My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time

by Liz Jensen

  ‘I was born in Jutland in 1872,’ I blurted as soon as the door opened, ‘& raised in an orphanage. In 1888 I ran away to Copenhagen but Fru Schleswig followed me.’

  Fergus, still removing his jacket, looked bemused, & Josie intrigued.

  ‘You wanted to hear my story?’ I continued. ‘So now you listen.’

  ‘A story?’ asked Josie. ‘Can I hear it too, Lottie?’

  ‘This one is not for children, min lille skat, I said. ‘It is full of boring grown-up pølsesnak!

  ‘Chock-a-block with tedious twaddle, pet,’ affirmed Fergus, & ushered his daughter to the living room, where he fed a video of her beloved Spiderman into the machine & I brought her a plate of lemon biscuits I had cooked that morning, for Love had turned me into a creature quite unexpectedly fired up with domesticity. When Fergus came back he sat opposite me at the kitchen table and said, ‘OK. Let’s take this slowly. Did you say eighteen something?’

  ‘Eighteen hundred and seventy-two,’ I said. ‘July 4th. In Copenhagen I did a dancing show with Else, we were the Østerbro Coquettes. But then she had an accident, & fell on the skin of a pig & her father died & she started a flower shop & I was selling my body & then one day I was in the bakery on Classensgade …’

  And as I recounted it all to him, in a somewhat gabbling & haphazard manner with much looping to & fro, I saw many emotions cross his visage, from sympathy (my orphanage years) to concern (the whoring) to amusement (Fru Krak) to deep puzzlement (the Time Machine), to alarm (Fru Krak’s gun), to disbelief (the Greenwich Observatory), followed by – yes! For was he not an adventurer at heart? Had I not spotted it in him? And was he not in love with history? – excitement! Joy! Nay, hilarity! For now that I had reached the part about arriving in London & getting acquainted with English life, & needing condoms for my brothel in Copenhagen, & seducing him as a whore but falling in love with him as a woman, he began laughing: laughing & laughing, with tears in his eyes!

  ‘My God, I enjoyed that, sweetheart,’ he said when I was quite done with my tale. He shook his head, still amused. ‘You’re quite a storyteller. The bit about the Professor writing his wife’s horoscope: I love it’ But then he took my hand & his face became serious. ‘But look, Lottie. When exactly do I get the real version of why you borrowed my credit card to order five thousand avocado-flavoured condoms and a load of fluffy handcuffs? Because, joking apart, I do think you owe me an explanation. A proper one.’

  O, how my heart plummeted! Reader, he had believed not a word! O woe was me! Now although I had perhaps expected my love to question parts of my story, I was nonetheless quite flabbergasted that none of it had convinced him – not even those elements it most pained me to confess: viz, my designs upon his wallet. O, beloved, can you imagine how I felt at that moment, when it seemed there was naught that I could do save provide more detail, which would bury me further in what my lover perceived to be an elaborate & fantastical web of lies? I was at a loss. Looking out of the window I saw an old lady by a pedestrian crossing, waiting for ‘the green man’. As the figure lit up, he became a wobbling blur & a lump came to my throat.

  ‘Lottie,’ Fergus said. He looked worried, & handed me a tissue. ‘I’d love to believe you. But– Well, it’s so incredible. And really thoroughly imagined. I bet you could even tell me the colour of Fru Krak’s kitchen floor!’

  ‘It’s wood, whitewashed,’ I said without hesitation. ‘Fru Schleswig, she uses bleach.’

  He nodded thoughtfully. ‘Impressive. You should put this talent to use,’ he said, & he seemed to mean it.

  ‘But it is all the truth!’ I cried, standing up so suddenly that my chair crashed to the ground. The noise of Spiderman came through from the next room: an insistent musical beat beneath the quick to-&-fro of voices. Fergus, still seated at the table, began playing with a metal corkscrew shaped like a fish.

  ‘Darling,’ he said, sighing. ‘It’s no good. This isn’t working.’ So this is how it is done, I thought. This is the pain that Love brings. ‘How can we live together if you’re hiding from me behind a story that sounds like something straight out of Doctor Who?’ And then I saw that he had tears in his eyes, too, but a new kind I had not seen before.

  ‘Doctor what?’

