Touchstone Season One- Complete Box Set

by Andy Conway

  He sat up, shaking, teeth bared, blinking away tears of rage.

  Footsteps ran along the landing. She knocked at his door. He slumped back, falling flat on the bed, strange without the pillow.

  “Danny?”

  She opened the door and peered round.

  Jessica.

  He wondered for a moment if it was the wrong time. She was all done up with absurdly lacquered giant hair and patterns painted on her face. Was he in 2014?

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Hi, Jessica.”

  She saw the pillow and the broken lamp. “Where the hell have you been?”

  He shrugged and turned away from her, feeling foolish, needing the pillow. The music was blaring through the house behind her: some eighties hit, all fast beats and synths. Sleepwalk.

  “You’ve been gone a week,” she shouted. “No one’s been able to reach you!”

  A week? He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d been here in this time. Preparing for his visit to 1934. Packing his case. Putting on his pin-striped suit. The Kindle. The Kindle in the suitcase, hidden in the secret flap. The case was back in 1934. In his room at the Station Inn on Kings Heath High Street. He’d left it there.

  A Kindle, back in 1934. Would anyone find it?

  “Are you listening to me, Danny?”

  “Not really,” he said.

  “You’re such a—”

  “Just go, will you!”

  The music blared on behind her. She hadn’t gone. She was watching him. He heard her footsteps cross the room, her hand on his shoulder.

  “Hey,” she said, her voice husky and soothing. “I was just worried about you.”

  He’d left a Kindle in 1934. How had he arrived back here? He remembered only how Rachel had tasered him, sending him to the burnt-out shell of the Kingsway cinema. He’d begun painting his accusation against her on the hoarding outside when she’d tasered him again. Playing with him. She had a power greater than his. She had banished him from the woman he loved, ruined everything, taking her revenge on him.

  He’d make her pay.

  “Everyone’s worried about you,” said Jessica.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “Danny. Are you on drugs? You look totally wasted.”

  “I’m fine,” he said, trying to sound amused, trying to hide the anger he felt swelling inside him.

  “Listen. We’re off to the Hare. It’s an eighties retro night. Why don’t you come?”

  That explained it. The music, the clothes. He snorted with disdain. They thought they could walk into the past by dressing up for a theme night in some pub. They had no idea the decades he’d traversed. He’d walked these same streets in 1966, 1940, 1934, 1912...

  “No, thanks,” he said.

  She withdrew her hand and he heard her feet clomp back to the door.

  “You used to be fun,” she said.

  She slammed the door and he didn’t sit up until she’d thumped down the stairs.

  He was in a t-shirt and a pair of jeans. His pin-striped suit was across the chair. He must have undressed. He couldn’t remember arriving back here. Trying to paint Rachel’s name on the hoarding outside the Kingsway. That was the last thing he remembered.

  He flicked on his laptop and waited for it to boot up. His eyes fell on a brooch on the desk by the keyboard. He turned it over in wonder. It seemed to be made from a Victorian penny, the old queen’s head on the back where someone had fixed a tube hinge, C-catch and pin. On the other side, the coin had been crafted into an engraving. An image of some sort of cherub blowing wind from its mouth, and large, ornate lettering. It looked like an M and a D, coiled together. It seemed to be some sort of love token.

  He had no idea where it had come from, but he had a blurred memory of placing it there on the table, some time ago.

  The laptop awoke and told him he was back in 2014. But it was different. Something had changed. He didn’t belong here anymore.

  He shoved the brooch into his pocket and gazed up at the scraps of paper pinned to the wall: his Amy Parker research. Birth certificates, photocopied pages of Kelly’s Directory, the photo of her with her father, the photo he’d taken of her in 1912.

  Rachel had called it his shrine to her.

