The Woman Who Died a Lot

8. Monday: Friday

"I spoke to Braxton Hicks today,” I said as Friday and I went into the dining room to set the table. “He tells me his daughter, Imogen, is looking for a ‘steady hand on the tiller.’ I said I’d mention it to you.”

“I don’t need my mother to set me up on dates,” he retorted.

“Besides, Mimi is totally bonkers. She surfed on the roof of a speeding car between junctions thirteen and fourteen of the M4. How insane do you have to be to do something like that? If she’d slipped, she’d have killed herself instantly.”

“You need a careful driver and soft-soled shoes,” I replied thoughtfully.

Friday looked at me with horror. “You didn’t?”

“I did. The flush of youth.”

“Does Dad know about this?”

“I think he was driving.”

“For God’s sake, Mother,” he said in an exasperated tone, “is there nothing dumb, daft or dangerous that you haven’t tried at some point?”

I thought for a moment. “I’ve never tried oysters. They can be quite dangerous.’

Friday shook his head sadly. To most of his and Tuesday’s friends, I was considered about the coolest parent one could have, but to Tuesday and Friday I was simply embarrassing.

“So . . . how many are we for supper?” he asked, counting out the cutlery.

“Joffy and Miles are in town and want to speak to your sister about the defense shield. All of us, of course, but maybe not Polly or Gran. Granddad will be coming.”

“Do you think he will want to talk endlessly about the good old never-happened days at the ChronoGuard?”

“Probably. Try to steer him onto plumbing. Which reminds me, Jimmy-G and Shazza both wanted to be remembered to you. Shazza said, ‘It would have been seriously good.’ And she raised her eyebrows in that sort of way when she said ‘seriously.’”

“Sharon ‘Steggo’ deWitt,” he murmured with a smile. “She would have been known as the ‘Scourge of the Upper Jurassic.’”

“Curiosity insists that I inquire why.”

“It was a popular place for timejackers to hang out. The Epochal Badlands, we would have called them. A jump into the Upper Jurassic was usually a safe escape. Not for deWitt. Twenty million years, and she knew each hour like the back of her hand. She was the one who tracked down ‘Fingers’ Lomax, hiding out after the Helium Heist of ’09. Or at least she would have.”

“She said you were going to have a weekend retreat in the Late Pleistocene.”

“I was going to have a lot of things. She and I would have been very close, so I got some of her potential future in my own Letter of Destiny. How will she turn out now?”

“Not great,” I replied, handing him the forks. “Two unremarkable kids, a husband she doesn’t like—and then she gets hit by a car in 2041.”

“Same year as me,” mused Friday.

I stopped folding the napkins. “You never told me you only make it to fifty-five.”

“Bummer, isn’t it?” said Friday with a shrug. “Thirty-seven years to go and counting.”

I stared at him for a while and felt a heavy feeling of grief in my heart. It was over three decades away, so I didn’t feel the loss quite yet, just the notion that I was going to outlive him. And that wasn’t how it was meant to happen.

“But there’s an upside,” he added.

“There is?”

“Sure. I miss HR-6984 slamming into the earth by three days.”

“That might not happen.”

“I’ll never know whether it does or it doesn’t.”

“What else happens to you?”

“My future’s my own, Mum.”

“Okay, okay,” I said quickly, since we’d covered this ground before, “forget I asked. Have you thought any more about university or a career?”

“No.”

I pondered for a moment.

“You know, your sister needs a lab assistant she can trust,” I said, “and she’ll pay you well. There’s a career there ready and waiting.”

“Mum, Tuesday’s work is Tuesday’s work. My life lies along a different path. I was going to be important—I was going to do wonderful things. I would have been head of the ChronoGuard and saved an aggregate seventy-six billion lives. Shazza and I would have made love on the veranda of my place in the Pleistocene while the mastodons bellowed at one another across the valley. I would have been there at Mahatma Winston Smith Al-Wazeed’s historic speech to the citizens of the world state at Europolis in 3419, and listened to his last words as he lay dying in my arms, and then implemented them. But now I don’t. All gone. Not going to happen. Mum, I don’t have any function. No kids, no wife, no achievements, nothing. I die aged fifty-five, my life essentially . . . wasted.”

There was silence for a moment. We stopped setting the table, and I gave him a hug. One of those strong Mum hugs that always do some good, no matter how bad things happen to be.

“Listen,” I said, “you don’t know for certain there are no good times. They didn’t give you a full view of the future, did they?”

