Anachronist

by Andrew Hastie

  Dalton was standing waiting for him on the other side of the gate, his profile a black silhouette against the moonlit marble tombs. The grey walls of a sprawling necropolis stretched out behind him for miles. Josh could see Caitlin was standing next to him, she was protesting about something, but Josh couldn’t hear what it was about. The others were climbing down into the stone avenues of the crypts. The gate was another way into Highgate Cemetery, not somewhere he had ever really wanted to spend any time, but it was different and kind of exciting.

  ‘He’s not one of us!’ he heard Dalton say.

  ‘He is under my jurisdiction. You have to let him try.’

  As Josh came through the gate, she turned towards him. ‘Josh. There is something I need to explain.’ She sounded serious and incredibly sober.

  ‘No need. I know when I’m not welcome.’ Josh’s head was spinning. The night air was making him feel a little weird.

  ‘See. Even he knows!’ said Dalton, slurring his words. ‘You can’t just go picking up any oik off the street because he shows a little talent.’

  ‘Who are you calling an oik?’ asked Josh, his temper flaring. He was finding it hard not to punch the pompous git in the face.

  ‘You really know how to pick them, Cat. I’ve seen his type before — they’re destined to fail.’

  Josh had the feeling that there was more to this conversation than he knew. He wanted an explanation, and he felt his fists tightening as he thought about how he was going to get it.

  ‘Josh. Listen to me,’ said Caitlin calmly. ‘He’s just looking to provoke a reaction. Don’t give him the satisfaction.’

  ‘Yes, Josh. Be a good boy. Do as you’re told. Wouldn’t want Mummy to get upset now, would we? Not in her condition.’

  That was the final straw, Josh lashed out with his right hand and punched Dalton in the jaw. Dalton went down hard. It was possibly the most satisfying thing he had done in years, suddenly all of the pent up frustration and anger broke free, and he was on top of Dalton hitting him as hard as he could.

  ‘JOSH!’

  He could hear Caitlin screaming from somewhere far away. He didn’t care. He was focused on destroying everything that was wrong in his life. Dalton was Lenin, MS, the father he had never known, all these things and more. He felt the punches landing one after the other and with each one a door opened to more painful memories.

  There were other voices around him. Hands grabbed his arms and dragged him off the ground. Dalton’s body was no longer there.

  Then the world around him twisted, and he was standing at the gate once more. Dalton was talking to Caitlin as if there had never been a fight.

  ‘The first test of any gentleman is the ability to control one’s temper,’ he said, adjusting his tie. He didn’t have a mark on his face.

  Josh lunged forward, but this time Sim grabbed his arm and shook his head.

  ‘I rest my case. He’s a bloody savage.’ Dalton added turning to Caitlin.

  ‘You did that on purpose. You read him, didn’t you?’

  Dalton shrugged. ‘Well, it is my job after all!’ He took out his watch, which was on a chain like the colonel’s. ‘Shall we? I believe the Sun King is about to start the ball,’ he added as he walked off down in the direction the others had taken.

  Caitlin turned toward Josh. She looked very disappointed ‘Let him go, Sim.’

  He felt Sim’s hands relax and move away. The guy was stronger than he looked.

  ‘What the hell is going on? One minute he’s on the floor and the next he’s over there!’ Josh shouted at them.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand. It’s complicated,’ Caitlin replied, shaking her head.

  ‘Well, he deserved it,’ declared Josh checking his hands for cuts and finding none.

  Caitlin’s eyes lit up with a fire of her own. ‘No! That’s not true. I expected you to be better than that! You’re my guest, and you punch the first guy who gives you a hard time.’

  ‘You don’t own me! I don’t need to explain myself to you or anyone else!’

  ‘So that’s how it is. Josh against the rest of the world?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s done me okay so far.’

  ‘Really? Has it? Can you honestly say you’re happy with your life? Based on what I’ve seen I would say not!’

