by Andy Conway
“So you work the rest centre all day and this all night? When do you sleep?”
“We all have to do our bit,” Amy said. “Or what’s the point of living?” She yawned and covered her mouth with a self-conscious smile.
Rachel thought of Winnie and Mary Lewis, her family, who had gone home for the night, and a qualm of shame flushed her cheeks.
“So what’s going on here, then?”
She told her the situation: the mother in the bath, waiting for her baby to be found in the rubble.
“And the blokes want her out of the way, I suppose?”
“Yes. That’s about the size of it.”
“I’m not wasting petrol for that. Not when there might be another survivor. We’ll wait. She’ll be better here, close to it.”
A mobile first aid post – a car with three nurses and a doctor – arrived, and Amy sent them into the house where they’d taken the bath woman.
“They can patch her up, if she needs it,” said Amy. “Though I don’t think they’ve got any sort of bandage for what’s hurting her, the poor girl.”
Another van pulled up to join the convoy of vehicles now lining the road. They opened a serving hatch and Rachel realized it was a tea car. Nothing happened without tea. It was fuelling the entire war effort. If Hitler seized the tea plantations in India, it would all be over.
Screams came up from the debris. A woman’s weak cries of terror, the panic of someone who’d woken to find herself buried under a burning house.
“I’m going back to help,” Rachel said.
Amy Parker waved her off and got back in her cab, probably to grab a few moments of sleep, and Rachel ran back up the rubble.
The woman was screaming, “Get me out! Please!”
Fire broke out under the debris.
“More water here!” shouted Jimmy.
Constable Davies yelled, “Suppress that fire!”
The fire fighters shot a gentle flow of water at the flames, bricks singeing and steaming, the woman crying in panic.
To wake and find yourself buried alive, and now being burned alive, so close to rescue.
Rachel joined the men scrambling in the rubble, digging out hot bricks and throwing them aside. A frantic urgency to their work now. Water from the hose spraying her as she dug, breaking her nails, cutting her fingers.
A hand came out of the rubble and Rachel grabbed it.
“She’s here!” she screamed. “I’ve got her.”
The men rushed to her and clawed at the bricks and plaster all around that hand. A dusty tangle of hair emerged. The woman was moaning now, a low groan of pain, like a cow giving birth.
A creak of rubble and an ear splitting crack above. Rachel thought for a moment it was some sort of bomb dropping. Their eyes shot up to see a beam from the exposed attic falling.
She grabbed at Charlie’s trench coat and yanked him away, falling down the slope of rubble. The others dived aside as the beam crashed down.
Don’t let it hit her. Don’t let it hit her.
It crashed into the rubble with an obscene clatter and she rolled down to the pavement with Charlie, landing with a grunt.
She was on top of him, the warmth of his body against hers, his arms taking her weight. Their eyes met for a startled moment, then they scrambled back up the landslide.
Jimmy had the woman’s hand now. A dozen hands clawed at the rubble around her. Rachel stroked the woman’s hair from her face and lifted her chin.
“Don’t worry. You’re safe. We’re getting you out.”
Her eyes vivid white through the muck plastering her; eyes that said don’t let go, don’t let me die here.
Like a birth, it was a terrible struggle, with just her head poking out, and then they pulled her right out in an instant. Rachel fell back and sat watching as they put her on a stretcher and carried her down to the street to the first aid station. They plonked the stretcher right down and the doctor and nurses examined her.
Charlie pulled Rachel up. “You saved my life there.”
“What?”
“The beam. It would have hit me. I’d be a goner.”
She’d forgotten, so intent on pulling the poor woman out. She’d saved Charlie’s life, in a moment of instinct.
They skipped off the rubble and gazed at the smoking pile of devastation.
“I’m afraid that baby next door is a goner,” said Jimmy. “No chance.”
“We have to keep digging, though,” said Charlie. “Maybe time to get that mother out of here now.”
The men climbed back up and stationed themselves in a line, listening for a cry that would never come. Rachel looked at the house across the street where they’d taken the mother. She would do enough crying for both of them.
She steeled herself and walked across the street. The front door was ajar. She rapped on the wooden frame and stepped inside.
She had expected to see a woman screaming on the floor, restrained by alarmed neighbours, a woman trying to fight her way back to her baby, or to some other time before a German bomb had fallen from the sky, destined to land on her house; a woman screaming at Fate, wanting to change time, so that she might grab her baby and step outside a minute earlier, or not take that bath and hold her baby instead so she might die with it. She expected to see a woman screaming for death to take her.
But it was nothing like that.
In the front parlour sat an old grey-haired couple, the lady sitting on the sofa next to a young woman in a dressing gown and thick woollen socks.
They were looking at a photo album. Something to distract her. Rachel tried to imagine the scene. She had been blown from her house, left sitting in a bath in the middle of the street. The nice old couple from across the street had dressed her and given her a cup of tea and chatted about old times while twenty strangers looked for her dead baby.
“Hello, dear,” Rachel said.
The woman looked up and smiled politely.
“What’s your name?” Rachel asked.
“I’m Maude. Maude Brackley. Pleased to meet you.”
