Touchstone Season One- Complete Box Set

by Andy Conway

  To Vivian

  — 1 —

  SEVENTY FLAGS FLUTTERED in the summer breeze on the side of Birmingham Town Hall, and two old blokes were making a few last minute changes to one, taking it in turns with a rickety ladder. Thirty yards away, an ATV reporter stood outside the grand Council House entrance interviewing passersby for local news. Danny listened in from a distance and heard them speculating on the reason for the flags (everyone knew it was for the football World Cup) and which four nations were playing their group stage games in Birmingham (most people seemed to know that Argentina were in the city, but failed to name Spain and West Germany).

  By Danny’s side a wiry man in a dirty overcoat with Brylcreemed hair and a smell of turpentine chipped in with comments.

  “The Germans,” he said. “The murdering German bombing bleeders.”

  The TV presenter ignored him and carried on talking with his voxpop victims. It was a shame really, thought Danny, because the Brylcreem man knew all the answers he was looking for.

  “The Bloody Germans,” he said. “Back here now we’ve rebuilt the place they bombed to buggery.”

  A fat young boy with a red face that got redder and redder turned out to be a German who didn’t speak any English, but the Brylcreem man didn’t seem to get any angrier. Perhaps he sensed, even in his rage, that this boy wasn’t even born when the war had finished.

  “And the Spaniards,” he chipped in. “Another bunch of Nazi bleeders.”

  A couple of nattily-dressed old codgers told the TV presenter they were more interested in cricket than football but thought England might have a chance to win it.

  “Switzerland,” said the Brylcreem man. “But they ain’t playing here, only in Sheffield.”

  A young posh boy with blonde hair wearing a hoodie who talked like he was straight out of a war film didn’t know any of the teams but said he hoped England would win the World Cup.

  “Argentina and all,” said the Brylcreem Man.

  A fat Brummie bus driver with a quiff, a girl with a beehive hairdo and a group of what looked like Moroccan hipsters who blathered on in French while the TV reporter nodded with the odd knowing wink, all had their turn.

  “The bloody Germans,” said the Brylcreem man, “coming back to see what they bombed. And a fat lot of good the other three countries were when we needed them and all!”

  Danny chuckled to himself at the performance and the fact that Brylcreem man had enjoyed performing for him, a wry grin as he heckled, winding up the TV reporter more and more.

  He left them before the TV reporter could approach him, realizing how foolish it might be to be caught in an archive somewhere, 26 years before he was born. He crossed the slip road that curled along the front of the Council House and round down to New Street, all of which was pedestrianized in his own time, his present, his 2012, dodging between oncoming cars and an open-topped bus bearing the legend World Cup Bus Tour, wondering what sights they had cobbled together to make the trip worthwhile.

  As he marched across Victoria Square he noticed the large slope of grass to the side where office workers sat and munched on sandwiches; no stone steps, no giant fountain, no Floozie in the Jacuzzi, no great stone sculptures, no Iron Man to the right, just a quaint old civic square surrounded by traffic sloping down to New Street.

  There were shops he wanted to see down there, a whole city centre to explore, maybe even a 1966 pub to sample, but he veered off and crossed the street, avoiding old blue and yellow Routemaster buses and cars with fins and giant chrome bumpers and stepped into the first bookies he saw; the seventh today.

  — 2 —

  RACHEL HAD BEGUN TO wonder if she might be suffering from depression. Her mood had been low for weeks and it wasn’t solely due to the rain that had been teeming down all summer. She rattled around her apartment above Moseley village like a ball bearing in a puzzle, remembering what it was like when she’d visited the same flat in 1940, when she was Charlie’s guest. It was now hers, in 2012, the time she was supposed to belong to, but she felt a strange dissociation, as if she had woken in someone else’s body and wasn’t yet sure how to go about living their life.

