The Winning Side

by Lance Parkin

Emily looked around. She didn’t know very much about Russia. But she knew it was a big country. It straddled the world from the ice to the desert, from Europe to China. There must be parts of it with the same climate as England. It was as good a theory as they had.

  How they got here was another question.

  ‘Chloroform,’ Lechasseur said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she wondered if it was a Russian place name.

  ‘We were knocked out. Flown to Russia. It took hours – that’s why it’s night.’

  Again, this all made sense.

  Emily’s spirits were lifted at the thought they were making progress. And they’d reached a junction where the path met a wider, tarmac road. She had the real sense they would soon solve this mystery.

  Then they found a road sign.

  LEEDS 83 KM.

  ‘Perhaps there’s a Leeds in...’ Emily started to say, before stopping herself.

  ‘Fifty-two miles,’ Lechasseur said.

  ‘It must be about that,’ she agreed.

  ‘The sign...’

  ‘It’s in kilometres. English road signs are in miles.’

  ‘It’s in miles,’ he said defiantly. Then, a little less certainly, ‘miles and kilometres.’

  Emily really couldn’t see how to argue her case.

  ‘We should find somewhere safe to sit down and work this out,’ she suggested instead.

  ‘Why not here?’

  ‘If there are tanks here, it’s not safe. There will be a farm building, something like that, close by. Let’s find it.’

  It took them less than ten minutes. A barn. Although Emily couldn’t work out quite how its roof was staying on. There wasn’t a door. It was full of bales of hay, with scraps of rusted farm machinery sitting on a bench laid against one wall.

  Honoré was pacing around, reminding her of a drunk. He’d had pretty bad shell shock during the war. Perhaps this was a relapse, brought on by seeing the tank. Although it had started before then, come to think of it.

  Emily was grateful to sit down. Her shoes were caked in mud. She tried wiping some of it off with a handful of straw.

  ‘Kilometres,’ Lechasseur said.

  ‘Yes,’ Emily said, puzzled.

  ‘On an English road sign?’

  ‘We don’t know that we’re in England.’

  Lechasseur was silent. She couldn’t see him very well, but knew what he was thinking: of course this is England. He was looking for any certainties.

  ‘We don’t know that for a fact,’ she reminded him. ‘How would we prove it?’

  Emily started to look around. She stood and stepped over to the workbench. The pieces of machinery could have been anything, although they looked like engine parts. She moved one chunk aside, and tugged up the scrap of newspaper it had been rested on.

  ‘You think you can use your gift?’ Emily wasn’t all that clear on how Honoré’s ability to see the timelines worked. She wasn’t sure he was.

  He looked distracted.

  ‘Can you read this?’ she asked him, pressing the paper into his hand.

  He glanced at it, then passed it back. ‘Can you?’

  Emily assumed he meant that he couldn’t in the darkness, but when she peered at him, she saw the problem. The newspaper was printed in a language that looked more like a telegram than English prose. It didn’t seem beyond her, though it would take a little time to decipher. There was a picture of a tank just like the one they’d seen, sat in countryside just like the countryside they were in. She started at the top.

  ‘Honoré. Look at the date.’

  2 MARCH 1980

  It was an old newspaper. Lechasseur studied it carefully for almost a minute, squinting at it like he needed glasses.

  ‘A woman Prime Minister,’ he said, almost laughing. ‘An actor standing for President. It’s a joke. It’s some sort of hoax.’

  Emily looked at the paper again. ‘Where?’ she asked.

  ‘The picture,’ he insisted.

  ‘It’s a photograph of a tank.’

  ‘No!’ As Lechasseur took the paper back, he almost dropped it, as if he’d snatched a branding iron.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I can see it. This paper’s a few years old. It was brought in here to mop up oil. It was read by a woman and her family. Two sons, her father. It was printed in London. It...’

  He dropped the newspaper, apologising.

  ‘It was printed in 1980,’ he confirmed.

  ‘We’re in the future,’ Emily said quietly. It explained everything they’d seen. It didn’t give them a single clue how they’d ended up here.

  ‘There’s a farmhouse near here. Or there was when the paper was brought in here.’

  ‘Fresh hay,’ she said. ‘Fresh hay and ploughed fields – the farm is still running. If we talk to them, they might be able to help.’

  Lechasseur was sat on the floor, clutching his head. ‘Stop it!’ he shouted.

  Emily tried to shush him. It worked, after a fashion. But they weren’t going to convince any of the locals of anything if they saw him in this state. She told him to stay where he was while she went to the farmhouse. Lechasseur was grateful, telling her he only wanted some peace so that he could figure things out for himself.

  Emily was just as grateful for some peace of her own.

  She made her way out of the barn. She wasn’t sure, but she thought it was beginning to get light. The sky on the horizon was a deep, rich blue, not the black of night.

  It was quiet.

