Touchstone Season One- Complete Box Set

by Andy Conway

  She viewed her future mother and father through the aperture and snapped them, beaming at her.

  “Any good?”

  She nodded. “Perfect.”

  It was the photo she had in her handbag right this moment.

  “When can we see it?” asked Lorna. “We want copies.”

  “Got another ten pics to take,” said Martyn. “Then I’ll get it developed at Boots.”

  Rachel wound the camera on and wondered how they coped with this. Her dad had joked, every time she’d taken a photo on a phone and viewed it instantly, about how in his day he’d have to take it to Boots to be developed and wait a week for it. It was his silly dad joke, rolled out for every occasion. But here was the reality of it. You took a snapshot and hoped it was right and had to really think about what photos you took with your precious 24 shots on a roll of film.

  Martyn and Lorna went through the albums — Joy Division and PiL, lots of Bowie, John Foxx’s Metamatic, Kraftwerk.

  Mark made mugs of tea, bitter and stewed, and the two of them fell to just watching Martyn and Lorna get along, spectators at the birth of a love affair.

  Then they remembered the make-up and dug it out and painted their faces, coaching them on how to apply eye liner, lipstick and eye shadow, how to get it just right, till they were painting their own faces with ease.

  She couldn’t stop herself giggling. Her dad, wearing make-up.

  When Mark went to make a second pot of tea, she slipped into the kitchen cupboard with him and shut the door. If she left them alone together, hopefully they would be kissing when they went back in.

  Mark looked surprised, instantly awkward.

  Please don’t make a move on me, she thought.

  “Your boots are interesting,” he said.

  “Oh. Yeah. They’re pixie boots.”

  He nodded his head for a long time and grinned stupidly. “Pixie boots. Wicked.”

  Please don’t make a move on me, she thought.

  “They’re getting on well,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. He did a kind of half laugh.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What’s funny?”

  He was stirring the tea bags in the pot, not wanting to look at her. “Oh, it’s been a funny day.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “They’ve been like buses today. No girls for months and now two at once.” He sniggered and then realized he’d said too much. “I mean, he’s not like that or anything, just, I dunno. I’ve never seen so many girls interested in him, that’s all.”

  “What girls?”

  “Esther,” he said. “Woke up with her. She might be his girlfriend. I don’t know, really.” He saw the alarm on her face. “They didn’t sleep together or anything. She just kipped on the sofa. That’s all. She did kiss him this afternoon, though.”

  Esther Parker. It was happening. She was going to spoil it all.

  Mark saw he’d said the wrong thing again. “I probably shouldn’t have said that. He’ll kill me. It’s not like you think. I don’t think he knows what’s happening either.”

  “She’s bad news,” Rachel said.

  “Really? How?”

  “She just is.”

  They took the tea back in. Martyn and Lorna weren’t kissing. They were talking about how brilliant it would be to go to Berlin and just hang around outside the Hansa studios. Sense of Doubt was playing, eerie and uncertain, and Rachel knew all her plans had come to nothing.

  The doorbell rang. Mark went down the stairs to answer it.

  Martyn suddenly looked uncertain. She could read the change in his mood.

  “We should go,” she said.

  Lorna glanced up with surprise. Her happiness quashed.

  Rachel wasn’t quite sure why, but she knew she had to get her out of there, quickly.

  Footsteps tramped up the stairs. She knew somehow that it was going to be Esther Parker, and for some reason she felt scared of her.

  I could send her to another time, she thought for an instant. Get her out of the way, so Martyn and Lorna can be together. I wouldn’t have to explain it. Just zap her out of their lives and then disappear myself.

  Mark came back in, followed by the singer from the band, with his shock of peroxide hair.

  “Ooh, ladies,” he said.

  “We were just going,” said Rachel.

  “You’re not having your tea?” asked Mark.

  Glen looked at Martyn and seemed amused by something. “Hey, I’ve just seen Esther, looking for a parking space down there. Nice car she’s got.”

  “Esther?”

