by Andy Conway
Rachel swallowed another sip of bitter warmth. I came here to kill her, she thought. If she dies, I’ll get my life back. Isn’t that the only way?
She found Charlie’s eyes again and wondered if he might have read her thoughts. She wondered if he would kill for her, but she wasn’t ready to ask that question.
“So, in my future,” she said. “I’ve visited you in the past and told you to be here for me?”
“In 1934, yes.”
“How did I persuade you?”
“You told me not to tell you that.”
“But didn’t you think I was crazy?”
“Oh yes, of course,” he said. “But it was when you gave me the copy of the sports report that... Oh, I suppose I shouldn’t have mentioned that.”
She smiled. “Something else for me to remember to do.”
“Quite.” He edged forward in his seat. “You warned me not to tell you too much about what you’re going to do, what’s going to happen, even though for you it’s happened when you give me this.”
He held up the list and she felt a sudden urgent desire to snatch it from him and read it – read a message from her future self.
“There are certain things we need to just let happen. You’ll find a way to persuade me.”
“I already did,” she said.
“Yes. But we can’t intervene too much in things. It’s all very delicate.”
“But I told you to be here and intervene for me.”
He nodded and sat back, taking a generous slug of brandy. “You need to find what disrupted your life and fix it. Only that. We can’t go changing the world, much as we’d like to. This Danny friend of yours did that and erased you from time.”
He got up and straightened his tie. “Now, I have to go out and inspect the bomb damage. I’ll be back much later but please just go to bed. No need to wait up for me.”
She stood with him as he threw on his trench coat and cap.
“I’d like you to treat this place as your home, while you’re here. Please don’t feel like a lost waif. It’s largely yours anyway.”
“Mine?”
“I wasn’t so wealthy when you first met me, but you told me a few things that made it possible.”
“Oh? What?”
“I can’t say.”
A look between them. There was nothing to do but smile at the absurdity of it all. He strode across the room and she felt a pang in her heart. She didn’t want him to go.
“So you’re Charlie, then?”
He turned, his hand on the door handle.
“It’s quite bizarre that this is all new to you. Lieutenant Charlie Eckersley, at your service.”
“Pleased to meet you, Lieutenant Charlie Eckersley. I’m Rachel. Miss Rachel Hines.”
“Pleased to meet you, Rachel. Again.”
She raised her glass to him and listened to his boots tramp down the stairs. The front door clicked shut and his steps echoed down the ginnel.
She reached for the blackout curtain and was about to sweep it aside, to watch him walk off into the night, but resisted.
Somewhere in the distance, a fire engine’s bell clanged and a thousand dogs howled.
— 6 —
SUNDAY MORNING. DANNY waited until ten and ventured out to Moseley village. Standing on the corner of Chantry Road, he looked up towards the Prince of Wales and down to the village green. The Co-Op supermarket was open and the charity shops. It would be little different from a Saturday.
He crossed and headed for the Prince, and the Buygones emporium that was nudged against it.
Mitch, the 1930s-clad owner, had barely flipped the Closed sign to Open and turned back to the shop when Danny walked in, the door chiming.
“You’re too early for tea,” Mitch said.
“That’s all right. I’ve had breakfast. I’ve come for more coins.”
Mitch went behind the counter and gave Danny the once over. His moustache was waxed into tips and he was absurdly smartly dressed considering he spent his day surrounded by junk. “More non-collector’s 1912?”
Danny edged to the counter. “I was looking more for Second World War. Say, about 1940?”
Mitch paused, hummed with curiosity, and hefted out from under the counter the grubby Oxo tin full of coins. It thumped onto the counter and he rifled through it quickly, sifting out certain coins and laying them down. They were large and heavy and bore a man’s face, which made them seem foreign.
“I really should sort these out,” said Mitch. “Now they’re becoming so popular and all.”
“Do you have any notes as well?”
“Depends which one you want.”
“Pound notes, I suppose.”
“It depends which pound note from 1940 you want. There are two.”
Danny shrugged. “I don’t have a preference, really.”
Mitch took out a presentation case from a stack piled up against the back wall. Mounted in purple fabric were two old pound notes. They were identical except for the colours. One was green, the other was blue and orange.
“The green one was pre-War, up till the end of March, 1940, after which they issued this emergency note. The two colours make it harder to counterfeit, and it’s the first banknote with a metal thread running through the paper. After the War they went back to the green one.”
“So for late 1940, for historical accuracy, it would be the blue and orange one?”
“If you wanted to be strictly historically accurate, yes.”
“And just out of interest,” said Danny, “how much would one pound buy you in 1940?”
Mitch looked at the ceiling and stroked the tips of his moustache. “The lowest paid workers in 1940 are taking home three pounds a week; the highest about twenty, but that’s a managing director. Ten pounds a week and you’re living the dream.”
“How many of these do you have?”
“Of those emergency notes. Let me see. I think I have sixteen in stock.”
“And how much for each?”
“I could sell them on eBay and start each one at £15, but I’d maybe get more in auction.”
“What if I give you ten pounds each for all sixteen?”
“I could sink to that.”