  ‘It’s a television series.’

  ‘Television?’ I cried, all at once most offended & distraught. We were a pair of sweethearts having their first row. But I knew not the rules of how sweethearts disagree. All I knew was that the emotions involved were unbearable. ‘But I am real. I am not television! What happened is the truth! How can I prove it to you?’ I exclaimed, boiling with annoyance – at myself as much as him, for had I not spent much of my life thus far practising deceit on men? Most agonizingly ironic, then, that on the one occasion I should choose to tell the truth, I would be disbelieved! How frustrating was my lover’s obstinacy! I stamped my foot so hard upon the tiled floor that it hurt: he merely carried on playing with the fish corkscrew.

  ‘OK,’ he began wearily. ‘If I’ve understood you right, this recent argument you had with the other Danish people was about –’

  But I interrupted. ‘They’re expecting me to go back & save the Mother Machine with Fru Schleswig & Professor Krak. But I told them I will not do it. Because I am in love with you!’ I snapped.

  ‘So go back and tell them yes,’ he said, pulling the extendable fish to its maximum length & then letting it contract back. And his soft brown eyes looked at me steadily.

  ‘What? I shouted. ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘No, I’m quite sane, Lottie. Tell them you’ve changed your mind. Tell them that you’ll go.’ O, insupportable! No sooner had my own heart been awakened, than it was made to bleed!

  ‘You want me to leave you? Go back, be gone for ever, set up Hotel Charlotte in Østerbro & never see you again? And get stuck there just to show to you I am not television?’ I was ready to tear out my hair by the roots.

  ‘I never said that, hen.’ Lord, his calmness drove me to distraction.

  ‘Yes! More or less you did!’

  ‘Lottie,’ he said, getting to his feet & grabbing me by the shoulders, which forced me to stand still. He looked into my eyes as if searching for something: the way a doctor might look to see if there was any hope in the brain of a madman. ‘Listen, hen. Wherever it is you have to go, and whatever you have to do there, I want you to take me with you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You want me to believe you. But unless I see it for myself, how can I?’

  ‘But it’s dangerous!’

  He shrugged, for this reply clearly bolstered his scepticism. ‘That definitely sounds like another reason to say no.’

  ‘No! It’s not that! Anyway, what about Josie?’

  ‘Josie always comes with me on my archaeological trips abroad. Why should a journey to the past be any different?’

  He was still challenging me.

  ‘You have to trust me!’ I cried. ‘I tell you, it is dangerous!’ How pig-headed he was!

  ‘Lottie: seeing is believing. So show me it’s true and I’m yours for ever.’

  Much hoo-ha ensued.

  I will spare you the stormy details of my meeting with Professor Krak, who muttered ‘blackmail’ when I gave him the ultimatum, but brightened when he learned that Fergus was an archaeologist; of my address to the Halfway Club, which met with a mixed reaction of frantic pleas & outrage; of the wrath of Herr Dogger, who shouted that a certain worthless, brazen hussy had caused the club rule of confidentiality to be broken ‘for the first time in history’; of the emphatically expressed support of Fru Jakobsen & Franz, who argued that the necessity of a connection with home should over-ride the aforementioned rule; & finally of my own intervention. I spoke to the assembled throng at the Halfway Club with much passion & eloquence, declaring that whilst understanding the vital nature of our mission, supporting it wholeheartedly, & respecting the need for secrecy concerning the machine, the love of my life could under no circumstances permit the woman he
loved to travel unprotected &, if she wished to go, insisted upon accompanying her. At which declaration I, being the she in question, was moved to tears, as were all of the shes in the hall (with the exception of Fru S, who merely snorted that I was ‘nuthing but a spoyled bratte’), & in the end by a show of hands it was democratically agreed by all but Herr Dogger, who opposed it, & Fru S, who was by now snoring vibrantly, that desperate times required desperate measures.

  ‘OK, they agree. But if we do this, we must do what Professor Krak & I have already planned,’ I told Fergus when I returned, triumphant, from the meeting. ‘You & Josie must help. You must know we may be stuck there.’ I was beginning to become anxious. How could I acquaint him with the dangers of our journey, if he so thoroughly questioned its likelihood?