  ‘He started it!’ Josh heard himself say, and knew that he had lost.

  ‘Oh, grow up, Joshua!’ Caitlin said as she stormed off.

  Sim followed a few steps behind. He shrugged at Josh as if to say, ‘Women. What can you do?’ and they disappeared down into the crypts.

  Josh stood alone in the doorway trying to work out what had just happened — the night wasn’t supposed to end this way. He had never really cared about what other people thought of him, but the look of disappointment on Cailtin’s face was bothering him. Without her, it was going to be difficult to find a dealer for the medal. If he apologised now, maybe he could salvage something.

  He followed her down the steps into the dark street of tombs.

  Caitlin and Sim had caught up with the rest of the group, who were easy to spot by the glow of the torches they were using to read the inscriptions on the tombs.

  One of them shouted, and the others collected around the voice.

  Josh wanted to talk to Caitlin alone, and he slowly worked his way through the shadows of the baroque vaults until he was close enough to see what they were doing.

  Dalton inspected the inscription on a large stone sarcophagus and then produced a small book from his jacket, tore a page out and began to recite from the text. From his hiding place, it sounded like poetry to Josh, who was just thinking how weird this was becoming when he saw Dalton hold the page up to the tomb and disappear. Then, as if to confirm his disbelief, the rest of the group followed suit — each one taking a page out of the book and vanishing. Not through some secret trapdoor, but just basically winking out of existence. Caitlin was the last — she looked around as if expecting someone else to turn up, then she too disappeared.

  He went over to where they had all been standing and inspected the inscription on the grave. The weather-worn text read:

  Here lies what remains of John Milton. Author of Paradise Lost. 1608—1674

  The ground was littered with torn pages from the book. Some seemed to be glowing, and as Josh tentatively picked one up a string of light grew between it and the stone. He could hear the faint sounds of laughter and a string quartet, as the line turned into a ribbon that grew out from the page. Spreading like a vine, it twisted and turned round his arm. There were knots of energy with strange symbols floating around them. The motion of the twisting made him feel dizzy, as if he was looking down at it from a great height. He dropped the page, shaking his hand as if it had been burnt; the light died away. It left him feeling weird, a mixture of being on some major high and incredibly drunk at the same time.

  Something was tingling on his hand, but he ignored it and ran back to the gate. This night had given him enough surprises — now he just wanted to be in his bed.

  14

  The Colonel

  Josh slept through most of Sunday, only waking up once to eat cold baked beans out of a tin. He’d never felt this rough. It was as if man-flu and a hangover were fighting over the rights to his body — something had drained all his energy.

  His dreams were full of wild things, strange twisted versions of events that folded in on themselves. In one, his mother was completely cured and happy but one of her eyes was missing. She kept repeating: ‘It was a small price to pay,’ as she hoovered the flat. Another had him back in his old primary school trying to reach a rope that was just out of reach. He could hear his gym teacher shouting at him and when he turned round he found it was himself screaming at him to make the jump.

  He awoke in a cold sweat. It was morning, and the clock showed it was well past 9am, which meant he was already in trouble with Mr Bell. He was lying on top of the duvet, still wearing the clothes from Saturday night. There was a faint
aroma of Caitlin about them, from which he took a moment of indulgence. She’d spent most of the gig jumping up and down against him — something she apparently considered to be dancing. Josh remembered the way she’d felt as they had been pressed together in the crowd. He had restrained himself from putting his hands on her, even though she probably wouldn’t have noticed; his mother had taught him how to treat women with respect.

  There was still a faint ghost of a headache lingering at the back of his head, but it didn’t hurt anything like as much as his hand. He pulled off his hoodie and examined his arm. There was a subtle, fractal-like pattern of burns all the way up from his wrist to his elbow — like a henna tattoo from an Indian wedding — except it was etched into his skin like a scar. His right hand was covered in a filigree of intricate symbols and shapes that were not from any language he’d ever seen. Josh tried to remember what had happened on Saturday night, but it was a blur. The last moments in the graveyard were particularly fuzzy; he remembered something about a crypt and some fireworks, but it was vague and shapeless, like a dream. Did he get a tattoo on the way home? He doubted it.

