Space Hopper

by Helen Fisher

  ‘How are we going to do this?’ he said, grappling to get his arms around my waist in the tight space. He got me so I was sat on the edge of the hatch and then encouraged me down the ladder a little way before carrying me like a baby into the bedroom.

  ‘What the hell have you done?’ he said.

  * * *

  As I lay on the bed, present day seemed brighter and more colourful than the past, and fresher, less cluttered. Then again, the seventies have always seemed a bit untidy in my memory. It was still light outside, late July here, and the evenings were long. I could hear the girls laughing and Eddie looked out of the window.

  ‘They’re in the garden in their nighties,’ he said.

  ‘I love that.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I don’t want them to see me,’ I said, touching my forehead. It was bleeding.

  ‘You look like you’ve been dragged through a thorn bush,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand, I looked in the loft and you weren’t there, you weren’t in the house. Then an almighty bang and there you are in the attic.’

  I didn’t speak because I couldn’t say anything that would make any sense. I’ve travelled back in time, and it was a bumpy ride. Could I have said that?

  ‘Where have you been? Did you go out, get hurt and then get into the attic? I mean how did you get into the attic when you could barely get out of it? Are they your boots? Did you find them up there?’

  I opened my mouth to speak, and shut it again.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I could hear anger in his voice. ‘Tell me.’

  The tears slipped out of my eyes and I turned my head so the pillow blotted them. I looked at Eddie as he kneeled by the bed.

  ‘I haven’t done anything wrong,’ I said. Which was the truth.

  Then I lied.

  ‘I went up to put my box somewhere safe, I hit my head and must have fallen, knocked myself out.’

  Eddie just stared at me.

  ‘What was all the noise I heard?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘You’ve done more than just bump your head, you’re a mess.’

  He looked at me the way he looks at the girls when they say they haven’t had any chocolate milk, except there’s a line of it right across their top lip. He pulled me into his arms. ‘You always tell me everything,’ he said into my hair.

  * * *

  Will you do something for me? Next time you’re alone with a person whose opinion you respect, or someone you love and care for, I want you to tell them that you’ve been time-travelling into the past, that you have met with a deceased loved one from back then, and met your younger self. I want you to tell them that while you were there you got hit by a car, played cards, ate sandwiches, drank tea, and then returned home via a box. Do this for me, and don’t make a joke of it; tell them you’re serious. You’ll be at an advantage because it hasn’t actually happened to you, and you won’t need them to believe in you, you won’t be desperate to share your unbelievable reality, because it won’t be true. But if it was true, think about how they would react.

  I’m guessing at best they’d laugh it off. But at worst?

  What would it be like, at worst, if you kept insisting it was true? Soon enough I think you’d see a little less of that person, they’d glance at you sideways, whisper about you to someone else and steer clear.

  How could I tell Eddie? If I told him what really happened he would think I was making up a stupid story to hide some horrible truth. Or he would think I’d lost my mind.

  And then there was the possibility that he might believe me, I mean, he might. After all, he believes in God, and that takes faith. He might have faith in me. And if he believed me, he’d want to protect me; he wouldn’t want me injuring myself and ending up lost who-knows-where in the dark spaces between there and here. I think he might destroy the box for my own safety, and I can’t let that happen. Because being safely home again, all I could think about was my return trip to see my mother.

  Therefore the truth wasn’t a good option.

  But who was I kidding? He was never going to believe me.

  * * *

  Eddie was cross with me. He read to the children and tucked them in. Meanwhile, I kept a safe distance, evading his questions and suspicious looks. I got into bed, and lay there, looking at my mother’s boots, which were standing near the wall, and drifted off to the sounds of my family winding down for the night.

  It felt like only seconds later that I woke to Eddie brushing a strand of hair away from my face, it was dark outside. A lamp was on, and he was gazing at me.

  ‘Is my photo still in your office?’ I said, feeling uncomfortable that it was not in my wallet, but exposed and free to be picked up or moved.

