The Yoghurt Plot

by Fleur Hitchcock

  ‘And,’ says Dilan, looking down at the ground, ‘most importantly, my skateboard has gone.’

  Chapter 4

  ‘Gordon Bennett! What you wearin’?’ says a boy on the oddest bike I’ve ever seen. He’s pointing at Dilan’s shorts.

  ‘Surf pants,’ says Dilan, staring down at his legs. ‘What sort of bike is that?’

  ‘You know – a Chopper – five-speed, see?’ The boy fiddles with a large black ball on the end of a chrome stick. He weaves out across the play park and back, the front wheel wobbling from side to side. ‘Anyway, you look ridiculous,’ he says. ‘Surprised your mum let you out like that.’ He stops, and climbs off his bike. He’s wearing a huge coat with a baggy bum and a fur collar. His trousers stick out at the bottom, and don’t reach his shoes.

  ‘Right, yeah,’ says Dilan, moving forwards to inspect the bike.

  I look around the play park. The rubbish roundabout seems to have been replaced by a wooden spinning thing that moves much more easily. I push it and leap on. It whizzes around at twice the speed of the one that was here before and I actually have to stop it.

  I climb off. The play park spins for a moment and I sit down while the yoghurt finds my stomach again.

  ‘What’s your name?’ says Dilan.

  ‘What’s yours?’ says the boy.

  ‘Dilan,’ says Dilan.

  ‘Like Bob? That hippy bloke?’ says the boy. ‘Mine’s Dave Dando.’ He puts out his right hand.

  Dilan stares at it and tries to high-five. Only it doesn’t work and they both look a little foolish.

  ‘Like Dando’s the surf shop in the high street – is that your dad?’ I say.

  Dave stares at me blankly. ‘My dad’s a fireman. How come I haven’t seen you two around?’ he says, clambering back on his bike and peddling around in an almost circle.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘we’ve just moved.’

  ‘Moved to Dunroamin’?’ Dave points towards our house.

  ‘Yes. No. Don’t know,’ says Dilan. ‘We’re just having a walk. Going to the shop.’

  ‘Don’t let me keep you,’ says Dave, making an exaggerated gesture along the path.

  This is not the way to the shop – at least not the quick way, but we walk on anyway, clanging out of the far side of the play park, and on to the cul-de-sac that joins the estate to the town.

  We swing around the corner. Everything here looks much as normal, although there don’t seem to be so many cars and the ones that are there are square, old ones. But in very good condition.

  ‘Classics,’ says Dilan, pointing at a red shiny car with sheepskin on the steering wheel.

  ‘Where are the satellite dishes? And the trees are tiny.’ I say.

  ‘Are they filming something?’ says Dilan. ‘Perhaps we’ve wandered onto a film set – or any second now a horde of silent, very hungry mutant jellyfish could emerge from the sea and eat us,’ he says, almost cheerfully. ‘Cos they’ve obviously eaten everything else.’

  I move closer to him, pulling at the sleeve of his T-shirt, like I used to hang onto Mum’s bag when I was little. This new version of Shabbiton is scaring me.

  Dilan doesn’t brush me away; he grabs my hand back, as if even he might be finding this just a little bit scary.

  ‘Even the bus-stop sign looks different,’ I say, gazing upward and thumping into Dilan’s side as he stops suddenly.

  ‘That,’ says Dilan, ‘shouldn’t be there.’ He points at a collapsed cottage planted right in the middle of the footpath through to the school.

  ‘And look at what’s happened to the shop,’ I whisper.

  We cross the road and stare in the windows. It looks like a time capsule. Old packets of washing powder and biscuits on one side; on the other, comics and magazines with terrible orange and brown lettering. Just to the side of the doorway is a rack of newspapers. The names are familiar, but the headlines don’t make any sense.

  ‘General Pinochet, New President of Chile’

  ‘More Power Cuts on the Way’

  My eye strays to the date. 2nd July 1974.

  Chapter 5

  I’m not sure either of us wants to go further, but we don’t actually stop each other. We walk on through almost familiar streets to the seafront.

