Touchstone Season One- Complete Box Set

by Andy Conway

  She stood on her own and tried not to look at the group close by dressed like rock stars, the biggest bunch of posers on the course: Jessica, Stacy, Tyrone... and Danny. He was different to the others, she could tell. He didn’t dress quite as ridiculously as they did, but he was the undisputed ringleader of their sect. He wasn’t as crass as them — there were deeper layers to him, and he was the only one who’d ever looked at her and actually seemed to notice her. They hadn’t talked, not outside of vague platitudes when thrown together to discuss something in a seminar group, which was rare because his clique of friends usually made sure they were the only ones on their table. But Rachel thought she had a sense for what was inside people and he wasn’t anywhere near as much of a freak as his friends.

  She stood alone in her Primark best and wondered if the laughter that had just crackled between them was about her. She shrunk in on herself and scowled.

  Her eyes fell on the upper storey of the bar on the corner. Its modern frontage curved the south-eastern corner of the village crossroads, and the name had changed several times recently. It seemed one of those bars that could never quite establish itself. Above the ground floor wooden panelled frontage that screamed cool, modern interior, the Baroque Revival of the original building looked over the village, an ornate stucco rosette, balustered battlements and latticed oriel windows.

  Her favourite building in the village because, if you squinted to shut out the ground floor, it looked like a ruined castle.

  A shadow in the window up there.

  A shudder passed through her. Someone walked over her grave, a ringing in her ears that blocked out the roar of the rush hour traffic for a moment. She palmed her ear till it popped, and shivered again.

  Mr Fenwick arrived and they gravitated towards him. He must have parked his car nearby. He looked stupidly cheerful in the face of their sullen glares and she forced herself to stop scowling and smile so she wouldn’t look like the rest of them. He was a good lecturer with a sharp sense of humour and must have been slightly younger than her dad but more handsome.

  “Good morning, historians,” he shouted as they gathered round him. “Welcome to our first field trip in the neighbourhood of Moseley. In particular, St Mary’s church round the corner. Let’s go.”

  He headed off up the road, stepping off the green and walking up St Mary’s Row past the Bull’s Head pub. They followed in his wake, and turned into the churchyard further up at the lychgate entrance where the winos usually hung out.

  The churchyard had a small front apron above the road where tombstones watched over the traffic below, but the main graveyard was round the rear of the church, an impressive 15th Century structure with a crenellated tower. She realized she’d never been inside it, even though she’d always liked the look of it and the way the battlements of its tower peeped over the Bull’s Head pub and could be seen from the green.

  They huddled around Mr Fenwick on a patch of broken, buckled paving stones and she took up position on the fringe of the crowd.

  “St Mary’s church has been here since the fifteenth century, five hundred years before Moseley even became a part of Birmingham, which was when, Jessica?”

  Jessica looked as surprised as her ridiculous hair for a second, then shrugged and said, “I’ve no idea.”

  “Anyone?”

  They shuffled uneasily. Jessica and Stacy smirked. Rachel’s eyes fell on Danny. He caught her staring and she looked at her shoes and then at Fenwick.

  “We did this a week ago,” he said. “Danny. Is your memory any better than Jessica’s?”

  “Yeah,” said Danny. “She’s thick.”

  Jessica punched him and Rachel stole another glance.

  “So, when did this fine little suburb defect to the sprawling Birmingham metropolis?”

  “1912?” said Danny.

  “Wrong. Rachel, you’re local, you should know?”

  She looked up, surprised, and thought it’s okay to know the answer, this is Uni, not school.

  “1911?”

  “Now who’s the thick one, Danny Pearce?”

  Everyone laughed. Mr Fenwick indicated the street they overlooked. “Now, you all know Moseley for its fine selection of trendy bars. But we’ve got a pub called the Village, a fish and chip shop called the Village, and everyone calls the centre of Moseley the Village. Why is that?”

  Danny piped up. “Is it because it used to be a village?”

  “Give him his degree right now! Yes, Danny, Moseley used to be a village. A village built around this fine mediaeval church.”

  “Did it used to be all fields round here, Nick?”

  Everyone laughed again and Danny smiled at his own joke. Tyrone decided to join in. He always did whatever Danny did and thought it made him just as witty.

  “Do you remember it back then, Nick?”

  Mr Fenwick’s eyes sparkled, encouraging their banter. “Yes, yes, very funny. Now, long before all the trendy bars opened, Moseley was a tiny village, and some of its villagers would have been buried in this churchyard. Their gravestones are long gone, but some of them remain. Look at your feet.”

  They looked down and saw that the path was made of broken gravestones. A general “Ewwwww!” went up. Rachel found herself reading the tip of someone’s headstone, between her Primark shoes. Arabella Palmer, who departed this life August 16th 1876. Her age had been underneath, but the stone was broken off at that point and she could only make out the word YEARS and the top of the number. It could have been 8, or 38. She hoped it was the latter.