She held out her hand and Rachel shook it.
“We’re going to take you to hospital now. If you’d like to come with me.”
“Oh, I’m quite all right,” Maude said. “I’m not ill, am I?” She looked to the old couple for reassurance.
The old lady took the photo album from her lap and put it aside.
“That’s fine,” said Rachel. “But the nurses need to check you over. Just in case.”
“Oh,” said Maude. “Well, if you think they need to.”
“Come with me and I’ll walk you out.”
Maude got up and thanked the neighbours for their hospitality, as if this were a Sunday afternoon visit.
Rachel walked her out and Maude stopped on the garden path, seeing the chaos across the street.
“Ooh, what’s happened there?”
“It’s... nothing... there’s been a bombing.”
“Aw, that’s terrible,” she tutted. “Those poor people.”
Rachel took her to Amy’s ambulance. They helped her climb in the back and Amy put her on one of the bunks. She lay there quite content.
“Poor bugger,” said Amy, as they walked over to the first aid station. “She doesn’t know what hit her. See it a lot.”
“Will she come out of it?”
“Who knows? She’s better off if she doesn’t, I suppose.”
The woman they’d dug out of the rubble was all patched up. They’d made an effort to wash her down but she was caked in dust and grime.
The stretcher-bearers hopped to it and picked her up.
She reached out and grabbed Rachel’s arm.
“You’re the angel,” she said. “I was dead, and an angel pulled me out, stroked my hair and told me it wasn’t my time. That was you.”
Rachel glanced at the others, squirming with embarrassment. “What’s your name, dear?”
“Helena,” she said. “Helena Bright.”
&n
bsp; She walked alongside the stretcher-bearers as they carried Helena Bright to the ambulance and put her in the bunk next to Maude. One of the nurses hopped in and sat with them.
Amy slammed the door, hopped into the cab and sped off.
Rachel watched the van shrink into night, quickly engulfed in blackness. She had helped. She had done her bit. But she didn’t know why she felt so useless. An awful thought hit her. If a German pilot had released his bombs a second or two later, that random bomb might have fallen on the house where Amy’s child slept instead of on this house.
She wiped the thought from her forehead, hot with shame, and walked back to the rescue team picking through the rubble.
— 18 —
DANNY WAS THE FIRST person through the great glass doors of the Central Library, almost pushing the security guard aside as they opened.
He sailed up the escalators and ran down the first floor corridor, past the new cafe space, turning to take the escalators up to the research floors, acres of orange carpeted concrete space, strangely deserted. Usually there were people at every desk space, strolling among the stacks, but he was alone, only a couple of library staff noticing him as he jogged up to the sixth floor.
It was not his usual morning routine, and he had been surprised to see how many people were out and about, going to work and doing important things in the city.
At the sixth floor, Local Studies, he headed straight for the shelf of fat, scarlet Kelly’s Directories. Skimming the titles with his finger, he landed on 1939 and pulled it out. He plonked the 1940 edition on top of it, then the 1941 edition, and all the others through to 1945.
He tottered over to the nearest study table with the precarious pile of volumes and sat down, immediately rifling through the 1939 edition, pen poised to take notes.
“Hello, did you get your photograph?”
He looked up, startled. A woman. Glasses, ginger hair pinned up. Plain looking. His eyes flitted to her name badge. Kath Bright. He placed her. The librarian who’d helped. Of course, the photograph of Amy and her father that Rachel had handed to him. Only the other morning.
“Yes, I did. Thank you very much.”
“We don’t normally make finds like that, but as I told your friend, this photographer kept an archive of his subjects’ names.”
“I see.”
Kath Bright ran her fingers through her hair.
“It’s a brilliant photo. Thank you very much for finding it for me.”
“Any time,” she said.
She backed off, bumped into a table behind her, flushed red, walked quickly away.
Danny frowned and then forgot her.
He found Amy Parker, alive and still living in Moseley in 1940. He scribbled the address down and ran out, leaving the pile of directories, 1939 — 1945 lying on the table for the library staff to put back.
He was home in Moseley by 10am. The house was quiet; Jessica, Stacy and Ben probably still sleeping after a night down Broad Street in some glitzy hell hole of a nightclub. Jessica had begged him to come out with them and laughed at his excuse that he was staying in to study.
He sneered. That was their idea of adventure. A crappy club full of braying, selfie-taking idiots. How could they understand what he had at his fingertips? He had walked the gaslit streets of Edwardian Birmingham, and now he would witness the Blitz. He was chasing a beautiful woman through time, a woman whose life he had saved. Nothing in their stupid lives could compare to that.
He unpacked the bundle of 1940s clothes he’d hired from Mrs Hudson’s shop and laid them out on the bed with a few additions of his own.
The trousers were incredibly baggy and just about as opposite to skinny jeans as it was possible to be, a muddy navy blue with a faint pinstripe. They were too long so he had to roll them up at their tapered ankles, and they were loose on the waist so he gathered them in with a sturdy leather belt.
The shirt felt rough, but he liked the knitted tank top and silk tie combination. He’d also found a pair of Argyle socks his Grandmother had given him for a present three years ago and he’d never worn.
