Frozen in Time

by Ali Sparkes

  ‘Go on, Frederick,’ said his father.

  ‘You oughtn’t to have done it. You really oughtn’t to have put Polly in there. It was jolly well not right— do you know? It’s been the most awful week for her.’ Freddy gulped and bit back down on his lip. His eyes glittered.

  His father got up and walked across to him, Polly holding tight to his arm. He put his hand on Freddy’s green pyjamaed shoulder and nodded. ‘Well said, my boy. Well said. I agree wholeheartedly. Can you forgive me?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Freddy, in a strangled voice, and flung his arms around the man. ‘It’s been all right really, I suppose.’ He sniffed and gulped. ‘Quite a hoot with Ben and Rachel—just wait till you try a Whopper.’

  ‘And Pot Noodle!’ piped up Polly.

  Ben and Rachel had the good grace to look ashamed.

  ‘Can I help anyone, please? Who’s next, please? You want fries with that? D’you want to go large for another thirty p?’

  Professor Henry Emerson winced amid the racket of shouting staff, sizzling deep-fat fryers, and hyperactive children. ‘You’re telling me people come here … from choice?’ he asked. He watched, mesmerized, as Polly proudly opened his carton in front of him on the plastic-topped table.

  ‘Here you are—it’s a Whopper! Not a fib, but a burger! In a round roll. It’s super when you try it, honestly, Daddy! Try it!’

  Professor Emerson reached into the carton as if he were about to de-fuse a bomb and retrieved the large burger. Polly nodded at him excitedly. ‘Go on! Just take a bite!’

  He paused and looked around. ‘Can you not get plates and cutlery here? It is a restaurant after all.’

  ‘No!’ said Polly. ‘It’s not that kind of restaurant. Oh, Daddy—you’ve got such a lot to learn. Just bite it!’

  At last Professor Emerson did as his daughter told him and took a bite out of his Whopper. His eyebrows shot up while they all waited, breathlessly, for his verdict. After a few munches he nodded. ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Certainly a lot better than Russian food.’

  ‘Did you really meet the Russian president?’ asked Freddy, poking his straw into the top of his Coke cup.

  ‘Both of them—the one in 1956 and the one in 2009,’ said Professor Emerson and there was a hint of pride in his voice, thought Ben. ‘Khrushchev wasn’t called a president back then, of course. Then it was the Soviet Union and they didn’t have such titles, but that’s really what he was. He was fascinated by my cryonic chamber research and personally asked me to work on it for the Soviets. I said I would build it for him, but only on the condition that he would let me go home afterwards. He wouldn’t agree. He said not in his lifetime. So I suggested that he let me go home after his lifetime. We agreed that he would most likely be long gone after fifty years—and so when my work was complete, a few months later, he wrote a letter to the leader of the country, to be opened in 2007. In the letter he told whomsoever it might concern that my cryonically frozen body would be found in a research facility in an underground bunker in a province of Chernobyl, and I was to be woken and sent home.’

  ‘Chernobyl!’ gasped Ben, through a mouthful of chips and ketchup. ‘You were in Chernobyl! But that’s where they had the nuclear disaster! How did you survive?’

  ‘So they did drop the bomb!’ Freddy sat up, his eyes wide. ‘Father—you were right!’

  Professor Emerson smiled and shook his head. ‘No, Frederick. They didn’t. It was an accident in a nuclear power plant—quite close to the research facility I was sleeping in. It happened nearly thirty years after they put me into stasis. They had long ago abandoned the cryonic experiment, because I hadn’t given them the final part of my research—the part that stops animals dying after they get re-animated. They couldn’t solve that and so, like my old friends in Britain, they gave up and spent their money elsewhere. They left me in place, because they were told to, and because they didn’t know what else to do. Then of course, after the Chernobyl disaster, nobody could get to me if they tried—not without great risk. And I was the least of their worries. I might be there still if someone hadn’t found the old letter from Khrushchev. They put on their radiation-proof outfits and came to awaken Sleeping Beauty. It was the most extraordinary thing. It took me days to believe that I wasn’t really still in 1957.’

  ‘I know exactly what you mean!’ said Polly, biting into her Whopper with feeling.

  ‘But it is fantastic out there,’ said Freddy, his eyes drifting to the expanse of glass at the front of Burger King and out onto London’s Oxford Street where countless shoppers, tourists, and locals moved in a colourful, never-ending procession.

  ‘They put spikes through their skin!’ whispered Polly. ‘Just because they want to!’

  Her father’s eyebrows went a notch higher.

  ‘And they don’t just pierce their ears—they pierce their tummy buttons! Truly! Girls of my age! Can you believe it?’

  ‘I really don’t want to.’

  ‘Everyone has a motorcar and there are more sweets than you’ve ever seen in your life,’ said Freddy.

  ‘And Coca-Cola comes in tins,’ went on Polly. ‘And you can get money out of brick walls.’

  ‘They’re called cash points,’ laughed Rachel.

  ‘And people talk all the time on tiny, tiny little phones clipped to their ears and look quite, quite mad!’ added Polly.

