The Psychology of Time Travel

by Kate Mascarenhas

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Did you believe it at the time?’

  ‘I believe it now.’

  ‘I suppose it might have been true, but that wasn’t why I stayed away from her. I felt guilty. Getting into that time machine fucked her head up, and we were all to blame.’

  ‘Bee would have been manic depressive whatever her job was. Angharad says so. Time travelling was a trigger but an air hostess would have the same problems. Are you going to show your melds, or what?’

  Lucille did, and laid off a king of diamonds. ‘That’s gin. Angharad doesn’t know everything. We should have taken better safety precautions – we shouldn’t have sent the other workers away, we should have spaced out our missions, and we shouldn’t have rushed to the BBC. At least if we hadn’t been live on television Barbara’s breakdown would have stayed private. If I’d visited her afterwards I’d have to face my guilt. Much easier to say she was better off without us.’

  Grace gathered the cards and shuffled them.

  ‘How’s Ruby?’ Lucille asked.

  ‘She’s great,’ Grace said. ‘Unless – hang on – where in the year are we?’

  Lucille squinted at the calendar clock hanging on the wall. ‘November.’

  ‘Ah, then she’s not great, I don’t think. She’s busy plotting her revenge on Margaret.’

  ‘Geez, somebody has to. I wish Margaret wasn’t coming to my funeral.’

  ‘Don’t invite her if you don’t want her,’ said Grace.

  ‘She comes regardless. Might attract public attention if she snubs her old colleague. But she gets nothing in the will. Speaking of which…’ Lucille removed the ring from her wedding finger. ‘This once cost me and George a month’s salary. You might as well take it now. I know you won’t get another chance to come over before I kick the bucket.’

  ‘Lucille. You’re such a sweetheart.’ Grace kissed her friend on the cheek.

  ‘Don’t pretend you’re sad. You’ll keep seeing me anyway.’ Lucille laughed, but her eyes were wet. ‘Go see your silver selves, Grace. It’s terribly lonely, dying.’

  ‘I’ve already made arrangements for my death. I won’t be on my own. Do you want to play another round?’

  ‘Go on then. God, I’d kill for a cigar. With a nice single malt! I wish you’d smuggled some in.’

  *

  Grace went back to the Conclave, where she placed a call on Beeline to her secretary. She wanted inquest announcements from Southwark Coroner’s Court, for the month of February 2018.

  As she’d told Lucille, Grace didn’t worry about her silver selves. Instead she was newly sorry for Bee. Lucille’s confession had sparked some recognition in Grace. She, too, had professed to acting in Bee’s interests by staying away from her old friend. There was nothing Grace could do to change that. But if Bee was anything like Lucille – if she was anything like Grace herself – she would be frightened of dying. Grace could do something about that. Now she knew why she sent the dates of their deaths – in August 2017, the last weeks of Bee’s life. Grace wanted to tell Bee that she wasn’t alone. Death wasn’t uniquely final to her. It was coming for them all.

  Grace collected the inquest announcements from the mailroom, and threw away the irrelevant ones. Neither Grace nor Lucille’s deaths were embargoed, but Margaret’s was. That meant the messages would have to be anonymous. There, between the mail sacks and pigeonholes, she creased and folded her sheet of paper until the rabbit was complete. All it needed was Barbara’s name.

  52

  NOVEMBER 2017

  Ruby

  Ruby didn’t apply for a job at the Conclave. Grace’s reaction implied Ruby would fail, and that shook her confidence. But she didn’t abandon her plan to confront Margaret. She considered her options for a week. What could she offer Margaret, in exchange for an audience? Ruby laughed when she realised. Margaret had already suggested the perfect bargaining chip. It placed Ruby at risk of arrest, but she no longer cared.

  She made the phone call from her flat, with a glass of red in her hand. It was only half ten in the morning but she needed to steady her nerves.

  ‘I’m afraid you can’t speak to her now,’ Margaret’s secretary said. ‘Her telephone calls are diarised some time in advance.’

  ‘It’s about Barbara Hereford’s legacy. She specifically asked me to call if I had information.’

