Trick of time, p.7
Trick of Time, page 7
“Look at this mess,” she muttered, frowning. “Just thrown in the box like a load of old junk. I wonder about people, sometimes, I really do. Don’t they realise how much all this costs?” She held up an Art Deco table lamp with a broken shade. “Useless.” Miri took a sip from the cardboard cup by her side, and sighed. “Sorry, love. Don’t mind me. What can I do you for?”
I leaned against the wall, wishing I’d brought something to occupy my hands. “Actually I just wondered if you needed any help with anything.”
The deep furrow vanished from her brow, leaving only a ghost behind. “Oh, that’s kind of you. Any good at fixing stuff?”
She thrust the lamp at me, and I examined the shade without much hope. “I think it’s had it. Sorry.”
“Damn. All right, have a rummage through that box over there and see if you can find a shade that’ll go. I’m thinking old lady, mid-sixties. The decade, not her age. Not too well off.”
I dutifully rummaged. After a few minutes, I broached the subject I’d come down to talk about, speaking as casually as I could. “Do you ever pop out while there’s a play on? For coffee, I mean.”
Miri didn’t look up. “Sometimes. Not too often. Too expensive. You can spend half your wages on coffee ’round here, if you don’t watch out. Why, do you want me to get you something next time I go?”
“Oh—no, thanks.” I cleared my throat. “I just—I just wondered if you ever noticed anything odd. When you left the theatre.”
“What, odder than usual? Can’t say I have. What sort of odd?”
She was looking at me now, and I felt heat rise in my cheeks. “Oh, nothing special.” I bent my head back to my task, and was grateful she didn’t question me further.
I wasn’t sure if I was more pleased, or troubled, to find the gateway hadn’t opened for her.
What was so special about me?
I found myself rubbing the scars at the back of my head and snatched my hand down to turf roughly through the box of lampshades.
Eventually, I came up with a dusty fabric monstrosity with ugly green fringing. “Will this do?”
“Ugh. Yes, perfect. Thanks.”
“No problem. Um, I’d better be getting back upstairs now.”
Rob raised a good-natured eyebrow when I muttered an apology and went straight out for another cigarette.
Back at home the next day, I tried searching online for any reports of real-life time travel. In amongst all the Doctor Who fan sites, I found a mess of conspiracy theories and Photoshopped pictures. More interesting were the brief accounts of people who claimed to have inadvertently slipped into other times. Two Oxford dons in Versailles over a century ago alleged to have met members of Marie Antoinette’s court. Ordinary people walking along a very ordinary street in Liverpool, who suddenly found themselves in the 1950s or ’60s. I found various sources for this one—but it was all, of course, anecdotal evidence. Still, it gave me some reassurance I hadn’t completely lost my mind.
I found nothing whatsoever related to the Cri.
In my spare time I read up on Victorian London. It made depressing reading. One source I found online listed the life expectancy for a working class London male in the middle of the nineteenth century as twenty-two. Twenty-two. If I’d had to guess, I’d have said Jem was around that age. Christ.
Reading about Oscar Wilde and his prosecution for homosexuality wasn’t any better. Working on the treadmill in jail broke both his body and his spirit. He’d died three years after his release. On the other hand, an Internet search for Jem’s all-sheltering grove threw up an absolutely filthy seventeenth-century poem about prostitution in St James’s. Written by an earl, although on reflection I don’t know why that surprised me.
I made sure I was early to work the night the new production started. There was going to be a talk in the afternoon, for which I needed to be there. Plus, if I was hoping to duck out and see Jem without losing my job, I needed to show willing beforehand. The talk went off all right. It wasn’t as well attended as the Wild Oats one had been, and there were a couple of hitches, but nothing I couldn’t easily put right. The curtain raised on Loot promptly and with only the intended dramatics.
I was free to take a break. Thinking of Jem, I smiled as I walked out of the theatre—and stopped, horror-struck.
