he took 
from the half-empty packet of Benson & Hedges Gold Leaf 
he found in his pocket. Had he started the evening smoking 
that brand? "I think I'm recently separated from my wife, 
who I don't recognise from the photographs on the 
mantelpiece. I've no idea whether I still work at the brokers 
I was supposed to be working for yesterday. It's really 
stupid going to work. Once I was a Spanish teacher in 
Exeter and I don't know a word of Spanish. And the 
number of wives I've had!"

Vivienne smiled. "Sometimes the husband or lover I wake 
up with is a real catch," she admitted. "It's like I've really 
lucked out. Sometimes you can't believe the disgusting 
lump of lard I've been sleeping next to. They really hate it 
when they start groping me and I tell them to fuck off."

"The best I ever had," Quentin boasted, "was this model I 
was married to. She was fantastic. I couldn't take my hands 
off her, though I don't know how much she appreciated my 
attention. I was some kind of techno musician, though I 
didn't know what I was supposed to do with all the 
technical equipment. My hair was halfway down my back. I 
just wished I'd stayed like that for longer. One day I went 
to sleep in an enormous bed with this gorgeous blonde and 
woke up the following day a homeless drunkard in 
Brighton. That was horrible!"

"I've thought about trying to escape from it all," Vivienne 
said. She drew on her cigarette and sipped from her glass of 
wine. "You know like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. I got 
on this plane to Hawaii, fell asleep over the Pacific, and 
woke up in my bed in Slough. Another time I was in a car 
crash and lost consciousness with blood all over me. The 
next thing I knew I woke up in a comfy bed with no bruises 
or anything. That really shook me. Had I just died or 
something?"

The two of them sighed. 

Quentin looked around him at the other people in the bar. 
He wasn't sure that the barmaid wore the same green 
blouse when he entered the pub. And when had he acquired 
that strange scar just above his thumb? There was so much 
he knew nothing about the lives of the Quentins whose 
bodies he drifted through. And Vivienne, didn't she have 
slightly different coloured lipstick when he started talking 
to her? 

Life was so confusing. It might be wonderful, but it was 
sometimes such an effort to relax when each day brought 
new surprises and new revelations. He hoped he'd never 
again have a repetition of that month in gaol for 
manslaughter. Or the weeks shooting up heroin in that 
derelict house in Manchester. Or that day in hospital with 
his face ripped apart by shards of glass. Life could also be 
intolerably hard.

"Do you want to come back to my apartment? It's 
gorgeous. It faces onto the river and there's a lovely view 
from the window."

"Beats Hounslow, that's for sure," agreed Vivienne. "Yeah! 
Why not? Fuck it! Tomorrow I'll probably wake up in 
Timbuktu."

Quentin laughed, but remembered only too well those 
weeks when he found himself working as an aid worker in 
the Sudan. It was difficult to be as irresponsible as he'd like 
to be with so many people relying on him, but impossible 
for him to perform the medical duties in which the Quentin 
whose body he inhabited was proficient.

When Quentin opened the door to his apartment, with 
Vivienne giggling behind him, he felt an anxiety he never 
normally experienced when he took a woman home with 
him. It wasn't just the anxiety that he'd find a wife or 
girlfriend he'd never known before waiting impatiently for 
him. Nor was it the fear that this encounter might not 
resolve itself in a physical way. Vivienne's passionate kiss 
under the shelter of the nearby Sainsbury Metro made clear 
that her intentions were precisely the same as his. He had, 
at last, after all these years, met someone who could be his 
real soulmate. Someone, at last, who could truly understand 
his deepest anxieties and concerns. Someone with whom, 
already, he would like to spend the rest of his days.

He stretched his palms out to press against Vivienne's bared 
breasts with tension that tingled like electricity through her 
body. The disrobing had been easy. The act of embracing 
her naked body was much more fraught. Would she 
suddenly vanish as his hands made contact on a bosom still 
firm and pert? Would she suddenly mutate, as had 
happened before, into someone wholly different from the 
one he'd accompanied through the Docklands streets: his 
arm around her waist and his nose nuzzling her long brown 
hair? 

Contact was made. The docking was smooth. Their mouths 
grappled together with passionate urgency. When he placed 
his hand on her crotch, it was already dripping with a warm 
moistness of desire that hastened his impatience to couple 
with someone who might anchor his drifting through 
universes of subtle mutation. 

Someone, perhaps, who could share the jokes he often 
wanted to share as he noticed details that hinted at the 
larger changes in the world around him. One who would 
remember, as he did, a world where Prime Minister Gordon 
Brown didn't defect to the Liberal Democrats rather than 
lose a term in office. One who remembered a world where 
the Euro was accepted with amazing enthusiasm by the 
British public. Or one who might also know a world where 
the UK refused to join the European Community.

