‘A what?’ I asked.
‘A kidonge,’ said Nkoyo, ‘it’s your bit grip.’
‘I wish I understood even some of what you’re saying.’
‘Okay, so you swallow that tiny thing. That’s a kidonge.’
‘A kidonge,’ I said, trying to pronounce it correctly, it sounded like ‘kidon-gay’.
‘It will gently work its way into your system, most likely embedding into your bone marrow.’
‘That doesn’t sound good,’ I said as another wave of alarm spread through me.
‘It’s completely benign, it will remain within you your entire life.’
I imagine Nkoyo stopped talking at that moment because of the expression on my out-of-control face, an expression close to abject horror. After a beat she continued. ‘It’s just a bit grip, it allows you to grip your bits.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Your bits, your money,’ she said. ‘We all have them, usually we feed a kidonge to a small baby as soon as they take milk from a bottle but obviously you didn’t…’
‘So if I swallow this, I can buy things with my newly found millions, and if I don’t, then I…’
‘Well, you can’t pay for anything and you’ll wander around in those rags and slowly starve to death.’
I could not tell if she was joking or just stating a glaringly obvious fact.
I tried to open the tiny bottle by twisting the slight bulge at one end of it; however, I was already aware that it probably didn’t open with a simple screw pattern moulded into the lip and lid, as would be the case in 2011. There was no obvious lid, it was just a small piece of transparent tube with closed ends.
‘How do you open it?’ I asked.
‘You don’t need to open anything, just put the end on your tongue,’ said Nkoyo.
I opened my mouth, placed the flat end on my tongue and looked at her. She giggled again.
‘Not that end, look, the end that’s blue.’
I held the container up and inspected it again, as I slowly turned it I could see that one end was indeed slightly tinted blue. If you didn’t know that, if you hadn’t grown up knowing that all your life, I don’t believe you’d ever notice the difference between the two ends. I say this because I want to point out I am fairly adaptable when it comes to new devices and materials, it’s a realm I am familiar with but as I was constantly discovering in the new worlds I was exploring there was always something completely baffling waiting in the wings.
I put the blue end on my tongue and immediately felt a small sort of cold wormy thing in my mouth, it felt a bit weird as it wiggled about.
I swallowed and it was gone.
‘Is that it?’ I asked.
‘That is it. I promise you won’t die. I’ve had one my entire life, as does everyone else on earth, you’ll soon forget you’ve even got it.’
‘So this little thing I’ve just swallowed, it’s like an electronic tagging system that communicates with remote devices and enables transactions between parties?’
Nkoyo looked a bit flummoxed. ‘It’s your grip. It keeps a grip on your bits, did they not have them in the place you came from?’
‘Gardenia? No, they didn’t use money, or bits or anything.’
‘And did you not have something like them in, well, back in 2011?’
‘No, we had cards and cash.’
Nkoyo repeated what I’d just said as if the words were magical. ‘Cards and cash,’ she shrugged. ‘I don’t know what that means.’
‘Well, cash was money, like pieces of paper with numbers on them that represented their value.’
‘I have seen pictures of sheets of money, I didn’t know the word cash,’ said Nkoyo.
‘We also had online transfers, electronic payments, contact payments using smartphones.’
‘Well, we don’t have any of that,’ said Nkoyo. ‘I think it’s a bit simpler now. You’ll soon get used to it.’
Then I met Ralph.
What I was about to learn about Ralph would obviously stay with me, but the thing that struck me about him first was that he was so ridiculously tall. I’d hazard a guess he was over two meters tall, that’s seven feet in old money.
‘Ralph is going to take you shopping,’ said Nkoyo as this lanky monster approached us across the perfect floor of the Institute’s reception area.
This beanstalk of a man was wearing a bright yellow, skin-tight sort of body stocking and a large floppy mauve hat. At first I thought he was barefoot, but I could see as he approached that he had walking shoe soles attached to the bottom of his feet.
