‘Maybe my numbers will come up this week?’ she said, holding up the tattered old lottery ticket that spent most of its life down the side of her chair. ‘Then we can get that house with a garden, and you can go back to college, like I promised.’
She was looking directly at him — her hand stroked his face. ‘You deserve a better life than this, Joshua.’ There were tears welling in her eyes.
‘This time next week, Mum. Yeah?’ He gave her one of his reassuring smiles and took her tray back to the kitchen.
‘Yeah,’ she echoed as her attention returned to her programme. ‘Did you get me some Rizzies?’
‘In your pot on the coffee table,’ he shouted as he dropped their plates into a sink of greasy, lukewarm water. The gas had been cut off two weeks ago and he had to boil the kettle to wash up. He checked the electricity meter. It was running low and in a couple of days they would be out of credit — which was bad news as it was another two weeks until her next disability cheque. He was going to have to sort something out — something that would get them through the winter.
He went into his bedroom and closed the door. It was just thick enough to block out the blare of the game show. The room hadn’t been redecorated since she’d got sick. Old posters of rally cars and Formula 1 trading cards were holding back the peeling wallpaper with drawing pins. There was hardly any furniture apart from a bed and you couldn’t see the carpet for his clothes that lay scattered across the floor, as if someone had detonated a sack full of charity-shop rejects. Next to the bed was a very badly assembled cabinet that he had rescued from a skip, it was barely holding together, and he knew how it felt.
Josh had never really been one to think about the future; he could just about manage to make it through the next twenty-four hours: ‘Makes more sense to live in the present tense.’ He knew that it couldn’t go on much longer, that there would have to be some big changes soon. Mum wasn’t getting any better and the frequency of her relapses was increasing.
He sat down on his bed and took out his journal from under the pillow. It had been his faithful companion during the long nights of watching over her, his only record of the nightmare that had been the last five years. Now held together with Sellotape and football stickers, he had kept track of every one of her episodes — documenting every day, every symptom, every drug until she recovered — he knew her condition better than any doctor.
As Josh flicked back through the pages, he realised that his handwriting had changed little since he had started all those years ago. To anybody else, it would look like the scrapbook of an eight-year-old, but he understood every misspelling, every reversed character — it was like his own secret language.
A Polaroid fell out from between the pages. It was an old photograph of the two of them on a beach. His mother looked so young and so well in the faded image. His younger-self was beaming as he held up an ice cream that was nearly as big as his face. There were hazy, fragmented memories of that day, it was Brighton or Bournemouth, somewhere with a beach, on one of those long hot summer days that seemed to go on forever. It was his sixth birthday, and she had taken him on an adventure to the coast by train. He could still remember the moment he saw the sea, it was quite a revelation to a kid who had grown up in the city — a wide curving horizon of blue that stretched beyond the edges of his vision. It made him wonder how big the world really was, and from that day he was determined to see what was over the ‘edge of the world’.
Those were the days when he used to dream of being a pilot, of flying all over the world, the last few golden years of his childhood before his mother’s illness forced him to forget such fantasies.
He used to convince himself that his father had taken the Polaroid, that the mysterious man whom his mother refused to talk about was standing on the other side of the lens. He would imagine what it would be like to go back through the image and speak to him — ask him why he had left.
He put the photo on the cabinet and lay down on the bed. It had been a crazy, messed-up day. His arms ached from the chopping and his stomach was undecided about keeping the meal he had just eaten.
He closed his eyes and tried to relax, letting his mind wander. He called it ‘drifting’. It was a trick he had discovered back in the classroom when he got tired of trying to read the books they gave him. It was like having a TV inside his head; he found he could replay old memories like they were DVDs or just make up new ones. The teachers called it ‘daydreaming’ and usually sent him to the headmaster.
The memory of the Nazi officer resurfaced, and Josh allowed it to run back and forth, looking for clues as to what was going on. He focused his attention on the things that had fallen out of his briefcase, the strange wax packages, the wires and the timer. He switched his focus to the expression on the man’s face as he went into the stall. The man had looked guilty — as if he had been caught red-handed. The more he went over the scene, the more convinced Josh was that the contents of the suitcase had looked like the parts of a bomb.
His eyes snapped back open.
That made no sense, he thought to himself. There was no way he had gone back in time and met an actual Nazi officer. It was more likely the colonel had some kind of fetish cosplay going on in the basement and he had fallen through a trapdoor. There would be a rational explanation for what had happened. Although it still didn’t explain how he had lost all of his clothes.
The possibilities were beginning to make his head ache, so he tried to think about something else.
He would take the medal down to Eddy in the morning. It should be worth enough to keep Lenin happy and get the electric topped up for another couple of weeks, giving him some breathing space to focus on getting a regular job — although there weren’t many he could apply for with his police record.
He closed his eyes and let out a long, slow sigh. Something would come up, as Mrs B used to say.
6
No Telly Eddy
Eddy had one of those trustworthy faces: his brown eyes were large, doe-like and sat on either side of one of the biggest noses Josh had ever seen. His hair was receding over his head in direct contrast to the beard that was sprouting from his chin. These features tended to give someone the impression of a kindly old gentleman, which was the one thing he was not.