  ‘One moment please.’

  A few bars of muzak played.

  ‘Dr Rebello,’ Margaret said. ‘Did you find something in Barbara’s will after all?’

  ‘Not exactly. But you were right about the stolen atroposium. She was using it for experiments.’

  ‘I see. How much are we talking here?’

  What had Bee said? A single brick was worth about five hundred thousand pounds. Which was a life-changing sum of money to Ruby, but probably peanuts to the Conclave. A little bit of embellishment would be required, if Ruby was to have any bartering power.

  ‘We have a suitcase of it. About fifty bricks, I’d say.’

  ‘Very well. Thank you for alerting us. You can make arrangements with my secretary for its safe return.’

  ‘Not so fast. I want something in exchange.’

  Margaret laughed. ‘My dear, we’re talking about stolen property. If you don’t want to return it to its rightful owner, we can call the police.’

  ‘I think we can make things more interesting than that.’ Ruby sipped her wine. ‘I want to play the Candybox game. If I lose you take the fuel.’

  ‘What’s the Candybox game?’ Margaret asked.

  She didn’t want Ruby to play, that much was clear. Somehow Ruby must be different from the players Margaret usually picked. They must be more eager for Margaret’s approval. Or maybe they were more susceptible to Margaret’s intimidation. Perhaps Margaret preferred players who were too scared to shoot. She enjoyed their humiliation.

  What could Ruby do – other than show vulnerability, which she refused to do – to make Margaret play?

  She could attack Margaret’s vanity.

  ‘Are you too frightened to play with me?’ Ruby asked.

  ‘The very idea,’ Margaret said. ‘You’re really not like Barbara, are you? You’re not like her at all.’

  ‘Are you going to play or not?’

  A long pause followed. ‘All right. Do you know the venue?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll see you there at eight.’

  ‘Seven. I won’t spend my whole evening waiting for you.’

  ‘Nor I for you.’

  Ruby hung up. She didn’t have fifty bricks of atroposium, of course. But she wasn’t intending to lose the game.

  53

  OCTOBER 2018

  Odette

  The firearms examiner had been shooting into the Candybox, as Odette requested.

  ‘We’ve fired a hundred bullets, over the course of an hour,’ said the examiner. ‘The Candybox used an atroposium briquette, size B12. Eighty bullets rebounded immediately. The other twenty successfully dematerialised. None of them have rematerialised yet – we’re keeping the Candybox in an isolation room to manage the bullet discharge safely. The bullets will rematerialise after forty-eight days, eight hours and ten minutes. We know because we’ve already received a call on Beeline to tell us.’

  ‘That’s fantastic,’ Odette replied. By counting back from Margaret’s death, they could work out when the fatal bullet was fired into the Candybox, and set up surveillance for that date. Forty-eight days before Margaret’s death would be the nineteenth of November. ‘I had an additional query, if that’s OK. Does firing a gun sterilise the bullets?’

  ‘Not necessarily, no. Obviously some germs may die off due to heat and deceleration but it’s quite easy to transfer bacteria by firing a bullet. In fact, there’s an entire field dedicated to bacteria ballistics.’

  ‘And – I hope you don’t mind a follow-up question – if there were bacteria on a bullet, just ordinary everyday bacteria, and the bullet was fired into a Candybox – would the
radiation encourage an overgrowth of macromonas?’

  ‘That’s certainly a possibility.’

  It stood to reason that playing Candybox roulette would be associated with macromonas outbreaks. If you liked playing high risk games fuelled with atroposium, you probably didn’t implement hygiene protocols. Odette returned to the other macromonas cases she’d unearthed in case they included Margaret’s fellow roulette players. Of the people who died, Barbara Hereford seemed the most likely participant, because she knew Margaret. But she couldn’t be Margaret’s murderer; she died in August, well before 19 November.

