“Lost something, mate?” one of them said to me. “Only if you have, then one of these has probably already nicked it.” He looked Middle Eastern in origin. One of his eyebrows was pierced with a diamond stud. The rest of his company erupted in laughter, but it all seemed pretty good-natured and they had soon forgotten me. The bus grunted then lurched off along the road. The woodland seemed to sing with colour and light.
When I arrived at my house on Frobisher Street the key would not fit in the lock. By then I was not surprised. I had even been expecting something of this kind. I rang the bell, and after a minute or so the door was opened by a young woman. Her hair looked uncombed, her eyes dark from fatigue. A child clung to her knees, a boy of perhaps four or five. In contrast with the woman’s scruffy housedress the toddler wore a cleanly-pressed playsuit in a cheerful mix of blues and yellows.
“Yes?” she said. “Can I help you?”
I peered over her shoulder into the hall. The black-and-white tiles had been replaced by a dun-coloured carpet. Piles of washing stood heaped at the foot of the stairs.
“How long have you lived here?” I said. The woman took a sudden step backwards, almost tripping over the child. She ran a hand through her hair, and I saw that all her nails were bitten.
“We’re registered,” she said. “We’ve been here almost two years. I’ve got all the forms.” Before I could say anything else she had darted away inside the house, disappearing through the door that had once led to my own living room. The toddler stared up at me, his green eyes wide with fascination.
“Are you from the prison?” he said.
“Not at all,” I replied. “This used to be my house once, that’s all. I wanted to see if it had changed.”
He continued to gaze at me as if I were a visitor from another planet. As I stood there wondering whether to stay or go the woman returned. “Here you are,” she said. “They’re all up to date.” She thrust some papers at me. I glanced at them briefly, long enough to see that her name was Violet Jane Pullinger and she had been born in Manchester, then handed them back.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m not from the council or anything. I used to live round here, that’s all. I was just curious. I’m sorry if I scared you. I didn’t mean to.”
The little boy looked from me to the woman and slowly back again. “He says he’s not from the prison, mum. Do you think he’s my dad?”
“Stephen!” She touched the boy’s hair, her face caught somewhere between laughter and embarrassment. When she looked at me again she looked younger and less frightened. “I don’t know where they get their ideas from, do you? Would you like to come in? I could make us a cup of tea?”
“That’s very kind,” I said. “But I’ve taken up too much of your time already.”
I knew I could not enter the house, that to do so would be a kind of madness. I said a hurried goodbye then turned and walked back to the High Street. I thought about looking to see if my office was still there but my nerve failed me. I went to the cashpoint outside my bank instead. I inserted my card in the machine and typed in my PIN. I felt certain the card would be swallowed or rejected. If that happened I was not only homeless, I was penniless too, aside from the couple of notes that were still in my wallet. I peered at the little screen, wondering what I would do if that happened, but this was one decision I did not have to make. My debit card, apparently, was still valid. When the machine asked me which service I required I selected cash with on-screen balance, then when prompted I requested twenty pounds. It seemed a safe enough amount, at least to start with. I waited while the note was disgorged, staring intently at the fluorescent panel where my bank balance was about to be displayed.
When the figure finally appeared I gasped, inhaling so sharply that it set off a fit of coughing. The amount I apparently had in my account was four times the sum that had been in there the day before. It did not make me a rich man by any means, but for a weary time traveller without a roof over his head it certainly provided a measure of temporary security.
I went to the nearest shop, a corner newsagent’s, where I bought a newspaper and a wrapped falafel. I ate the falafel where I stood on the street, wolfing it down in three bites then wiping my fingers on the greaseproof paper. Then I headed for the Woolwich Road and a hotel I knew, an enormous Victorian pile that had always been frequented mainly by travelling salesmen and had something of a dubious reputation. Its reputation mattered very little to me right then; what I needed was a bed for the night, some time to think in a place where I would not be noticed.
The hotel was still there and still a hotel. It looked more down-at-heel than ever. Some of the rooms on the ground floor appeared to have been converted into long-stay bedsitters. There was a pervasive smell of cooking fat and stewed tomatoes.
“I don’t do breakfast,” said the landlady. “You get that yourself, out the back.” She was huge, a vast whale of a woman in a flowered print dress with the most extraordinary violet eyes I had ever seen. I told her that was fine. She looked vaguely familiar, and I wondered what she would look like with her hair down. I shook my head to clear it and headed upstairs. The upper landing was sweltering and my poky little room was no better but I didn’t care. I sat down on the bed, which creaked alarmingly; it seemed strange how much this room, with its faded wallpaper and antiquated washstand, resembled the hospital cell where I had spent the previous night.
