Time's Mistress

by Steven Savile

  Policemen were on him in a heartbeat.

  The Wanderer tutted, shaking his mop of blonde hair, and walked off whistling another refrain from the music of chance.

  ***

  Remember Me Yesterday

  Death marked the old man; its irresistible charm dancing impatiently behind his wine-dark eyes. He sat at the corner table alone, tearing adverts out of the newspaper laid open before him. A cup of black coffee had gone cold on him while he neatly stacked his scraps of paper.

  “I hate all of the commercials,” he grumbled as I slipped into the seat opposite him. “People who don’t know us telling us what we need to make our lives complete. They don’t know shit.” An Ebel watch joined the growing graveyard of commercials set adrift on the tablecloth sea.

  Federico had been doing this for as long as I had known him—tearing every advert from every magazine before he deemed them safe for consumption. Not that he ever read them; he simply tore the adverts out and left the naked stories behind. When he was fifteen he had joked that he was a one-man crusade against the evils of laisse faire. His wry, slightly self-mocking smile suggested he was well aware how far he had wandered down the Lunatic Road with his obsessions.

  He gathered the cuttings up and stuffed them into the pockets of his once designer jacket. The cuffs had frayed, the elbows worn, the patches on the elbows worn. Did he still have boxes of old adverts at home?

  “I didn’t think you’d come, Caro.” He said it without looking at me.

  “Neither did I,” I admitted, and that was the truth. In the eighteen years since I’d last heard Federico’s slightly Spanish sounding voice my life had changed. Actually it had become a life; I’d married, divorced and had my son Marcus along the way. But hearing that voice again today when I answered the telephone … Voices carry our secrets. That is what I truly believe: If the eyes are doors into our hearts, where everything we want, crave, desire can be seen in the confusion of colours, the voice is the key to ‘us.’ A carefully detailed blueprint of the longings, the needs, that are our souls. So much of us, our essence, our history comes wrapped in the sounds our mouths make. But think about it, the voice is something so deliciously ephemeral, changing as it does from morning to night, thickening with emotion, aching with hurt, love, it’s all there to hear, our secret selves hidden within the curves and contours of the street map of our souls.

  And Federico always had the key to me.

  A red-eyed waiter appeared over the shoulder of my window reflection. “Cafe Latte,” I said to him through the backwards land of the glass. I lit a cigarette and exhaled a beautiful ribbon of blue.

  “Have you ever fallen in love, Caroline?” Federico asked when the waiter was gone. Soft jazz whispered around his words. He laid his hands flat on the table, palms up, an old trick. The magician’s misdirection showing me there was nothing up his sleeve while the coin was already hidden between his fingers.

  “You know I have,” I said softly, looking at the man I used to love, remembering one time, one night, when I finally found the words to say I was all out of love for him. Three a.m., the time when most relationships die in the dark where it’s safe because they can’t see our eyes. Can’t see the truth or the lies. I whispered, “But I don’t love you anymore,” and didn’t know if I was talking to him or the memory of him.

  “You never did, not enough.”

  “Why did you call me, Freddie?” I asked as if I hadn’t heard him.

  “Because I am dying,” he said simply. “Because I’m selfish. Because I loved you.”

  “So you’re putting your house in order?” The words were colder, harsher than I had meant them to be.

  “Something like that,” he agreed. I wanted to see him through yesterday’s eyes, to see him the way he had been before—before he had taken to wearing this skin that didn’t fit. Before the years had carved away his smile, his cheeks, his beautiful mask.

  He looked sixty when he wasn’t even forty. I looked into his eyes for the accusation, for the blame. And remembered the first time I had seen that wonderful sky. How it had felt that first time, knowing that for just one look that said “I love you,” I would have been able to fly, fly in those eyes. But, like Icarus, I had flown too close to his sun and melted the wax binding my wings together. With the wax gone the feathers blew away and my flight of teenage love became a free fall into adult loneliness.

