Out of Time (20 page)

*

He gave her the amber stone and it hung from Kathryn’s neck, finding its reflection in her hair just as Joe had imagined it would. Randolph, displaying his skill as a metal worker, forged a linked chain and threaded it through. The stone was Joe’s and Kathryn’s talisman, a flawless affirmation of their love, a link between the past whence it came and the present where it belonged.

Shocked by their recent separation, by their almost fatal parting, they jealously guarded every moment together. Work rotas were altered to accommodate their need, extending even to guard duty on the pine. The once hazardous ascent was now a joy to Joe, a favourite time for him and Kathryn. They were alone in a secret world, invisible from below and with only the stars and moon to see them from above. The quivering branches of the trees and the darkening panorama embraced them like a caress. They sat back to back, looking, watching, swivelling round to change perspective, the warmth of their bodies flowing one into the other. They talked until words ran out and away, and in the silence heard the song of their love.

‘Will you tell me about other times?’ Joe asked one night.

‘You mean other lovers?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘I could but they really aren’t important,’ Kathryn said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you, preparing for you.’

‘How come?’

‘I always knew there’d be a great love, someone special.’

‘Precisely me, Joe? Tall, handsome, clever from another world?’

‘Handsome certainly.’

‘Up to expectations?’

‘Almost!’

Supremely happy, Joe gazed at the silver river snaking into the distance, at the brimming sky, grasping at a moment when the conjunction of love, passion and the rapture of the surrounding beauty gathered into a boundless perfection.

‘Look, there’s Orion’s belt,’ he said, pointing to the sky.

‘Is that what you call it?’

‘Yes, and that we call the Great Bear.’

‘And we call it The Four Wheel Cart.’

‘Great Bear.’

‘We’ve known it longer than you. We’ve known it since time immemorial.’

‘So have we. The same stars in a different world. Unfathomable!’

Like their love.

*

There are long discussions as to who should risk themselves first by pretending to be dead. Susie, Margaret, Ian and Rob all volunteer but it is finally decided that the most appropriate person is Susie. She is thin and small and looks so white and drawn she could easily fool the guards.

If she succeeds in getting out of the shed, where should she go? For a child to move around in Bantage is inviting instant imprisonment and death. The many children in the dungeon are witness to how difficult it is to be concealed.

They know that there are several empty houses in the town because the population is dwindling and considerable numbers of people, deemed to be acting unlawfully, have been killed. Susie thinks that her house may be unoccupied but for her to go there is too risky. If the guards realise her corpse is missing they will know where to find her. Ian knows of another house that used to belong to a man accused of helping a teenage boy escape. Susie asks him to tell her more about the boy but Ian only knows of a rumour that he appeared out of nowhere, made no attempt to conceal himself and then somehow got away. The junta blamed the man at whose house he knocked, the house at twenty two Fairfax Road. They imprisoned and killed him.

That boy again. She tells them how Joe followed her and her parents after her skipping exercise in the park the night after the bells rang. She tells him that, though they never saw him, her parents were accused of helping him escape. She hopes he is still alive.

Ian thinks that the boy left the town and went into the wilderness. This is not an option for the children. Their plans are more ambitious than survival. They want to free all other children and somehow, though they have no idea how, rid the town of Helmuth and his henchmen. It is a lofty goal for a group of starved, dying children but this is what is keeping them alive, hope and determination in the face of all odds.

Twenty-two Fairfax Road is where Susie will go if she escapes. Ian is able to give her all the details she needs because he used to live nearby in Gipsy Lane and was allowed out at night.

Susie has somehow to let the committee know once she gets there. This is the next problem they have to solve.

