by Andy Conway
She sat back and stared in wonder at the story that had unfolded. Maddy Parker with a fortune, saved by the intervention of a TV crew, and Charlie surviving because Powell was under investigation for corruption and had ended up in prison along with D.I. Davies. Had Charlie done that? He must have tipped off the police about the link between Powell and D.I. Davies. As soon as Maddy had surprised them all by claiming the money, he must have sprung into action to save himself.
She stared out of the window and watched the rain come down for a while. He had lived. At least there was that. She couldn’t go back to him but he had survived somehow. Except she would go back to him, because she’d given him the sports almanac in 1934 and that hadn’t happened yet. She would see him again. The touchstone would work again somehow. She could keep trying and maybe even get her life back; stop little Esther Parker growing up to marry Martyn instead of her mother, Lorna Foster.
She went back to the reception desk and asked for the fiches of deaths and births and smiled as the nice man offered her more tissues.
She trawled through them and found no record of the birth of Lorna Foster in 1959. That was the year Martyn had always told her her mother had been born. Was it some sort of error or had she not been born at all? She searched through the five years before and after and found nothing. She went further back and found Lorna’s mother’s birth: Deirdre Foster in June 1934. So her grandmother had at least been born. That was something. She ploughed onwards checking every year for the same name in the list of deaths and found it sooner than she’d wanted: October 1959.
Lorna Foster hadn’t been at the street party because she’d never been born. Her mother had died before she could give birth to her, or perhaps even in childbirth.
She noted down the date and left the library, walking straight over to the Register Office in the drizzle. She handed over the details and paid her money and waited for them to copy the death certificate and remembered waiting here with Danny, an eternity ago, waiting for news of Amy Parker’s death – the death she should have had as a teenager at the hands of her father.
After a while, the clerk called out her name and handed her the envelope. She didn’t open it until she was standing outside just under the shelter of the doorway. It was still raining but it might cease soon and she could get home on the bus through a pause in the downpour.
She scanned the details of her grandmother’s existence and found herself reading just one word over and over again.
Suicide.
She looked up at the sky. It didn’t look like the rain was going to stop any time soon.
4. STATION AT THE END OF TIME
Dedication
To Rita
— 1 —
RACHEL WAS DRAWING shapes in the sugar that had fallen on the café table, humming along to Julie London breathing Something I Dreamed Last Night, meandering on the radio behind the counter.
The women – the old dear behind the counter and another woman Rachel hadn’t looked at yet – had been gassing on for what felt like an eternity.
She felt an urge to lift her head and turn to see them but something prevented her. She couldn’t take her eyes off the trails her fingertip was leaving in the sugar. There was something soothing and therapeutic about it.
“Well, I certainly won’t be getting one of them in here,” said the old dear. “If youngsters want that new fangled espresso muck they can go and find one of them coffee bars.”
“Or go to blummin Italy,” said the other woman.
Rachel hummed along to the tune and couldn’t remember how she knew it.
There was a rumbling sound she felt as a vibration under her seat. Something outside the window to her left chimed, ding-ding, and she was suddenly aware of how cold it was. Bitterly cold. Her legs were freezing under the table. She crossed her ankles and shuddered.
A train whistled mournfully in the distance and the grumbling of its belly grew louder as it pulled into the station.
“That’s my train, Renee, I’ll be seeing you tomorrow.”
“Righto, bab.”
The woman scurried out and Rachel lifted her eyes and saw the hem of her skirt, a whisper of black stockings, seamed, a tweed coat, before the door banged open and a blast of cold air hit her legs.
She was thinking how funny it was that the old dear’s name was Renee and they pronounced it Reeny.
She turned her head to look through the window. Her neck was all stiff and sore, aching terribly. The window was a solid sheet of white and only after a moment could she see that it was fog and steam; the vague outline of a woman climbing onto a train only a few yards away.
“Worst fog in years.”
Rachel jumped.
Renee was standing next to her, peering out of the window. “Oh, you’ve made a right mess there with my sugar.”
She was wiping it with a cloth, wiping away the picture Rachel had made in the sheet of sugar granules. What had it been? Too late. It was gone.
“I’m sorry,” said Rachel. “I spilt it.”
She realized she had lied. She couldn’t remember spilling it.
“Is that not your train, bab?”
Rachel looked out at the foggy platform again and shook her head. She stopped herself from saying, “I don’t know.” She didn’t know if it was her train because she had no idea where she was or how she’d got there.
Renee bustled back behind her counter and Rachel rose on a sudden impulse. She scuttled out to the platform.
It was like walking into a giant freezer, blinded by white light, the cold burning her throat.
A piercing whistle shrieked and the train pulled out, hissing. A steam train. She followed it along the frost-paved platform, heels clicking on the paving stones, looking for the sign.
It loomed through steam and fog, a white board the size of a coffin lid:
KINGS HEATH.
She was at a station that didn’t exist anymore. It had been closed down years ago, sometime during the war, she remembered. It hadn’t been operational her whole life.