Traffic fumes—neon lights—unruly crowds—noise, noise, noise. The sights and sounds of the twenty-first century drilled their way into my head.
Why was this happening? Or more accurately, why had nothing happened? I turned to look at the Cri, begging her silently to help me somehow. Garish posters for the new production, Loot, stared back at me.
The new production.
Was that it? Was the gateway open only when there was an old show playing? One from before Jem’s time? I yanked open the door and grabbed for a programme, laying it on the stair rail to keep it from trembling too violently to read. When was the next pre-1886 production?
I scanned the diary, trying to remember the age of the plays. There. She Stoops to Conquer—that was eighteenth-century; that would do, thank God. It would be on in May—three months away. Three months.
Jem was expecting me tonight. He’d think I’d abandoned him.
I only realised I’d groaned aloud when I felt Rob’s hand on my shoulder. I jumped and spun around.
“Ted, what the hell’s the matter? I thought you were just going out for a smoke?”
I stared at him, completely unable to think of anything to say.
“Are you not feeling well? Is it your head?”
“I—yes.” It wasn’t even a lie. There was an agonising pain growing in my head, as if my skull was shrinking, constricting my brain. I tried to step away from the stairs and lurched to one side.
“Jesus Christ! Come on, Ted, you need to sit down.” Rob half carried me into the box office and helped me into his chair. “Have you got any painkillers you can take? You are allowed to take them, aren’t you?”
Caught between a shake of the head for the former question and a nod for the latter, I just stared at him.
“Bloody fuck,” he muttered. “Just—just wait there, okay? Don’t try and move.”
Rob disappeared. I realised I had to pull myself together. Three months was hardly the end of the world—but Christ, it had shaken me, to realise how careless I’d been. And three months was plenty long enough for Jem to find someone else, to forget all about me, with all the men he met and yes, fucked. The headache worsened.
No. I couldn’t afford to think like this. I took a deep breath, and then another. Rob came running back up the stairs, Miri in tow.
“Are you all right, love?” she asked, crouching down by my chair. “Rob said you’d had a bit of a funny turn.”
I managed a smile. “Bad head’s all.” My speech was thicker than I’d hoped, and they exchanged looks.
“Have you had anything for it?”
I shook my head then wished I hadn’t. Apparently the constriction of my skull hadn’t yet advanced enough to stop my brain slamming against the insides of it when I moved.
“Here you go, then.” She handed me a couple of paracetamol and a bottle of water. I swallowed them with the feeling that while it was probably like trying to put out a fire with your own spit, at least they couldn’t do any harm. “Now, you just sit quietly there for a bit.”
“Sorry to be so much trouble,” I murmured as the pain did, in fact, start to recede. “You must wish you’d never hired me,” I added to Rob.
“Don’t be daft!” He sighed. “It’s my fault for not insisting you take some time off.”
“Now who’s being daft? You’re my boss, not my keeper.”
“I’m your friend, Ted.”
He was. He was a good friend. I wished I could tell him what was really the matter—but it’d only worry him more if I started babbling about time travel. He’d think I was mad.
* * *
Over the next three months, there were times when I wondered if I really was mad. If I’d just imagined it all. I wished I’d thought to bring something back with me, some keepsake of Jem—anything to prove it wasn’t all a delusion.
Rob must have noticed I wasn’t going out anymore, but he didn’t say anything. I think he just put it down to me being disappointed in love. He and Miri started inviting me out for drinks at odd times, when work allowed. I was probably poor company, but they persevered. All I could think about was Jem. Miri made a poorly veiled hint about hoping I’d been safe, that night I hadn’t returned to the theatre, which prompted me into a shamefaced, furtive visit to an STD clinic. I was relieved to find that if Jem had fallen prey to any of the diseases of his trade, he hadn’t passed them on to me. But it didn’t stop me worrying about all the dangers he faced daily, while I was unable to get to him.
