The Yoghurt Plot

by Fleur Hitchcock

  I reach my hand towards the plastic bag and close my fingers. It sags in my hand, as if it’s finally giving up.

  ‘You’ll never get either. Madge wouldn’t agree. She loves that house. And the seafront? Not in a month of Sundays. You’d need the luck of the devil to have that happen. More tea, Ed?’ says the woman’s voice. ‘George?’

  ‘Thanks, Mum,’ a boy replies.

  I shuffle backwards, grazing my elbows on the tarmac. But I’m not really aware of that. I’m thinking about all the things I’ve heard back here in the past. This is the same father and son talking. The ones that I saw in 1970-something, polishing cars in the shiny new showroom. In that reality, the pier burned down. In this one, where we caught the gerbils, the pier shouldn’t burn down. But it did, because Granddad said it did and it’s not there in 2014.

  So why did it burn down the second time?

  ‘Bugg?’ It’s Lorna. She’s standing there, holding one of her gerbils, looking really worried. ‘Did you get it?’

  I hold the bag out past the car wheel and her face creases into a smile. ‘Oh, what a relief! Mum would have killed me if I’d lost the shop.’

  ‘Lorna, if you’d lost the shop, she’d never have known it existed in the first place. She’d have grown up somewhere else, with another shop.’

  ‘What?’

  I sigh. Some people don’t understand the very simplest principals of time travel.

  Chapter 17

  The man is back in the garden, planting the tree which means that the big apron woman will be back in the kitchen, ready to shout at us. We stop at the garden gate.

  ‘Perhaps we should try a different way?’ suggests Lorna, stuffing the gerbils deep inside her pockets.

  ‘Like what?’ I ask, but I’m too late to have doubts, because Lorna swings in through the gate.

  ‘S’cuse me, any chance of a glass of water?’

  The man straightens up, putting his hand on his lower back as if to push the bottom of his spine into place. ‘Ask the missus; she’s in there.’

  ‘Here?’ asks Lorna, eyes wide, her hand on the kitchen door handle.

  The man nods and drives his spade into the ground.

  Lorna opens the door and smiles sweetly. ‘Hello,’ she calls. I lurk behind, ready to run, although where I’d run I can’t imagine.

  ‘Yes?’ Big apron woman fills the doorway.

  ‘Could we please have a glass of water?’

  The woman stares hard at Lorna. ‘Do I know you? Were you … ?’ but she shakes her head, as if dismissing the thought.

  I peer past the woman to the clock over the doorway. Seven thirty-five. We’re later than we were last time, she’s already met us, but looking at her face she’s confused, rather than angry. Which of course you would be if you had two children who appeared and broke into your fridge before disappearing into thin air. And it happened more than once. In fact, from what she said before, several times.

  ‘Water?’ says Lorna, stepping right into the kitchen, so that I can stand behind her, my back to the fridge.

  The fridge purrs. It lets out a long low rumble.

  ‘Oh yes.’ The woman turns her back and reaches up into a painted cupboard for two rounded glasses. ‘Water.’

  Lorna nudges me, but she doesn’t need to. I whip round, yank open the door to the fridge and grab two modern-looking yoghurts. There are no spoons, so I pass one put to Lorna and rip back the lid of my own before tipping the contents down my throat. I gaze out of the window towards the pier as the surroundings fade. It’s still there as we go, flag fluttering in the breeze, but by the time everything stops changing, like the blue and white lino on the floor, it’s gone – it’s burned down.

  Chapter 18

  Our kitchen’s a bomb site just as it should be, and there’s no nursing-services coat hanging over the back of a chair.

  Lorna immediately starts to play with the plastic letters on the fridge. They’ve bred since we’ve been away. CAUTION, TIME, DARE and SMNLND.

  ‘You’d almost think they meant something,’ she says, this time writing: TIMED SOME CAR LAND TUN IN.

  She takes one of the gerbils out of her pocket and kisses it. ‘Can you read it, clever Bunfight? You’ve time-travelled, you know, and we did it, you clever little gerbil! We saved the world.’ I can’t be bothered to point out that she nearly lost the world with her stupid carrier bag, so I open the lounge door to check on Granddad. He’s waltzing with a small table, swinging it gently from side to side, watching more feathered couples whipping around the dance floor at maximum volume. He seems fine. At least, he seems much more normal than he did after the gerbil version of history, but he’s a long way from the man we saw dancing on the pier.

