by Mike Ashley
Molly Brown is an American writer and occasional stand-up comedienne, long resident in Britain. Her novels have included the historical mystery Invitation to a Funeral (1995) and a children’s science-fiction thriller, Virus (1994), and you will find other time-travel stories in her collection Bad Timing (2001).
I felt like I was going through a meat grinder. Then there was a blinding flash of light – bright orange – and I felt like I was going through a meat grinder backwards. And there I was, back in one piece. Slightly dizzy, a little stiff around the joints. Swearing I’d never do that again.
The digital display inside the capsule read: 29 April 1995, 6:03 p.m., E.S.T. If that was true, then I was furious. Toni promised she would only set the timer forward by two minutes, and I’d gone forward by a year! A whole year, wasted. Didn’t she realize I had work to do? And then I thought: oh my God, the exhibition! I was supposed to have an exhibition in July, 1994 – if I’ve really gone forward a year, I missed my one-woman show at Gallery Alfredo!
I opened the capsule door, bent on murder. And then I froze. This wasn’t my studio.
I live and work on the top floor of an old warehouse in lower Manhattan, and I do sculpture. Abstract sculpture. I take scrapped auto parts and turn them into something beautiful. I twist industrial rubbish into exquisite shapes. I can mount a bicycle wheel onto a wooden platform and make it speak volumes about the meaning of life. I once placed a headless Barbie doll inside a fish tank and sold it for five thousand dollars, and that was before I was famous – I hear the same piece recently fetched more than forty.
I’d been working on a new piece called “Women on the Brink of a Cataclysm”: an arrangement of six black and white television sets, each showing a video loop of a woman scrubbing a floor, when Toni Fisher rang the doorbell. I’ve known Toni off and on since we were kids. We grew up in the same town and went to the same high school before going our separate ways after graduation, in 1966. I went to art school in California; she got a scholarship to study physics at Cambridge in England. It would be twenty years before we met again, at the launch party for Gutsy Ladies: Women making their mark in the 80s, the latest book by Arabella Winstein.
It was one of those dreadful media circuses; I remember a PR woman in a geometric haircut dragging me around the room for a round of introductions: “Hey there, gutsy lady, come and meet some other gutsy ladies.” I was there in my capacity as “Gutsy Lady of the Art World” and Toni had been profiled in a chapter entitled: “Gutsy Lady on the Cutting Edge of Science”.
I saw her leaning against a wall in the corner: a tall, stick-thin character with spikey blonde hair, gulping champagne. I could see she was a kindred spirit – we were the only ones not wearing neat little suits with boxy jackets – but I had no idea who she was; in high school she’d been a chubby brunette with glasses. She saw me looking at her, and waved me over.
We leaned against the wall together, jangling the chains on our identical black leather jackets. “I’m working on a calculation,” she said, “that will show density of shoulder pad to be in directly inverse proportion to level of intelligence. I’m drunk by the way.”
“I’m Joanna Krenski.”
“I know who you are. I’ve still got the charcoal portrait you did of me for your senior year art project. The damn thing must be worth a fortune now; I keep meaning to get it valued.”
That was the start of our friendship, the second time around.
Eight years later, I was sitting inside this metal egg, surrounded by my work and my tools and the huge amount of dust they always seem to generate, and Toni was shouting, okay, push the button. Then I opened the capsule door and Toni was gone and all my work was gone and even the dust was gone.
I was in a huge, open-plan loft with floor to ceiling windows – that much was like my studio – but everything had been polished and swept and there were flowers everywhere. Flowers in vases, flowers in pots, flowers in a window-box. And then there were paintings of flowers. Dozens of delicate little water-colours depicting roses and lilies and lilacs completely covered one wall, each framed behind a pane of sparkling glass. Unframed oils on canvas stood leaning against every wall, apparently divided into categories: fluffy kittens, cute children, puppies with big sad eyes. I could have puked.
