Touchstone Season One- Complete Box Set

by Andy Conway

  I’m a god now. Doesn’t he realize?

  Of course not. He was a stupid boy. In thirty-five years he’d be a stupid man, and no nearer to understanding anything. Danny grinned and felt a malicious thrill surge through him.

  “Keep looking,” he said, leaning across the table and clasping Fenwick’s fingerless-gloved hand. “Keep searching for the answer. Never give in. You’ll find it one day.”

  He rose and walked away, trying to stifle the laughter that flooded his throat. No escalator back down. Stairs, over there. He headed for the Exit sign: a picture of a red man running. As he reached the oak door, he turned and caught a glimpse of Fenwick sitting there staring at the other sausage roll.

  As he ran down the marble steps, his laughter echoed off the walls.

  — 18 —

  THE RAIN CAME DOWN hard as they rushed down Woodbridge Road and came to the wall of traffic at the corner where Brannigan’s sweet shop stood guard. A sudden, furious torrent that bounced off the pavement. They sheltered in the sweet shop doorway and Rachel turned to Lorna and smiled.

  There was confusion in her mother’s face. She had wanted to stay with Martyn. Which was great. But she surely hadn’t wanted to come face to face with Esther Parker?

  “Why the rush?” said Lorna.

  It was the first time she’d shown any irritation with her, and Rachel reminded herself to keep Lorna onside. Everything depended on Lorna trusting her. If Lorna became annoyed with Rachel, the whole operation would collapse: she would never get her and Martyn together. Martyn would marry Esther and Rachel would never be born.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s that Esther. She gives me the creeps.”

  Lorna pulled her coat tighter around her. Rachel’s coat. Lorna didn’t have to say it. Rachel knew she wanted to go home now.

  She gazed over her shoulder at Brannigan’s sweet shop window display and thought of how she’d only recently walked in there when it was Shufflebotham’s delicatessen in 1934, and when it was Cafephilia in 2014, with a giant photograph of Shufflebotham’s on the wall.

  “I better get home,” said Lorna. “It’s been a long day. Two days.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  An awkward angel flew by between them, ruffling its wings.

  She would have to go to her Moseley flat above the shops and be alone. She panicked for a moment. She would need Lorna’s phone number so she could meet her again tomorrow. Perhaps even arrange the meet up right now because no one here had a cell phone on them — you had to catch them while they were near the phone in their house and hope they were there.

  “Are you going home?” Lorna asked.

  Rachel shrugged. What was home now? She had no idea what that word meant. Somewhere, sometime, an older version of Martyn was waiting for her to walk through the door. He would recognize her when she did. She felt the cold of her old front door key against her breastbone, still hanging around her neck, even though she’d been shipwrecked a hundred years away.

  “Yeah. I’m going home.”

  “Oh,” said Lorna glumly. “You know, you could... well, I suppose...”

  “What?”

  “You could come to mine. I mean, it’s a long way. Winson Green. Two bus rides. And your place is right there, but if you wanted to, I could repay you for helping me out so much and you could stay at mine. If you wanted.”

  Lorna’s mother, Deirdre Foster, would be there. She would surely recognize Rachel as the girl who’d stopped her throwing herself in front of the nuclear train in 1959. She couldn’t let her see her. Too risky.

  “I couldn’t impose,” said Rachel. “Your mum and all...’ She let the excuse trail off. It sounded so lame.

  “My mum’s away at a CND meeting tonight,” said Lorna. “She’s staying the night. I’m on my own.”

  Rachel saw what it was now. Lorna all alone, going back to that house down a dark canal bank. A giant smile cracked her face and she said, “Okay. I’d love to.”

  “Brill,” said Lorna, surprised, cheering immediately. “Do you want to get anything from home?”

  “I suppose I’d better.”

  They walked down to the village and crossed over and Rachel rushed up to the flat. She shoved her toothbrush and a pair of knickers into her handbag and threw on a different dress and was back with Lorna at the bus stop downstairs in a couple of minutes. They caught a number 50 and it sailed into town, rain lashing at the windows. On the other side of the road the traffic was already thick and gridlocked.

