The Psychology of Time Travel

by Kate Mascarenhas

  ‘Can you do my laundry too, Maman?’ Odette rested her head on the table in mock idleness. The waxed oak smelt like home. French exercise books were stacked in towers at the table’s edge, to form a skyline of Maman’s marking.

  ‘Laundry and cooking don’t mix.’ Maman swooped to kiss Odette’s head. ‘Not unless you want underwear in your coconut sauce.’

  Odette slunk like a child to the utility room, her holdall in hand. She crammed the machine with T-shirts and spring dresses that she hadn’t had time to wash while she was revising. The softener bottle was cracked. Her hands slickened with soap. No matter; there was a sink. She ran the hot tap and the boiler audibly ignited.

  The whoosh transported her back to the museum, where she could hear nothing but the basement boiler and breathe nothing but the stench of death. She believed the blood was on the floor again. She believed the body was slumped before her with its broken head and hand and heart. The world had been disturbed and made no sense.

  Odette was oblivious to the water still running over her palm. The temperature rose, until her father – who had entered the room without her realising – snatched her hand from the stream.

  ‘Midge,’ he said quietly. ‘Midge, come back.’

  Her childhood nickname reached her. She stared at the red mark on her hand.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she groaned.

  ‘I came to say don’t use the softener.’

  ‘Too late.’

  ‘Is this happening to you a lot?’

  ‘Laundry mishaps?’

  ‘No. You… disappearing.’

  ‘I knew what you meant. Sorry, Papi.’ Odette breathed deeply. ‘It’s happening some of the time. Especially at night. It’s the strangest thing – every so often I forget where I am and really believe I’m back in the museum basement. This time it was the sound of the boiler that set me off. It reminded me too much of the museum boiler, I think. You won’t tell Maman, will you? You know how anxious she gets.’

  ‘I’ll keep quiet on one condition. You need someone to talk to.’

  Odette was tiring of people telling her she needed support. The psychologist; Stuart Yelland; her father. And now Papi had her in a corner – either she must find someone to talk to, or worry her mother unduly.

  ‘So you’re giving me an ultimatum?’ she checked.

  ‘Yes. Now let me put you in touch with a professional.’ Papi was a GP.

  ‘No. I don’t want to see one of your friends. Maman might still find out if you do that and I really don’t want to worry her.’

  ‘Odette…’

  ‘I’ll find my own counsellor… I promise. You don’t need to arrange it.’

  Papi nodded, grudgingly.

  They went back upstairs. Maman was uncorking Prosecco in the kitchen.

  ‘Let’s watch the sunset while we eat,’ she said.

  Odette accepted a glass gratefully. They dined outside, on the decking, while the clouds turned the colour of Odette’s scalded palm. Enough time passed for her wine to dull the sting. Sunsets were always so slow in England. That was one of the things Odette remembered about Seychelles; the way the sun went instantly, like the flicking of a switch, at the end of the day.

  *

  For months Dr Rebello’s number had lain undisturbed behind a bank card in Odette’s purse. But with Papi’s threat hanging over her, Odette knew she had to ring. She hoped there would be a long waiting list. That might be enough to get her off the hook with Papi; she could at least say she tried. Unfortunately her telephone call was answered within three rings and an appointment was available the following day.

  She turned up as arranged. The clinic was in a Victorian townhouse; Odette could picture it as the workplace of a gruff Austrian, dispensing treatments for neurosis and hysteria. She peered at the panel of buttons on the intercom and pressed the one labelled Dr Ruby Rebello.

  ‘My name’s Odette,’ she said to the speaker. ‘I have an appointment with—’

  The intercom buzzed before she had completed her sentence. Odette stepped into a plain corridor with a stairway. She was about to knock on the nearest door when it swung open – to reveal the young, dark-haired woman Odette had met on the motorbike. Dr Rebello.

  ‘Come in, Odette.’ Dr Rebello smiled. She was olive-skinned and quiet-voiced, with a diamond nose-stud, a lumberjack shirt, and twelve-hole Docs.

