by Nina Allan
“You’ll have to come with us. It’s for your own protection. I suggest you get moving.” He nodded to the man he had called Weegie, who grabbed me by the upper arm and pushed me into line behind the others. I stumbled a couple of times, but with the soldiers’ powerful searchlights to see by the going was actually much easier. Now that it seemed they were not going to shoot me, or at least not immediately, my panic had subsided somewhat. I thought back to the night before, when I had lain comfortably in bed contemplating my forthcoming visit to Andrews and the state of my political complacency. It seemed impossible that a mere twenty-four hours could alter my life so completely. I felt inclined to agree with the officer: I had been bloody stupid.
We marched through the forest for about an hour. I was exhausted by then, my mind empty of anything but the desire to stop moving and lie down. At last there were arc lights, shining to meet us through the trees. The forest ended suddenly at a barbed-wire perimeter fence, and I realised we had arrived outside the hospital.
I was too tired to be afraid. I was marched through a set of iron gates then led along a green-tiled corridor that smelled faintly of damp clothes and disinfectant. Unbelievably it reminded me of school. I caught glimpses of a kit store, and a rec room, where soldiers sprawled on bunks were watching a televised boxing match. At the end of the corridor a short flight of concrete steps led down to what was clearly a cell block. The officer in charge nudged open one of the mesh-strengthened doors and gestured me inside.
“I’d get some kip, if I were you. I’d bring you some grub, only the mess will have shut up shop, so you’ll have to hang on till morning.”
I stepped through the door, which was immediately banged shut behind me. I heard the sound of a key being turned in the lock, the soldier’s footsteps trudging back up the stairs. Then there was silence. I stood where I was for a moment, wondering if anything else would happen. The room I was in was small, although curiously it still had the wallpaper and curtains left behind from the time before the soldiers had taken over. The way the wainscoting and ceiling architrave had been divided made it clear that the cell had been partitioned off from a much larger room, possibly the doctors’ lounge. There was a bed pushed up against one wall, a metal-framed cot of the kind that is usual in hospitals. In the corner was a bucket and basin, crudely screened from the rest of the room by a section of cotton sheeting strung from a pole. The windows behind their curtains were barred from the outside.
I relieved myself in the bucket then lay down on the bed. It creaked beneath my weight, the springs weary from decades of use. The room was lit by a single bulb, a bald, enervating glare that I feared would be left burning all night, although when I tentatively pressed a switch by the bed the light went out. In contrast with the alien blackness of the forest, the darkness of my cell gave me a feeling of being protected. I lay under the threadbare blanket, listening to the silence and wondering what was going to happen to me. I was a prisoner, but what was I being imprisoned for? If it was a simple matter of breaking the curfew then I could expect a hefty fine and perhaps three months behind bars, as well as the wholly undesirable possibility of finding myself under continued surveillance. This could lead to all sorts of problems at work, not just for me but for my colleagues. Certainly it was no laughing matter, but it was at least a situation with navigable parameters. The thing was, I knew my situation was not that simple. I had witnessed a murder, the execution of a defenceless and vulnerable woman. That I had seen the frightful injuries inflicted upon her by the Time Stasis hardly served to make things less complicated.
There was also the fact of my visit to Owen Andrews, a troublemaker who by his own admission had been repeatedly in conflict with the state.
What if the soldiers decided it was simpler just to get rid of me? Now that Miranda was dead there would be few who cared enough to risk asking questions. Dora might ask, she might even look for me, but in the end she would weigh up the cost of the truth about a dead man and the price of her own safety and Ray’s. She would find the balance wanting and I would not blame her.
Probably they would just shoot me, or perhaps they would use me in one of the time travel experiments. I thought of the mutant woman, twisted and bent by the Time Stasis almost beyond the bounds of her humanity. I still found it difficult to contemplate her isolation, the loneliness and horror she must have suffered at the moment of her realisation of what had been done to her. It came to me that there were fates worse than being shot. I even found myself wondering if her death at the hands of the soldiers had been for the best.
