My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time

by Liz Jensen

  A ring at the door. We froze.

  A loud & commanding banging, and a ferocious male cry of ‘Let us in or we will bash the door down!’

  ‘Don’t go!’ I yelled at Fru Schleswig, who, with that bovine instinct of obedience so common among lowly creatures of her ilk, had already begun lumbering towards the hall. ‘We know not who it is!’

  The banging ceased, & I was glad to remember that we had triple-bolted the front door. But the respite was all too brief, within a minute, the thumping noises had started up once more, but louder this time, & with a splitting-wood timbre that hinted at alarming events on the horizon.

  Fergus woke with a start & snapped instantly into action, grabbing a poker & bidding Josie to take her toy tram, descend to the basement, & hide inside the Time Machine. Alarmed, Franz quickly screwed the last component of the vacuum cleaner back in place, & Fru Schleswig clasped it passionately to her bosom, whereupon Franz went to summon Professor Krak from his bath – from which he emerged dripping & wild-haired & clad in his wife’s pink bath-robe, adorned with sea-horses.

  ‘Right: we must now activate Plan 4b, sub-section ten!’ he ordered sharply, referring to the flow-chart he had bidden us all learn by heart, but which had faded to a distant memory in my mind by then, thanks to schnapps & the passage of time. ‘The Time Machine is under direct enemy threat! Deploy all defence strategies, while I hasten to prepare the catalysing liquid, which I pray is still fresh enough, after my visit to Zaragoza, to fuel the journey!’

  By now Fergus, still clearly befuddled but nonetheless determined, was ascending the stairs with his poker, where from the landing window a view was to be had of the street immediately below. I followed him, my heart a-patter, for there were few things this could mean, & none of them bode well. When he reached the landing I heard him gasp.

  ‘Lottie, quick! Is that her?’ he asked, pointing to a carriage that contained a plump woman wrapped in a beige shawl, fur-hatted & hard-faced. And next to her, the pompous Pastor. I groaned in the affirmative.

  ‘Then Fred is right, & we must act quickly,’ said my love. We had changed the locks, of course, in anticipation of just such an intrusion, & there existed a blood-spattered document proving Fru Fanny Schleswig’s legal ownership of the house – but what none of us could have foreseen was the speed with which events would unravel: that first of all, Fru Krak would blab about the Ghost of the Little Cleaning Girl in her sleep (a fact we later learned from an acquaintance of the Pastor’s); that the Parson would interrogate his wife further; that next, the Man of God, apprised of his home’s occupation by a demonic machine, would be filled with a most righteous & biblical fury, & insist on returning posthaste from Silkeborg, stopping only to awake a lawyer & hire two burly thugs to defend his rightful ownership, as Fru Krak’s husband, of the property in question, & expunge Satan.

  And so we did not stay to watch any further, as two monumentally big, scar-faced, stubble-jowled thugs (members of the criminal underworld, most surely, to judge by their looks!) swung their sledgehammers again, striking ever deeper into the dark oak of the front door. In that eye-blink of a moment, it became clear that there was only one course of action open to us, for we could not hold these brutish oxen off, & their destructive work might not end with the front door, but in bloodshed.

  ‘We’ve got to go back to London this minute. Franz, since you are staying here, you must try to save the machine!’ called Fergus as we ran down the corridor, with the young man & Josie hurtling in our wake, while Fru Schleswig rolled & pitched her way along in the rear, uttering her usual limited range of expletives. By the time we reached the basement, Professor Krak, who had sped on ahead, had already entered the machine & was preparing it for passengers.

  ‘Right, who is leaving for London?’ he cried.

  ‘Fergus, Josie and I wish to return,’ I said quickly.

  ‘Yor not leevin me here aloan,’ boomed the hippopotamic Fru Schleswig, wheezingly catching up with us. ‘Do notte think u kan abandun yor pore old mutha a second tyme!’

  ‘As you wish, Fru Schleswig,’ cried Professor Krak, ‘but make it snappy, for they are upon us!’ (I groaned. Would I never shake this woman off?)

  ‘But what will you do, Fred?’ asked Fergus. ‘Surely you can’t stay here yourself?’

  ‘Who else will guard the machine?’ he replied. ‘I spent years building her!’

  ‘So build another one in London!’ urged my love. ‘Come along, step in quickly!’ and he pushed Professor Krak through the door, & bundled the complaining Fru Schleswig after him.

  ‘Now Franz,’ called Fergus, ‘you and I will fight them off for as long as we can: then I’ll get inside the machine while you make your getaway through the ventilation shaft. Tell your parents some of the truth, & do your best to make sure the machine isn’t destroyed. We’ll be back!’

