Step Back in Time

by Ali McNamara

  ‘Sure,’ I mutter, dismissing this. The last thing I need to know about at the moment is my love life. ‘But back to the lifeline, you just said —’

  ‘And your headline just here,’ she points to a different line on my hand. ‘That shows me you’re a very practical, analytical person, that you need black and white answers, no grey areas.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, that’s exactly right, I do need answers. I need to find the missing page. Can you help me find it, Rita?’

  Rita studies me carefully across the desk. ‘I don’t need to, Jo-Jo, the answers you need are all in here.’ She turns my hand over and places it on to my heart.

  ‘But, that’s no good!’ I cry, jumping off the stool. ‘I need to know why I’m doing this! You know, don’t you?’ I desperately search Rita’s calm face. It gives nothing away. ‘Is there going to be more when I’m finished here? Is there?’

  ‘Calm down, child.’ Rita takes a deep, almost meditating breath. ‘Now take a seat again,’ she says, gesturing to the stool. ‘I can’t help you if you’re leaping about the place.’

  ‘What can you tell me then?’ I ask, pulling myself back on to the seat. ‘You obviously know something, I’m not stupid.’

  ‘No, you’re definitely not that, Jo-Jo,’ she smiles. ‘I know that you can be very demanding at times, and you always want to know what’s going on right at this very minute, and you’re not good at letting things be and waiting for answers to arrive at their own pace.’

  She’s right. That is one of my faults. I’m not very good when it comes to waiting. In fact, it’s amazing I’ve been able to be so patient this far. Maybe my brain has been more addled by the process of time travel than I realise.

  ‘You’re also a very determined person, and once you set your heart on something nothing will prevent you from getting it.’

  I nod at this. Also true.

  ‘This has helped you in your life so far, in your career especially.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. I’m very determined when it comes to my job.’

  ‘But for all your success you’re very lonely too.’

  ‘Of course I’m lonely. At the moment I’m being thrust into all sorts of random time zones with complete strangers most of the time. It doesn’t take a genius to work that one out!’

  Rita regards me with another patient, yet knowing look.

  ‘I mean you’re lonely back in 2013.’

  ‘I am not,’ I answer without thinking. ‘I have plenty of friends, colleagues and family. I see them all the time.’

  ‘Do you, Jo-Jo? Really?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answer firmly. ‘I do.’

  ‘You may see them, but are you close to them?’ Rita may only be looking into my eyes as she asks her question, but it feels as if she’s burrowing deep into my soul. ‘Aren’t most of them more casual acquaintances than close friends? What people do you have in your life who you could share your every thought and desire with?’

  ‘Maybe I don’t want to share my every thought and desire with people,’ I respond huffily. ‘Maybe I prefer keeping them to myself.’

  ‘But why is that?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I?’ I rub at my forehead, and I’m surprised to find tiny beads of sweat there. I wipe them away. ‘It’s just easier if you keep things to yourself.’

  ‘Why?’ Rita’s eyes blink innocently back at me. ‘Surely the more you share with people the easier life becomes? A problem halved and all that?’

  ‘But it doesn’t work like that, does it? When you share with people you can’t keep things ordered; you don’t know what you’re doing. Humans are too unreliable, in my experience. Life is so much easier when it’s just you. You’re in complete control.’

  ‘Ah…’ Rita says, nodding. ‘Now we’re getting somewhere.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think we are. Look, are you going to help me discover why I’m travelling through time, or are you just going to sit there and judge me and my choice of lifestyle?’

  ‘Jo-Jo, you will discover all you need to know in time. I can promise you that. And when that time comes this journey will truly be worthwhile for you.’

  I sigh. How frustrating this all is. First George and now Rita. They obviously know more than they’re letting on, but they won’t tell me.

  ‘Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?’ Rita suggests. ‘I think your time would be better spent elsewhere while you’re here than in my shop, don’t you?’

  ‘Will it make me leave here any quicker?’

  ‘Have patience. All things are difficult before they become easy.’

