by Ross Welford
My dad hugged me, sure. But in the last couple of days he hugged me longer and harder. Like, really hard, so that it hurt a bit. And he took to kissing me, which I know loads of dads do, but mine didn’t really, not since I was very little. I did mention that, yeah.
Anyway, a couple of nights before he died, he came into my room when I had gone to bed and I asked him to tell me a story, and he went very quiet.
“From when you were little.”
He shook his head. “Not tonight. Tonight it’s a made-up story.” I didn’t really mind, even though Dad’s made-up stories were a bit rubbish usually. It was just nice having him there. And this story was one that sounded like he’d planned it. I mean, Dad’s stories were normally full of hesitations and stuff, because he was making them up as he went along, but this one wasn’t.
“There was once a young man who lived in a village next to the mighty Ganges, and one day he was visited by the goddess Kali, which in Sanskrit means ‘She Who Is Death’, and she is a very, very scary goddess with a blue face and a necklace made of the heads she has cut off …”
“Gross,” I say.
“Yep. Completely gross. And she said to the young man who was called … um …”
“Trevor?” It was part of the fun with Dad’s Indian stories to give the characters names that were as un-Indian as we could think of.
“Yes. Trevor. Trevor O’Sullivan. And she said to Trevor O’Sullivan, ‘I shall give you the gift of clairvoyance, O Trevor’…”
“What’s clairvoyance?”
“Seeing the future. And he said, ‘O Great Kali. Ta very much!’ And he went down to the Ganges and peered into the water where he was told he would see his future, but nothing did he see. And verily he summoned Kali thus: ‘Oi Kali, come ’ere!’ And Kali appeared before him and said, ‘What do you want, Trevor O’Sullivan?’ and he said, ‘I can see no future,’ and Kali said, ‘Funny, that,’ and sliced off his head and strung it on her necklace.”
“Oh, that’s nasty!”
“Indeed it is. And the moral, Al, is if ever you are offered a look at your own future, never take it. The future will look after itself, without any help from you.”
And he hugged me hard and kissed me.
When I come round, I’m not even sure that I have come round. My head is hurting really badly, especially at the back, like I’ve fallen backwards and banged it. My eyes are stinging and I daren’t try to open them, and there’s something cold on my cheek, which I take to be the floor. There’s also something around my neck, tight.
Yet – so far so good – is the first thing I think. Then: I’m going to open my eyes soon, and I’ll be back in my room shortly before this whole thing started.
I open my eyes dead slowly. Am I in my room? The cord of Alan Shearer’s box has twisted round my throat, but I can loosen it, and Alan Shearer’s unharmed, which I’m relieved about. But still …
I am in my room. I know I am because I am staring upwards out of the window and I recognise the tree in next door’s garden and the line of the roofs opposite. This is the room I left, with Mum pounding on the door, and Grandpa Byron’s face in the window as I disappeared. I sit up and rub my eyes and do that thing when you ask yourself if you’re in a dream just to make sure you’re not in a dream.
I am not in a dream. Also, this is not my room after all. The door’s in the same place, the view out of the window is the same, but the bed is along the other wall, there’s a different duvet cover on it, the rug is different, there’s a poster for a band I’ve never heard of on the wall …
So whose room is this?
From downstairs comes the sound of a television, and from the next room the sound of a shower. Removing my feet from the zinc buckets and standing up, I go to the window.
“Oh my God,” I mumble to myself. “This is my room.” Outside is the little back garden I look at every morning, the house next door, everything is as I had looked at it last from this position.
I look around the room again, just to check, and at first I think Carly must have moved into my room while I was away in 1984.
But I set the return time to exactly when I left. By rights, Mum should be thumping on the bedroom door, Steve shouting at me, Grandpa Byron’s mouth forming an astonished ‘O’.
Then the bedroom door opens, and in walks Carly in a dressing gown, towelling her hair dry and she doesn’t see me at first.
“Hi, Carly!” I say. That’s when she does see me. Her eyes widen and she emits a shriek; a long scream of absolute terror.
“Hey, it’s OK, Carly, what’s up with you?” I ask.
