The Eternal War

CHAPTER 70

2001, New Wellington

Sparks danced up into the night sky from their campfire, one of several dozen they could see up and down the side of the roadway. Refugees heading south and those on foot, like them, stopping at the side of the road for the night to rest, eat and perhaps sleep.

They were cooking cobs of corn they’d plucked from a field earlier this evening over the fire. Somewhere across on the other side of the road, someone was roasting coffee beans over theirs, and someone else, salted bacon.

‘It’s cooler tonight,’ said Liam.

Sal, snuggled beside him, nodded.

‘You all right, Sal?’ he said.

She nodded again, her eyes on the fire, glistening.

‘I know,’ he started. ‘Look, I know what happened was hard — ’

‘Hard?’ she whispered. Hard was a lazy, careless word to use for what they’d witnessed. ‘I … I keep seeing it, Liam. You know?’ She looked up at him. ‘I see Samuel looking at me, looking right at me when they shot him. He was …’ Her voice faded to nothing. Together they stared at the fire in silence, watched the cobs slowly blacken on the edge of the fire.

‘I feel …’ She chewed on a fingernail. ‘I feel strange. Like I’m … like I’m not who I used to be. Not the same Saleena I used to be.’

Liam nodded. ‘We’ve both seen a lot, you and me.’

‘It’s like my old life — my parents, my home, my school friends — all that’s become someone else’s life, not mine any more. Do you know what I mean?’

‘Aye,’ he said softly. ‘Me too.’

‘It feels like you, me and Maddy have been together for years.’ Although she knew exactly how long it had been: a hundred and fifty-five days — seventy-five bubble-time cycles plus five days.

‘For me it is,’ said Liam. ‘Six months in 1956 … and another six months in the twelfth century. And another in dinosaur times.’ He looked at her, quizzical. ‘You know what? I’ve lived a whole year longer than you since we were recruited.’

‘I know.’ She looked up at him, tilted her head to look at the tress of grey hair by his temple. ‘You do look older.’

‘Well, I’d be seventeen now, I suppose.’ Mock serious. ‘I went an’ missed me birthday!’

She smiled and punched his arm lightly. ‘Happy birthday, then.’

He reached out and prodded one of the charred cobs with a stick. Still too hard to want to eat yet. On the other side of the fire Lincoln was muttering something to Bob about his childhood, something to do with skinning hares.

‘You’re right, though,’ Liam said after a while.

‘About what bit?’

‘That we’re different people now. You, me and Maddy. I’ve seen things, done things, that I think have changed me.’

‘Like what?’

‘Well … I killed a man, so I did.’

‘Really?’

He nodded. ‘The fight for Nottingham. Killed a soldier with me sword. He looked at me … was staring at me as I did it to him. Like … I don’t know, Sal, it was like he wanted me to know him, in his final moment, like he wanted me to make sure I remembered him forever.’ Liam shook his head. ‘And it worked. I see him every night … in my dreams. That same fella. The same face.’

‘Do you ever dream of the moment when Foster recruited you?’

Liam closed his eyes. Not recently. Since Nottingham it had been this man over and over, haunting his sleep. ‘I used to.’

‘I do,’ she said. ‘Almost every night. I remember every little detail. I see it all every night like a holo-movie.’

She’d told him once about how she’d been recruited. ‘The fire?’

Sal nodded. ‘Every morning I wake up and want to cry … because it’s like I’ve just left my parents … my mathaji, baba all over again.’

‘I can barely remember my parents,’ he said. He tried to remember them and struggled to conjure their smiles, their frowns in his mind. Only one memory successfully gave him their faces, a fleeting recollection of holding in his hands a badly faded photograph of them in an old tin frame. He shook his head. How could that be the only decent enough memory he’d managed to hang on to?

‘But there’s this thing, Liam, this odd thing …’

He gave up fishing for another mental image of Ma and Da. They were gone. People from someone else’s life now. ‘What? What odd thing?’

‘My memory of Foster saving me from that burning tower. There’s this moment, when the building finally begins to collapse. It’s horrible.’ She shook her head and winced at that sensation of the floor collapsing beneath her feet, of falling … and the fire beneath waiting for her to drop into it as if she was falling into Hell itself.

‘I’m falling, Liam … but beneath me, spinning beneath me, there’s this soft toy. A teddy bear. A blue teddy bear. It belonged to one of my neighbours, Mrs Chaudhry’s little boy. I used to babysit him.’

He shrugged. ‘What’s so odd about that?’

‘Because I’ve seen it, Liam. The same bear — the exact same bear — in that antique shop near us.’