Buying Time

by E. M. Brown

  She shook her head. “I can’t begin to comprehend…”

  “By sending Ed Richie back,”Mackendrick said, “we hoped to prove Dennison’s theory; we hoped that Richie might effect a change in his own, personal timeline… and so prevent something from happening, something which had had terrible repercussions for one certain individual, and for the person he became.”

  Ella swallowed.

  Mackendrick went on, “Why do you think he agreed to take part in the project? He was a highly successful novelist, rich and feted, with an enviable lifestyle and many friends. Of course he would have his life to live again, and find himself inhabiting a new, younger, fitter version of himself” – he smiled – “but there was something more, something even more important, that lured him into the past. We hoped he would be able to change an event that happened when he was twenty-three… Of course, there was always the possibility that in this time-line, Annabelle did not die that morning, but we could not take the risk of returning him to after the time of the accident.”

  Ella leaned back against the cylinder, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “Annabelle…?” she said.

  “Despite the temporal dysfunctions that had shunted Richie randomly through his past, he did indeed arrive at the date we’d pre-programmed as his destination: the 20th of June, 1983. The morning your sister died, in our timeline, in a car accident on Victoria Park Road. Richie blamed himself for her death – they had an argument that morning, and she set off for work earlier than she normally would have done. Annabelle was killed, and Richie had to live with the guilt for the rest of his life.”

  “But did he manage to…?” Ella gestured towards the tank, aware that her hand was trembling.

  “Richie came to consciousness that morning in 1983, and prevented the argument, and in so doing brought about a timeline in which your sister survived.”

  He nodded to the technician at the foot of Ed Richie’s tank, and the woman ran her hand across a touchpad. Mackendrick took Ella’s elbow and assisted her towards the array of screens; the technician vacated her seat and Ella slumped into it.

  “Watch,” Mackendrick said, indicating the big softscreen at the end of the tank.

  The screen was black, but shot through with lines of interference; then a hazy image appeared, its colours muted to shades of pastel. The interior of a restaurant, dim and candle-lit.

  “This is a recording we made of the evening of June the 20th, 1983, in Ed Richie’s new timeline – hours after, in our own timeline, your sister died.”

  Ella leaned forwards, her tears flowing freely now, as the image of the restaurant as seen through Ed Richie’s eyes swung and he looked across the table.

  Ella gasped.

  On the screen, Annabelle laughed at something Ed Richie had said to her. Her sister was twenty-three, and elfin-beautiful, her eyes glowing in the candlelight. The girl reached out and took Ed’s hand across the table, and her lips moved as she silently spoke.

  Ella wept as she recalled that day, all those years ago. She had been twelve, living in Peckham with her mother and father. She’d felt sick that morning and her mother had allowed her a day off school, and just after eleven o’clock a police car had drawn up outside the terraced house. A constable came to the door and spoke to Ella’s mother, and as she came down the stairs from her room, Ella had seen her mother collapse against the door frame, caught by the constable, and heard her anguished cry. She recalled little of the hours that followed, other than being hit by the stunning realisation that she would never again see her sister.

  And now here was Annabelle, on the night of that same day, enjoying a meal with Ed Richie – who, Ella thought, would be rejoicing in the salvation of the woman he loved… and no doubt wondering at the miracle that had brought it about.

  Mackendrick murmured something to the technician, who reached past Ella and tapped the touchpad. The image on the screen went blank, flickered, then was replaced by another scene.

  Ed Richie was sitting on the side of a bed, staring at the sleeping Annabelle. Ella could only imagine what must be going through his mind.

  Mackendrick said, “This is a little later that evening.”

  Richie’s gaze lingered on the sleeping form of Ella’s sister, her chest rising and falling, her long blonde hair fanned out across the pillow. As Ella watched, Richie reached out and stroked the sleeping woman’s cheek.

  Ella looked up at Mackendrick, wiped her eyes and said, “Why…? Why have you shown me this?”

  He smiled. “Can’t you guess? We would like Ed Richie to know the truth behind that ‘miracle’; we failed once, when we sent Emmi Takala, but we have honed the system since then, and we know where we went wrong. We would not make the same mistake again.”

  “Again?” she echoed.

  “With our increased understanding of the phenomenon, we can send you back to Ed’s timeline, so that you can tell him all about the experiment here in 2030, and reassure him that he is now stabilised in his own time.”

  Ella stared at the screen as Richie turned and watched her sleeping sister.

  “Send me back…?”

  To live her life over again, to avoid the mistakes of her youth, to navigate the uncertainties of growing up, with the knowledge of the adult who had already done the growing…

  “But Kit…?” She had left Kit once before, all those years ago, and still felt guilty at doing so; could she desert her all over again, just when Kit hoped that there might be a possibility of their getting back together?

  She stared at the screen and the young woman on the bed.

  To see her sister once again, to hold her in her arms and tell her that she loved her…

  She felt Mackendrick’s hand rest briefly on her shoulder. “We will leave you for a while, so that you can come to a decision.”

