But in the singularity, in the…there’s no word for it because time didn’t exist yet but let’s say nanosecond …before the Big Bang, we were all, everyone and everything in our universe, galaxies, leopards, rocks, squished up together, so close we could see up each others’ noses.  We were so together once, we were almost fused.

I know, not the noses (or the leopards) but you know what I mean: the building blocks of everything that is or was or ever shall be came from the same source, the pinprick of stuff that, 14.8 billion years ago, exploded into existence. There was nothing; then there was stuff.  There was no thing and then there was every thing.  We started together; we flew apart.

Over the bank holiday weekend, my stepdaughter and her husband and our two small grandchildren came to visit. The pandemic is leaving (I know, I know, not everywhere) and a lot is kicking off.  The pace is picking up. There was nothing – sort of – then there was everything: clamour, kisses, babbling, the mashing of vegetables, full-cream ‘blue’ milk to buy; adult-sized aprons were tied around baby-sized bodies for the making of brownies.  Bedding was pulled out of cupboards, rooms re-arranged. Towers of Mega Bloks rise and are knocked down, nappies are changed, greasy little hands bang on the highchair tray. There are cuddles, stories, tears, demands, lots of laughing.

During the weekend my son and his girlfriend come to lunch.  This is their first meeting with the youngest grandchild. My son makes sweet overtures to the eight-month-old baby; the baby stares back at him, unblinking, solemn, full-on Auto Sergei mode, scanning, computing, committing to memory.  Then suddenly, the baby catches sight of my son’s girlfriend. His eyes shine like stars and he beams, in love.  It’s instant.  Total.  My son has to suck it up. 

The grandchildren and their parents head back to Devon.

‘When you go,’ my husband tells our son-in-law: ‘there’ll be a feeling of relief - which’ll last about five minutes. Then we’ll miss you so much.’

We were together; we fly apart.

Later that day, the house restored to calm, I nip over to the post box to make sure a card gets off first thing in the morning.  It’s J’s twenty-ninth birthday.  J and my son grew up together, J in the flat above ours when I moved back to London after my first marriage ended in 1996.  I could just afford, with loans from six friends to help with the deposit, a two-bed ex-council flat.  It’s a mile – and a universe – from where I live now.

We stayed in that flat for eight years until I was back on my feet.

J and my son were both four years old in 1996, and though J’s parents were still together – just about – he’d had very few other advantages in his little life.  When we first arrived, J’s father was in prison for stealing a caravan. (He hadn’t checked it was empty before he towed it away.  It wasn’t.)

J’s mum became a friend even though we drove each other mad: me with my bossy self-righteousness, her with her chaos and noise.  We had just about enough lovely bits between us to muddle through.

She had grown up illiterate and had no idea how to support J at school. He fell behind, got into trouble, was sent away briefly to a residential school.  I tried to help him a bit but I’m not a teacher.  (Some of his actual teachers were outstanding and did what they could to keep him on track.)  He and my son were best friends in lots of ways, and J’s face was sad as the removal men pulled away, me and my son following in the car, heading for a quieter road and a leafier life.

J was a father at seventeen, he’s been in and out of prison, he has a scar seared from mouth to temple. 

Many astrophysicists believe that our Big Bang wasn’t such a singularity after all. There are beginnings and endings everywhere all the time.  Why should the concept of a multiverse seem surprising?  We are worlds apart and then our worlds collide as we live alongside one another, the fine, glass plates of our lives sliding across and below and above one another.  We are together.  Then we fly apart.