The Fall

15

‘Where the hell have you been? I couldn’t stop them. They’ve all gone.’ Jud Campbell had greeted them with these sharp words when he ran to meet the Range Rover. It was a little after half-past five. He looked harassed, tired. Speckles of perspiration on his face glittered in the still-hot sun. Now he carried the once-immaculate gold waistcoat roughly balled in one hand. ‘What happened to Lee? Surely you never let him go, too?’

Sam Baker climbed out of the car, the newspaper rolled in his grasp. One look told him that the amphitheatre’s visitors had deserted. With the exception of the ice-cream van and their Range Rover, the car park was empty.

‘That fool you saddled us with ran off and got himself shot,’ Carswell snapped. There was little sign of gentlemanly English cool now, Sam realised. The man’s glass-bead eyes blazed nastily.

‘Shot?’ Jud’s eyes widened. ‘Shot? How?’

‘With a bloody gun, of course.’ Grant Carswell slipped off his white linen jacket. ‘My God, I’ve had a gutful of fools today.’

With that he walked angrily away. Sam didn’t doubt that if a puppy had got in the man’s way he would have kicked it as hard as he damn well could.

Jud called after him. ‘We need to talk about this. We’ve got to get together and find a—’

‘Leave him,’ Sam said. ‘He’s the kind of guy who does exactly as he pleases.’

‘Oh, what a hell of a day.’ Zita rubbed her temples.

‘What happened?’ Jud asked again.

Sam sighed. ‘For some reason, Lee decided to play the hero. He went haring off, confronted a gunman and got himself shot. We managed to track him down to the local hospital.’

‘It doesn’t look good,’ Zita said. ‘I told them a little white lie, that we worked for the same company. As far as we can gather he’ll be lucky to survive the next 24 hours.’

‘Oh, Christ,’ Jud shook his head. ‘He can’t be more than 25. Poor man. He was just so desperate to go with the two of you. He kept saying he wanted to help, that he wanted to do the right thing.’

‘If you ask me, he was more than a little flaky,’ Sam said. ‘I think the whole situation had knocked him off track.’ He looked round the deserted car park. ‘What happened here?’

‘I couldn’t keep them. Whatever affected the electrics of the bus and the cars must have sorted itself out. When I tried to explain to them that… that—’

‘Time had gone skew-whiff?’

‘Yes, they wouldn’t listen. They drove off.’ Jud looked at Sam and Zita with wide, horror-filled eyes. ‘Can you imagine? Those people will be like a plague virus. They don’t belong to this time anymore.’

For a while no-one spoke. With an unspoken accord they moved to a bench in the shade of a tree.

At last Sam broke the silence. ‘I remember as kids we’d sit around campfires and ask ourselves questions that would drive you half-crazy trying to answer them. You know the kind, trying to describe how big infinity really is. The big favourite was: could you go back in time before you were born and murder your own grandfather?’

‘Ah, scientists call it the Grandfather Paradox,’ Zita said. ‘The general consensus was that even if time travel was possible you couldn’t go back in time and kill your own grandfather, because if you did, you’d never be born, therefore you couldn’t go back in time in order to pull the trigger. Like you say, if you thought about it too much it would drive you insane.’

Jud shook his head in frustration. ‘I should have found some way to keep those people here.’

‘What could you do, short of holding them at gunpoint?’ Sam tapped the rolled-up newspaper gently against the point of his chin. ‘Besides, is it our problem? As far as I can see, it’s going to take a whole busload of scientists to figure out what happened today.’

‘I think it is our problem,’ Jud told them with feeling. ‘I believed it was our duty to contain those people, hold them here in quarantine until we could convince the powers that be about what has happened.’

Zita said. ‘That we – the people who were gathered in the amphitheatre – have somehow come adrift in time?’

‘Yes. A tough one, I know. But I should have tried harder. I really should have.’

Sam handed him the paper. ‘We bought this in town. It shows just how adrift we really are.’

Jud nodded. ‘I know. We’re one week adrift. We’ve jumped backwards seven whole days.’ He glanced at the newspaper. ‘When you didn’t come back, I checked the television’s Teletext service on my boat. It took a while for the reception to get back to normal, but when it did, I saw only too clearly that it was last week’s news, last week’s programmes and last week’s date. Tuesday 16^th June.’