  ‘And …’ Freddy looked reverent, ‘I just saw a TV screen the size of a door!’

  His father shot him a look. ‘Oh really, Frederick. Now you’re going too far.’

  ‘We’ll take him into Comet next week,’ said Ben and Uncle Jerome nodded, with a smile.

  ‘Don’t you worry, sir,’ said Uncle Jerome. ‘You’re going to absolutely love it! Science is going off the scale! DNA, gene therapy, string theory, chaos—oh— a new planet, we have nine now, don’t you know … unless you take away Pluto, which turned out not to be a planet after all … and then …’

  The two scientists fell into a riveting discussion about DNA then and Freddy, Polly, Ben, and Rachel grinned at each other.

  ‘Would you go back?’ asked Rachel. ‘If you could?’

  Polly and Freddy looked at each other. ‘I don’t know,’ said Freddy. ‘It would be awfully hard now, knowing all of this is to come … and having to wait until I was sixty-six to get to it.’

  ‘And we’d miss you two,’ said Polly. ‘I don’t know what we’d have done without you.’

  ‘I do,’ said Freddy. ‘We’d’ve stayed asleep for another fifty years! No—it’s been super. You saved our lives—both of you.’ Ben grinned at Rachel. By now they had shared their stories and he was as proud of her as she was of him.

  ‘We can’t thank you enough,’ went on Freddy. ‘And … well, it’s going to be jolly hard to get along without you.’

  ‘It’s only for the term though,’ said Rachel. ‘You’ll be back at home with us in the school holidays. You’re both much better off back at boarding school. You won’t meet anyone like Lorraine Kingsley where you’re going. It’s one of the country’s best schools, too! And you’re not far from us at all, so we’ll be able to pop up and see you on weekends sometimes. We might be able to bring Bessie.’

  ‘Oh, gosh, yes—that’d be super!’ said Polly. ‘Imagine! I’ll be at the same school as Freddy! They have a girls’ wing and a boys’ wing. Would you ever believe such a thing? We’ll be able to meet up and have a midnight feast!’

  They finished up their junk food with enthusiasm. ‘Isn’t it the tops, Daddy?’ said Polly, as her father screwed up his napkin and put it inside the burger carton.

  ‘Polly—no! It’s not the tops!’ said Rachel, earnestly. ‘You really should only eat it every so often. Your hotpot is miles better—and much healthier. Do remember that. Burgers and stuff are just treats. And look … not too many sweets or Pot Noodles, either. OK?’

  ‘You’re turning into Mum,’ laughed Ben. ‘Hey— they’ll be home this weekend! What on earth are they going to say when the
y find out what’s been going on—and who’s coming to live with us?’

  Outside, Professor Emerson blinked as someone went by on a unicycle, and handed him a leaflet for a Tattoo Parlour. Uncle Jerome took it off him and they all stood around, slightly awkwardly, until Polly hugged Rachel and then Ben.

  ‘I’m not going to blub,’ she sniffed. ‘Because we’ll see you all again in a week or so, to meet your mother and father … and I can’t wait.’

  Rachel hugged her back and did start to blub.

  Freddy shook Ben by the hand. ‘I want you to know,’ he said, ‘that I have never seen anyone do that flail thing so impressively. To see you knock out that bad sort was just so … cool!’

  Ben grinned. Freddy thought he was cool. And well … maybe he was. He shook hands with his great-uncle and best friend and then gave him a blokey hug. This was 2009 after all.

  ‘I say, steady on!’ laughed Freddy. ‘No really,’ he added. ‘You’ve been an absolute brick!’

  ‘Um … best not say that again,’ advised Ben.

  The refugees from the 1950s turned and walked along Oxford Street, a government minder discreetly a few steps behind them. Ben was glad the minder was there. London in 2009 was a big, startling place. Their new branch of family should be protected.

  ‘Back to normal then,’ said Rachel.

  Ben grinned. ‘Do you think anything’s ever going to be normal again?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ smiled his sister. ‘I’m really going to miss Polly’s cooking, though. Do you think I could make a hot pot? In time for Mum and Dad coming back?’

  ‘I’m sure you could,’ said Ben, as they walked towards the tube station with Uncle Jerome. ‘I’ll help, if you like—but first you’ve got to try out Freddy and Polly’s skates! They’re super … way faster than in-lines …’

  ‘Ben—did you just say “super”?’

  ‘Me? Don’t be daft.’

  ‘You did. You jolly well did …’

  Ali Sparkes is a journalist and BBC broadcaster who chucked in the safe job to go dangerously freelance and try her hand at writing comedy scripts. Her first venture was as a comedy columnist on Woman’s Hour and later on Home Truths. Not long after, she discovered her real love was writing children’s fiction.

  Ali grew up adoring adventure stories about kids who mess about in the woods and still likes to mess about in the woods herself whenever possible. She lives with her husband and two sons in Southhampton, England. Check out www.alisparkes.com for the latest news on Ali’s forthcoming books.

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