The Yoghurt Plot

by Fleur Hitchcock

  I sink to the ground underneath the rows of banked seats, watching the dance floor between a pair of large, baggy-stockinged, elderly ankles.

  The dancers swing into what I recognise as a foxtrot, and I follow the Granddad/Dad man skimming through the moves, his feet barely seeming to touch the ground.

  He is awfully good – even I can tell that.

  I try to look up through the gaps in the chairs, but Dilan prods me. ‘Who’s that?’ he points at the Dad/Granddad man’s partner. I examine the pretty teenager swept up in the arms of the youthful Dad/Granddad man. ‘I sort of recognise her,’ says Dilan. ‘She’s not Gran, is she?’

  ‘No. Gran died in 1968, when Dad was born, but I recognise her too,’ I say, watching her smile at the man, smile at the seated people and dance backwards at speed.

  ‘Mum and Dad aren’t here,’ says Dilan in the end, halfway through the tango.

  ‘Um,’ says Lorna. ‘Nor are Bunfight and Coleridge.’

  ‘Coleridge and Bunfight? Who is Bunfight?’

  ‘My girl gerbil. They’ve escaped.’ She shakes out her pockets, the blue carrier bag floats to the ground, but there are no gerbils. I look at her and her face creases up. ‘They’re lost here; someone’ll tread on them.’

  ‘You mean there were two – a boy and a girl? Together?’

  ‘You’re not serious,’ says Dilan.

  Lorna nods, her eyes brimming over with tears.

  I pick up the carrier bag and examine it for gerbils. I know they aren’t there, but I check thoroughly inside and out and hand it back to Lorna, who wipes her eyes on it and jams it back in her pocket.

  Dilan lets out a long sigh. ‘Well, we’d better look for them then.’

  We don’t find them. In the end we give up all hope of finding either Mum and Dad or the gerbils and head home across the meadows, Lorna jabbering alongside me, telling me long tales of how utterly cute, lovely and darling the gerbils are.

  ‘ … and there was the time Bunfight got into the cereal packets in the shop – it was so funny – and when she went to sleep in Mum’s slippers … ’

  My mind glazes over, and I think about life without Mum and Dad. We’ve already run out of money, we’ll have to start cooking soon and I don’t think either of us has a clue. I realise that for the first time I can remember real-life anxiety is larger than imagined anxiety. I am more worried about food than alien invasion.

  Whether that’s good or bad, I’m not sure.

  We reach the house. It looks exactly as we left it, the back door open, the yoghurt pots standing on the side. The telly still booms on in the lounge.

  Silently we open the fridge. There are five yoghurts. They look identical. They also look modern, with thin peely plastic lids and pictures of healthy people smiling over sun-ripened fruit. I hand one to Dilan, one to Lorna and we scour them for sell-by dates. ‘3rd July 2014,’ hisses Dilan. Lorna nods. Mine says the same.

  ‘OK,’ I whisper. ‘Go.’

  As I spoon in the first delicious mouthful, I’m vaguely aware of the door from the lounge opening and the shadowy figure of a bearded stranger rubbing his eyes and raising his hand. But I keep spooning the yoghurt, and by the time I reach the bottom of the pot, we’re home again.

  ‘That was amazing,’ says Lorna, ‘even if I have lost Bunfight and Coleridge. This time-travel lark’s a breeze.’

  But something’s bothering me. When we left, the kitchen was a mess. Mugs of cold noodles, a pile of crumbs and the dishwasher running.

  Now it’s all tidy. In fact it’s tidier than I’ve ever seen it, and there’s a blue jacket hanging over the back of one of the kitchen chairs, with Perrymead Nursing Services embroidered over the pocket.

  Chapter 14

  ‘Time for your bath, Arnold,’ says the strange woman with the tightly curled hair.

  ‘Granddad?’ I say, standing in the doorway to the lounge. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Hello, Bugg, dear,’ says the woman. ‘Have a good day at school?’

  She flashes a smile at me and drags Granddad upright.

  ‘If only it hadn’t burned down,’ mutters Granddad, playing an imaginary piano with his gnarled old fingers.

  ‘Yes, dear – if only. Now lean on me,’ says the woman, gripping Granddad’s elbow.

