The Accidental Time Traveller (13 page)

‘Will you come again?’

‘Please, if you like. Or maybe we could have a coffee again in town if I can get out of the office.’

‘Smashing,’ but she had already turned to Davy and was peeling off his filthy jumper. She was caught up in domesticity. I let myself out and walked back through town, turning over what I’d seen. How strange to see Caz with kids, and kids she clearly adored, at that. And coping with them in that small, dark, damp house. Caz!

I wondered about what she’d said about her and Will. What’s love got to do with it … It was almost like a business partnership. Yet they had three kids, so it certainly wasn’t platonic. And that look and grin they’d shared … I didn’t like to think of Caz and Will in bed together, so I hurried on, concentrating on finding my way home, thinking of this new Will I’d seen. Will as a family man.

When I got back to the Browns’ house, I was desperate for the loo. Somehow, I hadn’t fancied the sentry box at Carol’s. Doreen and Frank seemed to be out, but Peggy was in the bathroom. I waited a while, then finally I had to bang on the door.

‘Peggy, could you hurry please? I’m getting desperate!’

Eventually she flung open the door and came out surrounded by billowing clouds of steam.

‘Good grief! It’s like a sauna in here,’ I said, getting past her. I’d never known that bathroom so warm. And that was another odd thing. I could have sworn she smelt of booze. I mean, I occasionally like to lie in the bath with a glass of wine but I didn’t think that was Peggy’s thing. As I sat on the loo, I could hear her crashing around in her bedroom. She sounded almost as if she were drunk. But that was just daft. Peggy wasn’t the drinking type.

Sometimes I think about the third circle of hell … Heathrow on a bank holiday … Will and Jamie explaining the offside rule … waiting for an hour to get through to a computer helpline, and finally talking to someone in a far-flung country who says his name is Kevin, just before the phone goes dead …

None of these compare to Sundays in the Browns’ house.

Saturday evening had been OK really. Just after the Browns got back, two lads had called round. They were friends of Stephen on leave from the forces. They’d come in and Doreen had made some sandwiches and Frank had nipped out for a few bottles of beer and it had been a bit of a laugh. So I wasn’t prepared for Sunday.

It started with church. Now I’ve got nothing against church. I go regularly myself – oh, at least once every other Christmas to keep my mum happy. Not that she goes much more often. But I thought, in the Browns’ house, it would be a nice thing to do. Right?

Wrong. It was grim. If that was what church was like, no wonder everyone stopped going. I couldn’t find my place in the service book and when I got the words wrong, people glared at me. Surprisingly, I knew the first hymn, sort of. ‘Praise my soul the King of heaven’ – I’ve sung it at weddings. But then I dropped my hymn book and you’d think I’d farted by all the tut-tutting around me.

As for the sermon … it was so riveting that I started counting pieces of stained glass, and I can tell you that in the window behind the altar there were thirty-three blue bits, five fewer than in the window to my right.

And yet, maybe something got through, some yearning for something, but I didn’t quite know what. Not so much the service, but something about the building itself and the thought of all those people going back hundreds of years, who had come here to worship, to say the same prayers. In a way, I could almost feel them there around me.

And it gave me a chance to think about Will, or rather Will as Billy, a family man. I know Carol had laughed, but the only way I could describe him was ‘grown up’. He was doing things for his family, literally providing for them by growing food, and teaching them, showing Pete how to make that cold frame.

Gosh, even Pete seemed more grown up than Will in some ways.

Would Will be like that if we had a family? Would he take responsibility?

Billy had taken responsibility since he was seventeen, when he became a dad. At eighteen, he was married, a father and a soldier. Is this what they mean by making a man of someone? I thought of the way Billy had shown Pete how to do that cold frame thing, a father passing on skills to his son. He wasn’t making a big deal of it, he was just doing it. And it was brilliant.

Oh God, I wanted to cry. Thank goodness it was the last hymn and soon we were all shuffling out and putting our hymn books back on the table at the back and out into the fresh air away from the musty smell of moth balls and peppermints.

As soon as we got home, Mrs Brown changed out of her Sunday best, rolled up her sleeves and started on the lunch.

Now my mum makes a mean Sunday dinner. The best. She always does it for my brother when he goes home and it’s good enough to make me forget I don’t really like red meat – roast beef and all the trimmings. But Mum manages to do it while knocking back the best part of a bottle of Merlot and in between sitting at the kitchen table reading the
Sunday Times
. It never seems a big deal.

This was. Peggy had emerged from her pit and was trying to read the
News of the World
. Not that I think she was reading it really, she seemed more to be hiding behind it. But not for long. Mrs Brown has us both peeling (more bloody potatoes) and chopping. She had the cloth off the kitchen table and was making pastry.

‘Rosie, can you go down the garden and pick some rhubarb please?’ she asked.

Rhubarb?

The back garden was steep, narrow and treacherous, a sort of series of terraces leading down to the river, which went rushing past below. It was easy to see from the debris on the steps that the river had been halfway up the garden recently. I looked around for rhubarb and tried to think what it looked like. Long pink sticks.

Anyway, I went up and down those slippy steps, along the little patches of garden and couldn’t see anything looking like rhubarb. I was so long, that Peggy came to look for me, stamping down the steps in a mood.

‘I can’t find it, sorry,’ I said.

She just gave me a withering look and marched over to a big upturned metal bucket. She picked it up and beneath it were some long thin pink sticks of rhubarb with large pale green leaves.

‘Well how was I meant to know it was under a bucket?’ I said.

‘Where do you think rhubarb grows?’ she said, very sarcastically.