  His hands twitched on the table. “I want to ask you something, Caroline. You don’t have to say yes, but …” he didn’t say any more, didn’t have to. His eyes did his talking for him. If you ever loved me, they said, if you ever cared, you won’t say no. “Take a good look at me, Caro. This is what ol’ Papa Death looks like when he comes knocking.” Federico’s fingers made the sign of the cross, from forehead to eyes and settling, like a plea for silence, over his lips. There was a tiredness fogging his eyes now, as if the simple act of talking like this was too much for him.

  “Is it cancer?” I asked, putting two and two together and making five. Cancer, the Big C. His post mortem smile seemed to be saying if only life—death—could be that simple. His hands fluttered again, full of nervousness. They cast shadow-wings on the tablecloth. I was struck by the half-formed image of an angel watching over our reunion. Not some all loving cherub, something more seductive with its sensuous shadow shape, a darker presence blessed with the cold embrace of that endless winter night.

  “No,” he said, breaking the angel. He rubbed his eyes. “No. Listen, Caro. I don’t think I have the life left in me to say this more than once. I’m dying but it is not the kind of death I can fight with antibiotics and chemotherapy. I’m dying from here,” Federico touched his temple tenderly, “To here.” His fingers rested over his heart. “I’m dying from yesterday all the way into today, if that makes any kind of sense.”

  “I’m sorry, Freddie,” I said, feeling stupid. “I haven’t got a clue what you are talking about.”

  “I’m forgetting myself, my life. You. All the times we spent together, the threads are coming unravelled; it might as well be as if we had never met. As if that time we shared never existed. There are these huge blanks that used to be filled by my life. And with each new memory that slips into the blank spaces, another piece of me dies …”

  I tried to put the whole thing into terms I could understand. I’m not a stupid woman but Federico always has had the ability to leave me feeling like an IQ napkin. “Are you telling me that you’ve got Alzheimer’s?” Jesus, he was less than three months older than I was. The realisation sent cold fingers shivering down the ladder of my spine. “Is that what’s wrong with you?”

  “I made a promise to the Thief of Time. I gazed into her eyes and offered everything I had.” He answered cryptically. “Everything I am, everything I was. Now she is collecting her marker.”

  “You’re talking in riddles, Federico.”

  He smiled a sad parody of his old smile. “The world might love winners, Caro, but she doesn’t. Her black smile and her black heart make her a jealous lover. I’m learning how to treat her though. She hates to let the taste of success linger in your mouth. She wants you to know she can always take it all away. I thought I had a chance to win, you know, ever the gambler and now I am dying from yesterday all the days through until today. When the blackness finally catches up, well, then I hope it is painless. A man is the sum of his memories, Caroline. She’s taking each and every one from me, one at a time. I’m thirty-eight years old. I’ve seen a lot of things but I have these holes inside of me that are spreading like cancers, tearing me apart. I can’t remember the grin on my own son’s face. It’s gone. I can’t remember what it felt like to dance with his mother in the rain the night he was conceived. I can’t remember what she said when we kissed our last goodbye. It’s gone … all of it, and I don’t mean it is fuzzy; it’s gone so thoroughly it might as well never have happened. I need you to help me remember yesterday, Caroline. I want to die knowing who I was.”

  He looked a
t me, the tragedy of his ending life written deep into the sky of his eyes. I so desperately wanted to help him but I didn’t have a clue where to start. The Thief of Time? A woman who’s dipping into his memories and taking them for her own? It was a Grimm fairy tale. One of Federico’s Latin fables. But not Stockholm. Not the Stockholm I had lived in for nearly twenty years. What could I say?

  “Have you tried hypnosis?” I said, remembering all of those New Age chat shows littering daytime TV. And then something else occurred to me. “Maybe you’re forgetting for a reason.”

  “You just don’t listen do you?” Federico said, slamming his hands down on the table suddenly. “The Thief of Always and Forever is bleeding me dry and you’re playing medical join-the-dots.”