“And throw in the coins?
“Go on then, seeing as I can shut up shop and have the day off now.”
Danny pulled out his wallet and slapped his credit card on the counter. “Can I pay by card?”
Mitch reached under the counter and pulled out a card reader. “You may.”
He tapped in the price of £160 and Danny inserted his credit card and keyed in his PIN.
Moments later, he was walking out a rich man, for wartime.
— 7 —
RACHEL WOKE WITH A start and shouted, “Dad!”
Blackness. An unfamiliar smell. Bonfires and teak oil. She struggled free of bedclothes and her bare feet found a rug.
Where was she? The rush of a bad dream overwhelmed her. A gravestone in St Mary’s churchyard that sent her back in time. Danny had saved Amy Parker’s life in 1912. Rachel had tried to stop him, had tried to let her die. And then Rachel’s own life had been taken from her. Was it her punishment for wanting Amy Parker dead?
No, it was all just a bad dream.
And an air raid in the Blitz, stumbling into a shelter. Petty squabbles in the rubble. The soldier who’d saved her. Lost from her father, forever.
A bright, crazy, vivid nightmare.
A chink of light. She stumbled for it, her hand reaching out blindly. Curtains as thick as blankets. She pulled them back. Another set of curtains, thinner, light shining through them. She yanked them open and peered out through leaded windows at Moseley village below.
Under the net of electric tram cables, the green had lost its iron railings and there was an underground public toilet there where the old cabman’s shelter had been. The kerb all around it was painted white, as were the lampposts. Sandbags; sandbags everywhere. People coming and going, passing thro
ugh, everyone with a square cardboard box hanging from their shoulder. Gas masks. A people at war.
She looked wildly around the room. Dark mahogany wardrobe and chest of drawers. Art Deco ornaments. She was in a silk nightgown that tumbled to her ankles.
The nightmare was real.
Someone knocked the door.
“Miss? Are you awake?”
An absurdly proper voice, like the Queen pursing her lips.
“Er. Yes.”
A woman bustled in with a breakfast tray. Dark hair in a net. Something familiar about her face.
“Good morning, dear, I’m Winnie,” she said. “I do a bit of housework for Lieutenant Eckersley. He said I ought to bring you breakfast in bed.”
Rachel climbed back into her bed and Winnie laid the tray on her lap.
“He also said you’d be quite worn out by all the travelling you did yesterday. You’ve been asleep for a good twelve hours.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”
“Nothing to be sorry for, dear. You perhaps need to get your strength back.”
A girl sneaked into the room and stood by the door. She was about seven and dressed in a light blue knitted sweater. Rachel felt herself unnerved by the child’s gaze.
“Where’s Charlie?” she said.
“He went out hours ago, miss. I don’t think he sleeps at all. He’ll be out inspecting the damage from last night’s raid. But he gave me instructions to take you along to the rest centre. He’ll be along there later.”
“Thank you for this.”
“You just call me when you’re up and ready.”
Winnie turned to leave and saw the girl. “What you doing in here? Come on. Out.”
Her Queen’s English had slipped. She turned back to Rachel, covering her mouth.
“I am sorry about that, Miss. She gets under my feet so.”
She bustled the girl out of the room and closed the door behind her. Rachel looked down at the tray. A boiled egg, toast triangles in a rack, tea in a bone china cup and saucer, a napkin. The egg was warm to the touch. This was real. She was in 1940.
Then she remembered that she’d come here to kill a woman.
— 8 —
DANNY CROSSED BACK over the street and strolled along the parade of shops on the west side of Moseley village. The 1940 coins bulging in his pocket and the reassuring wad of notes at his heart, he stopped and took in the architecture. If you looked up, above the shops, you could see Moseley as it used to be. A row of Mock Tudor frontages, mostly bedsits now above the shops, the black paint worn and flaked. Above an alleyway between the La Plancha tapas bar and a carpet shop, a brickwork panel declared it to be Victoria Parade. 1900.
He felt a smug thrill of satisfaction, that he’d seen it only twelve years after it had been built. A secret that no one knew. No one but Rachel.
Mrs Hudson’s costume shop was just down the way and he laughed to see the sign on her shop door say OPEN. It was all falling into place nicely. Only the Central Library was the problem now. That couldn’t be accessed till the morning, and it had information he couldn’t get online, information that was only stored in dusty volumes on shelves.
He stepped into the gloom of the store and remembered how creepy it had been. Mrs Hudson was seated low behind the counter, reading a book. He strode over confidently and placed his shopping bag on the counter.
“Good morning,” she said, swiping off her glasses and easing herself up with a groan. “You’re keen.”
“Come to return my costume,” he said.
Her eyes should look small and weedy without her glasses, he thought, but she looked right through him and he shifted uneasily.
“It’s not a costume,” she said. “I don’t do costumes. It’s a suit.”
“Sorry,” he said. “My suit. From 1912.”
She took the bag and pulled out the tweed suit as if it was made of gossamer and might fall apart at the touch. She held it up to the light to look it over, brushing out the creases, and draped it over her counter, placing the felt bowler hat on top. Danny would happily have watched her doing that for longer, because once she was finished she trained her eyes on him again. There was something about the way she looked at him, looked right inside him.