  She watched the two men walk away between the tanks, and returned her gaze to the woman on the bed.

  She could return to inhabit her younger self, she thought, and work for a better future in a new timeline…

  She smiled. But what had changed, she asked herself? Wasn’t that, after all, what her life had always been about? To do one’s best to make your world, this world, a better place?

  On the screen, Annabelle rolled over to face Ed Richie, and smiled.

  She looked up and watched Mackendrick and Dennison in conversation across the chamber.

  “I don’t know,” she murmured to herself. “I just don’t know…”

  From Ed Richie’s journal, 20th June, 2023

  I RECALL READING somewhere – I can’t remember where; it might have been in a novel – that grief is like a physical wound. It heals, in time, but always there is scar tissue.

  The ‘scar tissue’ of grief is psychological trauma, which manifests itself in all manner of devious ways when you least expect it. For years after the accident, I’d see small, blonde women and convince myself that they were Annabelle. Even now, more than forty years later, the sight of someone resembling Annabelle brings me up short and fills me with a bitter, corrosive guilt.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  June, 1983

  THREE DAYS AFTER arriving in this time, three days after saving Annabelle’s life, Richie awoke early and lay rigid in bed. He thought, for a terrible few seconds, that he’d jumped back in time yet again: the sunlight slanting in through the gap in the curtains made the room appear somehow unfamiliar. Then he saw the alarm clock on the bedside table, and the novel he was reading, and he calmed himself. He reached out, touched Annabelle’s warm, reassuring body, then slipped out of bed and dressed quietly. He moved to the sitting room and sat at his desk in the corner.

  He pulled a book from the shelf beside the desk, the collected works of Oscar Wilde, opened it at the bookmark and for perhaps the hundredth time read the astounding quote.

  Was it too much to hope, he wondered, after three days, that he would remain here for good? Or, as he feared, would his stay of execution come to an end and h
e’d be whisked off to inhabit the body of a younger version of himself? He lived in fear of being taken from the bliss that his life had become.

  But even more painful than that was the thought that Annabelle would be left with the person he had been.

  The day after saving Annabelle’s life, he had awoken on what he presumed would be his last day here, and then again yesterday, and again this morning… thinking always that this day would surely be his last.

  On the second day he’d been leafing through the collected Wilde, and happened to read a line in An Ideal Husband that brought him up short, stunned.

  Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is.

  He’d hardly dared hope, since then, that perhaps he was that unlikely man…

  Now he set aside the Wilde, opened his notebook, picked up his pen and began writing.

  A little later he became aware of Annabelle, leaning in the doorway. “Ed,” she said sleepily, “what are you doing?”

  He looked up and smiled at her. Limned in the doorway by the sunlight, she was an angelic vision, and he swore to himself that, no matter how long he might have in this time, he would show Annabelle Shaw his love and live every day as if it were his last.

  “I’m writing a story,” he said, “about a man who buys back his past with the hard-won currency of experience.”

  Annabelle crossed the room and stood beside him, then caressed his shoulder and kissed the top of his head.

  “Love you, Ed,” she murmured.

  She returned to the bedroom, and later Richie finished writing and joined her.

  From Ed Richie’s journal, 10th May, 2024

  JUST BACK FROM a late session with Diggers at the Bull. Really shouldn’t be drinking that much at my age.

  I’m sitting at my desk. It’s almost two, and the house is very quiet. Ella Shaw’s Corbyn: A Life, is open on the desk where I left it before I set off to the pub. The sight of it, Ella’s picture on the back-flap… it brings back memories of Annabelle.

  I really ought to contact Ella Shaw, tell her how much I’m enjoying the book, and perhaps talk to her about Annabelle. I need to talk to someone about her, someone who knew her…

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  July, 1988

  ELLA AWOKE IN the body of her eighteen year-old self.

  Born again…

  She lay very still, as if too frightened to move, as sunlight streamed in through the bedroom window. Her last thought was of being inserted into the Dennison-Ventura-Ozaki chamber, the freezing touch of the gas as it enveloped her body, the telemetry leads being attached to her shaved skull. She recalled experiencing a moment of supreme terror at the thought of what could go wrong. There was always the chance that she might not survive the shunt, that this would be her very last thought.

  Mackendrick had elected to shunt Ella into Richie’s new timeline in 1988, when she was eighteen. She had finished school with three A levels and was about to start a course in journalism at the London School of Economics in autumn. At eighteen she was on the cusp of adulthood, coming to terms with her sexuality: it would be a good place to ‘start.’

  She was startled by a call from downstairs. “Are you ever going to get up, Ella?”

  Her mother’s voice made her throat tighten with emotion. No amount of mental preparation, back in 2030, had readied her for the fact that she would meet again her mother who, in 2010, had died… would die… of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of seventy.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Coming!” Ella called.