“Who … who are you? Get out! Get out! Take what you want. Take it, just don’t … just go.” She’s trembling and her voice is shaking. I stay by the window.
“Where’s Steve? Where’s Mum?”
“My boyfriend’s downstairs and my dad’ll be back any minute, really he’s just gone to the corner shop. He’ll kill you. Jol! Jolyon!” She’s shouting really manically.
“Carly! Stop it, why are you being …”
At that moment, things get really hairy because I hear pounding footsteps on the stairs and into the room bursts Jolyon Dancey who looks at me in puzzled anger. “Who are you?” he snarls. “What are you doing in Carly’s room?”
“It’s me – Al,” I say. “You know – Carly’s stepbrother?” Then – desperately – “The hamster fancier?” His face screws up in utter incomprehension, and a kind of wariness.
“Get him, Jol – do your karate on him!” Jolyon immediately adopts a weird martial-arts stance, feet apart, legs bent, hands aloft. It’s almost comical and I expect him to go, “Hi-yaaa!” but he doesn’t. He just stands there with a tough expression on his face, and that’s how we stay for the next few seconds until Carly says, “Well go on then, Jol – get him!”
“Shut up, Carly!” I yell at her, and it seems to do the trick. She stops, and just stands there, her bottom lip wobbling, and tears welling in her eyes. “What have you done to my room?” I ask her.
There’s a pause while Carly looks at me, pleadingly. “Just go, please!”
The fear in her voice is genuine, and I’m scared that Carly has gone a bit off her rocker, and when people go a bit crazy there’s no knowing what they might do – they’re unpredictable. She was always heading that way, I suppose: teenage angst and all that. I try to slip past her and get to the door, but Jolyon blocks my way, still waving his hands around, trying to look menacing. “I’m a green belt. You don’t want to tangle wi’ me.”
He is right, I don’t, but the way he’s standing, with his legs wide apart gives me a chance. I turn my head to look out the window, then I point and say, “Oh my God!”
It works. They both turn to look and in that instance I draw back my foot and deliver a swift, hard kick right between Jolyon’s legs. The sound he makes is horrible: a high-pitched squeak and a breathy gasp at once. I feel sorry for him as he keels over sideways, clutching his groin and retching. I have plenty of time to pick up Alan Shearer’s box, take the black box from the bucket and put them both in my backpack and leave through the bedroom door. Carly looks utterly terrified and I feel bad for that.
The stair carpet is different. It’s the same one as when me and Mum moved in, then it got changed. I crane my head to see if Mum’s watching telly, but she isn’t and I guess she’d have heard the commotion.
It’s the same house, all right. But so many things are slightly different, not just the stair carpet. Things are arranged differently. The picture of Mum in a frame on the hall table isn’t there, the coats on the rack are different.
Halfway down the street I see Steve coming towards me, carrying a bag of groceries. He’s grown a goatee beard in, like, a day, which doesn’t suit him.
“Steve! Steve!”
Steve stops. He looks at me with a half-smile. “Hello.”
I stand in front of him, and take on the same half-smile, and say, sort of conspiratorially, “Um, Steve, I think Carly’s
going a bit y’know … I dunno … cuckoo?”
Steve squints at me quizzically. “What?”
“Carly. She’s just screamed at me to get out of the house.”
Steve shakes his head. “Sorry, son, but, erm … who are you?”
I give a little sigh.
“Steve, man – c’mon. I’m really … I’ve had a mad time lately, and I don’t want to do this.” Steve has started to walk on now, and I keep up with him. “It’s just Carly was being all weird with me, and well … I just …”
“Are you a friend of Carly’s? Have you been round our house before?”
“Ste-eve!” I’m getting bored with this now.
“Look, I’m sorry, son, I don’t have a good memory for Carly’s friends. What’s your name again?”
“Stop it!” I’m truly impatient now, and I snap the words out.
“Hey – watch your step, son.” We’re outside our house now, and walking up the front path. “You wait, and I’ll tell Carly you’re here.”
“Steve! Stop it!” I’m shouting now, and really upset. “Where’s Mum?”