  ‘I guess so,’ he said, not moving.

  ‘Can you get it?’ I said. But he just stared at me. ‘Please.’

  He sighed as he got up and when he returned I almost snatched it out of his hand, and stared at it. There was the tree, there was the box in the best condition it was ever going to be. I had been there, in the photo, just now. I shook my head, my thoughts spinning about in there like a bag of marbles that had been tipped out and were bouncing off each other, rolling in one direction, then hitting something and going off in another. When you look at a photo that you remember being taken, you remember the moments around it, the argument that erupted as soon as the smiles could be dropped; the dispersing of people from the group to the bar, the garden, or the bedroom; or the moment just after the photograph has been the taken – that moment when everyone relaxes, laughs for real and looks their absolute best, but the camera has already clicked and captured the lesser moment: the one before. But a picture of a truly happy child is different. I tapped the photograph as though my genuine, smiling face were not imprisoned in time and on paper, but as though my younger self were on the other side of a pane of glass, reachable, tangible. Eddie slowly took the photo from me and placed it on my bedside table, where my eyes followed it.

  Eddie touched my cheek to turn my face to his. ‘I’ve run you a bath,’ he said. I went to get up, but my limbs felt stiff when I tried to move them. ‘Let me,’ he said, and peeled back the duvet, gently straightened me out, and carefully removed my clothes.

  ‘I don’t recognise this top,’ he said.

  I was mute.

  He sighed. Resigned. ‘Okay.’

  When I was naked, Eddie picked me up like he did before, carried me to the bathroom and lowered me into the tub, for my second bath of the day.

  The warm water was heavenly. Eddie drew the little wooden stool to the side of the bath and sat on it; we had bought it a few years ago to save our backs when bathing the children. He leaned his elbows on the rim of the bath and stared at me. I kept shutting my eyes, unable to keep eye contact with him. He didn’t speak, but took a sponge and some body wash and washed me, lifting my legs out of the water and sponging my feet and knees. He was more careful the higher up he went and dabbed at my face, which stung.

  ‘How did you do this?’ he said. I think by now he hardly expected an answer.

  ‘Can you talk?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Should I call the police?’

  ‘No!’ My body jerked in the water as I tried to sit up.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I said. ‘Nothing’s happened.’

  ‘Well if nothing’s happened, there’s nothing to talk about.’ Eddie exhaled slowly and looked into the distance before focusing back on me. ‘I’m thinking that whatever it is, you think it will hurt me. And you refuse to lie to me, so you can’t even make up a good story. In the absence of feeling you can tell me the truth, you’re telling me nothing.’

  ‘Is that okay?’ I said. ‘Can we leave it at that?’

  ‘No, it’s not okay. I love you, I want to know what’s going on. We always talk.’ He rubbed some dirt off my cheek with his thumb, his brown eyes were creased and intent. ‘But you’re here, and
you’re safe, and whatever happened to you didn’t kill you, although it looks like it nearly did.’

  ‘I’m not having an affair, I’m not seeing anyone,’ I said. Why I said that, I don’t know. I guess I hoped at least to reassure him that there was nothing obvious to worry about. ‘No one tried to hurt me, it was an accident.’

  He frowned and I wished I could just shut up. I was making no sense, not even to my own ears. ‘You’d need a lot of faith to believe in what happened to me today,’ I said, vowing to myself to stop talking now.

  ‘Now faith I’m pretty good at,’ he said.

  ‘Not me,’ I said. ‘I wish I could believe in God, but I don’t.’

  He looked at me as though searching for words in a word search, trying to make sense among the jumble of letters. Sometimes a thought is so strong that it feels like people can read it above your head in a speech bubble, or in subtitles, but it’s just as well they can’t.

  ‘You do a lot of things that God would like,’ he said.

  ‘But I don’t believe in him,’ I said.