It proved surprisingly easy to track down an antique dealer who could supply me with Victorian coinage at a ruinous exchange rate—then again, with cigarettes at five for a penny, perhaps it wasn’t so bad as all that. And anyway, I was determined to be able to buy Jem a drink if I wasn’t allowed to take him gifts any more.
I couldn’t sleep the night before She Stoops to Conquer opened at the Cri. Around four o’clock in the morning, tired of lying awake, I opened the window wide and stood smoking, looking at Alasdair’s picture. He still smiled, but there seemed a far-off quality to his gaze now. Had Alasdair...moved on? I ground out the cigarette into the ashtray.
“Forgive me?” I whispered, and slipped my wedding ring off my finger, placing it carefully by the picture.
He didn’t answer, but when I collapsed into bed, bone-weary, I slept soundly for the few hours that remained of the night.
On the day itself, we were kept busy unpacking programs, putting up posters, making sure finishing touches were applied to scenery and all the other last-minute things that have to be done before a new production, but it wasn’t that which had my mind racing and my heart pounding. Would I be able to get through to Jem? After all this time, would he want anything to do with me if I did? There were minor niggles with the talk, frustrating more than disastrous. My nerves were so bad I seriously considered asking Miri to lend me one of her nicotine patches. The coffee I was downing by the gallon to keep me awake didn’t help, either. I was light-headed and fighting the urge to laugh nervously at inopportune moments.
When the curtain went up, Rob just looked at me. “Go on—take a break. You know you want to.”
“Thanks,” I managed. Grabbing my jacket, I practically ran to the door and pushed through it. When I saw the Victorian street scene I’d been secretly dreading might have gone for good, I sagged at the knees with relief.
Then I frowned. Something was...not quite right. The sky seemed lighter than it ought to be, even for early May, and the air was surprisingly warm. I looked around for Jem but another young man, this one shorter, thickset, with coarse, ruddy features and pale hair, stood leaning against his lamppost.
Icy foreboding prickled at me.
Chapter Seven
I walked straight up to the newcomer. In a ghastly case of déjà vu, he straightened and fixed me with the same wary, speculative look Jem had done the first night we’d met.
“Where’s Jem?” I demanded.
“’Oo?”
“Jem. He’s a bit taller than me. Slimmer. Chestnut hair.” Beautiful. “This is his patch—I mean, it used to be.”
“Ain’t never heard of no Jem.” He smiled, showing blackened teeth. “I’ll show you a good time, mister. You don’t need no Jem.”
I turned away, sick to my stomach. Was I too late? Why the hell hadn’t I found a way to get here sooner? It’d been three months. Anything could have happened in the uncertain life Jem led. He could have been caught, imprisoned.
He could be dead.
I had to find him. I ran through the streets towards Holborn, desperately trying to remember the way Jem had taken me to his lodgings. I went wrong several times—damn it, why hadn’t I taken more notice of the route? Thank God I knew the address. I didn’t even know Mrs. M.’s full name. Would any of them still be there in any case?
My lungs were heaving as I got to Kingsgate Street.
Mrs. M. opened the door to my frantic knocking. “All right, all right, don’t break it down. What do you want?” She stared at me with no recollection whatsoever and looked like she was about to shut the door in my face.
I realised I must look a mess—my face red from running, my trousers splashed with God knows what. “Mrs. M? It’s me, Jem’s friend. Is he here?”
“Jem’s friend, are you?” She sniffed, her expression hard. “Fine friend you was, then. You’re too late. We buried Jem last winter.”
Buried.
Jem was dead. That was his destiny—to die, thinking I’d forgotten him. The world lurched around me. I found myself leaning against the door frame as if I were drunk. God, I wished I were drunk or dreaming or anything but stone-cold sober and having to face my worst fear. “How...how did he die?” I asked, my voice hoarse.
Mrs. M. still had her arms folded, but her face softened as she answered. “It was his chest. He took cold and couldn’t shift it.” She sighed. “You want to come in for a cup of tea? Look like you could use it. That or something stronger.”