  Mr Fenwick led them round to the rear of the church and the overgrown graveyard. Moss covered headstones leaned at various angles, some broken. Bushes and weeds had reclaimed the scarcely visible paths. There were some impressive monuments with sculpted angels and readable inscriptions, but most had faded with age. Some wealthy people had been buried here, but no one for a very long time. It was a neglected inner-city museum that few people visited except for winos and bored school kids and History students on field trips.

  “Luckily for us,” he shouted, “the graves that still exist here are from the last hundred and fifty years. That means they’re all people who lived in Moseley when it was a heavily populated satellite of Birmingham. We can find out lots of things about them in the city archives and it will all be deeply fascinating and turn you into semi-professional local historians. So, I want you to choose a project partner...”

  They started pairing off noisily. Rachel glanced around in panic, knowing no one was going to pick her.

  “...pick a name off a gravestone. That person is going to be the subject of your local history research. Danny, come here.”

  Danny sloped over to him.

  “You can partner Rachel for your project. Maybe she’ll knock some sense into you.”

  Rachel looked up at Danny with a hesitant smile, just in time to see Jessica shoot her a vicious look.

  Danny slumped off, hands in pockets. Everyone spread out and Rachel followed Danny down to the bottom end of the cemetery, close to the green wrought-iron gates that fenced off the graveyard from a back alley that led right back to the village green.

  — 3 —

  DANNY FOUND HIMSELF drawn to a gravestone shaped like a small bench or a baby’s cot; its edges blurred by time, the inscription faded.

  Rachel joined him and sat on it, trying to decipher the words that had been chiselled in over a century ago.

  “I’m not sure if it’s Rees or Reed,” she said. “It’s practically worn away. Maybe it’s Read, with an A.”

  Danny sat behind her, not paying attention, leaning back, his hands absently roaming the surface of the gravestone.

  “Listen,” he said. “I’ve got an evil hangover, so can you just sort it out yourself and not bother me with it?”

  “We’re supposed to do this project together,” she snapped.

  “We will,” he said. “But if you could just get the name, I’d be very grateful.”

  She turned away
, choosing to be all offended about it, not realizing how much it was hurting his head just to be out in the light. It was just his luck to get paired with some loser who wanted to turn it into a PhD.

  “You and that lot over there think everything’s here for your own personal amusement,” she said. “Well, I don’t a give a toss. I think you’re all a bunch of—”

  He didn’t hear the end of her sentence. His fingers touched something warm and her voice sounded like it was coming through a tin funnel, then his ears blocked like he’d fallen underwater.

  He looked over, surprised, thinking she was playing a joke.

  But Rachel wasn’t there.

  The shock was so instant that he didn’t notice what would strike him every time afterwards: the noise. It was as if the constant hum of traffic that was always there wherever you were in the city had been ripped away. It was like your ears suddenly blocking while you were flying, so you had to swallow to pop them clear again.

  “You shouldn’t sit there. It’s someone’s grave.”

  He looked up into the clear green eyes of a young woman.

  “Hello, I’m Amy Parker. Who are you?”

  She held out her hand and he shook it and wondered why he couldn’t move his feet or take his eyes off hers.

  “I’m... Danny,” he croaked. “Danny Pearce.”

  “And where do you live, Danny Pearce?”

  “Er, Chantry Road.”

  “I’m sure you don’t,” she said.

  There was something not right about this at all. He flexed his jaw to make his ear pop, but nothing happened. He had the sickly sensation of being trapped in a bell jar, hypnotized by her eyes.

  “What?” he managed to say.

  “I live at number twelve, Alcester Road and I know most of the families on Chantry Road and I’ve never heard of you before.”

  A voice barked from the other end of the graveyard and the slightly unusual became utterly weird.

  “Amy!”

  Fear flashed in her green eyes. “I have to go, Danny Pearce.”

  Danny looked away from her eyes for the first time and it overloaded his senses, so many things in a sudden breathless rush, like a TV info burst, most of the details of which he would only remember later.

  He saw that Amy was dressed in a black gown of the type that any middle-class girl attending a funeral circa 1912 might wear. A bearded man marched towards him dressed in a frock coat and a top hat, brandishing a cane, wide-eyed and angry, a speck of spittle at the corner of his mouth. A cluster of people around a grave in the distance, dressed in Bible black, top hats and veils. A priest in a flowing white smock that billowed in the breeze. The graveyard was not overgrown, the lawns were well kempt, the stones were not tilted and weathered but many were bright and new.

  He slumped back on the gravestone, shock and panic overloading his senses.

  The man grabbed Amy’s arm. “Who is he?” he barked. “Is this the one?”

  “Please, not here, Father,” she whimpered, casting a cautious glance back at the mourners in the distance.

  Danny’s fingers groped the surface of the gravestone as he gasped, struggling for air, hyperventilating.

  The man turned, hissing spittle, brandishing his cane.

  Danny knew he had to run, or have his face smashed in, but he couldn’t move, frozen, like in a bad dream.

  “Is he the one?”

  Danny’s fingers edged towards the same spot he’d touched before.

  “Father! Stop it!” Amy hissed.

  Mr Parker glared back at her and shoved her away. But when he turned back, Danny was gone.