Their two bodies fell onto the bed, Vivienne's gasps of 
passion and enthusiasm drowned out by his own. And when 
they conjoined,?his penis entering her vagina with 
energetic thrusts, each one savoured and relished as they 
had rarely been before,?it was not just two bodies, but 
two souls, that met in each upward thrust of her crotch, as 
wild and unrestrained as any he could remember. It was 
truly two people becoming one. As little as nothing 
separated his hairy torso from her full bosom. Or his 
slightly bulging stomach on her flat muscular one. Or his 
stubbled chin grating against her smooth one.

The orgasms she voiced, which he reciprocated without 
losing the will and vigour to continue, were full, throaty 
and unfeigned. Fuck the neighbours. Quentin would never 
confront their complaints about the passion they could hear 
through the walls. This was it. This was the moment. This 
was the zenith of his life.

When they parted, two bodies reluctant to accept any pause 
in their lovemaking as anything other than brief respite, they 
exchanged memories and observations of the different 
worlds they had drifted through. The universe where the 
Americans won the Vietnam War. The universe where the 
Naturist Party won a seat in parliament (and the furore that 
caused). The universe where Michael Jackson became a 
militant black cleric and did remarkably well in the 
Presidential elections.

But no amount of passion could last forever, and neither 
Vivienne nor Quentin had the stamina of youth. They 
eventually accepted defeat. More lovemaking was beyond 
them. The two lay together on the huge double bed, sheets 
pushed to one side, while below the window of Quentin's 
apartment, a barge chugged along the River Thames, its 
lights shining against the darkness of the double-glazed 
glass.

It was to the sound of seagulls and tourist barges that 
Quentin awoke many hours later, gratified to find Vivienne 
still nestled beside him. He stared at the ceiling, his naked 
body cuddled up close to Vivienne who was dozing 
peacefully.

She was still here! 

Now was the first day of the rest of his life, he mused, 
reflecting on the threadbare observation, but in his case one 
that promised to be rather more literally true. He smiled 
appreciatively at Vivienne as her eyes opened and she 
gazed at him through her long eyelashes.

"Still here?" he asked with a smile.

"Still here," she replied, "but not for long. I've got to get to 
the office soon. It's a working day."

"Are you going to work then?" wondered Quentin.

"Well, of course. And you? Back to the City?"

Quentin wasn't sure how he should answer. He wasn't sure 
where he worked exactly. "We'll see each other again, 
won't we?" he asked hopefully.

"I guess so, although my husband won't like it, I'm sure."

"If, of course, it's the same husband as yesterday..."

Vivienne frowned. "You what?"

"I mean, you don't know who it might be today. It could be 
anyone."

"Could it?" asked Vivienne, puzzled and leaning towards 
him on her arm.

"Indeed," said Quentin, warming to the theme, "who knows 
what world we've woken up in? For all we know, Elvis 
Presley might be dead, Jack Straw might be Prime Minister 
and there might be no Fox TV."

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm just saying we don't know how the universe might 
have changed since yesterday."

"What you on!" Vivienne exclaimed, with a nervous laugh. 
"I can't imagine any of those things happening. Have you 
gone loopy?"

"No," laughed Quentin. "I was just speculating. You know, 
the two of us sliding sideways through space and time..."

"'Sliding sideways'? What kind of metaphysical rubbish is 
this? I'm not sure I do want to see you again if you spout 
stuff like that."

Quentin panicked slightly, but he relished having his arm 
around her. "Don't you remember our conversation 
yesterday?"

"I guess so. Mostly about your job in the City, the money 
you earn and how your wife doesn't understand you. But, 
let's be honest, will we, you're not the first married man I've 
heard go on like that..."

"No?" Quentin wondered. Was this the same Vivienne? 

Then he heard a door slam shut. It was the one to his 
apartment. Who could this be?

"Quentin, I'm home!" he heard a woman's cheerful voice 
echo from the hallway. "They found an earlier flight from 
Washington after all. You're not still in bed, are you?"

"What the fuck?" said Vivienne, echoing Quentin's own 
thoughts. "You said your wife would no way be back."

The door to the bedroom opened and in the slow motion 
prelude to the drama that followed, in which he was the 
victim of a torrent of verbal abuse from both Vivienne and 
a woman he didn't recognise but was his wife of many 
years, he saw a neat figure silhouetted against the doorway. 
She wore a smart business suit, was slim but much the same 
age as Quentin, and her face was frozen in an expression of 
unfeigned horror and disgust. And no wonder, at the sight 
of her husband, naked and lying next to an equally naked 
woman, who was slow, almost impertinently so, in covering 
her breasts under the bed linen.

The two women attacked him, almost ganging up with each 
other, though from opposite poles, in their condemnation of 
his infidelity and stupidity. As Quentin sat there on the bed, 
still naked, rocking with the depression that suddenly 
engulfed him, it was not guilt that made him so miserable. 
After all, this was not the first time that one wife or 
girlfriend or other found him in bed with another woman.

The moment had passed. 

The Vivienne he was with was no longer the soulmate for 
whom he would have gladly abandoned his tall, elegant 
wife. She was a woman who was as much a stranger to him 
as the woman he had inadvertently cheated.







