My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time

by Liz Jensen

  ‘By pure luck, she stood under the green laser beam of the Greenwich Meridian, whose field of epistemological longitude had swept her into the Krak Time-Sucker fault-line, forcing her molecules to obey the Magnetic Memory Imperative – by which means she was catapulted back to the Copenhagen she had left a year before!’ he declared. ‘A stroke of luck if ever there was one!’

  On Rigmor’s unexpected arrival in the Krak basement, she told him she wanted to return to the future as soon as she could, for she had learned English now, & had found thriving employment in a ‘nail bar’.

  ‘So these people knew not what awaited them?’

  ‘Desperation bends the mind to consider awful things.’

  ‘And how long before you tried it on yourself?’ I asked indignantly.

  ‘You do not understand, my dear. Being the architect of the machine, & having sole knowledge of its inner workings, I was too valuable to go myself I had to send envoys. No one has complained.’

  ‘How many have been in a position to? How many never returned?’

  He smiled condescendingly. ‘That is hardly the point. These brave folk wanted an exit from the life they led. I provided it – no questions asked. They knew the risk they were running.’

  ‘But I did not ask to come here,’ I expostulated furiously. ‘And nor did Fru Schleswig!’ Who was at that moment using the dust-sucking contraption beneath the chair on which I sat, in a most irritating manner, so I pulled the plug from its socket, unleashing a bitter little spark which much matched my mood, & snapped at her to clean somewhere else, or I would push her into the River Thames, & cheer as her fat carcass pickled in its waters.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, with that twitchy smile of his. ‘Now we are getting to the nub of it. For I think you did ask to come here. Indeed you did. I am not speaking of your good mother, whose arrival was something of an imprévu, but of you personally, my little Charlotte. Were you not intrigued, dear young woman, by the thought of another life? Admit it! And were you not drawn to the machine in my cellar, despite the fact that I warned you off? You cannot deny it! Come not near, young madam, if you value your life were the words I wrote, as I recall. But still you came. You were curious about another life, one that might elevate you further & do that clever-minx brain of yours, & those pretty looks, more justice than the one you led on the streets of Østerbro & in the service of my charming, joyful & thankfully erstwhile wife.’

  I do not normally blush, for we harlots have learned shamelessness, but just then, as I gulped, I felt my face redden furiously. For was there not a tiny grain of truth in what he said? Had I not harboured secret dreams of a better life, & other things? Had I not thought of exchanging what I was for what I might yet become? And then, a split second later, it dawned on me that Professor Krak had been clever – oh so very clever, so much cleverer than I! For he had been playing me all along! He had lured me to the machine, & my own cursed curiosity had done the rest!

  But why?

  The answer came that night. Professor Krak announced that he was going out, having called a meeting of what he called his ‘Scandinavian flock’, to tell them of our safe arrival, & to organize a welcome party for myself & ‘the unexpected bonus that is Fru Schleswig’.

  ‘But don’t worry: I will be home before midnight, & in the meantime young Franz Poppersen Muhl is coming to keep you company.’

  Our companion was a weedy-looking young man of fragile sensibilities, clad in strange mud-green garments he called combat gear, covered with pockets & clever metal fastenings with tiny teeth. He sat at the table & drew from a voluminous bag a huge scrapbook which he opened out in front of us. ‘I have been keeping a journal,’ he announced. ‘I call it Journey into the Unknown! The pages were covered in tiny spiderish writing, & here & there coloured papers and what looked like tickets had been stuck, while other scraps fluttered out like the wings of butterflies as he leafed through. It seemed that he had come here planning to work on it, so while he glued a few cards in, & furnished written explanations for them, I asked him how he had fetched up in London. At which he proclaimed most vehemently that he was a victim of circumstance, & were it not for his fear of his parents’ wrath, he would return forthwith to Copenhagen & resume his philosophy studies. Or would have done, had that opportunity not been lately blocked.

  ‘The opportunity to return blocked?’ I asked in panic, my arms laden with frozen bricks of something called ‘lasagne’ I had just removed from the freeze-box. My fingers grew numb as I awaited his answer. But he just looked moody. ‘Explain, I beg you! Blocked how?’