A woman was standing with her back to me, painting something on a medium-sized canvas mounted on a wooden easel. It looked like it was going to be another puppy. The woman had tightly permed hair cut just above the collar – mouse brown gone mostly grey – and she was wearing a white smock over a knee-length dress. I also noticed she was wearing high heels. To paint.
Oh God, I thought, just like my mother. I remembered her putting on a hat and a little string of pearls to attend her first evening art class; she was like something out of a ’50s TV sitcom. And how proud she was of her little pictures of birds. My mother used to paint birds: little red robins and yellow canaries, with musical notes coming out of their beaks. She hung them all over the living room walls. It was embarrassing.
I was going to have to handle this very carefully. The woman was obviously some old dear of my mother’s generation and I was a disembodied head sticking out of a metallic egg. I didn’t want to give the poor woman a heart attack. I cleared my throat. “Excuse me,” I said. “Please don’t be frightened. I’m not a burglar or anything.” Even as I said it, I realized how stupid it must have sounded: a burglar in a metal egg.
The woman swung around, and I gasped.
“You again,” she said, quite calmly. “I never expected you to turn up here.”
I felt my mouth open and close half a dozen times, but no words came out. I just sat there, inside the capsule, gaping like a mackerel. The woman had my face. She’d let her hair go grey – something I’ve refused to do – and she was wearing a string of pearls just like my mother’s and a dress I wouldn’t be caught dead in, but based on her face – and even her voice – she could have been my sister. My twin.
There was an odd smell in the air; I’d noticed it the moment I opened the capsule door and now I realized what it was. It was bread, baking. Something very strange was going on here.
“I don’t know how you did it,” she went on. “Toni said we were both stuck where we were. She was very apologetic about it, of course.” She put her palette and brush down on a table beside the easel, then crossed her arms and looked at me. She seemed angry. “Well, you can forget it.”
I finally managed to get my vocal cords working. “Huh? Forget what?”
“Even if you’ve found a way, I’m not going back,” she said. “No way am I going back. Ever. This is my life now, my world, and I like it. Though . . .” she paused a moment, and her face – my face – crumpled into a mass of lines. Oh God, I thought, I don’t look as old as her, do I? She blinked hard, several times, as if she was trying not to cry. “How’s Katie? Is she all right?”
I shook my head; the only Katie I knew was a drama critic, and I didn’t think that was who she meant.
“The boys I don’t worry about so much; they’re grown up now. I know they’ll be okay. But Katie . . . she’s just a kid, isn’t she?”
“Katie who? And who are you? I mean you look so much like . . . like my mother. Are we related or something?”
Her eyes opened wide. “You mean you don’t know? But . . . but you’ve been there. Isn’t that where you came from just now?”
“Been where?”
“But you must have! Or how could I be here?”
This woman was talking nonsense; I figured she must be crazy, maybe even dangerous. Maybe she was one of those fanatical fans who get plastic surgery to look like their idols. Okay, maybe a forty-five year-old sculptor doesn’t have that kind of fan. Even a forty-five year-old sculptor who appeared in two Warhol films and has had her picture on the cover of everything from Newsweek to Rolling Stone (twice), probably doesn’t have that kind of fan. I still figured the only thing for me to do was to get the hell away from her in a hurry.
/> I leaned forward, trying to pull myself out of the capsule, but she grabbed me by the shoulders, shoved me back down inside it, and held me there. I struggled and swore, but I couldn’t get up. I don’t think she was any stronger than me, but she had the major advantage of not being curled into an almost foetal position inside a metal egg.
Her face hovered inches above mine, mouth twisted with rage, eyes narrow and shining with something that might have been hate or might even have been fear; I couldn’t tell. It was like looking into one of those distorted fairground mirrors.
“But you have been there,” she insisted. “You arrived there a year ago today. That’s when the switch took place.”
“What switch?”
“This switch,” she said, slamming the capsule door down over my head.
It was worse the second time. My head was pounding; my whole body ached. It took a few seconds for my eyes to come back into focus – then I saw the digital display. I was back where I started; 29 April, 1994, 6:01 p.m., E.S.T. I sighed with relief. I was home and I still had three months to get ready for my show at Gallery Alfredo; I hadn’t missed it after all.
