Come Again

by Robert Webb

  Chapter 8

  Kate pulled on her Doc Martens and laced them. Beside her, two piles of paperwork she had collected from the porter’s lodge on arrival last night.

  Must get used to calling it ‘last night’. Not ‘half a life ago’.

  She had divided the documents: the leaflets and flyers for various clubs and societies formed one multi-coloured heap; the other, the more sober A4 stapled sheets about her course and the various necessary enrolments and registrations. No lectures till Monday. Societies Fayre in Central Hall: tomorrow. Meeting future dead husband: tonight. She glanced at the paperwork – it was enough to dishearten her.

  ‘Queueing,’ she muttered grimly, ‘the endless queueing.’

  She didn’t know how long she was going to be here. But if she was to make contact with Luke and somehow save his life, she would have to blend in and do all the regular student things. And this weekend a large portion of the regular student things involved queues – for her NUS card, her YUSU enrolment, her doctor’s registration and all the other start-up stuff. But the queueing didn’t stop there. All year for three years: queueing for the phone booth, queueing in the college canteen, queueing in Dennington village for the only cash machine that didn’t charge a transaction fee.

  She was broke, like everyone else. She could have been less broke but she’d never set foot in a casino since her dad had accused her of abusing her gifts.

  ‘You forged an ID, Katie. That’s illegal. You too good for the law, is it?’

  ‘No, ’course not!’

  ‘Well, then! And you can take that power drill back to Halfords first thing. Thanks, but I don’t want it if you got it from cheating.’

  ‘It was blackjack – everyone counts cards! It’s just some of us are better at it than others!’

  ‘Katie, that’s not what a memory like yours is for.’

  ‘What’s it for, then?’

  ‘We’d all like to find out, love. But it’s not that!’

  She pulled the second double bow tight on her boot and rubbed her eyes, remembering to be careful of the contact lenses.

  Unlasered eyes. Twenty-twenty vision had become 2020 vision. Hindsight. She was staring at 1992 through the back of her arse. This, she had to consider, wasn’t necessarily the most reliable view of it.

  Where had she gone first? She had delayed breakfast in the canteen and gone for a self-consciously sentimental walk, taking in her new surroundings and thinking of – and Kate blew a low whistle at this – the future.

  She had stopped halfway across one of the lake bridges on campus and some kid called Vandra had ruined the moment by joining her and introducing herself. She would scarcely see Vandra again for the next three years but had engaged with her for those ten minutes just in case she had met her new best friend. This was the crackpot lottery of Freshers’ Week – one moment you were furiously exchanging room numbers and gap-year stories with people whose names you wouldn’t remember even next week; but then you’d find yourself putting down your lunch tray opposite someone whose wedding you would attend, or whose surprise fortieth birthday weekend you would plan, or whose children would call you Auntie Kate. Or you might find yourself sitting next to someone in a bar whose funeral invitation you would design.

  Not quite a lottery, Kate thought. York wasn’t a big university in 1992 and Benedict wasn’t a big college. Sooner or later she would have bumped into Luke. If not that first night then another. But how? And would it have made a difference? What were the chances that those two people would find that connection at that moment? What were the chances that they had been born at all? What were the chances of life on Earth, of the universe forming in the first place? The entirety of human existence was laughably improbable and it was all complete madness. Remembering that, Kate felt oddly encouraged about her situation. A glitch in the Matrix, a kink in the space-time continuum – well, stranger things have happened.

  She hadn’t met Luke or any of the other big guns – Amy, Toby or Kes – till that evening in the bar. So she would retrace her steps to avoid them today. She vaguely wondered if she should wear a hat and sunglasses as a disguise before remembering that none of those people knew who the hell she was.

  Luke didn’t know who she was.

  ‘Okey-doke,’ Kate said to herself as she stood. For the sixteenth time that morning she looked for her phone. Yes. No problem. Who needs a phone?

  Texts, emails, websites, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram … all gone. All of it.

  She closed her eyes and said calmly to herself, ‘Nobody else is walking out of their room today missing their iPhone. I am one of them. I’m Generation X. We invented half of this shit. I can do this. I’m with my people.’

  She stuffed her tatty silver wallet into the pocket of her army surplus coat, scrunchied her hair into a ponytail with a few artful strands loose at the front the way Sandra Bullock did in a movie that hadn’t been made yet, grabbed her keys and set out.