Zita shook her head. ‘That means I can jump in the car, drive back to my flat, walk in through the door and give the other me a hell of a shock.’

‘No,’ Sam said. ‘That won’t happen.’

‘You don’t think we can meet ourselves as we were one week ago?’

‘I don’t know if there’re any physical laws that would prevent it. But think about it, Zita; think back to last week. Did you see someone who looked exactly like you – and who claimed to be you – come sailing through the door with a cheery hello?’

‘No… no, I didn’t.’

‘Earlier you used the mobile in the amphitheatre. You said at the time that you could have sworn you found yourself speaking to someone who sounded like you on the phone. Do you remember that?’

‘Now that I do remember.’ Zita said, her eyes lighting up. ‘I was in the office, busy writing up the costings for a documentary commission. The phone rang, I answered it and I heard this woman asking for Liz. I told her, no, Liz wasn’t in, that she was speaking to Zita Prestwyck. I realised it was a mobile and the link wasn’t too good; only this stupid woman insisted on claiming she was Zita. I took it she’d misheard me; anyway, the call made no sense whatsoever and after a while she hung up. I was so preoccupied getting my figures to add up I dismissed it entirely.’ She gave a watery smile. ‘I guess that stupid woman was me.’

Jud rubbed his jaw. ‘At least it demonstrates that if we don’t remember actually meeting ourselves in the past we’ve had the common sense not to try and find ourselves as we were a week ago.’

‘A little difficult for me anyway,’ Sam said. ‘This time last week I was in New York.’

‘Well, as long as you don’t try and telephone yourself.’

‘No danger of that. I’m still trying to get my head round what’s happening now.’

‘But we don’t know what the others will do, do we?’ Jud asked thoughtfully. ‘I counted 52 people in the amphitheatre. I guess perhaps there were half a dozen or so just outside it who were also transported. What are they going to do now? Just what on Earth are they going to do?’

At that moment Sam Baker mentally stepped out of himself and saw their small group as if from a distance. Perhaps from the top of the church tower across there on the grassy incline. There was the amphitheatre and acres of rolling meadow bathed in sunlight. The river with Carswell’s millionaire launch moored behind Jud’s homely narrow boat with shirts and brightly coloured towels hanging from a washing line.

And there, in the car park, three lost, bewildered people. Zita, looking as if she was suffering from the mother of all headaches. Jud Campbell, tired, harassed and as worried as if he’d been left in charge of a child who’d become lost in a wolf-infested forest. And himself, Sam Baker, sitting with his hands in his pockets, his chin almost touching his chest as he stared at the tarmac wondering what the hell they should do next.

It was as though they’d fled the scene of a natural disaster. But unlike a physical hurricane that tears through a town, flattening houses, hurling cars about, knocking people off their feet, this particular psychic storm had torn through their minds.

The tourists sat on the bus feeling emotionally bruised. They didn’t move and none of them felt inclined to discuss what they’d experienced.

The driver of the County and Coast Tours bus muttered to himself as he drove. He stared glassily through the windscreen. Once he missed a red light. Drivers sounded their horns; a car missed him by a whisker.

In the front seat of the bus Nicole in her gorilla suit and Sue as Stan Laurel tried to decide where to go.

‘I mean we can’t just take the coach back to the office and say, “Sorry we’re a week ahead of schedule,” can we?’

‘I was in the office last week,’ Sue said in a small voice. ‘They’d asked me to stand in for Toni Burke in admin. If I go back I’ll meet myself. I was wearing that silly dress with the pink flowers.’ She pushed her fist into her mouth and a hard, machine-like laugh came clacking from her throat. Yet her eyes had a scared cast to them, like she’d just found a severed hand in her shoulder bag. ‘I’ll say hello to myself. What then? Ask myself to go out for a coffee and talk about what I’m going to do about Graham? I mean, I can hardly tell him he’s got two identical girlfriends now, can I?’

Nicole sat with the gorilla head clenched in her two hands. She felt dangerously hot in the stupid suit that bristled with black nylon fur. And here was Sue, going over the edge. Oh, Lord, she didn’t feel far behind.

In the seat behind her, Ryan Keith sat with his face in his plump hands, the Oliver Hardy bowler still wedged on his head.