Steve turns to face me now, with his back to the front door.
“I think, son, you need to go home.”
“What do you mean? This is my home!”
Steve stares at me for a moment.
“Go on, son. Off you go. You’ve had your fun. Go now.”
“What? No! Where’s mum? Is she working late? Is she out with Annika?”
“This is your last warning. Now. Piss. Off.” He’s not shouting, but his voice is menacing and when he turns to let himself in the door, I’m left standing in the middle of the path, blinking hard and gulping and holding a box with a hamster in it.
I’ve got the tiniest bit of power left in my phone, so I call Mum.
“The number you have dialled has not been recognised. Please check the number and try again.”
So I do, even though the number is in my phone memory as MUM MOB.
“The number you have dialled has not been recognised. Please check the number and try again.”
I’m about to give it another go when the phone dies. I get a sick feeling in the bottom of my stomach. This is not going the way I had hoped. Mind you, the way I had feared – not so long ago, when I was back in 1984 – was a lot, lot worse and basically involved me being dead or never even existing, so I’m kind of stuck between dread and hope and it’s not a nice feeling. Perhaps Mum’s changed her mobile. Perhaps the ‘network is down’, whatever that means. More likely there’s a fault on my phone caused by travelling through aeons of spacetime.
Grandpa Byron would put things right. He’s never let me down.
This is what I’m telling myself on the walk to Grandpa Byron’s house. But I’m not convincing myself, however hard I try. For in my heart, I know that something has gone very, very wrong.
You see, by rights – according to the Grandfather Paradox – I should not exist at all, because my father died in a tragic accident when he was twelve and could never have fathered me.
But here I am, so clearly that bit of time travel theory is rubbish. The thing is, I’m scared about what else might be happening.
As soon as I walk up Grandpa Byron’s front path, my fears increase. Where is his moped? Why is the front door painted a different colour? Where are the wind chimes tinkling by the side door?
I ring the doorbell anyway, but when a lady answers that I’ve never seen before, I just mutter, “Sorry, wrong house,” and quickly walk away.
It’s getting late and dark. I’m feeling weak with hunger, I’m thirsty, and almost dizzy through trying to piece together what’s happening.
Don’t get me wrong. I have worked out the basics, as – no doubt – have you. In case you haven’t, here’s a neat list. (Incidentally, a ‘neat list’ is just about the absolute opposite of how these thoughts are arranged in my head. Even ‘arranged’ is wrong. What’s happening in there is total chaos – thoughts and fears colliding and contradicting and the ‘what ifs’ forming a noisy queue, trying to cancel each other out. But anyway, here goes.)
When Pye drowned, a lot changed. (OK. A nice gentle start. Hang on for a bumpy ride.) So:
Pye didn’t grow up to meet Mum and become father to me. Which means:
He didn’t die four years ago, so:
Mum didn’t meet Steve and move in with him and me and Carly.
Yes, I’ve worked that out. But there’s a fifth thing that is nagging at my mind and that is:
5. Grandpa Byron didn’t then move from Culvercot to Blyth
And there’s a sixth thing as well, but I hardly dare allow myself to think it, or write it, but I’m going to have to, so here it is:
6. If Pye died when he was twelve (and he did, I was there) then he wasn’t alive to be on the beach with Grandpa Byron and the other Indians the day that Mum nearly drowned.
In other words – quite apart from the fact that I don’t understand what I’m doing here, in some weird spacetime bubble where I have no parents or home, and by rights should not even be alive – I may also be the more-or-less direct reason that my mum died some time in the mid-90s by being the more-or-less direct reason my dad died ten years before.
And this is why I’m wandering the street muttering to myself, blinking hard and trying to create some order out of the traffic jam of confusion in my head. Sitting down on a wall, I take off my backpack, and take out the box that holds Alan Shearer. Letting him run over my hands and up my arm always makes me smile, and I put him down next to a little puddle for him to take a drink. He then circles around a bit and licks his tiny hands. (I should say ‘paws’, really but if you look at a hamster’s paws they are just like hands, so that’s how I think of them with Alan Shearer.)