  The area around the pier looks very similar to the way it should, except that Henderson’s huge car showroom isn’t there, nor are the estate agents’, or the pound shop, but the baker’s is there, and the flower shop, and the newsagent with the buckets and spades, but nothing prepares me for the pier itself.

  Where usually there’s a boarded-up chippy, here there are two pretty wooden booths, one hanging with buckets and candyfloss and popcorn; the other advertising tickets to events in the Castle Ballroom. ‘Dirk Brinsley and the Cherokees … Loretta Bacall and her performing chinchillas … Live Music Every Night … Dancing, Ballroom and Jive, professional teachers and exhibition performers. £1 entry afternoons, £2 evenings. Special event tonite: the finals of the Frank Darnell Competition Cup, 7–11p.m.’ The booths are painted red and gold and look as if they have been every year since they were built. Tall lit-up letters blaze above our heads – castle ballroom – and underneath in curly writing: The Best in the East.

  It’s busy too. The normally deserted Shabbiton seafront is buzzing with people, mostly overdressed, clustering around the pier. I’m aware that we look really out of place and pull Dilan back until we’re safely hidden in a fishy alley by the arcade.

  ‘I’ve always thought it would look really skanky, but it doesn’t. It’s … ’

  ‘Yes … ’ I say, stepping aside as a collection of women wearing thick make-up bustle past and across the road to the pier. ‘Dilan, can we go home now?’

  We walk in silence back to the play park. Dave is still trying out turns on his bike. Two other boys are kicking a ball, and a girl’s appeared on a space hopper. Three more come in from the other end with long lengths of elastic.

  I am probably in a state of shock. I should probably be given a cup of sweet tea and a biscuit. This is how I felt when Mum told us we were moving house, as if it couldn’t possibly happen, and again when Granddad moved in with us.

  The ground is still ground, but it’s clearer than it was before, and ever so slightly threatening. For a moment I imagine millions of microbes squirming under the earth’s crust – waiting to spring out and grab our ankles before taking over our minds. Or is it the other people? Are they actually aliens, robots in rubber human suits?

  The girl catches sight of Dilan’s shorts and giggles.

  Dilan frowns but doesn’t say anything.

  Dave wobbles towards the fence and rests his arms around the supports. ‘Back?’ he says, slipping a finger up his nose, pulling something out and inspecting it before eating it.

  ‘What’s the date today?’ I ask, wondering what alien snot tastes like.

  ‘2nd July 1974 – only three more weeks of school,’ he says.

  ‘Oh,’ says Dilan, nodding his head. ‘Of course.’

  We head out of the play park and through the houses to the building site. Dilan sits on a pile of blocks, and I join him. We stay silent for a long time, scraping patterns in the dirt, listening to the birds, but neither of us saying anything.

  ‘Try screaming,’ I say in the end.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because when you’re dreaming, you can’t shout – you can’t call for help.’

  Dilan opens his mouth and lets out a shout. A bevy of seagulls flap into the air, circle and land again. He turns and punches me hard on the arm.

  ‘OW! Why’d you do that?’

  ‘Just checking,’ he says, ‘that you’re not dreaming too.’

  I rub my arm. ‘So – it’s not a dream then. Either Earth’s been invaded by nice chatty aliens on weird bikes with a lousy fashion sense, or we’re in 1974 and we’ve somehow stepped into the past, through a fridge portal, and are now occupying a parallel time period. Personally, I’d go for the second one as being mor
e likely.’

  ‘Bugg – wake up. We can’t have done. It’s not possible.’

  He’s right. Even with my small grasp of history and physics I know that The Time Machine and Doctor Who are actually fiction. Even if Einstein thought it was theoretically possible to travel in time, he never proved it, and if all the minds at the great universities haven’t managed to do it yet, then the likelihood of a 1920s bungalow managing to invent a time machine, unaided, is very, very small. Time travel is far too complicated and unlikely to have been invented by a fridge.

  I turn it over and over in my head. ‘But, Dilan – what other explanation is there? I mean, is everyone dressing up just to fool us?’ I wave at the building site. ‘Has someone knocked down the entire estate just to give us a bad afternoon?’

  Dilan sighs. He is actually speechless. I’m not sure I’ve ever known that happen.