  The dream. Amy waiting for him by the touchstone. Had it been a dream or had it been real? It felt more vivid than a dream. He had been there, he felt sure. But it didn’t match with any of the times he’d visited her before. She had been dressed in what seemed to be late fifties clothes, but Amy would have been... his eyes fell on her birth certificate, he totted up the decades... sixty years old.

  It didn’t make sense. She had looked younger. Early twenties. Maybe it had only been a dream after all.

  He slumped, his forehead hitting the desk in despair.

  Could he get back to her?

  He had finally found her, been with her, made love to her, in 1934, but Rachel had expelled him from that perfect moment. Rachel had spoiled everything. Rachel had cast him out of paradise.

  He realized now, there was only one way to get back to Amy.

  “I’m going to kill you, Rachel,” he said.

  No one heard it.

  — 5 —

  THE DJ DROPPED The Wild, the Beautiful, and the Damned and half of the dance floor cleared, but Rachel closed her eyes and moved to the music all on her own. It was such a perfect song.

  They didn’t get it because it wasn’t an easy synth pop song — it had guitars and drums and a violin — but it was pure poetry and it tore her heart open every time. It was as if the DJ played it for her and her alone, and she swayed in her delicious drunken fog, not caring if she would be the only person on the dance floor when she opened her eyes.

  When it reached its frenetic climax, he played The Robots and the dance floor filled again. Some idiot girl in a pirate outfit jostled her aside so she retreated to the sidelines. It wasn’t even the original version. It was just a dance remix from the nineties.

  She stood on the edge of the dance floor and watched for a while, disgusted by the sickly glamour and escapism.

  Most of them just didn’t get it. They were in styles that were late eighties. She snorted with disgust. What did it matter? The poster said Eighties Retro Night at the Hare & Hounds. It didn’t say anything about Obscure Music and Fashions from 1980 Only. What right did she have to sneer?

  She retreated to the table where Jessica was pouring Prosecco for Stacy, Tyrone and Ben. She laughed to herself. They had been Danny’s friends, not hers: the trendy set, too cool for school, looking down on her. But in this time they didn’t know her, had never known her. Of course they hadn’t: she hadn’t been born. She had drifted into their circle with the effortless cool of a princess.

  It has been easy because she had two things they prized above all else: money and bad fashion.

  She wondered why she’d bothered. She didn’t even like them. But it had amused her to see the people who’d sneered at her in another life now fawn over her.

  “Why are those old people here?” shouted Jessica.

  They all looked at the collection of individuals in their fifties and Rachel noticed they’d been the only ones dancing to the same song with her.

  “I think they were at the original eighties nights,” said Rachel. “You know? In the eighties?”

  “Oh god. They look so fat,” said Stacy.

  “They look like my dad,” laughed Jessica.

  “My dad was one of them,” said Rachel. “This was our parents’ music.”

  “They shouldn’t let them in,” said Jessica. “They’re dragging the tone down.”

  They cackled and Rachel found herself laughing along with them and hating herself for it. She drained her glass and grabbed the bottle from the bucket. It released an inch of amber in her flute. She put the bottle to her mouth and swigged the last few drops from it while the others cheered and took pictures on their iPhones and posted them straight to Twitter.


  “Looks like we need more party juice!” Jessica shouted.

  They looked at Rachel expectantly.

  “Let’s get another bottle, then,” she said.

  They cheered.

  “Go on then, Jessica,” Rachel said. “I’ll give you the money.” She pushed a twenty across the table and Jessica forced a fake smile.

  “Okay, but you’ve just so got to show Tyrone your trick!”

  “Oh, it’s sick!” cried Stacy.

  “Go on, Rachel. Do your trick,” said Ben.

  “It’s like a proper magician style thingy,” said Jessica.

  Rachel shrugged and hiccupped and tried to pull herself together. The room was swaying and the DJ was playing The Same Old Scene.

  She held her hand out in the middle of the table, palm up, and focussed on it, trying not to think of warmth or flames or candles or anything like that. The trick was to think of time, and to try to feel an entire life time in a single instant of time.

