News from Gardenia

by Robert Llewellyn

  We approached a machine, in some ways recognisably a digger although I’d never seen one like it. The top half, above the impressive-looking caterpillar tracks which allowed the gigantic beast to shift its bulk, seemed again to be moulded out of one enormous piece of some kind of plastic.

  Two men stood beside an open door in the side of the main structure and one was, in a classic portrayal of bamboozlement, scratching his head.

  ‘Best not say anything about where you have come from,’ said William discreetly as we approached them. ‘Not for any evil reason; it’s just I want to get the job done and go home for my nap. If they start talking and asking questions we will be here a fortnight.’ He smiled and gave me a wink.

  ‘It’s okay, I understand,’ I said.

  The two men turned and smiled as we approached.

  ‘Friends, I bring help,’ said William heartily. They shook hands and turned to me.

  ‘This is Gavin; he is a mechanical engineer,’ said William proudly.

  ‘Good day to you sir,’ said one man, the shorter of the two, although he was a good deal taller than me. The other almost had to bend over to talk to me – he must have been nearly seven feet tall and yet not in the least disabled by this great height.

  I spent a fascinating hour looking over the machine. It was a mighty earth-moving digger that used a hydrogen fuel cell to power the motors running the hydraulic pumps and caterpillar tracks. It was huge and clearly very powerful. It had a large array of other specialised equipment I wasn’t familiar with, but I imagined it was a sorting system to extract plastic waste from the other material that lay strewn over the site.

  It was so odd to investigate what to me was brand new technology that was now very old, dirty and battered. I could see that a lot of half-hearted repairs had been done to the machine over the years; it was very badly worn and hanging together more with hope than any technological accomplishment.

  ‘It’s in a bit of a state,’ I said as I removed my head from within the drive chamber. ‘I’d say the fuel cell is shot, the feed pipes from the tank look a bit worrying – it basically needs a total overhaul.’

  The two tall men nodded but said nothing.

  ‘What spares have you got?’ I asked.

  ‘Only these,’ said the shorter of the two. He handed me some gasket rings in a plastic bag.

  ‘Is that it?’ I asked. ‘Is that all you’ve got?’

  They nodded and looked slightly ashamed. I turned to William.

  ‘I don’t understand. I mean, to me, this is the most incredible power plant I’ve ever seen; it’s beautifully made but really badly maintained. The hydraulics and mechanics I can understand, but the power plant is a mystery. It’s a hydrogen fuel cell isn’t it?’

  The very tall man nodded.

  ‘Well, I know nothing about those. I mean, I understand the principles involved but if it’s not working, that’s a problem. If you really want it to work again, you’re going to need to strip it right down, replace the worn parts and somehow re-configure the fuel cell and rebuild it. It’s a huge job.’

  William smiled. ‘I thought you might say that. D’you want to do it?’

  ‘Well, I’m going to need some help, and spare parts or at least the facilities to manufacture spare parts if you don’t have any.’

  ‘I’m sure we can sort something out,’ said William. ‘But you think at present, it’s not going to function.’

  ‘I’d say at the moment it’s positively dangerous. You’ve got high-pressure hydrogen in that tank – you don’t want that leaking – and the pipes all look shot to ribbons. My advice is forget it, get a new one.’

  ‘There are no new ones, Gavin,’ said William. ‘No one is making such machines any more. This is an antique and much loved by these wonderful operators. Anything you can do to help would be greatly appreciated.’

  I stood and looked at the massive machine. It was a giant job and I had no idea where to start: I needed so much kit to work on a machine of this size – all the components were far too heavy for mere mortals to tackle.

  ‘It’s going to take a long time. I’ll need tools, heavy lifting equipment, welding and cutting gear and a lot of help.’

  William shook my hand with enthusiasm. ‘I had a feeling you were the man for the job. We shall return to Goldacre Hall and begin planning.’

  Our return trip was made in the same way as our outward journey, although we had to wait longer for a podmibus to arrive. William had a small packed lunch in his shoulder bag and we sat in the afternoon sun in the small clearing next to the stone entrance. Even this close to the ugly scar on the landscape where the digger sat motionless, the air smelt fresh and clean.

  I also started to feel a little more hopeful at that point. I had something to occupy myself; the prospect of spending my days gardening and cooking really didn’t appeal. This earthmover project was something I could get my teeth into.

  That night I dined in the kitchen at Goldacre Hall amid a whirlwind of conversation about the digger. I spoke to people who knew of a mobile crane we could use, a woman who had access to what I eventually understood to be welding equipment and a man who ran a large 3D printer in a nearby hall. I took notes on my iPad and started building up a list of tasks that I could already see we needed to do. I was, in effect, giving lessons in engineering management which everyone I spoke to seemed very impressed with.

  Late that night I went back to my room, once again exhausted but feeling a lot less depressed. I took a shower and was sitting in my towel when I heard a gentle, possibly slightly hesitant knock on my door. I stood up and was just about to ask who was there when I realised it was pointless – there was no lock on the door anyway.