  ‘By the wife of Professor Krak, I believe,’ he said finally, pushing back from the table & fiddling with the metal fastenings I later knew as zips. ‘Fru Krak is to remarry, & is turning Number Nine Rosenvængets Allé upside-down with a view to finally selling the property, so our link to that world shall soon be lost, for the machine is housed there, & will most probably be broken into a thousand pieces or sold for scrap. So far Professor Krak has held her off by making the place look haunted, but now …’ he trailed off. ‘It looks like we are done for, & we are stuck here for ever. Unless ‘

  ‘Unless what?’

  He looked puzzled. ‘Well, that is why you are here, Froken Charlotte. Surely you realized? That’s why everyone is so excited about your arrival. You & Fru Schleswig are Professor Krak’s last hope.’

  Professor Krak’s last hope? I did not like the sound of this at all, but it explained a great deal, all of a sudden: Professor Krak’s nervousness, & the fact that he seemed to have been expecting me (though not Fru Schleswig) all along. But how on earth had he known I would discover the machine, & enter it? Had the whole thing been a trap? Over a microwaved ‘meal for two’ (a hideous mish-mash of pulpy flour-paste & red-tinted offal), I questioned Franz further while Fru Schleswig polished off her own plateful & then set to thawing out more icy boxes, pausing only to squint at the gastronomic horrors depicted on their wrappings, seemingly oblivious to our conversation & the impact it might have upon her future.

  ‘Have you ever thought of becoming a police interrogator?’ the weedy Franz asked me when I had finished my questioning, & amassed much supplementary knowledge on the subject of the Time Machine & the Kraks. ‘For you have squeezed me dry as a lemon & my poor brain is aching.’ But he had furnished me with much to ponder.

  After Franz had asked me & Fru Schleswig to pose for a photograph, which we duly did (Fru Schleswig insisted on wielding the vacuum cleaner), he showed us the picture he had taken on a screen incorporated into the tiny silver camera, & said he would ‘make us each a print’. Then while he continued work on his journal, & Fru Schleswig crashed around loading plates into the crockery-whirler, I tried to summarize what I’d learned from Franz. According to him, during the seven years since he staged his own death, Professor Krak had managed to import & export himself between London & Østerbro, & make a pretty penny out of it by offering ‘eternal escape’ to those Danes who wished for it. Which is how Franz & others like him – the forlorn, the desperate & the plain criminal – came to London to seek a new life. The fee was a hundred kroner, but in return for this preposterous sum, Professor Krak promised them they need never return or be discovered, & tempted them with pictures of the Great Beyond, as he called London, & with stories of the technological marvels that awaited them there.

  ‘But how did he keep Fru Krak from discovering him, & his activities?’ I had asked Franz. ‘Surely she had an inkling?’

  ‘I believe she did indeed,’ he’d replied. ‘But somehow he has always managed to keep her at arm’s length.’

  I thought of her reluctance to listen to me when I told her there was a creature living in the basement of her house, and how flustered she had been when I had insisted. Ha! And what had Herr Bang said, about the place being rumoured as haunted? No wonder she had been unable to sell it. Was this also part of Professor Krak’s plan? I resolved to ask him this, & all the other questions that continued to crowd my mind thereafter. I g
athered from Franz that as a result of Professor Krak’s recruitments, the part of London known as Greenwich – along with its sister districts of Lewisham, Deptford, Mudchute, Blackheath & the Isle of Dogs – was now crawling with previously disgruntled Danes from the last century who were carving out futures for themselves in this brave land: a small army of Olsens, Jensens, Rasmussens, Petersens, Nielsens, Madsens & Svendsens integrating themselves seamlessly and quietly, minding their Ps and Qs, honing their Vs and their Ws, and working on their English vowels until they were indistinguishable from the common stream.

  Franz’s own story was that of a spoiled boy. He revealed he had had a furious argument with his parents concerning his weekly allowance, & sworn to commit suicide by strapping fireworks to himself and igniting them, but then could not muster the courage. So instead he went down to Sortedams Lake, loaded his pockets with stones, and jumped.

