Lost in a Good Book

22. Travels with My Father

Dad turned up for breakfast, which was unusual for him. I was just flicking through that morning’s copy of The Toad when he arrived. The big news story was the volte-face in Yorrick Kaine’s fortunes. From being a sad, politically dead no-hoper he was polling ahead of the ruling Teafurst party. The power of Shakespeare. The world suddenly stopped, the picture on the TV froze and the set gave out a dull hum, the same tone and pitch as the moment Dad arrived. He had the power to stop the clock like this, time ground to a halt when he visited me. It was a hard-won skill—for him there was no return to normality.

‘Hello, Dad,’ I said gloomily. ‘Did you hear about Landen’s eradication?’

‘No, I didn’t—I’m sorry to hear that, Sweetpea. Any particular reason?’

‘Goliath want Jack Schitt out of The Raven.’

‘Ah!’ he exclaimed. ‘The old blackmail routine. How’s your mother?’

‘She’s well. Is the world still going to end next week?’

‘Looks like it. Does she ever talk about me?’

‘All the time. I got this report from SpecOps forensics.’

‘Hmm,’ said my father, donning his glasses and staring at the report. ‘Carboxy-methyl-cellulose, phenylalnine and hydrocarbons. Animal fat? Doesn’t make any sense at all!’

He handed back the report.

‘I don’t get it,’ he said quietly, sucking the end of his spectacles. ‘That cyclist lived and the world still ended. Maybe it’s not him. But nothing else happened at that particular time and place. Maybe it’s something to do with—’ He frowned and looked at me oddly. ‘Maybe it’s something to do with you.’

‘Me? Listen, I didn’t do anything.’

‘You were there. Perhaps me handing you the bag of slime was the key event and not the death of the cyclist—did you tell anyone where that pink goo came from?’

‘No one.’

He thought for a bit.

‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘see what else you can find out. I’m sure the answer is staring us in the face!’

He picked up the paper and read: ‘Chimp merely pet, claims croquet supremo,’ before putting the paper down and looking at me with a twinkle in his eye.

‘This non-husband of yours—’

‘Landen.’

‘Right. Shall we try to get him back?’

‘Schitt-Hawse told me they had the summer of 1947 sewn up so tight not even a trans-temporal gnat could get in without being seen.’

My father smiled. ‘Then we will have to outsmart them! They will expect us to arrive at the right time and the right place—but we won’t. We’ll arrive at the right place but at the wrong time, then simply wait. Worth a try, wouldn’t you say?’

I smiled.

‘Definitely!’

Dad took a sip of my coffee and leaned forward to hold my arm. I was conscious of a series of rapid flashes and there we were in a blacked-out Humber Snipe, driving alongside a dark stop of water on a moonlit night. In the distance I could see searchlights criss-crossing the sky and heard the distant thump-thump-thump of a bombing raid.

‘Where are we?’ I asked.

‘Approaching Henley-on-Thames in occupied England, November 1946.’

‘Is this where Landen drowned in the car accident?’

‘This is where it happens, but not when. If I were to jump straight there, Lavoisier would be on to us like a shot. Ever played “Kick the can”?’

‘Sure.’

‘It’s a bit like that. Guile, stealth, patience—and a small amount of cheating. Okay, we’re here.’

We had reached a section of the road where there was a sharp bend. I could see how an inattentive motorist might easily misjudge it and end up in the river—I shivered involuntarily.

We got out and Dad walked across the road to where a small group of silver birches stood amidst a tangle of dead bracken and brambles. It was a good place from which to observe the bend; we were barely ten yards away. Dad laid down a plastic carrier bag he had brought and we sat on the grass, leaning against the smooth bark of the birches.

‘Now what?’

‘We wait for six months.’

‘Six months? Dad, are you crazy? We can’t sit here for six months!’

‘So little time, so much to learn,’ mused my father. ‘Do you want a sandwich? Your mother leaves them out for me every morning. I’m not mad keen on corned beef and custard, but it has a sort of eccentric charm—and it does fill a hole.’