  “I’m just trying to say that maybe your ghosts won’t let you remember, subconscious amnesia. Something like that.”

  “I don’t have any ghosts,” he said bluntly. “They’ve been taken away from me, just like everything else. When I walk through the town, down Västerlånggatan or Sveavägen, I am walking down streets that should be dancing with ghosts of relationships lost, hearts broken, hopes raised, but I’m walking down cold grey stones. The old grey bricks of our school on Vallhallavägen, they’re dead but I don’t see the spirits of us as teenagers haunting the playground. I just don’t see it. The bricks and mortar might remain but the memories have gone. It’s like being no-one. I could introduce myself to people, ‘hi, I’m nobody, pleased to meet you.’”

  “Now you are being ridiculous,” I said, but he wasn’t. I tried to put myself in his shoes, project his losses onto my thin shoulders, but it was useless.

  “I need you to help me remember,” he said again. I hadn’t heard him like this before—this was a whole new Federico. I wasn’t sure I liked it.

  “But what can I do?”

  “Make it come alive for me, the time we spent together. Give me back yesterday.”

  O O O

  I live in a small two-room apartment with a blind cat called Deuteronomy and a view of the big grey mushroom at Stureplan. I love sitting on the cushions in the window, looking out over the city while the light bulbs on the building opposite flash currency rates and stock prices. Sometimes its raindrops that run down the windowpane, sometimes its fat white flakes of snow that die on the glass. It’s worth the cold and the damp for the summer scents that bring everything to life.

  I fell in love with Stockholm the first time I caught the subway. All of these elegant people queuing along the platform’s edge, waiting for this rickety old train straight out of the Blitz to come rolling down the tracks. I just stood there on the platform and lost myself in this ocean of colognes. Breathed it in. It was the first time I realised that I was in a foreign city. Everything smelled so rich and wonderful, quite unlike my native New York with its restless heat and its thick blankets of smog and winter snow. It’s the kind of thing I take for granted now. One of those simple pleasures.

  Raindrops made rivers on the glass while I turned the pages of one of my old photograph albums. I’ve always been a photo taker. I have a bookcase full of bad photographs of friends, regal snaps of Deuteronomy curled up in the window, tricks of perspective, grey stone streets, snow-laced gargoyles, I even have one that Mikael took of me while we made love. You can’t see anything but you can still tell exactly what was happening. Deuteronomy was a ball of contentment listening to the commercials with his usual cattish disinterest. Outside, rainbows were puddling in the gutters, shoppers kicking their feet through the pots of gold at either end. I was thinking about things—people—I hadn’t thought about for a long, long time. The sounds from the television changed into a game show: Bingo Lotto. All around the country I imagined people reaching for their purple tickets in the grip of bingo fever. I didn’t realise who—or rather, what—I was seeing for a good five minutes.

  Veronica Andersson was leaning against the doorway into the building across the street, her beautiful brown eyes looking up at my window. Only it was impossible, it couldn’t have been Ronni. The girl looking up at my window was just that, a girl. She couldn’t have been a day over fifteen. Veronica was my age; at least she had been the last time I saw her. Admittedly that was over twenty years ago, but I felt safe in assuming she was still my age. So who? Her daughter? It was possible but what were the odds? Better than my chances of cleaning up on Bingo Lotto, I thought as I raced down the stairs and into the street. Of course, when I hit the pavement Veronica or whoever she was was long gone and I was left looking like a crazy woman chasing ghosts. I had to fight hard to resist the urge to simply grab a passer-by and start babbling about the girl who had been standing in the doorway. Instead, I trudged back up the stairs to my photograph album.

  Of course, it occurred to me that she hadn’t been there, hadn’t been looking up at my window. That made the most sense, and it didn’t mean I was going crazy either, just that I had been so busy thinking about being back at school with Federico and the others I simply saw a resemblance on some strangers’ face and blew it up to the size of an honest to God Peter Pan clone peeking through my window.