  In town, they walked down New Street, weaving their way through the crowded pavement, and Lorna turned down the short rise of Lower Temple Street and stopped at a bus stop opposite the Shakespeare pub, the only thing Rachel recognized on the street. Even the road was no longer there in 2014, it was pedestrianized. Behind them was a bookstore called Hudsons and there was an arcade along the side of it that must have been blocked off some time because she’d never seen it in her life.

  Jon’s Sandwich Bar was opposite, a couple of doors down from the Shakespeare, and Lorna told her with wonder how it had one of those new microwave ovens that could heat a pie in a minute.

  They huddled against Hudson’s window as the rain came down and she noticed how people were still forming an orderly queue for the bus, despite the rain.

  When the bus came down New Street and hulked down the hill towards them, Lorna joined the back of the queue and they climbed aboard.

  It weaved its way through the grey city centre streets and she caught glimpses of the architecture, surprised at how much was changed even in only thirty years. It snaked its way down to the drab huddle of shops on Summer Row and turned sharply up to the Jewellery Quarter, eventually circling around it, past the Mint, and picking up speed as it twisted and turned through a drab estate. The sky was black and foreboding and she felt a sudden terror grip her body as she realized the bus was dipping down Lodge Road and would climb the hill, right past the asylum.

  Lorna was chattering away and didn’t notice her fear. Rachel remembered the terror of being carted there in the ambulance, screaming, locked in the padded cell, alone at night, trying to escape.

  “Are you all right?”

  Her knuckles were white on the silver handrail. “Fine,” she said, staring at her lap. “Just a bit travel sick.”

  “Aw. Close your eyes,” said Lorna. “We’re nearly there now. Just the top of this hill.”

  She wanted to say I know. She’d taken this same ride many times herself when she was eleven years’ old. She’d lived in the same house by the canal. She could get off at the right stop and walk right to the front door of the canal cottage without opening her eyes.

  The bus climbed past the asylum and then along the edge of the prison, its red brick walls topped by a giant black pipe, an enclosing tentacle. They turned sharply onto Winson Green Road and Lorna stood up. Rachel followed her down the stairs and gulped in the rush of fresh air as they jumped down to the wet pavement outside the prison gates.

  “It’s down there,” Lorna pointed.

  Rachel nodded and looked around. She could barely see through the sheet of rain, but it was pretty much as she remembered it: a bombsite around a prison, and opposite only the drab Acorn pub standing and a lone tobacconist. Every other building on the block had long since been demolished.

  They crossed over, rushing in the rain, and marched down Wellington Road, large wastelands either side, and she followed behind, trying not to anticipate as Lorna cut through the space between a row of derelict houses.

  They trod gingerly over waste ground to the bank, slippy with mud, and took the tow path along the murky green canal. A rat splashed into the water as they ducked under the rail bridge. It was dark and creepy and she’d forgotten how awful it was. In her memory it was all brilliant summer days and barges sailing by and riding her bike along the tow paths. She had been happier there. She had always been happy alone. The canalside world had been her own private kingdom. When her dad had moved back to Mosele
y, she’d felt too exposed; felt that she had no privacy.

  “It’s very out of the way,” Lorna said apologetically.

  They emerged from the under the rail bridge and she looked at the cottages across the water, sat high on their perch: two great brick houses together, walled off, like a castle.

  “It’s lovely,” said Rachel.

  “I like it in the summer.”

  Rachel smiled and didn’t say, So do I. So did I.

  They crossed the arched bridge and she followed Lorna through the gate and up the short slope of garden, round the side of the house and the yard where one summer Martyn had planted potatoes in a small triangle of dirt, and then served them up with glee.

  “We’re livin’ off the fat o’ the land!” he’d kept singing, every time they’d eaten spuds, and only years later had she read Of Mice and Men at school and recognized the line.