It’s the distraction offered by my hamster that clears my head. You know when sometimes in a traffic jam there’s a gap ahead and once you’re there everything speeds up and suddenly all the revving and honking is behind you? It’s like that.
Putting Alan Shearer back in his carry-box, I turn down the street that leads to the coast road and the buses to Culvercot, and I start running – partly because the bus is approaching and partly because I suddenly know where I need to go.
It’s proper night-time now, a warm early-summer night with the faint taste of seaweed hanging in the air, and I’m on Sandview Avenue, in Culvercot, the tiny semi-detached houses now thirty years older, with bigger trees, some with loft conversions and cars now lining the street all the way down to the seafront.
The bamboo wind chimes are still there, but soundless in the still air. There’s a moped parked on the road outside. I check it for damage to the faring, where I scraped it escaping from the police. There isn’t any. Of course there isn’t. How could there be?
I stand in the street for a few minutes, staring at the front door, willing myself to ring the doorbell. My feet have taken me up the path, but my arm won’t lift to ring it. I don’t know how long I’ve been standing there, but it must have been a while – someone inside has seen me and I can see a shape approaching through the bobbled glass and my heart is beating so hard that it feels like there is someone inside my chest thumping to get out. Now the door chain is rattling, and I can make out details on the shape behind the glass, and it is him, I’m sure it is, but I dare not believe it, and then the door opens.
It is him.
Grandpa Byron.
And he just kind of leans forward a bit to get a better look, and his mouth starts moving but no sound comes out except for a croaky, “P … p …” and I’m thinking, to hell with this staring at each other, and I cross the door threshold and fling my arms around him, and breathe in his smell (different from what I expect, but still him) and smile a huge smile of relief to myself as his arms encircle me and he hugs me back. A few seconds pass like this; his voice becomes clearer and I hear what he is saying over the top of my head as we embrace.
“Pye. Pye. Pye. How can it be you? Oh, my boy, my Pye. How?”<
br />
Oh dear. I didn’t expect that.
There we are, in his front doorway, and he hugs me harder, and he keeps repeating, “How?” and “Pye?” and I hate myself for it, but I start to become slightly uncomfortable because I know that I have some explaining to do and whatever I say is going to disappoint him because I’m not Pye. I uncurl myself from the embrace and stand in front of him as he continues to stare at me. There’s no good way of saying this, so I just say it.
“I’m sorry. I’m not Pye.” There’s a long pause while Grandpa Byron just looks intently, his eyes flicking to my hair, my ears, my mouth, my hands, and I add, as gently as I can, “How could I be?”
Grandpa Byron’s blinking hard. I can’t tell if he’s blinking back tears, or what. Then I say, “I’m Al. Al Singh? Do you remember?”
Grandpa Byron’s eyes move up and to the left, then back at me. He shakes his head.
“Come on,” I encourage. “You remember everything! In the shop with the Sikh guy, they thought I was Pye and …” Still he looks blank. “I came here, to this house. The day that Pye …”
He finishes it for me. “The day that Pye drowned. You came here. Then you were in the shop. With Baru and, and … the other guy. His son.” As the memory comes back to him, he starts nodding slowly. He puts his hand on my shoulder and brings me into the house, shutting the door behind him. “Come on in, bonny lad,” he says.
But there is no lightness in his voice. It is as if I have sucked all the energy out of him. Very slowly, feeling terrible, I follow him.
OK. Think about this for a second. How would you even begin to explain to Grandpa Byron what had gone on?
No. Me neither. In fact the first thing I say, as I sit at the kitchen counter, is, “Is there anything to eat?” He gives me a glass of milk, which I down in one while he heats up some aloo chaat in the microwave, then I eat and eat and eat. I take Alan Shearer from my backpack, and the look of incomprehension on Grandpa Byron’s face is replaced, briefly, by a smile, and he gives him a Brazil nut and a saucer of water, and he seems to relax a little. It’s good: I think my hamster has given him something else to look at apart from me, and the tension I have felt since the doorstep lessens slightly. Grandpa Byron pulls up a stool to the counter and sits opposite me while my hamster and I eat.
