by Ross Welford
“That’s, um, Jolyon Dancey. Kid in my year.”
Grandpa Byron smiles a tight little smile, shakes his head slowly and gets astride his moped (which just sort of involves sitting down). He winks at me, and as I see him putt-putting up the road, something inside me changes.
It’s partly a hot flush of shame that rises from my still-stinging hand to my eyes and makes them prick with tears. The whole thing is hateful because I know I’m being mocked. And Grandpa Byron knew it too, as soon as he saw Jolyon Dancey edging away, and his face showed that he knew, and I hate myself for putting up with it, and I hate myself for not having the courage to stop it, and I hate myself for not carrying out my dad’s instructions and for my indecision and dithering.
And it’s partly because I now know how I’ll get from Blyth to Culvercot.
It’s tonight.
Tonight, I have to creep downstairs (and not get caught) and then travel ten miles down the coast to our old house in Culvercot.
There are a number of reasons why this will be practically impossible:
There are only three bedrooms in the house. Mum and Steve’s room is right across the landing from mine, and Carly’s is a little further along. So sneaking out of my room without being heard will be hard.
Mum’s a really light sleeper. If I get up in the night to use the toilet or to get a drink of water, she’ll always call out softly, “You OK, love?” (Carly, on the other hand, is usually a really heavy sleeper.)
I’ve then got to get out the front door. The lock makes a noisy clunk when it’s opened and there’s a big bolt at the bottom, which also make a noise. The back door might be easier, but that’s stiff and you have to bang it shut.
In other words, going out the front door or the back door is out. That leaves my bedroom window, and the only way I can get out that way is with a ladder and we don’t have one. So what’s it to be?
Once I’ve managed this impossible task, another awaits me: I’ve got to steal Grandpa Byron’s moped.
This at least will be easier than getting out of the house, though. I’ve already located the spare key to the moped. ‘Located’ sounds like it was hard, but in fact it just hangs with the other keys on the hook in his kitchen. I took it this afternoon, during the ad break in MindGames, and it’s now safely in my pocket.
There are some other things I need to check:
Clothing. Grandpa Byron says it gets cold on a moped, so I’ll be fully dressed and wearing my winter coat. The spare helmet is in the box on the back of the moped, which doesn’t lock. It’s got a dark visor over the front, so no one will tell it’s a kid riding the moped.
Route. That’s easy: I know the way.
Schedule. Mum and Steve are nearly always in bed by ten thirty. They watch the news on TV, then come upstairs, brush their teeth, lights out by eleven. Steve’s a real early-bird and his alarm goes off at six, so I’ve got plenty of time to do what I need to do. The problem is the ‘Mum being a light sleeper’ thing.
Carly goes to bed at the same time, but watches videos and does internet stuff with her headphones on. No worries there.
Equipment: torch, new batteries.
It’s only when I think about what I’m doing all this for that my heart starts to pound and I get a little sick feeling in my stomach. So instead I return to the problem at hand: how to get out of the house.
It’s ten thirty, and I can hear the end music from the TV news coming up through the floor.
I’ve decided that there is no option. It’ll have to be the front door, and I’ll have to do it really, really slowly and quietly.
I tried to behave as normally as I could this evening, but Mum knows something’s up. Once she asked, “Is there something the matter, love?” and I just said, “No – I’m just a bit tired,” which normally works when I don’t want to talk about something. It was a good reason to go to bed early and I threw in some yawns for good measure. She still looked at me funny, though.
Instead of getting undressed for bed when I came upstairs, I took off my school uniform and put on jeans and a thick sweater. I’m lying on the bed listening to Mum and Steve’s going-to-bed noises when I hear the handle on my bedroom door – Mum’s coming in, and I’m fully dressed.
