Very soon I’d be seeing her.
It was a tiny little house in the middle of a row of other houses. I went to the door.
A load of kids stood very still, staring at me with serious faces. When I said that my name was Cyril Corporamore, I thought I saw a couple of compassionate looks, but I might have been imagining that.
I shook her parents’ hands and I studied their faces while at the same time trying to act as if I had no special connection to them at all.
“Hello,” I said.
They both said, “How do you do, sir?” as if I was someone important.
I said that I’d been sent by George Corporamore, even though being an imposter like that is something that can get you into quite a lot of trouble. I showed them the Blackbrick cart, which Kevin was now crouching behind, and I said that I was there to inform them that the whole plan about their daughter coming to the big house was a hundred percent genuine.
I went on to say that I was sorry about the previous mix-up when Kevin had come on his own, and that of course we should have notified them in advance and how when I thought about it—ha, ha, ha—they must have been very suspicious about the whole arrangement.
And they said they hadn’t meant to be uncooperative but that Kevin’s late-night arrival had seemed a little strange, and we all exchanged these friendly knowing looks with one another. I was more or less brilliant the way I lied about everything.
They asked me if I had a letter, and by then I’d had a major crash course in thinking on my feet, so I said we’d arrange to have that sent on, and they nodded their heads as if they thought that was totally grand.
Everyone in the house was rustling about and there were screeches and cries and other noises mingled together—a mixture of excitement and worry. The kids clustered around, still staring, making me feel kind of edgy.
I did it, though. I pulled it off. It was stressful because of the pressure that comes from being a massive liar. For a while I thought the thudding in my head was never going to stop. But then she came to the door and it did stop. Everything did.
I wondered why nobody had ever told me how ridiculously good-looking my gran was. I also wondered why she’d never told me about the squillion brothers and sisters she had. I must have had all these old relatives that she’d never said anything about as long as I’d known her, which is my whole life. When she was old, Granny Deedee was forever going on about how important family is, and how you need to stay close to your loved ones. So it seemed strange that she’d never said a single word about this whole gang-load of brothers and sisters and I was only finding out about them now.
Before she left her house, she held each of the children’s faces and kissed them on the tops of their heads. Standing in the doorway, her dad blew his nose and her mum stroked her hair and buttoned up her thin coat. I tried to assure them that she was in safe hands and that everything was going to be fine, not that you can ever really guarantee anyone anything like that. I did my best to seem like I knew what I was talking about, but I have to admit that I found it difficult to say anything at all. It was mainly because of her face and how beautiful it was.
Kevin was still hiding behind the cart. She walked with me backward down the little scraggy path, waving at her mum and dad and all those kids. I told them that there was no need for them to keep waving us off. I told them to go inside or they’d freeze. Eventually they closed the door. And then Kevin jumped out from his hiding place, and she nearly died. When she’d recovered, he took her by the hand, all gentle and tender. As she climbed up into the cart, her messy hair brushed against my face by accident and I could feel her breath on my skin, and something inside me started to get warm.
Kevin put the blanket around her, and he kept saying, “How are you?” and she kept saying, “I’m the finest. It’s so wonderful to see you.”
They were obviously much too busy talking to each other to think about practical things like driving the cart, so I took the reins, and the horses started trotting back toward the Abbey.
“Kevin, I can’t believe it—you came back for me, just as you promised,” she said, and he went on about how he was someone who never broke his promises, as if I weren’t even there and as if I hadn’t had anything to do with the whole thing.
I thought then would be an excellent moment to unveil the truth. The timing was more or less perfect and I was feeling quite excited. So without waiting for another second I said, “Hey, guess what? I know a whole load of things about you.” And I was feeling all knowledgeable and wise, the way only time travelers can.
“For example,” I continued, looking at her, “I know what your name is.” She looked at Kevin, and then they stared at me in a not-particularly-impressed way.
“Your name’s Deedee.”
There was a kind of spooky silence for a while, and I assumed they were absorbing my brilliance.
“Deedee?” they both said then. “Who’s Deedee?”
“Don’t worry,” Kevin whispered to her, and he tapped his half finger on the side of his head, which I knew for a fact was his way of saying there was a lunatic on board.
They told me that neither of them had ever even heard of anyone called Deedee in their lives.
“This is Maggie,” he said, pointing to her with that finger again. “Maggie McGuire.”
And his voice was as certain and solid as a bullet whistling toward me.
Chapter 9
IT WAS all wrong.
This girl looked like she was about fifteen, maybe even sixteen, and she had a ton of siblings that Granny Deedee never had, as far as I knew. This girl was a different person completely.
Oh no, I said to myself. I’m tampering with history here. I’m interfering with the natural order of things. It wasn’t until then that I realized how hazardous the whole thing was. You’re not supposed to mess with the past like that.
The point is that if you want to exist, then your grandfather has to marry a very specific person, and in my case that person’s name was not Maggie McGuire. And now there was a massive question mark over me and my whole basic future existence.