  He stumbled out of his bedroom to find the flat was even more trashed than when he’d left it. From the state of the carnage, it was obvious that word had got around — it was now open season on Josh’s place. Every thief and their second cousin had been around and helped themselves to anything that wasn’t nailed down. There were no taps in the bathroom, no carpet in the hall and the kitchen was lacking a sink. Some inspired genius had even started on the boiler, but had given up and taken the doors off all the cupboards instead. The boiler hung precariously away from the wall, supported only by the pipes, a fitting end to something that should have been condemned years ago.

  Based on the smell, Josh decided it was wiser not to go into the toilet, and simply changed his clothes before going across to No. 52.

  ‘Hello, dear,’ said Mrs Bateman once her door was finally unlocked.

  ‘Hi, Mrs B. Can I borrow your loo? Mine’s been nicked.’

  It took more than an hour to get away from Mrs B. She insisted he finish a full English breakfast and two rounds of toast before she would discuss any other business. She was a cross between a grandmother and a sergeant-major — kind, but with the ability to make you do exactly as you were told. There had been times when she had been more like a second mum — in the early days she would take care of him when his own mother was too ill or hospitalised, before they knew it was MS.

  ‘Now I’m not going to ask how you did this,’ she said, as she brought out the first-aid kit and began to bandage his arm. There was a knowing look in her eyes, ‘but I do want to talk about that medal you left with me the other day.’

  Josh felt a cold chill run down his spine at the thought of having to explain how he came by it; Mrs B had a way of making him feel like a six-year-old. He’d never been able to lie to her, she seemed to see through every one of his excuses, and she was certainly never going to believe what really happened. He was having enough trouble with that himself.

  The face of the general loomed large in his mind once more. Because of Josh, the assassination of Hitler had failed, and Stauffenberg had been shot, not to mention the many others who had died in the extra year that the war had lasted.

  He stopped the thought before it went into overdrive — could he seriously be considering that he’d travelled back in time and changed the outcome of the Second World War?

  ‘When you get old,’ she began, interrupting his train of thought, ‘your memories are all that you have.’ There was a wistful tone to her voice, the kind that old people used when they reminisced about the ‘good old days’.

  She finished dressing his arm and carefully pinned it in place.

  ‘The mementoes we’ve collected throughout our lives become part of us. They help us to remember our past; they connect us to our memories and remind us of those we have lost.’ She looked up at him. Her skin was deeply wrinkled, and her hair fine and thin, but behind those bright blue eyes he knew she had a mind as sharp as any twenty-year-old.

  ‘Now I’ve known you since you moved here, Joshua, and you’re not a bad lad, not like some I could mention. You still care about things, but you never consider the consequences of your actions. Young people don’t — you’ve always been a challenge for your poor mother.’

  She was possibly the only person who could say this to him, and he would take it.

  ‘So,’ she said, producing the medal still wrapped in the newspaper. ‘In all that time there’s never been a mention of a great-grandfather, and especially not one that could have come by this. It was precious to someone once. It may be all they have left of the person that earned it. No matter how bad the trouble is that you are in, is it worth the cost of someone else’s happiness?’

  He hated it when she got inside his head. She was like his conscience, a moral compass, the one person he could rely on to tell the truth — something that had otherwise been missing from his life. He assumed it was the role that one of his parents was supposed to play, to keep you on the straight and narrow, but since Mum was always sick and he’d never known his father, it was a hard thing to imagine. He wasn’t sure he was missing anything, really, because most of his friends’ dads seemed to be utter twats and more than half of his mates’ parents were divorced . . .