  He shuffles upright, muttering. A string of dribble escapes from the corner of his mouth. He looks ten years older than he did when we left. I glance at the coffee table. There’s a copy of the paper – 2014 – he can’t be older, so what’s happened?

  ‘Are you all right, Granddad?’

  He straightens, turns to me and mumbles, ‘The gerbils … the ruddy gerbils. They ate the wires. If it hadn’t been for the ruddy gerbils, my lovely pier would still be standing – still there … ’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ interrupts the curly-haired woman. ‘If only, if only, our lives are full of if onlies. If we could correct all our mistakes, how different it would be.’

  ‘We’ll have to go back to that day. The day we went and lost the gerbils.’

  ‘What difference does it make? The pier burned down anyway a few years later.’

  ‘Yes, but look at him now – he’s really lost it. He’s really … old. The gerbils must have brought on the fire earlier, which destroyed his career earlier too. We must go back and find them.’

  ‘You go – I’ll stay,’ says Dilan. ‘I’m interested in exploring this alternative reality.’

  ‘Can I stay?’ says Lorna.

  ‘No!’ I say. ‘They’re your blasted Gerbils. I need you to catch them. And Dilan, I don’t think you should.’

  ‘I promise to do absolutely nothing.’ He glances at Lorna. ‘And when I say promise, I mean it.’

  ‘You won’t talk to anyone, go anywhere … ’

  ‘ … pick any buttercups,’ interrupts Lorna.

  ‘I definitely won’t pick any buttercups,’ he replies.

  I can see that we’ve got it wrong the moment we step out of the garden. The fields are gone, no concrete yet, but someone’s scoured the top layer from the ground, leaving mud and puddles. That means it’s later than 1969, but earlier than 1974. I wonder how old Dave Dando is. ‘This is wrong,’ I say. ‘We’ll go back, have another go and take Dilan with us this time, so we’re all together and things can’t go wrong.’

  ‘Wait,’ says Lorna. ‘Can we just have a look? I want to see the shop again – in a different time. I might meet my mum.’

  ‘No, you mustn’t meet your mum.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t think it would be good.’

  ‘What would happen?’

  ‘I don’t know. You might … ’

  Lorna runs backwards away from me and towards the town. ‘D’you know, you sound like my gran – all worries and “don’ts”. Live a little – take a chance.’ She bounds off ahead along the path, skipping and singing.

  ‘Lorna!’ I shout after her, but she doesn’t listen.

  I follow her through the beginnings of the building site along the footpath that leads to the shop. A middle-aged man’s outside, putting out the newspapers. Lorna sucks in her breath, ‘That’s my granddad, he must have been really young then. I never met him.’ Lorna walks over, but I stay on the other side of the road, a bubble of anxiety forming in my throat. I don’t like this. I’m sure she’s about to break one of the fundamental rules of successful time travel, although thinking about it, we’ve probably already broken more than one. The gerbils are a pretty enormous time catastrophe all on their own.

  Lorna wanders up and down outside the shop, pretending to look at the flip-flops, but actually staring at the bloke.

  ‘Lorna,’ I call. ‘Come on! We should get going.’

  The man looks up. ‘Lorna, that’s a pretty name.’

  I glare at her. She flashes the man a smile. ‘Thank you. It is, isn’t it?’ And she comes back over the road towards me, beaming. ‘Let’s go and see the pier, see if it really did burn down cos of Bunfight and Coleridge.’ />
  We walk through the streets. They’re busier than in 1969, more cars, one or two gardens turned into driveways, advertisements plastered on telegraph poles. It’s all shinier, newer, but somehow uglier too.

  The pier’s gone. The lovely little booths have gone too. A thread of manky barbed wire crosses the entrance, and a few feet of wooden boardwalk end in charcoal. The metal framework scattered with burned fragments of the magnificent ballroom stands in a quiet sea, marking out the full size of the building. It smells of wet fires, and there’s no moss on the wood, so it must have happened quite recently.

  ‘Wow,’ says Lorna. ‘Bunfight and Coleridge did that?’

  ‘Or their grandchildren,’ I say.

