by Ross Welford
So I’m as far away from the proper bat-and-ball action as I can be without looking like I’m actually skiving, in a position called Deep Mid-On, or Deep Mid-Off (I’ve no idea), and I’m on to reason number two – breaking into my old garage.
Unlike every other house on the street, our garage had old-fashioned double wooden doors rather than one of those tip-up metal doors, and the lock never used to work properly. You can get your fingers under the two doors and sort of joggle them till they ease apart. I did it once when I was locked out and Mum was late back and it was raining.
Anyway, there I am thinking I can almost tick that one off and feeling quite pleased, when I hear yelling.
“Al! Al, man! Chaudhury! Catch it!” A cricket ball is sailing towards me from out of the sky and a tiny wave of despair comes over me. I am truly hopeless at catching (and throwing, and batting for that matter; cricket’s not really my game). Without any confidence I cup my hands in the vague direction that the ball is heading and …
Plop! The ball lands exactly in my grasp. And doesn’t fall out again. There’s a wild cheer and over at the wicket Freddie Stayward is glaring at me as he tucks the bat under his arm and starts to walk. I decide that it’s a good omen, and even my throw back to the bowler is not as bad as usual.
It’s reason number one that’s really bothering me, though, and the question lingers with me all through double maths, through lunch, geography, French and history. How do I get to my old house in Culvercot?
Years ago, there used to be a train between Blyth and Culvercot, then it was replaced by a bus service, and then that stopped as well, so now you have to take two buses and change at Seaton Sluice and it takes forever. Besides, if I’m going to break in somewhere, it’ll have to be at night so that scuppers that idea.
I’d cycle, except my bike was stolen last year when I left it unlocked outside the house.
This is all, of course, ignoring the biggest objection of all: what if it goes wrong? The ‘time travel’ bit, that is. I mean, I trust my dad, but still … He’s basically asking me to go to our old house, which is ten miles away, commit a bit of breaking and entering, and then use an actual time machine to travel through time.
Great birthday present, Dad, I think.
But I have to, don’t I? If there’s a chance – even a small one – of preventing his death, of having him back again.
And I have to admit it: there’s a part of me (quite deep down, I think, because it’s not always there) that’s so excited it makes me feel a bit sick.
That afternoon, Mum and I are eating soup in the kitchen. (It’s one of her ‘experiments’, coconut and Stilton, which doesn’t really work, to be honest.) Steve’s working late, and Carly said this morning that she was in the school choir, which I know to be a big fat lie, and besides, I saw her heading off in the other direction with Jolyon when I came out of school, but I haven’t said anything. I know far better than that.
The soup is hot and we wait for it to cool a little (which suits me fine).
“Mum …” I’m trying to find the right words. “Did Dad have any hobbies? I mean, things that he did apart from work?” I’m trying to find out if Mum knew about his Top Secret Underground Laboratory.
Mum thinks for a while and lifts the soup spoon to her mouth. She drinks it without slurping even a little and then answers, “Ee, well, not really.” (This “Ee” that Mum says, it’s part of her Geordie accent, and it usually makes me smile, but right now I’m too interested in what’s coming next.) She looks a little puzzled as if she had never really thought about it before.
“Your father was a very clever man, and he thought about things a great deal, but …”
“Was he, like, into science fiction or, or … stuff like that?”
“Science fiction? Your dad?” Mum gives a slight snort. “No. Definitely not! Not his thing at all. Why?”
“Ah … no reason.” Mum’s looking at me intensely, so I invent something quickly. “I was just thinking of the stories Dad used to tell me, and I wondered what he liked to read.”
Mum smiles. “Detective stories. Real-life crime. Mysteries. Anything with a puzzle. That was your dad. Always trying to work things out.”
We eat our soup in silence for a bit. After a few spoonfuls, it’s not as bad as it sounds. Then I get a brilliant idea.
“Did Dad ever mend cars?”