  I have to smile. ‘You may be very infuriating, Rita, but you’re very wise.’

  ‘Sadly not one of my own,’ she says, gesturing to a book of quotations on the shelf. ‘But there are some very wise words in there if you’d like to read it some time. Take it.’

  I lift the book down off the shelf. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Jo-Jo, I’m never wrong. Trust me.’

  So, still feeling a little frustrated, but with new reading material under my arm, I leave Tranquillity early and walk back down the King’s Road. I pass the World’s End pub, which doesn’t seem to have changed much since the sixties, and carry on along the high street, stopping occasionally to look in shop windows at the weird and wonderful assortment of goods on sale in 1977. In an electrical store I see a cassette tape recorder being advertised as the latest must-have gadget and I can’t help but pause outside a hairdresser’s window to stare at all the tight poodle-like perms being applied to lovely locks of straight hair.

  ‘Want to come in, love?’ one of the hairdressers mouths at me through the window.

  I shake my head ferociously. Perming my long hair is the last thing I want to do to it. I think I’d rather have it cut like Harry’s.

  I think about this version of Harry as I carry on down the street. He’s a strange mix again – in some ways very mature for his sixteen years, even with that silly haircut. It’s like he doesn’t quite fit in, but is also desperately trying anything to do so. There is something very endearing about him that seems to transcend all the times we’ve met. It never feels like I’m meeting him for the first time. It’s as if I’ve always known him.

  ‘Watch it!’ a raucous voice calls, barging into me as it exits the newsagents I’m just passing.

  ‘I think you’ll find you should be the one watching it!’ I snap, swivelling around to find Stu, Harry’s punk mate glaring at me.

  ‘I should have know it would be you, dreaming your way down the road,’ Stu says, lighting up a cigarette from his newly purchased packet.

  ‘I was not dreaming my way down the road, I was —’ I stop myself. Actually, I had been daydreaming; I’d been thinking about Harry.

  Stu sniggers. ‘I thought as much. All you lot do is dream your way through life, ain’t it?’

  ‘What do you mean, “my lot”?’

  ‘The flower-power brigade. Heads in the clouds. No idea of what’s going on here in the real world. Blip on society, that’s what you are, if you ask me.’

  I look at Stu leaning up against the shop wall, with his shaven head of green spikes and his upper lip formed into a permanent snarl.

  ‘I’m a blip on society? Look at you!’

  Stu regards his look in the window of the shop by strutting to and fro along the pavement. ‘Yeah, and your point is? Nothing wrong with the way I look,’ he says, holding out his hands. ‘I stand out. I don’t try and blend into the background like all them other morons.’ He gestures across the road at the shoppers bustling up and down the street – who are by no means your dullest-looking Londoners. This is the King’s Road, mecca to all things and all people wanting to be hip and trendy. But he’s right; they don’t make anywhere near the statement Stu did.

  ‘But you look aggressive dressed like that. People are scared of you, afraid to approach you.’

  ‘And so?’ he shrugs. ‘That’s a good thing far as I’m concerned. Don’t want peopl
e approaching me. Not them sort of people anyway.’ He shudders.

  I look at him again. And suddenly I see something different behind all his bravado. I see a streak of vulnerability.

  ‘What you staring at now?’ he demands. ‘You’re weird, you.’

  ‘You’re scared, aren’t you?’ I ask in a quiet voice.

  ‘I ain’t scared of nothing, me.’ He raises his face up to the sky and blows a plume of smoke casually in the air.

  ‘What are you scared of?’ I continue. ‘All people? Or just these sort of people? People who conform to life?’

  Stu throws his cigarette to the ground and stubs it out viciously on the pavement with his boot. Then he turns to me, pushes me up against the wall and presses himself up against my chest so his face is centimetres from mine. ‘Listen, you. You don’t know nothing about me and who I am. So don’t you go spreading any nasty rumours, or you’ll find out just how not scared I really am! Of you, them, or anything in this lifetime.’

  Then as quickly as he’s pinned me up against the wall, I’m released, and he’s strutting off down the street, lighting up yet another cigarette.

