Jay, Lizzie and the Tale of the Stairs

by G J Lee

  Chapter 23

  The Streets Where I Live

  Albert and Maureen didn’t like the idea.

  “I don’t like it,” Albert said shaking his head, “even just to the end of the street and back.”

  “Neither do I,” echoed his wife. “I mean, what if somebody sees through your disguise and the police catch you. We’ll be the talk of Shad Hill. Make no mistake about that.”

  I could see their point. What if I was discovered? How would we explain away the fact that I come from the future. That both myself and Lizzie have been tripping through time whenever we feel like it. But I really wanted to have a look at our street in 1946. I couldn’t tell you exactly why. Maybe it was that morbid curiosity thing again. Or maybe just something as simple as finding a connection with the past. One thing was certain, if Mum wasn’t ill in hospital I don’t think I would have felt this urge to go wandering the dark streets of 1946. Dealing with Mum’s illness had been like walking in water. You try to carry on as normal but everything’s slowed right down. The added pressure, the extra burden, means you struggle on, waiting for someone to rescue you, so things can return to the way it was. But no-one does. No-one is even near enough to help. Even though I was still young I could already plot the cycle of birth and the horrible D Word. How the past was very much alive in the people we know now. How the past makes us who we are today. I felt like I needed to connect with the past to show myself that I had an understanding of the world my great Grandparents and even my Grandparents would have been familiar with.

  That somehow it would bring me closer to Mum.

  I needed to go out. Just this once.

  So I told Albert and Maureen exactly that. I told them how much I loved and missed my Mum. How the daily routine for Dad and me had become one of treading water, waiting for bad news. How I couldn’t tell Mum how much I love and miss her. How she might never know. Taking a walk down our street before Mum had even opened her eyes to the sun and the rain would help me start to fix the wounds that words can’t.

  Albert nodded and puffed on his pipe and Maureen stared straight at me, twisting the worn tea-towel in her lap.

  Lizzie simply pulled fluff from the carpet.

  After I’d finished explaining Albert looked thoughtfully at Maureen but Maureen blinked this stare away, choosing to finish her kitchen duties. Albert sighed and turned to me.

  “Do you like poetry, Jay?” he asked, taking his pipe from his mouth.

  I shrugged. I told him about Mr Butler and his poem. I liked that because I understood the feelings of the character. Albert went to one of the drawers in the cabinet by the wall and produced a small book. It was dark blue with some gold writing on the front cover. He gently handed it to me.

  “Read page sixty two,” he said softly, “then put on that disguise of yours.”

  Lizzie looked at me and smiled and I smiled right back.

  “And don’t go too far.”

  On a later visit I copied the poem out. Here it is:

  What shall we Know

  What shall we know when the candle of Life

  Slowly flickers, and then goes quickly out?

  Will all the pain, will all the bitter strife

  Persist, as one stage further in the rout?

  What shall we know of Beauty left behind,

  Will it perish in a moment’s space?

  This beauty of human form, shall we find

  That it was of little concern, a place

  For a more real spirit which will forget

  The transient beauty in a lover’s eyes,

  The bodily forms of those we have met,

  Shall these be dead, never again to rise,

  When the candle flickers, will memory fail,

  Will that be the end of this uncertain tale?

  Like anything I read, I had to read it a second time, tracing the words on the page with my fingers. Albert had gone to stand at the window and Lizzie had skittered up stairs to find some make-up and an old coat. When I finished I closed the cover carefully and now ran my fingers over the shapes of the gold lettering, tracing them like a blind man would do. It grandly said Second World War Airforce Poetry. As with Mr Butler’s poem, my mind was swimming with the words I had just read, trying to place them in an order which would make sense to me. I couldn’t and Lizzie called me upstairs. But some words kept returning, like a determined wasp or a friendly cat.

  ...the bodily forms of those we have met, shall these be dead, never again to rise, when the candle flickers, will memory fail, will that be the end of this uncertain tale?

  When I came back downstairs twenty minutes later Albert removed his pipe from his mouth in surprise and Maureen stood with an uncertain smile, still wringing the worn tea-towel. Lizzie made me do a twirl. And I did. Reluctantly.

  Lizzie had found a heavy black coat from her Dad’s wardrobe. Although I was tall for my age it was big on me, my hands hidden by the long sleeves and its bottom reaching down beyond my knees. It also smelt old and damp, like books taken down from the loft. Lizzie had also chosen an old cap from several that Albert didn’t wear anymore. Back in my time I still saw some old men wear them. Grandad did sometimes. This one was grey with feint white stripes. It was big and smelled mouldy and old. But, like Lizzie said, ‘it’ll do’. The fabric of both the coat and the cap was heavy and itchy and uncomfortable to wear. Her Dad’s old trousers were far too long and big at the waist so my jeans stayed on. My white trainers were a problem though and I had to go back to my bedroom again to grab my only pair of black shoes from my wardrobe. While I was there I made sure I looked at the time. I surprised to see that it was three in the morning. I was going to be knackered again tomorrow. Still, it was half-term soon, so I tried to forget about it.