  ‘Where’s Dilan?’ I ask.

  Granddad bumps into the telly, ‘’Aven’t a clue.’

  ‘Granddad – how did the pier burn down?’

  Granddad’s head swings round to face me. ‘They never said.’ His face clouds over. ‘Or did they?’ He looks back at the TV and seems to forget me completely.

  ‘Could they tell what caused the fire?’

  Dilan comes into the room and drops his skateboard on the floor. ‘Why are we asking this?’ he says to me.

  ‘Because it wasn’t the gerbils. We rescued them before they did any damage, but it still burned down.’

  Granddad pulls his forehead into a frown of concentration and gazes at the swirling figures on the screen. There’s only the faintest suggestion of the dashing man we saw in the beautiful ballroom. A tiny spark of youth that leaps into his eyes for a millisecond. ‘We were supposed to be dancing that night, me and young Doreen. Doreen was your dad’s babysitter, you know – lovely girl. We’d practised and practised; we’d worked so hard. We’d been dancing all day every day—’

  ‘So when did it happen?’ I ask, wishing I hadn’t interrupted, but desperate to know the answers.

  ‘2nd July 1974.’

  I feel a sudden jolt of surprise and turn to Dilan. ‘That’s when … ’

  Dilan nods and makes the motion of zipping his mouth.

  ‘And it was tragic, tragic – ended my career, you know, mine and others … ’

  ‘Yes, but Granddad, what actually happened?’ says Dilan.

  ‘Yes, how did the fire start?’ With my fingertips I clear a circle in the sea of tissues and sit down on the carpet.

  Granddad stares out of the window, using the sky for inspiration. ‘It was seven o’clock.’ He rubs the drip from the end of his nose on his dressing-gown sleeve. ‘Seven o’clock, or was it quarter past?’ Already, I can see the spark is fading. The old shell covering the young man’s memories.

  ‘Around seven then?’ says Dilan, whirling the wheels on his skateboard.

  There’s a long silence. ‘Seven fifteen, I think. The judges were due to come in and take their places. We had Ted Mildenhall, from the Palace Dance Theatre in London, and Anita Smears – she was a name back then. I was in the green room, polishing my shoes, again.’ He gets up and shuffles across the room to his bedroom door; he opens it and slips inside.

  ‘Has he forgotten what he’s doing?’ whispers Lorna, settling onto the arm of the sofa, almost the only place not covered in tissues.

  But Granddad comes back, the same slow pace, the same bent back. This time he’s holding a pair of dusty black shoes. He grips his dressing-gown cuff and rubs the sleeve over the dust. Underneath, the cracked black leather shines.

  He lets out a long, shuddering sigh. ‘These shoes, my lucky shoes.’ He sighs again and sits back, staring at the telly, the shoes slipping to the floor.

  ‘And … ?’ says Dilan. ‘What happened next?’

  Granddad’s brow furrows, he looks at the back of his hand and leans across to take the remote control from the top of the television. He blinks as if he’s waking up. ‘Have you got anything to eat? I’m starving.’

  Chapter 19

  ‘We were there then,’ I say. ‘2nd July 1974 – it must have been for a
reason.’

  ‘No, we weren’t. We were in 1969,’ says Lorna, sticking her finger into a peanut-butter jar and hooking a blob into her mouth. ‘Or was it 1970?’

  ‘No, the first time,’ I say. ‘We were there that very day – and we met Dave Dando. We were there an hour beforehand.’

  Dilan nods. ‘We did. Dave Dando at six o’clock on 2nd July – and the pier was still there.’

  ‘So your Granddad was still dancing in 1974?’ says Lorna. ‘Still that smart bloke in the suit?’

  ‘I can’t help remembering him on the dance floor in 1969,’ says Dilan. ‘Whisking Doreen around, looking so … so sharp, so happy.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘And when we went back to catch the gerbils, he was brilliant – not like … ’

  ‘Sad,’ says Lorna, saying the word in my head. We sit in silence, staring at different things in the kitchen, thinking.

