I turned to Nkoyo and grimaced, I had no idea if I’d said the right thing.
Another question came from someone so far back in the auditorium I couldn’t see them but again it was a woman’s voice.
‘We are meant to believe you came from the past, other than your hair and clothing there is nothing other than the information we’ve just received to give us any proof that this is the case. Can you convince us?’
I leant forward and thought about it for a moment. I resisted the temptation to scratch my head, I didn’t want to attract any more attention to my hair. The only two men I had seen up to that point wore their hair much longer than mine.
‘My hair is, well, it’s just hair, I don’t know how to explain that, my clothes are, um, borrowed, my twenty-first-century clothes have been, um, mislaid. I don’t know how to prove my twenty-first-century credentials other than the huge amount of knowledge I have regarding that period of history. So far all the information I have given the, err, the Institute, has been verified as you heard from Professor Etheridge. My family, my education, official records and the like are all verifiable, along with a great deal of photographic evidence. I really am Gavin Meckler, I really was born in 1979. I really shouldn’t be here, but I am.’
That caused a fresh stir, not an angry one but I got the impression people really liked my final quote. I quite liked my final quote and decided to make it my tag line.
‘I really shouldn’t be here, but I am.’
A woman in the front row waved at me. I looked at her. Okay, I found her rather attractive which may be why she got my attention.
‘We understand,’ she said, ‘that you have many millions in your account, what do you intend to do with it?’
At that moment I had been aware of my newly found millions for about an hour, suddenly it appeared that everyone knew about it. How could that be, had Nkoyo announced it on some sort of television system, or web-based network, if that was the case I’d seen no sign of it and I’d been with her the entire time.
‘Oh yes, I, err. Well, I’ve only just discovered this and I don’t know,’ I said. ‘That is as big a surprise as my landing in your square. I hope to be able to buy some clothes as these are the only ones I have.’
I was very surprised then that it seemed most of the audience laughed when I said this. Clearly they thought the clothes I was wearing were fairly odd, or even humorous.
There was then a lot of shouting, I couldn’t make out a distinct question but I saw Nkoyo stand up and point to a woman at the far side of the auditorium.
‘Do you have children, Gavin?’
‘Children?’ I needed time on this one. I didn’t know if I had children but I knew it wouldn’t be wise to say that. The woman spoke again.
‘If you had children back in your own time, you may have descendants living here today.’
‘Oh, I see, no. I didn’t have children; I suppose I may have relatives in some form, my brother’s children’s children. I might be a very many greats great uncle to someone.’
I turned to Nkoyo and whispered, ‘Do you still have uncles?’
Although I was whispering, it was instantly clear that everyone heard me. Nkoyo smiled and nodded and the rest of the audience seemed to be enjoying this moment, I even got a round of applause.
The woman at the end of the row was still standing. ‘Would you like to have children now? Here in London?’
I know my eyebrows did a bit of a dance, as this elicited a lot of laughing and excitement.
‘I haven’t really thought about it. I suppose I’d have to meet someone I’d like to have children with,’ I said. Again the reaction to this statement was not quite what I would have expected. It was a little bit wild, a sort of high-pitched cheer with whistles and applause. I’m pretty sure I heard some fairly suggestive remarks coming from the crowd.
‘Boy children?’ someone shouted. ‘Can you have boy children?’
I noticed Nkoyo react to this statement, she stood up and pointed to the women in the front row.
‘What are you going to do and where are you going to live?’
I was smiling now; whatever trepidation I’d felt before the questions started had fled, I was starting to enjoy the attention.
‘I truly have no idea,’ I said, ‘I’d like to find out how things work here, how you all live, how you grow food, how you move about, how this incredible public address system works.’ I was silent for a moment, something was happening but I didn’t know what it was. I was suddenly missing Beth, missing my mum, I wanted to walk through Kingham again on a Sunday morning and actually buy a newspaper, something I’d not done in years. I was having feelings, really intense, strong feelings that seemed to emerge from nowhere. My throat felt tight, I couldn’t focus my eyes.
‘I’d like to do all that,’ I said, ‘but really, more than anything, I’d like to go home.’
That’s when it happened, that’s when the dam burst and that’s when I cursed my feelings for happening without warning. I was crying as I spoke the last few words, tears streaming down my face, sobs breaking up the words. Just as I was starting to have a good time, to bathe in my newfound fame, I started bloody crying like a baby.
7
Perfectly Benign
A young man with what appeared to me to be Photoshop-perfect skin stood behind a large desk in the enormous reception area of the Institute.
Photoshop-face man was much taller than me, he leant forward a little and held out a small glass container.
‘Here you are,’ he said in a surprisingly deep voice, he only looked about twelve, but a twelve-year-old with some kind of growth hormone disease that had made him unfeasibly tall.
I took the container but couldn’t help looking at this man’s face. I don’t think I’d ever seen skin like it, not on an actual human being. It didn’t look like he had make-up on but his face was eerily perfect.
