My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time

by Liz Jensen

  The journey was punctuated by the frequent halts we were compelled to make in order that Fru Schleswig & myself who, having found ourselves unaccountably hungry, had quickly devoured between us the cylindrical packet of chocolate biscuits proffered by Krak – could vomit, which we both did copiously, arousing the wrath of the cannibal driver, whose white-teethed fury scared the wits from me, for I had visions of him tearing us limb from limb & munching on our bones, just as they do in the godless realms of Afric, or shrinking our heads to wear as tasteless jewellery. ‘Fear not, ladies,’ said Professor Krak. ‘I have told him you have been to a fancy-dress party, & become merry, & I will tip him well for his pains.’

  Us? Fancy dress? Merry? Kidnapped, more like! The nerve of it! But I could say naught, so sick & discombobulated was I feeling, & so anxious about the cannibal, whom I prayed had assuaged his hunger with a good meal earlier, though his fearsome mood would indicate the opposite. London was first of all to me a land of seasickness. First the driving-machine made us sick, & then as soon as we were free of the enraged blackamoor (what dizzy relief!) we were led (– dragged! Screaming!) into a building bedazzled with lights (all up the front steps, embedded in the pathway, & shining from above, & from the sides, & all directions – never had I seen so much light at evening-time) & then bundled into a box whose door closed on all three of us. Professor Krak pressed a button & all at once we were scooped vertically upwards, leaving our stomachs at floor-level. My brain heaved, & had Fru Schleswig not caught me, I would have fallen to the floor & smithereened my skull there & then. Finally, the box’s motion ceased, the door slid open (do not ask me how, & what is more I care not to know!) & we exited, veering wildly as two bagatelle balls along a brightly lit corridor, where Professor Krak pointed us onward until we came to a door which he unlocked not with a key, but seemingly with a small piece of dull-looking ivory which he inserted in a hole until an odd noise sounded & a small red light winked.

  There he led us to a pale room with slatted blinds & two plain beds of birchwood & a quiet woven rug on the floor. Lord, it was a relief to see something familiar at last, that had the patina of home!

  ‘It’s all from Ikea,’ he said, as though we should have heard of such a land, & then: ‘Drink that down, dear ladies, each of you. It will put you in a state of drowsiness, & help you sleep. I will bring you fresh nightwear – I have quite a supply of clothes for just such arrivals as yours – & run a bath. We have all the modern conveniences which, I assure you, you will be most impressed by.’

  ‘I will be forced into a bath over my own dead body,’ I said defiantly, for I had heard of people taking baths, & drowning in them like Tragic Johanna, & I had seen the one in Fru Krak’s house, a deep enamelled tub that required much scrubbing from Fru Schleswig. The creature, too, weighed in at this point, just as negatively & vociferously as I, for she has her own annual midsummer washing ritual, dear reader, the details of which I will spare you, save to tell you they involve her stripping naked, rubbing her flesh with chicken fat, and exposing herself to the dogs of the neighbourhood who lick her clean with their slobbering tongues amid much giggling on the part of the townsfolk, and much revulsion on mine. There are times when I praise God we are not related! Anyway on the issue of bathing Fru S & I were so united & adamant that Professor Krak sighingly agreed that we might simply wash & change for now, & showed us to what he called the bathroom, so white & luminous that it looked like a porcelain Heaven, with hot water – he demonstrated – that gushed from neat little taps, & liquid soap that foamed most prettily, & lights so bright that in the mirror you saw your face in more detail than you had ever done before, & had occasion to feel mighty pleased with your appearance, despite the misery of your situation. Professor Krak indicated on a chair two unadorned white nightdresses of soft cotton, one a normal size & the other gigantic, & then pointed out the water-closet, & showed how one must press a button to make the water whirlpool through its system after one had sat on it & done one’s private business & dabbed at one’s tissekone with the very soft white paper that hung in an interminably long roll next to it. With many grunts, Fru Schleswig proceeded to show great interest in the throne, so different from our own bucketed facilities, or the porcelain receptacle at Fru Krak’s, & investigated in detail, & by the time we had succeeded in freeing her thick arm from the pipe Professor Krak called ‘the U-bend’, the sleeping potion had begun to take sudden & dramatic effect, & I felt the urgent need to get into my nightdress & horizontalize.

