Temporally Out of Order

by Unknown

  Money, in short, was no longer an issue. If only Harriet were with him now. She would be so pleased. But Foxx had been discouraged as of late, spending all his time satisfying London’s desire for fanciful historical “reimaginings,” while neglecting his own desire to paint.

  He looked around his studio, saw the blank canvases he had purchased and the many tubes of paint sitting unopened on shelves.

  Do not complain, he reminded himself. He had been given a great gift: enough wealth to be comfortable along with fame for his masterful, if “fanciful,” artistic skill.

  Yet even now, his work with the camera lucida was not coming along as readily as before. It was as if the clarity and intensity of the historical scenes themselves were fading with his lack of interest.

  “Mr. Foxx?” It was George, appearing from the front of the shop. “There is a woman here to see you. She claims to have met you many years ago. A Madame Magnin? Funny old bird.”

  Foxx started. “Yes, of course. Please, send her back.”

  A minute later the old woman shuffled into the studio slowly, flicking a cane ahead of her with each step, tik-tik-tik.

  “Ah, Mr. Foxx,” she said, looking around. “This is a nice place, quite fancy.”

  “Thank you.” Foxx motioned for her to sit down on the cushioned chair next to his, but she shook her head.

  “It has been many years, Madame. How can I help you?”

  “I have a message, Mr. Foxx.”

  “From whom?”

  “Your Harriet.”

  Foxx paled.

  “She visited me. She said you have been harder to see lately. Distant. She said I was to speak to you. I’ve come across London. It is a long walk from Whitechapel to Mayfair, Mr. Foxx.”

  “What … what is the message?”

  “You must leave the past behind now. It is time for your future. That thing,” she pointed to the camera lucida, “has served its purpose. Now you must paint.”

  She turned and began to shuffle out again.

  “Wait!” said Foxx, chasing her. “That’s the message? Just … paint?”

  “Yes.”

  It felt incomplete, anticlimactic. Foxx tried to stall her. “But … Harriet! She is well? She is happy? She is … with the Lord?”

  Magnin smiled, still shuffling forward, tik-tik-tik. “Ah! That’s usually the first question, you know.”

  When her hand was on the doorknob at the front of the shop, Foxx remembered his manners and pulled a crown from his pocket, offering it to her. She shook her head.

  “Please,” protested Foxx. “For your troubles.”

  “The messages are not troubles,” she said, pushing his hand away. “They are gifts.”

  Then she walked out the door and disappeared into the crowds on Burlington Arcade.

  Suddenly, from the studio, there was a shout and the sound of something breaking. A distraught George appeared, a bent brass rod and broken prism in his hand.

  “I’m … I’m sorry, Mr. Foxx! I bumped the table when I was moving the books you signed. It must have fallen off!” He looked desperate. “Please, take it out of my wages!”

  Foxx took the broken pieces of the camera lucida and stared at them for a moment. Then he patted George on the shoulder.

  “A simple accident, George. Don’t upset yourself. This day is nearly over anyway. Why don’t you lock up and go home. I’d like to spend a little time alone.” Foxx eyed the stack of large, empty canvases in the corner of the studio. “Although perhaps, before you go, you can help me lift one of those onto an easel?”

  “Of course, Mr. Foxx,” said George eagerly. “Anything you say, sir!”

  When George had gone, Foxx set the pieces of the camera lucida on a shelf and began to open tubes of paint, one by one.

  ‘A’ IS FOR ALACRITY, ASTRONAUTS, AND GRIEF

  by Sofie Bird

  Becca hadn’t even meant to show Sam the typewriter. It had sat in the crate in the attic with the other things she and Julie had played with as children that their mother, Candice, hadn’t gotten rid of yet. Becca had flown in to Heathrow, thrown her bag on the lower bunk of her childhood room and driven to the hospital to collect her nephew from Candice’s arms.