“No,” he said, “it’s always a summary. A side of letter-size paper on what we would have done and the same again of what we will. An entire life compressed into barely five hundred words.”

“Right,” I said, “so you don’t know for certain you won’t a have a few boffo laughs and some good times, now, do you?”

“What’s going on?” asked Landen, who happened to be walking past the open door of the dining room.

“Friday’s lost his life function,” I said.

“He looks fairly alive to me.”

“No, no, his purpose. His raison d’être.”

“Everyone has a function,” said Landen, coming in to lay a comforting hand on his son’s shoulder, “even if he doesn’t know what it is. Some of us are lucky enough to have a clear function. I wasn’t sure what mine was for a while, until I realized it was to support your mother—and make sure you and Tuesday survived into adulthood.”

“Don’t forget Jenny,” I said.

“Yeah, her, too. Yours might not be obvious right now or even known—but it’s there. Everyone has a function. A small role to play in the bigger picture.”

Friday detached himself from my arms and continued to set the table. “You’re wrong, both of you. Here’s the thing: My life didn’t even warrant a full sheet of paper. This Friday at 1402 and four seconds, I murder someone. I’m in custody by the evening. In three months’ time, I’m sentenced to twenty-two years in the clink. Fifteen years into my sentence, I stab Danny ‘The Horse’ Bomperini to death in the prison laundry. It was self-defense but the courts don’t see it that way. My sentence is extended. I finally get out on February first, 2041. A few days later, I’m found in the car park of Sainsbury’s. It looks like they used a baseball bat, and the police never find who did it.”

There was silence. It explained the sullen mood he’d been in ever since his future had arrived from the Union of Federated Timeworkers.

“My money’s on the Bomperini family,” said Landen thoughtfully. “Payback for offing the Horse, y’know.”

“Landen!” I scolded. “This is serious shit we’re talking here.”

“I beg to differ, wifey darling,” he replied emphatically, “but it’s not. You can change it. The Standard History Eventline’s not fixed. If we’ve learned anything over the past two decades, it’s precisely that. Yes, it follows a general course that remains the same, but detail can be changed. We’ve all altered the future— and the past, on occasion—and so can he.”

“I could,” replied Friday, “but I have this strange feeling that I won’t. That I’ll let it go ahead.”

There was a pause.

“Do you know who you’re going to murder on Friday?”

“Yes. It’s . . . Gavin Watkins.”

“Gavin Watkins?”

“Do you know him?” Lande asked me.

“A boy in Tuesday’s year,” I replied, “not very pleasant. He paid fifty p to see her boobs.”

“I might have to kill him myself,” said Landen. “Does that have something to do with it?” he asked Friday.

“I don’t think so,” said Friday with a shrug, “but I’m amazed she didn’t hold out for at least a pound.”

“Market forces,” I observed. “We’ve already established that the boob-flashing market isn’t what it used to be. But we can warn the Watkinses. Have him taken into protective custody or something.”

“I’ve got four days,” said Friday, “so we might learn some more before it happens. Who else did you say sent their regards to me?”

“ Jimmy-G at TJ-Maxx,” I replied. “He’s setting up a Destiny Aware Support Group for those who have been summarized, and he wanted to know if you would attend. Eight P.M. at the sports center tomorrow.”

“I’m not really into support groups,” Friday grumbled. “Are we going to get this table set or not?”

So we did, and chatted of lighter things, such as Friday’s part-time job at B&Q and whether his fellow workers actively pursued a policy of looking busy when customers needed assistance.

“It’s the first thing we learn,” he said. “But you have to remember that most customers are as dumb as pig shit and couldn’t find the floor if they fell on it, so there’s a sound reason behind it.”

Once the table was set, Friday went off to tinker with his motorbike, and Landen and I managed to have a few words in the kitchen together. Friday’s future looked bleak, but he was right— we’d changed the timeline before and could do it again.

“What do you think Gavin Watkins will do to make Friday murder him, just supposing he does?” asked Landen.

“What could a sixteen-year-old do?” I replied.

We thought for a moment.

“Do we intervene?” said Landen.

“We can try,” I said, “but the eventline can be a tricksy beast. Push it too hard and it will push back—and almost guarantee that you complete the event you were trying to avoid.”

“It’s annoying,” said Landen.

“What is?”

“I thought we’d seen the back of all this time-travel nonsense.”

“Even when it’s not there,” I murmured, “it still is.”

“Like forgotten dreams,” said Landen.