Behind him the passengers sat and stared at the passing scenery. Dumb from shock, Nicole guessed.

At one point on the drive to York a man had slapped his wife.

A full-blooded slap straight across her face.

No-one knew why.

No-one asked.

No-one reacted.

It was as if it had never happened.

Then both husband and wife had sat there in silence. Only her cheek was now a brilliant red and tears filled her staring eyes.

They were all coming apart at the seams.

Because each and every one of them knew time had come adrift.

Nicole ran her fingers through her beautiful blonde hair and tried to imagine what had happened.

The best she could come up with was that the present – the here and now – was like a group of rafts all tied together. These rafts drifted steadily down a river that was time. For some reason their raft of now had somehow broken away. It had gone spinning away from the rest of the here and now, away from the rest of the world of 23^rd June, and somehow it had been stolen away on another current that ran backwards. That raft had floated a whole seven days back, from 23^rd June to 16^th.

My, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun? The saying suddenly seemed extravagantly absurd.

Like Sue beside her, Nicole found that her fist had made it into her mouth and that she was biting her knuckles. Whether it was to stop herself laughing out loud or plugging a scream that threatened to erupt from her throat she just didn’t know.

But right then a crazy idea struck her. A neighbour of hers had died suddenly on 20^th June. Mr Thorpe was a cheerful 60-year-old who lived with his wife of 40 years in a house full of cats. Every spring he’d bring Nicole sticks of fresh pink rhubarb from his garden and glowingly tell her what marvellous crumbles they’d make. On Saturday afternoon he’d just clutched his chest and rolled over dead in his chair.

It occurred to her, seeing that today was, as far as the rest of the whole wide, shining green world was concerned, 16^th, she could see him alive and well again (at least, outwardly well if you discounted the artery ballooning in his chest) – and she could talk to him.

She bit her knuckle harder. Wouldn’t that be a scream?

To talk to a man who she knew would be dead within days.

She screwed her eyes tight shut as the world gave a slow, sickening spin around her.

But the idea that occurred to her now – the overwhelmingly powerful idea that rushed through her skull like an express train – was that she could save his life.

She could get off the coach, take a taxi to Invicta Parade in the suburbs of York, somehow persuade Mr Thorpe that he should go to hospital. A quick test would reveal the man’s swollen artery on the verge of rupture. They’d operate. Take a section of healthy artery from his leg. Cut out the damaged section in the region of his heart; then splice in the strong section. Why, he might live for another 20 years.

Nicole stared out of the window at the houses and hotels on the edge of York. Her reflected eyes, wide with astonishment, stared back at her.

God, yes. She could do that. She could save his life.

She climbed to her feet.

‘Bill… Bill!’ She struggled out of her seat. ‘Bill! Stop the coach. I have to get off”

The man who sold ice creams found himself down by the river bank. He wasn’t exactly clear how he had got there. Only that he’d been wandering aimlessly in a daze. Birds swooped above the surface of the water catching insects. The plop of a water rat slipping into the river sounded overloud to his jangled nerves.

He looked round, eyes creasing into two thin slits against the brilliance of the sun. Through the V-shaped cleft in the grass slope he could see the timber seating of the amphitheatre.

It was deserted.

He realised he must have left the ice-cream van unlocked.

But at that moment he didn’t give a merry chuff. He was just coming to terms with seeing a man humping his wife.

But it wasn’t just any man.

Now that he’d thought about it for a bit it wouldn’t even seem so bad if it had been a stranger or… or the bloody window cleaner, if it came to that.

No, the man he’d seen had been none other than himself.

That’s something you don’t expect, he thought, for the twentieth time since coming to his senses a moment ago.

Not yourself. You never expect to walk into a room and see you there as large as life, do you?

He knew the Germans had a word for meeting your exact double: doppelgänger. It meant ‘double walker’. If you met your doppelgänger it was a bad omen. It probably meant you’d die soon.

Another rat plopped into the water by his feet, where it swam just below the surface, leaving a muddy trail.

‘Doppelgänger.’ He rolled the unusual word across his tongue. ‘Doppelgänger.’ Was that it?

He’d seen himself.

His own doppelgänger.

Did that mean he was he going to die soon?

Jesus Christ.

Forty-five years old. That isn’t old, he thought. I don’t want to die at 45.