‘Six months?’ I repeated.

He took a bite from his sandwich.

‘Lesson one in time travel, Thursday. First of all, we are all time travellers. The vast majority of us manage only one day per day. Now if we accelerate ourselves like so—’

The clouds gathered speed above our heads and the trees shook faster in the light breeze; by the light of the moon I could see that the pace of the river had increased dramatically; a convoy of lorries sped past us in sudden accelerated movement.

‘This is about twenty days per day—every minute compressed into about three seconds. Any slower and we would be visible. As it is, an outside observer might think he saw a man and woman sitting under these trees, but if he looked again we would be gone. Ever thought you saw someone, then looked again only to find them gone?’

‘Sure.’

‘ChronoGuard traffic moving through.’

The dawn was breaking, and presently a German Wehrmacht patrol found our abandoned car, and dashed around looking for us, before a breakdown truck appeared and took the Humber away. More cars rushed along the road and the clouds sped rapidly across the sky.

‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ said my father. ‘I miss all this, but I have so little time these days. At fifty daypers we would still have to wait a good three or four days for Landen’s accident; I’ve a dental appointment, so we’re going to have to pick it up a bit.’

The clouds sped faster; cars and pedestrians nothing more than blurs. The shadow of the trees cast by the sun traversed rapidly and lengthened in the afternoon sun; pretty soon it was evening and the clouds were tinged with pink before the rapidly gathering gloom overtook the day and the stars appeared, followed by the moon, which arced rapidly across the sky. The stars spun around the Pole Star as the sky grew blue with the early dawn and the sun began its rapid climb in the east.

‘Eight and a half thousand daypers,’ explained my father. ‘This is my favourite bit. Watch the leaves!’

The sun now rose and set in under ten seconds. Pedestrians were invisible to us as we were to them, and a car had to be parked for at least two hours for us to see it at all. But the leaves! They turned from green to brown as we watched, the outer branches a blur of movement, the river a soft undulating mirror without so much as a ripple. The plants died off as we watched, the sky grew more overcast, and the spells of dark were now much longer than the light. Flecks of light showed along the road where traffic moved, and opposite us an abandoned Kübelwagen was rapidly stripped of spares and then dumped upside down in the river.

‘What do you think, Sweetpea?’

‘I’d never get bored of this, Dad. Do you travel like this all the time?’

‘Never this slow. This is just for tourists. We usually approach speeds of ten billion or more daypers; if you want to go backward you have to go faster still!’

‘Go backward by going forward faster?’

‘That’s enough for now, Sweetpea. Just enjoy yourself and watch.’

I pulled myself closer to him as the air grew chilly and a heavy blanket of snow covered the road and forest around us.

‘Happy new year,’ said my father.

‘Snowdrops!’ I cried in delight as green shoots nuzzled through the snow and flowered, their heads angling towards the low sun. Then the snow was gone and the river rose again and small amounts of detritus gathered around the upturned Kübelwagen, which rusted as we watched. The sun flashed past us higher and higher in the sky and soon there were daffodils and crocuses.

‘Ah!’ I said in surprise as a shoot from a small shrub started to grow up my trouser leg.

‘Train them away from your body,’ explained my father, diverting the course of a bramble that was trying to ensnare him with the palm of his hand. My shoot pushed against my hand like a small green worm and moved off in another direction. I did the same with the others that threatened me but Dad went one step farther and with a practised hand trained his bramble into a pretty bow.

‘I’ve known students literally rooted to the spot,’ explained my father. ‘It’s where the phrase comes from. But it can be fun, too. We had an operative named Jekyll who once trained a four-hundred-year-old oak into a heart as a present for her boyfriend.’

The air was warmer now, and as my father checked his chronograph again we started to decelerate. The six months we had spent there had passed in barely thirty minutes. By the time we had returned to one day per day it was night again.

‘I don’t see anyone, do you?’ he hissed.