‘Ralph, meet Gavin,’ said Nkoyo.
The man held out a gangly yellow-clad arm that ended in long, spindly fingers. I shook his hand, a peculiar experience as his fingers where so long they reached right around to my wrist. Now I’m not trying to give the impression he was some kind of alien or genetic mutant, he was very human, just longer boned than anyone I had encountered previously. The other odd experience I had as I shook his hand was a slight feeling of emptiness, not pain or anything particularly unpleasant, just a kind of deflating slump in my belly.
‘Nice to meet you, Ralph,’ I said after a moment of confusion.
The tall man turned to Nkoyo. ‘Oh Mungu, I’m so nervous.’ Then he turned back to me, held my arms with his long spindly fingers and said ‘I cannot easily believe what I know to be true, but it is wonderful to meet you Great, Great, Great, Great, Great Uncle Gavin.’
The silence that followed was very long. I suppose there was some kind of recognition going on, something familiar in his facial features, something about his hairline that looked, well, looked a bit like mine when I looked in a mirror. I knew if no one had given me a clue I would never have known I was in some way related to this man, but his description and obvious excitement was dizzying in its emotional impact.
‘I don’t wish to overwhelm you, Gavin,’ said Nkoyo gently, ‘but Ralph is the great, great, great, great, great grandson of your brother.’
Eventually I managed to speak. ‘How do you do, Ralph,’ I said. ‘I think this is probably a very unusual experience for both of us.’
Ralph nodded slowly which in turn made it clear that his neck was freakishly long.
‘Nkoyo contacted me yesterday, we did some checking through the family archives and found a picture of you and Giles, your brother.’ At this point Ralph held up his hand and started to count off on his enormously long fingers. ‘Giles was my great, great, great, great, great grandfather. You knew him.’
‘Yes, I knew him,’ I said. I didn’t want to elaborate too much that Giles and I did not have much in common. In fact the biggest mystery to me was how two such utterly disparate individuals could possibly come from the same gene pool. Giles embodied the very essence of the sporting male. He played rugby, he talked about rugby, he watched rugby on television, he sang rugby songs, he was a little shorter but a great deal stronger than me. He drank copious amounts of beer, drove much too fast and blamed everyone else for anything that ever went wrong in his life.
When I had left Kingham back in 2011 Giles was single, working for Barclays Bank in Harlesden and nursing a knee injury he’d acquired playing rugby. As you may be able to discern, I didn’t spend a lot of time with him.
‘Oh yes, I knew Giles very well,’ I said. ‘Of course he didn’t have children when I left in 2011.’
Ralph nodded solemnly. ‘Correct, my three times great grandmother was born in 2014, she was your niece, my two times great grandfather was born in 2044, my great grandfather was born in 2069, my grandmother was born in 2097, my mother was born in 2135 and I was born in 2170.’
‘Wow, you know your dates,’ I said feeling duly impressed. Ralph glanced at Nkoyo for some explanation.
‘I will explain later,’ Nkoyo tol
d me, ‘but truly, it’s not difficult for us to access such basic data.’
‘I cannot wait to find out more,’ said the spindly Ralph. ‘In many ways, genealogy has replaced the religious illness of your era. We all want to know who we are by studying where we came from. I know about your family in great detail going back hundreds of years before you were born. Maybe one day we can find time to go over it together, but we have an altogether different task ahead of us today.’
‘What task is that?’ I asked, by now completely bamboozled by what he’d just explained to me.
‘We are going to do some serious shopping my 5-G Uncle.’
‘Ah yes, right,’ I replied flatly.
Ralph stood back from me and looked up and down in a slightly over dramatic way while Nkoyo watched him, she was clearly enjoying this.
Ralph held his chin with his freakish hands and said, ‘Can I just ask, quickly, and I don’t mean to cause offence, but where did you get your drapery?’
