Chapter 4
NICK
Emma was staring at me, a look of terror in her eyes. I couldn’t blame her.
‘I know you might think I’ve gone mad,’ I said, and she gave a small nod. ‘But listen to me. This photo, this house. It’s mine. I live there right now. And you say you do too. And that thing – that phone thing. It doesn’t exist, where I live. But you seem to think that’s weird.’
She continued to stare at me, not speaking. I ploughed on.
‘Remember when I didn’t know what you were talking about when you were telling me about dating the other day? You called me a relic. But what if… what if I’m not a relic, what if I’m simply living twenty years in your past?’
Emma leapt up and backed away from me.
‘You’re not serious?’ Her voice trembled.
I needed to try and explain what I meant before she got up and ran away.
‘I know it sounds impossible,’ I said. ‘It should be impossible. But if you assume we’re both telling the truth, can you think of a better explanation?’
Emma froze for a moment as though torn between going and staying. Eventually, she sank back down onto the bench again.
‘But… how?’ she whispered.
‘I don’t know. But the more I think about it, the more it makes sense.’
‘Really?’
A thought occurred to me then. I opened my bag and handed her my Nokia phone.
‘This is my phone. It’s the latest model.’
Emma turned it over in her hands, prodded it. It sprang to life, the date and time glowing from the grey screen: 2nd April 1999.
She dropped it as though it was on fire and it clattered onto the bench and bounced onto the floor. I bent down to pick it up, cradling it in my hand.
‘Why don’t you try and ring me?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘I assume that fancy computer-camera-phone thing makes simple phone calls as well?’
‘Of course it does.’
‘Try and ring me.’
I watched as she swiped her finger across the screen of her phone, then I read out my phone number. I held my breath while we waited for it to connect.
The number you have dialled has not been recognised. The tinny voice rang out, and when Emma ended the call we both sat in silence for a moment. Then she shrugged.
‘You could have just given me a wrong number.’
I nodded. ‘I could have done. I don’t know what else to suggest.’
She looked at me, her expression hard to read. ‘Try and ring me.’
She read her number out and I tapped the numbers on the keypad carefully, checking it before I pressed the green dial button. We both waited, watching as my phone tried to connect. And then: The number you dialled has not been recognised.
We stared at it for a few seconds, taking in the implications. Although there was a chance that there was simply a problem with the phone network, or we’d both given out our numbers wrong, it was pretty clear to me that it was more than that. I hoped she’d realised the same.
Finally, she looked at me.
‘My God,’ she whispered. Her eyes were wide.
‘I know,’ I whispered back.
The world still turned, lives still went on around us. But something in this tiny bubble in which we were sitting had shifted. She ran her fingers through her hair and her eyes were wild. ‘This should be impossible. This is impossible.’
‘And yet here we are.’
She nodded. ‘Here we are.’
I’d spent most of my life either studying maths – at school, at university – or working in the field of maths and logic.
I understood how the world worked, how time is a continuous moving thing, that there is no chance that it can move backwards, or that two people living in different times can ever be together.
And yet, unless one of us was seriously ill or playing some elaborate hoax, then that’s exactly what appeared to be happening right here. The question was, what did it mean?
‘Did you feel a jolt when we touched?’
Emma turned to me, her face pale. ‘Every time. I thought it was just me.’
I shook my head. ‘It felt like more than the usual attraction. To me at least.’
‘It did to me too. It felt kind of… other-worldly.’ She shook her head. ‘That’s not right. It’s almost impossible to describe.’
‘Impossible’s the word.’ I sat forward and dropped my head down. The floor was covered in bird poo and litter, and one of the slats of the bench was loose beneath my thigh. ‘Tell me what you see,’ I said.
‘What I see?’
I looked at her. Her face was stricken. I knew how she felt. ‘Tell me what the bandstand looks like, to you. Tell me what you can see in the park. What the weather’s like. Anything.’
She looked away from me and cast her eyes around her.
‘The bandstand is painted white and the railings are dark green. There’s a bit of graffiti up there—’ she pointed to the roof above my head ‘—but other than that it’s in pretty good nick.