  ‘But as you see,’ he said sheepishly, ‘I did not die. The water there is no shallower than one’s knees, a fact I was not aware of when I leaped. You cannot imagine how difficult it is to summon the courage to commit such an act, & then be thwarted. Most humiliating, to boot’

  Then, scrambling out of the water, he said, a hand appeared offering assistance. It was attached to an arm, which was attached to the body of a dark-cloaked balaclava’d man, who had seemingly been posting a letter. ‘There is another way,’ said Franz’s saviour – & to cut a long & self-pitying story short, Professor Krak questioned the dripping & snivelling lad & once he had gleaned he was from a wealthy family, offered him the services of the machine. ‘Being a student of philosophy, I was attracted to the idea,’ whined Franz. ‘But since coming here, & learning English, & reading all the philosophy that has been thought since our own era, I am keen to go back & profit from my knowledge, & make a splash with it – even though Professor Krak insisted it was impossible to alter the events of the past through intervention, for he had tried it himself to no avail & insisted it was futile for “epistemological reasons”. But that door now appears to be closing in any case, with Fru Krak’s marriage on the horizon. All I really want is to go home to my parents & eat flæskesteg for Sunday lunch,’ finished Franz. ‘But they believe me dead!’ And he howled miserably, reaching for a tissue to blow his dejected nose.

  When Franz finally departed for a place he referred to mysteriously as the Halfway Club, I resolved to confront Professor Krak as soon as I saw him again, & ask what mad & jigged-up idea he had got into his head, & was he planning to use me & Fru Schleswig as guinea-pigs? And if so, he had no right to make assumptions of any sort about what we would & would not do, unless a very tempting financial offer was involved! And then, for the first time in my life, I enacted what I later learned was a strong tradition amongst the inhabitants of that country & time in which I now found myself: I trained my eyes on the silent flickering television screen, across which passed a stream of images, by turns boring, sugary, violent, & plain incomprehensible, & fell asleep.

  ‘To begin with,’ said Professor Krak the next morning when we resumed our talk, ‘I sent only animals.’

  I remembered the scratching noises from the basement. ‘You used rats?’ I queried.

  ‘Rats, cats, dogs. A pig, once, for they are of high intelligence. I had no luck with the smaller creatures, & I fear most were killed in transit None returned.’

  It being early morning, Fru Schleswig was still snoring in her bed: I had pinned an explanatory note to the giant knickers draped over the chair (STAY WHERE YOU ARE, CRONE) & closed the door softly. I’d insisted to Professor Krak that if he wanted my co-operation, he take me on a tour of the Tin City (yes, I had to go there! I had seen it sparkle & glitter, I had seen it was where the magical green line pointed to, from the Observatory! Who says a girl can’t have dreams?) whilst explaining his method & purpose in more detail.

  ‘The problem was, the Time Machine does not travel: it remains where it is, while those inside it are catapulted into the void. I simply did not know how to make the creatures return to Copenhagen, for once they had been decanted into another era, how could I explain that the only way of returning was to keep to the meridian, & hope that a miniature earth tremor might be triggered, thus setting the Time-Sucker’s Magnetic Memory Imperative in motion?’ Professor Krak was saying as he steered me down the pavement of a street along which vehicles rampaged, spurting cacophony & acrid fumes.

  ‘It’s just everyday pollution, for there is a hole in the ozone layer,’ he explained with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘But Nero fiddles while Rome burns. I have seen the devastation it will lead to a hundred years hence – but heigh ho, man will be man.’

  The street was still heaving with people, many of them as fat as Fru Schleswig, with skins of all hues, like a foreign bazaar, many of them seemingly speaking aloud to themselves, with strange, ugly black jewellery clamped to their ears or dangling near their mouths like laces of liquorice. I saw tattooed sailors adorned with silver face-jewellery such as one finds in illustrations of Amazonian tribesmen, and ruffian females, too, similarly bedecked, some pushing small perambulators containing babes whose little mouths were stoppered by handy corks. Amid the bustle, no one paid the slightest heed to either me or Professor Krak, camouflaged as we were in the uniform of that freakish era: I in my unflattering men’s trousers, loose shirt & the grotesquely bulbous footwear that seemed de rigueur among England’s future-folk, & my companion shod likewise, but clad above in a monkish hooded jerkin & flapping long-johns.