I looked down at my simple Gardenian tunic and flat sensible footwear then back up at Nkoyo for guidance.
‘It’s okay, Ralph knows the entire situation,’ she said.
‘I know you’re from two hundred years ago my friend,’ said Ralph, ‘but that get-up is something I’ve never seen in history logs and believe me, I’ve looked. If you want to know the history of drapery, I’m your source.’
‘Oh, these aren’t really my clothes.’ I explained. ‘I left my real clothes in Gardenia, I was given these.’
‘Clothes,’ said Ralph carefully. He was mimicking my delivery but I couldn’t tell if he was taking the piss or just intrigued by the word.
‘If I was given “clothes” like that, well, it would challenge my normally peaceable demeanour.’
Ralph proceeded to laugh at his own joke. I tried to laugh along but I don’t think I was very convincing. I glanced at Nkoyo and she gave me a little nod that reminded me of nothing more than my mother encouraging me to ‘join in’ at a party or sporting event, something I’d never been terribly good at.
I took a deep breath.
‘So, we’re going shopping,’ I said, ‘and what are we buying?’
Again Ralph burst out laughing. ‘Excellent!’ he said. ‘What are we buying? That is so funny.’
‘We thought you might like to buy some drapery,’ said Nkoyo kindly. ‘If you wear…’ she looked down at my outfit. ‘Well, let’s just say you may not want the attention such drapery might attract.’
‘I’m not that crazy about clothes shopping,’ I said. ‘I buy everything online.’
Both Nkoyo and Ralph looked at me with completely blank expressions. Surely they didn’t still have ugly great department stores and clothes factories in 2211? Surely I wouldn’t have to try something on?
‘I hope I understand you,’ said Ralph, ‘but clearly you’ve never been shopping in London, you’ll have an excellent time.’
‘Okay, let’s get this over with,’ I said feeling ever more despondent. I wanted to talk to Nkoyo about Africa, and mineral excavation and materials developments and I was going shopping for clothes, the one thing I truly hate doing.
8
Not Born to Shop
The heat of the streets of london hit me as I followed Ralph out of the Institute and down a smooth path away from the building. My eyes were feeling overloaded with what I was seeing, the experience was at the same time mundane and utterly overwhelming.
London was so unlike Gardenia it’s hard to know where to start. All the time I was in Gardenia I felt I had time to consider what had happened and digest what I was learning. The pace was slow, the atmosphere was peaceful and time seemed to go on forever.
The streets, or maybe a more accurate description would be paths of London were anything but peaceful; they were vibrant with colour and spectacle. I am describing them as paths as there was no mechanical traffic of any sort in evidence, not even bicycles, everyone appeared to be walking.
Everywhere I looked I saw people in spectacular outfits and as we made our way along the wide path I realised that most of the truly spectacular outfits were adorning men.
If the auditorium where I’d burst into tears was full of women, the streets appeared to be the opposite. I was staring at the bizarre sights that confronted me as we made our way along the path. I was also very noticeably the focus of just as much staring back. People did double takes when they saw me, children pulled their father’s hands and pointed as we passed them.
Before long I realised we had quite a crowd behind us, they all laughed and pointed and seemed quite happy and I noticed the gangly Ralph was lapping it up.
‘This is my two-hundred-year-old 5-G Uncle Gavin and we are going shopping for drapes,’ he announced. This raised a cheer from the steadily growing collection of onlookers.
After a few more paces I noticed we had been joined by two young women in something resembling a uniform. Not exactly a uniform but a dark costume that made them stand out from the crowds walking with us.
‘Hello,’ I said to one of them, she was an impressive young woman, well over two meters tall with broad shoulders and a walk that gave the impression of her being capable of looking after herself.
‘Don’t worry, Mister Meckler, we’re just here for support,’ she said without actually looking at me.
I didn’t know at the time if they were police or security officers, they had that sort of standoffish authority and clearly the milling group around us kept their distance from these two Amazonian operatives.