“Where’s your friend?”
“She... She’s coming in later with hers.”
Mrs Hudson scrutinized him a while longer.
“I wanted another one. Another co... another suit. For this student film we’re making.”
“You’d like another 1912 suit?”
“No,” he said, glancing around the rows of musty costumes. “Have you got anything that’s more... World War Two? Civilian.”
That look again, like she knew about the touchstone and Amy Parker and Rachel and all of it.
He cleared his throat and said, “It’s sort of like a family saga type film.”
— 9 —
RACHEL DEVOURED THE breakfast in a minute or so, surprised at the ravenous hunger gnawing in her belly. The ornate silver knife, the bone china cup and saucer, the porcelain rack for the toast triangles, the hand-painted plate – all of that should make you take it slower. Sometimes her nan made a fuss of the breakfast table like that, usually on Sundays, and Dad would laugh and ask if the Queen was coming to stay.
She pushed the tray aside and climbed out of bed, rubbing her arms against the chill. She threw on a silk dressing gown, wishing it was thicker and warmer, and found the slippers sitting under the chest of drawers.
She ventured out across the lounge. Winnie was clattering and humming in the kitchen, a tiny side room off the spacious lounge, like her bedroom, and her little girl was standing at the window looking out at the village, cocooned by net curtain. She turned to look as Rachel passed through, a ghost through gauze.
The toilet was a single room, a cupboard really, dank and cold, with a porcelain cistern sitting high up in the ceiling, a long chain hanging down. In the tiny bathroom next door she strip washed at the sink, not knowing if she could run a bath – there was a war on, was water rationed like everything else? – and scurried back to her room.
She threw on the clothes she had chosen last night; she’d only worn them for an hour or so, and it seemed right to make do. The shoes felt extravagant and she longed to root in the wardrobe for her DMs.
She fussed in front of the mirror with her hair, trying to pin it up properly so that it looked something like the women she’d seen in a thousand old movies. There was no hairspray or gel, nothing to make it stick in place but hairpins. Surely they didn’t have their hair permed? How did they make it stick?
There was a make-up set. She’d been too scared of it last night, but she applied some foundation and rouged her cheeks; a little eyeliner, and finished it off with russet lipstick, thankful it wasn’t bright scarlet.
A coat hung in the wardrobe, brown wool with a black fur collar over the shoulders. She snuggled into it and felt it warm her through to the bone.
The woman who peered back at her from the full-length mirror in the wardrobe door wasn’t a stranger exactly, more of a distant relative. Then she realized it was that she actually looked like a woman, not a girl, and this was the first time she’d ever felt that. Dressed to kill.
She brought the tray out.
“Oh, that’s a lovely coat, miss.”
Winnie stood frozen, cupping two brandy glasses in one hand, the stems crossed like swords.
“I feel all done up like a dog’s dinner.”
“You look very glamorous.”
“Everyone looks so glamorous here.”
“In Birmingham? You must be used to much more than this in London, miss.”
She struggled for a lie, wondering how much Charlie might have told her about her. “I live in a very quiet part of London, really.”
Winnie rushed forward and took the tray, bustling to the squat kitchen. “I’ll just get this washed, then we’ll go to the rest centre.”
Before leaving the flat,
Winnie handed her her own little cardboard box to sling over her shoulder with string.
“Lieutenant Eckersley said you’d forgotten your own in London and would need this. Quite dangerous, you travelling all that way without it.”
“Yes, I’m sorry.”
They left the flat through the back yard and tramped down the dark ginnel, Winnie pushing the girl ahead of her. They came out on to the street, opposite the village green lined with sandbags. An army truck rushed past, blowing her skirt around her knees.
Haunting barrage balloons hung silent in the sky. She couldn’t escape the feeling that she’d walked onto a film set. It could be just a film about the war, but for the smell – acrid smoke and singed hair – which hung in the air and caught the back of her throat.
They filed up the hill and she felt a dizzying sense of displacement, just like when she’d first come through the touchstone to 1912. The feeling that she did not belong here and if she didn’t concentrate really hard on being in the moment, she would fall through the ground; the sensation that it was only her own will that was holding her here, perhaps even that it was only her own imagination holding all of this together.
They crossed the street and climbed the steep steps to the church. She dragged her knuckles against the rough stone, exquisite pain centring her.
No, this is real, she thought. All of this is real and I am here, trapped in it, cut off from my own life.
Winnie marched right into the church, holding her girl’s hand. Rachel followed, but halted once inside and gazed all about in shock. It was the size of an aircraft hangar, half of the pews at the back taken out to make room for a village of camp beds. Various families seemed to be living there. Some of them had obviously been there a while and seemed at home, used to the cramped and impersonal conditions, while others were being welcomed fresh from a bombing, dazed and dirty and bloody. She felt a pang of guilt for the breakfast she’d had this morning, and the stockings she was wearing, the expensive dress and coat. For the first time in her life, she felt privileged and the contrast with this devastation was obscene.