As well as the bed and the washstand there was a battered mahogany wardrobe and a portable television set with an old-fashioned loop aerial. I opened the window, hoping to let some air into the room, and then switched on the TV. The six o’clock news had just started. There was footage of a refugee encampment like those I had seen previously in Tangier and Sangatte. I was amazed to learn that the camp, a ragged shanty town of tents and standpipes and semi-feral children as skinny as rails, was situated on the outskirts of Milton Keynes. A delegation from the camp had delivered a petition to Downing Street, and the prime minister himself appeared on the steps to receive it.
The prime minister was black, a slimly-built, earnest-faced man named Ottmar Chingwe. I had never seen him before in my life.
I watched the broadcast through to the end. Some of the items covered—the famine in Russia, the blockade in the Gulf—were familiar or at least they seemed to be at first but other events, reported in the same matter-of-fact tone, were like passages from some elaborate fantasy. The newspaper I had bought was the same. I felt dazed not so much by the scale of the changes as by their subtlety. There were no miracle machines, no robots, no flying saucers; in many ways the world I had entered was the same as the world I had left. What I saw and felt and observed was a change not in substance but in emphasis.
Was it this that the Billings regime had learned of, and sought to reverse? Certainly Billings’s world view—his ‘Fortress Britain,’ as he had proudly referred to it—was everywhere conspicuous by its absence. This new England seemed more like a gipsy encampment, a vast airport lounge of peoples, chaotic and noisy and continually on the move. There seemed to be no overall plan.
Yet commerce was active, the homeless were being fed. People of all shades of opinion were expressing those opinions robustly and at every opportunity.
It was like the London I remembered from when I was young.
I watched TV for about an hour then went down to the curry house opposite and ordered a meal. I ate it quickly, still feeling conspicuous, although none of the other diners paid me the slightest attention. Once I had finished I returned to the hotel. There was a pay telephone in the hallway. I inserted my card and dialled Dora’s number. The phone rang and rang, and was eventually answered by a woman with an Eastern European accent so strong I could barely understand what she was saying. Silently I replaced the receiver.
After a moment’s hesitation I lifted it again, this time dialling Owen Andrews’s number, reading it off the slip of paper in my wallet. The phone clicked twice and then went dead. I climbed the stairs to my r
oom and watched television into the small hours, trying to gather as many facts as I could about my new world. Eventually I turned out the light and went to sleep.
I had to keep reminding myself that this was not the future. That is, I had lost three months somewhere but that was all. The year was the same. The TV channels were more or less the same. The Shooter’s Hill Road was still rife with carjackings, only now there was no talk of reinstating the death penalty. The increase in my finances I put down to some lucky quirk, an error in accounting, if you like, between one version of reality and another.
Once my initial nervousness had begun to wear off my biggest fear was meeting myself. It was the kind of nightmare you read about in H.G. Wells, but Owen Andrews had not mentioned it and in any case it did not happen. I began to wonder if each reality was like Schrodinger’s theoretical box, its contents uncertain until it was actually opened. I thought that perhaps the very act of me entering this world somehow negated any previous existence I had had within it.
Such thoughts were unnerving yet fascinating, the kind of ideas I would have liked to discuss with Owen Andrews. But so far as I could determine Andrews did not exist here.
I returned to what I was good at, which was buying and selling. I was still nervous in those early days, afraid to expose myself through some stupid mistake, and so instead of applying for a job with an estate agent I decided to set up by myself selling watches and clocks. I enjoyed reading up on the subject and it wasn’t long before I had a lucrative little business. I had learned long ago that even during the worst times there are still rich people, and what do the rich have to do but spend their money on expensive luxuries? I had never lost sleep over this; rather I made good use of it. I was amused to find that some of my clients were people I knew from before, men whose houses I had once sold for them, or their sons or daughters, or people who looked very like them. None of them recognised me.
The only thing I had left from my old life was the photograph of Miranda that I had always carried in my wallet. It was a snapshot taken of her on Brighton beach soon after we married. Her topaz eyes were lifted towards the camera, her heart-shaped face partially obscured by silvery corkscrewed wisps of her windblown hair. It was like an answered prayer, to have her with me. There were no traces of her death now, no evidence of what had happened. All that remained was my knowledge of my love for her and this last precious image of her face.
One evening in September I left a probate sale I had been attending in Camden and walked towards the tube station at St John’s Wood. It was growing dusk, and I stopped for a moment to enjoy the view from the top of Primrose Hill. The sky in the west was a fierce red, what I took to be the afterglow of sunset, but later, at home, when I put on the radio I discovered there had been a fire. The report said that underground fuel stores at the old army hospital at Shooter’s Hill had mysteriously ignited, causing them to explode. The resulting conflagration had been visible for twenty miles.
The Royal Herbert was a listed building, said the newscaster. It was originally built for the Woolwich Garrison at the end of the eighteen eighties and was most recently in use as a long-stay care facility for victims of war trauma.
The police suspected arson and had already sent in their teams of investigators. I wished them luck in their search. I supposed they would find something eventually, some loose circuitry or faulty shielding, but felt certain that unless they were experts in tracking a crime from one region of reality to another they would never find out the real truth of what had happened.