  None of the other macromonas deaths matched names on the Conclave’s staff lists – but perhaps they’d had contact with a time traveller who was carrying the bug. In an attempt to identify vectors for the infection, Odette requested a list of residents and staff from the old people’s home. She also requested patient and staff lists from the hospital, in the week of the nurse’s death. Finally she cross-referenced the lists with the Conclave’s own staff lists, and yielded two historical hits. The first was Veronica Collins, a resident at the old people’s home who had joined the Conclave as an interpreter in 1982. The second was Julie Parris, a hospital patient who had commenced work as an environmental conservationist in 1993. Both women had resigned in the past twelve months. Odette telephoned each of them. She said she had some questions about hygiene breaches, and would like to interview them as soon as possible.

  *

  Veronica Collins came to the Conclave that very morning. She was a bright-eyed woman with a dowager’s hump, her face lightly liver-spotted. No one would imagine her as a gun fiend. Odette eschewed the interview rooms for their conversation. They went instead to the gardens, as Odette believed Veronica might open up more in relaxed surroundings. They scattered seed for the birds.

  ‘It’s a while since I took a trip without the other residents. The activities there run like clockwork. Normally we play golf on a Thursday. The nurses hire a coach to the course.’

  Odette apologised for keeping Veronica away from her game.

  ‘I don’t mind. Glad to break up the routine, actually. It’s always good to have new ears for my old tales.’ Veronica replaced the cap on the tube of millet. For a while she talked about the kind of assignments they’d given her at the Conclave, before Odette steered her towards the topic of Margaret. Had they got on? Odette asked.

  ‘Up to a point.’ Veronica gave a short, sardonic laugh. ‘The thing about Margaret was – if you were in her group, she was clannish. She never let you forget that time travellers were different from everyone else. We were special. But we also were terrified of not being special any more. The prospect of readjusting to normal life, if you have to quit time travel, is really daunting. It made us put up with extraordinary things.’

  ‘What kind of things?’

  ‘You know. Encouraging people to carve themselves up in those time machines? Did you go along with that? No? I wish I hadn’t. The weird pranks and assaults. And that thing where she shows you a little cache of your relatives in the morgue? Seeing those pictures really did a number on me. Is it any wonder I got totally neurotic about bad things happening to my family? But I was so desperate to be a time traveller I took the initiation stuff as the price of admission. And what’s really unpleasant is that those rituals do bond you together, once you’ve been through them. The suffering becomes something you’ve all shared, and that makes it harder to leave. For years I didn’t have the strength to quit.’

  ‘Was there a particular incident that prompted you to resign?’

  ‘Hmm? No… I wouldn’t say that, not at all. When I was young I said I’d never leave. But I realised gradually I had to go.’

  ‘The thing is, Veronica,’ Odette said slowly, ‘we’ve been tracing hygiene breaches back to games of Candybox roulette.’

  Veronica dropped the tube of millet.

  ‘That wasn’t me!’ She put her hand on her chest. ‘I never fired – I never…’

  ‘Fired what, Veronica?’

  ‘The gun – during Candybox roulette.’

  ‘Tell me about Candybox roulette.’

  ‘It was one of Margaret’s sick games. Games – oh, for years she made me play games – she said I couldn’t stay at the Conclave if I didn’t let her recondition me to stop fearing death. It wasn’t shooting to begin with – that was at the very end. And it was the final straw for me. I’d endured it for years but that Candybox roulette game was the worst.’

  ‘Did you fire the gun into the Candybox, Veronica?’

  ‘No! No, you must believe me. Margaret fired, and the bullet rebounded. She made me pick it up and swallow it. But I never fired the gun myself.’

  Odette sensed she was lying – from fear, or perhaps shame. She needed to check whether Veronica was alibied for the day in question.

  ‘When did you play this game?’

  ‘I didn’t fire, you must believe that. We played the game last year. August, it must have been.’

  ‘You’re sure about the date? It wasn’t November?’

  ‘November?’ Veronica looked blank. ‘No. I was in Canada that month, with my niece.’

  ‘Send me the details of your ticket payments and your niece’s contact details.’

  ‘All right. All right. May I go now?’

  ‘In a moment. Can you think of anyone with a motive to harm Margaret?’