“When we first married we had an old Ford Fiesta that he’d work on. Why?”
“In the garage at Chesterton Road?”
“No. We didn’t live there then. Why?”
“It’s just there was that hole in the floor for mechanics to stand in, and I thought he may have used it.”
“The pit? Ee, no. I don’t think he ever used that, apart from when we first moved in and we checked out the fall-out shelter.”
I furrow my brow. “The what?”
“The people we bought the house from were terrified that there was going to be a nuclear war. MacFaddyen, they were called. Rough, they were, and …” She makes a twirling motion with her finger next to her head. “Anyway, they converted the cellar into a shelter under the garage to protect them from a nuclear bomb. It was tiny and creepy. They thought it increased the value of the house, but it didn’t. We only went in it the once, when they showed us round.”
“You never told me this before.”
Mum shrugs. “You never asked. You never asked about the loft either, but that was there as well. I suppose I didn’t like the thought that you might want to play there, so I just never mentioned it. To be honest, Al, neither your dad nor I gave it a minute’s thought.”
Mum’s taking a deep breath and looking at me with her head tipped to one side. She’s about to change the subject and I think I know where it’s headed.
“The boys in your class …”
I was right.
“Is there anyone you’d like to invite back for tea one day, or just to play?”
Now, Mum has asked me this, or a clever variation on it so that I don’t think she’s obsessed, roughly once a month since I started at St Eddie’s. The answer’s always the same.
“Not really, Mum. Most of them are busy with other stuff. You know – homework and that.”
Mum nods and looks away. She’s not going to pursue it today. Finally she says, “That letter from your dad. Was it … OK?”
It’s a funny choice of word and I smile. “Yes, it was OK. It was … private. Growing up advice, and –” I add this next bit to try to deflect her attention – “guy stuff. Man to man, you know? Growing up, drink, drugs, girls.”
Mum smiles warmly and a bit sadly, but says no more.
Which suits me because I’m just sitting there thinking: Fall-out shelter. That’s where the time machine is.
Ten Things I Know About My Dad
His name was Pythagoras Chaudhury. I know, right? Who’d call their kid Pythagoras? Well, Byron Chaudhury-Roy, for one. Grandpa Byron had got his name because his father loved English classical poets. He once told me, “It could be worse, Al. I could have been called Elizabeth Browning.” I laughed, even though I didn’t know who Elizabeth Browning was. Anyway, Dad called himself Pye, and sometimes for a joke wrote his name like the Greek letter pi. You know: π. His sister’s called Hypatia, and she lives in Canada, but I’ve only ever met her the once. Well, twice actually, if you include when she was five, which we’ll get to later. Dad said that Hypatia was the ‘mother of modern maths’. The original Hypatia, that is, not his sister. She’s an estate agent.
He loved me very much. This is what Mum always tells me, so it must be true.
His favourite meal was fish and chips with chilli pickle. He said to Mum that, like them, it was the perfect Anglo-Indian marriage. Except he was only half-Indian, because Grandma Julie was Welsh.
He was very, very clever. He once built a dishwasher in the garage from old parts that he got off a friend. Mum said it didn’t work very well, but she never said that to him.
He a
nd Mum met when Dad was a student at university becoming a doctor. Not a real doctor, but an engineering doctor. That’s what they call you when you pass an exam called a PhD, so his name was really ‘Doctor Chaudhury’, though he never called himself that in case people thought he was a real doctor and wanted him to cure them. Mum was working at the university bookshop.
He wasn’t very handsome. I know that sounds mean, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t ugly or anything, not like Tara Simmons’s dad, he was just … all right. I’ve seen photos and video and stuff, and he’s sort of skinny, with loads of black hair (‘a bird’s nest’ Mum says) and a slightly pointy nose. It’s his smile you notice, though. Mum says it was his smile that she fell in love with first. There’s a picture that we had up on the mantelpiece until shortly after Mum started going out with Steve, and Dad was grinning at the camera and you could see what she meant. When he smiled he became almost good-looking, except for a crooked bottom tooth. I think he looks nice. I wish Mum hadn’t taken the picture down. She probably thinks I haven’t noticed.
