Trace Memory

TWO

'Jack?'

He'd been sitting alone in his office for ten minutes, while Owen and Gwen were taking Michael from Basement D-4 to the Boardroom; ten minutes in which he had done nothing but think, and yet those thoughts were still so clouded. How could he have allowed himself to be blindsided like this? How could he not have known this was going to happen?

Decades spent knowing the future had, he supposed, left him with a kind of complacency; a resignation to the future and the concept of destiny. There was no point in fighting the future, or destiny, and so very little surprised him these days. Why had this hit him so hard?

'Jack?'

He looked over at the door. Gwen was standing in the entrance to his office, leaning against the doorframe, smiling softly.

'You OK, Jack?'

He shook off his mood, at least on the outside, and smiled back.

'Yeah. I'm fine,' he said. 'I'm just glad our guest doesn't have six arms and a penchant for human flesh.'

Gwen laughed.

'You sure you're OK? I was watching the monitor, when you were down there. You looked like you'd seen a ghost.'

'Yeah.' He paused, and then, with greater certainty, said 'Yeah. I'm fine. How is he?'

'Michael?'

Jack took a deep breath. 'Yeah. Michael.'

'He's fine. A little shaken up. A little disorientated. But he's OK now. Owen's giving him his usual, sensitive bedside manner. You know how Owen is.'

'By sensitive bedside manner I take it you mean the third degree?'

'Something like that.' Gwen smiled, but the smile faded quickly. 'We've established that his name is Michael Bellini and that he's twenty-four. He said you knew his name.'

'What's that?'

'Michael. He said you knew his name. He said you called him "Michael".'

'He must have been confused.'

'Are you sure?' asked Gwen.

'Yes.'

'Oh. Because… I thought I recognised him. I don't know where from, but it's like déjà vu or something. Or like when you see somebody you recognise off the telly.'

'I don't know him.'

Gwen nodded, biting her lip. What was Jack hiding? He'd been so secretive about so many things, and every time it put her on edge. She trusted him, they all trusted him, but sometimes it was as if they didn't know him at all.

'So are you coming down?' she asked.

Jack shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'Not yet. I've got a few things need doing here. You go on down. I'll join you as soon as I'm finished.'

Gwen left Jack's office and walked down to the Boardroom. Michael was sat in a chair at one end of the conference table, while Owen took his blood pressure. Ianto and Toshiko stood in the far corners of the room.

As Gwen entered the Boardroom, Michael looked at her, wide-eyed and lost, and then at the others.

'Here, Gwen…' said Owen, 'listen to this.' He turned to Michael. 'Who's the Prime Minister of Great Britain?'

'W-Winston Churchill,' said Michael, his voice barely louder than a whisper.

'OK… And who's at number one in the charts?'

'Frankie Lane.'

Owen turned to Gwen, his arms open as if he were the ringmaster of a circus presenting the next act.

'Owen, quit it,' said Gwen. She looked at Michael. The young man looked so scared, it didn't seem fair turning him into a freak show.

'He's from 1953,' said Owen. 'Or, to be exact, November the twentieth 1953. Churchill is Prime Minister, and Frankie Lane is at number one with… Hang on. Michael, what was that song called?'

'"Answer Me",' Michael replied, timidly.

'Owen, I said quit it. This isn't some kind of game show.' Gwen turned to Michael. 'Do you know how you got here?'

Michael shook his head.

'Do you remember where you're from?'

Michael nodded. 'Cardiff,' he said. 'Butetown. I live on Fitzhamon Terrace. Where am I?'

Gwen looked at the others. 'You didn't tell him?'

The others shrugged.

Gwen sighed and leaned back against the wall. She looked to the ceiling for an easy way to say this. How could you tell someone they were so far away from home? She'd sometimes felt as lost and as scared as he did now, especially in the early days. What could she say to him? 'You're still in Cardiff,' she said at last. 'But it's not 1953. That was more than fifty years ago.'

Michael's eyes filled with tears once more, and he let out a shuddering, helpless sob.

'But… But that means I'm almost eighty.

'No,' said Gwen, smiling gently, trying to put him at ease. 'You're not eighty. You're still you. You're just here.'

'But the future?' Michael shook his head. 'How can I be here? How can any of this be happening?'

'Wait,' said Gwen, turning to Toshiko. '1953? We've had visitors from 1953 before. Do you think this could be connected to that?'

Owen looked up suddenly, his expression a curious mixture of shock and hope.

'I don't think so,' said Toshiko. 'They flew through the Rift in the Sky Gypsy.

It wasn't the Rift that brought Michael here. It's clearly got something to do with the pulse that I was picking up earlier. The curious thing is, since we brought Michael here, I'm now picking up two definable sources for it.'

'Two?'

Toshiko nodded. 'Yes. Michael and Basement D-4.'

'What does all this mean?' said Michael, growing angrier. 'You're all talking rubbish. None of this makes sense. It's a nightmare, isn't it? It's a bad dream? It's got to be a bad dream. I've been watching too many of those stupid bloody films at the pictures. All those films about flying saucers and spaceships…'

'You're not dreaming,' said Gwen. 'What's the last thing you remember, before you were here?'