I shoved the door open, expecting to see my studio, and Toni waiting by the capsule. I had a few choice words in store for Toni! But she wasn’t there. And my studio wasn’t there.
I couldn’t tell where I was at first; it was dark. But as my eyes began to adjust, I saw that I was in a windowless room lined with crowded shelves.
“Hello!” I shouted. “Is anybody there?”
No answer.
“Shit.” I took a deep breath, gathered all my strength, and slowly began to extricate myself from Toni’s infernal machine. I never felt so stiff and sore; I could hardly move. My jeans felt tighter than usual, as if my body was swollen. And my poor legs! I had to massage them to get the blood moving again, and then there was an unbearable sensation of pins and needles. I finally managed to stand up.
The shelves around me were stacked with jars of homemade preserves and chocolate chip cookies. There were bags of flour, a tinned baked ham, fresh coffee beans, baskets of fruit and vegetables, various pots and pans. It looked like some kind of a pantry.
I reached for the door, praying it wasn’t locked. It wasn’t, and I stepped into a kitchen that would have been the height of technology in 1956. The brand names were all ones I remembered from my childhood, the appliances were all big and white and clunky, except for the toaster, which was small and round and covered in shiny chrome, and the coffee percolator, which was switched on and bubbling away.
There was nothing in that room that would have been out of place when I was five years old. No microwave oven, no food processor, no espresso machine. There was a meat grinder and a coffee grinder, each with a handle you needed to crank. You needed a match to light the stove. You had to defrost the fridge.
And it was all brand new.
“Hello! Anybody home?” I wandered through the dining room – a printed sign on the wall above the sideboard read, “Give us this day our daily bread” – and into a living room with a picture window and clear plastic covers over all the furniture. An embroidered sampler above the fireplace proclaimed, “Bless this house and everyone in it.” I shook my head.
I looked out the window and saw women in cotton dresses hanging laundry, men in white shirts mowing lawns, kids on one-speed bikes with little tinkling bells and metal baskets. There was at least one big, gas-guzzling automobile in every driveway.
It was 1950s suburbia, even worse than I remembered it. I had walked straight into an episode of Leave It to Beaver. I shook my head in disbelief; Toni’s time machine had actually worked.
I heard a crash, coming from the kitchen. I ran back, pausing in the kitchen doorway. The back door was open. I looked around the room. There was no one there. Nothing seemed to be missing. I took a couple of cautious steps onto the linoleum floor. Then a couple more. Everything seemed okay; the door probably wasn’t properly closed in the first place, and a gust of wind had blown it open. It wouldn’t be that unusual back in the ’50s; we never used to lock the doors when I was a kid. I crossed the room and pulled the door shut. I realized I’d been holding my breath, and let it out.
There was a sudden high-pitched sound, and I nearly jumped a mile. I swung around, clutching my chest and cursing myself for being such an idiot. It was only the telephone. The phone was mounted on the kitchen wall behind me, big and white, with an old-fashioned dial. I walked towards it, then decided to let the answering machine pick it up. I listened to it ringing and ringing, until it finally struck me they didn’t have answering machines in the 1950s. I lifted the receiver. “Hello?”
“Joanna, what kept you so long? I was just about to hang up.”
I knew that voice! “Toni? Oh thank God. How did you find me? How did you know what number to call?”
There was a long pause. “Joanna, are you all right?”
“I’m stuck inside a forty-year-old copy of Better Homes and Gardens, and you’re asking me if I’m all right?”
“Joanna, you sound a little strange. Is Bob there?”
“Bob? Who the hell is Bob?”
“You’re having one of your little turns again, aren’t you? Now do me favour. I want you to sit down, or, better yet, why don’t you lie down? Take some good deep breaths, and try to relax.” I could not believe the way she was talking to me, in this slow, soothing murmur, like I was some kind of nutcase. She might as well have been saying, “Now put that gun down, Joanna.”