“No...no, I’m fine,” I lied. A strange, cold, numbness was spreading through me. It was worse than the nausea had been. “I’ll...I have to go.” I lurched away from the house and set off back the way I’d come. I had to fix this.
I had to.
But how? We buried Jem last winter... That must have been just after I’d last seen him; it was late spring now. How could he have taken ill and died so suddenly? My gaze lit on a newspaper seller, and I scrabbled in my pockets for a halfpenny for the Evening News. Snatching it out of the boy’s hands, I squinted at the date.
June 16, 1889.
1889.
I was three years late. Three months from when I’d last seen Jem was May, 1886. Why had the gateway done this to me? The paper fell from my hands, unheeded.
“Don’t yer want it then, mister?”
I didn’t answer him. I had to get back to the Cri.
I ran all the way back and burst through the door with a stitch in my side, panting.
“Rob, I need a list. All the shows that have played here. Back in the eighteen-eighties.”
“It’s all online,” he said, eyebrows raised and an unspoken question on his lips. “Look on the theatre website—you can download a PDF.”
I pushed into the box office and sat at my computer. With shaking hands I hit the bookmarked page and searched through it. There. She Stoops to Conquer. It had played at the Criterion in the summer of 1889.
That was it. The gateway opened when the play was the same in my time and in Jem’s.
Jem had died—I swallowed—in the winter of ’88/89. I needed to find what was playing between 1886 and 1888, and go back to warn him.
No. A warning wouldn’t save him. I needed to take him away from the dangerous life he led. I needed to bring him here. To my time, with its National Health Service and its antibiotics. Where he could live in my centrally heated house and eat a decent diet.
I scanned the list, ice-cold nausea settling in my stomach. The Man with Three Wives; Two Roses; Betsy; David Garrick... All of them had sunk without trace in the last century. There was no way we’d be putting on a revival of any of them here.
I’d been a fool—a stupid, complacent fool. I’d missed my last chance of seeing Jem, and I hadn’t even known it.
I slumped at my desk, my guts twisting in despair, and put my head in my hands.
When Rob voiced his concern, I said I wasn’t well and had to go home. He didn’t seem to have any trouble believing me. I had a lot more difficulty getting him to accept that it was safe to let me go on my own. In the end, I snapped at him to, “Stop being such a bloody interfering old woman!” and stormed out.
I’d have to apologise next time I went in. If I ever went in again.
I walked through London in a daze. Faces came towards me in a continual stream, but none of them meant anything to me. None of them were Jem. I found my feet had carried me towards Holborn, to Jem’s street—except it was no longer there. Kingsgate Street didn’t exist; there was only Kingsway and Southampton Row, as if fate had decided to stamp out entirely the fact that he’d ever existed.
I kept on walking a short way, but I was tired, so tired. I got on the tube at Goodge Street and let inertia carry me up the Northern Line and through Hampstead to my front door. When I got in, I saw there was a blinking light on the answer phone. I ignored it, heading straight to the kitchen, to Alasdair’s whiskey. When I sat down with the bottle, though, his face seemed to reproach me. I considered turning the photograph to the wall, but in the end I took the bottle back to the kitchen and tipped the remainder of its contents down the sink.
Then I went upstairs, stripped off my clothes and let them lie where they fell, and crawled into my soft, clean-smelling, achingly lonely bed.
* * *
I awoke next morning from tangled dreams, feeling not despair but a sort of feverish determination. The first thing I did was listen to Rob’s message, which begged me to give him a call as soon as I got in. One more hundredweight added to the burden of guilt I carried around on Rob’s behalf.
I rang him back immediately, before I could lose my nerve. “I’m an idiot,” I said, before he could get out anything beyond hello. “I’m a selfish, stupid idiot who doesn’t deserve any friends, least of all someone like you. I’m sorry.”
There was a heavy sigh from the other end of the line. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I’ll see you later, at the Cri.”