  My wallet, phone and iPad had been left in the room all day and effectively on display since I had arrived; no one had come in and taken anything. I looked down at myself, it wasn’t appropriate to open the door when I only had a towel wrapped around my waist.

  ‘Who is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Just me,’ said a quiet voice, a woman’s voice, a soft sounding, slightly husky woman’s voice.

  I opened the door and I admit my heart skipped a beat. It was Grace. She was alone. There was a brief moment when we just looked at each other, then she moved towards me and we embraced. We kissed for the first time, but not the last.

  16

  ‘Grace, I want’ to know more about the other man who came through the cloud,’ I said the following morning. The early morning light was just beginning to seep under the curtains. I had been awake a while and felt a little uncomfortable bringing it up; however, I wanted to know about this other man and people seemed a little reluctant to talk about him. I thought I might catch Grace in an unguarded moment.

  Grace turned over in my bed and stared at me. Her hair, normally neatly tied back, was a mess. It was half covering her face. I gently moved it back with my left hand. She held my face in her hands, kissed me and smiled.

  ‘Good morning, Gavin, you lovely, lovely man,’ she said. She was right of course, not that I was lovely, but that what I had just said wasn’t exactly a lover’s morning greeting.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Good morning, Grace, you utterly stunning, beautiful and alluring woman.’

  We stared at each other for a long time. I normally find high levels of direct eye contact disturbing but I was immensely relaxed in Grace’s company. I sighed and was just about to tell her how beautiful she was again when she said, ‘I only met him a couple of times.’

  ‘Oh, you did meet him then.’

  ‘I was very young when he died. He seemed like a very nice old man,’ she said sleepily.

  ‘So you never saw the plane he was flying?’ I shook my head before she could respond. ‘No, of course you didn’t. I’m sorry, I’m so confused about dates, and time. What year were yo
u born?’

  ‘2181,’ she said automatically. It sounded so natural coming from her, but it still sounded so weird to my vintage twentieth century ears.

  ‘2181,’ I said slowly. ‘That is so spooky. I mean, if I’d lived to a ripe old age, say ninety years old, I would have died in 2068, more than a hundred years before you were even born.’

  Grace smiled and said slowly, ‘I’m glad you didn’t die one hundred years before I was born.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m glad. I mean I’m glad because I’m here with you now, but it’s so confusing. I still think I might be dead and this is heaven.’

  Again Grace smiled, only this smile was a little more lascivious.

  ‘Oh, I think we can safely say you are not dead, sweet man.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ I said and kissed her forehead gently. Then I lay on my back and looked up at the beautiful wooden ceiling in my weird room. The morning light was now leaking in and the day was taking shape.

  ‘You know that the man who came through the cloud before you is Henry’s Grandfather, don’t you?’

  ‘What!’ I said turning to look at Grace. She was lying on her side with her eyes closed.

  ‘He was Mitchell’s father, that’s where Mitchell got his name from. That’s why some people think Mitchell is rather distant and maybe a little sad, because in some ways he comes from another time. I know that’s not true, Mitchell has a quiet soul, he is at peace with the world in a way many hope and strive for.’

  She didn’t open her eyes once while she spoke.

  ‘So let me get this straight,’ I said, propping myself on one elbow, ‘this RAF pilot comes belting through the cloud in a Supermarine Spitfire, crashes it into a greenhouse, bails out, parachutes to the ground, meets people, gets Mitchell’s mum pregnant and then dies at a ripe old age.’

  ‘I didn’t understand some of that, but the bits I did understand are correct,’ said Grace.

  ‘He must have been even more confused by all of this than I am. It’s so bizarre, I wish I could have met him.’

  Grace put her hand on my chest and made a tiny sound, possibly the most intimate and sexy sound I’ve ever heard in my life. I was a little torn; the information about Reginald Peter Mitchell obsessed me, but so did the woman lying naked beside me. Who was this bloke, what did he make of Gardenia, of the changes to his world? Did he freak out, did he fit in, did he look after Mitchell when he was a kid?

  ‘He’s Mitchell’s dad,’ I said. I watched Grace nod gently. ‘That is incredible. What must that have been like for him, it’s so weird.’

  I didn’t have children. I’ve never known if I wanted them, I was fairly certain I didn’t but I was starting to regret it since I’d been in Gardenia.

  After a while I said, ‘The other thing I thought about yesterday was that if I’d had children, then I’d have had grandchildren, then great grandchildren, and great-great grandchildren and if that had happened some of them might be alive now.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Grace softly. She kissed me again.

  I was thinking about Beth and her children, but I didn’t want to mention it in case Grace felt uncomfortable being reminded that technically I was married and cheating on my wife. I shook my head, such an idea was insane.

  ‘I used The Book to find out about my wife the other day, after I freaked out in the hall with the kids.’

  Grace didn’t move but I could sense something. I wish I was more sensitive to such subtle changes in emotion but I’m not, and she seemed to cope.

  ‘What did you discover?’

  ‘Well, there are three people who could be alive now who are her direct descendants.’

  Grace turned to look at me. ‘Are there? Goodness me, am I one of them?’