  She played Charlie’s old vinyl records which she’d found stacked up in one of the sideboards, placing them one by one on the Dansette turntable and letting their sounds fill the empty rooms as she walked from one to another or sat in an armchair reading a book, or cooked something for herself and ate it alone at the table where Geoff Winston had sat and signed over the deeds to her new life.

  She was working her way through the entire stack of albums, mostly old jazz records, but some pop from the sixties too, easy listening. They made her feel closer to him, as if she might find him somewhere through the notes, but she never did. She just felt more alone.

  She knew that all she had to do was walk down the stairs, emerge opposite the bus stop on the village green, cross the road and walk up to St Mary’s church, whose tower overlooked the crossroads everyone called the village. She could walk through to the graveyard at the rear of the church and place her hand on the gravestone and she would be there again with him in whatever year of the last hundred the touchstone randomly chose for her.

  She could have done it at any moment during the last few months since he’d made her come back to this time and had his solicitor present her with the flat and the trust fund that catered for her every need.

  But she hadn’t, and she wondered why not. It was perhaps that she’d felt hurt that he’d rejected her, forcing her to return from 1940 when she’d wanted to stay. But she knew it wasn’t that. She just didn’t know what it was.

  The music didn’t help. She wondered if it was the aftershock of witnessing the Blitz, so much death and destruction, smelling the burning body of a man she knew. Perhaps that would make you slightly mad.

  Maybe she was just lonely.

  She put on her blue and white striped shirt, blue waistcoat and red scarf, her uniform, with a raincoat on top, and left the flat, walking through the village under a light drizzle and smiling to people she knew before realizing they didn’t know her, not in her new life. She didn’t exist for them.

  She walked up the row of shops to the Prince of Wales pub and its warm interior.

  A handful of afternoon drinkers already there — the usual crowd, the ones who came every day. They called out delighted hellos and she smiled as she clocked on for her shift behind the bar.

  She’d worked here for a few weeks now, even though she had all the money she needed. There were regulars who’d known her in her previous life who came to the bar and looked right through her, treating her like any other part-time student barmaid who would be here a while and then disappear some day. She chatted to regulars who liked to joke with her, make small talk with her, even flirt with her, but it didn’t make her feel any less lonely.

  This afternoon, the regulars were complaining that the pub had been refused a music licence for the upcoming Moseley’s Got Talent night. Someone on the council had cited the possibility of local residents complaining about the noise.

  “The possibility, mind. No one’s actually complained, they just think they might.”

  “If you can’t hear live music in Moseley where can you hear it?”

  “They’re trying to stamp out everything that makes Moseley Moseley.”

  Rachel smiled to herself. Moseley had the reputation of being a place full of artists, dropouts, failed poets, social workers, teachers and media people, but she knew it hadn’t always been like that. She knew it was once a respectable, mature suburb, looking down its nose at the rest of Birmingham. She’d seen it for herself; she’d felt the full force of its snooty glare.

  After a couple of hours’ pulling pints and measuring out shorts, a man walked in and hovered at the bar, smiling nervously even though he was a big man, a rugby player and much older than her.

  She looked into his eyes and smiled back.

  “Hi, Rachel,” he said.

  “Hi there,�
�� she said. “What can I get you?”

  “Pint of Landlord, please.”

  She poured it out for him, watching it swirl and teem luxuriously while he fidgeted and seemed to want to say something.

  “Oh,” he said, like he’d only just remembered. “I got you that thing you asked about.”

  He pulled from his jacket pocket a paperback and placed it on the bar. Total World Sport: The Greatest Sporting Moments of the Last 100 Years.

  “Oh, brilliant,” she said.

  “Should have just about everything.”

  “That’s just what I need. How much do I owe you?”

  He waved it away. “Nothing. It’s a gift.”

  “Well, thank you,” she said, feeling tears prick her eyes.

  He pulled some coins out of his pocket to pay for his drink.

  “On the house,” she said, taking the book and placing it on the shelf below the till.

  “Oh, thanks, Rachel,” he said.

