My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time

by Liz Jensen

  As we approached, a cheer went up, & the double doors of the schoolhouse flew open to reveal a most excited-looking throng of people in modern dress, all waving miniature Danish flags. Now you do not need me to tell you how very gratifying this was! News of my arrival – and the role Professor Krak was counting on me to play – had clearly come as a most welcome event among the community of Danish time-travellers. ‘Dear Frøken Charlotte, you will be our heroine for ever!’ cried an elegant lady, who shook my hand warmly & introduced herself as Fru Helle Jakobsen. At which flabbergasting pronouncement I merely smiled, & gulped down the schnapps she discreetly handed me, & then cried bravely, getting into the spirit of the thing, ‘I will do my best, good madam!’, & let her then present a whole muddle of people – a burly sailor-looking type with a lascivious eye called Henrik Dogger, two boys named the Joergensen twins, & their teenaged friend, the flame-haired Mattias Rosenvinge, one Max Kong, who carried a violin, one Rigmor Schwarb, who carried no musical instrument but whispered that if I ever needed instruction in the sexual gadgetry & manners of modern times (she winked knowingly) I must not be shy to ask, the multitudinous Poulsen family, a couple named Jespersen & their mangy mastiff, then a nervous spinster called Ida Sick who shook my hand most vigorously & said she hoped I would not be staying in London long, as it were, for she knew I had important work to do & if she were frank (here she tittered) she couldn’t wait to see the back of me! Next a huge man with the big matted beard of a sailor came up, & said he was Fru Jakobsen’s ‘other half, Georg, at my service, & then declared that what you two good ladies (for there was no shaking off Fru Schleswig) really wanted, he would wager, was a taste of his wife’s fine home-baked wienerbrød.

  At which Professor Krak clapped his hands & raised a glass: more schnapps appeared & soon some twenty people were making a toast to me & Fru Schleswig, & chattering most excitedly. Helle Jakobsen returned with a further tray of sweetmeats & took Fru Schleswig aside in a most warm & hospitable manner, exclaiming with much enthusiasm, ‘I gather, madam, that you share my passion for new-fangled cleaning devices!’ & in no time was waxing lyrical about dust-suction while Fru Schleswig, her prodigious backside now moulded into an armchair, listened whilst gobbling her way through a plateful of cinnamon-dusted pastries. Franz then showed up, looking a little drunk, carrying his scrapbook under one arm & supported on the other by Rigmor Schwarb, whom I now noticed sported a tattooed snake that writhed around her elbow before disappearing into the pit of her arm. As these two launched into a heated argument about Franz’s ‘cowardly’ wish to return home, I took in the surroundings.

  All about us were small tables lit with candles, & in a corner, in place of an electric kettle made from the ubiquitous coloured ivory known as plastic, there was a good solid copper vessel on a fiery hob, & on the wall a large map of Denmark with all its waters & islands – Kattegat & Skagerak, Storebaelt & Lillebaelt, Jylland and Fyn, Fejø & Drejø Æerø and Møn: & how just the sight of these names & the contours of my beloved homeland brought a lump to my throat! And on the back of the door was a noticeboard to which hand-written messages were pinned (‘home-pickled herring for sale’, ‘offer gardening & odd jobs to Danish-speakers’, ‘swap sewing machine for English lessons’) and against the facing wall a bookshelf loaded with maps & dictionaries.

  Just as Franz & Rigmor’s argument was teetering on the edge of lunacy, for Franz was clearly of a most nervous disposition, & Rigmor a tough-minded girl, Professor Krak swept in, distributing salted liquorice bonbons & marzipan-balls, & his arrival – whether due to his natural authority or the treats he bore – put an instant halt to their bickering. Fru Schleswig & I should realize that we were far from being alone, the Professor assured us, in arriving abruptly in this ‘most fascinating of locations’. Those clustered around him nodded in vigorous agreement. Fru Helle Jakobsen put her arm around me in a motherly fashion, & promised me I would grow to love both the future and London, however short my stay was to be, & furthermore she knew I was a brave young woman.

  ‘Those of us who have grown nostalgic for home – & my husband & I are among them – are counting on you to assure our safe passage back to Denmark,’ she said, smiling at me with a winning confidence that offered no room for argument.

  ‘Hear hear,’ muttered Franz, who then took photographs of us with his tiny silver camera, before retreating to a corner where he set to gnawing his nails.

  ‘Eat, drink & be merry,’ advised Professor Krak. ‘For tomorrow morning, my dear Charlotte, begins your education.’