All at once the darkness of the room seemed oppressive rather than soothing. I put the light back on and got up from the bed. I paced about my cell, examining the barred window and testing the door handle, wondering if I might discover some means of escape, but for all its ramshackle ambience the room was still a prison. I placed my ear against the door and listened, straining for any sound that might give a clue as to what was happening in the rest of the hospital, but there was nothing, just a deep, eerie silence that suggested I was completely alone. I knew this had to be nonsense: I had seen the rec room, the soldiers on their bunks watching television and playing cards. I supposed the cell had been soundproofed somehow. The thought was not exactly comforting.
In the end I decided the only thing for it was to take advantage of the silence and get some rest. Now that my life was not being directly threatened I found I was ravenously hungry – it was hours since the meal at Andrews’s house – but there was nothing I could do about that. I drank some water instead from the tap in the corner. It had a peaty taste and was unpleasantly tepid but it was something to fill my stomach. Then I lay back down on the bed and covered myself with the blanket. I thought I would be awake for hours but I fell asleep in under five minutes.
At some point during the night I was woken by the sound of shouting and running footsteps but no one came to my door and I decided I must have dreamed it. I closed my eyes, hovering on the boundary between sleep and waking, a citizen of both nations but unable to settle permanently in either. I saw sleep as an immense blue forest that I was afraid to enter in case I never found the way out again. Then I woke with a start to bright sunlight, and realised I had been asleep all along.
I was surprised that none of the soldiers had come to wake me. Surely they hadn’t forgotten I was here? It occurred to me that I could easily be left in this cell to die and no one would know, that perhaps this had been their plan all along. I leapt from the bed, relieved myself once again in the stinking bucket, then crossed to the door, prepared to rattle at the lock and shout until someone came. I seized the handle, twisting it sharply downwards.
The door opened smoothly and silently in my hand.
I eased it open a crack and peered out into the corridor. I was prepared for a burst of shouting or even of gunfire, but there was nothing, just the silence of my room, magnified in some queer sense by the largeness of the space it now flowed into. There was nothing in the corridor, just a single plastic chair, as if once, many days before, someone had stood guard there but had since been assigned to other duties and ordered away. The doors to the other cells were closed.
I stepped out into the corridor, my footsteps echoing on the bare cement floor. I tried the door to the room next to mine, and like mine it swung open easily. I was afraid of what I might find on the other side, but what I found in fact was nothing at all. The bed had been stripped of all its furnishings, including the mattress. There was a slops bucket but it was empty and perfectly dry. Beside it stood a pile of old newspapers. I glanced down at the one on top. The headline story, about Clive Billings losing his seat in a by-election in Harrogate, did not make sense. The paper was brittled and yellow from sun exposure and dated two years previously. I remembered the by-election to which it referred – who wouldn’t? It was the by-election that effectively made Billings prime minister – but it had happened more than two decades ago, just as I was about to enter university. Billings had taken th
e seat with a huge majority.
Looking at the headline made me feel odd, and the idea of actually touching the paper made me feel queasy, off-kilter in a way I could not properly explain. I felt that by touching the newspaper I would somehow be ratifying the version of reality it was presenting to me, a reality I knew had never happened. It would be as if I were somehow negating my own existence.
I left the room quickly, passing up the short stone staircase and into the hospital proper. The building was empty, not derelict yet but certainly abandoned. The soldiers’ rec room was stacked high with dismantled beds and plastic chairs like the one I had seen in the corridor. There were signs everywhere of encroaching damp and roof leakage, peeling wallpaper and buckled linoleum. One more winter without proper attention and the place would sink inexorably into decay.