Josh had sold Eddy a few things over the years, mostly old stuff his gran had left him when she died, and every single time he had come away feeling cheated. Eddy had an innate ability to know the value of a thing and then offer you less than half of what it was worth.
To the casual bystander he was the manager of a launderette — one that had the appearance of being constantly busy without ever having any visible customers. Josh knew this was just a front for the real business that took place out back beyond the beaded curtain, where he ran a very successful trade in buying and selling second-hand goods.
He took them in any condition, although he especially liked to fix electrical appliances: vacuum cleaners, washing machines, toasters, but not TVs. He hated them with a passion and it had earned him the nickname ‘No-Telly-Eddy’.
Eddy was a great believer in the free market, which meant he was happy to buy and sell just about anything, no questions asked.
The chill of morning melted away as Josh walked into the warm, tumble-dried air. It was like stepping into another climate. The washing machines were all droning away, each full of the soapy items of someone else’s life — he wondered if anyone ever actually turned up to collect them or whether Eddy just washed the same things over and over again.
Eddy was sitting in his usual spot behind the counter, busily disassembling a hair dryer, the component parts of which were laid out in careful order on the desk in front of him. He didn’t look up but simply raised a finger to acknowledge Josh’s existence and command him to wait.
There was a large pair of spectacles balanced on the end of his nose, which enlarged his eyes even more as he peered over them into the heart of the motor. With the concentration of a master wa
tchmaker he was carefully adjusting something with a long thin screwdriver.
‘These are always buggers to put back together,’ he muttered. ‘Bloody Chinese manufacturer uses cheap brushes in the motor — they wear out in days.’
There was another twist of the screwdriver and something wiry dropped out onto the counter. He looked up at Josh. ‘See what I mean? What can I do for you, Mr Jones?’
Josh had always admired Eddy’s style; — he spoke like an old-fashioned shopkeeper from Downton Abbey — even though Josh knew it was all an act. Eddy had grown up in London’s East End and had an evil temper when he didn’t get his own way. Some of his more naïve clients fell for it, which meant that they got ripped off even more than the regulars.
Josh pulled the medal from his jacket, still carefully wrapped in the newspaper. Eddy’s eyes narrowed as Josh unwrapped the precious object.
‘Let’s take this to my office, shall we?’ he whispered, glancing at the front door and closing Josh’s fingers back over the medal. The old man put his hand on Josh’s shoulder and guided him through the beaded curtain.
The back of the shop was an Aladdin’s cave of broken and part-repaired appliances, dimly lit by a random collection of low energy bulbs. It felt like Josh was entering the workshop of some mad inventor. It smelt of dead machines, of grease and metal, wires and solder.
‘So, Mr Jones, if you would be so kind as to let me inspect that lovely piece?’ Eddy asked as he put on a pair of thick leather gloves. He motioned towards a workbench with a bright desk lamp and a huge magnifying glass.
Josh unwrapped the paper bundle once more and placed it in the circle of light on the bench.
Eddy moved his spectacles onto his forehead and picked up the medal with a pair of long-nosed pliers. Josh knew Eddy was a little bit weird about germs and bacteria, but these precautions were excessive, even for him.
‘Hmm. 1944. Stauffenberg. SS long-service medal with oak cluster. Very rare, very rare indeed,’ Eddy noted as he turned the object over under the glass.
Josh congratulated himself; he’d known it had been a good one. The name still escaped him, but he was only interested in what it was worth, not what some dead German had done to earn it all those years ago — that was ancient history.
‘How much?’ Josh asked directly. He didn’t really have the time for Eddy’s Antiques Roadshow act.
‘That depends.’
Eddy placed it on some antique scales and began adjusting the weights.
‘On what?’
‘Just under four ounces of twenty-four-carat gold.’ Eddy pretended to do some maths in his head. ‘I would say it’s worth £500. But it depends on where it came from,’ said Eddy, putting the medal back on the newspaper.
‘You know better than to ask,’ Josh replied, smiling.
Eddy shrugged and placed his glasses back down on his nose.
‘Anything strange happen when you acquired it?’ he asked, fixing Josh with a piercing glare.
‘No. Why? Does it make it more valuable?’
It was Eddy’s turn to smile. ‘The thing about medals, apart from their base material value, is who they belonged to, the more notorious, the more their worth.’
‘I don’t care about its history — it’s just a lump of metal.’
‘Ah, but you should. This General Stauffenberg, for instance, was once a very important man, and he nearly killed the most evil dictator of the twentieth century.’
That was when the memory finally surfaced, like a birthday card that turns up two days late from your aunt with a tenner inside. It was a history lesson on the Second World War and the way Hitler had died in a bomb blast. Stauffenberg was the name of the officer that had taken the suitcase full of explosives into a meeting of the high council and ended the war. He was a hero, and this was his medal. Josh couldn’t believe that he had met the man that had killed Hitler.
‘So that makes it way more valuable. Yeah?’
‘Maybe, to the right people. Would be even more valuable if he had succeeded.’
That wasn’t right, Josh thought.