  Three hours and several queues later, the campus had made her feel like she was on a movie set where the designers had gone crazy with 1990s overkill. It was all so insistently, so dementedly 1992. There were too many perms; too many boys in long-sleeved tops under Ned’s Atomic Dustbin t-shirts; too many rugby shirts and floppy curtain haircuts; too many girls in heel-length pencil skirts (English students); too much pre-GHD-hair-straightening frizz on those heads; too precisely the right number of Goths for this time of day (none); too many James daisies everywhere; too many students making air-quotes at each other; too much Tasmin Archer, Pearl Jam and SNAP! drifting through open windows from radios and bulky CD players.

  She approached Dennington – the small, not-quite-picture-postcard village on the edge of the campus. And now, entering non-student provincial England, the movie-makers seemed to have taken a lunch break and the 1980s had crept back in. The massive white satellite dishes clamped in lines along the newer terraces; the gnomes proudly on show in the neat gardens of those more prosperous: the older-bricked and semi-detached. Two English tribes, Kate reflected – and the recession was deep and painful to many. But this wasn’t a culture war or an opportunity for race-hate. Margaret Thatcher was gone, John Major was two years into office with another five to go. Britain was entering a golden era of utter boredom. Wrong in many ways but accountable to the truth. Almost no progress but very few regressions. About to fuck up the railways but not about to fuck up the entire constitutional basis of the country and its relationship with Europe and the rest of the world. In short: grey with sunny intervals – the frustrating weather of a functioning democracy.

  She inspected the broadsheet newspapers in the stand outside the newsagent – still broadsheet-sized and with black and white pictures. The IRA exploding bombs in London. The government closing the last of the deep coal mines and warning of cutbacks because of the financial crisis. Chancellor Norman Lamont was about to spend more time with his family. So, for different reasons, was David Mellor. Another philanderer, Boris Johnson, was still just a frivolous hack rather than a frivolous prime minister. Kate assumed that between the sheets of the Daily Telegraph an admired column of his about ‘Europe’ trying to straighten our bananas was already pushing its tiny erection into the back of a sleeping nation. She vaguely wondered if she had been sent back in time to strangle the lying bastard. Probably not.

  And the taste in the air as every Astra and Sierra chugged by – lead petrol. Deliciously, poisonously nostalgic. It seemed like the back of every other car trailed a zig-zag rubber strap to make contact with the ground: an evidence-free placebo for car sickness that about half the motorists in the country would swear by – until a few years later when they would quietly change their minds. Otherwise, the strange peacefulness of a village on the edge of a university campus – the mild October day held in check by the asphalt Yorkshire sky.

  She noticed for the first time the undeveloped land in between some of the older cottages; the faint smell of manure on the breeze from a nearby farm; a rusting
manual lawnmower in someone’s wild front garden – nettles and primroses growing around and through it; the plaintive echo of an ice-cream van playing ‘O Sole Mio’ from a distance. Was it the past or was it just the countryside?

  Just one Cornetto …

  She was a London girl. She loved nothing more than the view of her city from Lambeth Bridge. But this was special too. York was her second home and she dared to allow some love for it back into her heart. Just a little – she had work to do.

  Kate reached for her wallet as she approached the cash machine. She thought she was just about in the black on her current account. Judging by the quaint prices she’d found in the café next to the central library, that would be fine until her grant came through.

  ‘Grant’. No wonder millennials and zedsters think we’re all full of shit.

  The Alliance and Leicester card disappeared into the slot just an instant before she realised she hadn’t the first clue of its PIN. She had regularly changed the PIN of every card, scoffing at those fools who kept the same number from year to year. She frowned in bewilderment at the four blank dashes. ‘Oh Christ,’ she said out loud, ‘where are your memory powers now, old woman?’

  She keyed in the Great Reform Act. No good. She tried Jane Austen’s year of birth. Nope. She sensed someone now standing behind her, slightly huffing with impatience.

  Suddenly, inspiration: Luke’s birthday! Month and year – yes, obviously. She entered 1072.

  YOU HAVE ENTERED AN INCORRECT PIN THREE TIMES. YOUR CARD HAS BEEN RETAINED FOR SECURITY REASONS. PLEASE CONTACT YOUR LOCAL BRANCH.

