Ripples

[Content warning: reference to inpatient psychiatric care, infertility]

Amara is seven when she finds the pebble that offers her her heart's desire. She's seven, and it's two weeks since Mr Fluffles turned up his paws and went to the great rabbit hutch in the sky, and so what she wants, what she really wants, is her bunny back. What she gets is an object lesson in the importance of clearly stated contractual terms, and more first-hand experience of the decomposition of leporidae than a seven-year-old really needs. The pebble vanishes before she can demand restitution, and it is left to her bewildered parents to deal with both rotting rabbit and hysterical child.

Laura finds the pebble on a school trip and brings it home in her pocket. She's nine, quiet and serious, and prone to the kind of introspection that her teachers dismiss as 'away with the fairies'. She ponders the implicit question for a week or so, increasingly anxious about the possibility of making the wrong choice, before solemnly requesting of the pebble admission to the university of her choice when the time comes. Were it not for the pebble's vanishing on A-level results day she might credit her own hard work more than supernatural intervention for her place at Cambridge. As it is, she's left with a nagging sense of wasted opportunity for all that, by any reasonable measure, the world is now her oyster.

Laura is never able to explain, even to herself, how she understood what the pebble was offering. It did nothing so crass nor unbelievable as speak, of course, and on the one occasion she attempts to describe the experience the best she can come up with is a pressing, urgent sense of possibility. The woman she tells is not only palpably disbelieving but also utterly uninterested. Laura is an involuntary patient on a psych ward at the time, to be fair, but that's for reasons wholly unrelated to sentient wish-granting pebbles and she feels she could have been afforded a little more of the benefit of the doubt.

Gavin finds the pebble when he's scrabbling for his keys in a car park in the dark, late for his first date with Irene. Something about it gives him pause, and he shoves it in his pocket, but he thinks no more of it in the whirlwind, intoxicating three weeks before Irene becomes yet another ex. Gavin is phlegmatic about the pattern of his love life. He's free with his heart and happy to play the field on the off-chance that he stumbles into something real, but he doesn't lose sleep over the transience of his relationships. He is blessed with a handful of good friends, an extended family who love him and whom he loves in return, and a job which is reasonably fulfilling and, importantly, knocks off on the dot of 4:30 on a Friday.

So, although the pebble presses at him, and although he's peripherally aware of what it's offering, there's nothing he wants badly enough right now to mess with what he fears – with guilty reference to a half-remembered, vaguely Catholic upbringing – might be the Forces of Darkness.

He's had a couple of drinks the night it occurs to him to wish for world peace. That's the sort of thing you're meant to do, right? He has no idea what world peace might actually look like, and he wonders if that's why he's feeling a sense of resistance from the pebble as it warms in his hand, but it's equally possible it's just the beer. He narrows his eyes at Sid outside the Co-Op, though, as he hands over a sausage roll and a handful of change the following day. Sid needs a home. That's more doable than world peace, surely? (He's not had his coffee yet, so the obvious explanation for the sensation of the pebble twitching against his fingers is caffeine deficiency.)

He doesn't see Sid again. It's freezing, and the world's not a kind place to one man and his dog without a roof to call their own, so he hopes beyond hope that there's a benign explanation. Two months later he's buying coffee, and the barista looks vaguely familiar, and he squints and imagines hair four inches longer and a slavering boxer at the man's heel, and it's Sid.

After that, the thrill is addictive. He lends his weight to his colleague's hope for an all-clear at her oncology follow-up, and to his boss's quiet, harried cheer-leading over his son's GCSEs. It's almost a game, as he people watches in the park and eavesdrops on one-sided phone calls on the train and thinks yes, yes, that one and the pebble shifts in his hand.

Anita gets her all-clear and the teenager gets 6s and 7s that his dad can't shut up about and Gavin imagines a bubble of wellbeing expanding from him as he influences the lives of people he'll never see again.

When he breaks his leg, somewhere between the first scream and the morphine, he reaches for the pebble. It's not just the thought of having to explain the inexplicable to a bunch of sweaty, middle-aged footballers that stops him, though. It's also a barely perceptible chill where his fingers brush the pebble, and a half-remembered story from childhood about a magic purse, and the sudden, inexplicable certainty that if he uses this power for himself he will lose it forever.

He never mentions the pebble to his friends, nor to Keira or Saida or Erika or Grace. Nor to Lucy, not even when she lasts beyond three hedonistic weeks and is still there after two, three, and finally a record-breaking four months.

He experiments a little, tests the boundaries. The more easily he can visualise what he's asking for, the less resistance he gets, so he starts to read. He subscribes to The Economist and the New Statesman, and listens to less talk radio and more political podcasts. His colleagues tease him that he's getting woke, but when Lucy says it it's a compliment.

He's wary of losing this power now he has it, because if influencing the lives of strangers on the bus was addictive that's nothing to how it feels to see your voice made a difference or vaccine breakthrough in the campaign emails in his inbox, or new wonder drug and no longer endangered in the headlines. So he chooses the disease research for which his own risk profile is low, or for which he lacks the requisite anatomy; he picks humanitarian campaigns in countries he'll never visit and learns about the hardships of peoples he's never heard of and thinks not me, not me, it's not about me as hard as he can.

Lucy goes from months to years, and Gavin takes evening classes in politics and sociology and the move from the private to the charity sector is a no-brainer.

They marry on a crisp, April day, and the reception is full of love, and Gavin's benign eavesdropping is a habit now and he thinks yes, yes, that one as he twirls Lucy through their first dance.

He wonders, from time to time, whether someone else could do more with the pebble, but the risk feels too great. There's a faint resistance from the pebble when he thinks it and after all these years he has a good read on its moods and that's enough to persuade him that what he wants is, in this case, objectively the right decision.

Vaccine research progresses by degrees and world peace is still a pipe dream but it's tangibly closer than it was a decade ago. And hundreds, thousands of people who've passed through Gavin's orbit are a little less isolated, their living situations a little less precarious, their health a little better. Life is good, and Gavin is doing good, every time he tightens his hand around the pebble and makes the world a better place.

And then Lucy is holding their seventeenth negative pregnancy test and tears are streaming silently down her face, and the pebble is ice cold beneath Gavin's fingers.