Once all the time travellers were in a stable condition, she decided to visit her future self, who was on maternity leave in 1973. Angharad was still awed by the novelty of visiting other time periods and ventured from the Conclave with some trepidation. Since 1969, the governing party had changed from Labour to Conservative, and the IRA would begin their attacks on mainland Britain. But the appreciable differences, from Angharad’s perspective, were at street level. She noticed prices had gone up quite a bit, considering less than a decade had passed; and there had been a small uptick in the earth tones of clothing and cars. The world hadn’t changed so much it was unrecognisable. It had altered just enough to seem uncanny to her. She was both at home, and a stranger.
She took a bus, and then a train, to her home town. The way to the maternity hospital was still familiar. Her siblings and their children had all been born there. Angharad was grateful for any continuity. The building was a single storey block, partitioned from the road by privet hedges. Inside, the corridors echoed with newborns crying. Angharad followed the sound into a long ward that smelt of sterilising fluid and milk. Iron beds alternated with cots. She passed the series of new mothers – all of them with the same drained pallors; all of them wearing prairie nightgowns, in embroidered muslin and floral lawns. At the very end of the room Angharad came to a woman she recognised, who cradled a child wrapped in pink wool.
‘Hey,’ Angharad called gently.
The woman looked up, her eyes widening slightly, then she smiled.
‘Hello, you!’ she said. ‘Come and see our girl. This is Julie.’
She tilted the bundle towards Angharad. The sleeping baby’s mouth, pale and soft as rose petals, had pursed to suckle at a dream breast. Angharad’s heart ached.
‘Labour was fucking horrible,’ her older self said cheerfully. ‘Thirty-six hours and eighteen stitches. But it helped to know for definite we’d both make it.’
‘Well done you.’
‘Do you want to hold her?’
Angharad nodded. She took the baby in her arms, and sat in the easy chair by the bed. Julie stirred, but didn’t waken. Her fists were as red as radishes. Close to, Angharad recognised the blanket; her mother had knitted it when Angharad was still small. She had always hoped she’d wrest it from her siblings when her time came to have children. The baby gripped the shawl’s silken corner.
When you’re born I’ll already know you, Angharad thought. And then I’ll know you for ever. It was a queer kind of bliss, mingled with terror. Angharad was glad she wouldn’t have responsibility for someone so utterly dependent on her just yet. She had four years to prepare. But she wished she could revisit and revisit this moment. How sad that she wouldn’t. She knew she wouldn’t come back, because only one of her future selves was present. A single reliving would have to do. The two women exchanged smiles.
‘Have you had many visitors?’ Angharad asked.
‘Just family. Margaret sent a present, hot off the factory line.’
Three dolls, bearing a resemblance to the pioneers, stood on the bedside cabinet. Two of the dolls’ torsos were just visible through the V-neck of their boiler suits, and Angharad could see that their upper bodies were decorated with a raised pattern. They were action figurines suited to a much older child than Julie – as if they’d been bought by someone unfamiliar, or unconcerned, with the capabilities of newborn babies.
‘A little replica of Margaret,’ Angharad said. ‘I’m not sure I like that idea.’
‘Me neither. But it’s entirely typical, isn’t it? Do you know anyone else who’d give a model of themselves as a gift? I mean, Margaret’s not vain, but she’s…’
‘An individualist?’ Angharad supplied.
They both laughed. And beneath the new mother’s embroidered collar, a red speck enlarged like an ink blot, staining the white cotton.
‘You’re bleeding,’ Angharad said.
‘Damn… The dressing’s leaked.’ She dabbed at the mark.
For reasons she couldn’t explain, Angharad didn’t want to know how she’d cut herself. She was almost frightened of the prospect. The oddness of seeing her own future may have caught up with her. I’m being irrational, she thought, and she forced herself to ask:
‘How’d you get that cut?’
‘When the time machine broke, of course.’
‘You were there? But you were on maternity leave.’
‘No; it was my last day. I left straight after the accident. Everyone was wailing and screaming and I was desperate to get away. By the time you arrived I was already on the train out of London. Don’t worry, the wound’s quite clean – there’s no infection.’
That strange feeling, of fear and oddness, grew more intense.
‘Can you explain something to me?’ Angharad whispered. ‘You all knew the accident was going to happen. Why on earth did you get into the machine?’
‘You wouldn’t understand.’ Her older self smiled. ‘You’re still very green.’
The answer was cryptic – and condescending. Angharad wondered if she came across that way a lot. Many people disliked their own personal traits, she knew, but it was disconcerting to experience her flaws as a separate party. She let the question drop, and looked again at the baby. Julie provided their common ground.
‘I’d do anything for her,’ Angharad said softly. ‘I’d die for her. I’d kill for her.’
‘I know,’ said the older Angharad. ‘We both would.’
14
JULY 2017
Ruby
On the final Saturday of July, Ruby gathered her post and saw that among the usual bills was an unmarked brown envelope – presumably hand delivered. She tore it open to find a solitaire ring. The gold band was engraved with a chain of numbers: 1939201519392018.