  “We’ve got to go,” said Rachel, shooting a warning glare to Lorna.

  “I think she’s coming here,” grinned Glen.

  “Come on, Lorna.”

  Martyn didn’t try to stop her as Lorna climbed off the bed.

  “You guys are wearing make-up,” Glen laughed.

  “See you soon?” Lorna called, as Rachel pulled her out of the room and down the stairs.

  They stumbled down the precarious stairs and along the long, smelly hallway. The bell rattled upstairs as they reached the front door.

  Esther Parker would be on the other side of it.

  Rachel opened the door but didn’t meet her fierce blue eyes. It was the other member of the band. The keyboard player. He seemed startled to see them and stepped to one side to let them pass. Rachel pulled Lorna with her.

  “Why are we running away?”

  “We just are,” she said.

  She glanced up and down the street. No Esther Parker in sight. She thought about waiting for her.

  I could do it now. Send her to any time I choose. She was never meant to be born anyway.

  But she walked off quickly, dragging Lorna with her. Something about Esther Parker scared her and she didn’t know what it was. Maybe it was the sudden idea that people created by disruptions in time might have special powers, just like people who’d been wiped out of time.

  Or maybe, she thought, it’s that I want to kill her.

  — 17 —

  DANNY WALKED THE LENGTH of New Street, surprised to find it a dusty, traffic-clogged high street, and as it emptied out at the top, to what should have been the new square with its glass-fronted fashion stores and its iconic bronze bull sculpture, it descended instead in a dirty flight of steps to a grubby subway under the Rotunda. The subway was a dank tunnel that led down to the markets. It was lined by shabby window displays for a cheap fashion store called Nelson House, which seemed to cater to every youth culture fad going: punks, rude boys, skinheads, rockers, teds, new wavers.

  He had shoved some notes into his pockets while in the taxi cab, so he wouldn’t have to delve into the duffel bag and draw attention to himself.

  The pungent smell of vinegar drew him onwards and he emerged from the narrow subway to a ramp that descended to the markets, which cowered under a concrete flyover, traffic buzzing overhead. None of it was recognisable from what it would be in 2014.

  To his left, a row of shops on a raised concrete gantry overlooked the market stalls. There was a chippy there, and a donut seller. The smell of it made him drool.

  He pulled a pound note from his pocket and bought a bag of chips, fat and warm in his hand.

  The row of shops spilled out at the end into a paved circle with benches, where shoppers munched on cheap food and pigeons pecked around their feet. The only thing he recognized was the statue of Nelson, roughly in the same position it would occupy in 2014, although everything around it was different.

  He ripped open the paper bound bag of chips, releasing a cloud of steam, the sharp tinge of vinegar almost choking him, and he devoured it, shoving them into his mouth, burning and stinging his lips with their salt. When he’d finished, he wiped his greasy fingers on the paper and thought about finding a public toilet where he could wash his hands. None of the ones he knew would be there, he realized.

  People looked at him. Looked twice. Wa
s it his clothes? He surely didn’t look much different to them? His jeans were perhaps a slightly different cut, and a little fancier, but barely noticeable when surrounded by punks and skins and New Romantics wearing much more bizarre attire.

  But he needed clothes, he knew. They’d arrest him if he didn’t look right. They always had done. If he blended in and did nothing to get himself noticed, he’d avoid the police altogether.

  Like robbing a bank, he thought. He giggled to himself, trying to hold in the laughter that bubbled and screamed inside him. Robbed. A. Bank.

  He had to get out of these clothes, and ditch the bag. A description would be circulating. The police would be slower than their 2014 counterparts, but not that slow. His description would be circulating across the city via the crackle of short wave radio.

  He skulked back along New Street, looking for the blue sign of the fashion store he’d noticed earlier, finding it just beyond the ramp to New Street station, past the Waterstones building which was still a Lloyds bank.

  A cramped boutique called Style.

  It was dark and warm inside and some synthpop song wailed on the speakers about A New Kind of Man. He sifted through the racks of men’s clothes and noticed many of the styles were based on 1940s cuts. If he’d not changed out of his pin-striped suit after returning from 1934, he’d have looked fine.