  There was by now a thumping & thundering at the basement door, & the Pastor’s voice boomed: ‘O begone, Satan’s hordes! Begone, ye foul demons of the Netherworld! For I have here Herr Bagdelsen, the best lawyer in Copenhagen, who will most rightfully attest to my wife’s signature on your document being extracted under extreme duress, nay vicious torture! Ye shall have no quarter in the Lord’s home, nor shall ye befoul it with thy noxious presence!’

  As his speech gathers momentum, we begin to hear a louder banging at the door; hurriedly, Professor Krak pours a pinkish liquid into the quartz orb from a small vial, twiddles dials and jabs at buttons, consulting a time-sheet, a compass & a map as he does so.

  ‘Hurry!’ cries Fergus, securing the bolts. ‘They’re coming!’

  Whereupon there is an almighty crash & the door whams open, busting the locks like matchwood. Now the two jowly men, their bodies as broad as they are tall, burst in, followed by the screeching figure of Fru Dahlberg, formerly Krak, nee Bischen-Baschen, & that Servant of God, her husband, whose moment of spiritual heroism – his finest hour – has come. Behold him, crying: ‘Get thee behind me, Satan! Fie on ye, & your cursed followers likewise! Blighted are ye in the eyes of the Lord, & crushed shall ye be, as the locust is crushed beneath the rock of righteousness, & expunged for all eternity!

  By now Fru Schleswig & I have squashed ourselves & Josie (whose ‘wee theme park’ is now a full-blown nightmare) on to the chaise-longue housed within the machine, where Professor Krak, on his knees & still wearing his wife’s excruciating bath-robe, is fiddling ever more frantically with the manifold knobs of his contraption.

  Yea, verily, vengeance is Pastor Dahlberg’s, for the door has crashed inward & he is upon us, alongside two burly criminals who have knocked Fergus to the floor with a single blow (how I scream!), & are just preparing to heave Fru Schleswig out by the arm when –

  Bing! BANG! Bong! CREAK!

  Professor Krak has pulled the lever.

  I scream again.

  You know what happens next – for is it not the third voyage we have been on together now, you & I? So picture its mechanics, O my petal of a reader: that mighty roar, like a cracking, searing explosion, that now-familiar vivid puff of noxious light, that gasp of sulphur-gas.

  WAAAAGH!

  And we are reeling & gone.

  I scream all the way back to London. Scream until there is no more breath in me, scream like a mad kettle, scream until I can scream no more. O woe! For just before the physics of epistemological magnetism wrenched us into flight, this is what I beheld: my precious Fergus, the love of my life, knocked sprawling to the floor by a murderous thug, a gash of crimson blood at his temple, his face dazzled by the flash, crying desperately: ‘NO! NO! NO! Lottie! Josie! Dont leave me behind!’

  Part the Fourth: Beyond Beyond

  As the great poet Dante said: Nessun maggior dolore/Che ricordarsi del tempo felice/Nella miseria! There is no greater grief than to recall a time of happiness when in misery!

  Beloved, cherished & extremely precious reader of this dog-eared, grubby journal, which at any moment risks disintegrating into a hopeless sheaf of
tear-soaked jottings, the mad scrawlings of a semi-deranged woman: how I need you now! Sweet, sensitive and wise friend, help me in my hour of need, & pity my plight! O had I but known, when we embarked upon this journey together, that it would lead to such a mortifying abyss of despair, I would never have requested the pleasure of your company, for the once joyous whirligig of our adventure has now transmogrified into a veritable ghost train of grotesquerie & gloom! If ever there were a time for you to return to the municipal library, or to the bookshop where you found this sorry little tale in print, & express disgust, either by a quiet word to the librarian or asking (nay demanding!) the good man at the bookshop for your money back, then that time has come! Point out to those noble handlers of literature, & custodians of the written word, that there is no edification to be had in a dose of heartache, & no bargain neither in time stolen from you thus! Do it! For your own sake!

  But you are a gentle, kind one, & I know your heart is too generous for any cruelty, even to one who deserves it, & I suspect that although your resolve will begin firm, you will relent at the last moment, & instead of relieving yourself of the unwholesome burden that my confessions have become, you will find yourself forgiving their humble scribbler & instead borrow or buy yet another book, perhaps this time penned by someone more distinguished, educated & raffiné, & then throw a shining silver coin to the little rosy-cheeked match girl (still there, so steadfast!) on your way home. So instead I merely beg your condescension, you admirable creature – & I pray from the bottom of my heart that, should you choose to stay the course, whatever our destination be, you will remain by my side as generously, nobly & stalwartly as you have thus far, for now you are the only intimate companion in the entire universe in whom I can confide, with Fergus wrenched so cruelly from me, & Professor Krak & Fru Schleswig –

  O!