“You said you were going to send me two minutes forward, not forty years back! I don’t want to lie down and relax. I want to get out of here! And what do you mean, ‘turns’? I do not have ‘turns’!”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can, okay? Just try and stay calm; I’m on my way.” There was a click.
“Wait a minute, Toni! Toni?” There was no one there; she’d hung up. I leaned against the wall, rubbing my throbbing temples. Nothing made sense. If I was really in the 1950s, and I’d left Toni back in the ’90s, then how could she phone me?
I heard a door open and slam shut, then a man’s voice: “Honey, I’m home!”
I didn’t know what to do. One half of me said I should walk right up to the man, introduce myself and calmly explain what I was doing in his house. The other half said I should hide. I heard footsteps, moving towards me. Heavy footsteps.
I decided to hide.
I tiptoed backwards into the pantry, pulling the door closed behind me, trying hard not to breathe. I turned around and saw a second metal egg. I raised a hand to my mouth and bit it to keep myself from screaming. Where had that other egg come from? I bent down to examine it. Like mine, the digital display must have been broken; it still said 1994. But this egg was nearly twice as big, and looked a lot more comfortable. It even had a padded lining.
So that was how Toni found me; she’d followed me back into time. She’d had a second egg the whole time, and she’d obviously saved the better one for herself, the selfish bitch. But if she was here, in the same house, then why did she have to phone me?
And where was she now?
I heard the man’s voice again: “Joanna, sweetheart! Jo-aaann-a!” Who was this guy and how did he know my name? “Joanna!”
The voice was louder, he was getting closer. I heard footsteps moving across the kitchen floor. They stopped in front of the pantry door. I watched the doorknob turn. I tensed, unsure what to do.
“Who’s there?” I said.
The voice sounded relieved. “Oh there you are! Didn’t you hear me?” The door opened and I saw a middle-aged man with his mouth hanging open. “Oh my God, Joanna! What have you done?”
“Huh?”
“Your hair! What have you done to your hair? It’s . . . it’s purple!”
I couldn’t believe it; this guy catches an intruder cowering in a closet, and his only reaction is to comment on her hair colour? And my hair isn’t purple, by the way. The tint I use is called Flickering Flame, and
the packet describes it as a deep burgundy red. The guy was so busy gawking at my hair, he didn’t even notice the pair of metal ovals sitting in the middle of his pantry floor. I stepped out into the kitchen, pulling the pantry door closed behind me.
“You . . . you look positively indecent,” the man went on, following me across the kitchen. “Look at you! Hair sticking up all over the place, like you haven’t combed it in a week!” I positioned myself with my back to what I assumed was the cutlery drawer; I wanted to be within reach of something I could use as a weapon, just in case. “You look like some kind of a . . . a . . . a hussy! No wife of mine is going around looking like a hussy.”
Wife? I thought, this man thinks I’m his wife?
“And where did you get those awful clothes? You look like some kind of a greasy mechanic!”
I was ready to punch the guy. First my hair, and now my clothes. There was nothing wrong with my clothes. I was wearing black designer jeans – strategically ripped at the knees – that cost me nearly five hundred dollars, and an understated, plain black T-shirt that was a bargain at $57.99.
Hussy? I thought. Greasy mechanic? What kind of bigoted moron uses words like that, and more important, what kind of moron mistakes a complete stranger for his wife? The man looked normal enough – almost too normal. Forty-something, thinning hair, brown tinged with grey, bit of a paunch, dressed like he just came home from an office.
“What if the neighbours saw you looking like that? And what about Katie?”
Katie. That rang a bell. “Ah,” I said, remembering what the woman who looked like my mother had told me, “Katie’s just a kid, isn’t she?”
The man sighed and shook his head. “You’re having hot flushes again, aren’t you?” He touched my forehead as if he was checking for a fever. I slid my hand into the drawer behind me, grabbed hold of something I hoped was a knife, and waited to see what he would do next. But all he did was bend slightly forward, and stare open-mouthed at my feet. “You’re wearing tennis shoes.”