Here comes Alice, foot in front of foot, her hands in the warm confines of her jacket pockets, her hair carelessly tied back with a scrunchie, her eyes determinedly staring down at her black Doc Martens, step after step after step. She is not thinking. She is trying not to think. Her mind, one of the most powerful in this part of the galaxy, must be crowded with repetitive noise, white noise, random junk, in case it remembers. Left boot, black leather, scuffed, yellow stitching. Right boot, much the same. When she was a girl she couldn't remember which was right and the teacher laughed at her in front of the class. Of course her boots will be the same every step, but so will the paving slabs. When she was a toddler she peed in her wellies and she didn't tell her mum, and she walked around all day with wet feet too embarrassed to talk about it. She will keep walking this street and pretend it's Perivale until it ends, and then, well, she will take another corner and walk down that one. When she was a kid the boys threw her trainers over the school wall, and Manisha knocked their teeth out. I miss Manisha, she thinks. I miss Perivale.
Fuck it, I'm making this up, this isn't Perivale. She stops. She feels the thoughts she's trying to hold back, malevolent thunderclouds at the edges of her mind. Perivale has grey streets, it has shops, it has houses that look like houses. Maybe these would look like houses, if you were colour blind. Except that they're kind of transparent. Alice is autonomous, but even though most of the time she knows what to do in a crisis, there are moments when she wants to ask for help. The thoughts edge closer. Maybe the long walk isn't working. Maybe it has to be vodka and an hour of full volume on the stereo she got from... Oh, maybe it has to be the explosives, she's sure she has some left. Maybe it has to be razor blades.
The thought slipped in, and the sound of its footfall hummed in her head a moment, the memory of how she'd dealt with the pain rippling through her from head to fingertips. Sometimes you can see the pain coming and you can't turn yourself away, and you keep walking, just as she'd kept walking. At least she wouldn't have to hide it from her mum these days. Alice takes a long, slow breath through her nose, and closes her eyes, and breathes it out, and tells herself she is sane.
For a moment her brain is as quiet as the streets.
Actually, that's an oddity too: Perivale isn't deserted, any more than it looks like a rainbow exploded on it. Where is everyone? She peers at the shop beside her, which is orange. None of the buildings seem to be more than one colour; it's like being in a plastic model town for an enormous child. In the silence, she finds herself reading the sign aloud: "Early closing Wednesday". Is it Wednesday? Alice can't remember, but the shop is closed anyway. She shakes the door, and is surprised to find that the door is part of the building; shaking it has no effect, except that the shop turns through a murky brown colour into royal blue. Alice sits down on the pavement, head in hands, and sighs.
But she's not as depressed as she might be. The interruption has changed her mind around a little, the feeling of hanging over an abyss within herself has passed, and she's feeling a little less unstable. She wonders briefly whether her situation can be used as an opportunity for something useful or fun, but after some consideration all she can think of is streaking, and though it's safer when the town is completely empty, it has a fair amount less of a point behind it.
It's as well she didn't, because at that moment she hears footsteps. There doesn't seem to be anyone around, but in an empty town, sounds carry further. After a few minutes she sees a woman approaching, and scrambling to her feet gets ready at last to greet a fellow human; she is almost hungry for conversation. A moment later she is a little surprised to see it's a man she's never met before, wearing a skirt, and becomes rather more surprised when he says, "Oh, hello. It's you."
"You know me?", she says.
He is a short man, clean-shaven, with trusting eyes. By his voice he's from Perthshire, though to Alice all Scottish accents are indistinguishable, and he looks by his muscles as though he often handles something heavy. Alice supposes he seems friendly, and might be kind of fit if she went for blokes.
"I've seen you around," he says. "You know the Dominie? Are you looking for him?"
"You know the Dominie? Wait a minute," she says, and hoists herself onto a transparent aquamarine bench, sitting on the back with her feet on the seat. With a little more reserve, the stranger sits on the seat and looks up at her. She suddenly hopes he doesn't start hitting on her or something. "See," she says, "I came here with the Dominie. I knew I shouldn't have left him."
"Aye, he usually knows best," grins the stranger.