  Forgive me, for I must leave you for a moment, as I feel another fit of weeping coming on!

  The buckets I have filled with my torrential tears, since last we met! Enough to flood the dust-plains of America & the deserts of Afric combined!

  And now you, too, have a lump in your throat, you darling, sympathetic one: yes, I can sense it! Though separated physically, let our two souls now combine as one, that we may fully express our feverishly garbled emotions, & sob in one another’s imaginary arms!

  But hush now, for time, my increasingly bitter enemy, marches on, & we must pull ourselves together lest we fall apart entirely, & let young Josie down. So use your handkerchief, whilst I do the same, & then having excused me my moment of weakness (as I know you will, being so kind an empathizer), be patient while I reapply the full range of cosmetics, take a deep breath, & explain my new & most dreadful predicament.

  It begins with a piece of heart-wrenching news, which I know will shock you to the marrow, so brace yourself for the revelation that –

  I am all alone!

  Alone, save for one small, five-year-old symbol of hope, namely the brave young tomboy Josie!

  Yes!

  And no, I cannot believe it either!

  But believe it I must, & it is compulsory that you do too, for the fact is, not only are Josie & I bereft of Fergus, whom we left bloodily & heroically struggling for his survival on the floor of the Krak basement, but when we emerged from our time-travelling dizziness, the Professor had utterly vanished from the face of the earth, & Fru Schleswig along with him! Gone! Nowhere were they to be seen or found! Josie & I searched the many halls of the Greenwich Observatory high & low (I, desperately trying to make it seem merely another game of hide-and-seek for the child’s sake – as if so grotesquely vast a bulk as Fru S could be secreted anywhere!), but discover them we did not, nor was there sign of them, not so much as a popped button, a whisker, an echo or a whiff Which forced me to conclude that by some technological anomaly, our fellow-passengers had remained stuck in Copenhagen, & that the same malfunction which flung Professor Krak to Zaragoza before New Year had once more afflicted that poor man, & done likewise to the wretched human catastrophe that is Fru Schleswig, bless her simple, vegetable soul, & stranded them in the old days, at the mercy of Fru Krak, the vengeful Pastor & their two hired thugaroos – for both were within the Time Machine when the lever was pulled: of that I would swear on my mother’s life, if I had a mother. But neither were anywhere in sight when Josie & I awoke in Greenwich Observatory!

  O treble woe!

  And what of my current situation? I will apprise you of it swiftly, for I await the heavy footstep of my tormentor at any moment. It is now three weeks since we returned to London. I will spare you the distressing details of how Josie & I begged & cajoled our way home in our old-fashioned Danish garb, penniless, & broke into Fergus’s house via the bathroom window; of the aghast & dejected reception we had from members of the Halfway Club when I informed them next morning of how our glorious mission had been so painfully & disastrously banjaxed; of the way Henrik Dogger’s eyes lit up strangely when he learned that Fergus had been left behind; & of how I now actually, on occasion, find myself pining for the filthy, stinking crone that is Fru Schleswig, whom I have hitherto gone to such lengths to try & jettison! O, hark at me now: how hypocritical does my contempt of her turn out to be, how shallow the depths of my disdain! As for the fearlessly innovative & excessively brilliant Professor Krak, the man who led me to my love: how I have come to appreciate his courage, wisdom & inspiration!

  But worst of all was the moment, some hours after our return, when it dawned on little Josie that her father is no longer of the world he once inhabited. How to explain to a girl of five and three-quarters that the man she knows as Dad is stranded across whole oceans of inexplicable time, when that word means nothing to her except when conjoined with another, such as ‘bed’, ‘bath’ or ‘dinner’!

  ‘Where’s Dad, Lottie?’ she kept asking. ‘When’s he coming home?’