The main doors had been boarded over but after hunting around for a while I found a side entrance and made my escape. The hospital grounds were a wilderness, the paths choked with weeds and many of the smaller outbuildings partially hidden by rampaging bramble and giant hogweed. Beyond the perimeter wall the trees loomed, whispering together with the passing of the breeze. In spite of the emptiness of the place, and the fact that I was plainly alone there, I felt exposed, watched, as if the trees themselves were spying on me.
The army checkpoint had disappeared and the entrance was unguarded but the high gates were chained shut and it took me some time to find a way out. The perimeter wall was too high to climb without assistance, and I was just starting to think about going in search of a ladder when I discovered a rent in the small section of chain-link fencing that blocked off the access to the service alleyway at the side of the building. The torn wire snagged at my clothes. I smiled to myself, thinking how the breach was most likely the work of schoolchildren for whom the hospital now as then was a realm of dares and bribes, of dangers both imaginary and real. I was glad they had broken through, that some of them at least had been bolder than I.
I came out of the alleyway and wandered down to the main road. I tried to look nonchalant, not wanting to draw attention to my soiled clothes and general unkemptness. There was a bus stop by the hospital gates, just as before, and after only ten minutes of waiting a bus arrived. I got on, swiping my Oyster card. The sensor responded with its usual bleep. The driver did not look at me twice, and I noticed with a start that she was black. I could not remember the last time I had seen a black person in any position of public service in this country. The bus was, once again, full of soldiers, their London accents blending noisily together as they exchanged ribald jokes and squabbled over newspapers and cigarettes. They were white and black and Asian, as racially mixed as the cowed hordes of deportees in the television broadcasts of my adolescence. I stared at them, barely understanding what I was seeing.
“Lost something, mate?” one of them said to me. “Only if you have, then one of these crims has probably already nicked it.” He looked Middle Eastern in origin. One of his eyebrows was pierced with a diamond stud. The rest of his company erupted in laughter, but the whole exchange seemed pretty good-natured and they soon fell back to speaking amongst themselves. The bus grunted then lurched off along the road. The woodland seemed to sing with colour and light.
* * *
When I arrived at my house on Frobisher Street the key would not fit in the lock. By then I was not surprised. I had even been expecting something of this kind. I rang the bell, and after a minute or so the door was opened by a young woman. Her hair looked uncombed, her eyes dark from fatigue. A child clung to her knees, a boy of perhaps four or five. In contrast with the woman’s scruffy housedress the little boy wore a cleanly pressed playsuit in a cheerful mix of blues and yellows.
“Yes?” she said. “Can I help you?”
I peered over her shoulder into the hall. The black-and-white tiles had been replaced by a dun-coloured carpet. Piles of washing stood heaped at the foot of the stairs.
“How long have you lived here?” I said. The woman took a sudden step backwards, almost tripping over the child. She ran a hand through her hair, and I saw that all her nails were bitten.
“We’re registered,” she said. “We’ve been here almost two years. I’ve got all the forms.” Before I could say anything else she had darted away inside the house, disappearing through the door that had once led to my own living room. The toddler stared up at me, his green eyes wide with fascination.
“Are you from the prison?” he said.
“Not at all,” I replied. “This used to be my house once, that’s all. I wanted to see if it had changed.”
He continued to gaze at me as if I were a visitor from another planet. As I stood there wondering whether to stay or go the woman returned. “Here you are,” she said. “They’re all up to date.” She thrust some papers at me. I glanced at them briefly, long enough to see that her name was Violet Jane Pullinger and she had been born in Manchester, then handed them back.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m not from the council or anything. I used to live round here, that’s all. I was just curious. I’m sorry if I scared you. I didn’t mean to.”
The child looked from me to the woman and slowly back again. “He says he’s not from the prison, Mum. Do you think he’s my dad?”
“Stephen!” She touched the boy’s hair, her face caught somewhere between laughter and embarrassment. When she looked at me again she appeared younger and less frightened. “I don’t know where they get their ideas from, do you? Would you like to come in? I could make us a cup of tea?”