I just have time to flick the duvet over myself as mum comes alongside my bed. I’m holding the duvet up to my chin as Mum sits down on the edge of my bed and starts to stroke my hair like she did when I was very little. Normally I like that: I can smell the hand cream she uses and when she leans over I can check if the little grey streak of hair in the middle of her head is advancing any further through the brown. But tonight I’m screaming silently, “Go away! Go away!” My eyes are shut tight and I’m trying so hard to look like I’m asleep.
It seems like she’s there for ages, but eventually she bends over, kisses my forehead and gets up. She spends a little while standing by my bed, looking at me, I guess, and then walks out.
I tell you – she knows something’s up.
So it’s eleven thirty now, and all’s quiet. I don’t think I’ve moved since Mum left the room and there’s a rush of cool air as I lift off the duvet and tiptoe to my bedroom door. I can hear Steve snoring – not comedy-loud, just normal, but Mum never snores so I’ll just have to hope she’s asleep. If Carly’s up, there’s usually a light from under her door, but tonight it’s dark.
It’s only three steps to the top of the stairs, but it takes me about thirty seconds to make them, pausing after each one to make sure no one has woken up.
The stairs are even slower. The third and fifth stairs from the top are creaky so I carefully step over them … and then I’m downstairs.
Slowly, slowly, I ease the bolt at the bottom of the front door. Slowly, slowly I turn the lock. I grab a scarf from the rack and hold it over the lock just as it’s about to go ‘clunk’ and the noise is muffled. I’m out.
Ten minutes later, and I’m outside Grandpa Byron’s house, down his side passage, and there it is: silver and mauve, splashed with mud, and I’m having a little trouble breathing, because I’m so nervous. I push the moped off its stand and start wheeling it up the path. My helmet’s on now, and I figure I’ll push the moped down the street before starting it in case it wakes up Grandpa Byron with its distinctive, raspy engine note. ‘Guttural,’ he calls it, and he is right, if guttural means sounding like an old lady clearing her throat.
At the corner of Percy Road, I put the key in, hold the brake, and turn it like Grandpa Byron showed me that time. The engine comes to life and I look around nervously, but the street’s empty. There are a few lights on in the windows and I can smell the sour exhaust fumes. Because everything else is so quiet, the engine sounds deafening, so I figure the best thing to do is to get going. I sit astride the moped, release the brake handle and twist the throttle with my right wrist, and we’re off, through misty air tinged yellow by streetlights.
Inside the motorbike helmet the noise of the engine is muffled and the wind whooshes past. I can hear myself breathing rapidly as the needle on the speedometer creeps past 20mph, then 25, before I have to slow down for a roundabout. There’s a car coming from the right. “Give way to traffic from the right,” I say out loud to myself and I stop and watch the car go past. The driver doesn’t even look at me.
Off we go again, over the roundabout, down towards the coastal road. I find the indicator under my thumb and signal right. Even at midnight, the coastal road is busy. I’m just looking straight ahead and every time a car overtakes me I tense up, so by the time the buildings thin out and I’m past the Elf garage I’m aching all over and I can feel drops of sweat running down my back despite the cool wind.
A couple of miles later and the orange road lights finish, and there’s no more traffic, it’s just me and the moped. Its headlight gives off a pool of white light ahead of me and anything else I can see is just what the moon lights up. It’s funny: I’ve been in the car loads of times at night but only as a passenger, when you can look out and
all around, but you can’t really do that when you’re driving – you have to look ahead pretty much all the time, especially when the twin headlights of another car are coming towards you, then zooming past, dazzling you a bit until your eyes adjust again.
On my left is the sea and it glints a little silver from the moon, and then the road goes between some hills so the sea can’t be seen any more, but then the hills end, or the road bends round, and there’s the sea again, and I like that, it feels comforting somehow, black and silver. At one point, the road goes quite near the beach, but much higher, and I can see the white line of the foam where the sea hits the sand. I can’t hear it, but I can smell it – the salty, seaweedy smell of the beach.