*

A holiday mood prevailed. Like buds in warm sunshine the group opened their hearts to one another, revealing themselves in guises new to Joe. And for the first time since his arrival he felt the freedom to talk about himself. He told them about his world, so far from their experience that they refused at first to believe in the towns, cities, cars, aeroplanes and trains he did his best to describe. He told them of shops, supermarkets, television, telephones, books, magazines, newspapers, of schools and universities, computers, technology and medical advance, of Dolly the sheep and the potential of cloning humans. He explained the structure of democracy and its opposing forces, he told them of wars and terrorists, of ethnic cleansing and famines. They listened with awe and wonder and dismay.

Joe sometimes found himself remembering wistfully the easy life he had left behind, half longing for computers, the fun to be had on the internet, for video games, for films, for shops which provided food and clothes, for all the comforts and the pleasures; for time, for fun, a word no longer part of his vocabulary. Despite himself he was conscious of the occasional note of regret straying into his voice, aware that Kathryn heard it too.

‘Do you think I would like your world?’ she asked one day.

‘You’d like some of it,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘but not all.’

He could not picture Kathryn at home, could find no place where she would fit. He tried to imagine her at number twenty-two. How would she view his materially driven technological world? With disdain. He could see her at peace rallies, leading a non violent animal rights movement, destroying motor cars, protecting the countryside. What would his friends make of her? She had none of the experiences or interests of her peer group - though what her peer group would be was difficult to gauge. She would undoubtedly feel as strange in his world as he had first felt in hers. He was shocked to discover that the idea of Kathryn at home was an impossible concept. Did it mean that he did not want her there, that his love for her was confined to this world and that, if ever he returned, it would slip from him like a discarded cloak? Were the two worlds waging war against one another in his unconscious?

Such moments of self-doubt filled him with guilt and alarm, shocked by the possibility that an unspoken, transitory wish could catapult him back.

These were his thoughts one evening as he sat in the kitchen playing idly with his calculator which still miraculously worked. He felt a presence at his shoulder. Looking up he saw Meredith.

‘What’s that?’ Meredith asked.

‘A calculator.’

‘What does it do?’

‘Calculates.’

‘Numbers?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I have a look?’

‘Sure.’

Joe handed it over. Meredith took it with shaking fingers, a strange excitement in his eyes.

‘How does it work?’

‘Takes energy from sunlight, stores and uses it as electrical impulses. You can’t leave it long in the dark or it will stop working. It took me ages to get it going again after I rescued it from the cave. Look, this is what you do.’

Joe demonstrated a random sum going into eight figures. Meredith could not believe what he was seeing and tried sums of his own. Entranced, he asked to borrow it.

‘You can have it.’

‘Have it?’

Meredith could not believe that Joe would give away so wondrous a thing.

‘Sure.’

It pleased Joe to see this icon of the modern world in Meredith’s hands, making its calculations in this strange, wild place.

Meredith was besotted with his new toy. Dawn would frequently find him in the kitchen, pale, bleary-eyed, pushing number after number into the machine, triumphant at problems solved, frustrated if the calculator had failed him or, as he put it, he had failed it. Meredith drove it in a way Joe could not match and he regarded him with envy and awe, embarrassed because in his world calculators were two a penny and neither he nor his friends had ever bothered to find out how to use them to full effect. But Meredith, as time went on and he became more familiar with the instrument’s potential, used it for complex calculations that were far beyond Joe’s range of knowledge. Meredith was a better mathematician from a standing start than anyone Joe had ever met. He would thrive back home, probably get a Nobel prize for some achievement or other.

‘Let’s look at the stars together tonight,’ Meredith said one evening. ‘It’s getting near the longest day and there are no clouds.’

They climbed the hill and gazed at the sky.