  She’d had to turn her face away from Julie’s battered face on the bed, unable to look at the tubes and bruises and swelling. The doctor’s prognosis had stuttered through static.

  You know she’s not in there anymore. Becca hadn’t dared say the words. There’s a reason they offered to up the morphine, they just can’t say it. She might wake up, but she’s not coming back.

  Work had given her two weeks’ bereavement leave. A luxury, with the project already overdue. She’d used up two days just getting here, walked out on salvaging six years with Rick with four words that had burned into her mouth like acid. My sister is dying.

  Now she couldn’t even look at her.

  Candice had sat haggard in the only chair next to the bed, Sam hunched and silent in her lap. When Becca lifted him from Candice’s strong grasp, neither of them stirred. She’d driven Sam back to the house in silence and trawled through the attic for something for him to do while she worked out how in the hell you explained to a seven-year-old about comas and car accidents and orphans.

  It would be different if Sam’s father were alive. If Candice had had anyone else to call but the daughter who’d crossed oceans to get away from her. Candice had barely said a word since that phone call, not even when Becca had hired a car against her instructions after twenty-six hours on a plane.

  It would be okay. It would all be okay. Becca hugged her elbows like they could fill the hole in her stomach. Julie’s not going to wake up, how can that be okay?

  Because she’s not going to wake up. You won’t have to stay here. You can just say goodbye and go home, like you planned. She sank her teeth into her cheek and forced the admission from her mind. She had more important things to deal with.

  Sam was solemn, and for once not full of questions. A dozen platitudes rose in her throat and withered. Julie’s weekly Skype calls aside, the last time he’d seen her, he’d been a toddler at his father’s funeral. She was the aunt who appeared when parents died.

  Becca flinched. She hasn’t.

  You can’t tell him differently. It wouldn’t be fair.

  He sat at the crate, hunched in on himself, and poked the old typewriter buttons. He hadn’t even lifted it out. Armed with a cup of earl grey and a chocolate biscuit, Becca sat next to him and waited.

  “I’m writing a letter to Mum,” he said flatly. “But the letters don’t come out right.”

  Becca leaned over; the typewriter produced the same gibberish she remembered from her childhood.

  It had driven her father to distraction. His last unsolvable riddle: a perfectly normal, working, ordinary typewriter that wrote alien hieroglyphics. He’d kept it in pride of place in the lounge to puzzle out with his two girls, and taken it apart three times, even the electronic pieces and the 80’s-era solar-cells. What is it we do when we don’t know something? She smiled at his voice in her head.

  But I can’t puzzle this one out, Dad. I can’t fix it. I just want her to go, to be peaceful and I hate myself for that. She squeezed the biscuit so hard it shattered, gazing down at the typewriter and its printed nonsense like it was a talisman.

  Candice had packed it away after he died, along with all of his things, like he’d never lived here at all.

  Sam stroked the yellowed paper standing stiff from the rollers.

  “How many letters can it make?” he asked.

  “How many do you think? Can you work it out?” Becca brushed biscuit crumbs from his hair while he screwed up his face.

  “Twenty-six?”

  “Come on, that’s a guess. You can work it out.”

  This was met with silence. He peered at the paper, at the keys, fingers opening and closing individually.

  “Forty… Fifty … eight.”

  “Including the numbers and all the
commas and things?”

  More silence while his finger hovered over each of the number and punctuation keys.

  “Eighty … six?”

  “There you go.”

  Sam shook his head, blonde curls shivering like Julie’s pixie-cut did. Used to. “But it makes more than eighty-six different letters.”

  Becca pressed her lips, her mother’s “that’s impossible” dismissal pent up behind them. Julie had said he was bright. Even if you doubled the keys, there seemed to be far more printed letters than the typewriter could physically type, none of them familiar. She released her breath with a smile.

  “Your mother and I used to pretend it was a message from someone far away,” she said. “It’s what made me become a programmer, trying to figure out puzzles like that. We kept everything it printed in that binder, there. Maybe you can figure it out.”