What I believed was that the resistance fighters Andrews told me about had finally found a way to destroy the hospital. The blast had been so strong it had ripped through the time stasis, wiping the building off the map in all versions of reality simultaneously.
Or in the neighbouring zones, at least. For a moment I had a vision of the great hotel lobby of time Andrews had spoken of. Alarm bells clamoured as a line of porters shepherded the guests out on to the front concourse and a fire crew worked to extinguish a minor blaze in one of the bedrooms. The fire was soon put out, the loss adjusters called in to assess the damage. By the end of the evening the guests were back in the bar and it was business as usual.
Some old biddy’s cigarette, apparently, said one as he sipped at his scotch.
We’re lucky she didn’t roast us in our beds, his companion jabbered excitedly. D’you fancy some peanuts?
I supposed that my escape route, if there had ever been one, was now cut off for good. Perhaps this should have bothered me but it didn’t. The more time passed, the more it was my old life that seemed unreal, a kind of nightmare aberration, a bad photocopy of reality rather than the master version. The world I now inhabited, for all its rough edges, felt more substantial.
I had no wish to return to the way things were. I uncorked a bottle of wine—the dreadful rough Burgundy that was all you could find in the shops at the time because of the flight embargo—and drank a silent toast to the unknown bombers. I thought of the soldiers in their rec room, their harmless card games and noisy camaraderie, and hoped they had been able to escape before the place went up.
It was not until some years later that I stumbled upon the picture of Owen Andrews. It was in a book someone had given me about the London watch trade, a reproduction of a nineteenth century daguerreotype that showed Andrews at his work bench. He was wearing a baggy white workman’s blouse and had his loupe on a leather cord around his neck.
The caption named him as Mr Edwin Andrews, the ‘miracle dwarf’ who had successfully perfected a number of new advancements in the science of mechanics and with particular reference to the Breguet tourbillon.
It was him, without a shadow of a doubt. I studied the picture, wondering what Andrews had made of being called a miracle dwarf. I supposed he would have had a good laugh.
The text that went with the picture said that Andrews had held a position in the physical sciences department at Oxford University but that he had resigned the post as the result of a disagreement with his superiors. He had come to London soon afterwards, setting up his own workshop in Southwark.
Sometimes, on those light summer evenings when I had finished all my appointments and had nothing better to do, I would make my way to Paddington and eat a leisurely supper in one of the bars or cafes on the station concourse. I watched the great steam locomotives as they came and went from the platforms, arriving and departing for towns in the north and west. A train came in from Oxford every half hour.
I knew it was futile to wait but I waited anyway. Andrews had said we would meet again and I somehow believed him. I sipped my drink and scanned the faces in the crowd, hoping that one of them one day would be the face of my friend.
Choose Your Own Adventure
Kat Howard
The most dangerous moment in any story is the beginning.
As the story opens, every ending is equally possible, every path unwalked, every question not only unanswered, but unasked.
The unread story is infinite possibility. Yet the ending is already written, and though you be clever, though you be brave, there is no outwitting it.
Are you brave enough to begin? If so, turn to page 1. If not, remain safe. Close the book and return it to the shelf. No one will think any less of you.
Page 1: You find yourself standing in a beautiful garden. It teems with all the birds of the air, and all of the creatures of the Earth, and every good thing that grows. As you explore, you feel an incredible sense of peace and rightness, as if the garden had been created just for you.
This is the place you belong. Still, you are restless and lonely. You begin to explore your surroundings. At the western edge of the garden, there is a gate. Do you walk through?
If yes, turn to page 37. If no, turn to page 19.
Page 19: You wish to see more of the garden before you leave its bounds. Soon, you are glad you have chosen as you did, for you find the perfect companion for all your days and nights. You come to believe you have f
ound a new Eden, as well. It seems impossible for a place so perfect to be other than Paradise. When they are born, you name your children Kane and Abelle.
This will prove to be a mistake.
Page 37: Gates, like books, are meant to be opened, and you would never be truly content if you did not know what lay on the other side. You pass through the gate and enter into a dark forest. You hesitate for a moment, look back, but the forest stretches behind you as if the garden had never been.
You continue on.
Shadows deepen. An owl calls. Something cries out at a distance and is silenced. You grow chilled, and your feet develop a talent for finding uneven spots of ground, tree roots, and rocks. After the third time you fall, you lean against the very tree whose roots last tangled your feet.
The bark prickles and rubs against your back, but it is a welcome distraction from your bruised knees and skinned palms. Your bones are weary and your muscles ache.
You crave sleep. A brief rest to fortify yourself for your journey. Do you close your eyes?
If so, turn to page 3. If not, turn to page 25.
Page 3: You close your eyes, and drift into sleep. When you awaken, you are in your own bed. The previous events were a dream, which has already begun to fade.
You spend the rest of your life trying to return to the winding path in the dark forest. You never will.
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition Page 53