  Emily was beginning to doubt her own sanity. Not as much as she was doubting Honoré’s, of course, but a rational approach to take was that her mind was far more likely to flip over and go wrong than the entire rest of the universe. She had no memories from more than a few months ago, when she was found on the bombsite; she’d seen her own dead body yesterday; she’d been attacked twice in the street since then. She had to face the possibility that she was suffering some form of shock and so couldn’t rely on her perceptions.

  Emily decided, instead, to enjoy the sunrise for a moment. It was quite flat countryside, but not completely flat. If this was England, it was the Cotswolds or the Yorkshire Dales, not Cumbria or East Anglia. As the sunlight made its first sorties into the countryside below, Emily was struck by how beautiful it was. And how timeless. Of course, there was evidence of man – the field patterns and the grazing sheep wouldn’t be there without agriculture – but this place would look much the same if they’d travelled two hundred years into the past, or two hundred years into the future.

  How did she know that? About the future?

  She shook her head, trying to dislodge a thought, then realised that there was someone looking at her.

  It was a woman in her mid-sixties, possibly older. She was short, dowdy in worn work clothes. Her hair had tinges of red among the grey. Emily didn’t like to speculate if it was tinted or not.

  ‘Hello?’ Emily said slowly.

  The woman looked her up and down, almost confused.

  ‘Those clothes,’ she said finally.

  Emily wouldn’t have stood out from the crowd in London in 1949, and it only now dawned on her that she must have looked quite remarkable.

  ‘You’ve ruined them shoes,’ the woman scowled. ‘Nice shoes.’

  Her own boots looked worn through.

  Emily introduced herself. The woman wasn’t interested, and looked minded to turn away and go back to whatever she’d been doing.

  ‘Um... is your husband around?’ Emily asked.

  ‘Died twelve years back,’ she replied.

  ‘Right... er... your son? Sons?’ she said, remembering what Honoré had seen.

  ‘At the front. Both of them.’

  Emily found herself craning her neck to look for the front of the building before
she realised what the woman was saying.

  ‘The battle front?’ Emily asked.

  ‘Ay.’

  Emily remembered the newspaper. Honoré had said it was years old, and it looked like it, and there had been a tank on the front of that.

  ‘The war’s been going on a long time,’ Emily suggested. ‘Too long.’

  The woman looked at Emily as though her next observation was going to be that the sun came up in the morning or that you got wool from sheep. Emily hesitated before saying anything else. The woman kept standing there, just looking at her, a little suspiciously. She didn’t look nervous or angry. Just weary.

  ‘Where are we?’ Emily asked.

  ‘My farm.’

  ‘I mean...’

  ‘Village is down there,’ she said, pointing down the hill. Then she turned away and started trudging off to one of the other outbuildings. Their conversation was over, and Emily was left wondering whether to tell Honoré where she was going. She could see the roofs of the village behind the rise now she’d been pointed towards them. It was five minutes walk at most. Still very early in the morning, but farmers got up early, didn’t they? There would be at least some people around.

  The village was little more than a dozen limestone cottages, a pub and a shop. The road was pocked with potholes and had crumbled away altogether for one stretch where there was more hole than road.

  It was getting light by the time Emily arrived. There was no obvious sign of life: no lights at the windows, or smoke coming up from the chimneys. On the way down, Emily was sure she’d heard a plane. It had been a spluttering engine sound at any rate, possibly a motorbike or small van in the distance.

  A side door of the shop was open, and a woman was putting out a bale of newspapers.

  ‘Hello there,’ Emily said, trying to sound cheerful.

  The woman barely looked up.

  ‘I was looking for, er, some breakfast.’

  The woman shuffled aside, and it took Emily a moment to realise she was being invited inside. The shop was dark, and smelt of cabbage. The shelves were almost bare. There were a couple of drab packets of powdered milk, some faded stationery. The windows were shuttered and the only source of light was a television set into the wall, which cast flickering sepia light over the shop, draining any chance of colour from the room. Emily stared into the screen, mesmerised by the pictures of warships ploughing through the sea, firing their cannons at some unseen enemy. Her own face was reflected in the screen. She realised just how much she stood out here, compared with the two local women. She had the merest hint of lipstick, barely a dusting of foundation, but she looked almost impossibly glamorous, like she belonged on the screen, not on the other side, staring in.

  ‘Anything you want here?’ the woman said. She was busying herself at the counter.

  There wasn’t much to choose from. Emily glanced back at the woman, who looked away a little too quickly.

  Emily wasn’t sure why, but she felt she should leave. She made her way to the door, and found it blocked by a young man in a grey uniform, who was clearly some sort of military policeman.

  ‘Show me your papers,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t have any... any of them with me,’ Emily said, acutely aware he’d have noticed the change of story halfway through the sentence.

  There had been a minute when the shopkeeper could have telephoned the police, she supposed, but only the barest minute. Had it been the old woman up at the farm who’d tipped the police off?

  ‘Arms up,’ he ordered, then moved over, patted her down. He might have been searching for her papers, weapons or something else. But there was nothing there for him to find. He didn’t seem to take any pleasure in the procedure, which was something, at least.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  Emily wished she knew. ‘London,’ she answered.

  ‘Why are you dressed like that?’

