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don’t fool anyone.’
    He was right. But still.
    ‘I’m sorry you don’t believe me.’ And I jumped out, arms flailing extravagantly.
    ‘Arrrrgh, Nooo!’ Mr Kenny leapt up. I could hear the clatter of his desk, flung to the side as he raced across the room and the further crashing of his frantic progress through the class. Then he was above me, staring down from the window, wide-eyed. Ilooked back up at him and smiled, before straightening up.
    There was a small window ledge, which I had been crouched on. It was a bit risky to throw myself out so dramatically, but I reckoned that if something had gone wrong, in the second or two it took me to fall, I could move to a universe where I didn’t crash into the playground paving.
    ‘You boy,’ he stood, white, trembling all over, ‘are a disturbed child and a menace.’
    As I climbed back in, Zed gave me the thumbs-up.
    ‘Deadly, Liam. The best ever, really.’
    That night Mr Kenny rang my dad for a long chat, but we were ready. For someone from an Asian family background, Zed can do an amazingly convincing impersonation of my dad, northside Dublin accent and all. He and I were sitting there playing Gran Turismo , the volume down of course. Zed had the phone cradled on his shoulder. Every now and again he would say, ‘terrible sorry, Mr Kenny, terrible sorry,’ or, ‘the little f…, the little eejit.’ Zed finished it off by sounding really angry, ‘ Jaysus ! You can be sure that won’t be happening again. Wait till I see the little … Well. You can be sure.’
    After that window incident, Mr Kenny never again shouted at me during swimming; he really did think I was a little mad.

4
Girls
    I am getting around to Tara. But first, reluctantly, I had better say something about girls. Naturally, being a sixteen-year-old boy I had a great desire for girls, but unusually for that age, because I could move, I also had a lot of scores. I’ll spare you the details since they are sleazy, I’ll admit, but chasing girls did teach me something about other people’s behaviour and moving.
    When I search for other options to a physical event, or an event involving me, that’s easy. At every moment there are thousands of alternatives, far too many for me to comprehend them all before they fall away, time moving onwards. But the number of options that involve other people changing their actions is much narrower. I can’t move to a universe where anything goes. People behave in a manner that is more or less trueto their character across all the universes.
    What I discovered, though, was that our friends’ characters were not always what they seemed. For example, there was a girl in our class called Hazel Cartwright. She was very proper, very aloof. She did ballet after school and scorned the rough side of the class. There was no way she would show the slightest interest in me. Except that, during one very dull geography lesson, I started to daydream and explore some of the more unusual alternate universes. Once I had started to look in all seriousness, I was amazed at the options involving her. There was one where all I had to do was come up to her during a lunch break when we were the only people in the classroom. In my hand I held the key to the storeroom at the back of 4D.
    ‘What’s that?’ she asked.
    I told her.
    ‘Why are you showing me?’
    ‘Come with me now, and we’ll have thirty minutes together, in the dark.’
    She said nothing more, but followed.
    Then there was Jocelyn Doonan who all the boys fancied, some of the girls too. She was cool about it, not showy, just natural, and modest. She had wonderful black curly hair that she would hold to the side when she leant over her desk. Most of the time she wasn’t interested in me, although for a while it was all I did, search around fruitlessly for universes in which I got together with Jocelyn.
    There was a big dance for Debbie Healy’s birthday at the community hall in Tolka Park. Tara wasn’t there, but