My dad didn’t really have any hobbies, like football or fishing. He just liked doing stuff with computers. At work he wrote software programs that helped other programmers write their software programs.
He died four years ago, when I was eight. I have tried to forget most of it, but I do remember the ambulance, and going to stay with Aunty Ellie. Everyone said I was being ‘brave’ but I just didn’t feel like crying until a few days later, and by then it was too late to start.
He could sing songs in Punjabi. There was one that he taught to Mum as well that they’d sing to me at bedtime, but she never sang it after he died. I asked her about it not so long ago and she said she had forgotten it, but I think she might have been fibbing.
That’s only nine, but I can’t think of anything else. Is that really bad of me?
I’m sometimes scared that I’m forgetting what my dad was like.
Look: put yourself in my shoes.
It’s been nearly a week now and the truth is, I’m not even sure whether to believe what the letter says. Would you?
And I’m thinking about this – what we believe and everything – when something occurs to me that sort of tips the balance in my indecision. (Indecision, by the way, which is now so bad and so distracting that last night I hardly slept at all and my form teacher, Miss Henry, kept me back after school for one of those, “Is everything all right with you?” chats.)
You see, my mum believes in ghosts, even though she told me there’s no such thing.
I’ve started to think about it now because of the letter from my dad and because I’ve been thinking about it, I’ve remembered this stuff from a book I tried to read called 2001: A Space Odyssey, which everyone thinks is just a film, but it’s actually a book as well, and the writer predicted loads of stuff long before it ever happened, like the satellites that let us use mobile phones, and men visiting the moon.
Anyway, in 2001 he said that, “behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts.” Now, by ‘man’ he meant ‘person’, because that’s how people wrote back then, and the ghosts thing just meant that for every person then alive, thirty people had died in history.
He wrote that in 1968 when the world’s population was about half of what it is now. If he was writing it now, it would be ‘behind every person now alive stand fifteen ghosts’.
That means that more than 100 billion people have died on earth since humans began, which is funny because that’s the number of stars in the Milky Way, according to my dad.
I don’t think Arthur C Clarke, who wrote it, believed in ghosts – I mean, actual proper ghosts like you get in stories, the kind that haunt places. Dad didn’t either – he told me so. Actually, what he said was that he thought it was ‘stupendously unlikely’. That’s what he used to say about things that he thought weren’t real, but that no one could prove.
Stupendously unlikely. It’s a cool phrase.
Like, you can’t prove that ghosts don’t exist, can you? All you can say is that it’s stupendously unlikely.
Mum wasn’t so cautious, though. I had a bad dream once when I was little, and I thought there was a ghost living in the loft and she told me – definitely and certainly – that there was no such thing as ghosts; that it was all just our imaginations.
So I grew up not believing in ghosts. Stuff like Scooby Doo was good fun and I got really scared one Christmas by a ghost in a play, but I knew it wasn’t real.
But after Dad died, Mum changed.
It wasn’t long after he had died, maybe a month, and I overheard Mum talking to Aunty Ellie. We were still living in Chesterton Road in Culvercot then. I couldn’t sleep so I had got up to get a glass of water and I heard them talking in the front room and I stayed to listen on the stairs.
“Come on, Sarah,” Aunty Ellie was saying, sort of soothing.
“No, I did, Ellie, I did, plain as day. He was standing right there. The funeral director was sitting where you’re sitting, and he came through the door, and sort of looked at me, and looked at Dennis Harrison and his mouth went ‘no!’ and he went out the door as quiet as anything.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, I was in a daze. I just stared, and Dennis Harrison saw me gaping at the door, and he asked me, ‘What’s the matter?’ and I said, ‘I’ve just seen Pye!’ and he just nodded. ‘A lot of people say that,’ he said.”