  No, she realised. Of course it wasn’t Luke’s birthday. She hadn’t met Luke.

  She shut out the resurfacing grief and screamed at the green text. ‘What!? What are you talking about, you stupid Dalek!? How am I supposed to remember a number like that in the middle of all this shit? Fuck you!!’

  She drew her right fist back and it took all her self-discipline not to plough it into the screen.

  ‘Go for it, love! I’ve been there! Fucking lamp it.’

  A voice from behind her, and a very familiar one.

  Kate turned on the heel of her boot.

  ‘Although, bloody hell, don’t hit me, tiger! Steady now.’

  A fringe, Kate thought as she passed out. Amy used to have a fringe.

  ‘She literally just swooned like a damsel. I thought, “Bloody hell, did I say the wrong thing?”’

  Kate chose not to open her eyes. She heard a second voice, male.

  ‘Surprisingly heavy, actually. Lot of muscle. Probably quite sporty, if you ask me. I mean, she’s obviously quite fit. In more ways than one!’

  ‘All right, well, thanks for your help … Freddie?’

  ‘Yah, completely. Freddie.’

  ‘All right, love, thanks for your help but I’ll look after her now.’

  ‘I can totally stay. She might need some TLC, yeah?’

  Kate heard a beat of forced patience.

  ‘You’ve been very good, Freddie, but my sister’s a nurse and I know a thing or two. She’ll be all right with me now.’

  ‘You’re quite fit too, Amy.’

  ‘Freddie, love, do one.’

  ‘Righto.’

  Kate sniggered herself awake. She tried to turn it into a cough.

  ‘Okay, the Kraken awakens-eth,’ said Freddie, looming over her in a two-coloured, four-quartered rugby shirt. ‘I’ll make my excuses.’

  ‘Thanks a lot for helping me carry her, pet.’

  ‘I’m massively at your disposal, Amy.’

  Freddie, Kate thought. Second-year. Hearty. Rugby and Geography. Not a bad sort but clearly trying to score a shag out of a crisis.

  ‘Yarp,’ said Freddie, finally leaving. ‘Any time, Amy. Any time.’

  Kate turned her woozy gaze to her friend.

  Amy, eighteen years old, a younger parody of herself as if twenty-eight years of ageing had been an elaborate hair and make-up job, now peeled away to leave an essential Amy-ness. Her proto-All Saints period, of course. A camo crop-top, her pierced navel, her jet-black hair still undyed and allowed to fall around her shoulders during the day. Kate smiled and her friend smiled back.

  Amy spoke first. ‘Now then, you. What was all that about? You looked like you’d seen a bloody ghost.’

  ‘Not till later,’ Kate muttered.

  ‘Y’what, love?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She sat up and tried to collect herself. ‘Sorry. No idea what happened. Some kind of weird turn. I’m Kate.’

  ‘Nice to make your acquaintance, Kate, have a drink of water. I’m Amy.’

  Kate took the proffered mug featuring the cast of thirty-something and did as she was told. She looked around the room. ‘Your room’s the same as mine but you’ve made it look nicer.’

  ‘Are you here too?’

  Kate nodded towards the window. ‘South Block, over there. Room 47.’

  ‘Well, you certainly know how to make an entrance.’

  Kate laughed. ‘Sorry again. Christ, what must you think? Bloody … collapsing like …’ She wanted to say ‘that BBC weather presenter on YouTube from 2016’ but rapidly plumped for ‘… Madame Bovary.’ Probably because she knew Amy was here to study French.

  ‘Ah! Now then! Interesting fact. She doesn’t actually faint. Justin does, but not Emma.’

  Kate saw an opportunity for a connection. ‘Emma Bovary’s a bit of an idiot, don’t you think?’

  ‘I think she’s meant to be a bit of an idiot in a good way, but to be honest I can’t stand her.’

  ‘That’s right! I did not know that about you!’

  Amy looked at her quizzically for a moment. Kate filled the gap with default courtesy. Her accent was veering wildly between her native Deptford and her acquired middle-class. ‘Thanks so much. It’s Amy, isn’t it? This has been extremely kind of you.’

  ‘You’re all right, love.’

  Kate felt herself being observed as she took another awkward sip of water and glanced around the room in embarrassment.