  He picked out a grey woollen pair of Oxford bags, which the assistant called ‘pegs’, a white button-down shirt, a kipper tie, a burgundy tank top, a pair of deep brown brogues and a fawn raincoat.

  “Can I change into them now?” he asked the assistant.

  He knew it would be no problem. He’d seen his face light up at the amount of product he’d bought.

  “Help yourself,” the kid said.

  He had a floppy fringe falling over one eye. Danny wondered if he should get his hair cut or just ride it out with the style he had. Would they arrest him for having the wrong hair?

  He stifled more giggles as he squeezed into the cramped, curtained-off cubicle and changed into the clothes. What prison cell could hold him now? He’d rip the bars from the wall with a single thought of Amy Parker. He’d reduce the police station to a pile of rubble with a flick of his finger.

  He was a new kind of man...

  He was invincible. No one could stop him. Only Rachel. And he would destroy her too. She was here. He knew it. Wherever he ended up — whenever — she was always there too. Sometimes he thought it was her drawing him there, as if she had some magnetic power that compelled him through the decades. Some kind of curse on him.

  He had to destroy her.

  He took the money out of the red duffel bag and stacked it into neat piles on the seat, then distributed it among his various pockets. He rolled his old clothes and the duffel bag into the blue plastic store bag and admired himself in the mirror.

  He was a new kind of man...

  Transformed. He looked the part of a young, fashionable boy about town, carrying home his latest purchase. He would dump the bag in the nearest bin.

  The brooch.

  He remembered and dug it out of his jeans pocket, examining it in the dim light. The cherub blowing a gust of wind from his mouth. Zephyr, he thought. Wasn’t that its name? He shoved it into the pocket of his new trousers and stepped out.

  The boy behind the counter looked him up and down and nodded and said, “You look great.”

  He strode out and came face to face with the boy from the graveyard.

  He looked like a poet. Shabby grey box jacket, fingerless gloves, blue plaid scarf, blonde hair flopping over one eye. There was something familiar about his face. Was it merely the recognition of him being the man he’d encountered this morning? No. Something more. He knew him.

  “Are you following me?” he said.

  “No,” said the boy. “Yes.”

  Danny’s fingers twitched. He knew he could destroy him. Destroy him with a single thought. All he had to do was remember Amy Parker and a tornado would devastate New Street.

  Traffic roared past them; the rush hour beginning to thicken. There was something familiar about him. Something in his face.

  “Do I know you?”

  “I saw what you did.”

  Had he followed him from the bank? He’d been so distracted by the difference of everything that he hadn’t thought to check if he was being followed. Only the police scared him, and if they weren’t jumping on him and slapping handcuffs on his wrists, he was safe.

  “What did you see?”

  The boy bit his lip, scratching his beard with his teeth.

  Danny recognized the gesture and a face flitted through decades, matching the one before him. Younger here, but with a stupid beard that covered his chin but not his upper lip so he looked like a teenage Abraham Lincoln.

  It was Fenwick.

  But a young Nick Fenwick. It was Fenwick the student, not Fenwick the teacher.

  Danny laughed, giggles fizzing in his throat.

  “I saw you rob the bank. And, and, and...”

  “And what?”

  The boy gulped down his fear, his disbelief. “You weren’t joking when you asked me what year it was.”

  With a click of his fingers he could send this young Nick Fenwick flying right across the street and through the window of Mansfield & Sons bootmakers opposite. But he smiled, sensing a much more delicious alternative.

  “Is there somewhere we can talk?” Danny said.

  Fenwick looked up and down the street, nodded and headed up towards the town hall end of New Street, looking over his shoulder once.

  Danny could see the Grecian pillars of the old Town Hall above the cluster of cream-and-blue buses that crowded the street, but there was no Tin Man, and no Victoria Square, just the hint of a grass slope that descended from the Council House. He’d seen it in 1966 and it was still here in 1980.