“And that was it?”
“That was it. He didn’t look like a ghost or anything.”
“What was he wearing?”
“Like, did he have a sheet on him? No, Ellie, he was wearing his normal stuff. His jeans, his blue cotton check shirt, you know? The one he liked.”
“Listen, honey, it’s a very stressful time, I think—”
“Ellie, don’t tell me I was imagining it. It was real, he was there. Right there!”
“I’m sure he was.”
“And don’t patronise me either.”
They stopped talking for a minute, then I heard, “Al? Is that you?”
But by the time Mum came out to check, I was back in bed.
I still don’t believe in ghosts. But what if Mum hadn’t seen a ‘ghost’?
What if she had really seen Dad, only that Dad was a ‘ghost’ from the past? In other words, what if Dad had travelled from a time before he was dead to a time after he was dead, and accidentally turned up while his own funeral was being planned?
I know. Stupendously unlikely. But it all pushes me further towards the decision I know I have to make, even though I still don’t know how I’m going to get from Blyth to Culvercot at night.
I’m going to do it. I’m going to follow my dad’s instructions, and travel in time.
I’m not sure it’s a good idea.
I’m still not.
Grandpa Byron was ten minutes early this morning, so I’m at school before everyone else, and he’s not in a hurry, so we’re just leaning on the low school wall. He lights a beedi. He’s wearing jeans today, and with his big boots and leather jacket and grey plait he looks like some really cool old Hell’s Angel from an American film, except for his moped, which is a tiny 50cc scooter, and mauve. Its top speed is 30 mph, less when there are two people on it.
He once let me ride it, just up the back alley. He showed me where it switched on, and how to twist the handle to make it go. He ran alongside of me to the end of the alley. It was pretty awesome.
I can smell the beedi and it’s nice, sort of fruity. He sees me sniffing and smiling.
“Mango,” he says. “I’m usually smoking vanilla-scented, but Baz had run out.” Baz is the guy who runs the shop that sells them.
“Have you always smoked them?” I ask, and he thinks about his answer before replying.
“Never much. Your Grandma Julie didn’t like the smell.”
“I like the smell.”
“I know, but when you are loving someone, you make compromises. Then when she died …” His voice tails off and he take
s another puff.
I had heard about Grandma Julie, but she died years ago due to ‘birth complications’ after Aunty Hypatia was born. I don’t know what that means, actually, but it’s what Grandpa Byron said. I’ve seen a photo of Grandma Julie that Dad had, though: she looked really nice and I’m sure I’d have liked her. When she died, Grandpa Byron and Hypatia and Dad lived in the same house in Culvercot for years. (It was only later that he moved up the coast to Blyth, quite close to where Mum and I ended up living.)
And then he asks me the question that I know is coming.
“Have you started reading the book yet?” He’s trying to sound dead casual, as if he doesn’t care one way or another, but I know he does.
I haven’t, not really. “Yeah!” I say, a bit too enthusiastically, but I don’t follow up with anything else, and my “yeah” kind of hangs in the air between us. Grandpa Byron glances over at me and waits.
“It’s … great, it’s just … not that easy to read sometimes?”
He smiles. Phew.
“Some things take a little bit of effort, Al, man. You want to know how I memorise all that stuff? Well, that takes effort an’ all. But it’s easier than you think. How far have you got?”
“A few pages.”
“Keep goin’, man. It’ll be worth it.”
Grandpa Byron has walked away from the wall to dispose of the beedi in a litter bin when Jolyon Dancey comes round the corner.
“Hey, look who it is! Come on, man – high five!”
I hold up my hand and he slaps it so hard that I wince, and then Jolyon notices Grandpa Byron walking back towards me and edges away without saying anything more.
“Who was that?” There’s something in Grandpa Byron’s tone, which is wary, as if he’s seen something he’s not keen on.