  ‘Whatever you say,’ he grinned. To him the undertaking was still a source of benign amusement & curiosity – but as the days passed, my seriousness about equipping him & Josie for the ‘surprise trip to Denmark’ began to dent his confidence. ‘Er, how long do you expect us to be gone?’ he asked, as I measured him up for clothing.

  ‘I am no philosopher,’ I said, kissing his left cheekbone, of which I was particularly fond. ‘But it all depends on how you measure time.’

  Just over six weeks had passed since Fru Schleswig & I began our adventures: Professor Krak had calculated that we should therefore land in Copenhagen sometime in late December 1897, nigh on Christmas. ‘A good time,’ he assured us, ‘for it is a preoccupied season, involving much drunkenness & high spirits, & we can take cover behind the revelry.’ So thus it is that after further intensive discussions concerning the logistics of the mission, Fergus, Josie & myself, with Franz, Fru Schleswig & Professor Krak, all clad in appropriate 1890s dress (ah, how at home do I feel in my familiar bodice & dress, freshly dry-cleaned! And how splendid does my love look in Herr Jakobsen’s waistcoat, jacket, breeches & frock coat, & how adorable Josie, in the woollen sailor’s outfit Fru Jakobsen has knitted for her!), now pile into a hired minibus along with several large suitcases of equipment, medical drugs & other modern paraphernalia including the vacuum cleaner from which Fru Schleswig has most obstinately refused to be parted, & travel to the Greenwich Observatory where, tiptoeing in, we crowd together next to the telescope, beneath the green laser Meridian Line in the upstairs hall. In which anxious tableau try to picture us, O precious one, as we stand quaking on the brink of our adventure – a small throng sizzling with nerves & uttering jumbled, hapless prayers to whatever idea of God our imaginations can summon, while Professor Krak prepares to trigger, with a long, curved magnetic wand, the tiny earth-shudder that will (hopefully) awaken the Time-Sucker & catapult us back to whence we came.

  Whoosh! Ping!

  We gasp as –

  Yes!

  No!

  Yes!

  A loud crack, a puff of noxious smoke –

  HELP!

  The time is exactly 11pm on Wednesday July 30th. But not for long.

  Part the Third: Back from Beyond

  This journey was quite different from the last. Not least because I, for one, was wide awake for the whole excruciating process, which involved a hideous whirling that seemed to last both seconds & years (as indeed it did), & featuring many coloured flashing lights and screaming, hissy noises, much like a fairground jamboree randomly & catastrophically melting: but then, just as I was beginning to believe that this was Hell, & I should never be out of it, & that nor would I forgive myself for assigning my poor Fergus & Josie to the same Fate, the monstrous experience came to an abrupt halt, & we landed with a shoddy & uncompromising thud in a place of pitch darkness & searing cold where, dizzily recovering our bearings, we discovered ourselves crushed together in a higgledy-piggledy amalgam of heads, torsos & limbs within the velvet interior of the Time Machine in the Krak basement. Or there, at least, we surmised we were, for a moment passed before Herr Krak located his powerful modern torch. Disentangling ourselves from one another & struggling out (this time, I was pleased to note, we had not travelled the maritime route, & were quite dry), we looked around to find the basement room exactly as we had left it, but thankfully minus Fru Krak & her blunderbuss. Pandora the orangutan looked down upon us mournfully from her high glass-walled perch. Josie – who seemed not to have been aware of the journey, unlike the adults in our party, all of whom were feeling nauseous – was already jumping up & down with excited glee, & clambering all over the machine (’Touch nothing!’ warned Professor Krak. ‘She is the most delicate of beasts!’), while Fergus simply stood staring openmouthed in amazement, that all I had recounted was indeed true and not the ravings of a fantasticator, lunatic or sect member.

  I turned to him triumphantly. ‘You see?’

  He blinked several times, acknowledging the fact that we were no longer in Greenwich. I saw him taking in the dresser, the pictures on the walls, the ornamental table. Professor Krak smiled at his consternation and said in English: ‘It’s all very much vintage klunkestil, as we call it in Denmark – late Victorian, to you. Except the exercise bicycle, which is an import.’

  Fergus fell before me on his knees, & when he finally spoke, it was with the slowness & deliberation of an oracle.

  ‘If you can ever forgive me, Lottie,’ he said – still looking around him like a sleepwalker, or Lazarus returned from the dead – ‘then please marry me.’