‘What have you got there?’ Bee was on her way to the kitchen in her pyjamas. She had arrived the night before, with Breno, the Candybox, and lab equipment in tow.
‘Mystery gift.’ Ruby assumed it was from Grace. Another little puzzle to work out. But Ruby couldn’t mention that. As far as Bee was concerned, Grace didn’t know who Ruby was.
Ruby tried the gift on each of her fingers. The only one it fitted comfortably was the ring finger of her left hand. Bee watched with amusement.
‘Spill the beans,’ she said. ‘Who’s sending you engagement rings?’
‘You think it’s an engagement ring?’
‘That’s what it looks like. You must know someone who’d send this to you?’
‘I hope not.’ It couldn’t be Ginger, with her evasiveness and her alcoholism and her probable wife. No keeper she. Ruby suppressed a snort of laughter, and followed Bee into the kitchen.
*
After breakfast, Bee and Ruby sat at the kitchen table with the Candybox. Ruby turned it on. Bee took a white paper bag from her pocket, and tipped a cobble beach of sugared almonds onto the table.
‘I bought them yesterday. I like to have something sweet to eat on the train. Now… let’s see… to send this into the future, I suppose I just put the sweet in here?’
‘That’s how I remember it,’ said Ruby.
Bee dropped one of the almonds into the box. They watched it disappear.
‘Why can’t we adjust how long it takes to reappear?’ Ruby asked.
‘Because this technology is as simple as time travel gets, and in fairness it’s well suited to children. They don’t want to wait longer than a minute. Now, with the right modifications, and the right fuel, you could use the Candybox to send objects months into the future. But you’d need an arms’ dealer’s budget to pay for it.’
‘What makes the fuel so expensive?’
‘Sourcing costs. The main constituent is atroposium which has to be harvested from garnet rock. It’s rarer and harder to mine than coal, or uranium. Fuel was by far our biggest expenditure in the early days. Margaret funded us until the military money came through.’
The Candybox’s beep sounded.
‘Aha!’ Bee said
, looking inside the box.
She tipped the almond out, picked it up and popped it into her granddaughter’s mouth. Ruby bit it cautiously.
‘That’s definitely a sugared almond,’ she said.
‘A time-travelling sugared almond,’ Barbara said. ‘And you’ve eaten it.’
Ruby dropped a second almond into the machine. The almond began to dematerialise – but then stopped, and shot straight up out of the box, with enough force to shatter on the ceiling.
Ruby jumped. ‘That’s the design flaw that took it off the market.’
‘You’re lucky it didn’t hit you in the eye,’ Bee said.
She made a few adjustments to the Candybox that she said should improve the reliability, and then she attached various pieces to the side of the machine, taken from her apparatus. Ruby passed tools, periodically shooing Breno from under the table. He was scouting for crumbs and the pickings were rich due to Ruby’s relaxed housekeeping.
‘I’m probably going to sound dim,’ Ruby said. ‘But what exactly are you doing?’
‘I’m making a fuel converter and connecting it to the Candybox,’ Bee said.
‘Why?’
‘So we can run it on time machine fuel.’
‘You said that was expensive.’
Bee gave Ruby a sideways glance. ‘There’s something you don’t know.’
‘What?’
‘When I was talking about expensive fuel…’ she whispered. ‘I have some.’
‘I don’t understand. How did you afford it?’
‘I stole it.’
‘Granny!’
‘Not deliberately. I had two briquettes in my pocket when I left the Fells. But I didn’t return them.’
‘Why not?’
‘Keeping them made me feel better. I’d come away from the project with nothing, Ruby. No job, no friends. The pioneers even had my pet rabbit. So it felt satisfying to keep something that belonged to the lab. I know it sounds petty.’
‘The other pioneers must have noticed the briquettes had gone.’
‘Oh, they did. The police came round to my house, actually, and searched for them. I’d hidden one beneath a patio slab, and I hid another behind some loose bricks in the chimney stack. They only found the one under the slab.’
‘Oh, Granny. You might have gone to prison.’
‘There was some talk of pressing charges,’ Barbara admitted. ‘But I wasn’t fit to stand trial.’
‘You would be now, though. You could have returned the fuel after you recovered, but you kept it, and while you were in your right mind. How much is it worth?’
‘About half a million, in today’s money.’
Fucking hell. Even Breno stopped in his scavenging to look up at Barbara, no doubt sensing a change in emotional temperature.
‘There must be a black market in fuel,’ Barbara pondered. ‘D’you think I should sell it instead of using it in the Candybox?’
‘No. No I don’t think you should sell it. What are you thinking? It’d be traced back to you. You can’t just make half a million pounds without someone asking questions.’
‘I suppose you’re right. But, Ruby, it’s been fifty years. A lot of the people who’d put two and two together are dead.’
For a mad second Ruby thought about what they could do with five hundred thousand pounds. Then she checked herself.
‘No. Any risk of you being arrested is too much. And I won’t be able to sleep until we’ve disposed of it.’
‘Fine, my love,’ said Bee. ‘Let’s use it in the Candybox. That’ll burn up some of the briquette, and then I’ll discard the remains, I promise. Although I wish you’d let me buy you a house instead.’