I looked around; the road was deserted. I opened my mouth to speak but he put a finger to his lips. At that moment a car appeared around the corner and drove rapidly down the road. It swerved to avoid a fox, skidded sideways, off the road and landed upside down in the river. I wanted to get up but my father held me with a pinched grip. The driver of the car—who I assumed was Billden—broke the surface of the river, then quickly dived back to the car and resurfaced a few moments later with a woman. He dragged her to the bank and was just about to return to the submerged vehicle when a tall man in a greatcoat appeared from nowhere and placed his hand on Billden’s arm.

‘Now!’ said my father, and we dashed from the safety of the copse.

‘Leave him!’ yelled my father. ‘Leave him to do what he has to do!’

My father grabbed the interloper and with a sharp cry the man vanished. Billden looked confused and made a run for the river, but in a few short moments a half-dozen ChronoGuard had dropped in, Lavoisier among them. One of the agents rugby-tackled Landen’s father before he could return to rescue his son. I yelled. ‘No!’, pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled: ‘No!’, pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled: ‘No!’, pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled: ‘No!’, pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled: ‘No!’, pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled: ‘No!’, pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled: ‘No!’, pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled: ‘No!’, pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled: ‘No!’, pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled: ‘No!’, pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden

I yelled. ‘No!’, pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled: ‘No!’, pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled: ‘No!’, pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden

I yelled: ‘No!’, pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

The next thing I knew I was disarmed, sitting on the ground and feeling shocked and disorientated after my brief enloopment. It was how I imagine a stuck record might feel. Two SO-12 operatives stared at me while my father and Lavoisier talked close by. Billden was breathing heavily and sobbing into the damp earth.

‘Bastards!’ I spat. ‘My husband’s in there!’

‘So much to learn,’ muttered Lavoisier. ‘The infant Parke-Laine is not your husband, he is an accident statistic—or not. It rather depends on your father.’

‘A lackey for the Goliath Corporation, Lavoisier?’ said my father. ‘You disappoint me.’

‘Greater need prevails, Colonel. If you’d handed yourself in I wouldn’t have had to take these extreme measures, besides, the ChronoGuard can’t function without corporate sponsorship.’

‘And in return you do a few favours?’

‘As I said, greater needs prevail. And before you start waving charges of corruption at me, this combined Goliath/ChronoGuard operation has been fully sanctioned by the Chamber. Now, it’s so simple even you can understand it. Give yourself up and your daughter can have her husband back—whether or not she decides to help Goliath. As you can see, I am in a very generous mood.’

I looked at Dad and saw him bite his lip. He rubbed his temples and sighed.

‘No.’

‘What?’ exclaimed Lavoisier.

‘No,’ I repeated. ‘Dad, don’t do it. I’ll get Jack Schitt out or just live on my own—or something!’

He smiled and rested his hand on my shoulder.

‘Bah!’ went Lavoisier. ‘As hideously self-righteous as each other!’

He nodded to his men, who raised their weapons. But Dad was quick. I felt him grasp my shoulder tightly and we were off. The sun rose quickly as we leapt forward, leaving Lavoisier and the others several hours away before they realised what had happened.

‘Let’s see if we can lose him!’ muttered my father. ‘As for that Chamber stuff—bullshit. Landen’s eradication was murder, pure and simple. In fact, it’s just the sort of information I need to bring Lavoisier down!’

Days amounted to no more than brief flashes of alternate dark and light as we hurtled into the future.

‘We’re not at full speed,’ Dad explained. ‘He might overtake me without thinking. Keep an eye out for—’

Lavoisier and his cronies appeared for no more than the briefest glimpse as they moved past us into the future. Dad stopped abruptly and I staggered slightly as we returned to real time. We moved off the road as a fifties-style truck drove past, horn blaring.

‘What now?’

‘I think we shook him off. Blast!’

We were off again—Lavoisier had reappeared. We lost him for a moment but pretty soon he was back again, keeping pace with us.