Michael looked down at the ground, and his shoulders shook with another barely suppressed sob.

It was like stepping off the roller-coaster at first, that feeling of nausea, and of senses overloaded. It took a few seconds for the white noise and for the light behind his eyelids to go away, and for him to realise that he was on his hands and knees, and that the ground beneath him was hard, and cold, and wet.

Then there was the noise.

He couldn't say that he had never heard it before, because he had, but many years ago. Like thunder, only it was worse than thunder. It was louder than thunder as if somebody was slamming a colossal door, and every time the door slammed the ground beneath him shook.

Above that slamming sound there was the drone, that unmistakable drone, like a million angry hornets. The Heinkel bombers. After five months, they had all learnt the difference between the sounds of the British and German planes.

Michael got to his feet and looked around. He was in the lane, his lane, at the end of Neville Street. Years ago, when he was a child, he had played in this lane, flicking pennies against the wall and kicking a ball about with Tommo and Mogs. Only, he suddenly realised, it wasn't years ago. Those games had happened at the same time that German bombers swarmed overhead and the howl of air-raid sirens would send people running for shelter.

The bombers hadn't been aiming for the houses, of course, they were going for the train tracks and the depot. It just happened that the houses were built around both.

He stepped out into Neville Street and saw the night sky lit up like Hell. He remembered somebody telling him that the only reason the bombers got this far was that the antiaircraft guns on Ely Racecourse had malfunctioned, only that wasn't many years ago. It was now.

It was 2 January 1941, and Michael Bellini was walking down the street where he had grown up as a child, a street he hadn't revisited in more than a decade. There, on both sides of the street, were houses that neither he, nor anyone else for that matter, had seen in all those years, and yet they were still standing. There, running out of their front door, were Mr and Mrs Davies, with Mrs Davies holding her pet Yorkshire terrier under her arm. There, in the middle of the street, was Mr Harris, the ARP warden, self-important in his tin helmet, barking orders at them to get to shelter, and quickly.

Michael was wondering whether anyone could see him, when his question was answered by Mr Harris.

'Oi, you… Lad! Get inside, quick. This isn't a walk along the bloody promenade. It's an air raid!'

He had heard him say those words before; it wasn't déjà vu. Michael had heard Mr Harris say those exact words, with that exact voice. Looking further down the street, past Mr Harris, he saw three figures outside the open door of number 26; a boy no older than eleven, an older girl, and a woman, her hair still in curlers.

Michael thought for a moment that his heart might stop, or that he would finally, thankfully wake up, but he didn't. Running from their house and out into Neville Street, he saw his mother, his sister Maria, and himself.

Mr Harris did an about-turn, and starting yelling at the three of them and, though Michael couldn't hear what he was saying over the drone of the planes and the slam and the roar of the explosions, he could remember. Mr Harris was asking them where they were going, and Michael's mother was telling him that they were going to her sister's house on Clare Road, because they had an Anderson shelter there. Mr Harris told them to hurry up while they were at it, and so they started running.

Michael knew what happened next.

They were halfway down Neville Street when Michael's mother stopped in her tracks. She had told him and his sister to carry on running until they reached Aunty Megan's, and then she had run back to the house. Maybe she had forgotten something.

As he watched himself and his sister running to the end of the street, Michael suddenly realised that this was his chance. Maybe this was why he was here. Maybe this time it could be different. He started running towards the house he had grown up in, heedless of the sound of bombs and the drone of the planes. He ran towards it knowing what was going to happen, and he cried out: 'Mum!'

The bomb didn't hit their house directly; it landed somewhere in the gardens behind their street. Michael and his sister had been on Clare Road at the time, crying and scared, not knowing what had happened.

Facing it for the first time, Michael saw the explosion almost a split second before he could hear it; a blinding flash of white light and then a fireball that erupted upwards and outwards, destroying a whole row of houses as if they were made of nothing more than sand and matchsticks.

The sound and the Shockwave knocked him off his feet, and suddenly everything was dark, and all he could hear was the roar of the fire and the sound of bricks, and wood, and glass raining down upon the cold, damp street.

He struggled to his feet, and saw the gaping crater filled with fire where their house had been, the neighbouring houses now hollowed out like dead teeth, the street itself shoulder-deep in debris.

He wiped the tears now streaming from his eyes away from his face and saw that they had been turned to ink by soot and ash. He put one hand to his chest and felt a sliver of wood sticking out of his shirt. Just touching it sent a hot bolt of pain through his chest.

The Traveller…'

Somebody was calling him, only they weren't calling him. They weren't even raising their voice. It was like a whisper that he could somehow hear over the din of the fire and the bombers and the sound of people screaming.

'The Traveller…'

He turned and saw a man walking through the flames. A man dressed smartly in a black suit and bowler hat, and carrying an umbrella.

That was when he blacked out.