  She dried her eyes on the cuff of her pyjamas, then looked at her hands and laughed: they seemed ludicrously young. She sat up and swung herself from the bed, staring across the room at her reflection in the wardrobe mirror.

  So young, so fair and slight and… unfinished. That was the word that came to her. She appeared, sitting on the edge of the bed, to be physically innocent of the traumas that life would heap on her in the years to come: no lines on her face, no stoop, no habitually downturned mouth: all the signs of age that had greeted her when looking in the mirror at the age of sixty.

  She had never recalled being so impossibly pretty – she had always downplayed her looks, eschewing make-up and wearing dowdy clothes, and ignoring the attention of the boys in the sixth form who asked her out. It had only come to her, very gradually in her sixteenth year, why she felt nothing for boys. That slow learning experience, that coming to terms with what she was, and having to face the consequences of her mother and father finding out, was something that, now, she had no need to fear. She had lived through it once, traumatically, and now with the wisdom of years would know how to negotiate the emotional pitfalls that had made her life, back then, so fraught.

  She found her clothes on a footstool beside the bed and dressed: old jeans and a grey sweatshirt.

  Taking a deep breath, preparing herself, she left the bedroom and made her way down the narrow stairs.

  Even this short descent, on garishly patterned carpet, past dowdy old-gold wallpaper from the nineteen-fifties, past the dusty cuckoo clock in the hallway and the wooden globe on the telephone table, brought back a slew of long-forgotten memories.

  And now to face her mother in the kitchen: her mother, whom she hadn’t seen for more than twenty subjective years.

  She was standing at the sink with her back to the door, washing dishes. Ella collapsed onto a dining chair.

  “Make yourself some tea and toast. I’m not doing it for you. I don’t know what time you call this. You know what your dad said? Up at eight all summer, and you work on your studies. Prepare yourself for a working life, girl.”

  Listening to her mother’s litany now, Ella wanted to weep. As a young girl she was frustrated by the admonitions, but now they came to her ears like poetry.

  When her mother turned, leaning back against the sink and drying her hands, Ella just stared.

  Her hair was not as grey as Ella remembered, and her face was without the lines of grief that had etched themselves since the death of her eldest daughter. In this timeline, Ella told herself, her parents had been spared that tragedy.

  Her mother was small, slim, in her late forties now, with a head of blonde curls and a thin, not unattractive face.

  And it was like staring into a mirror and seeing her future self. The resemblance was unnerving: the thin, pretty face, the small nose and wide lips.

  “I don’t know what you’re staring at, Miss. Didn’t you hear me? There’s the bread, and you know where the kettle is.” She finished drying her hands and hung up the towel. “I’m popping round the corner for a coffee with Doreen and Pat.”

  Ella could only nod.

  “Pop out to the Co-Op, Ella. Get some milk and eggs, would you?”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s a miracle. No protests?”

  Ella smiled.

  Her mother busied herself round the kitchen, putting things away, and then hurried into the hall. She came back holding her overcoat, a thick brown thing that looked at least fifty years old. “Your dad’s back early today, so tea’s at five. I won’t be long.”

  Her father…

  Ella took a breath and said, “I might… I might go and see Annabelle and Ed later.”

  Her mother gave her an odd look. “You know Ed will be writing all day? He won’t want to be bothered. And Annabelle won’t be back till after six.”

  “Oh, I forgot,” she said.

  Her mother gave her a concerned look. “Ella, are you feeling well? You’re acting odd.”

  “I’m fine. Honest. A bit tired.”

  Her mother laughed and shook her head. “I don’t know…” she said. “Well, drop the latch when you go out, and don’t forget to take the spare key.”

  Her mother pulled on her coat and hurried from the room. The front door slammed.

  She sat very still in the sudden silence.

  Mention of her father brought back another rush of memories. Her father had alwa
ys been a remote, emotionally reserved figure. He’d worked as a clerk for the local council, earned enough to keep a roof over the family’s head and put food on the table, and probably considered that the extent of his familial duties. Ella could not recall his once avowing love for her or her sister, and he was not the kind of man to hug or kiss his daughters. Ella’s relationship with him during her later teens had been fraught with mutual misunderstanding. In just ten years from now he would die from lung cancer at the age of fifty-nine, the result of a twenty-a-day cigarette habit from an early age.

  She would work to make her relationship with him easier from now on: it certainly couldn’t be any worse.

  Also, she told herself, she would attempt to stop him smoking.

  She started, then, as she realised that her promise to Mackendrick and Dennison had slipped her mind. She moved into the hallway and stood before the mirror. She mouthed Thank you, then remembered the pre-arranged signal to assure the observers in the future that all was well. She held up her right hand, three fingers spread, then one by one folded her fingers until only her fist remained. I’m well, I have my memories…

  She leaned towards her reflection, as if this would make it easier for Mackendrick and the others to read her lips, and said slowly, Thank you so much.

  She didn’t feel like anything to eat. She’d grab something later.

  She’d need money for the bus… but where had she kept her savings?