  I smiled and shook my head. ‘No, don’t worry. But I have to say I would love to meet them.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Grace. ‘Well, maybe you could find them. You found me after all and I’m rather grateful for that.’

  Although she had exhausted me the night before, Grace was still not satisfied. I did my best to rectify this and we remained in bed for another two hours that delicious morning.

  However, the remainder of that day and the ten days following was spent repairing the wretched digger in the filthy quarry. With some help from very willing workers who seemed to hang on my every word, I managed to strip the vehicle down piece by battered, worn-out piece.

  I looked at the mechanical design of the mobile crane that arrived on the site on the second day. This was a very impressive piece of kit; the majority of the bodywork and chassis seemed to be made of the same plastic as the podmibus I was commuting in every day – a very thick but seemingly lightweight material that was clearly incredibly strong. The hydraulic systems and crane arm were made of steel, but it was the motor and power system that really impressed me.

  The digger’s motive power came from a substantial electric motor; it was big and resembled a 20 centimetre-thick circular dining table but was clearly a power plant of immense torque. My fellow engineers did know about this motor: I learned it was an old axial flux unit with 7,500 Newton metres of torque. I was suitably impressed, as they were with my understanding of this system. I had seen prototypes of small motors like this when I visited a manufacturer in Abingdon the year before. No, not the year before, two hundred and one years before.

  After stripping out the fuel cell stack in the broken digger my initial fears were confirmed. The whole power system was redundant and needed replacing.

  I spent many hours taking the complex thing to pieces; it was the first time in my life I was confronted with technology I truly didn’t understand. The fuel cell contained materials I was utterly unfamiliar with, alloys and sheet material that baffled me, and it seemed none of my fellow mechanics had the faintest idea what it was or what it did.

  ‘All I know,’ said Tom, the very tall man who operated the crane, ‘is I fill it up over there.’ He pointed to an installation on the side of the pit. ‘And then I turn it on and start work.’

  After a brief inspection, I understood that the installation was in fact a hydrogen generator, a water splitting system that extracted and compressed hydrogen. I poked around its dusty and battered interior for a while, remembering the engineers I’d known who were convinced that this was to be the future. Well, I suppose it was for a while, but not any more.

  One thing was for certain though: unless we could get a completely new cell stack the digging machine was next to useless.

  We needed to get some power to the motor from some other source. A lot of power. My experience up to that point had shown me that there was electrical power everywhere – the grid would supply any amount of it, so why didn’t the electric motor just work?

  Clearly the electricity had to be received in some way, and then had to be carefully controlled. With a motor as powerful as the one in the broken digger, control was rather vital.

  After asking the small crew of amateur mechanics I had assembled, news came through of a disused surface soil transport unit we might be able to salvage. There was much talk of the ultra-capacitor system these vehicles contained and how they could draw substantial power from the grid at any time.

  The following day I waited in the clearing by the sweet Victorian house and watched a small electric tractor thing like the one that had towed my Yuneec through the field. This one was slightly larger and was clearly straining to pull a large four-wheeled truck, a soil transport they called it. It had no cab or control system for a driver that I could see. It was clearly well used and a bit knackered. It had never been repaired, just left in a convenient yard somewhere.

  Another day was spent isolating and removing the power unit and then using the mobile crane to carefully transport it through the woods and into the plastic quarry.

  This process caused
a lot of discussion as it clearly upset the people in the Victorian house to have this much disturbance to their precious woodland. The crane was a heavy piece of kit and we had to cut back a lot of shrubs and a couple of small trees to make the path wide enough. The low-pressure tyres didn’t do too much damage to the ground but there was an impact. I was fascinated to watch how this was negotiated, how the long-term benefits of this disturbance were balanced with the short-term impact: we seemed to stand around talking about it for days.

  All this took an enormous amount of time and was often very frustrating. I didn’t have the right tools and it seemed I was the only one with any gumption.

  However, each night when I got back to Goldacre Hall, I would eat in the big kitchen surrounded by the residents who seemed very keen to hear my news; this event had clearly sparked a lot of interest. I was beset with suggestions and offers of help.

  I was barely aware of what I was eating as I was completely absorbed into their bizarre but essentially friendly community; I even began to feel a part of it. I no longer looked at the noisy group as an outsider, I came to realise I was part of the noisy chaos and I rather liked it.

  However, in the back of my mind all the time I spent there, I was thinking, wondering, hoping that Grace would come and see me again. I would make my excuses, claim I was exhausted – which was never a lie, I was utterly knackered – then I’d retire to my room as early as I could.

  Every evening I would start to read the history book Paula had given me. I must have read the first few pages many times but as soon as I started, I would hear the gentle tap on the door.

  Every night Grace would arrive, eager and almost desperate for my body. At first I found it wonderfully romantic, but before long I became aware that there wasn’t that much romance involved. It’s not that Grace wasn’t affectionate; she was. Very. However, there seemed to be an overwhelming drive to couple with me for as often and as long as possible. I would often tell her I loved her. I did – I had fallen hopelessly in love with her and would think about her all day. I missed being in her company but she had kept our meetings strictly to the hours of darkness.