  ‘Education?’ I queried, but he merely winked & handed me another glass of schnapps, so I ate & drank as instructed, & had a most agreeable time of it, what with the violin-jigs & the homely food, & the mix of most curious company (for had not all these people been driven, at one time, to seek oblivion?): & if I harboured anxieties about how I might perform my role as the saviour of this odd bunch of folk, I swallowed them down with the schnapps as I danced & laughed, & watched Fru Schleswig get most roaring drunk, & when Professor Krak came & asked how I was doing, & squeezed my hand, I returned the squeeze, for I was suddenly feeling most generous towards the man who had just handed me a new dream on a plate, with trimmings, & when I thought of the whorehouse that would bear my name (Charlotte, the orphan from Jutland, turned lady of business!), I smiled & felt a loud bell of happiness ring through my blood.

  It was with a shocker of a hangover that, the next afternoon, the Professor escorted myself & the old hag & I, escorted by the Professor, arrived at the Halfway Club for our Newcomers’ Orientation Class. It was run by Henrik Dogger, a red-faced former helmsman whom I had met briefly at the welcome party: as he greeted us, the assessing look in his eye made me wonder if I might once have serviced him in Copenhagen, but to my relief he indicated no recognition, at which I was glad, for there was coming over me a feeling that I might advantageously reinvent myself somewhat to better suit this time & place, as my fellow time-travellers had seemingly done before me. At this notion, I felt a small worm of possibility shift inside me. For all anybody knew, I too was a Bischen-Baschen! While the implications of such a transformation ran through my head, Herr Dogger was instructing us to be seated, lighting his pipe & announcing that he had personally made several expeditions in the Time Machine. Being of a technical disposition, he had often been sent on missions by Professor Krak (who nodded in the affirmative), & described himself as ‘Fred’s right-hand man, technically speaking’, to which the Professor did not demur but merely smiled & cracked his knuckles.

  Dogger claimed he had visited twelfth-century Paris (’sewage problems you won’t believe’) & he-knew-not-what-century island of Marroquinta in the South Atlantic, now sunk beneath the surface of the waves but once a tiny splotch of land on the Meridian Line three hundred miles south of Ghana. Here, he said excitedly, poking energetically at his pipe, the natives are presided over by the Sultan, whose myriad wives hide their faces & show their breasts, while the island’s menfolk wear cosmetics & glorious woven silks bright as flamingos & hold beauty contests, & the sand whips your face & the camels make noises ‘like gurgling drains or the destruction of Pompeii’.

  ‘Well, I shall leave you in Herr Dogger’s capable hands,’ said Professor Krak when he saw me listening openmouthed to this nonsense. And handing me the key to the apartment, he instructed Franz – who was working moodily on his scrapbook – to escort us home when we were done. ‘I need to make a foray into the criminal underworld to get you some paperwork forged, lest you should fall foul of the British authorities at any point,’ he said airily, taking a small gulp of schnapps from his hip-flask. ‘Herr Dogger will teach you about the century you have missed, and about Britain and its inhabitants, will you not, Henrik? And try to combine it with a crash course in English, while you’re at it!’

  ‘Consider it done, Professor,’ said Dogger, giving a nautical-looking salute, which I thought most creepy, & before we could object, Professor Krak had taken his leave & Dogger had pu
lled out chairs and a blackboard, and given Fru Schleswig and myself each a piece of paper on which was written in elegant cursive script:

  Club Rules

  1. All Danes who have travelled through time shall hereby be deemed club members, & shall agree to abide by its rules.

  2. Members must wear modern dress at all times, save for traditional celebrations such as Jul, Nytår and Sankt-Hans Aften, held at the club.

  3. Community obligations: All members must keep fellow-members of the Halfway Club cognizant of their whereabouts at all times. Security being paramount, they must also note the names, addresses and telephone numbers of all modern-age friends and acquaintances in the Club Book of Local Knowledge. Failure to do so will be regarded as a serious offence.

  4. Discretion: Members must not reveal the true circumstances of their arrival in the modern age to any non-member, including modern spouses & offspring if applicable. This is crucial to the security of our community: breaking this rule shall be considered a punishable offence, entailing exclusion from the club & its services. Members must especially beware of Danes from modern Denmark. Should one be encountered by chance, who turns inquisitive, suggest that you represent the Danish tax authorities.

  Upon the blackboard Dogger then affixed a map of the world, dotted with small red pins: these, he explained, marked where ‘Krak pioneers’ had settled. ‘Thanks to electronic messaging systems such as text and e-mail, we have news of those in this era, but of the other time-travellers there is no trace, if they have chosen, as they most often do, to settle where they are, & integrate.’