  Eddie closed his eyes, and then I saw the gentlest of smiles light his face, and I knew a good memory had passed behind his lids. He opened his eyes and looked at me. ‘The day Esther was born, I remember you held her in your arms and said, “She doesn’t even know us, and yet we love her more than anything in the world.” Do you remember that?’

  I nodded. The moment was as fresh to me as though it had happened yesterday. We were in the hospital and she was in my arms, bundled in a white blanket, her tiny face screwed up like the world had a bad smell, and Eddie encircled us both. In the boundless universe we were a very tiny, very important, speck.

  ‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in God,’ Eddie said, drawing my fingers to his lips and kissing them. ‘Because He believes in you.’ He kissed my fingers again. ‘When he needs you to believe in him, he’ll give you a sign.’

  I felt a surge of overwhelming love for my husband. My chest felt tight with a cry of emotion that I wanted to let out, something guttural that had everything to do with him, and the children and my mother and me. Me as a child, who I had seen and touched, and saved. The me I so pitied because she was going to lose her mother soon. My mother, for whom my heart ached with the pain of what she was about to miss out on, the pain of losing her the first time, the pain of leaving her today. Could God be involved in anything that was happening to me? If he was going to give me a sign, then surely this was it?

  And yet I battled against any reasoning that said God was there for me. It was easier to think of my journey as a split in the fabric of time, or more like a passage through time that I had accidentally found the entrance to. If I accepted that God would let me know when He needed me to believe in Him then that would be like saying I do believe in God, just not right now, and I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t do it. I wanted to, but couldn’t. I touched Eddie’s cheek. ‘Eddie, I think it’s crazy that you believe in God.’

  ‘Tell me why.’

  ‘Because there’s no proof; you can’t see him. And the rabbits. Watership Down,’ I said, feeling weighted down with drowsiness. I was overcome with the events of the day and wanted to sleep, just wanted oblivion. What I really wanted was to tell Eddie that I had been back in time, in fact fallen through time and landed hard and that’s why I was injured, and that I had met my longed-for mother and my younger self, and I wanted to ask him what it all meant and what I should do. Eddie always knew what to do.

  ‘Well, I believe in lots of things I can’t see. Genghis Khan, for instance,’ said Eddie, and I frowned; the cuts in my face stung. ‘I believe that Jesus rose from the dead because he was the son of God. People there, at that time, saw him, and I trust in the things they wrote about that.’

  I wanted to get out of the bath, and as I raised myself up Eddie grabbed a big towel and carefully dried me, patting my scraped shoulder and face, and tutting at the purple marks coming up around my ribs and arms.

  ‘Anyway, what’s this about Watership Down?’ He wrapped the towel and his arms right round me and I leaned into his chest. The warmth of the steamy bathroom, and the strength of my husband beneath my cheek, was comforting.

  ‘When I was a little girl,’ I said, my voice slightly muffled by the towel, ‘I believed in God, and when my mother died, I assumed she’d gone to heaven. I was about eighteen, I think, when I read Watership Down, and those rabbits believe in a god of their own. And I knew that there was no god for rabbits; it was a charming thought, but ridiculous. And I realised that if a higher being was looking down on me, and saw that I believed in God and heaven too, the higher being would think of me in the same way I thought of those rabbits. Deluded.’

  ‘Except that the higher being would presumably be like God,’ said Eddie.

  ‘Only if you think of humans as gods compared to rabbits.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he said, putting an arm under my knees, lifting me up again. ‘You’re not the first person to query these things in this way. A lot of time and effort has gone into the study and debate of exactly this. And lots of people have written stuff about animals believing in their own kind of god.’

  This was so sweetly distracting that I hoped Eddie would do what he often did, and carry me away on a train of thought that would remove me from my inner turmoil for a few miles of thoughtful contemplation. He would do beautiful sermons.