‘What do you mean — if? He did kill Hitler. I remember that much from school.’
Eddie looked at him strangely as if unsure of what to say next. Then he shook his head and handed him back the package.
‘No, my boy. I don’t know what they’ve been teaching you. But Hitler survived that particular attempt, and the war lasted another terrible year. It wasn’t until 1945 that the Allies took Berlin and Hitler committed suicide. The Nazi’s surrendered on the 8th of May — it’s called “Victory in Europe” or VE day.’
Josh was confused. He remembered the general in the washroom and the things that had fallen out of the suitcase. It had been a bomb, he was sure, but what kind of crazy shit was he dealing with now? It made no sense — VE day was today. The Nazis had surrendered after the death of Hitler in 1944; he could still hear his history teacher Miss Fieldhouse reading it out to the class.
‘Eddy. Stop messing around. Do you want to buy this or not?’
The bell chimed from the front door telling them that someone else had come into the shop.
‘Too specialist for my clientele, I’m afraid. The gold is worth something, but the medal would be worth £30,000 in the hands of the right dealer,’ he said, taking off the gloves as he made his way out of the workshop, ‘if it isn’t a fake, that is . . . Let yourself out.’
Before Josh could ask Eddy if he knew any dealers, he’d disappeared through the beaded curtain and begun talking to someone about the hair dryer.
Josh let himself out of the back door and stood for a moment watching the world go by. Nothing seemed any different; people looked just as dumb as they always had, the adverts on the sides of the buses pushed the same old crap — there was no sign that history had changed at all.
He decided Eddy must be pulling his leg — it was just part of a negotiation strategy to get the price down — but Josh didn’t have the time to play games. He thought about going back and threatening the old man, getting him to admit it was a wind-up, or at least give him the name of a specialist who might buy the medal from him. They could even negotiate some kind of finder’s fee for Eddy.
Except Josh knew better than to threaten Eddy, he was like an endangered species, protected by his clients, most of whom were way more dangerous than Lenin, and that was saying something. He had no choice but to find out for himself. It was Saturday so there was no community service today, and there would be a few more hours before Lenin would surface and come looking for him; time enough to do some digging of his own.
He started walking in the direction of Churchill Gardens. If the past had changed somehow, then VE day would have moved, and there would be nothing going on at the war memorial in the park today.
From a grimy upstairs window of his office, Eddy watched Josh until he disappeared from sight. Then went to his desk, unlocked the bottom drawer and took out a Bakelite telephone with a rotary dial. As the last number clicked back into place, there was burst of static in the earpiece — he took a deep breath and spoke slowly into the mouthpiece.
‘This is William Edward Taunton, Antiquarian 7-382. I wish to report a temporal deviation.’
7
Caitlin
When Josh got to the park, it was full of kids; a school fête had transformed the serene green space into a bouncy-castle showroom with a sideline of stalls selling home-made cakes and offering tombola prizes. There was no sign of the Salvation Army or their band and no WW2 veterans — no poppies and not one Union Jack.
Josh circumvented the ring of parents screaming encouragement at their hobbling children in the sack race and went over to the memorial. The weather-beaten brass statue of a lone soldier stood sentinel above him with the dates of the two world wars: 1914—18 and 1939—45 etched into a brass plaque at his feet. Josh scanned down the names that were listed on each of the sides of the marble base, running his finger over those that died in 1945 as if to check they we
re real. The metal letters were cold and hard under his fingers, and he could feel the pitted edges where acid rain had eaten into the surface. Nothing was making sense, he thought. Was he the only one that remembered it differently? How do you go about asking someone without sounding like you’re going mad?
He felt the medal in his pocket, and knew he had to find out more about it. He needed to find a dealer, but had no idea where to start. They could never afford a PC, broadband or even a smart phone at home. It had never really bothered him that much until now; electrical stuff always used to go wrong when he came near it, which was useful for disabling car alarms but not much else. It was the same with watches — they would just stop working for no apparent reason.
A grumpy parent announced over the PA that the tae-kwon-do demonstration was about to start and a crowd of candy-floss-fuelled kids swarmed to a roped-off square of grass. Josh took one more look at the memorial and walked out of the park in the direction of the local library.
Aside from graphic novels, Josh had never been a big fan of books. At school his reading levels were way lower than those of the other kids. His numeracy was higher than average, and maps were his absolute favourite. So they assigned him a special teaching assistant and that worked well for a year or two, but then his mum got ill and they had to move to a poky little flat and a different school. Without the dedicated teaching, his grades dropped, as did his interest in education. At sixteen, with no real qualifications and very little in the way of job prospects, his offender manager had managed to get him onto a car-mechanics course at college, which, even though it was mostly practical, still had a heavy amount of theory — something he failed miserably at.
Libraries were alien places to Josh. To him they were just drop-in centres for the homeless and old people. He hadn’t been inside one since a school trip in year eight to the Bodleian in Oxford. That had been like something out of another century, stacks of books that nobody read, lined up in the vain hope that someone would borrow one. ‘Where books go to die,’ Mrs B had remarked when he’d told her about it afterwards.
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