  So this was where Lorna had grown up, and soon, in a possible future, she would marry Martyn, and they’d move in together here, and raise their daughter, and then Lorna would get cancer and die and leave Martyn all alone to raise her, and Martyn’s mum would lose the big old house on Anderton Park Road and come stay with them, and they’d be dirt poor for a long time, only gradually making enough money to move back to Moseley, to a smaller house, almost as a defiant statement that they could retrieve their lost wealth.

  And none of that would happen if she didn’t stop Esther Parker ending up with her dad tomorrow night.

  Lorna pushed the kitchen door open and they rushed inside, shaking the rain off their coats.

  Rachel stared at the terracotta tiled floor, remembering. The drab kitchen with its Belfast sink and yellow vinyl-covered cupboards with plastic handles. The same sickly yellow floral wallpaper. She knew the tiny bathroom at the back of the house, and the old outhouse behind that, and the giant triangle of overgrown garden at the back, fenced off from the rail line.

  Lorna took her leopardskin coat and hung them together on the back door. She filled a camp kettle with water and put it on the electric stove, then nipped into the bathroom and came out again with two towels. They dried their hair.

  “Come through.”

  Rachel followed her through the dining room, the tiny box room in the middle of the house, and through to the larger front room. Bare floorboards everywhere, but not the trendy varnished floorboards posh people had: these were the tired, grey dusty floorboards that people who couldn’t afford carpets had. A black plastic settee with blue polyester cushions. Two green polyester armchairs, mismatched. In the corner of the room an affectation of dried ferns and plumes exploding from a giant urn.

  She knew it all. There had been more stuff in her childhood, the furniture that Martyn had brought with him, some of it perhaps from his mum, or the furniture he and Lorna had acquired together as a couple in the decade before they had Rachel.

  Lorna rattled a box of matches and lit the paraffin heater. The sickly smell of it reminded her of the old heater that had stood unused, only ever pulled out and lit during an emergency winter when the gas bottle heater had broken down.

  She gazed out of the giant bay window that looked over to the rail yard opposite, where the trains went to sleep at night, and she had a vivid flashback to a Christmas afternoon. Not the blurred Christmas memory of her mother she’d carried around her whole life, but later, as a young girl, about nine years’ old. A giant Christmas tree in the window, all glittering and twinkling, the gas heater belting out warmth, an animated film of The Wind in the Willows on the TV, the cat, Chips, curled up on her lap. She was waiting for Dad and Nan to come back from shopping. It was Christmas Eve. And she was wishing her mum was still alive, enjoying the maudlin fog of self pity.

  “I’ll get us a cuppa in a minute. Soon be warm,” said Lorna.

  Rachel turned to her and smiled, hugging herself, wanting to hug her mum instead.

  Lorna switched the television on and turned the dial through the three channels. A shot of the closed down Kingsway cinema. An ATV News presenter talking about a bank robbery that morning.

  “That’s Kings Heath,” said Lorna.

  They stared agog as the presenter recounted how a lone robber had walked in and wrecked the place with some sort of secret weapon that had seemed to wreak total destruction.

  “He didn’t have no gun,” said a woman.

  “It was like a force field,” said a security guard in his sixties. “Like a hurricane.”

  Rachel clutched her throat. Danny.

  He was here. In 1980. He was always here. Wherever she was. What was it Mitch had said? “It was your power that sent him to the past before you.”

  Wherever she went, she brought Danny with her. Wherever she went, Danny unleashed his havoc.

  “That was this morning,” said Lorna. “We were almost right there when it happened!”

  A scream from the other end of the house. Rachel flinched, fear clutching her heart.

  “Kettle,” said Lorna, rushing through to the kitchen.

  The scream died and she listened to her mother making tea. Sometimes, as a child, she’d fantasized over that same sound, listening to her Dad or her Nan making tea, and imagined it was her Mum, alive, and that she’d walk in with mugs of steaming tea in her hand and be a real woman, not the blurred presence of her only childhood memory. And now that it was finally happening, it wasn’t the same. Because it wasn’t her mother. It was a teenage girl who thought she was her friend. She would never hold her in her arms like a mother would. Rachel would never be that girl being held by her mother, no matter where she travelled in time.