So I went, “Whoa!” and I pulled the reins, and the horses slowed down and then they came to a total stop.
“Cosmo, what are you doing?” Kevin said. “Keep going! We’ve got to get back as quickly as we can. This is no time to relax.”
“I’m not relaxed,” I said, which was definitely true.
“Excuse me for a second,” I said to Maggie then, and she looked at me and smiled.
It’s very hard to explain what it was like to have Maggie smile at you, even under stressful conditions like the ones I was in. I could supply you with a load of details, like for example that her hair was all messy and her face was all pale and oval and everything, but that still doesn’t really give you an idea.
So anyway, I asked Kevin if he wouldn’t mind stepping off the cart for a moment, there was something I needed to discuss with him in private, and it was important.
“What the bloody hell, in the name of all that’s holy, are you doing?” he asked after we’d both jumped down onto the muddy ground.
“There’s something I really need to discuss with you. Something to do with you and this girl. You see, the thing is, she’s not who she’s supposed to be at all.”
“God almighty,” he whispered, his voice kind of gravelly and grim. “You need to keep out of this. This is none of your business.”
He was only a young boy himself, way too young to be thinking about making a lifelong commitment to somebody, especially someone who he wasn’t supposed to end up with anyway.
The other quite big problem was that she was gorgeous. And if he did end up with her like he said he was going to, then I was pretty sure it meant he wouldn’t be ending up with Granny Deedee, and if he didn’t do that, then I’d basically never be born.
Typical me to get tied up in a situation like this.
“I want you to know, for your information, that you can’t
marry her.”
And he went, “Why not?” and I went, “Well, for one thing, you’re only a kid,” and he said, “No, I’m not. I’m sixteen, and that’s a very good age for people to start thinking about their future.”
I told him that as far as I was concerned, thinking about the future was fantastically overrated.
“Look, how many girls have you actually met in your life?”
He admitted that he hadn’t met very many, and I said, “See? See? How can you possibly know that she’s the one if you haven’t had a proper look around? There might be billions of other girls in a whole load of other places who could be perfect for you.”
And it was around then that I realized that even if your life is rubbish, the idea of not being born . . . Well, let’s just say I didn’t think it was a particularly good option.
“Okay, anyway, listen,” I said. “I’ve changed my mind, and the thing is that we can’t bring her to Blackbrick. We need to take her back to her house. Because I know for a fact that she’s not your future. Everything’s going to get screwed up if you marry her, and I’m not going to let that happen.”
I stood facing him, trying to make myself into somebody that he wasn’t going to argue with. But it didn’t work. He had this big, annoyed look on his face.
“Right. Hold on a moment now. Who are you to be telling me my business? What suddenly makes you such a know-it-all about the things that I should and shouldn’t do and about decisions that have got nothing to do with you? Get back up into the cart and get moving,” he growled. He was pointing ahead and acting like I was his personal slave.
“No, I won’t,” I said.
“Well, grand,” he said, “because it doesn’t make any difference to me. I’ll be just as happy to leave you here.”
“Well, if you do that, then I’ll go back and tell her parents the truth. I’ll tell them, Lord Corporamore doesn’t know anything about this whole creepy, dodgy arrangement.”
I definitely wasn’t ready for what he did next.
He snatched my shirt and started to swing me around. I tried not to let him, but it turns out he was very strong. Then he dragged me onto the ground.
He curled his hand into a knobbly fist and he punched me in the face, and I could feel a dead prickly burn, which was the beginning of a massive purple swelling that ended up staying on my face for a good while afterward.
I was lying on the ground then, and he had his foot on my chest and was pointing his toe at my chin, and he was going on about how his will was greater than mine.
“Why are you threatening to scupper me? I’m the one who let you stay. I should have told you to go back to wherever you bloody well came from as soon as I first saw you. And you know I can still get rid of you now. All I have to do is tell Corporamore you’re here, scribbling things down in that notebook and not having any proof of identity and suchlike.”
I spoke to him as clearly as I was able to, even though by then I felt extremely dizzy.
“Listen to me for a second, Kevin. Will you please listen? I know things that you don’t know and I’m from a place that none of you has been, and I need you to trust me. Maggie’s not supposed to be your destiny and you’re not supposed to be hers, and if you do become each other’s destinies, then a load of people will be in trouble, including me.”
“What kind of trouble are you talking about?” he asked, all out of breath.
“Nonexistence trouble. My life is probably hanging in the balance as we speak.”
He looked at me as if I was the saddest person he’d met in his entire life.
“It’s hard to explain. And I know it sounds weird and everything. But I need you to believe me. Please.”
My voice got smaller and smaller. Suddenly I felt kind of humiliated. I think it was because of the way he was looking at me, and how extremely weird he obviously thought I was. I could feel myself sort of slumping down as if the air had been let out of me. I was scared that I was in the middle of wiping out my own future, but as well as that, I was disappointed. If you’ve been all geared up to meet the young version of your gran and then you realize that in fact you’ve collected someone who isn’t actually her, that’s disappointing in its own strange way.