‘There’s a comet due in five years. It comes every seventy six,’ Meredith said. Halley’s Comet. How many times had Meredith seen it? In Joe’s world many people never did. How privileged in this respect Meredith was. Joe listened spellbound as he talked on, for each and every circling star and planet was his friend, each constellation his familiar. Meredith gave a long and detailed account of what he knew of the moon. He had charted its movement, had calculated the size of its craters and its effect on the tides. Joe made a point of not telling him about the moon landing. He knew the community held the moon sacred and spun myths round it. After harvest each year its reflection was crowned in the well with a garland of herbs. He had been ill during the previous ceremony but had been told about it. He did not savour telling Meredith that their holy symbol was nothing more than a dead, airless, silent world strewn with rocks and that its surface sported the Stars and Stripes. But Meredith, with uncanny instinct, asked him outright if humans from his technologically canny world had ever landed on its surface.

‘Yes,’ Joe said, and forestalled the next question.

‘We built a rocket with a capsule...’

‘Rocket?’

‘A machine that is propelled into the sky by using special fuel. Very powerful. We called the rocket Apollo 11 and sent it up with three astronauts inside.’

‘Astronauts?’

‘People trained to travel in space. They lived in a small capsule and circled round the moon. Then an even smaller capsule detached itself from the rocket and two men landed.’

‘They actually landed?’

It was hard for him to visualise.

‘Yes, and left footsteps. Should you go to the moon in ten million years time you’ll still be able to see them.’

‘Not even I will be alive that long.’

‘A lot longer than me.’

Meredith looked at him thoughtfully, faced with their essential difference.

Meredith plied Joe with questions, pushing him to the limits of his knowledge and beyond, unwittingly making him once again feel ashamed because information infinitely precious to Meredith was commonplace at home, readily available and largely ignored. Later, Meredith told Joe that it was his dream to soar into the sky, how he had tried to copy the birds and build wings. The flight to the moon symbolised all his dreams, the ultimate poetry of man’s earth-bound existence.

‘The possibility of flight has been my only reason for staying alive indefinitely.’

‘The only reason?’

‘Yes, and you’ve told me what I always suspected, that the impossible is possible. It needs only time and knowledge.’

Knowledge clearly was valued in inverse proportion to its availability, the largesse of technical and scientific advance in Joe’s world as pearls strewn before swine. But in similar circumstances would it in the long run be any different here? He had acquired enough cynicism to doubt it.

It was Meredith who, on one of their nocturnal walks, suggested that Joe might be a traveller from another phase in time. This had occurred to Joe but he had dismissed it as improbable, a piece of science fiction. He had seen plenty of SF films, had read SF books but to apply to himself the deliberate improbabilities of such stories Joe scorned. But now with the suggestion coming from Meredith, who had seen neither films nor read novels, he was forced to reconsider the idea more seriously and together they examined it from every angle. They came to no satisfactory conclusion. If time traveller he was, why had he not appeared in a different period in his own world? The one he was in fitted nowhere in English history despite the similarities of country and of language. Time travel left too many questions unanswered.

Joe no longer attached any importance to such speculations. Neither why nor how he had arrived signified, only how to prevent being snatched away.

When the rest of the group learned about space flight, they regarded Joe with awe as though he were personally responsible. He hastened to disabuse them. He explained that scientific experts sent shuttles into space, exploring deeper and deeper into the universe, how landing craft sent data back to Earth; he tried to explain, though he was on uncertain ground, the correlation between time and space, a concept only grasped by Meredith.

‘You mean if you travel far enough into space, the time you’re in the shuttle is different from the time passing on earth, that you could come back after an hour and find a century had passed?’

Joe looked at him in wonder.

‘If you go far enough, for long enough, yes.’

He told them that there could be life on Mars, which they called The Red Planet, that bacteria had been found in one of its rock deposits, and possibly signs of water. He told them as much as he understood about Einstein’s theory; he told them about nuclear fusion and the hope and power it brought, and the despair. He told them about Chernobyl and Hiroshima, about the conflict with Iraq; he explained the destructive capacity of the latest nuclear devices.

‘Do you realise,’ Joe said, ‘that with all our wonderful achievements and our scientific discoveries, we haven’t even begun to tackle death? We’re as far from conquering it as our primitive forefathers were. Yet you have a drug that prolongs life indefinitely.’