  I stand in the middle of the pavement staring after him, pedestrians brushing against me as they try to get past along the busy street. As scared as I’d been for that split second when Stu had had me pressed against the wall, when he’d looked directly into my eyes, I’d seen something. Something I’d seen somewhere before, but where? And on whom?

  Sixteen

  ‘You all right, love?’ Penny calls as I come back through the door. ‘You’re home early today, ain’t ya?’

  ‘Rita let me away early because we were quiet,’ I lie, heading straight through to the kitchen to get a drink. I know it will have to be a Tizer or a Panda Pops or something equally sugary and horrid. Right now, after my encounter with Stu, I could do with a nice chilled glass of Pinot Grigio, but I have to remember I’m only sixteen, and I don’t think Penny is likely to allow that, or even likely to have any in the house for me to drink in any case.

  I find her at the kitchen table, hurriedly gathering up the books that cover it. She looks a bit jittery.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask her as I go straight to the fridge and pull open the door. Even worse, I think as I view the contents, only full-sugar Pepsi. Still, the sugar hit might help quell my shakes.

  ‘Nothing, I was just doing a bit of light reading.’

  I stroll over to the table and pick up one of the books.

  ‘Accounting for Beginners?’

  ‘Yes!’ she says, snatching it back. ‘I just borrowed it from – from the library.’

  I pick up another. ‘Running Your Own Business the Easy Way.’ I flick open the front cover. ‘But there’s no library ticket in here and it’s virtually brand new.’ I look at Penny again; she’s now flushed bright red. ‘What are you doing?’

  She sighs and rolls her eyes. ‘You had to come home early, didn’t you? I was trying to keep it quiet. I’m doing some night school courses, that’s all. That’s where I’ve been going every Monday and Wednesday when I said I was going over to Maggie’s to watch Coronation Street with her.’

  ‘So?’ I say, perching on the edge of the table to take a sip of my Pepsi – blimey it’s sweet! ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  Penny looks surprised. ‘I – I didn’t think you’d understand.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, your mum going back to school when you can’t wait to get away from the place.’ She begins arranging the books into a neat pile now. ‘I didn’t think you’d think I was clever enough to do it, either.’

  ‘And are you?’ I ask. ‘Clever enough, I mean. How are you getting on?’

  Again Penny looks surprised by my question. ‘Very well, actually. And I’m enjoying it too.’

  ‘Then that’s all that matters. Go for it, I say.’

  I wish my own mother had been more proactive in creating a full life for herself before my sisters and I left home. She spent so long travelling the world with my father and his job that she never seemed to do anything for herself, except the Women’s Institute which she threw herself into every time we were based in England for a bit. Maybe if she had made a proper career for herself she’d spend less time trying to meddle in my life.

  Although right now, hearing my mother’s composed, calm voice trying to control this current mess I’ve found myself in, would actually be very welcome.

  Penny, as if sensing this, stands up, walks round to the other side of the table and wraps her arms around me.

  ‘My girl,’ she says, hugging me tightly. ‘That’s what you are. My best girl.’ Then she stands back to look at me. ‘You’re changing, though.’ She looks me over.

  ‘How do you mean?’ I ask, trying to remain casual, but inside I feel very touched by this stranger’s tender gesture, just when I most needed it.

  ‘You’re more mature. Like you’ve grown up suddenly. Maybe working in that shop is doing you some good after all.’

  ‘Yes, maybe it is. So,’ I ask, changing the subject before she has time to consider this apparent change too long, ‘what are you going to do with all these new qualifications when you get them?’

  ‘Nothing, I expect,’ she says, moving back around the table again. ‘This college stuff is just a bit of fun really, something to pass the time in between my odd shift at the factory and looking after you lot.’

  I stare at her. ‘Don’t be daft! You have to do something with what you’ve learnt or else it’s just a waste of time.’

  ‘Jo-Jo, I’m a widowed mother of four, lucky to be living in the council house whose lease she inherited from her mother because your dad and I chose to live here and look after her. I’m hardly going to wake up one morning and start up my own business, now am I?’