“And all I need you to do is listen carefully to me. Because this is the last time I’m telling you: Maggie McGuire is coming with us to Blackbrick. Nothing’s going to stop that from happening. Do you understand? If you’re still planning to thwart me, then I will do you another injury, and this time you might never recover from it. But I don’t think you really want to thwart me, do you?”
If I’d known what “thwart” actually meant, I might have been in a better position to comment.
He took his foot off my chest, and I sat up.
By then Maggie had climbed off the cart.
“Kevin? God almighty. What in heaven’s name are you doing to Lord Corporamore’s poor nephew?”
They stood quite close to me, but for a while I couldn’t get up off the ground. I grabbed clumps of mud out of the earth and kind of threw them so they scattered off in a load of different directions.
After that he didn’t say another single mean thing to me. He waited for a bit until I calmed down.
“All right, easy there,” he said. “You are being a terrible nuisance, but all the same I don’t like to see anyone so grieved.”
I felt like telling him if he didn’t like it, he shouldn’t have given me that punch in the head.
“Kevin, what’s happened to you? What on earth . . .? This boy doesn’t wish us any ill. He’s helping us. Aren’t you, Cyril?” She looked at me and smiled one of her fantastic smiles.
I wondered if he really did feel bad, or whether he was just trying to impress his girlfriend.
“I didn’t mean to be so rough with you,” he said quite softly then. “But you see, I’m not letting anyone come between me and Maggie, and the fellow who threatens to do that will make me furious. That’s my position on the matter. I’m not apologizing for it, though I do admit to having gotten a bit carried away there. Now I’m going to ask you this one question, and the question is: Are you still going to help us?”
I rolled over on the cold ground and I pushed myself up onto my feet and staggered around for a bit.
I know it’s a pretty unlikely thing to happen, but in case you ever meet your granddad when he’s young, don’t be too aggressive to him, not even if you’ve been provoked.
“Okay, okay. I’ll still help,” I said, even though something inside my brain felt like it was sinking into the quicksand of time.
So then we were up on the cart again, and Maggie laughed a little bit and said, “Well, goodness me. I’m very glad we got that sorted out.”
And that’s how Kevin’s plan to bring her to Blackbrick was suddenly back in the middle of happening, and the horses were trotting up the north avenue, and I knew then that if I was going to have any chance of existing in the future, I was going to have to figure out a plan of my own, and I was going to have to do it quite soon.
By then my young granddad didn’t seem to care about anything apart from her. They kept looking at each other without blinking, until eventually I had to say, “Guys, delighted you’re so happy to see each other and everything, but would you mind waiting until we get back to the stables for this, because I’m the one who has to steer the cart, and I kind of need to be able to concentrate.”
It was obvious that both of them were totally on the love train. And the problem is that love like that can be a very difficult thing to reverse.
Chapter 10
IT’S NOT like I didn’t know how bizarre the whole thing was—meeting my granddad when he was a kid, and then meeting this lovely strange girl who wasn’t my grandmother but whom he worshipped, and helping to get the two of them together—and realizing that if I actually wanted a chance of existing, then getting him together with someone who wasn’t my gran was not in my best interests, to put it mildly. It sounds completely mad, I kn
ow, and I wouldn’t have believed it myself—that’s if it hadn’t happened. There might be people who could reckon that I was having one massive big hallucination because maybe I was mad myself. But just because you can’t explain something scientifically doesn’t mean it’s been invented by the murky recesses of your own sad little brain. Weird things happen. That’s the thing about being alive: it’s totally weird.
I had no idea what the plan was when we got back, but it turns out that Kevin had a good few of the practicalities already taken care of. He’d been organizing them for ages, apparently.
There was this whole big bit of Blackbrick that nobody ever went to anymore. It was called Crispin’s wing, and it’s where we took Maggie. She had started to get suspicious—obviously, because she wasn’t stupid—asking why were we creeping around like that, but Kevin kept telling her to trust him, and she kept saying of course she trusted him, and he said, “No more questions, then—not until we get everything settled.”
We walked along a brown shiny corridor. To the right at the end of it, there was a thick door scarred with deep cracks, like old wounds. Kevin pushed it open. On the other side was a cold room, very dusty, with wind coming in gushes down a big stained fireplace. There were brushes and cloths and a bucket stacked in the grate. It looked as if someone had once been in the middle of cleaning it but had given up for some sudden reason. Kevin weaved across the room, past saggy armchairs and sofa-shaped objects, which were all covered in blotchy gray sheets. There was another door, and behind it was a much comfier type of a place, with a wide, clean bed and warm-looking blankets. A proper fire must have been lit earlier in the day. It was dying down now but was still smoldering in its grate, and breathing out little occasional glows of brightness. A fat candle glimmered on a low table. There was a huge bookshelf that went up to the ceiling. All of the shelves dipped in gentle curves, weighed down by heavy hardbacks. There was a mirror and a comfortable-looking chair. I thought about my own small, cold room and my flat mattress for a jealous second or two.
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