*
‘Margaret wouldn’t even consider giving Barbara a job,’ Lucille said to her fiancé George. She was visiting him in Liverpool; they were in the kitchen of his parents’ two-up two-down, adjusting his crystal radio set.
‘I’m not surprised,’ said George. ‘That one hates to be shown up.’
‘You don’t think she’s doing what’s best for Bee?’ Lucille leant on his shoulder. His overalls smelt of car paint; he’d been working at the plant in Speke.
‘Only by accident,’ George said. ‘Bee’s better off without her help.’
‘I don’t believe that.’
‘Because then you’d have to admit Margaret’s no good for you either.’
‘You wish I’d leave?’
‘You should work wherever you damn please. Just watch out for that Margaret. Never trust the aristocracy.’
‘She’s only got a minor title. Baronesses are one step up from commoners.’
‘She’s below you, queen.’ He donned the earphones and passed her a cigarette. They had played with radio sets since they were children.
‘What can you hear?’ she asked.
‘Storms. Singing. Footsteps. Someone singing in another language.’
‘Give over them earphones,’ Lucille said. ‘You have them to yourself all the other nights.’
‘It’s no fun without you. Besides, I get scared. You mock, but I do. Some of the voices are spooky. Like a ghostly voice’s calling my name. George! George! Hey! Get your ghosty hands off me!’ He protested as she wrested the earphones from him.
She snapped them onto her own head. ‘I can only hear whispering.’
Electronic noise drowned the words. The noise ceased. As clear as a tuning fork, she heard a Cornish voice say: Tinned sardines and fruit with evaporated milk. Lovingly decanted. Bee’s voice; Bee’s words.
‘What is it, queen?’ George was at once serious. He cupped Lucille’s face, wiping a tear from her cheek with his thumb. ‘What did you hear? Tell me.’
‘I was imagining things,’ she said. ‘Do you ever do that? Convince yourself you’ve heard something in the static?’
‘All the time.’
‘I just feel so guilty,’ Lucille confessed. ‘Bee’s going to be left behind. And I’ll still be carrying on there, year in year out.’
‘I do wish you’d leave,’ George said. ‘But we both know you won’t. Do you know what that means?’
‘What?’
‘You have to make the Conclave better, from the inside.’
She laughed. ‘How do I do that? The place never bloody changes. It can’t.’
He lit another cigarette. ‘You’ll have to think of something.’
8
JULY 2017
Ruby
Ruby still wanted to talk to Grace directly, to hear it confirmed that the dead woman was Granny Bee. Without much hope, she contacted the Conclave. She requested a meeting with Grace ‘to follow up on their recent conversation’. The Conclave said they’d get back to her. At least it wasn’t an outright refusal, although there was no guarantee Grace would comply. Now there was nothing to do but wait. Ruby did all of this without Bee’s knowledge. Bee didn’t want to contact Grace until she had a new discovery to offer the Conclave. But Ruby couldn’t wait that long to hear if Bee was in danger.
A week passed, and Ruby’s anxiety about Bee’s safety didn’t wane. It affected her sleep. She spent too long each night googling Grace on her phone. A pirated set of video installations, made by Grace some years ago, caught Ruby’s attention because of the title: Death and the Time Traveller. Ruby clicked on the first of the series, which yielded an interview with a newly recruited barrister in 2030, yet to take her first trip. She was filmed in black and white, perching at the edge of a slouchy leather sofa. At her side was a pot of aloe vera. Other than that the room was featureless. Grace, unseen behind the camera, asked Fay what she was looking forward to about time travel. Fay responded that she would meet her father for the first time since his death.
I want to give him books, ones he’d like, that were written after he’d gone. I want to show him photographs of the people he wouldn’t get to meet, and the events he wouldn’t get to witness. I want to ask his opinion on current affairs. I want to give him family gossip. I want to compare failings, because now I’m an adult I know what my failings are, and perhaps we could find common ground.
Her wistfulness touched Ruby, who had the strange sensation of recognising Fay’s face, but not being able to place where from. She discarded the thought. In 2017 this woman must still be a child; Ruby could only be confusing her with someone else.