  Penny’s widowed? I assumed her marriage had broken down and her husband had left her. My resolve to help her becomes even greater.

  ‘Why not? Plenty of single women run very successful businesses and still cope with having a family. Why not you?’

  ‘Like who?’ she demands. ‘Name one.’

  ‘Er…’ Now I’m struggling. My knowledge of seventies women entrepreneurs is fairly limited, to put it mildly.

  ‘See. There aren’t any.’

  ‘So why are you doing the course then? You must want to make something more of your life than working at the factory?’

  ‘Nothing wrong with good honest toil, Jo-Jo, you’d do well to remember that. It was good enough for your grandmother, and great-grandmother, God rest their souls.’

  ‘But you can break the mould, Pen – Mum,’ I correct myself. ‘You can be the first, and set Sally a good example for the future.’

  Penny considers this. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘No perhaps, just do it!’

  Penny smiles. ‘That’s a good slogan. I like it. Just do it. More people should just do it, instead of putting things off and wishing they had.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I smile. ‘It’s catchy, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Just do it,’ she mutters to herself as she collects up her books from the table. ‘Yes, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll just do it in future.’

  ‘Yes, you do that.’ I sit down at the table with my drink and watch her.

  ‘But now I have to go and fetch the children from school,’ she says, glancing up at the clock on the wall. ‘I’ll just do that first. Bonnie’s down for a nap – can you listen out for her and I’ll be back in a bit?’

  ‘Sure,’ I say, pleased at the thought of a few minutes’ peace to collect my thoughts. ‘I may have a nap myself, but I’ll hear Bonnie if she wakes up.’

  I listen for the click of the front door as Penny leaves the house. Then I finish off my drink, crushing the can down on the Formica table when I’m done, wishing I could pop down the road for a Starbucks or a Costa. Suddenly all the Pepsi in the world can’t produce enough caffeine to get me through this weird life I’m living right now.

  Exhaustion suddenly over
whelms me, so I head upstairs to take a nap.

  I fall asleep quickly, and when I wake, for a split second I wonder if it’s all been a really bad dream. But I soon hear the TV droning away downstairs, and Sally and Sean bickering with each other in front of it. So I lie on my bed and look at the ceiling for a few minutes – I find it’s best not to look at the walls otherwise I get a bit freaked out by all the testosterone and bulging biceps.

  So what next? It had seemed easier in 1963 when I felt as if I was at least working towards something, helping Ellie win the competition, getting Harry the audition. But here in 1977 I feel like I’m just treading water, not going anywhere or achieving anything. And wasting time is never a comfortable thing for me.

  I think about what George said, about Harry and Ellie benefiting from me being there with them in 1963, and how I seemed to have changed their lives for the better. Maybe that’s what I need to do here before I can proceed any further.

  But here in 1977 Ellie and Harry are only sixteen and they don’t really know what they want to do with their lives. I think wider: who else? Penny, perhaps? But how can I persuade Penny that there’s more to life than looking after Sally, Sean, and Bonnie? I can’t just magic up something to transform her evening classes into a practical business opportunity that would benefit her and her family.

  Or can I?

  Seventeen

  ‘Would you like some popcorn?’ Harry asks as we wait in a long line to buy tickets for Star Wars.

  ‘No, you’re OK. Pen – I mean Mum – cooked for me before I came out.’

  I say cooked. She poured water on some Smash potato granules and grilled us some sausages, which might as well have been vegetarian for all the meat they had in them. Although I moan about my nomadic childhood, my mother always made sure we ate right. We always had a proper dinner every night, whatever country we were in. Even if my parents were entertaining clients at some fancy dinner, we’d still be fed properly before we were put to bed, and we almost always had a bedtime story read to us too. Perhaps my mother wasn’t so bad, I think; maybe I’ve just let years of distant memories cloud my judgement of her. Living with Penny, the twins and Bonnie was certainly making me think a lot about my own childhood again. Something I usually avoided.