  At which juncture it is possible that I parted with consciousness, for I have no memory of changing, walking back to the bedroom, & lying on the softest bed I ever felt beneath my bones, or falling into a deep & dreamless slumber, such as a baby might enjoy in its cot in the very earliest days of its entry to the world.

  And I was such a baby, of course, dear reader, in terms of innocence. But I was not to remain in that happy state for long. The next morning I awoke to find myself still in the future: it seemed that whatever dream my sleep had conjured was proving most tenacious. And I might have carried on believing in it still, were it not for those small things that made me know that, as a part of me had suspected & feared, what I saw & felt was indeed a waking reality. The snoring of Fru Schleswig was real. I pinched myself & the pain of it was real. I looked in the mirror (the mirror being so often my solace, dear one, & my means of cheering myself – I need not explain further, as being beautiful too, I am sure you have the same experience!) & knew that my face was real, & when my heart groaned (not at my appearance – on the contrary – but at my situation), that, too, was real.

  Returning to the bedroom where Fru Schleswig was just beginning to utter the first expletives of wakefulness, I saw that across a chair next to her Herr Krak had now spread a huge plain shirt, & a giant skirt, & some monstrously big white undergarments in a stretchy fabric I had never encountered before. On my own bed lay a pair of men’s trousers & a shapeless man’s shirt, alongside a pair of hideous bulging shoes of a soft texture, a woollen long-sleeved shift & a pair of socks. There was underwear, too: a pair of white knickers with very little lace, & a gusseted contraption, also lacking in adornment, that I presumed, from its dual concaves, that one strapped to one’s bazookas. My clients would have laughed their heads off if they had seen me attempting to get into it, & I would not have blamed them, but the result was comfortable & flattered the cleavage, though it could never, to my mind, compete with the aesthetics of a corset

  ‘I hope I furnished you with the correct, er, size,’ said Professor Krak who knocked & opened the door just as I had finished dressing in my mannish garb, looked me up & down, & gave me a hesitant smile. ‘I have quite a collection of clothes for such occasions, as you can imagine, what with all the pioneers arriving over the years. I figured you as a 36D.’ On which baffling note he said he would leave me to coax Fru S to life, & then join him, if I would be so good, for a ‘hearty English breakfast’.

  As Fru Schleswig struggled into her modern-day clothes, I averted my eyes & sought refuge in the view from the window, only to be rewarded with instant vertigo. We were high, high, perched upon a teetering platform. Outside, the Tin City stood in the distance, silver & grey – unlit now, except by the sun, which bounced off its flat planes & made it glitter in a harsher way than when I first saw it last night – but still I was mesmerized by its scale & its presumption. How many people must there be in this world, to live in such a place? Why, you could fit all the folk of Denmark into just a scatter of its buildings! The thought made my whole mind tilt to the perpendicular. I had never found myself higher from ground level than the top of the spiral church-tower of Christianshavn, before, but now –

  Outside, there were leaves on the trees, & the sun shone bright, & it seemed to be summer.

  ‘A tour of the apartment, ladies,’ announced Professor Krak, dressed today in ecclesiastical-looking garments he introduced as ‘classic contemporary leisurewear’, & we followed him through the various corridors & roo
ms. From most of the windows one could glimpse a sickening view of the metropolis that he still claimed to be London, spread before us, with its tall blank-faced towers planted cheek by jowl, its silver snaking river, & only a very few familiar-looking buildings to rest one’s gaze on amidst the relentless metal & sheets of brilliant glass, those flat fa£ades, & the incessant hum of vehicles far below.