  He took me back to bed, carefully pulled a baggy T-shirt over my head and pulled a sheet over me. ‘Wait here,’ he said, and when he came back he was carrying a slim volume, light grey with a circle of thorns on the cover. He perched on the end of the bed. ‘Now, shut your eyes and just listen,’ he said. ‘Rupert Brooke wrote this over a hundred years ago, using fish in a stream to look at the way humans want to believe in something beyond their immediate surroundings. It’s called Heaven:

  Fish (fly-replete, in depth of June,

  Dawdling away their wat’ry noon)

  Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear,

  Each secret fishy hope or fear.

  Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;

  But is there anything Beyond?

  This life cannot be All, they swear,

  For how unpleasant, if it were!

  One may not doubt that, somehow, Good

  Shall come of Water and of Mud;

  And, sure, the reverent eye must see

  A Purpose in Liquidity.

  We darkly know, by Faith we cry,

  The future is not Wholly Dry.

  Mud unto mud! – Death eddies near –

  Not here the appointed End, not here!

  But somewhere, beyond Space and Time.

  Is wetter water, slimier slime!

  And there (they trust) there swimmeth One

  Who swam ere rivers were begun,

  Immense, of fishy form and mind,

  Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;

  And under that Almighty Fin,

  The littlest fish may enter in.

  Oh! never fly conceals a hook,

  Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,

  But more than mundane weeds are there,

  And mud, celestially fair;

  Fat caterpillars drift around,

  And Paradisal grubs are found;

  Unfading moths, immortal flies,

  And the worm that never dies.

  And in that Heaven of all their wish,

  There shall be no more land, say fish.’

  I was close to sleep, and in my mind I saw rainbow-coloured trout and neon minnows gliding in shallow water so clear I could see the pebbles beyond them on the riverbed, and I saw children’s fingers picking up those pebbles and passing them to me. I tried to think that the fish were silly to think of a heaven of their own. Then I tried to visualise my ideal heaven – my own creation – and what would be in it, and I knew that there would be rivers and fish there. And as I floated into oblivion, I realised that fish don’t need a heaven of their own, because if my heaven existed, the
n I would take them with me. And all the rabbits too.

  8

  The next few days I’d catch Eddie looking at me, the same way he sometimes looked at the crack in the plaster that ran from the corner of the fireplace to the corner of the ceiling. Except when he looked at me – a frown between his eyes over the top of his cup – he didn’t say, ‘I really need to fix you.’ But I could tell he was thinking it, or something like it.

  I was tired the way you’re tired after exercising when you haven’t done it for a long time; muscles protesting, every bone begging me to lie down, so that’s what I did.

  ‘Are Cassie and Clem coming over today?’ Eddie said, as I shoved lunchboxes into bags and found the girls’ school shoes. Every Monday after the school run we ladies have coffee together and I just knew he hoped I would talk to them, tell them what had happened to me, and then, if it was something serious they’d make me talk to Eddie, or tell him themselves. I suppose most couples have those friends they call their own, the ones they would take with them in case of divorce. But Cassie and Clem – though mine – were loyal to Eddie and always had been. If he and I ever split up, we’d have to have joint custody, because I don’t think they could give him up.

  We’d all known each other since college days: they were on the same course as him – something financial – and when Eddie and I started dating they stepped in like two protective aunts. Before they became like sisters to me, I thought of them as Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker from Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, though both infinitely better looking and nicer than in the story. Clem was big and beautiful, as was everything else in her life: husband, house and baby; while Cassie was tall and slender, with an ethereal look that we all agreed meant she could be related to aliens. She’d been stopped in the street before and offered modelling work, but said she preferred accountancy.

  Now, in my experience, girls can bond over a lot of things, but periods, diets and slagging off boyfriends were standard topics in most familiar female company. In those days however, I was at a disadvantage because the moment I said anything detrimental about Eddie, Cassie and Clem would start cooing and bustling like a couple of matronly pigeons; shooing me away from any notion that he could do wrong.