I wanted to say ‘in a long polystyrene tray just on the left when you go into Sainsbury’s’, but thought I was probably wasting my breath …

I had to get some apples from a shelf in the pantry. They were from the twisted old tree in the garden and had been packed in the previous autumn. Talk about past their sell-by date. The apples were all individually wrapped in newspaper and were soft and waxy. I peeled them and chopped them and stood stirring them on the side of the range until they went mushy. All this just for some apple sauce.

The meal was a production. It was like something out of
A Christmas Carol
. Mrs Brown produced the meat, Mr Brown carved it. We were all meant to say ooh and ah … Gosh, it would have been so much easier for us all just to go to the pub. The only excitement came when we were working our way through the meat. And I said, ever so casually, to Peggy, ‘Do they do good food at the Rising Sun?’

She gave me a filthy look and said, ‘How should I know? I’ve never been there.’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I thought you might have been there on official business, with the editor maybe.’

‘Well you’re wrong. I haven’t,’ she snapped, banging down a rhubarb pie on the table. She looked really upset and a bit pale, which made me feel guilty, so I left it at that. But I’d clearly touched a nerve.

Finally, when we were all too full to move, we had the washing up to do. It took hours. It was like the porridge pot only much more of it, all cleaned with a bit of wire wool and some grey powder.

And that was it. That was the excitement for the day.

Peggy said she was going to see a friend and tittled off. Mr Brown sat at the dining-room table and did some parish council work, and Mrs Brown did the ironing.

Oh yes and Stephen’s girlfriend Cheryl came around. She was a mousy little thing, but only seventeen years old. She’d brought a letter from Stephen to show to the Browns. Mrs Brown stopped ironing and went and got her latest letter from Stephen from behind the clock in the kitchen. The two women compared notes while Mr Brown paused in his parish council work.

As far as I could tell the lad had written the same thing to both mother and girlfriend. It was very hot, there had been a spot of bother and they hadn’t been allowed any free time that week. They were still in the Nissen huts but hoped to move to proper barracks soon. Maybe his girlfriend had a few more kisses than his mother. And that seemed about it.

‘Oh he won’t like it in the heat,’ said Mrs Brown. ‘He always gets that itchy rash on his back.’

‘And behind his knees,’ said Cheryl.

Heat rash? As far as I could tell Cyprus was in a state of riot after they’d got rid of Archbishop whatnot. There was shooting in the streets. Goodness knows what the ‘spot of bother’ was that Stephen had mentioned. And all his mother and girlfriend could worry about was the rash on the back of his knees.

It baffled me. It really did. This couldn’t be real.

I went up to my room, lay on my bed. Sambo followed me up and lay beside me purring happily. I listened to the river and tried to make sense of it all. And there was so much to make sense of.

I am no nearer at all in working out where I am or why I’m here but I’m beginning to think that it cant be a reality show. There are no cameras, no rules, no video room, no perky little Geordie comics commenting on it.

It’s too big. You can recreate a house, a newspaper office, a street even, but not a whole town.

Then there are the people. Carol and Billy are not Caz and Will. Almost like them. Just like Caz and Will would be probably if they had grown up in a different time. If they had been transplanted to the 1950s for instance. I mean, Caz has always said she doesn’t want children, and here she is with three of them on whom she absolutely dotes. But Caz hasn’t missed them. Carol’s dead excited about getting a job as a school cook. If she hadn’t fallen pregnant at sixteen, then what could she have done?

It’s ridiculous to think of Will and Caz as a couple. But Billy and Carol seem a real partnership, working together for the kids. If they’d had to, could Will and Caz have worked it out like Billy and Carol? Maybe. All very weird.

I thought of the hymn we’d sung in church that morning. There was a line in it, ‘dwellers all in time and space’.

We were all dwellers in time and space. We think we’re restricted to one little place, moving along a narrow path, always in the same direction, a bit like railway lines. But what if it’s not like that at all? What if we can move around in it like astronauts in the weightlessness of space, bobbing here and there without much control over where we go? Could I really, perhaps actually be in the real 1950s?

It was a terrifying thought, so terrifying that I had been refusing to consider it. But now the thought would not be shoved to the back of my brain. I had to face it. I went hot and cold. My heartbeat raced and my skin went clammy. I took deep breaths to try to calm myself down.

The real 1950s? It couldn’t be. Things like that don’t happen. People don’t go back in time, not really, not to a different world. It’s not possible.

But what else could it be?

I had thought and thought about what was going on, had twisted ideas this way and that, but there was one idea I had dared not face up to.

That this was real. That I had somehow gone back in time. God knew how – or even why – it had happened. But it was beginning to be the only solution that made sense. I remembered a bit in
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
,where the older Pevensey children went to talk to the Professor about what Lucy had said about the land of Narnia. Basically, said the Professor, when you’ve eliminated everything else, then what is left must be the truth …

I was breathing more evenly now and suddenly felt strangely calm. Maybe I really was back in the 1950s. In a way, mind-blowing as it seemed, it was the only thing that made sense. I had time travelled. No. I couldn’t have. But how else to explain it? How or why, I didn’t know or understand. Couldn’t begin to get my head around it. But I was here. And if I needed reminding, the scratchy underwear and slippery eiderdown told me so.

I didn’t fit here. I didn’t belong. If I stayed here – God, I’d be older than my parents. Panic surged through me again.

But no. Deep breath. Everyone seemed to think I was here for only a few weeks. The Browns had said so. Richard Smarmy Henfield had said so. This wasn’t a full-scale exchange, just a time trip, a holiday in another age. It wasn’t for ever. I had to believe that.

But what about my life at home? Did Mum and Dad know I was here? What if they were ringing me and not getting an answer? What if they were worrying? My heart raced again.
It wasn’t for ever
. That was the important bit.
It wasn’t for ever
. At least, I didn’t think so. And just in case, I’d keep smiling for those cameras …