The video cut to a later interview, after Fay had taken her first few trips, and been reunited with her father. She spoke rapidly, half laughing.
It was so good. I thought I was starting to forget what he looked like. But as soon as I saw him I realised the memories were inside me, waiting to come back. I talked till I went hoarse and the best thing was how happy he was to hear it all. We planed wood. In the garden, listening to Radio 4. He was a furniture restorer, did I tell you that? No? When I got home I burst into tears. My hands kept trembling. I’ve been back to see him a couple of times, and I’ll stay whenever I’m in his timeline. The funny thing is, the other time travellers – I’m thinking of Teddy Avedon in particular, he’s been showing me the ropes – they keep telling me that it’s green to be so excited. They mean I’m being gauche. Teddy says I’ll get used to seeing dead people. But I think he’s wrong. Whenever I visit my father, the trees in his garden are young again, and so is he. I will never take that for granted.
The screen cut to black. Grace spoke through the darkness, pointing out that Fay may have an interesting perspective on death. As a specialist in time travel law, over which the Conclave had sole jurisdiction, Fay would be defending clients against the death penalty. Fay reappeared, in the same chair.
In the twenty-first century, where I come from, the English legal and judicial systems value fairness. But Conclave justice is different. It has more in common with medieval Europe, or colonial America, or twenty-fourth century Britain – because it values divine judgement more than fairness. They implement something called trial of ordeal. This is a very ancient, religious ritual, where the accused has to take a painful or difficult test. If they pass, the judge takes it as a sign from a higher power that the accused person is innocent. But if they fail, then that’s a sign they are guilty. For time travellers, the higher power is fate. All time travellers have experienced trying, and failing, to change a course of events at some point in their career. So their faith in fate is very strong.
I don’t present any evidence as part of the trial. But if the defendant is found guilty, I’ll use both the evidence from the initial investigation and the defendant’s own testimony to negotiate their sentence. The judge doesn’t award any custodial sentences. The guilty party pays a fine to the injured party, or if the victim’s dead, the family can dispense a corporal punishment. Anything from head shaving up to execution. Most time travel legislation derives from the twenty-fourth century, which is pretty bloodthirsty, I can tell you. That’s why the Conclave thinks blood revenge is a mitigating factor in sentencing for murder.
The film then jumped forward to an older Fay, recently returned from maternity leave. Her eyes were ringed. Through yawns she said she was happy to be back at work.
Being a lawyer sounds like a desk job, but my caseload covers a full three centuries, so I have to skip about from decade to decade to get everything done. During my maternity leave I really missed travelling. I suppose it’s like having wanderlust? Time lust. It feels weird now if I don’t have that flexibility of where and when I go. I have friends and family in other timelines that I don’t have here, so… yeah. While I was with the baby I couldn’t see those people. (Grace asks a question, inaudible to the viewer.) No, I never doubted they still existed. It was more like we were in separate lives. With the next baby my partner’s going to
take leave instead. I don’t want to be away from my job that long again.
Grace cut to another Fay, with pepper and salt hair, and lines bracketing her mouth. She spoke animatedly of collecting thistles during her last field trip into the past.
The petals were golden, like lions’ manes. And they grew on every English lawn, but I picked them less than a mile from my mother’s primary school. She was probably in lessons. I really felt I was gathering something precious. As soon as I got back to my timeline, I took them to the Conclave garden. My mother had died of a stroke while I was away, so I’d said I’d visit my sister at some point to talk through funeral arrangements, but I started chatting with one of the horticulturists about a trip he’d just made to Japan, and I lost track of time. It was quite late when I arrived at my sister’s. She kept going on about how we’re orphans now. (Long pause.) It’s not that I don’t know how she feels. I know she believes Mum’s gone for ever. But I don’t want to be reminded of feeling upset in that way. It doesn’t seem very… relevant… any more. Not to my life. I hate admitting this, but I wished my sister would shut the hell up.