  Fru Schleswig shifted in her chair & reached for one of last night’s pastries.

  ‘How long wil this tayke?’ she muttered through a mouthful. ‘I thort I woz dun wiv my skooling long ago. Did notte lyke it then & duz notte lyke it no more now.’

  ‘There have been two world wars, & many smaller ones,’ pursued Dogger, blithely ignoring the crumb-spitting creature. ‘We were lucky to have missed them. The era you have come to is called the Information Age. You will have access to all the knowledge in the world, but never, I’ll wager, will you have met folk with less wisdom, curiosity or insight’ Then he whipped the map away & proceeded to illustrate his themes on the blackboard beneath, writing ‘useful English vocabulary’ on the margins as he did so. And so my head was crammed with twelve-carat gobbledegook, while Fru Schleswig, armed as she was with seemingly endless supplies of wienerbrød, was not even pretending to pay attention, & once she had cleared the buffet, settled deep in her chair & began to snore. Whereupon, in a most haphazard & scattergun fashion, Dogger – who turned out to be a most fanatical pedagogue, much in love with the sound of his own voice but also with a lecherous eye that roamed breastward with alarming frequency – waxed garrulous on whatever diverse subjects caught his fancy, all of which announced themselves to be of a scientific & meteorological nature, & of deep unlikeliness: freeze-dried coffee granules, a man sent to the moon in a rocket at great expense, who returned with only a few dirty pebbles, flooding & drought in a place called ‘the Third World’ (‘O Lord,’ Igasped, ‘there are now three? Spare me, sir, I pray!), the phenomenon of living offal being transplanted from pigs intohumans who had killed their liver by excess drinking, ‘computer dating’, a cold soup called gazpacho (’so revolting thatyou will instantly be sick’), & finally (he drew back a frieze, behind which a television-like machine sat, its window flashing)Google, the means by which any supplementary questions I had could be settled. This, he said, was a ‘computer’, aninformation-containing device which could answer any enquiry one should care to ask within a matter of seconds, at theclick of a button, just like a crystal ball. With a flourish he sat before it & ran his hands across the keys, much like a player ofa miniature piano, & brightly coloured rectangles covered in pretty script & symbols blossomed on its blackboard.

  ‘Go on, Froken Charlotte, then, ask away!’

  ‘Does God exist?’ I asked, intrigued.

  ‘Try another,’ he said, clearly rattled. ‘Less ambitious, if you can manage it’

  ‘How do I get home?’

  ‘You need to be more specific. It isn’t geared –’

  ‘Will I, Charlotte Dagmar Marie of Østerbro, one day run my very own broth–’

  But here I halted my tongue, for I did not want to give too much away, & instead asked him how one might measure the breeding rate of flies, to which he instantly found several answers, some of them illustrated by screenfuls of writhing maggots.

  And so two long hours passed, during which, impressed though I was by the memory capacities of the computer, the more Dogger propounded, the more I realized that never, in the whole of my twenty-five years, had I heard such a quantity of rubbish spouted at me, even by boring clients who had paid for the privilege. However, when the lesson ended & I voiced my scorn, the old helmsman merely laughed, & insisted there was ‘photographic & documentary evidence’ to back up his preposterous claims, & in any case I would soon enough see for myself that my scepticism was merely ‘old-world prejudice’, the lowest common denominator of newcomers. Suffice it to say that by the time Franz finally escorted us home on the railway (in preparation for which subterranean journey Fru Schleswig insisted on downing three further glasses of schnapps), I had developed an intense hostility to my new teacher, who had run his eye up & down my body too often for my liking, & added insult to injury by addling my brain with so much toxic gibberish that when I fell asleep that night, it was to dream of flying pigs.

  O Chance, how like a game of bagatelle! Who could have foreseen what was to come & skew my fortunes next? For be warned, my dearest one: my tale, which has so far, I fervently hope, amused you, or at least kept the wolf of boredom from your door, is shortly to change shape in a most abrupt manner: indeed, it is about to swerve almost off the page due to a most unexpected event. So bear with me, & ‘fasten your seatbelt’ as they say in modern times, while we approach this shocking bend.

  I will not bother you, darling reader, with more about my acquaintanceship with the modern world, for you know its nature better than I, & it is no source of wonderment to you. All I need say therefore is that over the next fortnight I became more accustomed to the future present into which Fate had thrust me, & was forced to acknowledge that some, if not all, of the pølsesnak Dogger spouted with such confident pomposity bore some correspondence to reality, & that instead of reeling with shock at every novelty I encountered, my time would be better spent judging whether or not the conundrum in question, whether it be the dizzying concept of ‘post-post-feminism’ or a walrus that shat underwater fireworks (for by then nothing would have surprised me), was worth paying heed to, given that my stay here would be short.