‘I’m too old to fall for that one!’ He smiled.

Soon after two of his cronies reappeared as each one found us and matched the speed at which we were moving through history.

‘I knew you’d come,’ said Lavoisier triumphantly, walking towards us slowly as the time flashed past, faster and faster. A new road was built where we were standing, then a bridge, houses, shops. ‘Give yourself up. What do you hope to gain from all this? You’ll have a fair trial, believe me.’

The two other ChronoGuard operatives grabbed my father and held him tightly.

‘I’ll see you hang for this, Lavoisier! The Chamber would never sanction such an action. Give Landen back his life and I promise you I will say nothing.’

‘Well, that’s just it, isn’t it?’ replied Lavoisier scornfully. ‘Who do you think they’re going to believe? You with your record or me, third in command at the ChronoGuard? Besides, your clumsy attempt to get Landen back has covered any tracks I might have made getting rid of him!’

Lavoisier aimed his gun at my father. The two ChronoGuard held on to him tightly to stop him accelerating away, and we buffeted slightly as he tried. I had a sudden thought.

‘Do you guys cross picket lines?’

The ChronoGuard agents looked at one another, then at the chronographs on their wrists, then at Lavoisier. The taller of the two was the first to speak.

‘She’s right, Mr Lavoisier, sir. I don’t mind bullying and killing innocents, and I’ll follow you beyond the crunch normally, but—’

‘But what?’ asked Lavoisier angrily.

‘—but I am a loyal Timeguild member. I don’t cross picket lines.’

‘Neither do I,’ agreed the other agent, nodding to his friend. ‘Likewise and truly.’

Lavoisier smiled engagingly.

‘Listen here, guys, I’ll personally pay—’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Lavoisier,’ replied the operative, slightly indignantly, ‘but we’ve been instructed not to enter into any individual contracts.’ And in an instant they were gone as December arrived and the world turned pink. What was once the road was now a few inches of the same pink slime that Dad had shown me. We were beyond 12 December 1985, and where before there had been growth, change, seasons, clouds, now there was nothing but a never-ending landscape of shiny opaque curd.

‘Saved by industrial action!’ said Dad, laughing. ‘Tell that to your friends at the Chamber!’

‘Bravo,’ replied Lavoisier sardonically, ‘bravo. I think we should just say au revoir, my friends—until we meet again.’

‘Do we have to make it au revoir?’ I asked. ‘What’s wrong with goodbye?’

He didn’t have time to answer as I felt Dad tense and we accelerated faster through the timestream. The pink slime was washed away, leaving only earth and rocks, and as I watched the river moved away from us, meandered off into the flood-plain and then snaked back, swept under our feet, and then undulated back and forth like a snake before finally being replaced by a lake. We moved faster, and soon I could see the earth start to buckle as the crust bent and twisted under the force of plate tectonics. Plains dropped to make seas, and mountains rose in their place. New vegetation established itself as millions of years swept past in a matter of seconds. Vast forests grew and fell in seconds. We were covered, then uncovered, then covered again, now by sea, now by rock, now surrounded by an ice sheet, now a hundred feet in the air. More forests, then a desert, then mountains rose rapidly in the east, only to be scoured flat a few moments later.

‘Well,’ said my father, ‘Lavoisier in the pocket of Goliath. Who’d have thought it?’

‘Dad,’ I asked as the sun grew visibly bigger and redder, ‘how do we get back?’

‘We don’t go back,’ he replied. ‘We can’t go back. Once the present has happened, that’s it. We just carry on going until we return to where we started. Sort of like a roundabout. Miss an exit and you have to drive around again. There are just a few more exits and the roundabout is much, much bigger.’

‘How much bigger?’

‘A shitload. Quiet, now—we’re nearly there!’

And all of a sudden we weren’t nearly there, we were there, back at breakfast in my apartment, Dad turning the pages of the newspaper.

‘Well, we tried, didn’t we?’ said my father.