The fourth Fay was thinner – almost gaunt – and subdued. Ruby could see, on the timeline along the base of the video, that several minutes of footage remained.
When you’re a time traveller, the people you love die, and you carry on seeing them, so their death stops making a difference to you. The only death that will ever change things is your own.
Ruby hit the pause symbol. She let the phone go dark, wishing she’d never started down this particular rabbit hole. Until the meeting with Grace, the last thing she should be doing was dwelling on death. She really should be trying to distract herself.
One distraction was a woman named Ginger Hayes, who worked in a nearby brain injury unit. Technically, Ruby was single. But Ginger made an appearance at her flat once a month or so, for sex, and to drain Ruby’s reserves of red wine. Ruby had never been to Ginger’s house – which was apparently in Tring – and this exclusion from her everyday life made Ruby suspect she was married.
Later that same week, Ginger lay naked on Ruby’s bed, with flakes of mascara haloing her eyes. While Ruby was in Cornwall visiting Bee, Ginger had been in Brittany. Her skin was dense with freckles: a gift from the Breton sunshine. Ruby traced the constellations that adorned Ginger’s chest. Cassiopeia. The Seven Sisters. Had Ruby believed in astrology, she would have read their future from the patterns on Ginger’s body.
‘I assessed a new client this afternoon,’ Ginger said. ‘She was injured on her bike. A motorist opened his car door in her path, and she was thrown into the road. Now she’s aphasic. When she tries to talk, nothing comes out but a stream of swear words.’
Romantic pillow talk, by any measure.
‘Can you do anything for aphasics?’ Ruby asked.
‘This woman will probably benefit from speech therapy. She’s still young, which is in her favour. But her family want her to be the way she was before, and she won’t be.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Twenty-seven. Mother to a toddler.’
Ginger’s comments were downbeat, but Ruby appreciated the importance of Ginger’s job. They shared stressful working lives. Rarely did they discuss anything other than their clients.
Ruby’s arms circled Ginger’s waist and they kissed. Ginger’s lips were tannic. All week Ruby had fretted over the origami rabbit, how the body might be connected to Barbara, and what Grace could possibly be playing at. It felt so comforting, now, to be held. The closeness tricked her into an admission.
‘I’m sleeping badly,’ she said. ‘I keep worrying about my grandmother.’
‘Oh.’ Ginger fell back on her pillow. ‘Is she ill, then?’
‘No,’ Ruby said. ‘I mean – yes; she has bipolar disorder.’
‘Hm,’ Ginger said.
Ruby’s urge to confide in her ebbed. Had she overshared? By the usual constraints of their relationship, yes. She knew nothing of Ginger’s family. Ginger didn’t speak of her interests or where she was from. The secrets she shared were her patients’ rather than her own. Telling Ruby where she’d been on holiday was the most intimate detail she’d ever revealed. Picking up Ginger’s left hand, Ruby looked for a white circle among the freckles on her ring finger. The evidence was inconclusive.
Ginger pulled Ruby’s hand to her mouth, and kissed the inside of Ruby’s wrist. Maybe Ginger was right to shy away from personal revelations. Hadn’t Ruby wanted her for a distraction?
So Ruby let Ginger distract her. Afterwards, she fell asleep swiftly – for the first time that week.
*
The next morning Ruby heard Ginger in the kitchenette, opening and closing cabinet doors. Normally she would have left before dawn. Perhaps trouble at home had kept her here.
Ruby got out of bed and crossed the little hall to the kitchen doorway. Ginger was wearing Ruby’s dressing gown. Her hair was bright as marigolds against the green fabric. She filled the kettle.
‘I’ll make you breakfast,’ she said. ‘If there is anything for breakfast. D’you know what’s in your cupboards? A torn bag of rice and a very sticky bottle of Worcestershire sauce.’
‘There are eggs in that ceramic chicken.’
‘Perfect.’ Ginger busied herself with frying pans and butter. ‘I don’t have any clinics today. I’m giving a presentation on neural plasticity, but that’s not till noon.’
So they were to talk of work again. ‘Who’s the presentation for?’