  ‘Today’s lady is a lucky one,’ Professor Krak was proclaiming. ‘See all these labour-saving devices?’ he said, directing his hand towards various white cupboards in the corner of the room he called the kitchen, though it contained no trace of either victuals nor human toil. In one such cold-breathing cupboard sat many jars of indefinable substances, brightly coloured as poison, & I felt instantly hungry, for if Professor Krak were to be believed, I calculated that apart from the chocolate biscuits we had vomited up last night, we had not eaten in over a hundred years, & Fru Schleswig clearly felt a similar imperative, for she made a sudden lunge to grab a raw potato which she sank her teeth into, while Professor Krak, who merely raised an eyebrow, pointed to a small box he called a microwave, which he said was ‘very popular with the English, who do not so much cook food, as heat it through’.

  A habit he proceeded to demonstrate as he prepared our first breakfast.

  Dear reader, beloved one: belonging as you do to the future, none of the domestic novelties we encountered for the first time that day would be of any bafflement to you, but to me and Fru Schleswig they were magic indeed. ‘Believe me, you will become used to such things in a jiffy,’ assured Professor Krak, upon which the machine made a sudden ‘ping!’. Startled, Fru Schleswig flinched as though stung by a bee.

  ‘Iz it broke?’ she asked Professor Krak. Who in reply merely handed her a bowl of steaming porridge, which she attacked with gusto, & continued: ‘Let me explain to you the rudiments of time-travel, such as I have become aware of them.’ He was now spooning fragrant ground coffee into the mouth of a tall metal box, then pressing a button which provoked a whizzy hum. ‘Time has certain rules. It continues to run at the normal rate in the past, just as it does here in the future. One second per second, as it were. But while it is possible to travel both back & forth in time, because of the constraints of the machine or perhaps our own bodies, it is not possible, as far as I can configure, to change the past’

  ‘How so?’ I asked, curious despite myself.

  ‘If only I knew the answer to that, you would see before you a contented scientist. However, I hope to get to the bottom of it someday, & either confirm the theory or prove it wrong. In the meantime, we have the Grandmother Paradox. This is one crucial question that all time-travellers must ask themselves: if I went back in time and killed my own grandmother, would I exist now?’ (Oh Lord, I was feeling most disarranged & queasiatious, & was already regretting my query. Fru Schleswig, on the other hand, was in eating mode, & therefore oblivious, for she goes deaf when she masticates.) ‘So you will never meet your past or future self in such a way as to alter what has already been or is about to be. Which to my belief is just as well, for confusion would then abound.’ (As if it doesn’t already! I thought, most vexed.) ‘The machine can only make leaps – at present – of a hundred years or more,’ he continued, whilst I placed my bowl of oatmeal in the microwave machine & turned the knob as he had done. ‘I myself have gone as far back as a thousand years (to Mali, a most distressing experience which I care not to repeat) & forward three hundred, to France, which was even more so. I came to the sad conclusion that anyone living in this particular here & now (by which I mean the twenty-first century of course) would be foolish to hope for grandchildren.’

  ‘You mean the world will end?’

  ‘Oh, the earth will still revolve around the sun much as it does now,’ he replied airily, reaching for cups. ‘But the future is a sorry land, with all that is bright and exciting quite extinguished. All I saw on my visit were multi-storeyed pig farms that reached to the sky, plains of beetroot that stretched to the horizon, & buzzing between them, huge clouds of malaria-bearing mosquitoes. The people there are moody & dejected, & wheeze much due to breathing trouble. I shall not be going back. Now would you prefer cappuccino, which is light & frothy, or espresso which is rich & dark? Isn’t this part of the future stupendous? You will come to admire its nerve, I do assure you.’