  ‘All in good time,’ interrupted Professor Krak, before I could reply. ‘But first things first, if you do not mind. We are on a mission here, Mr McCrombie, & shall be requiring your assistance.’

  ‘I didn’t believe her, Professor,’ said Fergus, rising to his feet, but looking so dazed I feared he might swoon. ‘I was beginning to think it was, well, something mental. Delusions, you know, from her imagination being too big for her wee head. I figured we’d just have to tread water till the right pharmaceutical solution came along.’

  ‘Well, frankly she should never have told you,’ the Professor replied, looking at me reproachfully and rubbing his hands against the sudden cold. Chilly vapours puffed from his mouth as he spoke. ‘It is quite against regulations. But now you are with us, I am sure you can be of help. Perhaps you could begin by asking young Josie to get off the exercise bicycle? All the equipment here is most delicate & irreplaceable.’

  ‘Hoam, & not a minnit too soone,’ harrumphed Fru Schleswig, detaching herself from the vacuum cleaner & directing a punishing glance at Professor Krak, before reaching for the crate of food Fru Jakobsen had prepared for us. ‘I am not doin nuthing lyke thatte aggen as long as I lyvve. So putte that in yor pype and smoke it. Now wer is the bred? I cud eet a hors.’

  And so could we all, for our time-journeying had engendered a fearsome hunger, so it was with gusto that we attacked the home-made rugbrød, & the cheese & sausage Fru Jakobsen had packed for us, devouring it picnic-style along with hot, sweetened tea from a clever hotty-botty flask known as a Thermos. Upon which, with all but Fru Schleswig’s mighty appetite then assuaged (‘How cud anywun think this is enuffe to keep boddie & sole together?’ she grumbled), we set about our appointed tasks, according to the extensive flow-chart which we had now pinned to the wall, which Professor Krak had begged us to consider as our Bible. He also had instilled in us the need to co-operate ‘like a highly motivated populace, under the leadership of, say, Stalin in his heyday’, & this we did insofar as our understanding of this allowed, I at least never having heard of that good gentleman. First Fergus, Josie, Fru Schleswig & I unrolled the inflatable mattresses we had brought with us, & set up a temporary home in the two spare rooms of the basement not occupied by the machine, to which we now laid claim as safe territory. As we had anticipated, Fru Krak had barred entry to the upper rooms by a heavy metal grille at the top of the staircase, but our access to the outdoors remained unjeopardized, for it could be effected by all but the monstrously bloated Fru Schleswig via a narrow ventilation tunnel which finalized in the garden, & it was through this that Professor Krak & Franz planned to ventur
e when dusk fell, Franz for the long-anticipated reunion with his parents, the wealthy & distinguished Herr & Fru Poppersen Muhl, & Professor Krak to sell modern medicines on the black market, & thereby procure us enough money to last for the duration of our stay.

  There is a fever for things mechanical which comes over certain men when in the presence of anything bolted, wired, wheeled or pistonned – a fever to which my beloved Fergus unexpectedly turned out to be no more immune than a member of my own sex is to the allure of a diamond necklace or an elegant high-heeled shoe. So animated had I been by the charm of Fergus’s mind, thus far, & how busily besotted with his physique, that the practical aspect of his character had never surfaced, hitherto, in my presence. But now it had found its element. With Josie at his side (the child fair bubbling with energy like an overheated cooking pot), my husband-to-be excitedly investigated the incomprehensible innards of the Time Machine, quizzing our host about its capacities all the while. This curious attention flattered Professor Krak.

  ‘I will show you the plans if you wish,’ he beamed. ‘I keep a copy in there, as well as in London,’ he said, pointing to a large bureau in the corner, sporting many drawers. ‘But be warned; the machine can never be reproduced by anyone other than me: I have seen to that’

  ‘How so?’ I queried, yawning, for the phenomenon of men being masculine together always renders me somewhat bored & I will confess I felt a little disappointed that my dearest seemed more fascinated by the engineering of our vehicle than with the aesthetics of my attire, which the dry-cleaning process had rendered most glorious, to match the woman wearing it, if I may say so myself, for now that my nausea had subsided, a pretty flush had blossomed on my cheeks.