‘Some new rehab workers. They always love the London cab example. You know, where the drivers memorise so many routes it physically restructures their brains?’
Ruby nodded. Her own day would include two clients with depression, and a third with PTSD. According to the usual pattern of her conversations with Ginger, she should volunteer that information now. But her new impulse to make personal admissions was back. Her previous attempt to discuss Bee had failed, and Ruby was not quite brave enough to talk of her explicitly again. She found herself drawn to a halfway position: couching personal concerns in professional interest.
‘There’s something I’ve been thinking over lately. Do you know if time travel changes the brain?’ Ruby had plausible grounds for ignorance. She only knew the basics of brain anatomy; she specialised in talking therapies.
‘Time travel doesn’t do much in the short term.’ Ginger pushed a stray lock of hair behind her ear. Heat shimmered over the pan. ‘But more experienced time travellers generally have a weird hippocampus.’
‘No one wants a weird hippocampus,’ Ruby said, wryly. ‘What causes that?’
‘One theory is that time travel places your recall abilities under unusual stress.’ Ginger cracked two eggs into the spitting fat. ‘Let’s use your memories for comparison. Think of something that happened a long time ago.’
‘OK. I remember my grandmother reading me The Box of Delights.’
‘The Box of What?’
‘The Box of Delights. It’s my favourite book. It has puppeteers, and schoolgirls who love pistols, and a magic box that takes you to the past—’
‘When exactly did she read you this?’ Ginger interrupted.
‘No earlier than 1990. I could read the words along with my grandmother, so I was old enough to be at school. We probably read it in the winter. I remember the wool of her smock on my cheek. That would make sense, because the story’s set at Christmas.’
‘Right. You don’t automatically recall when the event occurred. You can piece a likely date together from hints and trifling details. A time traveller goes through the same process with events that she’s witnessed in the future. Sometimes she gets the date wrong, and mistakenly places it in the past. She expects her friends and family to remember something that won’t happen for years. If she works in intelligence, that kind of mistake can be dire. Have you got a fish slice?’
‘Second drawer down on the left.’
Ginger found the slice, and slid an egg onto a pla
te.
‘I didn’t know you were so domesticated,’ Ruby said.
‘Don’t expect me to make a habit of playing housewife.’
Ruby’s mobile was ringing in the bedroom.
‘Back in a tick,’ she said.
By the time she reached it the call had gone to voicemail. The number had been withheld. She dialled to hear the recording.
‘This is a message for Dr Rebello.’ The caller spoke with a quaint, mid-Atlantic accent. Ruby thought of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. ‘My name is Grace Taylor, and I’m calling to arrange an interview.’
She gave details of a hotel she would be staying at the following week, and instructed Ruby to meet her in the hotel restaurant at half eleven on Tuesday. The message ended there. Grace didn’t provide any other contact details.
Granny Bee had said that Grace liked to keep people guessing: she was deliberately obscure. Having met Grace, Bee’s explanation was convincing. Ruby remembered how Grace placed a finger to her lips in the gallery shop, as if they were co-conspirators. That kind of game troubled her, because she felt as though she were being manipulated. But now Ruby’s conversation with Ginger made her wonder if another explanation lay behind Grace’s behaviour. How much were future and past jumbled in Grace’s mind? She’d travelled years into the future on multiple occasions. Maybe she was too dislocated from the events the rest of them lived through. Was she confused about what Ruby knew, and what she didn’t?
Suddenly, Grace seemed a pitiable figure. Ruby didn’t know, yet, whether to feel sorry for her or afraid of her. At least, in just a few days, she would get the chance to pin her down.
9
MAY 2018
Odette
Having crammed successfully, Odette survived her final exams. She neglected celebrating with friends in Cambridge and instead went home for a family meal in Hounslow. The guest list was limited to three, because Odette’s older sister, Ophélie, now lived in Mahé. Three was enough. The hawthorn was flowering in the garden. Her father Robert was playing the piano, and her mother Claire was making octopus curry.
The Psychology of Time Travel Page 5