The Gates of Balawat, Chapter 7
Ella says her goodbyes and sets off in search of Andy before The Gates of Balawat close forever.
“A toast!” Caroline lifted her glass up towards Ella, the two of them at a window table in a little Italian restaurant round the corner from the shop. “To Italy! May you find your Mona Lisa there!”
“Aww, shucks!” she sipped the Prosecco.
“You’ll stay in touch,” Caroline said, with mock severity.
“I’ll do my best! Though I’m not sure how much I’ll be online.”
“Postcards, Ella, postcards!”
Ella smiled and felt the apprehension rising. Once through the Gates, she’d be in a different world, and she’d have to stay there or lose Andy forever. No matter how many times she went through the Gates, she had yet to enter the same world twice. She didn’t know if there was any way to choose which reality she entered, but if she was going through with this plan, she wasn’t going to risk it for the sake of a postcard. Caroline would, of course, appreciate one, but really, there was no one else worth coming back for.
The truth was that she didn’t even know if she’d be able to come back to her own reality once she had spent time in his. She’d never risked staying more than few hours, and had no idea if she would be able to come back through the Gates if she stayed longer. It was a moot point, though, because she certainly wouldn’t be able to return once the Gates were in Iraq, that was for sure.
But hell, new world, new beginning. She’d stop putting off the next stage of her career and start putting herself out there. Maybe the illustration market was a bit easier in whichever world she ended up in! She had no idea, but this was a chance to get out of a safe rut and do the things she’d always dreamt of.
The meal was over too quickly and the tears at the end as they said goodbye were all too real. Ella struggled to hold it together, knowing that she might never see Caroline again. Her family, that was less of a loss, but Caroline had been the closest thing she’d had to a best friend since she was twelve, and it was hard not telling her the truth.
❦
Her room was clear, the keys back with the landlord. Her bank accounts were empty, the cash in a money belt hidden beneath her clothes. She had all her important documents with her and hoped that she’d find a reality similar enough to her own that they wouldn’t be questioned.
She grimaced, took a deep breath and hefted the backpack onto her shoulders, clipping the belt around her hips so that they took the weight. She shut the door behind her and made her way to the museum.
She stood in front of the Balawat Gates, gazing up at the embossed strips, wondering if they could give her the answers she needed. She braced herself, though there was no real reason to, and stepped through. There was no sign that that anything had changed. Nothing different in the quality of light or in the feel of the air. No smell or change in decor, yet as she walked through the galleries, all the signs said British Museum. She turned back. She wanted a reality a little closer to her own.
Once she found a museum with the right signage, she checked the big perspex donations box at the main entrance and saw tenners and fivers that looked identical to the ones she carried. This might be the one, she thought. Another deep breath. The nerves were making her feel nauseous. If this turned out to be a mistake, it was one she could never undo. She checked her phone. No signal. She’s have to get a new one, she thought.
She went to the cloakroom and handed over her rucksack, hanging on to her day pack. Nervously, she handed over a five pound note, but the woman didn’t blink, just gave her change. A little of the tension ebbed away.
Ella made her way then to the museum shop, and the huge rack of leaflets on a stand by the doorway. Methodically, she looked at each one, checking that the attraction had the right name, one consistent with her world. She looked at the little maps on the back to see if the road names were similar. She found no significant deviations from what she considered normal.
She wandered aimlessly around the museum, alert to the differences but finding them not too shocking. She had time to kill, as Andrew/Andy/Anthony/Drew/Roo tended to arrive around lunch and she was early. Recently she’d been finding him in the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos, so she set herself up there. She perched on a bench, pulled out her sketchbook and began to draw.
It was the hardest sketching session she had ever had. Her shoulder was locked up tight. She tried her normal warm up exercises, but they didn’t help. Her lines were jagged and wrong. But she kept at it, killing time, pages and graphite.
As the morning turned into afternoon the flow of tourists increased. Ella switched from drawing the exhibits to sketching the visitors. She glanced at her watch, starting to worry that she’d picked a reality without an Andy in it. Or maybe she was just in the wrong room. She was about to swap galleries when, finally, he came in. She found herself staring at him, wanting to call out or wave, but he didn’t know her, she’d just freak him out. She turned to a blank page, shrugged her shoulders to loosen them up and began to draw with more purpose.
“Do you mind if I sit here?” he asked and Ella suppressed a smile.
“Of course not,“ she said, letting the smile out. “You sketch here much?”
“Most days at the moment,” he said. “You?”
“Sometimes,” she said.