  And so it went, & we met more so-called ‘marvellous contraptions’, including the television, whose nauseously flickering images instantly gave me a vivid headache, & the telephone, which for a reason I could not fathom looked familiar to me, & I gazed at it a long time before it struck me that I had indeed seen such a thing before, unearthed by Fru Schleswig in the home of Fru Krak. I had hidden it in a chamber pot

  ‘There are mobile varieties, too,’ Professor Krak enthused, clearly most keen to impress us. He cracked his knuckles. ‘Cordless! Is that not the bee’s knees?’ I promise you, dear ladies, that as soon as you have learned English, you will be making much use of this device!’

  ‘And whom, pray, do you expect us to communicate with?’ I snapped, determined not to be seduced by his eccentric enthusiasms. ‘For I can assure you, sir, we shall not be staying here long enough to bother speaking to strangers in their local languages!’

  At which he merely smiled, & chuckled, & hummed ‘Tragic Johanna’, as though he knew something we did not

  Whoever said nothing troubles me more than time & space; & yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them I recall not, but I knew that I had felt the same way until now. When not only did they begin to puzzle me enormously, they fair gave me a headache to boot. The great philosophers, who never minded headaches, & indeed made a living by engendering them in others, have speculated endlessly about time; this much I remember from all my mouldering books. Philosopher X says this & Philosopher Y says that – but when you try to translate their fine words into human discourse, the like of which a simple rustic being like Fru Schleswig might understand, then all evaporates as fleet as steam into airy persiflage & you find that, much as you may wish to express their high & mighty thoughts, you are struck dumb.

  But back to what I hesitantly call the ‘here & now’: I learned quickly that more than anything else, Professor Krak liked to brag, though why I could not fathom, for the Time Machine of which he was so proud had done far more harm than good, from what I could see, & enticing though the Tin City was, I still wished to be returned to my own place & time, Fru Krak’s waiting pistol or no. But I would get nowhere without information, so I let him speak. I am used to listening to the prattle of men, & I confess I do it well, for lending a sympathetic ear is part of the service one is paid for as a whore, & sometimes the most crucial aspect of the transaction. (You would not believe, O precious one, how many of those wives are right, when they complain that their husband is a crushing bore!)

  But Professor Krak was not a bore: he was more of a very convincing lunatic, or so I thought at first while he explained himself, as I had demanded that he do, I for my part merely nodding & asking the occasional question & sifting the information he came out with in my mind, wondering all the while how much was fantasy & how best to make use of what was not. And as this was going on, Fru Schleswig poked & nosed her way through the apartment, pressing every button & twisting every knob she could see, thus setting all manner of electrical appliances in motion, & unleashing gas. She then discovered the nozzled creature called a vacuum cleaner, for which she instantly developed a most unhealthy attachment, from then on dragging it with her everywhere, plugging it into this socket or that, & starting up its motor so that it could suck at the floor, the walls and the furniture like an insatiable flatfish.

  All the while I was listening to Professor Krak’s story.

  I learned the Time Machine took years to make, & even longer to perfect, & that some of the principles by which it worked, Fru Schleswig might be interested to know, bore parallels with the vacuum cleaner, in that Bernouilli’s Principle concerning air-speed & pressure ratios ap
plied to time-sucking as much as they did to the aspiration of dust. That he had devised a means – involving a ‘secret catalysing liquid’ one poured into the quartz orb – which ensured it could not be set in motion without his foreknowledge. I learned that Professor Krak had then decided to advertise discreetly in Politiken for people ‘seeking adventure in the Great Beyond’. His contraption became known among the intimate circle that then developed, & widened by word of mouth, as the Suicide Machine, for those who entered never returned. Until one day, quite unexpectedly, a woman called Rigmor popped up, who had taken her leave a twelvemonth before, being pregnant & destitute. She had visited Greenwich in the future, she claimed, & had her baby there, abandoned it outside a charity shop & then returned to ‘the past’ by accident, when visiting the Observatory out of a nostalgic interest, for this was where she had first found herself