  But something Federico had said came back to me: “I made a promise,” that’s what he said. “I made a promise to the Thief of Time. I gazed into her eyes and offered everything I had. Everything I am, everything I was. Now she is collecting her marker.”

  I looked down at the photograph of Veronica I had in my lap, at her eyes and found myself sinking into a dream I wasn’t ready for.

  O O O

  I sat at the same table in Cafe Muren with three packets of photographs neatly stacked beside the ashtray. I’d actually given up smoking two years before, but I needed something to do with my hands and holding a thin coffin nail seemed as good as anything. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do, sure I had a few ideas about flashback therapy, offering Federico a picture of the old school, of my old coffee cup with the 70s psychedelic swirls, the one he broke trying to juggle it along with two oranges; he had been trying to impress Louise and Karin. I smiled at the memory but then a strange feeling of selfish settled over me; how easily I could recall all of this mundane childhood stuff and there was Federico who couldn’t very well remember what day it was. I stopped smiling.

  When he came in through the door he looked more than a day sicker. He had a bundle of magazines under his arm, glossies with those tear off perfume samples and bulimic models. He sank into the seat opposite me. The nuts and bolts holding his face in place had loosened another notch and folds of loose skin were wrinkling up like the chins of a Pekinese pooch.

  “I thought I saw Veronica last night,” I said, offering it like bait.

  “Veronica?” was all he said, but it was enough for me to know that whatever memories that had anchored Veronica to Federico were gone. It gave me somewhere to start. I picked up the first packet of photographs and thumbed through them until I saw a candid snap of Veronica and Nic K. slow dancing in the dining hall. I teased it out and lay it on the table between us. Federico studied both of the faces in the photograph without the tiniest flicker of recognition in his eyes.

  “That’s Veronica,” I said. “Don’t you recognise her?”

  He shook his head. “Pretty little thing,” I thought I saw a hint of a smile when he said that.

  “We were all in school together,” I said softly and began to go through the photographs one at a time, feeding him with memories that should have been his own. The first one was of me on stage at the graduation ceremony. There was no real order to the pictures, I was working on a kind of hit and hope philosophy, throwing out event after event purely on the basis that the BIG things would break away bigger chunks of the amnesia or whatever it was and give Federico back bigger segments of his past. So after the graduation it was a picture of him leaning against the door of a blue two door ‘57 Volvo Coupe with a spectacular view of Stockholm filling the background. There was more to the picture than what was shown.

  It had been a Friday night filled wit
h mosquitoes and saxophones. We’d driven up to Vanity Hill with the top down, parked on the side of the road and laid our blanket out. He’d tried to teach me the names of some of the major constellations but I kept joking about seeing my uncle’s face in the clouds and that my dad had sent him to spy on us. It was difficult to get a fix on my Ursa Minor’s and Major’s with a rather cumulous member of the family breathing down my neck. I wasn’t used to drinking back then and the Chablis had gone straight to my head. I wasn’t drunk, but I was on the way and when we started to kiss things just started to happen and instead of slowing them down, stopping them, I started chasing them. It was a natural progression; soon we were exploring each other for the first time. It was the night we both lost our virginity and I could tell all that from a stupid photo of a beat up Volvo and Federico’s shit eating grin.

  The next photograph was of this huge Cat in the Hat character called Simon, whose fingers were decked out in gold and diamante. Next to his smile and his pearly white teeth all that gold was as dull as daytime TV.

  We went through five years that morning, with the waiter topping up our coffee cups frequently. Talked about things that I remembered and he didn’t. Had a quiz after two years, the highs and lows of a teenage life laid bare. Twenty questions. No points for wrong answers. No questions repeated. If you don’t know the answer go on to the next question. The usual quiz show stuff. Federico scored three points. It was a start.

  O O O

  Deuteronomy woke me by sitting on the left side of my face. The night was shadow boxing on the bedroom wall. Everything had the cold Stockholm touch to it, the oak floor kissed like a razor as I walked across it, drawn to the window.