‘Yes, Dad, we did. Thanks.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said gently, ‘even the finest eradications leave something behind for us to reactualise from. There is always a way—we just have to find it; Sweetpea, we will get him back—I’m not having my grandchild without a father.’

It did reassure me, and I thanked him.

‘Good!’ he said, closing his newspaper. ‘By the way, did you manage to get any tickets for the Nolan Sisters’ concert?’

‘I’m working on it.’

‘Good show. Well, time waits for no man, as we say—’

He squeezed my hand and was gone. The world started up again, the TV came back on and there was a muffled plocking from Pickwick, who had managed to lock herself in the airing cupboard again. I let her out and she ruffled her feathers in an embarrassed fashion before going off in search of her water dish.

I went into work but there was precious little to do. We had a call from an enraged Mrs Hathaway34 demanding to know when we were going to arrest the ‘unlick’d bear-whelp’ who had cheated her, and another from a student who wanted to know whether we thought Hamlet’s line was ‘this too too solid flesh’ or ‘this too too sullied flesh’, or even perhaps ‘these two-toed swordfish’. Bowden spent the morning mouthing the lines for his routine, and by noon there had been two attempts to steal Cardenio from Vole Towers. Nothing serious; SO-14 had doubled the guard. This didn’t concern SpecOps 27 in any way, so I spent the afternoon surreptitiously reading the Jurisfiction instruction manual, which felt a little like flicking through Bunty during school. I was tempted to have a go at entering a work of fiction to try out a few of their ‘handy book-jumping tips’ (page 28) but Havisham had roundly forbidden me from doing anything of the sort ‘until I was more experienced’. By the time I was ready to go home I had learned a few tricks about emergency book evacuation procedures (page 34), read about the aims of the Bowdlerizers (page 62), a group of well-meaning yet censorious individuals hell-bent on removing obscenities from fiction. I also read about Heathcliff’s unexpected three-year career in Hollywood under the name of Buck Stallion and his eventual return to the pages of Wuthering Heights (page 71), the forty-six abortive attempts to illegally save Beth from dying in Little Women (page 74), details of the Character Exchange Program (page 81), using holorimic verse to flush out renegade book people, or PageRunners as they were known (page 96), and how to use spelling mistakes, misprints and double negatives to signal to other Prose Resource Operatives in case emergency book evacuation procedures (page 34) failed (page 105). I was just learning about protocols relating to historical novels (page 122) when it was time to clock off. I joined the general exodus and wished Bowden good luck with his routine. He didn’t seem in the least nervous, but then he rarely did.

I got home to find my landlord on my doorstep. He looked around to make sure Miss Havisham was nowhere in sight, then said:

‘Time’s up, Next’

‘You said Saturday,’ I replied, unlocking the door.

‘I said Friday,’ countered the man.

‘How about I give you the money on Monday when the banks open?’

‘How about if I take that dodo of yours and you live rent free for three months?’

‘How about you stick it in your ear?’

‘It doesn’t pay to be impertinent to your landlord, Next. Do you have the money or not?’

I thought quickly.

‘No—but you said Friday and it’s not the end of Friday yet In fact, I’ve got over six hours to find the cash.’

He looked at me, looked at Pickwick, who had popped her head round the door to see who it was, then at his watch.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But you’d better have the cash to me by midnight sharp or there’ll be serious trouble.’

And with a last withering look, he left me alone on the landing.

I offered Pickwick a marshmallow in an attempt to get her to stand on one leg. She stared vacantly at me so after several more attempts I gave up, fed her and changed the paper in her basket before calling Spike at SO-17. It wasn’t the perfect plan but it did have the benefit of being the only plan, so on that basis alone I reckoned it was worth a try. I was eventually patched through to him in his squad car. I related my problem and he told me that his freelance budget was overstuffed at present as no one ever wanted to be deputised, so we arranged a ludicrously high hourly rate and a time and place to meet. As I put the phone down I realised I had forgotten to say that I preferred not to do any vampire work. What the hell. I needed the money.