Flashback

Chapter One

Berlin, some hours before

Jem Shaw made a quarter turn so that the hood of the phone booth was close enough to hide her lips. The airport concourse buzzed behind her. She had taken the middle of five booths. She was anonymous. One woman among many. She swallowed and listened to the ringer of an English telephone. It was the first time she had heard the sound in six months of exile. Dialling the number was a betrayal of the person she had been the previous summer: angry, proud, and leaving the island forever. Stepping from the ruins of her family, dressed to kill. On a mission and Arctic cool.

She passed a hand through her gas-flame blue hair and waited for her brother to answer. Never had she needed to talk to him more. She stamped her Cossack boots. At twenty-four, she felt too old for humble pie.

‘Ahoy-hoy,’ said Danny, and with those words, Jem was transported to Exeter and the crappy, 1980s BT phone that Danny now held. She could breathe the shoes-and-dogs smell of that hallway.

‘Danny, it’s me.’

She could accept any extreme from him. Anger. Contrition. Humour. But mostly anger. One moment she felt ready for him, the next off-balance and unprepared. Her brother was her twin, she told herself. They had shared too many pains. Each must know the other.

‘Where are you?’

His question was toneless. She knew, then, that Danny had lost the anger he must have felt when she ran away. What was he thinking? Was he planning an intervention?

‘I’m in Germany.’

‘Where? Are you still with Wolfgang?’

Jem scratched her eyebrow with a thumb, mulling over Saskia Brandt and feeling tired.

‘Not exactly. I’m going to Milan.’

There was a blast in her ear. Danny had sighed across the receiver.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I’ve met someone. I don’t mean Wolfgang.’

‘Who?’

‘She’s called Saskia.’

Another silence. Then he said, ‘Saskia,’ slowly, as though he were writing the name.

‘She wants me to go to Milan with her.’

‘Well, that sounds peachy.’

Jem laughed. A chuckle came back from Danny.

‘Do we get to meet her?’ he asked.

Jem looked at the departure board. She had left Saskia at the gate more than ten minutes ago, too long for her excuse of a toilet break to work any longer. Soon, Saskia would come looking for her.

‘Danny, I have to go.’ Jem spoke her next words with the knowledge that they might undo the good work of the conversation. ‘I shouldn’t have called.’

‘Then why did you?’

‘I’m…’

‘You’re what?’

‘…Worried.’ In a whisper, she continued, ‘There’s something strange about it.’

‘Jem, are you in trouble?’

‘It’s not that.’

‘I want you to stay in Berlin. I’m coming to get you. Stay right there.’

The tears made a shore at her eyes. She looked at her feet. She hated herself for the shame. She did not have to feel this way. The situation was not her fault.

‘Don’t, Danny.’

‘Let me get this straight. You don’t call us in months. When you do, it’s to tell me you’re worried about some new friend.’

‘I love you.’

‘Now I’m worried.’

‘Bye,’ she said. ‘Look… Bye.’

‘I love you, too.’

Jem replaced the receiver and stared at it for a moment. She closed her eyes and listened to the boarding calls, the wailing babies, the laughter, but she did not turn. In the private darkness, one future emerged. Anxiety, guilt and fear were washed out. Her escape from the airport would fix her. She could re-establish a certain version of herself.

Saskia would become a memory, if that.

Escape, then.

She left the airport.

At a café near the gate, Saskia Brandt sipped her coffee. She looked, mind stalling, at the great space above the concourse. The roof looked like the inner framework of a Zeppelin. She smiled. Whales of the air. She let her eyes move across the crowd. There was refuge in the mathematics of their movement and form, but her thoughts turned to the coming departure of the flight to Milan and the fact that Jem should surely have come back from the toilet long before now. Saskia looked at the crowd and blinked. There were seven hundred and ninety-one people on the concourse. Jem was not one of them. This understanding, the maths of it, was no antidote to her anger at the realisation that Jem had abandoned her.

I shouldn’t have let her find the gun.

And I should have told her about the other time traveller.

It was absurd that this loss should upset her. They had lived together for a month. Not such a long time. Saskia put her fingers on the ticket in her pocket. There was strength in loneliness, she decided, and she would regain that strength as her loneliness returned, like an appreciation for a cold, mathematical music.

She looked again at her coffee and the reflection of the roof upon it.

End of, as Jem might say.