  Abruptly, Amy rose from the bedside. ‘Anyway, you have a rest, I’m not going anywhere for a while.’

  Amy did some half-hearted organisation of her desk but then became quite still. Her back to Kate, she seemed to come to a decision. She turned and retook her position beside the bed, tucking some hair behind one ear and clearing her throat. ‘Now then,’ she began, giving Kate a shrewd but open look, ‘I don’t know you, Kate, and you tell me to bugger off if I’m crossing a line. But I can’t help noticing that you’ve been hurting yourself.’ Amy let her eyes rest on Kate’s left forearm.

  The three parallel cuts from this morning.

  Kate sloshed the mug onto the bedside table and instinctively covered her injuries. ‘Right, yep, no – that … that’s not what it looks like.’

  ‘I’ve a good idea of what it looks like, pet, and I’ve been there too.’

  ‘No, it was an accident.’

  ‘An accident with a sabre-toothed tiger?’

  ‘No, an accident with …’

  With what? A fork? An angry squirrel? A slippery pineapple? This was impossible. Kate shuffled down the bed and got up. Amy stood too. ‘Yes, you’re right. I don’t want to talk about it. Anyway, you’ve been very kind and—’

  ‘Listen!’ Amy was instantly at her most formidable, hands on hips, subtly plucked black eyebrows creased into a teacherly frown, one foot slightly forward. ‘It’s up to you. I’m saying that I’ve been there. And there are people you can talk to. People who can help.’

  Kate had been backing apologetically towards the door but on hearing this she stopped. She levelled herself and threw the sentence like a dagger. ‘You don’t fucking change, do you?’

  Amy gasped at the extravagant madness of this remark as well as the venom in Kate’s voice. Her hands remained on her hips but she swapped her leading foot and cocked her head. ‘Who … the hell do you think you—’

  Kate interrupted. ‘I don’t need it. I don
’t need anyone. I don’t “hurt myself”. I’m fine. I’ve always been fine. I will always be …’ She shook her head as the lies, grief, shame and hopelessness started to choke her voice. Amy’s face softened and she made a movement that threatened to turn into an offer of a hug.

  Kate grabbed her coat and walked out.

  She stomped, head down, back towards her room.

  Oh yes, that went TREMENDOUSLY well. Nice one, Kate.

  She crossed another campus lake bridge, this one at water-level and made of concrete stepping stones; only a few inches between them and she counted her steps. Mind the gap. The gap will find you out.

  Geese. The stupid geese everywhere. She remembered that this was the kind of thing that York alumni talked of fondly when they didn’t have goose-shit on their boots any more. She imagined doubling back to the bank to kick some squawking fuck into the sky. Why had she been so horrible to Amy? Was it just a habit now? Was this her system? Whatever the century, every time Amy offered help she could expect to be roundly insulted? What the hell is my problem? she shouted in her head.

  This had been a clean sheet. A fresh start. Now her best friend was forewarned and on the lookout for that rude, swooning, angry … ill person. Who wants to hurt herself. Which obviously she did, in the old life. But now … Kate slowed her steps.

  Now … she didn’t want to die any more.

  So that was … good?

  She reached the opposite bank and stopped. Yes, that was good. It was good but there was no one to share it with. Nobody knew her. She turned and watched a little family of geese venturing out into the lake.

  No.

  No, that would be unbearable.

  But wonderful.

  Come on, then. Best foot forward.

  She found the row of three phone kiosks in the usual place outside the Junior Common Room. Feeling even more furtive now that she had Amy to avoid, she waited for a free booth – studying her bitten fingernails and wishing she had a phone to look at. But then obviously if she had a phone, she wouldn’t be queueing to use a phone.

  The fresher in front finished her call. She was so completely random that even Kate couldn’t remember her name. She caught sight of the girl’s tearful face as she passed by and Kate felt a pang of regret. First time around, she had never understood the first-years needing to hear a familiar voice after barely twenty-four hours away from home. Now – well, her circumstances were unusual but a little more kindness last time wouldn’t have gone amiss. They’re only kids, she thought. Some of them have never been away. They don’t know anyone – they’re scared – so of course they want to talk to their folks. The only difference was that when the other freshers rang home in 1992, there wasn’t much chance they were about to talk to a father who died in 2001.