A few yards ahead of him an old man stood on the bank looking out across the river; he leaned forward, taking his weight on his walking stick.

Beyond the man a couple of boats bobbed at their moorings on the water. One was a huge white launch on which a blond-haired man in white linen trousers and short-sleeved shirt sipped from a glass.

The man who sold ice creams gnawed his thumbnail. It was already rough and frayed from being chewed, but he worried at it nonetheless, turning the problem over in his mind. He’d seen a God-given sign of his own death, his doppelgänger. What should he do? Was there a way to escape it?

The old man looked up as the ice-cream seller slowly walked towards him.

‘Fine weather,’ the old man said with conviction. ‘There’s nothing like a summer’s day.’

The ice-cream seller managed a nod accompanied by a tiny grunt.

‘You know,’ the old man continued, almost as if he was talking to himself, ‘I can remember a summer’s day like this when I was four years old. My father brought me fishing to this very spot. He was a big man, arms like tree trunks, and when he was fishing he’d wear this straw hat, you know? A straw boater? It wasn’t the thing you’d normally see a working man wear in those days. I think he found it somewhere, but he’d always insist on wearing it when he fished… A bit thin on top, I suppose… Didn’t want the sun to burn his scalp. Anyway, he wore that boater and cast his line into the water while I sat on the bank eating plums – big soft purple plums, sweetest things I ever tasted. I remember it all as plain as day. I remember the juice trickling down my fingers. And I remember my father stood just there by that tree stump. Course, it was a sapling then, more than 75 years ago…’

The old man talked on in a voice that was low, slow and even soothing. The man who sold ice creams listened. The normality of an old man remembering sunnier, happier days was reassuring. He found himself listening eagerly as if the voice was a lifeline thrown at him across the seething chaos of his stormy mental seas.

‘My father tilted the boater like so.’ The old man echoed the action. ‘So the brim came low over his eyes. He smoked a cigarette – gave him a lot of pleasure it did, too. There was no harm in cigarettes in those days, or eating meat, or even drinking a cup full of cream if you wanted to. At least, nobody thought there was any harm in it. People weren’t scared by what they ate or what they smoked. They knew nothing about tar levels, cholesterol, saturated fats and nonsense like that. It was all different then. Better. You left your back door unlocked when you went out. Children played in the streets. They were safe. And I remember sitting right there on that bit of banking with those plums on a summer’s day 75 years ago, and I remember it as clear as crystal. A brass band played marching songs over yonder in the amphitheatre. There were girls in pretty dresses that were so long they touched the ground. My father caught a pike that was as big as me. Monster of a fish it was, and a devil of a time he had reeling it in. As he was dragging it up the bank just there, he bent down to grab it by the gills and his hat fell off in the water. He loved that straw boater. And, you know? The current took it out into the middle of the river. A chap in a boat had to fetch it for him.’ The old man smiled, his face creasing into a thousand lines. ‘I wish I could live it all over again. And you know, I wouldn’t change a thing. I’d love it. Just love it.’ When the old man said the word ‘love’ his whole body seemed to swell. He didn’t so much say the word as will part of his soul into it until it appeared to pulsate with an energy all of its own. ‘I loved growing up here. I can remember it all as clear as people remember yesterday.’ His face darkened. The smile vanished. ‘But you get old. And you can’t remember what you did yesterday. You can’t remember what you did five minutes ago. My mother went the same way. You know, Alzheimer’s? You forget the names of your family. You forget you drank a cup of tea five minutes ago and you sit there asking over and over for another cup. It sends people barmy. No… I wouldn’t inflict that on my worst enemy. I won’t let myself go like that.’

With that the old man walked decisively forward into the water.

The ice-cream seller felt as if he was snapping out of a trance.

The old man floundered forward. In five paces he was out of his depth and swimming forward, blowing out his cheeks with the effort, his breathing noisy, then spluttering as he took in a mouthful of water.

The ice-cream seller pulled off his shoes as he ran into the river’s shallows. There he snatched up the old man’s walking stick that drifted on the current and held it out to him. It was a useless gesture. The old man was by this time a good 20 yards off shore. There the water had a blackness about it that spoke of cold depths.