’ She looked out across the park. ‘It’s still light but it’ll be dark soon.
There’s a threat of rain. There’s a rose garden all around the bandstand, and although only some of them are in bloom at the moment, I bet in the summer it looks spectacular.
There are a couple of men over there by that tree doing some sort of tai chi, and a few kids in the playground over there.
’ I glanced to where she was pointing but said nothing.
She looked back at me. ‘You see the same, right?’
I shook my head, then looked up. ‘The roof here is covered in graffiti, and there’s barely any paint left on the wood or the metal.
This bench,’ I said, patting the rickety slats, ‘is in danger of falling apart and I’d be amazed if it didn’t have woodworm or dry rot or something,’ I looked out across the park.
‘It’s a bright evening and the sun has only just gone behind the trees.
There’s no rose garden, I can’t see anyone doing any kind of tai chi but there are a couple of kids kicking a football around.
’ I looked back at her. ‘I can’t see a playground either. ’
We stared at each other as the implications of what we’d just discovered sank in.
The impossible seemed, somehow, to be possible.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ I said, picking up my rucksack. I stuck my hand in the front pocket and pulled out my keys. The keyring was a small, foldaway pocketknife. ‘I’m going to go over there and etch something in that tree.’
‘What will that do?’
‘You’ll see.’ Before she could ask anything else I stepped off the bandstand and marched across to the tree a few metres away.
I reached as high as I could and carved each of our initials and the date into the bark, big enough to see from the ground.
I folded the knife back into its case and turned around – and stopped dead.
Because the bandstand was empty. I looked around to see where Emma had gone but she was nowhere to be seen.
I ran back and leapt onto the platform – and there she was, sitting on the bench, staring at me.
‘Where did you go?’ I said, breathless.
‘I was here all the time,’ she replied, her voice a whisper. ‘But I couldn’t see you either.’
‘You mean…’
‘We’re only together inside this bandstand.’ She stood. ‘Wait here and you’ll see what I mean.’
Sure enough, the moment she stepped off the wooden slats of the bandstand floor, she disappeared, as if she’d never been there at all.
Would she come back? I glanced down and noticed she’d left her bag, which was a good sign.
I could hardly breathe as I waited. It felt like she’d been gone for ages.
But I had no way of seeing what she was up to, or of knowing whether she was going to return.
Finally, just as I began to think she’d given up on me, she reappeared, her face flushed.
‘“EV and NF, 2nd April 1999”,’ she said, excitement in her voice. ‘It’s there, Nick, the etching on the tree.’
‘My God,’ I said. I laughed out loud as it hit me. ‘I can’t actually believe this.’
‘Me neither.’ She sat back down beside me and I held my hand out and pressed it against her arm. The moment we touched a spark shot through me and I could see the same had happened to her. I pulled away and then did it again, and the same thing happened again.
‘This is mad,’ she said.
‘You’re telling me.’ I tried it one more time. ‘It’s like the air around us is charged,’ I said, as a jolt went through me. ‘Like atoms and the atmosphere and God only knows what else have caused some sort of weird chemical reaction and created this… this time slip where only you and I exist.’
She gasped, making me jump. ‘That explains the sweets!’ she said, clapping her hand over her mouth.
‘What do you mean? What sweets?’
‘The sweets you had, in the Woolworths bag.’
‘What about them?’
Her eyes widened. ‘Woolworths closed down in 2004. I knew there was something weird about it when I saw them.’
I rubbed my face with my hands. I needed a drink, but I didn’t have anything with me and I wasn’t going to risk leaving yet, not before we’d worked things out a little more. What if the time slip disappeared and we never saw each other again?
‘Do you want to know anything?’ she said.
‘Like what?’
‘Anything about the future. What life is like in 2019?’
Did I? I’d never really thought about it before.
When Dawn had been diagnosed with cancer, I wondered whether we would have done anything differently if we’d known it was coming.
Whether we would have made more of our lives if we’d known how little time we had left together.
But the truth was, I didn’t think we would have done.