  ‘OK,’ I say. ‘So it happened when we ate the yoghurts … ’

  Dilan doesn’t move, just stares straight ahead at the ground.

  ‘Which came from the fridge,’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. And then he says. ‘Bugg, in 1974 – had they invented skateboards?’

  Chapter 6

  We stumble back towards the house. I think we both feel that we need to see that fridge again – it’s the only thing that links both places – the here place and the other place.

  That’s when I have an idea.

  ‘We should leave a mark,’ I say.

  ‘How do you mean?’ asks Dilan.

  ‘I mean, I know we can’t possibly be in the past, but something we can see if we get back to now – I mean, then – I mean, 2014.’

  ‘What’s not going to change?’ he says. ‘Assuming of course that we have actually time-travelled, which as we know is impossible.’

  ‘It’s got to be something that could survive forty years, without being painted over or washed away.’

  I scan the building site. I can’t yet make out which houses will be which, but they’ve already put the fire hydrants in next to little metal hinged covers set into what will be the road. I open the nearest cover. Beside the thing for turning the water on and off there’s plenty of room.

  ‘Have you got anything we could hide in there?’ I ask, reaching into my pockets. I find an elastic band, a five-pence piece dated 1999 and some fluff.

  Dilan pulls out two fused sherbet lemons and a plastic book token that Aunty Sarah gave him for Christmas. ‘It’s still got 79p on it,’ he says. ‘I’m not sure I want to leave it.’

  ‘But if it’s still there when we reach now – I mean, normal time,’ I say, ‘you can use it then.’

  Dilan furrows his forehead as if he’s trying to make sense of what I’ve just said. It makes perfect sense to me, but then I spend hours at night trying to work out looping sci-fi plots so that I don’t think about the monsters that undoubtedly live in the washing machine. I’m used to time travel – virtually.

  I also know the fundamental rule. You mustn’t fiddle with anything from the past, because it could massively affect the future. All time travellers must know this. I also know that it’s possible to end up not having been born and that we must be REALLY careful.

  ‘Suppose there’s a fire in the meantime – I mean, the firemen might find my card and throw it away?’

  ‘We’ll hide it,’ I say. ‘Anyway, it’s only 79p.’

  The house is quiet. We duck under the living room window and stop outside the kitchen door, listening. The door’s still open and I can actually see the empty yoghurt pots on the side.

  We move into the doorway. The blue-painted doorway that should be green; our feet nearly on the blue and cream-tiled floor that should be brown.

  Dilan points at the yoghurt pots on the side.

  I point to the fridge. The fridge is humming, singing, like it did at home. We tiptoe into the kitchen and pull the door open. The fridge sighs and rattles, shaking itself slightly while I reach in and grab two yoghurts.

  Dilan snatches the empty ones with spoons from the side and we duck back outside and crouch beneath the scrawny little tree.

  ‘They’re different,’ he whispers. ‘They’re like modern ones.’

  I look down at the pots in my hands. As before, they have indistinct fruit – I can’t totally identify the flavour – they could be peach or pear, but they have thin peely lids and plastic containers. On the side they have a proper date: 2nd July 2014. I point at it.

  Dilan frowns, rips off the top and plunges the spoon into the pale orange contents. He brings out a huge glob and rams it in his mouth. ‘I don’t care – I just want to get back home.’

  I peel back the lid and taste the yoghurt. It’s just as delicious as before, so it’s easy to jam the whole lot into my mouth and lick out the inside.

  ‘Bugg.’ Dilan nudges my arm. ‘Look.’

  But I hear it first. The murmur of the estate. Cars, machines, voices, radios, all setting up a hum that I’d never noticed in the ordinary world before. I open my eyes; we’re crouched under the apple tree. It hangs over us, heavy with fruit, buzzing with insects and birds.

  ‘Oh, there you are,’ says Mum, sticking her head around the door. ‘Can someone look after Granddad? Give him something to eat – I’ve got a Historical Society Meeting and your dad’s not back from work yet.’ She slams the back door and we hear her go round to the front, followed by the crash of a car door closing and then the sound of the engine starting up.