  ‘So somehow we went back to one hour before the fire broke out on the very day that the pier burned down. So if we hadn’t panicked –’ Dilan stares at me – ‘we’d have been there when the fire broke out. We might actually have seen what happened ourselves.’

  ‘So who else would know what happened that night?’ I ask in the end, trying to reach for the thing in the back of my mind that’s bothering me.

  ‘Why are you so worried about it?’ says Lorna. ‘What happened, happened – it was meant to happen.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Dilan, ‘she’s right. It was meant to happen. Stuff happens all the time; there are giant natural disasters; people have car accidents. They’re awful, but they’re not really preventable. I mean, if we all rushed around preventing things that happened, we’d be going backwards all the time. In fact we’d barely ever go forwards.’

  ‘I could, for example,’ says Lorna, ‘not have banged my nose and had a nosebleed the other day. I could go back in time and stop myself.’

  ‘What good would that have done?’ asks Dilan

  ‘Um … ’ Lorna’s face falls and she wrinkles her nose up at Dilan in fury.

  ‘But was it?’ I ask.

  ‘What?’ says Dilan.

  ‘Was it really meant to happen?’ I say. ‘How do we tell the difference between what was meant to happen and what happened because someone else fiddled with it?’

  ‘You’ve lost me there, Bugg,’ says Dilan.

  I try to disentangle all the snippets I’ve overheard so that I can explain what’s been lurking in my head. That’s what that other boy said. Make your own luck. It was nothing to do with me. I wasn’t here all the time. Wasn’t here?

  ‘Supposing … we weren’t the first people to time-travel here, using the yoghurt and the fridge?’

  ‘Is there someone else doing it? Someone in our kitchen we haven’t noticed?’ asks Dilan.

  ‘Ooh!’ says Lorna, looking around for an invisible person. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. This house was empty for ages before you moved into it.’

  ‘Was it?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh yes. Mum said it was a shame, such a lovely house with a lovely garden.’

  ‘Anyway, yes – and no. I don’t know exactly if there’s anyone else, or who they might be – or at least I’m not sure. It’s just I can’t help feeling that time’s been messed with already. Before we messed about with it.’

  Dilan sighs. Lorna fiddles with the fridge letters. I TIMED SCONE AN LARD TUMN.

  I stare at the fridge. It howls and tweets, but gives me nothing more.

  They all wait for me to explain myself.

  ‘OK, what I mean is, if you watch any film or TV programme about time travel, they always say you mustn’t fiddle with time. You could change history, and not always in a good way. You could end up not being born, your parents might not be born – all that stuff. Yes?’

  ‘It’s not just films, Bugg, it’s you,’ says Lorna, sitting back down and flicking a bread crumb across the table. ‘Remember all that “ping” stuff?’

  ‘But – supposing someone’s changed history already. Someone’s fiddled about with time, messed it up, changed other people’s fortunes, bettered their own.’

  ‘You said that,’ says Lorna. ‘That there’s been someone else doing it.’

  Dilan looks up. ‘Are you saying that we could break the time rules, that we could interfere, because we’d be putting right someone else’s time mistakes?’

  ‘Well, yes. Exactly.’ I stand up and fiddle with the letters on the fridge. TEND A COLD TRAIN IN SUMMER – I need another R. ‘Do you remember what that big woman with the apron said? The one that lived here. Something about what happened last time and a boy.’

  ‘Where’s here?’

  I point at the floor. ‘This house. When Lorna and I went back to 1969 the second time, we met this woman, here in the kitchen. She said something about someone else stealing things out of her fridge.’

  ‘Who – why?’ asks Dilan.

  ‘That’s why I wanted to ask Granddad about what exactly happened when the pier burned down. The second time – or the real time, the time that we knew about back then, when we were in the now. I want to know who was there and who wasn’t. How exactly the fire started and why the fire brigade didn’t get there to put it out … ’ I stop. They’re both staring at me as if I’m utterly mad. ‘And I want to know who lived in this house.’

  Dilan leans back in his chair, balancing it on the two back legs. He looks at me sideways. ‘Bugg, you are nuts. You do know that? I’ve spent my whole life proving to you there are no Frankenstein’s monsters in the airing cupboard – so instead you’ve invented a conspiracy theory about a pier, a fridge and a house.’