We were happy as we were. Knowing what was coming was more likely to have ruined things for us than improved them.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you start by telling me what the hell you do with that weird phone thing? It looks like something out of Star Trek.’
She laughed. ‘It’s so bizarre to think how normal it’s become to have one of these,’ she said, holding the camera/phone/computer in her hand. ‘These have only been around about eight or nine years, but even kids have them.’
‘But what do they do? I mean, I can see they take photos. But what else are they for?’
‘Everything,’ she said, simply. ‘Honestly, it’s amazing. Let me show you.’
She swiped her finger across the screen and typed in some numbers and the screen sprang to life. She tapped a square in the corner of the screen.
‘This here is how you access the internet.’ I watched as she typed in ‘time slips’ and the page filled with lists. She tapped on one and a website loaded. It was incredible to see, and I knew I was staring gormlessly but I didn’t care.
‘And look at this,’ she said, clicking on a little pink square. ‘This is Instagram.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a social media site where people post photos and follow each other.’
‘So you can literally just look up anything at any time, no matter where you are?’
She shrugged. ‘More or less.’
‘Jeez.’ I looked round. ‘But where’s the modem? I mean, how do you get the internet connection out here in the middle of the park?’
‘It’s all on 4G. Or 5G. Or a wireless internet connection if you’re in range of one.’ She looked at me and laughed. ‘Your face is a picture.’
‘It’s just…’ I trailed off. ‘It’s like magic, to be honest.’
‘I guess it is, really. I mean, I’ve never really thought about how it works, I’m only ever really bothered that it does. But when you think about how little time twenty years is, it feels mad that things have changed so much.’
‘Can I have a go?’ I said.
She handed it to me. I turned the phone over in my hand. The case was smooth, an Apple sign on the back. I held it up next to mine. ‘And to think I thought my phone was hi-tech.’
‘I suppose it is compared to everything that’s come before.’
I tapped the screen the way she had but it remained blank.
‘I can’t see anything,’ I said.
She took it from me and it sprang back to life. She handed it back and it went dark again.
‘It looks like it’s defunct wherever you are.’
I laid both phones down on the bench and let out a long sigh. ‘This feels really freaky.’
‘It really does.’
I twisted my body so I was facing her. ‘I must seem like a dinosaur to you. And—Oh!’ A thought had just occurred to me, something I wasn’t sure I wanted to think about too much.
‘What?’
I shook my head. ‘Nothing.’
‘Come on, it clearly wasn’t nothing. What have you just realised?’
‘How old are you?’ I said.
‘I’m thirty-seven,’ she said. ‘Why?’
‘I’m thirty-one. Which means in 2019 I’ll be fifty-one. That’s… that’s pretty old.’
She shrugged. ‘It’s not that old.’
‘I bet you wouldn’t date a fifty-one-year-old.’
‘I would if it was Brad Pitt.’
‘Brad Pitt’s in his fifties?!’ I shook my head. ‘God that’s weird.’
‘How old is Prince William?’ Emma said.
I frowned. ‘I’m not sure. About fifteen I think.’
‘He’s married with three kids now.’
‘Wow.’
‘Oh, and is Our Price still a thing?’
‘Yes. Don’t tell me that closes down, too?’
She holds her hands out. ‘When people stop buying CDs and streaming music it all falls apart.’
‘What’s streaming?’
‘It’s when you listen to music through the internet.’
‘So, no more CDs?’
She shrugged. ‘Hardly any. But vinyl makes a comeback if that’s any consolation.’
‘It is a bit.’ I stared out into the park, my head spinning. The kids playing football had packed up and gone home now, and the twilight was beginning to pull across the sky, pushing the spring sunshine away. Shadows loomed and I shivered.
‘Let’s not talk about the future any more.’
‘Sorry. It must be freaky.’
I shrugged. Emma pressed her hand against my arm and as the usual spark juddered through me, I turned to her. ‘I’m not sure what this is or what it means that it’s happened, but I’m glad it has. I’m glad to have met you.’
‘I am too.’