  ‘Deliberately, you mean? Of the colleagues I remember… no one would have been open about hating her that much. We presented a unified front. She was one of us. And to set out purposely to kill her… well… what would be the point? The satisfaction would be so fleeting. After all, you’d need to take a trip into the past at some point, and there she’d be, issuing her edicts.’ Veronica picked up the fallen vial of millet. ‘I suppose you’d take solace in knowing what was coming for her. I suppose that could buoy you through the difficult days.’

  ‘Thank you, Veronica,’ Odette said. ‘You’ve been very helpful. I’ll see you out.’

  *

  Julie Parris arrived a couple of hours later. They went to the Conclave canteen. Odette was immediately aware of Julie’s thinness. The loose silk blouse concealed Julie’s size, but her wrists and neck were fragile, and her skin looked tissue-thin – as though she were made from origami. Her hair was folded into a pleat and her nails were beautifully manicured. She wore a delicate gold crucifix at her neck.

  Odette began by asking why Julie resigned.

  ‘I’d wanted to leave for years. I’ve had mental health problems for a long time, and you know what the Conclave’s like about that.’

  Odette nodded.

  ‘The first thing I did when I left was check into a clinic for eating disorders.’ Julie sipped from a glass of water. ‘Do you know what I learnt? I found this very interesting. Lots of the girls there were self-harmers as well as anorexics – scratching themselves, razoring their arms, you know the kind of thing – and the psychiatrists told us that one of the reasons why people cut for stress relief is that blood-letting lowers your blood pressure. It’s a simple physiological response. You quickly feel a sense of tranquillity. It made me think of the Conclave, on the day the time machines malfunctioned – we queued up to hurt ourselves and came out dripping with blood but I felt so calm the second my skin broke.’

  ‘Was Margaret aware of your mental health problems?’ Odette asked.

  ‘Oh yes. And she was vicious the day she found out.’ Julie tapped the side of her glass. ‘As if I’d personally affronted her.’

  ‘Why would she take your illness personally?’

  ‘I’ve thought about it a lot. And I’ve wondered if she saw something of herself in me. Because she had problems, too, you know. Don’t you think it’s weird how she quit using time machines? I think it’s because she’s a control freak, and time travelling makes you realise how little control you have. Nothing ever changes the past, or the future. I bet she was going crazy inside, just like I was.’

 
‘When did you last see her?’

  Julie shifted in her chair.

  ‘When I resigned, last year.’

  ‘She didn’t contact you afterwards?’

  ‘No.’ Her fingers interlocked round the water glass, whitening her knuckles. ‘What does this have to do with hygiene?’

  ‘There was a breach on November the nineteenth, 2017, and we need to know your whereabouts for that date.’

  ‘I was in hospital,’ Julie said rapidly. ‘The Royal Oldham. I’d hurt myself again. That’s all you’re going to get.’

  ‘At no point did you leave the hospital? No stepping outside for a breath of fresh air, perhaps?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Very well. I’ll verify with the Royal Oldham that you remained onsite for the full day.’

  Julie stood up and slipped her jacket back on. Her elbows were set square sharp as she fastened the buttons.

  ‘Do you miss it?’ Odette asked. ‘Time travelling?’

  ‘The Conclave made me ill.’ Julie looked into the middle distance, letting her arms fall to the sides. ‘To miss it I’d have to really hate myself.’

  When she’d gone Odette contacted the hospital again, to verify Julie’s whereabouts. She also asked why Julie had been hospitalised. The reason supplied was a gunshot wound.

  54

  NOVEMBER 2017

  Angharad

  Angharad sat next to Julie’s bed, swilling coffee from the vending machine. A television in the corner showed rolling news. The sound was high enough to be distracting but too low to make out the words. Julie was yet to come round. She’d had surgery to repair a gunshot wound in her shoulder. The doctor said Julie had been shot during a mugging. Around the fifth time that Angharad had watched refugees climbing under a razor wire fence, Julie stirred.

  ‘Mum?’ she said.

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘The hospital. You’ve been all patched up.’

  ‘Oh… oh. I remember. The gun.’

  ‘You don’t need to think about that now, sweetheart.’