  Sam lifted the almost-full three-ring binder, flipped it open. Becca’s eyes stung at the sight of Julie’s margin notes, the backwards ‘a’s she used to write as a child, and she ruffled Sam’s hair.

  oOo

  The hospital ward echoed with clicks and hums and machine-driven breaths. Julie lay, too bruised and too still, with Candice curled over her.

  “Mum! Guess what I found!” Sam burst in, a hurricane of enthusiasm.

  Candice glared, barely shifting from over her daughter. “Hush, sweetling. Your mummy is sleeping, she needs to get better.”

  “But I want to tell her about the codes! It’ll make her feel better, it’s really interesting!” He shook Julie’s shoulder gently. “Mum, I have to show you something.”

  “No!” Candice slapped his hands away and fussed over the tubes Sam had minutely disturbed. “You mustn’t touch, Mummy is very fragile,” she snapped. “Nurse!”

  “But”—Sam’s voice squeaked—“Mum always feels better when I hug her. She said so.”

  Becca wrapped her arm around Sam’s shoulder, squeezing him while she tried to swallow the cannonball in her throat. “You can give her lots of hugs when she wakes up, okay?” She rubbed the crown of his head like her father used to do. “We just need to be careful of the tubes and things, mate. They’re very important.”

  Sam snivelled. “They look uncomfortable.”

  “It’s okay, she’s asleep, she can’t feel them. Why don’t you tell her what you found?”

  “You said she’s sleeping, she won’t hear me.”

  “She’ll hear you in her dreams, love.” Becca shot a look at Candice, who still crouched over Julie like she was shielding her, and hardened her voice. “The doctors said it’s good for her to hear things.” She lifted Sam onto the foot of the bed and pulled the typewriter pages from her bag. Candice snatched the papers and waved them under Becca’s nose.

  “Not your father’s nonsense again! Nothing but broken junk.”

  “It’s a code!” Sam grabbed at the paper. “Someone is sending coded messages and we have to work them out!”

  Candice sucked in her breath, and arranged a honeyed smile. “I know you want your Mummy to get better, because you love her very much,” she said softly. “You want to help look after her, don’t you?” She curled one arm around his shoulders, easing him off the bed. “She needs you to be a big boy so you can help her. Can you do that for her?”

  Sam nodded mutely, clearly confused about where code investigation fell in the spectrum of “being a big boy.”

  Becca stepped forward. “Mum—”

  Candice’s head whipped up, and the sweetness vanished from her face. “I don’t want to hear any more of it. You’re under my roof. You’ll put that thing away when you get home. Or better yet, throw it out.”

  Becca clenched her jaw, but couldn’t find a retort. Candice had always hated Dad’s obsessions. It didn’t matter what it was: if she didn’t understand it, it wasn’t allowed.

  Candice lowered her voice theatrically. “Julie needs him right now while she gets better, not silly distractions.”

  “I thought it was interesting,” Sam mumbled.

  “It’s just broken, my sweetling. There are more important things right now.”

  oOo

  Sam barely said two words the whole drive home. He hunched in the back seat, hugging his knees and smearing ink-stained tears across his cheeks.

  “Careful with those,” Becca joked, nodding to the pile of crumpled typewriter paper she’d retrieved from Candice before they left. “You don’t know what they say, yet. It could be important.”

  He didn’t reply. To him, she was still just a face from a laptop. What did Dad do when I was this upset? He loved his puzzles, his what-ifs. Sometimes he’d be so engrossed he’d forget to eat, chewing pen lids into scraps until Candice dragged him down to dinner. Becca smiled to herself, then clenched her cheek muscles in place.

  What if Julie does wake up? Even just some of her, she might still be Julie.

  I can’t live with Candice again.