  She led Odette into a room with white walls and a beige carpet. Two chairs were arranged opposite each other. A coffee table, bearing a cactus and a box of tissues, was placed between them.

  Dr Rebello sat down, and placed a notebook on her knee. She gestured to the other seat and invited Odette to explain why she’d come.

  ‘Back in January – when you gave me your card – I’d just discovered a body in the toy museum. I suppose the police told you that much?’

  Dr Rebello made a note. She hesitated, then said: ‘Let’s concentrate on what you have to say, shall we? We needn’t concern ourselves with the police’s account right now.’

  This comment reassured Odette. She had found the police subtly discrediting. They had implied she was lying or mistaken about the basement being locked from the inside. The officer’s focus on her birthplace told her they thought she didn’t belong there – in their eyes she was out of place, and because of this she might be unreliable or even suspect. To hear that Dr Rebello was more interested in Odette’s own version of events made her more willing to open up.

  ‘Since January, I’ve been having flashbacks,’ she said.

  ‘What kind of flashbacks?’

  ‘Vivid. I feel like I’m there.’ Odette described her experience at the coroner’s court, and her parents’ house, and all the other occasions in between when she had lost track of her real surroundings. Dr Rebello asked questions at intervals, continuing to take notes until Odette had finished, then put down her pen.

  ‘During a traumatic event, memories aren’t recorded normally,’ Dr Rebello remarked. ‘One theory for why this happens is that stress suppresses the hippocampus. I think you may have been traumatised – and that’s affected how you’re recalling the event. You’re re-experiencing the moment that you found the body, rather than remembering it. To your mind, finding the corpse isn’t something that happened in the past. You keep reliving it.’

  ‘So what do I do?’

  ‘We’re going to construct a narrative of what happened when you found the body. As we do that, you’ll probably feel you’re slipping back in time, but I’ll keep you in this room by asking questions about what you notice in the here and now. Piecing together your story will allow you to lay down proper memories, so that you can recollect the incident without panicking you’re still there.’

  This sounded a sensible course of action. Dr Rebello’s calmness was what Odette needed. If Odette had confided in Maman, nobody would have stayed calm. Despite Odette’s resistance, Papi had been right to say she should talk to a professional.

  Yet one thing troubled her.

  ‘I can’t tell a story of what happened,’ she said. ‘Because I don’t know why it happened.’

  Dr Rebello put aside her notebook and studied Odette before speaking.

  ‘Explain to me what you mean,’ she asked.

  ‘I want to think this woman killed herself,’ Odette said. ‘It’s terrible, but it’s better than the alternative. Because if it was homicide – if someone murdered her – the killer escaped an underground room without unlocking the door, and they’re still free. How does that story make any sense? I have so many questions. About what happened. About why.’

  Dr Rebello picked up her notebook again and wrote something down.

  ‘The why doesn’t matter,’ she said quietly, without looking Odette in the eye.

  And Odette thought: she doesn’t believe that. She’s lying. She doesn’t believe that at all.

  10

  JUNE 1969

  Angharad and Barbara

  Angharad Mills, the medical engineer who had advised M
argaret, was still working for the space programme. But there were no other senior women on staff, and she was tiring of her employers’ chauvinism. She was therefore intrigued when she received an invitation to the Conclave. At their previous meeting, Margaret had hinted that a job might be available. Angharad didn’t hesitate before accepting the invitation.

  When the day came she arrived in the Conclave foyer and paused before approaching reception, to read the great directory sign displayed by the entrance. The departments were listed by floor. The basement was home to medical clinics and a series of laboratories – which included pathology and forensic sciences, as well as the physics labs which were so central to the Conclave’s work. At ground level, there appeared to be a visitors’ shop; the workers’ bar and social area; the hall of time machines; the gardens; and a rear exit leading to the time travellers’ accommodation. On the floor above, there was a range of offices shared by commercial services, public relations, administration and personnel. The legal, criminal investigation, justice and intelligence departments were on the second floor. A library, archives, Beeline’s radio operators, and a lecture hall were on the third floor, along with Lucille Waters’ office, which she occupied as Head of Knowledge. And finally, Margaret Norton oversaw the running of the Conclave from her rooms at the very top of the building.