He wore his own pair of old brogues he’d almost thrown out but could never part with, even though there was never an occasion he ever found to wear them. They seemed ideal for this: maybe too formal and shiny, but they would definitely pass.
The suit jacket had absurdly large lapels and smelled of pensioners and something that was like aniseed, possibly moth balls.
On the bedside table sat a stack of blue and orange banknotes and a pile of dirty coins with the King’s face. He slid the notes into a brown leather wallet, another unwanted Christmas present, and piled the coins in his trouser pocket, his iPhone in the other. He couldn’t use it to make calls or access the internet, obviously, but he could take photographs. He had a vague idea that he might be able to take pictures that might be worth something when he came back.
He admired himself in the mirror. A fairly dapper 1940s chap. It was a shame he had no time to grow a moustache.
He checked his pockets. What else? His eyes roamed the room. On his desk, his printout of Birmingham bombings and the note with Amy Parker’s address. He stuffed them in his inside jacket pocket. These were what would give him the edge over Rachel. She’d had a whole day’s head start on him, but she probably wouldn’t have found Amy yet, whereas he would be with her within an hour.
He looked up at the research notes above his desk. The photo he’d taken of Amy in 1912. He put his finger to her lips and then stalked out of the house.
— 19 —
RACHEL WOKE LYING FACE down in darkness and for a moment thought she was buried under rubble. Head throbbing, throat dry. She could feel she was fully clothed. How had she got here? The distinct smell of Charlie’s spare room; teak oil and emptiness. A room never used.
She twisted off the bed and stumbled for the blackout curtains, sweeping them open, grey light blinding her.
She was not buried alive, she thought, then laughed at the thought, because, in a way, she was.
Her DMs lying on the rug. No memory of taking them off last night, or falling on the bed. No recollection of arriving back at Charlie’s apartment. It was like blackout curtains had been drawn over her memory.
Parched, she staggered to the kitchen next door, took a tea cup from the drainer and poured water from the tap, slaking her sandpaper thirst, not caring if it was all right to drink the water or not.
Like a hangover. Did they have paracetamol here? She was fairly certain they didn’t. Aspirin, though, she thought might be common. She poured another cup of water and downed it in one gulp, choking for breath.
In the lounge, sitting in the middle of the dining table, was a note, written in a childish scrawl.
No time to wait for you. See you at the relief centre when you have woken from your beauty sleep, now you know the way. Ha ha.
Yours, Winnie.
Was Charlie gone too, or was he still sleeping? She crept to one of the other doors off the main lounge, the only one she had never entered, and listened, ear to the door. Nothing. She knocked, too lightly.
“Charlie?”
No answer. She took the handle and pushed the door open. A room just like her own, only slightly bigger. A large bed, neatly made with military corners, wardrobe, dressing table, chair. As neat and unlived in as her own. Perhaps Charlie too wasn’t present in his own life, pushed to the edge of it, feeling like he didn’t belong.
Had he even come back last night?
They had worked on, pulling at the rubble before another incident had called everyone away – this one could be finished in the morning, they had decided – so they had cordoned it off and moved on to another scene of random devastation. Long after the bombers had gone and the all clear had sounded, some time before dawn, with the sky still black but the birds singing in the trees, they had gone home. She remembered getting into the car but not arriving.
She wondered with guilt if Charlie had carried her from the car to her bed
.
Her belly groaned. In the kitchen she found bread but didn’t know how to toast it. She smeared butter over a slice and thought about getting fat. They didn’t have low fat spread here, or semi-skimmed milk, and yet she hadn’t seen a single fat person.
She sat at the dining table and chewed on bread and butter, hoping she wasn’t eating half of Charlie’s ration, shivering.
The past was always so cold, and there was never enough to eat.
When she had gorged on the slice, she smelled the charcoal on herself and realized she should change. She couldn’t go out dressed like this. Only at night, like the other women. It seemed funny to change into a glamorous dress and stockings, but it seemed the women at the relief centre liked to dress up during the day, even Amy.
Amy Parker, working day and night on the war effort. A true hero. And Rachel had come with the intention of wiping her out.
Angrily, she threw her DMs back in the wardrobe and applied some rough make-up at the mirror, hating the sight of herself. She had wished death on Amy’s child too, even in the midst of saving lives. The woman they had dug from the rubble calling her an angel, and not realizing she was an angel of death.
Like an agent, she thought. Those women she’d read about, even seen movies about, who had spent the war working undercover of the enemy, risking their lives every moment, to kill when the opportunity presented itself. They were angels of death too. And now she had been inducted into the ranks. It was as if Charlie knew all along how evil she could be. It was as if he were gently coaxing her into the idea of killing Amy Parker and her child.
It had to be both, she thought.
If it was only the child, Amy Parker might have another that could wipe out Rachel’s timeline.
To be absolutely certain of achieving her mission, she had to kill them both. Not Rachel – it wasn’t Rachel doing this – but the other woman, the angel of death, the assassin inside her. She would do it. Because Rachel had proved herself incapable.