  Danny followed Fenwick and was surprised when he entered a Woolworths store only a hundred yards away. Inside they stepped down to a giant retail floor, the near corner devoted to chart singles and stationery. Fenwick took the escalator to the side and they sailed up to a café.

  “Cup of tea?” said Fenwick.

  Danny nodded and took a Formica-topped table.

  Fenwick stared, hands in his pockets. “I’d ask you if you had any money,” he said. “But...”

  Danny pulled a blue banknote from one of his pockets and said, “My treat.”

  He sat back and watched the young man queue up at the counter, returning with two mugs of tea, balanced precariously on a tray, creeping along, trying to balance his canvas bag on his shoulder.

  Fenwick, his mentor, who’d shown him the touchstone. That first morning. The field trip to St. Mary’s. He’d led them there deliberately. Singled Rachel and Danny out and invited them to find the touchstone. He’d known it all along, and it was all because Danny had shown it to him this morning.

  He stifled more giggles, coughing them back.

  Fenwick placed the wooden tray on the table and he saw it contained a plate with two sausage rolls.

  He was thin. Maybe students didn’t eat much in 1980. Wasn’t there a recession on or something? He was probably carrying more in his pockets than most people earned in a month.

  Fenwick hugged his mug with his fingers, shivering away the cold, and sought Danny’s eyes, scared.

  “You’re obviously not interested in calling the police.”

  Fenwick shook his head, staring at the table. Staring at the sausage rolls.

  “Are you hungry?”

  Fenwick seemed disturbed from a faraway thought and blushed and pushed the plate towards him. Danny shook his head. Fenwick took a bite of one of the sausage rolls and couldn’t hide the near swoon of ecstasy.

  Danny watched for a while, fascinated at the crumbs collecting in Fenwick’s beard, till he washed it down with a gulp of hot tea and sat back, sated, warmed through, no longer shivering. His mentor, his teacher: a scrawny, starving student boy.

  “
So what do you want?”

  “What is it?” Fenwick asked, a more commanding tone in his voice now. More like the lecturer he knew. The lecturer he would become.

  “Time travel,” Danny said.

  He grinned and stared him down, enjoying the confusion in his face. He’d known the answer before he’d even asked the question. He’d seen it with his own eyes, but was afraid of hearing it said out loud.

  “Time travel?”

  “Why are you even doubting it? You’re smarter than that. You know what it is.”

  “Time travel.” Fenwick nodded now, the certainty seeping into him, like the tea he sipped at again.

  “I’m from 2014,” said Danny. “Your future.”

  “Mine?”

  “You’re Nick Fenwick. You’re a university lecturer. In History. You’re my teacher. I don’t know how it happens, but one year you’re going to get a new student. Me. And I won’t know anything about this, so don’t even think about telling me. But you’re going to take your class to St. Mary’s churchyard for a field trip, and that’s when it’s going to begin. For me.”

  Fenwick looked over his shoulder, looked all around. Did he think someone was listening in? Did he think this was all some practical joke?

  “How?” he said.

  Danny shrugged. “There’s a gravestone. You touch it in a certain place and... you end up in a different time.”

  He wouldn’t tell him that it worked without the touchstone; that the touchstone might not be the thing that sent you back into the past at all. Let him look for it. Let him spend years of frustration trying to make it work for him. By the time he was fifty, he’d be desperate to watch his student do it, just to prove he hadn’t imagined it all in his youth.

  “But it’s not just that,” said Fenwick. “There’s something else. You have other...”

  He didn’t want to say powers, Danny realized, because it sounded so stupid. Half of the battle was overcoming the sheer ingrained disbelief that any of it was possible.

  “What you did... at the bank...”

  Danny shook his head. Fenwick was useless to him now. He couldn’t travel himself. He’d done nothing for Danny other than show him the touchstone that first time and point him towards Amy Parker in 1934 the last time. He’d been useful. But he’d outlived his usefulness. There was nothing Fenwick could ever teach him. Danny had outgrown him.