  Tyrone glanced around at their eager faces, wondering what was going to happen. Rachel tried to shut out their giggles, shut out the music, tried to feel at one with decades of history: the whole hum and throb of life in Kings Heath over the last century: every life that had come to this room, every single breath that had been taken in this room. She felt it rush through her in just a moment and it flickered to life in her palm.

  A single flame.

  It danced there in her hand and lit up their delighted faces.

  “Oh my God!”

  “How do you do that?”

  “I told you. Totally sick!”

  The flame flickered in her palm, glowing brighter, golden blue and Halloween orange, then it sputtered and died.

  They clapped and roared and people all over the room looked to see what was happening at their table.

  Rachel slumped back in her chair, nodded her head, bowing, and hated herself.

  “Stop it!”

  She flinched and turned.

  That voice again, just behind her.

  No one there.

  Her friends still laughing and grinning at her.

  She stumbled to her feet and ran for the toilets.

  — 6 —

  AFTER THROWING UP FOR a while and trying to ignore Jessica calling, “Are you all right, Rache?” through the cubicle door, she’d felt the fog lift from her head.

  She took a pad of loo roll and ran it under the tap and used it to dab at her face, avoiding smudging her make-up.

  Jessica came back in. “We’re going back to mine. You wanna come?”

  She was holding the bottle of Prosecco, half empty.

  Rachel thought of Danny, who might be back there. She should say no. She should run. But wasn’t this what it was all leading to? Hadn’t she sought out his friends and housemates because she knew it would lead to the moment when she came face to face with him?

  “Okay,” she said.

  The band had come back on in the main room for their second set. They were a Japan tribute act, most of them young and looking reasonably like the original members, but the singer was a fat old bloke with a blonde wig and a painted face. He had the voice, just about, but also the tragic air of someone who’d wanted to be David Sylvian back in the eighties and was now living out his middle-aged fantasy.

  Stacy lifted Rachel’s leopardskin coat from her chair and held it out for her, snuggling it to her face for a moment.

  “I’m soooo jel of this. It’s so sick!”

  Rachel eased herself into it and they followed her, like dutiful courtiers. They stomped down the stairs and she couldn’t help but admire the ornate Victorian tiling, cool on her fingers.

  “I’m not walking in these shoes!” Jessica shouted, signalling a black cab that was queued up on York Road. They climbed in and it hared down Alcester Road, past the burnt shell of the Kingsway, where Danny had unleashed a tornado, past the retail park where the old train station had been and she’d been trapped in her UnTime; past the bottom of Valentine Road where Charlie had held her close as the Blackshirts who’d murdered Henry had run by.

  They took turns swigging from the bottle as the cab sailed past the Dovecote down to Moseley village, through the crossroads where her rooms above the pub on the corner stood, her castle; the church tower standing guard over the village green where she’d watched England win the World Cup; the alley that led to the touchstone; past Mrs Hudson’s costume hire shop — the lights out — and up the rise to turn left into Chantry Road.

  When the driver pulled up at their enormous Victorian house converted to student flats, they piled out, leaving Rachel to pay the fare.

  She fell in behind them, gazing up at the light that was on in the loft. Danny’s room.

  Jessica led them to the kitchen where she unearthed some booze, a few cheap bottles of wine, and put on some blaring grime on her iPod dock. Rachel felt the physical shock of it. She’d so detached herself from modern music that it felt atonal and invasive.

  “It’s okay. We’ve just got the one housemate who’s staying in bed. He’s such a bore these days.”

  Now that they were here, Rachel felt foolish. She made to leave but they forced her to stay. Jessica thrust a tall glass of wine into her hands and she drank; drank to forget.

  The same song was still playing when she realized she was drunk again. It might have been the same song. It all sounded the same. It wasn’t really a song.

  She was laughing.