  As soon as Angharad reported to reception, Margaret’s secretary came to greet her. They took the lift, which was lined with mirrors and red suede, to the fourth floor. The secretary led Angharad into Margaret’s office: a high-ceilinged round room with heavy velvet curtains. Margaret sat at a dark oak desk. She had back-combed her hair into smooth immobility, and wore a string of pearls over a cashmere top. She looked presidential.

  ‘Welcome, Angharad,’ she said. ‘Do take a pew. What do you think of the Conclave’s new home?’

  ‘It’s very impressive,’ Angharad said truthfully. ‘How’s time travelling treating you?’

  ‘You might say I’ve hung up my boiler suit. My main priority now is to be the best leader to the Conclave that I can – and making strategic decisions is considerably easier from a fixed vantage point.’

  ‘You’re not time travelling at all?’

  ‘No, it muddies the mind… all that toing and froing hither and yon. I have a clarity, a linearity, of thought that active time travellers can struggle to maintain. Lucille does the donkey work of compiling dispatches from the future. Bless her heart, whatever information I want from the future she fetches it.’

  ‘I look forward to meeting her.’ Angharad was hopeful that Margaret’s renewed contact was paving the way for a job offer, and was keen to demonstrate her willingness to fit in.

  ‘You’ll meet Lucille, and Grace, in good time, I’m sure. Perhaps there’ll even be an opportunity before you leave today. But in the meantime, I’d like your perspective on a matter of policy.’ Margaret took a file from her desk drawer and splayed it open on the blotter.

  Angharad leant forward to read the contents. The uppermost page appeared to be a psychometric questionnaire, for measuring anxiety levels. It wasn’t a test that Angharad had seen before, and some of the questions were decidedly eccentric.

  ‘The tests in this folder are a monitoring tool,’ Margaret said. ‘We use them to capture signs of anxiety and depression in time travellers. They won’t be developed until the middle of the twenty-first century, but a psychologist of that period has placed them at my disposal for us to check on employees’ mental health after every time-travelling trip. Might I ask you your initial impressions?’

  Turning the pages, Angharad said, ‘They contain a lot of questions about death – and the fear of death.’

  ‘Yes. Time travellers are constantly encountering people who are alive in one timeline and dead in another. According to the psychologist – her name is Dr Joyce – death usually stops being tangible to them. Most time travellers adjust by developing a… casual disregard… for their own and others’ mortality. It’s quite a healthy adaptation, in my opinion, because it allows them to do their work. A minority of time travellers never learn to cope with this movement between the living and the dead, and can be quite incapacitated by it.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘So during the hiring process I would like to detect which candidates show the most anxiety about death – and rule them out. These tests can play a part in that, but I wondered if you might have some supplementary strategies.’

  ‘You want employees who don’t care about their own mortality?’ To Angharad, this sounded like a fast track to hiring risk-takers and nihilists. But Margaret wasn’t inviting criticism. She wanted solutions. And if a Conclave job was in the offering, Angharad would provide solutions. ‘You have two options. The first is to administer a more nuanced test at the recruitment stage. If the questionnaires aren’t sufficient, people may be lying in their responses. They might not admit their true feelings about death, because it’s a personal topic. So I’d suggest something more… physiological… than a questionnaire.’

  ‘Go on.’ Margaret picked up a fountain pen and filled it with ink.

  ‘Play a showreel of images relating to death, along with more neutral pictures. You can determine if the candidate finds the death images more distressing by tracking physiological data, like pupil dilation – or brainwaves, if you want to use EEG technology. That kind of test is much harder for candidates to fake their responses.’

  Margaret wrote down Angharad’s suggestion. ‘You mentioned a second option.’