  The rain lashed at the windows and the wind howled around the house.

  Lorna came through, trying not to drip tea on the floorboards, and they sat on the sofa. Doctor Who was on BBC1.

  “I like that Tom Baker,” said Lorna. “He’s funny.”

  Rachel recognized him as the one her dad had always insisted was the best Doctor, but she was more interested in his assistant. She wore a pink greatcoat with a long white scarf and her long blonde hair had grown out mousey brown at the roots.

  “You look a bit like her,” said Lorna. “How strange.”

  There was a resemblance, thought Rachel. But the real resemblance was that she was an assistant without a Doctor. That was the problem. She was lost in time and with no one to help her. She laughed, realizing Mitch would probably tell her that she was the Doctor.

  “What?” asked Lorna.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do look like her.”

  As the episode came to a close and the Doctor and his assistant saved the day and disappeared in the TARDIS, she heard the gate clank out the front and a woman’s footsteps along the side yard.

  “That’s Mum,” said Lorna, surprised. “Her meeting must be cancelled.” She jumped up and skipped to the kitchen.

  Rachel stood, panic flooding her senses. Lorna’s mum, Deirdre Foster, was opening the kitchen door and coming inside. She had to run. Deirdre would see her and recognize her as the woman who’d stopped her from throwing herself under the train in 1959. The woman who’d sat with her in the café. She would recognize her and wonder why she looked exactly the same after twenty years. She would freak out and Rachel would have to run, and she’d stop Lorna from seeing her again.

  Their voices sailed through. She could hear Deirdre telling her daughter how the streets were flooding out there, and something about the meeting being cancelled, and how grateful she was that the kettle was just boiled.

  Lorna was telling her mother her new friend was in the front room.

  She could slip out now. The other door, the front door, even though it was on the side of the house just like the kitchen door, was between the front room and the dining room. She could slip out and run and Deirdre wouldn’t see her face.

  Footsteps coming through. Deirdre was coming to see her. It was too late.

  She stood frozen. The door pushed open and Deirdre Foster walked in.

  — 19 —
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br />   MARTYN HAD PLANNED to sit out on the triangle of grass in front of the Student Union, not wanting to wait in the Pot of Beer and have to buy a pint. But it began to rain and the students who’d been sitting out there all scrambled into the Sacks.

  He tried to shelter in its doorway for a while, but the wind blew the rain into his face, so he walked round to the Pot and surrendered to its familiar yeasty mug of warmth. He bought a half of Mild and stayed at the bar. Someone put Roxy Music’s Over You on the jukebox and he succumbed to its lush sentimentality. This is what it must feel like to be in love, he thought.

  He needed to stay positive, not allow his anger with Glen to get the better of him. When those girls, Lorna and Rachel, had run out, Glen had laughed hysterically and admitted he hadn’t seen Esther arriving, parking up her car. It was all a joke. The look on your face!

  Martyn had wanted to punch him, and Glen had probably seen the murder in his eyes, so he’d announced he’d just been told the band were playing at a house party in Moseley. Tomorrow night.

  “But I’m going to the Ultravox gig at the Cedar Club,” Martyn had complained.

  Glen had shrugged. “Come to the party afterwards. We’ll be playing about one in the morning anyway.”

  Today was a positive day, Martyn thought. Esther had kissed him, given him her card, sorted out the new rehearsal space for them, and Glen had announced the gig and was going to take him to see Wegs and get his money back. In about an hour he’d have fifty quid in his pocket and feel like anything was possible.

  But there had been bad things today too.

  Esther screaming at him in the street like a psychopath. Glen joking with him. And Glen Gr[a]e, for God’s sake.

  And the girl Lorna. He felt a thrill in his belly. It was similar to the thrill he’d felt for Esther. But different. With Esther, he wasn’t sure if it was fear he was feeling.