‘Grab this!’ the ice-cream seller cried. ‘Come on, swim and grab this.’ Even as he shouted the words at the old man, who was still swimming out towards the middle of the river, he knew that what he shouted made no sense. The old man hadn’t fallen into the water simply by accident. He’d walked into it deliberately. Just as he now swam out into the deepest part deliberately.

This was suicide.

The ice-cream seller couldn’t swim.

Wildly, he looked round.

He saw the man on the launch standing on the deck while sipping a drink from a glass.

The man’d seen everything.

The ice-cream seller ran splashing through the shallows towards the launch.

‘Can you see him? Can you see him’

The blond man didn’t react. He stared back, sipping his drink.

The ice-cream seller shouted: ‘Untie your boat; we’ve got to rescue him. He’s going to drown out there! He’s going to drown!’

The blond man gave a little shrug and sat down on a lounger on the deck.

Stunned, the ice-cream seller looked for anyone else who might be able to help. He ran wildly up the grass slope in the direction of the car park. All the time he was shouting.

He glanced back to see the old man, who now swam on his back with a lazy stroke; he was gazing at the sky with a look of wonder on his face.

Sam Baker had just that minute bought a drink from the vending machine by the visitors’ centre when he saw a man in a white uniform running across the car park, shouting wildly while pointing back at the river.

Zita had gone to wash her face in the ladies’ – and to beat her head against the cubicle doors if the fancy took her, she’d told him. He’d hoped she’d been attempting a little whimsy, but he half wondered if she, too, had sensed that pit of insanity opening its deep, dark throat at the back of her mind.

Now a man in white, with red and yellow stains on the front of his jacket, was running barefoot towards him across the tarmac.

Maybe that insanity was well and truly infectious, after all.

Jud looked up from where he sat on the bench. ‘That’s Brian. What’s eating him?’

‘Probably the same thing that’s eating us all,’ Sam said, hearing the bitterness in his voice. ‘You don’t go through the experience of sliding back one week and come out the other side all happy-smiley.’

The man shouted. ‘In the blasted river! There’s an old man. He’s drowning!’ He gestured. ‘I can’t swim and that stupid jerk on the boat won’t bastard well do anything.’

Jud threw his waistcoat to one side and ran across the car park. Sam followed. The man in white didn’t wait and ran back down the slope in the direction of the river. The bare soles of his feet were blackened with dirt.

At the bank all three stopped. Sam scanned the water but saw nothing. Apart from the two moored boats there were no others on the water. A pair of swans glided serenely by.

‘He was there.’ The ice-cream seller pointed. ‘Out there in the middle. Just swimming on his back.’ He ran down into the water until he was up to his knees, then stopped and turned his head this way and that like a nervous kid getting ready to cross a busy road. ‘He was there! You believe me, don’t you?’ He looked back at Sam. ‘There’s his walking stick… oh, Jesus. He must have gone under. We’ve lost him!’

Sam noticed Carswell standing, resting his elbows on the safety rail of the launch. He had a large glass tumbler in his hand.

‘Did you see anything?’ Sam called.

Carswell nodded, then took a swallow from his glass before returning to his lounger.

Sam Baker stiffened as if someone had just slapped him. He couldn’t believe what he’d just seen. Carswell looked about as concerned as someone seeing those two swans on the water.

Sam walked in angry strides to the foot of the gangplank. ‘There’s a man in the water. You mean you saw it and did nothing?’

‘Don’t trouble yourself about it,’ Carswell said dismissively.

‘What the hell are you saying, Carswell? That you’ve just sat there and watched a man drown?’

‘I sat here, but I didn’t watch.’

‘You callous bastard.’ Sam took five more angry steps up the gangplank and onto the deck of the boat. ‘Why didn’t you try and help?’

‘The old man knew what he was doing. He deliberately took his own life.’

‘But you—’

‘But nothing, Baker. Why the hell should I interfere in another man’s decisions if those decisions do not have any impact on my own life? And, by the way, Mr Baker, I didn’t invite you onto my boat, did I?’

‘You know where you can stick your fucking boat, Carswell.’

‘He wouldn’t help,’ the man in white was saying in a dazed voice. ‘He wouldn’t lift a finger.’

Sam scanned the river from the deck. From there he could see more of the broad expanse of water that stretched out more like a lake than a river at this point. The water was smooth, unbroken.

There was no sign of an old man.