  — 4 —

  MR FENWICK WAS CLOSE to the north-eastern corner of the church, squatting by a gravestone, admiring the subtle filigreed stonework and wondering how seriously this current crop of students would be taking their task.

  In every year there were a couple of standout exceptional students you knew would get Firsts from day one. These were the ones you had to feed with steady praise, but not too much in case they suffered vertigo and burned out.

  Unfortunately, the broad mass of students had no academic skills or inclinations whatsoever and would remain like that for three years, if they didn’t drop out. You just had to bully them constantly into the whole concept of research, analysis, discussion and referencing of primary and secondary sources.

  For some this proved an impossible thing to grasp, even after three years, mainly because they seemed quite content to make no effort at all and cruise through to get a Third because it was a degree, after all. If they scraped a 2:2 they’d feel they’d performed an amazing con trick on the educational system. There were only a handful of students in every annual intake that could surprise you by going either way; displaying enough talent that they could make a serious, late burst for a First, or fail at the end and sink into a 2:1 or worse.

  What was surprising was how few surprises there were.

  Rachel, the one student in this year’s intake he knew without a doubt would get a First, approached him and coughed shyly.

  “Er... Nick,” she said.

  He grinned before turning to her. It was always funny to see which students had most difficulty shaking off school and realizing they could call tutors by their first name now.

  “Rachel,” he said.

  “We’ve got one. I can’t work out if it’s Rees or Read, but the date of death is definite. I don’t know where Danny’s gone, though.”

  Nick squinted in the low winter sun, looking over her shoulder.

  “He’s over there.”

  Rachel turned back to look at their gravestone twenty yards away and frowned.

  Danny was sitting right there.

  — 5 —

  RACHEL STORMED BACK over to find Danny breathing hard, staring around him, bewildered.

  “I suppose you sloped off for a fag or something. Well, I’ve done it now so if you don’t like it, tough.”

  She froze. There was something wrong. She could read it in him immediately in the way you just know. He looked like his hangover had turned into a full-blown panic attack.

  “Are you all right?”

  “No.”

  “What is it?” she said.

  “You won’t believe what just happened.”

  “What?”

  Danny gulped, caught his breath, stammered. His face was white but he breathed like he’d just run twenty times around the churchyard.

  “I was sitting here and you were talking and then, bam, you were gone, and I was here and it was all different and there was this girl and her father in Edwardian clothes and a funeral.”

  He shook his head, like he didn’t believe it himself.

  “Have you been smoking?” she said.

  “It was real. I was there. I talked to her.”

  “What are you on about?”

  “When I touched the stone,” he said. “I went back there.”

  This was weird. He was acting like a freak, which threw her, because Danny was one of the cool kids and it was really her job to act like a freak.

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. The past or something.”

  “Yeah right. Whatever.”

  “It’s true. It was a very weird and totally lucid timeslip moment.” He pointed to the spot on the stone. “So weird. Right there. Touch it yourself.”

  She hesitated, frowning, thinking this was all going to be a joke at her expense. She glanced around. His friends were at the far end of the graveyard, lounging on a gravestone, smoking, making no attempt to research anything. No one was filming her on their phone. If it was a joke, what was the point of it? She looked back at him. His face was pale, beads of sweat on his forehead. He looked like he was about to chuck up his breakfast at any second. He wasn’t joking.

  She took a step towards him, leaned across, her fingers reaching uncertainly for the spot on the gravestone he was pointing to, his index finger shaking.

  “Okay, let’s all go this way!�
�

  Mr Fenwick was leading the whole class towards them. She snatched her hand back and looked at Danny’s face again, expecting to see a broad grin there, an amused glint in his blue eyes, but he wasn’t looking at her; he was looking at the floor, embarrassed, confused.

  Mr Fenwick passed by and headed for the wrought-iron gate, the other students dawdling in his wake.

  “We came in the normal way but there’s a little secret back here,” he called out.

  He walked down the slate slope and pushed the gate open. The class filed out into the alley between the shops. Rachel followed Danny, looking back once more at the gravestone.

  Mr Fenwick’s voice echoed out on the alley walls as he strode onwards. “This used to be a wide yard, before the Barclays Bank was built in the 1920s. But if we walk down here we end up...”

  They all emerged back out at the village ‘green’, between a chip shop and a bank.

  “Back in Moseley village,” he said, as if he’d pulled a rabbit out of a hat. “So, armed with your person from the past, let’s go back to our dusty old lecture room and learn about all the various kinds of research at our disposal. Field trip over. Mini-bus this way.”

  He headed across the green, off to the car park behind the south-eastern corner of the village crossroads.

  Rachel glanced involuntarily at the latticed windows of that crumbling, ornate stucco upper floor again. As the students snaked after him, Rachel grabbed Danny’s arm.

  “What happened?” she whispered.

  He looked over at his friends, worried, and snapped with sudden venom.

  “Nothing happened, right?”

  She gripped his arm harder and said with total sincerity, “I believe you.”

  He stopped, glanced at the others again.

  “If you tell anyone. I’ll—”