  ‘Or their great-grandchildren,’ says Lorna. ‘Or their children’s children’s children’s children. Or their children’s children’s children’s children’s children? Or their children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children. Or their—’

  ‘Thank you,’ I interrupt.

  ‘But think how adorable that would have been? Thousands of gerbils racing up and down the curtains.’

  I imagine the Castle Ballroom running with rodents.

  Just next to the entrance, a man on a ladder is putting the final coat of paint on a new sign: ‘HENDERSON’S CAR SHOWROOM’. Another man pastes big paper notices onto the glass. ‘Store opening tonite.’

  ‘Oh, Henderson’s. They’re still going. I wonder what the Hendersons themselves looked like then?’ Lorna stares in through the window.

  Inside, at the back, a teenager and a middle-aged bloke are frantically polishing cars. They’re talking and laughing and, because the street’s so quiet, I can hear what they’re saying.

  ‘What a stroke of luck, Dad,’ says the lad.

  ‘Not jokin’, son,’ says the man, pouring white liquid on the bonnet of the car. ‘Been waitin’ for something like that to ’appen – didn’t even need much ’elp in the end.’

  ‘Miracle,’ says the teenager.

  ‘You have to make your own luck, know what I mean? Anyway, we’re squeaky clean. No one can touch us. Not our fault, none of it.’

  ‘Sleep easy in your bed, Dad?’

  ‘Exactly, my boy. Someone comes up to you and says, “Young Eddie Henderson, where was you when the fire started?” You can swear on your granny’s pillowcase that you was tucked up in front of the telly – cos you was. And you was witnessed there, by the vicar, who happened to call on your mum.’

  ‘Cos I was at home.’

  ‘Cos actually the gerbils did it.

  ‘Yes, it was them that ate the cables that started the fire.’

  ‘Them that chewed through the sprinkler system.’

  ‘Maybe it was even them that made the phone call that took the fire brigade over to the electric factory when the sparks started to fly under the pier.’

  ‘What clever gerbils they must be.’

  ‘And it was nothing to do with me – I wasn’t here all the time.’ The son laughs, and the man on the ladder coughs.

  We’re in the way, so we cross the road and head out of town in the direction of the house.

  Lorna skips along the pavement, singing to herself. I follow more slowly, trying to make sense of what I’ve just heard. Phone call?

  Phone call?

  ‘Bugg. Bugg!’ Lorna calls back towards me. ‘Race you back to now. Last one back’s a loser.’

  Slowly I break into a trot and pick my way between the puddles back to our house. I pass Lorna, crash in through the back door, yank open the fridge door and I’ve already eaten half a yoghurt before she makes it into the room.

  ‘Loser,’ I say, as the kitchen morphs into the now.

  Chapter 15

  Yoghurt gets a little sickly after three pots. But Dilan’s standing there, waiting for us, and he immediately hands me another one. ‘Wrong year, wasn’t it?’ he says.

  I nod, tearing the lid from the new pot.

  ‘Thought so,’ he says. ‘I’ve been comparing pots. And the scary woman’s still here. She’s making Granddad eat stew and dumplings. It’s a horrible scene, gravy carnage, slime, the whole works. Anyway, these should work.’

  Before I start on the new yoghurt I fill a sparklingly clean glass from the tap and glug it down. Lorna becomes completely solid alongside me and grabs another glass.

  ‘When we get back,’ I say, ‘remind me to tell you about Henderson’s.’

  ‘Henderson’s? Why?’ asks Dilan.

  ‘Because,’ I say, taking my first spoon of yoghurt and having the fleeting thought that perhaps it’s not chance sending us from one year to another, but the fridge. ‘For now I need to get back and sort out the gerbils, and then there’s Mum and Dad. The other stuff can wait.’

  Lorna stands next to me, and fiddles with the letters on the fridge door. U ACTION, NO I C U AT, CAUTION.

  ‘What other stuff, Bugg?’

  He’s too late. The kitchen floor fades, and chequered lino takes its place.

  Our kitchen in 1969 looks exactly like it did last time. The only difference is that I’m far more worried; we can’t live with missing parents and the scary clean woman, or at least not for long.