"No, I mean I don't know how he'll manage without me. I'm trying to watch his back," says Alice. The bench hums very softly, and turns magenta as they speak. "I went off because I come from Perivale, right, and this place looks so much like it. Then I couldn't find him again. So I've been walking around since..."
The stranger interrupts, with some excitement. "Yes! When I saw it out the window, I had to leave and explore. This doesn't look like wherever you said to me-- around me, I see the MacLaren lands. And high above it all the Creag an Tuirc-- you see?"
"That?" says Alice. "That's Horsenden Hill."
"Everyone sees what's in their heart."
"Actually, that makes a lot of sense," she says. "The Dominie said he wanted to come here because this whole thing is part of how his people control time and space. But he says it's as much part of the universe inside you as the universe outside you. He says a lot of stuff like that."
"That's so," says the boy. "They call it the Matrix of the Other. Where were you trying to go through it?"
She is wondering where this conversation is going. "I was pretty much walking how I liked-- why?"
"The route that people take when they walk through here, or drive, determines how space and time turn out. There's a million different worlds that are and could be. Look, where I'm from," he is getting excited about his subject and drawing diagrams in the air, "where I'm from near Stirling there's a river called the Forth, and as it flows you can walk across it. But a way to the east it opens out and splits Scotland, and keeps Fife from being Lothian. Suppose we made it flow a different way. There'd be a whole new Scotland."
"Oh, I never saw that before," she says. "Thanks. I knew what it did, but I never saw how you use it."
"The Dominie's people all talk big about being lairds of space and time, but this is what it all comes down to," he said. "But I'll away now to the Creag, or whatever hill you thought it was, away up there; you have to end there wherever you're going. Nice meeting you," and he proffers a hand; Alice shakes it and he continues on his way. The bench is sky-blue now. She jumps down.
"That's all very interesting," she says aloud once he's out of earshot, "but it's not helping me find the Dominie. I need to get out of this place, or I don't know when I'm going to eat again."
She sets off walking in the direction the Scotsman had gone, up towards Horsenden Hill. You can see it from everywhere in the town, and all the paths slope gently up to it; she is no longer watching her boots. As she walks, she realises something practical that the boy's words mean for her: when she gets out of this place, the universe will have changed depending on the paths she takes, and she's been taking fairly random paths up until now. She pauses for a moment beside a lavender pillar box and considers her options. She can simply put the universe back together so she found the Dominie, if she could work out how to do that. Then again, if the Matrix of the Other was as powerful as she had heard, she can change the past to give herself a happier childhood and a sober mother. Perhaps that isn't the best idea even so, because it might mean she was a different person now; maybe what she should do is make sure she found the Dominie first, then do what she almost never does and ask his advice. But it's only because of him that she was here at all, and perhaps she wouldn't be able to find her own way back.
She begins walking, watching for signs. Here was a puce hairdresser's; one of the models in the window had the Dominie's face. She takes that corner. There was a mauve street sign with the name of the world he came from on it. She takes that corner, always working higher and higher until she finds herself at Horsenden Hill. Beneath her lay the town, a long diamond lying spread out before her, its buildings jewels of coloured glass catching the sun in a thousand hues.
It was only as she stands there, feet apart and arms folded, looking down on the town that feels like a solved puzzle, that she realises she could have used the Matrix of the Other to save Manisha. Manisha could have been with her still-- she could have come with the Dominie and explored the galaxy. More so, Alice could have made sure that the fascist little shits who threw the petrol bombs into Manisha's flat had spilt the fuel on themselves and set themselves on fire instead. She could have added a traffic jam to a street or two, and held up the ambulances from a vantage point five years ahead. She could have made sure the bastards burned themselves to death, or better still, condemned themselves to a long, long life of helpless pain. For that she would have trod the Matrix of the Other a thousand times over until its streets were worn thin. Hell, if she could rid the universe of them and everyone like them, she'd stay here a million years, and wear it away with her feet or find a way to break it up with an earthquake. But she hadn't. Still, she has no idea how to start treading the Matrix of the Other over again, once you'd reached the end. She sinks down to the grass and looks up at the sky, and everything becomes bright...
And it was the light in her room being suddenly snapped on, back in the Dominie's ship. She sat up suddenly and in alarm.