  The poor, dear little fjord-shrimp! Since then, it seems like every half an hour, day & night, that she has looked up at me with those sorrowful, questioning eyes. What to do then, but soothe her in my paltry English: ‘Dad will come soon, min lille skattepige. Maybe Monday or Tuesday.’ And stroke her sweet, tangle-haired head? But I know that this notion of her father’s swift return is more wishful thinking than fact, & the child suspects it, & the thought of having lost our beloved man for evermore turns both our hearts to beetroot goulash. Yet I must be strong, for his child, who is a part of him & who becomes more loved & cherished by the day, with her bright little smile (now so sadly rare) & her comical way of jumping in mud-puddles, & her passion for falsified bottom-noises & gruesome grimaces. And how madly do I try & cheer her, in these miserable times: O, the handstands & cartwheels I have done! The Play-Doh dinosaurs I have shaped, the water-pistols I have filled, the gingerbread men I have manufactured, baked & burned, the bubbles I have blown, the bathwater I have sloshed, the tickling sessions I have instigated! For being the only remaining adult in Josie’s much-diminished universe, apart from those three mistrustful-looking ladies in sloppy trousers who run Sunnyside Kindergarten (and perhaps there are some Scottish relatives of Fergus’s? But if they appear, how to explain, for I speak no Scottish & even if I did … ?!), I have suddenly become – overnight – a mother. But hell’s bells: what do mothers do & say? I know nothing – less than nothing – about mothering & its ways! What know I of children, except what I can remember of my own dismal childhood at the orphanage, toiling in the draughty kitchen of Fru Schleswig amid diseased rats, noxious pig-slime & green potato peelings, or taking refuge in my basement library with Baba Yaga Bonylegs? And what help was that? How to go about the task of nurturing a young life, when one has not, in reality, the foggiest clue? What mother have I ever had, save a creature who claims kinship with me, merely as a parasite claims kinship to its host? O, help me, dear one! I have never had such responsibility in my life! Never, in fact, had any responsibility at all!

  But try I must, & so – much as stablemen do horses, I must muck out, exercise & feed the
precious little human in my custody, & in the process create my own rituals of child-rearing – & thus it is that to the game of Crazy Frog Pillow Wars we have now added Squirt the Orange, Hunt the Toothpaste, Pick the Scab, To-Hell-With-Hairbrushing, & the Østerbro-Coquettes-Sing-You-To-Sleep, & every time I defrost & heat frozen leftovers, for every ping comes a pang, for it was my beloved Fergus who surely prepared this meal from his bachelor’s recipe book, & a lump comes to my throat & a tear to my eye, for his spirit is with us, his little family, but his body, his flesh, his being, his self –

  O!

  Better to have loved & lost than never to have loved at all? O, call me a coward, but I think not.

  All the sweet, tender words of Love my Fergus whispered in my ear… how they echo in my heart now, like lost ghosts!

  He said: ‘You’re the love of my life, hen.’ He said: ‘I could drown in your eyes.’ He said: ‘Let’s make a hundred babies, starting now.’ He said: ‘I love the freckles on your beautiful bottom.’ And he once sung to me a beautiful song which I am sure he wrote himself, in which he insisted I must love him tender & true, & I must never let him go, because I had made his life complete and he loved me enormously, & when I feel Josie’s questioning eyes settling on me in search of an explanation or an answer, I clasp her clumsily to my bosom & reassure her that all shall be well, & hope I am doing it right, my only consolation being that Josie’s real mother is dead & gone, & for her therefore any mother is better than none, & this, God help me, is my humble starting-point when it comes to the upbringing & education of my lover’s child. Which is just as much the upbringing & education of myself, for first of all I must become fluent in a tongue I still struggle to master, & so to this end each night when I put her to bed, I read her stories in my faulty-accented English: & thus she becomes familiar with The Snow Queen, & The Ugly Duckling & the steadfast Little Tin Soldier, & The Little Christmas Tree, & The Emperor’s New Clothes, & Clumsy Hans, & The Princess & the Pea,& Thumbelina,& Big Claus & Little Claus, but not The Story of a Mother for it is too, too sad. And though there are times when Josie cries because she misses Dad, there are times when she laughs too, & thanks to the kind intervention of Fru Jakobsen, who administers the Emergency Fund, the household bills are paid, & we are fed & clothed & furnished with a small allowance, & each morn I take Josie to kindergarten, where I have asserted to the (increasingly) sceptical ladies in sloppy trousers that I am the family’s new au-pair girl, for ‘Mr McCrombie, has gone away on a digging trip & I don’t know when he will be back’. But they look at me reproachfully & check Josie’s hair for lice & wipe the egg off her face & re-tie her laces according to their own method & ask more questions than I care to answer, & claim they cannot reach Josie’s father on his phone – which is hardly a surprise, as the appliance now lives in my pocket (& O, how I have hoped against hope that he might locate the monkey Pandora’s antique telephone, & ring!). Do the mistrustful ladies spot that, in my heart, I am all at sea? A sea which would be daily battered by a veritable storm, were it not for the blessed Fru Jakobsen, who fusses over us like a mother hen: how my admiration for her gracious competence & sweet, genteel nature grows hebdomadally!