  “Thank you... Martyn,” she answered.

  He smiled and went to find a seat.

  She served the next customer, trying not to cry, overwhelmed by the familiar smell of him that had made her want to jump into his arms like she always had when she was a girl, to be held by him and make all the pain inside her go away.

  Every time she saw him she wanted to call him Dad and it killed her that she couldn’t.

  — 3 —

  AFTER PLACING HIS TENTH bet of the day, Danny caught the bus to Moseley. The bus was an old Routemaster with an open deck at the rear where a conductor stood for most of the journey when he wasn’t prowling the upstairs and downstairs aisles collecting fares and dispensing square tickets on brown paper from the clip machine he wore slung low at his waist.

  He stepped off at the stop before Moseley village and walked to the Prince of Wales, intending to stop by for a pint, perhaps engage some locals in gossip, get a feel for the era, and had been all set to stride through the front door, but it was closed.

  He stood for a moment, wondering why the pub was closed in the middle of the afternoon, then remembered something he’d once heard his dad moaning about: that it was only recently this whole 24-hour opening thing. They’d always used to open just for lunch time and then for the evening. He vaguely remembered some long distant History lesson that had connected it with the First World War but he’d not been much interested in it. He’d never really been that interested in History at all but it had seemed the least boring of any of the options open to him and an easy way to get the degree his parents thought was so important.

  He shrugged and walked on down to the village, smiling at the old cars with their curves and chrome: Moseley in the Swinging Sixties. Except it wasn’t quite what you’d expect. Only half of the people he saw looked like they knew the Sixties were happening. The rest were still wearing fashions from the Fifties, and some even from the Forties.

  This one had been easy for him: no need to hire a costume from Mrs Hudson’s shop. All he needed was a slim suit and a thin tie, and he had a couple of those already, seeing as they were the fashion again in 2012. It was all very Mad Men and he felt as cool and ruthless as Don Draper. He had packed a couple of suits and some casual wear for summer, nothing too outrageous.

  As he walked through the village, he noticed the only bookies in Moseley. He’d researched the location of every bookmakers’ in the centre and south of the city, going through the list of shops in Kelly’s Directory for 1966, and wondered why Moseley only had one. The urge to walk in and place his array of bets was overwhelming, but he resisted. He had time for that. He needed to find a bed for the night.

  The Alcester Lodge Hotel was further up from the village, on the rise to Kings Heath, just past the old Dovecote. In his present, it was a care home. He’d taken a look at it in 2012, rehearsing his steps carefully for this moment. The front door chimed his arrival and he found a reception cluttered with chintz. He realized immediately that ‘hotel’ was a grand word for what was in fact a suburban bed-and-breakfast.

  A severe old lady with horn-rimmed glasses looked him up and down and forced a smile.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  From her voice he realized she wasn’t an old lady at all and was probably in her thirties; she just dressed like an old lady.

  “I’m looking for a room,” he said.

  “I’m afraid we’re fully booked, sir,” she said. “World Cup.”

  “Oh.”

  He hadn’t thought of that.

  “All the hotels are booked up solid for the whole month,” she said.

  He floundered, feeling suddenly tired.

  “You could try the Palm Court Hotel on Wake Green Road,” she said. “But if I were you I’d look in a newsagents’ window.”

  “A newsagents?”

  “Lots of people letting rooms out. Only way to get a lodging now.”

  “Okay. Thank you.”

  “You American?” she asked.

  The question threw him. Did he sound American?

  “Er... No. But I spent some time there.”

  As he walked out, he glance d back and caught her gazing after him with a look that seemed hungry.

  He strolled back down to the village and looked at the ads in the first newsagents’ window he found on St Mary’s Row. Dozens of cards offered rooms in respectable houses. A name caught his eye. Mrs Winifred Hines. Rachel’s surname. Could it be one of her relatives? He didn’t care.