The current must already have drawn him down. Nevertheless: ‘We could still make a search of the river if we use both boats,’ Sam said. He glared at Carswell, who stretched out on the lounger and rotated the glass between his two palms so the ice chinked against the sides.

‘No can do, Mr Baker. The man wanted to die. I drink to his sensible decision. And I, for one, wish more people would follow suit. Now, Mr Baker, kindly get yourself off my fucking boat.’

The man’s once polished accent had vanished. The tones were raw, with a dangerous edge. And his glass-bead eyes began to flash dangerously. Sam saw clearly enough the crude violence simmering beneath Carswell’s skin, like molten rock ready to blow the top from a volcano.

‘Don’t worry, I’m going,’ Sam told him, disgusted.

Jud was already untying the lines to his narrow boat. ‘We’ll use mine,’ he shouted. ‘If we head downstream we might still be able to pick him up if he’s on the surface.’

He wasn’t. The old man must have got what he wanted. A quick and, Sam hoped, a relatively painless end to his life. Jud Campbell returned the narrow boat to the mooring. By this time the sun was dropping towards the hills.

Jud told them that people who drowned in the river would remain submerged for a week or so before floating to the surface. In days gone by men would stand on the river banks and fire guns over the water in the belief that the vibration from the shots would loosen the bodies from the hold of the river bed. Now the police dragged the river with cables or sent in the divers.

Sam watched Jud deftly tie the mooring rope to the metal ring set into the timber landing posts. ‘I suppose we should report this?’

‘Report what exactly, Sam? That we saw an old man drown in the river? If they can’t find the body but somehow trace the man’s identity from his walking stick, what happens when they call at his house? Remember, there are two identical copies of the man now. One lying on the river bed – and one at home, probably grilling a kipper for his tea. If we weren’t charged with wasting police time they’d laugh in our faces, as likely as not. Ah, here comes your friend.’

Sam turned to see Zita walking down the grassy slope to the timber landing stage.

‘I saw you go out on the boat. I take it you weren’t running out on me. What happened?’

Sam told her. Occasionally he shot glances at Carswell’s launch moored behind Jud’s far more modest and homely narrow boat. The man himself sat drinking on his lounger.

Every so often a girl of around 18, wearing a little black dress, would come clicking in high stilettos across the deck to pour him another drink. Once Carswell squeezed her leg. It didn’t look like a gesture of affection; rather a pinch intended to hurt.

Sam Baker liked the man less and less.

‘Right,’ Jud said gently. ‘Can I offer anyone a drink and perhaps something to eat if you’ve the stomach for it?’

Brian Pickering, the man who sold ice cream, shook his head. ‘Thanks, Jud. But I think it’s time I was going home.’

‘Is that wise, Brian? After all, you’re going to find an identical copy of yourself there.’

‘I’ll work something out.’ He grinned, but to Sam it looked more like a frightened kind of snarl. ‘The wife won’t know which way to turn with two husbands, will she?’

‘Just take it easy with her, won’t you? It won’t be easy.’

‘Don’t worry about me, Jud.’ Again he tried to speak lightly, but there was a distinct waver in his voice. ‘I’ll be all right.’

‘Sure you will,’ Jud said kindly. ‘See you later.’

For a moment they watched Brian Pickering go. A stumpy man, half walking, half running up the slope back to his ice-cream van in the car park.

Sam felt for him. He sensed the man’s anticipation of meeting himself. Clashing with that was probably a hefty wedge of fear, too.

Zita was astonished. ‘How could you let him go like that? Imagine the shock of seeing what is basically a carbon copy of yourself coming through the door!’

‘I don’t think we need worry about him,’ Jud said evenly. ‘Something will happen to Brian Pickering between here and Casterton.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because he never met himself. After all, he never mentioned meeting himself to us, did he?’

Sam nodded. ‘Point taken. But tell me, Jud. Where were you on June 16^th?’

‘Twenty miles upstream… fortunately. I’d taken the boat to have her engine serviced. So there’s no immediate danger of me coming face to face with myself.’ He smiled. ‘Who’s for that drink?’

He stood back on the landing stage and held out his hand towards the gangplank, inviting them on board.

Sam Baker took one step forward. But he was never to have that drink.

Because at that exact moment, whatever had happened earlier in the day went and happened all over again