  I think back to the fragments I heard. ‘No, it’s not a theory. This is definitely real. I can’t prove anything because I didn’t record anyone saying it, but I’m sure something’s going on – not here, not now, but in a parallel time stream, someone’s up to no good. Someone from the nearer past visited the further past, and changed history. They did it using this house, this fridge and these yoghurts.’

  ‘Hey.’ The door from the lounge swings open and Granddad shuffles in. ‘I’m hungry. Any pie or anything?’

  I open the fridge. The whole of yesterday’s shop is still there, carrots and potatoes and raw meat. Dilan stares in too.

  ‘Not a clue what to do with it,’ he says.

  I shake my head. I don’t know either.

  ‘So are Mum and Dad part of all this, or is that just an accident?’ Dilan pokes at a piece of chicken as if it might magically transform itself into a casserole with accompanying vegetables.

  ‘I think Mum and Dad disappearing is an accident,’ I say. ‘Unless looking for them is part of the whole thing.’

  ‘Hmm,’ says Dilan. ‘Accident or no, we’re going to have to think of a way of getting them back. Just now though, I really wish we could come up with a way of feeding ourselves.’

  ‘I can boil an egg,’ says Lorna. ‘Would that do?’

  Granddad looks at her with appreciation. ‘With soldiers?’

  Chapter 20

  I learn from Lorna how to boil an egg, while Dilan has another go with Granddad. They sit at the kitchen table. Granddad draws pictures in spilled sugar on the top. He draws a pair of high-heeled shoes, with bows.

  ‘So, Granddad,’ says Dilan, ‘when the pier burned down … ’

  ‘ … That was a terrible night. I was polishing my shoes, you know, getting up a shine – shall I show you? I’ve still got them … ’

  ‘That’s all right, thanks, Granddad. I’ve seen them. I wanted to know what happened next.’

  The eggs come to the boil and Lorna sets a timer.

  ‘As easy as that?’ I ask.

  She nods. ‘Frying them’s pretty simple too. Can you make toast?’

  ‘What happened next … ?’ Granddad stares into the sugar crystals. ‘What happened next? I was young once. I’m still eighteen inside, you know. Under this old body. You can’t see the young man, can you? Just the old fool.’

  None
of us quite knows what to say to that.

  After a long time I say, ‘So, Granddad, can you remember what you did next, after shining your shoes?’

  Granddad seems to wake up. He stands, and takes Lorna’s hand. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he asks. Then, putting his arm gently on her waist and taking a graceful hold of her left hand, he takes half a dozen tiny light steps. For a moment he looks like the Dad/Granddad man we saw back in 1969. Then he swings Lorna round the kitchen table and then releases her so that she spins over to thump against the bin. ‘We were going to start with a tango. That was certainly the plan. The ballroom was full, packed to the gunnels. We had Ted Mildenhall judging, you know, and the prize pot was massive.’ He picks a noodle from his pyjamas. ‘Derek Simmons and Verity Cowley were our main rivals, and they were simmering, dancing out of their shoes that season, but Doreen and I, we had hopes, great hopes.’ Granddad slumps back into the chair as if someone’s pulled the plug.

  The toaster ticks as we wait to hear more, but Granddad’s stopped. Like an old record when it runs out and the arm lifts back over to the side.

  ‘So did Derek Simmons and Verity Cowley dance?’ I ask in the end.

  ‘What?’ says Granddad. ‘When?’

  ‘On the night the ballroom burned down,’ says Lorna.

  ‘Oh – I can’t remember – I just remember the flames. Twice the height of the building they were. Six fire engines, a sea full of water, but they couldn’t put it out. They came too late, you see.’ He shakes his head. ‘Tragic, utterly tragic.’ Granddad chops the top from his first boiled egg and the deep yellow yolk pours down the shell. ‘It was almost as if it was on purpose.’

  I spread butter on the toast and cut it into fingers. Dilan sneaks a slice from the plate, and Lorna looks longingly at the rest of the badly sliced loaf standing on the side.

  Almost as if it was on purpose.

  Once we’ve got Granddad settled in front of the TV, and some more eggs on the go, we talk. It feels as if I’ve been awake for days, which I suppose I have, and I’m starting to get confused.