Gemma was being driven mad by the smell of freshly baked bread coming from the kitchen. It was her own bread that had baked from a bread mix from Sainsbury’s. She had refrained from nibbling at the finished product because it the new diet she was on. Currently the diet appeared to consist of not eating too late, ‘listening to her body cues’ about hunger. Denial was not a word she would use lightly but she did feel like there were times when she would ordinarily have eaten and now, she had to painfully turn her back on a very frequent basis. To distract herself she logged onto Amazon Prime to search for a 2 or 3 star rated film to lose a few hours of her life on. She came across Alpha Gateway an Australian drama about a physicist who discovers that there are parallel universes and when her husband dies in a road traffic collision, she travels to one of these parallel universes, finds him and brings him back to her world. It did not take a genius to work out this not going to have a nice ending.  

Gemma found herself pleasantly lost in the world of Australia (she was bought up on a childhood diet of Neighbours and Home and Away) where the sun shines and the streets are wide and clear. As the film took its predictable course (think Pet Cemetry) Gemma’s mind wondered.  She wondered if there was a parallel universe where she and her husband Horace lived and had children. Could she step into a transporter and find herself in a world where she has been pregnant, her body has given birth and she is a mother. Would she find she had one, or two or three, would they be normal, would she and Horace still be together. The possibilities were endless. She wondered how she would feel to witness that. She wondered if she would dare talk to other self and tell herself there was another world where she lived childless and unhappy. Would she do this herself? What would be the ripple effect? 

She turned her focus back to the present. The film was close to the end, the clear and present danger, seemingly banished to another world. The man has untied his bonds and has found himself in what looks like a giant grey maze in a thunderstorm and two months later it appears that ‘something terrible has happened’ and she is in the wrong world.  Gemma shut her laptop, with the thought that perhaps something terrible had happened to her and she is in the wrong world.