So how had she got here?
She could make out a wooden bench under the sign. A newspaper folded up into a neat package. She opened it and peered at the headline.
Buddy Holly was dead and a tiny strip of print in the top corner said it was 1959.
— 2 —
RACHEL STAGGERED BACK into the tearoom and closed the door behind her. Renee was spooning tealeaves into a giant copper urn. A Multipot, just like the one Rachel had used during the Blitz, making tea for bomb survivors.
The room was mean and dour, brightened only by shabby adverts for Spillers, Rinso, Camp Coffee, Wild Woodbine Cigarettes and Wills’ Cut Golden Bar. From a poster, an impossibly chic family lounged in a carriage, looking out on a traffic jam and told everyone to Ease the Strain — Go by Train.
“You all right, bab? You’re looking really peculiar.”
Rachel felt her knees turn to jelly and thought she might throw up.
Renee was dashing over to her now, her bony hand gripping Rachel’s arm. “Here, bab. Come on. Sit yourself down.”
Rachel poured into a wooden chair and propped herself up on the table where she’d sat a minute ago.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Renee’s icy fingers stroked her cheek and brushed her hair from her face.
“I’m okay, I think.”
“Hang on. I’ll get you a cuppa.” She dashed behind her counter and was pouring tea into a china cup. “Lots of sugar too. Nice and sweet. You look like you need it.”
The old dear brought the cup, shivering on a saucer, and placed it on the table. Brought it to her lips. Made her sip at it.
The sweetness made her cringe, but the afterwave of warmth radiated through her and she knew she wasn’t going to be sick.
“I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t you be silly, love. Expect you’re still not yourself after... well, you know. You just drink that all up and get yourself back together.”
The old dear was looking at her like she might be mad; like she might have to phone for someone to come and take her away. “There. The colour’s coming right back to those cheeks.”
A radio announcer was talking about a CND rally in Trafalgar Square estimated at twenty thousand people.
“Goodness me,” chimed Renee, walking back to her counter. “World’s coming to a right old end and no mistake. I was telling Maureen only five minutes ago. Prime minister telling us we’ve never had it so good and there we are: nuclear wotsit everywhere and train fares doubling. Where will that leave me, I’d like to know? What good’s a train station tearoom if no one can afford a train ticket?”
Rachel sipped in more tea and sighed, over the worst. “What did you mean?”
“I’m sorry, bab?”
“You said you expect I still wasn’t myself after... something.”
Renee walked back over, puzzled. “Well, you know. I didn’t like to mention it again.”
“I don’t understand.”
“After what happened with Deirdre Foster.”
The name pierced Rachel’s heart.
Deirdre Foster.
Her grandmother on her mum’s side. A name on a death certificate. She’d got it from the Register Office. Standing in the rain reading the cause of death.
“You remember, don't you?” said Renee. “You were talking to her just before she did it.”
A flood of memories damburst her brain and her stomach lurched again.
Her grandmother had died before she’d given birth to Lorna Foster, who would become Rachel’s mum. That’s why I wasn’t born.
Rachel heard her own voice ask from the bottom of a well a mile away. “Before she did what?”
“Well... before she threw herself under that train last week.”
She pushed herself up from the table, the chair clattering to the floor behind her, and ran out to the platform just as another train wailed through and she was blinded by white steam and fog.
— 3 —
SHE HAD BEEN STARING at the swirling shapes in the Artexed ceiling for hours or moments before she realized she was awake. There was a smell of burnt toast.
A dream. Just a dream about an old station and her grandmother.
She rolled out of bed, her bare feet hitting the familiar rug, and stretched in her cotton pyjamas. She stared vacantly at her desk: writing pad, canvas college bag, library books on local history. Her old room.
She was in her old room.
Her heart jumped. Eyes bulging, she stood, heard clattering in the kitchen and the faint drone of a song from the radio. She threw her clothes on and ruffled her auburn hair and crept to the door.
She was in her old room.
“Rachel!”
Martyn’s voice. Her dad’s voice.
She was out on the landing in a second, feet sliding through luxurious warm carpet.
“Do you want a lift or not?”
He was standing at the foot of the stairs, tapping his wristwatch with a massive finger, looking like a rugby league manager on the touchline.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Dad? Is it you?”
Martyn frowned, reading the alarm in her face. “Of course it’s me. What’s wrong?”
She let out an animal yelp of need, ran down the stairs and jumped into his arms.
“Oh Dad! Dad! It’s you! I’m back!”
He hugged her, held her. “Hey, what the hell’s up with you?”
She was crying, weeping into his chest.
“What are you crying for?”
“Please tell me I’m back! Please tell me I’m safe!”
He squeezed her tightly. “It’s all right. You’re here. Everything’s fine.”
“Oh God, Dad! I was gone so long. I thought I’d never see you again!”
Martyn held her away from him. “What are you talking about? You only went to bed last night.”
She felt the hall carpet shift underneath her, the foundations of the house sliding away as if caught in a tsunami. She crumpled and swooned.