  Dilan sits examining the yoghurt pot. I do the same. I think there’s too much to say for either of us to try.

  ‘Book token?’ says Dilan.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, not moving.

  ‘I don’t think I want to find out if it’s there – or if it’s not there,’ he says, staring at the back of his hand.

  ‘I’ll go and see Granddad,’ I say in the end, taking my yoghurt pot and dumping it in the bin.

  ‘Good idea,’ says Dilan, bunging the other three into the sink.

  I hear Granddad before I see him.

  ‘De dum, de dum, de ta ta ta – de dum, de dum, de ta ta ta … ’

  I go through to the living room. It’s boiling. Granddad’s got the electric bar fire on, and the evening sun is streaming through the conservatory roof, bringing everything up to about a million degrees.

  ‘See,’ Granddad says, pointing at the telly. ‘They were a couple. De dum, de dum, de ta ta ta … ’

  I agree, two people on the screen dancing together, undoubtedly a couple.

  ‘Look at that,’ he points.

  ‘What am I looking at?’ I say.

  ‘The way he dances,’ Granddad struggles to his feet, grabbing a rolled-up rug that’s leaning against the wall. ‘See?’ Granddad grips the body of the rug with his left arm, and sticks his right arm out, holding the fringe with his fingertips. He takes two paces. ‘De ta, de ta, de ta ba ba – he danced like that.’

  I suspect I’m missing the finer points.

  Granddad continues to demonstrate, blundering around the sitting room, knocking things off tables. I rescue a pile of DVDs and a lamp before he drops the rug and slumps back onto the sofa. ‘He was a great dancer, one of the very best. Went on to present shows on the telly.’ Granddad turns up the volume and leans forward to hear the judge’s comments. ‘He used to dance here, you know, on special exhibition nights.’ He sighs and rubs his eyes, as if he’s got grit in them. ‘That was before the beautiful pier burned down, not long after your gran died and your dad was just a little’un … ’

  He sniffs. ‘Young once, you know. Back then, the Castle Ballroom was a gem. Me and it, in the prime of life – and look at us now. Two old wrecks. We were young once, you know,’ he says, as if he’s never said it before.

  ‘Yes, Granddad,’ I say, staring at the shapes whirling on the screen, thinking of the pier Dilan and I saw half an hour and forty years ago. ‘I know you were, once. I just wonder what happened to you both.’

  I’m in bed now, but I’m not going
to go to sleep in a hurry. Dilan and I ate noodles with Granddad on the sofa before Dad came back and cooked real food. We ate our proper supper around the table, but Granddad didn’t join us. ‘Happy with this, thanks,’ he said, slurping a cup of soup.

  ‘Dad,’ I’d said at supper, ‘do you think time travel will ever be possible?’

  Dilan choked on his cabbage.

  But Dad was shaking his head. ‘You read too much science fiction. It might be, but then, the transporters from Star Trek’ll probably come first. More stew? Or are you off to bed?’

  Granddad’s dance music thumps through the floor. Modern tunes. He must be watching live TV, and it keeps me awake so that even though I’m ridiculously tired I can’t get to sleep. When I do nearly fall asleep, Mum clanking about on the landing pulls me awake and then I just can’t stop thinking about this afternoon. The only explanation is that we time-travelled. That we went back into the past, although surely that’s totally impossible. Otherwise we had a dream or something – both of us at the same time, drugged by the yoghurt and taken into a sleeping state. I think about Dave Dando and I wonder if he’d remember us, and I think about Dilan’s book token – would it still be there, and if it was, what would that prove?

  And then I think that perhaps the best way to prove it would be to put something from now, that we could find then. A piece of twenty-first-century life, or even just a coin, that would prove that we came from the future.

  But will we ever find ‘then’ again?

  Was it just a fluke? Or were we guided by the fridge? Does the fridge know what’s happening?

  Is the fridge actually a life form?

  Does it have a brain?

  Or is there a giant metallic fungus and the fridge is a tiny growth on the top: the thing we can see only the tip of the iceberg? Maybe the whole town is built on a giant time-travelling piece of metal, activated by sea mist and candyfloss, and it’s trying to trap us into altering time, because of some evil-genius life plan it has.