  He memorized the number on Anderton Park Road and set off, past the church and up Wake Green Road, unable to forget taking the same walk in 1940. He didn’t turn off down Church Road towards where Amy Parker lived — there would be time for that too — he continued for another block, past the Sorrento Maternity and down Anderton Park Road.

  It was a big old house; the kind that had probably once belonged to a rich Victorian. He walked up the drive and rang the bell. A patter of feet slapped along tiles and the door eased open and he was surprised not to find a face until he looked down and saw the door had been opened by a young boy.

  “Hello there,” he said, immediately feeling like someone’s old uncle. “And what’s your name?”

  The boy looked up at him with fearless eyes and said, “Martyn.”

  — 4 —

  EVEN THOUGH THE TRAFFIC roared through the village crossroads below her, she still felt like the rooftop was a tranquil oasis. No one could see her up there. Stone battlements and an ornate stucco rosette arch crowned the building, and seemed to guard it. Few people who entered the pub on the ground floor realized that the upper floor was an apartment or that above it was a secret rooftop garden.

  It was a castle, and Rachel was the princess, all alone and waiting for a knight to rescue her.

  She lounged in a deckchair, enjoying a rare half hour of afternoon sun, flicking through Total World Sport: The Greatest Sporting Moments of the Last 100 Years. When she came to the page on England’s 1966 World Cup victory, she froze.

  Martyn had always told her how he first met her mum on that day. They were children, at a street party in Moseley. He a boy in shorts, she a girl in pigtails.

  “And did you know then, Dad? Did you know you were going to marry her then?” she’d asked him once, a hundred times.

  “Don’t be daft,” he’d said. “I thought she was a silly girl who couldn’t kick a football.”

  She’d imagined it again and again in her mind and only this time realized it would look very different to how she’d always pictured it, because in her mind it was set more in the 1940s. She’d been to Moseley in 1940 and she knew this would be 20 years later. There might be Union Jack bunting but it wouldn’t be like the Super 8 film in her head.

  She had always begged him for scraps of information about her dead mother: tell me more, please tell me more, Dad. And all she’d learned was he’d befriended the girl called Lorna Foster, even though she couldn’t kick a football straight, but then she’d been whisked away to the other side of the city and
ended up in an old lock keeper’s cottage by the canal in Winson Green. He’d not met her again until they were 20, at an Ultravox gig in town.

  Rachel had lived in that canal cottage too and remembered it from some of her earliest memories. Because after her mum had died, Martyn had lost the big family home on Anderton Park Road in Moseley and fallen back on the canal cottage, and it was as if Rachel’s life had mirrored her mother’s: cast out of respectable Moseley and banished to the far reaches of a canal house in Winson Green, next to the prison.

  But now she was back in Moseley, with property and an income: a successful young woman, but the life she wanted wiped out.

  Bobby Moore’s face smiled up at her from the book, held aloft by his team mates, the Jules Rimet trophy in his hand. A face that spoke of promise, optimism, a bright future; a face you could trust.

  A tear fell on his face.

  She snapped the book shut and stared at the rain clouds blocking out the sun. Another drop splashed her face. It was going to chuck it down again.

  She was supposed to give the book to Charlie so he could make the money that bought this apartment for her. But he’d already had it when she’d seen him in 1940, which meant she somehow had to get it to him before that. Had he mentioned the year? He’d said something like four, five, six years ago, when she’d sat in the lounge below, sipping his brandy. So she must have visited him some time in the mid 1930s.

  But the touchstone had so far let them through at seemingly random years, first 1912 and then 1940. So how could she get back to the 1930s?

  She smiled. Why was she worrying? It had already happened.

  She didn’t know. Ever since finding the touchstone, it was the things that had already happened but she’d not got round to yet that worried her most of all.

  She hugged the book to her breast and walked down to the apartment. It was time for her shift at the Prince. Perhaps her father would come in again tonight and make tragic small talk with her while she died inside a little more.