  Nine days left. Then she had to be on a plane home. Or not. She shook her head. Focus on Sam. His smile made Julie’s fate—and her own—less terrifying. Besides, Julie had named her godmother. He was Becca’s responsibility, now.

  “You know what you need to do?” she asked in her best detective voice as they pulled up at the Earl’s Court Road traffic light. “We need more data. For instance, there are more letters than keys. So does each key match a certain set of letters? Is there a pattern?”

  Sam frowned. “I don’t know,” he said huskily.

  “You don’t know?” Becca turned and gaped at him, mock-aghast. “Well, what is it we do, when we don’t know something?” Sam shook his head mutely. Becca mimicked her father’s exuberance: “We find out!”

  The slightest of smiles tweaked Sam’s cheek. Becca leaned between the front seats and whispered. “I won’t tell her if you won’t.”

  Becca blurred through the morning and afternoon cleaning walls and light switches and other things that didn’t need cleaning, to the plunks of Sam on the typewriter in the living room. Until—

  “Auntie! I figured it out! And it’s talking to me!”

  Becca raced in, half-expecting he’d taken it apart.

  Sam sat in the living room surrounded by open books of dense text, studiously writing in his Buzz Lightyear notebook.

  “What do you mean, kiddo?” Becca peered over his shoulder.

  “You said I should work out whether the same keys make the same symbols—they don’t,” he announced, in a tone like he was receiving the Nobel Prize. “So I thought it might be random, but it’s not. I counted one hundred and twenty-seven different letters, and there are patterns. Lots of patterns.”

  Becca remembered to close her mouth. She and Julie had played with this for months as kids. How had they never noticed that? And Sam had, all by himself?

  “So I looked through Dad’s old books Mum kept, they tell you how to crack codes, by looking for patterns and how many letters and whether the patterns are big or small, and—” he ran out of breath and gulped air. “There was one where it’s not based on letters but on sounds. Fo-somethings.”

  “Phonemes,” Becca murmured, half-entranced. She flipped through the books next to Sam—cryptography books. His father had been Military Intelligence. Julie had never said doing what, only that he’d had a knack for languages and numbers.

  “That’s why there are so many letters. It’s writing out exactly what he said, how it sounded. And then it started talking to me.”

  “Now Sam,” Becca heard her mother’s tone in her voice and winced.

  “I’m not lying! Look!” He pushed his notebook under her face. Becca frowned at the jumble of English words.

  “It’s backwards,” Sam said helpfully. “The words, I mean. They started at the end of the message.”

  “Why is it backwards?”

  “Why is it writing in an alien language?”

  “Point made.” She took the notebook. “Uncle Sam,” she murmured, reading backwards. “I guess Uncle Sam came t
hrough after all, I can see the shuttles flying.” A grin spread over her face at the beautifully impossible—her father’s grin. “That’s not you, Sam. That’s what people sometimes call America, like it’s a big brother. I think he’s a soldier or something.”

  “Like Dad, in Afghanistan?”

  Becca caught her breath. Careful.

  “I don’t think this is your father, sweetheart.”

  How do you know? It could be.

  “Is he in trouble?”

  The phone rang.

  Digging her mobile out of her jeans, Becca silently thanked the universe for the reprieve. “Could be, but it sounds like reinforcements have arrived. Hello?”

  “Ms. Willoway? This is Cromwell Intensive Care.”

  The world paused. Becca sank onto a plate on the coffee table, legs quivering.

  “Your sister is awake.”

  oOo

  “She’s going to be fine,” Candice’s insistence shrilled across Julie’s vacant stare.

  “It’s brain damage, Mum,” Becca whispered. “You can’t make it better. It doesn’t just heal like a broken bone. You don’t know if she’s still in there.”

  Candice rounded on Becca. “Of course she is! She just needs rest. We’ll take her home this afternoon, we’ll get her better.”

  Becca frowned. “Straight from the ICU? Don’t they want to keep her for observation or rehab?”