‘Don’t spend your ill-gotten gains on me! I’d never be able to relax. Let’s use the fuel right away, if that’s the quickest way to get it off your hands.’
With difficulty, Bee rose from the sofa and fetched the fuel briquette from the bedroom where she’d left her bags. The briquette was quite a mundane-looking thing, not unlike a tablet of charcoal, and was about the size of Bee’s palm.
Bee sat back down and adjusted her spectacles. She slid the briquette into the Candybox through the fuel converter. Ruby watched the machine steam and vibrate. The steam smelt pleasant – rather like fresh laundry. But Ruby was apprehensive about having a nuclear-powered machine in her flat.
‘It is definitely safe, isn’t it?’ she asked.
‘Oh yes. I’ve lined the fuel converter with lead. So what should we send through time?’
The engagement ring was still on Ruby’s finger. She slid it off.
‘You can’t send that,’ Bee said. ‘Somebody picked it out for you.’
Except Ruby didn’t know why. Grace’s tokens had perplexed her, and she was tired of feeling confused. It felt freeing to drop the ring in the machine and watch it vanish, albeit temporarily.
‘When will it come back?’ Ruby asked.
Bee pencilled some sums on a piece of scrap paper. ‘Forty-eight days. I hope whoever picked the ring won’t be hurt if it’s damaged in transit. You’re heartless, Ruby.’
‘There’s a swinging rock in my chest instead. Red and stony, like my name.’
Bee shook her head and sighed.
15
SEPTEMBER 2018
Odette
Some questions wouldn’t leave Odette alone, no matter how diligently she followed Dr Rebello’s advice. Odette asked herself again and again: how did the woman in the basement die? If the pattern of injuries couldn’t be self-inflicted, how did the murderer escape a room locked from the inside? And who was she?
The very day that Odette completed her last session with Dr Rebello, she contacted the coroner’s office. Inquest documents were available to researchers, and Odette requested copies so she could check the finer points. They arrived the following week. She stacked the documents neatly on her desk, in three piles. She read the reports several times, marking the pages of most interest to her with neon tabs.
Missing person records were also available to read online. Odette ran numerous searches for women in the right age range, with the right physical characteristics, and made a note of approximate matches, but none of the women had a scar below the neck as a distinguishing feature.
Claire, Odette’s mother, was concerned. She regularly invaded Odette’s room without knocking, and stood by the desk, shaking her head, picking up the nearest dog-eared page.
‘This isn’t healthy,’ Claire said. ‘You should have moved on from this by now, Odette. When are you going to start looking for a job?’
‘I am looking for a job.’ When Odette wasn’t poring over post-mortem results, she’d been seeking a good graduate role, but nothing seemed right. The majority of schemes underwhelmed her. She thought she might enjoy crime investigation if she only trusted the police. When Odette first came to England she’d considered herself light-skinned, but here she was black, and she’d witnessed the police pull her father over more than once. So she didn’t fancy applying for a job with them. Intelligence work – the only other field that appealed – was open solely to UK nationals. Odette was a Commonwealth citizen.
Claire pinched Odette’s chin. ‘Looking for a job isn’t enough. You have to apply for them. As long as you have too much time on your hands your head will fill with nonsense.’
It was true that Odette had felt rudderless since graduation. She made a little money by placing internet orders for friends back in Seychelles; they didn’t have credit cards, so they’d browse online, tell Odette what they wanted, and transfer the payment from their banks with some extra for her trouble. But that didn’t give her a routine. So she began waiting tables at Le Petit Cadeau, a nearby restaurant, until she could find something more suitable. Although she was glad of a few shifts, she proved bad at waitressing. The manager would tell her to wipe tables and she’d start with a good will but then she’d abandon her flannel as her mind wandered back to the corpse and the bolted basement door. She’d stand be
fore the table, arranging the pepper mill and soup spoons in a model of the crime scene. The body had lain here; the gun was there; this was the only exit. She moved the elements round like pieces on a chessboard and came no closer to understanding the dead woman’s fate.
In frustration, Odette decided to telephone the coroner himself. There were still rocks she hadn’t turned. The forensic photographs hadn’t been made public, for instance, and Odette wanted to check over them.
The coroner’s name, she remembered, was Stuart Yelland. Odette recalled his habit of screwing up his left eye whenever he thought over a question. She imagined him doing this when she dialled his number outside the restaurant. The only private spot was in a side alley, by the bins; and even that was overlooked by a kitchen window.
The coroner’s secretary answered first, then put Odette through.
‘Yes?’ Yelland barked.
‘This is Odette Sophola,’ she said. ‘I found the body at the toy museum? I wanted to ask—’
‘Ah. I remember you,’ Yelland said more gently. ‘Forgive the curt welcome – my secretary didn’t realise you were a witness. She thought you were a journalist.’
‘What?’
‘The journalist who covered that inquest was quite relentless – terrible pests, the media – but he’s gone quiet lately, thank God. What can I do for you?’
‘I’d like to see pictures of the crime scene.’
‘They’re not available to the public.’
The Psychology of Time Travel Page 8