They sat in companionable silence for a while, working, until Ella put her pencil down and stretched.
“Good grief, I'm stiff!" she said. “Fancy some lunch in the café?”
He looked up, grinning. “That sounds like a great idea.”
“I’m Ella,” she said holding out her hand.
“Andy,” he said.
Lunch turned into afternoon tea and the conversation flowed as easily as it had that first time, months ago. It was effortless for Ella, in a way that conversations with men she liked had never been. She knew how Andy thought, what he liked, what he had done. Or at least she had a mosaic of Andys to draw from, more alike than different. She knew how to steer the conversation onto topics he had an interest in, and avoid the things he did not.
As the afternoon wore on, she realised she’d have to make a move to find a hostel to stay in, but she didn’t want to part company just yet. Eventually, Andy noticed her discomfort.
“Everything ok?” he asked.
“I just got back from a big trip,” she said. “I need to find a hostel to stay in.”
“You didn’t book one already?”
“No, it was all a bit last minute.”
“Why don’t you stay with me? I share a flat with my sister, and our lodger just moved out. We’ve a spare room.”
“Really?”
“Sure. She won’t mind.”
“I don’t want to impose,” she said, although inside she was exultant.
“You’ll get on like a house on fire with Antoinette, I just know it.”
“Oh?”
“She’s my twin. I know how she thinks.”
Ella let out a small bark of surprise, then coughed to try to cover it up, Caroline was right, but not quite in the way she had thought. “Thanks,” Ella said, “That’s really kind of you.“
“Ah, it’s nothing!” He grinned broadly.
“Well, I guess I best pick up my stuff from the cloakroom, then!”
They walked through the museum at a leisurely pace, Ella making sure that they didn’t go back through the Gates lest Andy simply disappear at the threshold.
“Here, let me take that,” he said when the attendant handed over her rucksack.
“Oh, you don’t have to!”
“It’s not a problem,” he said.
Ella left a tip, noticing that her coins looked identical to the ones already in the jar, and took a deep breath. So, this was it then. They walked out in to the main foyer, through the huge main doors, and down the stairs to the museum approach. She turned around to look at the huge portico and the banners hanging down between the columns proclaiming it the National Museum.
As they walked down the street, Ella was alert to her surroundings with an intensity she hadn’t experienced since her first foray into one of these parallel worlds. But when they turned the corner, she saw signs of the Underground station building site exactly where it was supposed to be. The newly refurbished Tottenham Court Road tube station looked just as she remembered it. And Oxford Street was just as full of tourists and grumpy Londoners as it always was.
Down into the Underground, chatting easily the whole way, and back up again in south London. Ella began to forget that this wasn’t actually her world. It felt very much as if this were her own reality, as if the experiences of the last few months were no more than a fantasy, dreamt up to pass the time.
Ella propped up her rucksack by the window in what was her new room, thinking how much nicer it was than her old place. Even if things with Andy went nowhere, it felt good to be somewhere different, to be switching up her life a bit, seeing new bits of London, hanging out with new people. Then she turned to see him standing in the doorway, and his smile made her heart sing. She beamed. Any doubts she’d had were gone.
“Come on,” he said, beckoning. “Let’s get some dinner.”
❦
That night, whilst Ella fell asleep for the first time in her new life, the National Museum was alive with workmen. They brought in trolleys and crates and pallets, and began to take down those exhibits marked for transfer to Iraq. Ashurnasirpal II was carefully removed from his plinth and packed away.
And as Ashurnasirpal II was put to bed, his Gates were, for the first time since they were hung there decades ago, slowly and gingerly swung shut so that the workmen could access the hinges behind. The entrance to the Temple of Dreams was closed.
❦
Ella stirred, slipping into a dream: An impossibly beautiful woman wearing a long, tiered dress, a golden plastron around her neck and tall golden headdress upon her head, held her hand out to Ella. The goddess smiled. Ella knew she smiled, though she could barely see it for the fierce reflection of the midday sun that seemed to set Mamu’s face in a sea of fire.
Ella tentatively stepped forward and took her hand. She felt the the world snap around her, felt the hot air become cool upon her face, the daytime become night, her two universes collapse into one another. Mamu let her hand go, fading away as Ella descended into a deeper, dreamless sleep.
At the bottom of Ella’s handbag, her phone woke. The screen lit up, five bars in the corner showing a strong signal. It beeped quietly to itself with newly arrived text messages from Caroline.
✢
If you enjoyed reading The Gates of Balawat and would like to own a digital copy, download the ebook now, and please do consider upgrading to a paid subscription!