  It wasn’t really a song. Not like the songs she’d danced to in 1934: songs that would tear your heart out; make you laugh and cry all at the same time.

  She was laughing.

  Slumped in a kitchen corner, wine dribbling down her Katherine Hamnett dress.

  “What’s so funny, Rache?” Jessica asked, propping her up.

  “Charlie proposed to me.”

  “Who the hell’s Charlie?”

  “Proposed to you?”

  She couldn’t see their faces, but she knew they were laughing at her, laughing with their eyes. She’s smashed. She’s gone. She’s twisted.

  “Proposed to you? When?”

  “1966,” she giggled.

  “What’s she on about?”

  “She’s wasted!”

  “Who’s this Charlie, Rachel?”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “In 1934,” she said.

  She giggled again. It was hilarious. It was the funniest thing in the world. The only man who’d ever been in love with her, who’d waited for her through decades, the only man in the world (other than her dad) who’d made her feel safe, who’d asked her to marry him and stay with him — and to whom she could return at any time, any age, and be with him, because she had that power — and he was gone from her forever.

  And she was wasting her time here, with a bunch of phoney posers she didn’t even like.

  It was hilarious.

  “I’ve got to use your bathroom,” she said.

  “Up the stairs. First left.”

  Someone took her elbow and marched her up the stairs and shoved her into a cold bathroom that smelled of antiseptic. Wrapped in the leopardskin coat still. Holding her in a warm embrace. She sat on the edge of the bath and waited for the world to stop spinning. Whoever had rushed her up the stairs was walking back down again, rejoining the kitchen party, telling them all how totally ruined she was.

  She stood and tottered over to the sink. Her absurd clown face in the mirror, accusing her. She ran the tap and threw cold water over her, gasping with shock, icy, and washed it off. There was only a grubby hand towel but she used it to wipe her face clean. She winced at her ruined make-up.

  She would go. She would walk down the stairs and walk right out of the door. If she stayed here, she was no one, a nothing, as good as dead.

  That’s why she’d kept her coat on, so she could just walk straight out.

  She opened the bathroom door and stepped out onto the landing.

  Danny was there.

  They s
tared, frozen for a moment, uncomprehending.

  He rushed her.

  Before she could react, he was on her, had her in a throat lock.

  She gasped. Tried to cry out. Only croaked as she fought for breath.

  And he was dragging her.

  Up the narrow stairs to the loft.

  She kicked air.

  His strength was superhuman. He yanked her up the flight of stairs, kicking and choking, burst in on his room and threw her on the bed.

  Her head cracked on the wall and she drank in air.

  Before she could draw enough breath to scream, he jumped on top of her, pressing her down, pinning her flailing arms under his legs.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and pushed the hood of the coat into her face.

  She tried to fight him off, but he sank his entire weight down on her and there was no more air to breathe.

  — 7 —

  SHE WAS DROWNING IN a black lagoon. She yawned for air, desperately eating at black nothingness, kicking and flailing, dizzy, wild, till panic turned to acceptance. She would float off into the black nothingness. Hadn’t this been what it was all leading to? She had lost her life. She had been unborn, ripped out of time, a non-person, a blank, a nothing. This made total sense. To simply drift away in the black void. Fade away, disintegrate.

  She sank, spiralling down and down and down and down, to where there was no sound, no light, no air. This was what death must be: a nothingness, a delicious blackness that would soon just end and no one to ever know that she was ever a person who had lived in the world at all.

  A light pierced the ink.

  A blue needle of light from miles above.

  The black void was ruptured by a grey shape that skimmed towards her. Was it a submarine, a mermaid, a shark?

  She watched it loom, slowly coalescing in the void till it nudged her, curious, tentative. The needle of light behind it brightened suddenly.

  And wrenched her to the surface.

  Oxygen blowtorched into her mouth and scorched her lungs. She coughed her guts out, attacked by blinding light. A hard slap stung her face.

  “Rachel! Wake up!”