‘Thank you,’ I said, as I took the small container and inspected it.
It was the morning following my emotional event in front of what I had later discovered to be a sizeable proportion of the world’s press. I’d spent the remainder of the day in a quiet room with occasional visits from Nkoyo, who had been very patient with me. I’m not trying to cover up, I was in a right old state but I don’t want to be boring about it. I didn’t come to any sudden realisation about life, time, history, love and death. I just felt very sorry for myself.
I had woken early and was asked by Nkoyo to go and see Doctor Markham. I didn’t really have anything else to do, so I went to the beautiful room where I’d first met her, sat on the big couch thing and spent some time talking about my family, my childhood, my education and my adult life.
I suppose it was a therapy session, although having never attended a therapy session before it could just have been a conversation. It was a bit one-way though, I didn’t learn about her childhood, her education, her night fears or any aspect of her life.
She was disarmingly good at getting me to talk. The one thing that kept coming to me as I explained my life before Gardenia was how little I seemed to connect to other people. Initially I shrugged these suggestions off, not that Doctor Markham suggested anything in a blatant way. It was more that she asked questions, I answered them, and as I answered them I realised I was saying something about myself I’d never thought about previously. It was as if she made it possible for me to tell myself about myself. It sounds stupid and I’m embarrassed to even attempt the describe it. This kind of pointless worrying about yourself had always been anathema to me, it seemed that way madness lay. I’d rather let it all be and get on with my work, except now I didn’t have any work to do and I was very rich.
I realised through this process that I’d lived a rather remote life. I hadn’t really thought about my mum and dad since I had left in 2011.
I realised I hadn’t been thinking about them much before I left, or indeed my elder brother. I was always so preoccupied by whatever task was at hand. I wondered as I spoke to the Doctor if the reason I had been thinking about Beth was because I left her just after we’d had quite a bad row. I needed something that intense to even be aware of the interaction. If I’d just visited my mum and dad and had Sunday lunch with them, it would have made so little impact on my inner life I would probably have forgotten all about it half an hour later.
I’m not going to claim that going through all this nonsense with Doctor Markham immediately made me feel better but it did make me aware that I had feelings and these feelings, while not always apparent to me on a conscious level did sometimes affect the way I behaved.
To be honest, it was all a bit annoying. Yes, I had some feelings, but they didn’t actually help me get stuff done, they didn’t allow me to function more effectively.
So I was full of all these thoughts when Nkoyo had taken me to the spacious reception area of the Institute.
‘You came in through the emergency arrivals section so you won’t have seen this area,’ she said as one of the slidey silent doors folded into the floor.
I was confronted with a cavernous hall, on the opposite side from the doorway I stood in was a massive glass wall the height of the fully grown trees outside. The floor was some kind of polished material, not made up of tiles, just one seamless cream surface. At the far end was a large desk or counter behind which stood the man with the Photoshopped face, opposite that were a few comfortable-looking sofa type things with half a dozen or so people sitting talking. They were all women.
‘I know you felt a little worried when you discovered this was a mental health institute, but it may not be exactly what you think. It’s more a place of learning, I imagine a mental health institute in your era meant a place where people were sent when their lives collapsed in chaos, when they were a danger to themselves or others.’
I nodded, that sounded like a fairly good description.
‘However, in the present day we are facing new challenges,’ said Nkoyo. ‘We have essentially perfected physical medicine, we still have injuries and eventually death, but all of the many diseases which once beset the human race have been eliminated. We no longer get physically ill but we still suffer from what has often been described as the human condition. Depression, anxiety, confusion, psychosis and schizophrenia are still problems we occasionally have to deal with. We are able to treat these ailments with far more success than in the past and we are learning how to develop good mental health from an early age. The Institute is at the forefront of this research, hence our interest in you, Gavin. You are a very interesting case, you have not grown up in our environment, you have none of the advantages we benefit from, so we can use you as a kind of base measure.’
‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘That’s very reassuring.’
So I was seen as a knuckle-dragging ‘base measure’, essentially a cave man, crude and stupid, emotionally undeveloped and immature.
‘Please don’t be offended,’ said Nkoyo. ‘We all find you utterly charming.’
She looked at me with her big, beautiful eyes, I couldn’t really muster up any offence, I just felt very young and innocent.
‘I find you utterly charming too,’ I said, and of course immediately regretted it. I didn’t want to start flirting; I wasn’t any good at flirting anyway and was sure to make a right mess of it.
‘Do you?’ she said, she sounded genuinely surprised. ‘Oh, I thought you would automatically distrust me because of my skin colour.’
That stumped me. I really hadn’t seen that one coming. I felt myself flush, had I inadvertently revealed some kind of deep-seated, subconscious racism that I wasn’t aware of? Of all the human hatreds and fears, racism had always been a mystery to me. I know I’d had vaguely homophobic reactions in my time, I had felt uncomfortable in the company of gay men. I didn’t mind lesbians, I don’t mean I found lesbians kinky or perversely exciting, I knew an engineer quite well who often referred to her wife, I didn’t mind that. But two blokes kissing? Awkward.