  ‘I will admit’ – here he had to raise his voice to be heard above the roar of the horseless vehicles, ‘that solving the riddle of time became something of an obsession to me.’ I remembered what Gudrun had said about the way Professor Krak locked himself down in the basement, where she would leave meals outside his door, & hear strange shrieks & noises emanating from his rooms. ‘And then along came Pandora. My first pioneer.’ A note of terrible portentousness entered his voice then, & although he was much taller than me (I fair had to skip to keep up with his lanky-legged pace) & I saw him in profile, it seemed to me he blinked away a tear.

  ‘Who is Pandora?’

  ‘She was an orangutan from Borneo, originally. I purchased her from a Moroccan trader who ran a carpet shop. As soon as I saw her climbing his curtains, I knew I must have her. Herr Couscous drove a hard bargain, for he was fond of the animal & said she was more intelligent than his own wife.’ Here Professor Krak broke off & seemed to wipe another tear from the corner of his eye, then got out his hip-flask – ‘at, the great human antidote!’ – & slugged a mouthful down, then passed it to me, but I declined for I needed to keep my head clear to digest the progression of events. Blimey, had I not seen a stuffed animal with a dejected-looking face, in the Oblivion Room, opposite the bicycle? Yes, indeed I had!

  ‘This is the train station,’ he said as we next joined a mixed herd of scoundrels, gentlefolk, tarts & ragamuffins all queuing before a tall metal box. ‘I’ll take you to a place where things are more modern & a lot cleaner, in case you get the wrong idea about London. Rents are very high and we Danes have to duck and dive.’

  The machine spat us two pink tickets & we waited on a platform where a sleek vehicle glided in with speed & slyness; entering, we then stood packed together in a bemusing state of wordlessness which I later discovered to be the norm on such transport. I was once again feeling queasiatious, & prayed that we would soon reach our destination, but Professor Krak was now taking up where he had left off. ‘When I sent Pandora travelling, I think she went looking for her ancestors,’ he said, ‘or at least in search of others who resembled her, & could share her primitive urges. Be that as it may, she always returned with intriguing clues about the societies she had visited. I never knew when or if she would reappear, so as you can imagine, my life began to revolve around her arrivals & departures. She taught me courage, & I am forever grateful to her for that’ He wiped another tear away, & blew his nose. ‘She had gone on twenty missions before she met her
most untimely end.’

  The train stopped, disgorged more passengers, then restarted its hair-raising journey into the vortex of God-Knew-Where.

  ‘But how did she get back, pray?’

  ‘I fitted her with a magnetic device, for by now I had calculated the physics. I concocted a special collar which picked up earth tremors: I trained her to respond to them by heading for the source, which was always the spot where the Time-Sucker & the meridian conjoined. Then she would go through the situational magnetism routine I had taught her, & the next thing she knew, she’d be back in Østerbro.’ He laughed. ‘My, she had the strangest taste in the souvenirs she brought home. For what takes the fancy of a female orangutan will not closely coincide with whatever objects of interest one might select oneself, if one were free to plunder riches from the Great Beyond.’

  ‘What did she bring?’ I asked, for I will admit I was intrigued despite myself, & could feel my hostile stance beginning to erode, for it was plain there was no malice in the Professor: only the most reckless & foolhardy enthusiasm.

  ‘There was a whole collection,’ he replied. ‘A human skull she brought back once,’ continued Professor Krak. ‘A handbag made from scaly hide, padded with fabric. A ram’s horn. She tended to forage much for exotic fruit, which she devoured most happily on her return. Once, a small black box with a curious disc inside, which I did not understand the meaning of until I came to this century & discovered it to be a music CD.’ (He ignored my bafflement.) ‘A prayer mat. A mobile telephone likewise.’