  We arrive at the same time as Dilan and me do the first time, and I shove Lorna out through the door while my previous self is taking in the surroundings.

  ‘What’s the rush?’ says Lorna, stumbling along the footpath.

  ‘We need to stay out of sight of ourselves and get there before the gerbils get loose.’

  ‘OK,’ she says cheerfully. And to be fair, she makes a real effort and runs through the meadow, skipping through the tussocks almost as fast as me although I still don’t think she has the faintest idea why.

  I glance back. In the distance I can see the other me, Lorna and Dilan arguing about staying or going. It’s the weirdest feeling ever.

  We run past the woman with the pram and the little girl and the kite. She smiles at us.

  ‘Hello,’ I say. ‘Lovely day.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Isn’t it.’

  In a moment we’re going to pass her again. I wonder if she’ll notice.

  When we reach the pier, we don’t bother with the man in the booth, just race down the side and up the ladder. The barnacle limpet things look exactly the same, but this time they’re not as scary as the idea of not finding the gerbils.

  ‘So are we going to find ourselves in there?’ asks Lorna, clambering up the ladder. ‘Will we meet ourselves? Should we meet ourselves?’

  ‘Yes, we could meet ourselves, but, no, I don’t know if we should. I don’t know what really happens if you do, but I don’t think it’s a good idea.’ I step out onto the pier. ‘In everything I’ve ever read, meeting yourself has meant … ’ I hold my hands up to show an empty space. ‘Ping!’

  ‘Who pings exactly?’ she asks. ‘You or the other you?’

  I shrug. ‘How can you tell which one’s which?’

  Lorna tilts her head and wrinkles up her nose. ‘I’d rather not ping, if you don’t mind,’ she says.

  I don’t answer, and push the ‘NO ENTRY’ door, just like last time. I can’t see a thing and have to stand at the back blinking at the glitter ball as the brightest thing in the room.

  ‘We must have been over here when we lost them,’ says Lorna, crawling under the seats.

  ‘We were,’ I whisper. ‘But we’re going to have to stay hidden until we see the gerbils escape, and then we’ll have to do the best we can to catch them without being spotted.’

  ‘Otherwise, ping,’ says Lorna.

  I nod.

  Three figures come in through the door. I recognise Dilan’s silhouette, but not my own. They crawl in under the seats until they’re sitting really close to us, so close I can see the hairs on Lorna’s legs, and hear myself breathe.

  If I reached out my arms I could touch myself. It’s almost tempting, but I don’t know what would happen and so I won’t risk it.

  Inste
ad I glue my eyes to the new Lorna’s pockets. It takes less than a minute for the first gerbil to make an attempt at escaping. It sticks its nose over the rib of the pocket and clambers out.

  It sniffs the air and plunges down towards the floor.

  The second one follows.

  The real Lorna kneels forward and grabs the first one, handing it to me while she leans to catch the second one.

  I hold the little thing close in my hands and pray that it doesn’t bite. It’s warm and soft and squeaky.

  The previous versions of ourselves starts to search for the gerbils. We crawl around from one side of the audience to the other, keeping our heads down and waiting. We really mustn’t interfere with anything, otherwise we might get stuck in some kind of time limbo.

  Maybe that’s what ghosts are – people who time-travelled and got stuck.

  I’m just thinking about this when I notice that the other Lorna and Dilan and Bugg have left.

  ‘Whew!’ says the real Lorna next to me, and holds up her gerbil to kiss its nose. A nose that’s pointy and very like her own. ‘Well done, Bunfight. You made it back to Mummy, safe and sound.’

  I’m not going to explain to Lorna why she couldn’t possibly be mother to a gerbil, but I’m sure I’m still sitting staring open-mouthed at her when the one I’m holding, Coleridge, makes a lunge for it and leaps from my hands.

  ‘Aaaargh!’ screams a woman. ‘Children!’ she shouts. ‘There are children under the seats – with rats!’

  ‘Quick, run,’ I yelp, diving towards the escaped gerbil, grabbing it with one hand and using the other to slide backwards under the seats before heading for the door.

  ‘Not so quick, nipper,’ says a big man blocking the exit, reaching out towards me. ‘Let’s have a look at your ticket.’