Beth had been very critical when I’d thoughtlessly used terms like poof or bender when describing a gay man we both knew, but racism? I didn’t think I’d ever had a racist thought in my life.
‘I don’t think your skin colour has got anything to do with it,’ I said. ‘Anyway, your skin is beautiful.’
I cursed myself, was I flirting again?
‘I may have misread my history but there seemed to be a lot of hatred and mistrust between people of different skin colour in your era. I know slavery was less common but didn’t white people hate and fear black people?’
‘We didn’t have slavery in 2011!’ I stated. ‘Racism had sort of, well, it was, it was really uncool to be racist, only stupid, ignorant people were racist.’
‘That’s reassuring to know,’ said Nkoyo, she smiled at me. She had let the subject drop, but once again my mouth took over.
‘I’ll admit you seem quite different to many of the black people I knew back then.’
‘Different? Interesting, would you care to elaborate?’ again the smile utterly undermined me. She was spine-tinglingly gorgeous.
‘Well, I suppose, well, you’re…’ I realised as I was speaking that I was digging a massive hole for myself. I’d never actually spoken to a black person before about my thoughts on such an issue. What were black people like in 2011, what was I like?
Every experience, every conversation I had in this London always felt like as if it revealed something about myself to me and I didn’t particularly like the feeling.
‘You seem very confident, very well educated, um, not that black people weren’t well educated back then, but you seem, well, like you own the place, which, I suppose…’ I looked around the reception hall. ‘I suppose you do.’
‘Fascinating,’ said Nkoyo, thankfully still smiling.
‘Were you born in London?’ I asked.
‘No, I came here from Kinshasa,’ she said.
‘Oh, right, the Congo,’ I said, feeling proud of my geographic knowledge.
‘No, Africa,’ said Nkoyo, but without rancour. ‘I think you’ll find that Africa is a little different from your era, it’s now a collection of City States, what you would have known as Africa is now more commonly referred to as either Lagos, Nairobi or Maputo.’
‘Wow,’ I said quietly.
‘I used to run a similar Institute in Nairobi, then in Moscow, and for the last three years I have been based here in London.’
‘Amazing, but you only look, well, you seem too young to have had time to do all that.’
‘I’m fifty-seven,’ said Nkoyo. I should have been used to these moments, I’d had enough experience of age confusion in Gardenia but this was way more extreme. I had truly put Nkoyo in her early twenties, maybe twenty-five tops. Not in her late fifties.
‘But we are not here to talk about my age and professional experience, Gavin, we’re here to sort you out.’
That didn’t sound good, I felt I’d just been through an hour of being sorted out by Doctor Markham and my brain was mush. I couldn’t contain a clear thought for more than a second. My mum, my dad, my annoying brother, Beth, Grace, time, death, my possible baby in a possible world that currently did not exist. I don’t want to make excuses for myself, but I’d say that twisted concoction would be a challenge for anyone’s mental stability.
This had resulted in being trapped in a strange institution and bursting into tears in front of a thousand women. I grimaced at the prospect of going utterly insane.
‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing to be concerned about,’ said Nkoyo and I suddenly realised how mad I must already appear. Standing in a big public space like the enormous reception lobby and my face completely out of control, I knew I had to try an
d pull what remained of myself back together and make an effort to deal with the present.
I stared at the little container the perfect-skinned man had given me, then Nkoyo gently took my arm and led me across the reception area to the far corner, presumably out of earshot.
I tried to listen to Nkoyo, after all it was a pleasant prospect even though she was old enough to be my mum, but I was being hugely over-stimulated by my environment. There was something about the reception area that was oddly familiar, I knew I’d never been in the space before but it had a kind of twenty-first-century feel about it. A huge glass wall all along one side looking out onto a small garden and beyond that, people. Crowds of people walking on some kind of street, there was colour and spectacle as if a special event was taking place, some kind of carnival, like they have in Venice.
The crowds all seemed to be walking in the same direction, I stood by the window staring at them, most of them tall and noticeably slender. I then noticed many children walking and jumping up and down excitedly and every race I’d ever seen was represented in their ranks.
Nkoyo touched my upper arm.
‘I realise you might not be familiar with this system,’ she said under her breath, ‘but all you need do is swallow that.’ She pointed to the glass container I was holding. Finally I managed to concentrate, I looked down at the small container in my hand, I say small because in terms of things you hold in your hand it was small, about the size of a triple A battery; in terms of things you swallow it was bloody enormous. I held it up in front of my face to make the point.
‘Swallow this!’ I said.
Nkoyo giggled. Although I really wasn’t trying to find her attractive, the giggle was utterly enchanting.
‘No, not the bottle, the kidonge,’ she said pointing to the container. I looked at it more closely, inside was something a bit bigger than a grain of sand, it looked like a tiny drop of water, transparent but with a slight blue tinge.
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