  ‘Yes.’ Angharad hesitated, for her next proposal was a controversial one. ‘You could recruit people irrespective of their death anxiety results, but then condition them to care less about death.’

  ‘Condition them.’ Margaret paused in her note taking, and pursed her lips. ‘Do you mean brutalise, Dr Mills?’

  ‘I’m thinking of a more informal process. You might call it hazing.’ Angharad had seen plenty of hazing during the space programme, and before that, in the ballet. The dancers would march new girls to the laundry rooms, make them strip, sit on a washing machine in full throttle, and then draw circles round any flab that shook. Angharad reasoned that it was briefly humiliating, but not brutal. ‘Hazing takes the form of games and dares and pranks. In your case, you’d need games which desensitise the players to a risk of death. If an employee doesn’t respond, you can offer them an ultimatum. Leave the Conclave, or cooperate with further, intensified conditioning.’

  ‘Thank you, Dr Mills. I won’t rush to implement anything but it’s good to have these options on the table.’ Margaret smiled. ‘How would you fare, if you were on the receiving end of this hazing?’

  ‘I’d cope. Working at the Conclave would be worth some initial unpleasantness.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I want to study the human body in unprecedented physical conditions. Monitoring time travellers will give me that opportunity. And there’s nowhere else in the world I can do that – not until other countries start building time machines.’

  ‘That won’t happen for decades,’ Margaret said. ‘We have the monopoly on fuel.’

  ‘Well – there you are, then. The Conclave stands alone.’

  ‘We’d be happy to have you, Dr Mills. As we’re in agreement, I’ll ask my secretary to prepare a contract. Now, your very first assignment will be to travel to 1973 – there’s a serious staff health issue in that year and your silver selves will need your help.’

  Angharad’s answers must have satisfied Margaret. The much anticipated job offer had been made. They shook hands, and Margaret walked Angharad to the door.

  *

  Nearly three hundred miles away, in St Ives, Barbara was also considering her career prospects. Her recuperation had taken eighteen months and her parents had been patient but she felt ready to regain some independence. She had just been to the local vet’s, as they were seeking a receptionist. They told her the job was hers if she wanted it.

  She took the long way home, along the Hell
esveor path to the coast, to consider this change in her circumstances. The vet was a trusted friend of the family and, for an animal lover like Barbara, the job would have its perks. But it wasn’t the academic work she had trained long and hard for. It wasn’t time travel. Her heart had cracked a little when she said that yes, she would start the following Monday.

  The wind was high and rapidly loosening Barbara’s blonde up-do. It was when she paused, for the third time, to tuck her hair behind her ears that she saw a man flying a kite on the beach ahead. Not any man; a man she knew. Or had met, at any rate. He was Mr Rebello, the young Indian chemist from Porthmeor Pharmacy. She smiled at his attire. He was not dressed for the beach but in the trim brown suit he would have worn to work.

  ‘Hello!’ she called out.

  She was a little breathless when she reached him. He smiled, with his eyes crinkled against the glare of the sun. His black hair was cut long in the fringe, and his face reminded her of the golden ratio illustrations she’d seen in art books. This immediately struck her as a ridiculously soppy thought. She knew she was blushing.

  ‘What are you doing out here, during opening hours?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m flying a kite, Dr Hereford. My lunchtime is now my own; I’ve hired an assistant to sell Chupa lollies and cough syrup in my absence.’

  ‘I wish I’d known you were seeking help. I’ve been looking for work, but it doesn’t matter now – you have your assistant, and I’m going to help at the vet’s.’

  He looked at her with curiosity. ‘That is indeed a missed opportunity. I confess, I never imagined you’d join my little firm.’

  ‘What job would you imagine me in?’ The question was dangerous. Across St Ives – across Britain – everyone knew what job Barbara had done, and why she left. Yet she had asked the question anyway, lest it gave some clue to his thoughts about her. Would he think less of her, because of her public humiliation? If he did, better to know that now, before her soppy thoughts escaped her control.