I didn’t feel intimidated by them, if anything they made me feel slightly safer as by the time we’d walked half a mile there was a substantial mob of excited people around us.
As I stared at people and buildings we passed, one thing became immediately apparent. The squares I had seen from the plane before I crash-landed were big. Not some recreation of a cutesy Georgian Square you might find in Bath, Kensington or Cheltenham. These were large open spaces surrounded by very large buildings, more like Central Park in Manhattan.
The Institute I’d been cooped-up in was one of many huge buildings along one side of the square. Above a line of trees in the square I could just make out buildings on the opposite side.
‘So, tell me twenty-first-century Uncle, what you think of London?’ said Ralph as we strode along – I was almost having to jog to keep up with him.
‘It’s impressive,’ I said. ‘Certainly not the city I remember.’
‘It is spooky weird that you come from the way back when,’ he said. ‘Did all the horses really smell?’
‘The horses?’
‘You’ll have to forgive me, Uncle, I love history but I’ve never been good at dates. Wasn’t old London full of horses pulling things and women not being allowed to vote?’
‘That was a bit before my time,’ I said; I couldn’t help smiling. ‘Like, my great grandparents’ time. I’m from 2011, cars, taxis, buses, trucks, trains, planes, smartphones, space travel, women prime ministers, we had all that.’
I realised as I was saying this that I was in some ways defending my era, I wanted him to know I didn’t come from the Victorian age and that my era was fairly technologically and socially advanced.
‘Oh right, the Beatles,’ said Ralph.
‘No, even the Beatles were before my time. I was born in 1979, the Beatles split up ten years before I was born.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Ralph with a wave of his spindly arms. ‘I’ve got no idea of dates, now you’re going to think I’m really stupid.’
‘Not at all,’ I reassured him. I was lying; I had already decided that who-knows-how-many-G nephew Ralph was a bit of an airhead. I felt bad about that notion and added, ‘If I’d met someone from two hundred years before I was born, I wouldn’t have a clue what their lives were really lik
e.’
We turned a corner and once again I was chilled to my roots. There in front of me on a raised plinth was a statue I recognised. It was the Shaftesbury memorial; better known as Eros, the statue that used to be in Piccadilly Circus. I stopped and looked around for telltale geographic references, maybe this actually was Piccadilly Circus? The surrounding buildings were unfamiliar, no graceful curve of Regent Street, no ugly video wall promoting soft drinks, economy diesel cars and cameras. The path we were walking on was lined with neat trees that reminded me of Parisian parks but the small, instantly recognisable statue really jumped out at me.
‘You okay Uncle?’ asked Ralph, who had continued walking while I stood glued to the spot. The two possible policewomen had stopped with me and turned to gently control the now enormous gathering behind us. They just watched me in silence and obvious fascination. They all seemed to know who I was.
‘I’m fine,’ I said to Ralph who walked back to join me. ‘It’s just that I recognise that statue, it used to be in the middle of London.’
‘Well it still is,’ said Ralph, ‘pretty much, this is the middle of London.’
‘But I thought London had flooded, and anyway aren’t we near Didcot?’
‘Didcot Mews?’ asked Ralph, clearly puzzled. ‘That’s over the other side of Berners Lee Place, where the Institute is. Is that what you mean?’
I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
We carried on walking across the wide-open space of what I took to be the intersection of four squares. Clearly this area was very popular with the many thousands of Londoners all around me; either that or they had all gathered to see me, I wasn’t sure which. As we neared the statue Ralph stopped and looked up at it.
‘Is that statue really old then? I’ve never bothered to look at it. It’s always been there.’
‘It was really old when I was born, so it’s really, really old now.’
‘Amazing, I love old stuff,’ said Ralph and without further thought carried on walking.
‘There’s a little shop over here you are absolutely going to love,’ he said when I caught up with him. ‘My friend will be thrilled to drape you up.’
News from the Squares Page 8