“That’s very kind,” I said. “But I’ve taken up too much of your time already.”
I knew I could not enter the house, that to do so would be a kind of madness. I said a hurried goodbye then turned and walked back to the High Street. I thought about looking to see if my office was still there but my nerve failed me. I went to a cashpoint instead. I inserted my card in the machine and typed in my PIN. I felt certain the card would be swallowed or rejected. If that happened I would not only be homeless, I would be penniless too, aside from the couple of notes that were still in my wallet. I peered at the screen, wondering what I would do if my PIN was rejected, but this was one decision I did not have to make. My debit card, apparently, was still valid. When the machine asked me which service I required I selected ‘cash with on-screen balance,’ then when prompted I requested twenty pounds. It seemed a safe enough amount, at least to start with. I waited while the note was disgorged, staring intently at the fluorescent panel where my bank balance was about to be displayed.
When the figure finally appeared I gasped, inhaling so sharply that it set off a fit of coughing. My bank balance was apparently four times what it had been the day before. I was not a rich man by any means, but for a weary time traveller without a roof over his head the money at least provided some temporary security.
I went to the corner newsagent’s, where I bought a newspaper and a wrapped falafel. I ate the falafel right there on the street, wolfing it down in three bites then wiping my fingers on the greaseproof paper. Afterwards I headed for the Woolwich Road and a hotel I knew, an enormous Victorian pile mainly frequented by travelling salesmen. It always had something of a dubious reputation, but reputation mattered very little to me at that moment. I only hoped the place still existed in this reality.
The hotel was still there and still a hotel. It looked more down-at-heel than ever. Some of the rooms on the ground floor appeared to have been converted into long-stay bedsitters. There was a pervasive smell of cooking fat and stewed tomatoes.
“I don’t do breakfast,” said the landlady. “You get that yourself, out the back.” She was huge, a vast whale of a woman in a flowered print dress with the most extraordinary violet eyes I had ever seen. I told her that was fine. She looked vaguely familiar, and I wondered what she looked like with her hair down. I shook my head to clear it and headed upstairs. The upper landing was sweltering and my poky little room was even hotter but I didn’t care. I sat down o
n the bed, which creaked alarmingly. It was strange how much the room, with its faded wallpaper and antiquated washstand, resembled the hospital cell where I had spent the previous night.
As well as the bed and the washstand there was a battered mahogany wardrobe and a portable television set with an old-fashioned loop aerial. I opened the window, hoping to let some air into the room, and then switched on the TV. The one o’clock news had just started. There was footage of a refugee encampment like those I had seen previously in Tangier and Sangatte. I was amazed to learn that the camp, a ragged shanty town of tents and standpipes and semi-feral children skinny as rails, was situated on the outskirts of Milton Keynes. A delegation from the camp had delivered a petition to Downing Street, and the prime minister himself appeared on the steps to receive it.
The prime minister was black, a slim, earnest-looking man named Ottmar Chingwe. I had never seen him before in my life.
I watched the broadcast through to the end. Some of the items covered – the famine in Russia, the blockade in the Gulf – were familiar, or at least they seemed to be at first, but other events, reported in the same matter-of-fact tone, were like passages from some elaborate fantasy. The newspaper I had bought was the same. I felt dazed not so much by the scale of the changes as by their subtlety. There were no miracle machines, no robots, no flying saucers; in many ways the world I had entered was the same as the world I had left. What I saw and felt and heard was a change not so much in substance but in emphasis.
Was it this world that the Billings regime had learned of, and sought to eradicate? Certainly Billings’s worldview – his ‘Fortress Britain,’ as he had proudly referred to it – was everywhere conspicuous by its absence. This new England seemed more like a travellers’ encampment, a vast airport lounge of peoples, chaotic and noisy and continually on the move.
Yet commerce was clearly active, the homeless were being fed. People of all shades of opinion were expressing their views robustly and at every opportunity.