  She was right, of course. He couldn’t admit to her that the crazy man whom he’d stolen it from probably hadn’t a clue that it was missing, but that wasn’t the point. He stole cars because they were easily replaced; taking other people’s treasured possessions wasn’t his style.

  ‘Put it back.’ She patted him on the hand. ‘There’s a good boy.’

  That was when the thought struck him. Maybe he could keep her happy and still get something out of it.

  The bandage would be a perfect excuse for his lateness, Josh thought, as he walked into Churchill Gardens. Bell couldn’t punish him any more than he already had, but at least he might score some sympathy for the burn, which he could see from under the wrapping had already begun to fade.

  He wracked his memory for any more details of what had happened last night. He could have sworn there’d been a fight. He had a vague feeling that he’d punched the posh boy, Dalton, but it was all so fuzzy and muddled. There had been some kind of argument with Caitlin, which would explain why he hadn’t woken up in her bed this morning — what the hell had he drunk that had screwed up the evening so badly?

  Something was already kicking off when he walked into the park. All the community-service crew were crowded round in a circle shouting at someone. Mr Bell was standing in the centre of them, talking to whoever was sitting on the ground.

  As Josh approached, Mr Bell looked up and frantically beckoned him to come through. The circle parted to let Josh pass and he saw the crazy colonel sitting crossed-legged on the grass, rocking back and forth, hugging a large bag of gardening tools that included the machetes. He looked very upset.

  ‘Joshua, this gentleman says that you have stolen something of his and he refuses to move until we summon you.’ Mr Bell put air quotes around the word ‘summon’.

  The colonel looked up through his tangle of wild hair and smiled at Josh with a flash of amazingly clean, white teeth.

  ‘Ah, the thief has finally surfaced!’ he said, standing up and handing the bag to one of the bystanders. ‘Thank you.’

  Mr Bell managed to look both relieved and concerned at the fact that the crazy man had surrendered the bag of very sharp knives. Josh knew the supervisor was only thinking about the mountain of paperwork and inquiries that would result from this.

  The colonel grabbed Josh by the arm and frog-marched him back towards the park gates. ‘You still have the medal?’ he hissed under his breath as they walked. ‘Eddy told me you tried to sell it to him.’

  ‘Ye-ah,’ Josh stuttered. The old man stank of sour beer and sweat — being so close to him was making Josh gag. ‘I was going to give it back.’

 
‘Of course you were,’ the old man said sarcastically. ‘Couldn’t shift it without provenance so you were going to try to sell it back to me no doubt.’ His voice was rough, as if he’d gargled with gravel.

  ‘But —’

  ‘But what? You think you’re the first light-fingered Johnny I’ve had in my house? In another age, they would have had your bloody hand off for this! Now, for the sake of our audience, try to look like you’re in a whole lot of trouble. Which, by the way, you are.’

  Josh looked back to see the dumbfounded Mr Bell staring at them, his mouth flapping like a fish. The rest of the crew were laughing and pointing at Josh — clearly amused by the crazy man’s abduction.

  ‘Let go of me!’ demanded Josh, struggling to free himself from the iron grip.

  ‘I swear if you don’t play your part I’ll cut your nuts off and use them to stop that trap of yours from flapping. In twenty seconds your supervisor is going to think about calling the police, and young Delland hasn’t gone for the knife yet.’

  They were already through the park gates and onto the street when Mr Bell had the sense to reach for his mobile. He was on the verge of dialling 999 when one of the other lads sliced his hand open getting a machete out of the tool bag.

  ‘Brian Delland, where were you when they were handing out brains?’ Mr Bell said as he put the phone away and reached for the first-aid kit. The others were hooting with laughter as the blood sprayed out over anyone that got too close.

  Once out of sight of the others, the colonel released Josh, or, to be more precise, dropped him. Josh was impressed by the strength of the old man; his feet hadn’t really touched the ground the whole way across the park.

  ‘Now,’ said the colonel as he walked towards his front door, ‘do you have the vestige?’