I want to know what time it is, but I daren’t take my hand off the handlebar to look at my watch. It feels like ages, and my bum is aching now as well, and the speedometer needle has been just above thirty for miles, when I see the big white dome of Whitley Bay’s ‘Spanish City’, which Dad said used to be a dance hall, and then an amusement arcade, and now I don’t know what it is. Culvercot is after Whitley Bay, but they both kind of merge into each other.
Ten minutes later, I’m driving into Culvercot, and the feeling I get is very strange indeed. I think it’s happiness, and relief, and scaredness, and also a bit of sadness, seeing all the places I used to know, like the cafe where I had my sixth birthday, and I even drive past Oscar Rudd’s house, who was my best friend in primary school till he moved to Sweden in Year 4. He promised he’d email loads, but he never really did.
And then I’m on my old street, Chesterton Road, and ahead of me is my old house, number 40. I stop the moped a little down the street and turn the engine off, and let the roaring in my ears settle down and the feeling return to my arms and wrists. Now all I’ve got to do is break into the house, and I’ve already told you about that bit.
Less than five minutes later, I’m staring at my dad’s time machine – a zinc garden tub and a laptop – in the cellar fallout shelter and thinking, Surely that’s not it?
Like I said, I was expecting something a bit more … well, technical. A bit more? A lot more.
And now I’m standing here, holding the second letter, that as you know was taped under the desk in the nuclear fallout shelter, and the only light is coming from my torch beam, and for probably a whole minute I’m too terrified to move.
I had kept myself calm enough till now to do all the stuff required to get here. I think I’d even prepared myself for testing a time machine, but now that there isn’t one – or at any rate, anything that looks like one – the massive risk of what I’ve just done begins to overwhelm me. I’m suddenly very aware of the silence and the dark, and I can hear myself breathing, short raspy gulps of air, and at one point I even imagine I can hear my heart beating in my chest.
There’s only one thought in my mind: I want to go home.
Once I’ve got my legs moving and calmed my breathing down a bit, I come out of the cellar quickly, and close the heavy steel door behind me, spinning the wheels of the combination lock.
I’m still terrified of being caught, but my movements are smooth and quiet. I replace the planks over the stone stairway, and slip out of the garage, remembering to put the brick back in front of the double doors, then walk briskly among the shadows back to the moped. I get on it quickly, buzzing to the edge of town and back along the coast road, my head spinning with what I’ve just done.
The moon has moved across the sky and is higher and brighter than before. I am feeling really hot inside the helmet. On the outskirts of Blyth, level with the long stretch of beach, which is silvery grey in the moonlight, I stop the moped and take off the helmet for a moment, feeling a cool breeze through my sweaty hair.
Then I see the headlights of a car coming along the road. I turn my head to look, remembering too late that I shouldn’t be showing my young face and there’s another light above the headlights, on the car’s roof. The police car passes me as I put the helmet back on and start the bike again.
To be safe, I turn left at the roundabout, straight up a residential street that runs off the coast road and it’s just as well I do, because in my rear-view mirror I see the red brake lights of the police car come on and I see it turning around to come back. To follow me.
Desperately, I open the throttle of the moped as far as it can go, and the little engine whines in protest. I know I can’t go faster than a police patrol car, and as I look behind me, the car turns into the road I’m on and I hear the growl of its engine as the driver puts his foot on the accelerator.
In seconds the car is nearer, and his blue flashing lights are on – no siren yet, though. The road ends in houses arranged around the wide turning circle of a cul-de-sac. I’m trapped, and I’m going to have to brake soon anyway if I’m not to crash into one of the low front garden walls. Then I see it – a narrow footpath between the two end houses.
I mount the kerb with a rattling thud, which nearly knocks me off, hurtle towards the alleyway as the police car screeches to a halt behind me, and I hear the doors open and the beat of feet starting to run.
There is a metal bollard in the middle of the entrance to the alleyway and it’s going to be a tight squeeze, but I just manage it, scraping the side of the moped’s back end against the wall as I get past, and I know I’ve made it. I dare to look back and the two officers are running back to their car to try to get me on the next road.