  Meanwhile, although with the exception of a few phrases such as ‘yes please’, ‘no thank you’ & ‘do you want me to call the police?’ I still spoke none of the local language, my lack of English would not be a problem, Professor Krak assured me, for there were plenty of foreigners in London. All I need do, therefore, was learn two phrases: ‘Sorry I no speak English’ & ‘I from Croatia’. (‘Don’t say Denmark,’ he warned, ‘for all today’s young Danes are perfectly fluent in English, nay bilingual, & you will be instantly misprized.’) Which I duly did, & found it was indeed all I needed, until an unexpected revolution of the psyche occurred, & all the words of all the languages of the world could not express –

  But (time-traveller that I am) I once again leap ahead.

  So to get back to the present, if I may speak of the future thus: together, Professor Krak & I spent many an hour laying meticulous plans for the journey back to Copenhagen – a voyage he insisted we undertake with the excruciating Fru Schleswig at our side, for we would need her assistance ‘in an emergency’.

  ‘But she herself is an emergency! A veritable human calamity!’ I protested, for as you can well imagine, dear one, I was more than keen to leave the old swine behind me for ever, & dumping her in another era entirely, where she need never tro
uble me more, seemed like an excellent notion. ‘She will once again do something typically galumphing & foolish, & wreck –’

  ‘A risk we must take,’ the Professor interrupted, ‘for my wife will want to know her whereabouts if our plan is to work. And remember, your mother has the strength of an ox, which can come in handy if one finds oneself in a tight spot. Franz will also accompany us, as he wishes to return to his parents. He will remain in Copenhagen as Liaison Officer, & will be available for further reinforcement, should you need it. I, too, will be on hand, of course, masterminding proceedings – though, unlike you, I shall need to keep my profile very low. Fru Jakobsen is knitting me a new balaclava as we speak.’

  And so, once I had corrected him for the umpteenth time on the erroneousness of the genealogical link between me and Fru S which he so annoyingly and persistently harked on about, we continued to choreograph the possibilities, drawing what Professor Krak called ‘flow-charts’ to decide in advance what path to take should this-or-that happen instead of such-and-such, & if so … ad infinitum. But O, how I laugh now, when I look back at all that careful plotting we did of all the ‘variables’, for was it not what the English call ‘Sod’s Law’ indeed that the one very thing we could never have foreseen was the very thing that would transpire, & that before we even set off?

  In the afternoons, Professor Krak would don a tie & disappear on what he called ‘business’ (I later discovered he ran quite a brisk trade in the Danish antiques smuggled across time) & I would listen to the increasingly lecherous Dogger spout more absurdities about modern life, which I would then compare to the evidence before me, & add much salt before assimilating. It was on one of these afternoons, while Dogger & I were taking a half-hour break from the irritating intensity of one another’s company, that I took a stroll down to the local gardens & met with what I think of as my great accident. The gardens, a short distance from the Halfway Club, contained a pond, dotted with mauve and white lily-flowers, & it was to this small oasis of calm that I was wont to direct my steps, while puzzling over whatever new phenomenon of the modern age Herr Dogger had presented me with, whilst he stared at my breasts or fiddled with his pipe, or both. More often than not, however, I would find myself making plans for Hotel Charlotte – where the advantages of the future could, I soon realized, prove lucrative in my own era. As I approached the pond, I pondered the new possibilities that had opened up after I took Rigmor Schwarb into my confidence. Catching my drift at once (for it quickly emerged that she too had been a harlot back home), she had enthusiastically shown me an object called the ‘ribbed & flavoured condom’, & indicated how I might purchase ‘sex gadgets’ in bulk on the ‘World Wide Web’, not to mention erotic magazines & other paraphernalia of the trade. I became much excited at the prospect of using such equipment at Hotel Charlotte, but to buy them, we agreed, I would need funds, & for funds, I would need clients. How much could a girl charge in London? Rigmor Schwarb said she did not know, really, but could investigate. ‘At least fifty British pounds a go,’ she guessed. ‘If you include aromatherapy.’ That sounded a fortune to me, but I immediately thought of doubling – it easily enough done, if one avoided the small fry & headed straight for the rich pickings in the higher echelons, for time was of the essence. But how to identify a gentleman, when modern garb was so hard to decipher? Or should I simply return to Canary Wharf, where a suit might (I hazarded) be construed as a sign of money?