  ‘It’s just the way I dress.’

  ‘Your work?’

  She wasn’t sure what she was being asked. Did she dress like this because of her work? Did a skirt and a dab of lipstick really mark her out as a whore?

  ‘I do office work,’ she told him.

  ‘In London?’

  She nodded.

  ‘You’re a long way from the office.’

  ‘I’m on holiday.’

  He looked at her almost as though he was sorry.

  ‘Come with us.’

  It was only then she saw the other four uniformed men outside, behind him.

  4

  Emily was put in the back of a rusty van, painted the same grey as their uniforms. It had been the van’s engine that she had heard as she was walking down to the village. Three of the men sat in the bench seat at the front, the other two sat opposite her, sorting through the newspapers, checking every page for something.

  ‘These are fine,’ one of them said, when they’d studied them all.

  ‘Um... what were you doing just then?’ Emily asked.

  ‘What did it look like?’

  ‘It looks like you were checking to make sure all the pages were there. But why?’

  ‘It’s our duty to recycle,’ one of them chuckled. ‘Nothing should go to waste.’

  Emily wasn’t happy with the answer, but their task done, the two men had lapsed into a sullen silence.

  Emily couldn’t see out of the van, but from the lurching and often slow progress, she got the sense they were travelling along dirt paths as often as they were on proper tarmac. The three men in the front were having some sort of discussion about the quality of the road.

  She estimated the journey took twenty minutes. Given all the stopping and starting, she wondered if they couldn’t have arrived at their destination faster by walking. She was pulled out of the van by the two men with her. They’d parked – or broken down, she couldn’t be sure – on the long, sweeping drive of a manor house. There had clearly once been lawns running here, but they’d all been dug up, and now there were rows of vegetables, with unruly patches of grass here and there. A handful of men and women in overalls were tending to them.

  The manor house would never have been beautiful. It was low and the bricks were dark. Over the years it had been extended, and any symmetry there might once had been had broken long ago. Some of the windows had been filled in with ugly cinder blocks. The most remarkable feature, though, was that a great patch of the frontage was covered with posters. Or, rather, many examples of the same small poster of a man in a flat cap with a shovel, surrounded by the words

  DIG FOR VICTORY

  One poster on its own would have been lost on such a large house. So another had been placed up next to it, then another. As they’d faded, more posters had been pasted over them, and they’d spread out and up, like ivy. The stark, simple effect of the poster had been completely lost. It made it look as if a part of the house had been constructed from papier mâché, or as if it had a scab.

  Emily was pushed inside the house. The hallway was small and unimpressive, and had been stripped of its curtains, paintings and carpets.

  She was shown upstairs, locked in one of the rooms. Unpainted plaster spotted with damp and bare floorboards.

  It was evidently one of the rooms that had had its windows covered up with the posters. The morning light was streaming through the reversed lettering and the fractured, recurring images of the smiling farmer’s face and shovel, like grey and red stained glass. It was, in its way, almost beautiful.

  The door unlocked after what seemed like moments, and a man in his forties stepped in. The door closed and locked behind him. He was wearing overalls, and it looked like he had hurriedly dressed to get here – his hair looked a little untidy, he hadn’t shaved. He carried a tatty cardboard folder.

  ‘Name?’ he asked.

  ‘Emily Blandish,’ she said.

&nbs
p; He noted it on the front of his file, propping it against the wall to write. He had to shake the pen to get it to work.

  ‘You’re from London? You work in an office?’

  ‘Er... yes.’ There had barely been time for the policeman who’d brought her in to compare notes with this man.

  He pulled out a photograph and checked it was of her.

  Emily blinked, tried to work out when it had been taken. It was the village shop in the background.

  ‘The television was watching me?’ she asked.

  He looked up from writing something on the back of the photograph, but didn’t feel the need to reply.

  ‘No papers?’ he asked instead.

  ‘No, like I told the –’

  ‘Your number?’

  ‘My – ?’

  He made another note on the back of the photograph.

  ‘You’re a long way from London. Explain.’

  Emily decided to tell the truth.

  ‘I can’t.’

  The man sighed.

  ‘I really can’t. I was in London, then I was in a field.’ She realised she’d edited Honoré out of her story. She hesitated for a moment, but knew she was right to. He was still out there. ‘I think I might have lost my memory.’

  ‘You think?’

  Emily remembered the intense scrutiny after she’d appeared on the bombsite. The doctors, psychiatrists, journalists. She could make this story stick because it wasn’t so very far from the truth.

  ‘Yes. I have amnesia.’

  ‘You know the term?’ he asked, throwing her a little until it occurred to her what he must mean.

  ‘With most forms of amnesia, it’s the short term memory that’s lost. People remember their names, how to speak, all the day to day stuff.’

  He watched her closely. ‘Quite the expert,’ he concluded. ‘How do you explain your fancy clothes?’

  Emily looked down at her dress. It had seemed rather drab this morning. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘But you understand why I’m asking?’

  Emily smiled. ‘Because it’s a bit colourful for this year’s fashion.’