I emerge from the footpath and I’m not even that sure where I’m going, so I turn right on the road in what I hope is the direction of Grandpa Byron’s street, although by now I’m panicking and my breath is coming in short bursts.
I turn left, just as I hear the police siren, and the car turns on to the main road in pursuit. They must have seen me. To my relief, I recognise the street: one more right turn and there is Baz’s corner shop and still the siren is getting closer. I have the throttle open fully as I get near to Grandpa Byron’s house and the engine is buzzing loudly in the night quiet and I completely forget about waking him up so scared am I that the police car will catch up.
I turn into Grandpa Byron’s driveway and kill the engine and lights immediately and push the bike up the side of the house.
Then the siren goes quiet.
This is almost the worst bit. I’m sitting on the ground, trembling and panting. The moped and me are pretty much hidden from the road when the police car creeps past at walking pace. I can see the officers’ heads turning from side to side and I shrink back further, hoping the wall will somehow swallow me up.
But then it passes and I breathe out. All the same, it’s a good twenty minutes before I can stand up and hurry back through the shadows to my house, and up the stairs and flop into bed.
And now I feel like I want to cry, but I stop myself, and instead take out of my pocket the letter that was taped under the desk.
Dear Al,
By now you have had a chance to digest my last letter and there are two alternative outcomes:
You think your dad’s crazy and you have told Mum, or the police, or a teacher or a friend. That’s a shame, and it means I misjudged you. But that’s my fault, and I don’t blame you.
You have done as I asked. I hope it’s this one.
Did you do it all within a week as I asked? My guess is that you did and that shows real courage. That’s what the time limit was about, a kind of test, because it would be easy to wait and wait and never do anything. I promise you Al – there will be no more tests. What’s coming next is far too serious for that.
You’re probably terrified. That’s OK. I think I would be too. Be scared: it’ll keep you alert and if you’re alert you won’t make a mistake, and if you make no mistakes then all will be fine.
People have always dreamt, Al, of travelling in time – either into the future or the past. Sometimes both. (Do you remember the play we went to see when you were younger – A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens? Scrooge is shown Christmases in the past and the future. I thi
nk it scared you a bit!)
Recently, we have imagined grand machines that would do the job for us – often, vast spaceships that would zoom through the centuries faster than the speed of light.
And here, Al, lies the problem.
For nothing can travel faster than light. No matter how much energy you have, from whatever source – existing, or yet-to-be-discovered – physically moving faster than a beam of light cannot happen. If it could, then it would mean that all the laws of physics that we know, and have tested for centuries, are wrong.
And we know they are not.
It would mean that Einstein’s theories are wrong and so far, good ol’ Albert has had the last laugh on pretty much everyone who has tried to outsmart him. Sure, there are gaps in our knowledge, but every time we make a new discovery and fill in one of the gaps, it shows us that Einstein was right.
The Higgs Boson? I’ll bet that’s discovered soon. Plenty of people are looking for it, because Einsteinian theory requires it.
The theory of Cosmic Inflation? That’ll be proved soon too, I reckon. It’s another thing that Einstein predicted.
(Now, I don’t really know what a Higgs Boson is, but I know it has been found. And Cosmic Inflation was in the news too so that’s probably what that is. Yay, Einstein!)
“The speed of light,” Einstein said, “is the Universal Speed Limit.”
Einstein suspected that the way we think of time as moving in a line – from one minute to the next, one year following another – may not be the only way to look at it. That in fact everything might be happening simultaneously and that our sense of time is only relative – that is, in our heads. Remember his line about putting your hand on a hot stove?
What we perceive as the progression of events – one thing following another – could merely be the growth of an infinite number of dimensions all happening at the same time, and the key to moving between them might be found, not in a source of super-energy that could propel us faster than the speed of light, but in a mathematical formula.