Martyn swept her up in his arms and carried her into the living room, pushing her into the sofa, stroking the hair stuck to her wet cheeks.
“What’s going on, Rachel? Are you on drugs?”
She laughed through tears. “No! I think... I’m either going crazy or I had the worst nightmare ever.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“Oh Dad, don’t be scared. I’m so happy! I’m back home.”
“What are you on about, Rache?”
She looked about at the familiar living room of her youth, the one she thought she’d lost forever, and laughed again through tears.
“I had this horrible dream. But it was so vivid. So real. There was this gravestone in the churchyard and it sent me back in time, to 1912, and Danny stopped this girl from being murdered, but that was what wiped out me. It meant I’d never been born and I was back in the present here but you didn’t know me at all.”
“Who’s Danny?”
“A boy at Uni. He was in love with the girl. Amy Parker. And he saved her.” She realized she was babbling but didn’t care, desperate to share the dream with someone. “And then I was back there again in 1940 in the Blitz, and then again in 1966 at her funeral and that’s when I found out grandma had thrown herself under a train and that’s why I was never born.”
“Your grandma’s in the kitchen.”
“No. Grandma Foster. Mum’s mum.”
“She didn’t throw herself under a train.”
“I know! It was just a dream!”
The kitchen door opened and Olive carried a plate of half-burnt toast to the dining table.
“Oh, Nan!” Rachel rushed over and hugged her.
Olive steadied herself, surprised and delighted.
“You’re back too. I met you in 1966 and you were such a b... not nice person.”
“What are you talking about, love?”
Martyn chimed in from the other side of the room. “She had a nightmare.”
“A nightmare about meeting me? Charming.”
“No, silly. It was a nightmare because I couldn’t get back.” She kissed Olive on the forehead and sat down to breakfast. “Oh God, that looks great. I’m starved. I feel like I haven’t eaten for half a century.”
Martyn came over and put his giant hand on her shoulder. “I think you should stay here today. You’re not well. I’ll phone Doctor Devaz. See if he can come and look at you.”
“No way, Dad. I’m fine. This is the happiest I’ve ever felt. God, this tastes good.”
Martyn looked at Olive and they both shrugged. Rachel demolished her boiled egg and toast and Martyn rattled his car keys.
“Come on then. I can still give you that lift to your field trip thing.”
She stopped dead. This was how it had all started: her dad dropping her off at the church in Moseley village, exploring gravestones with her class, being paired with Danny, finding the touchstone.
“St Mary’s church?”
“No,” he said, dismayed. “You said it was All Saints. Kings Heath.”
She processed that. Not St Mary’s in Moseley. So it was different. That was good. Different was good.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go to Kings Heath.”
She ran upstairs and threw her things into her bag. She had no memory of Uni arranging a field trip to All Saints in Kings Heath but it would all come to her. She was still groggy from the nightmare. She was home again. She was safe.
As they were leaving, Olive emerged from the front room for her goodbye kiss.
“Ta ra, Nan.”
“Bye, Rachel,” she said and gripped her arm tightly, whispering low like it should be a secret from Martyn. “Now, do you need any money to take to your Uni?”
“No, Nan. I’m fine!”
She kissed her and followed Martyn out. She didn’t know if she had money
or not, but she didn’t want to take her Nan’s all the time. It wasn’t fair.
Martyn was already in the car.
Rachel smiled at the sight of the old banger. In her dream he’d replaced it with a vintage iris blue MGB Roadster. The sports car he might possibly have inherited from Charlie.
They snaked through rush hour traffic down St Mary’s Row to the church standing sentinel over the village green, but she was thinking more of Charlie now. A man she’d encountered every time she’d gone to the past. The man who’d left his flat to her so she could live in that terrifying alternative present where she had no family.
She gulped back a sob.
“You okay?”
She nodded. “I was just remembering Charlie.”
“Who’s Charlie?”
“In my dream. My nightmare. He was a man who helped me every time I went back in the past. First in 1940, then in 1966. I sort of fell in love with him. He lived in the flat above the pub.”
Martyn leaned across her and they both peered up at the ornate stucco façade above the Junction bar.
“That’s not a flat, Rache. That’s just the upstairs of the bar. Toilets and store room.”
“Yes,” she said. And now that he’d said it she knew that that was what it was and had always been. “But in my dream it was a flat. Charlie lived there during the Blitz, and when I came back to the present, to my life where I didn’t have you and Nan because I didn’t exist, he’d given me the flat in his will. I lived there for the whole summer before I travelled back to sixty-six.”
Martyn laughed and veered left, tearing up the rise towards Kings Heath as fast as the rust bucket would allow. “That was some dream. I’m lucky if I can remember a colour.”
“It felt real. It felt as real as this.”
She didn’t want to say it felt more real. As the car sped past the dovecote tower, she coughed and cleared her throat to hide the sobs that retched inside her for a man whose love she’d lost. A man who might never have existed.