  Lizzie spent the most time on my face and hands, trying to hide the grey, ghostly colour that came with time-travel. Like Mum back in my time she had used a pad to put it on. And like Dad often said to Mum, ‘she might have saved time by using a trowel. ’Lizzie’s idea sort of worked. Not close-up of course and at a distance I still looked a little odd, but in the darkness we were convinced that I would get away with it.

  “Just don’t talk to anybody,” Lizzie said.

  As I shuffled uneasily towards the front door with my hands stuffed firmly in the pockets of the coat (there was an old handkerchief in there. I stuffed it under the sofa) I felt like some sort of spy. Even the Raynors couldn’t stifle a snigger at my expense. Lizzie put on her coat, opened the front door and we were out, catapulted into Shad Hill, 1946.

  It was totally dark by now and a chilly, blustery wind was attacking the smoke coming out of the chimneys. There was still very little street light and only a weak and yellow glow shone through the curtains of the front room windows of Lizzie’s neighbours. It was also really quiet. No cars. No shouts. Nothing. Now I felt really nervous. As the front door clunked shut behind us I was showered with the feeling that this wasn’t such a good idea after all.

  “I’m not liking this,” I said to Lizzie.

  She put her arm through mine. “C’mon scardey-cat. We’ll be back before you know it.”

  And so we walked along the uneven pavement and I kept my head down and my hands stuffed firmly in the pockets of the long coat. Lizzie had to take little clopping steps to keep up with my nervous pace.

  Although the overall layout of my street was almost the same lots of things were different. Take something simple like the pavement. In my time you walked on big grey slabs, evenly laid and you could rely on them in the dark. I had only walked twenty or thirty yards when I stumbled onto hard earth with the top of what looked like a pipe sticking out. I stepped over this and off the pavement and into the road and quickly realised that it wasn’t a road. Well, not in the modern sense. It was just a wide dusty track with no tarmac or road markings. Becoming braver by the second I started to peer out of my shell, looking up and around.

  Just as a car turned the corner into our road and trundled towards us
.

  The glare from its headlights caught us like escaped prisoners and for a moment that’s what we were. I retreated again into the big overcoat. Lizzie pulled on my arm and then we were walking and I chanced a look as the car drew nearer and then passed us. The car was heavy, all gleaming chrome and metal. It sounded heavier too, the engine working hard even though it was moving slowly. I saw the dark shape of a man in a hat smoking a cigarette at the steering wheel. He paid us no attention whatsoever and the steel monster wobbled on up the road leaving the air around us dripping with the smell of petrol. Further on it slowed and rumbled left onto the main road at the end of our street, the same one I had seen Dad turn into a million times in his white van on the way to work. There was no indication that the car was turning left but I did see the driver stick out an arm.

  Relieved we walked to the point where the car had turned and stood looking left and right. There were a few more old street lights here and the road seemed to be made up of lots of stones and cobbles. Again there were no road markings and I noticed that there were gaps between some of the houses, looking like decayed teeth had been pulled out of a rotten mouth. I was dallying and Lizzie pulled me to her. We slowed. Then stopped.

  We had reached the end of our street.

  I noticed another gap between the houses, further down and across the other side of the road. The bricks and broken wooden window frames had simply been pushed back into the gap, left in a big pile and ignored.

  “What’s happened here?” I asked Lizzie already kind of knowing the answer.

  “Bloody Germans,” replied Lizzie.

  “What, bombs?”

  Lizzie nodded. She pointed at the pile of rubble. “Mrs Harcourt was killed in that one.”

  I was horrified. “What? Dead?” I said, realising the D word had slipped out without warning.

  Lizzie looked at me with that you-really-are-stupid look again. “When you’re killed, Jay, you normally end up dead.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  Lizzie was suddenly serious again. “That was four years ago now. I would have been six.”

  We stood looking at the jumbled bits of crumbled living across the street and the wind gently reminded us that we should turn back.

  “Brimson College.”

  Lizzie looked at me. “I beg your pardon?”

  “My school, Brimson College. Is it still here? I mean, has it been built yet?”

  “Pauline’s school isn’t far away, but it’s not called Brimson College,” said Lizzie. “It’s called The King’s School.”

  I rolled the name around my head. The King’s School. The King’s School. Then I said it out loud.

  “The King’s School.”

  It sounded so much grander than boring old Brimson College.

  “Why?” asked Lizzie impatiently. “We have to be getting back. We promised Mum and Dad.”

  “I know, I know.” It would be great to see my school. See how it used to be. “Lizzie, which way do we go to get to Pauline’s school?”

  Lizzie pointed in the opposite direction to the way we had started to go. “That way.”

  I felt a sudden rush of excitement and offered my arm to Lizzie.

  Lizzie was suspicious. “Where are we going?”

  “To school.”

  And we did. Head bowed and hands stuffed deep into pockets, past the occasional parked car, the odd, strangely dressed pedestrian, corner shops and singing from pubs, several bumpy cyclists and a noisy, smelly motorbike. I had to keep telling myself that all these things were just shadows of a time long gone and that they really didn’t exist. That they were all like fallen, dead leaves, kicked up and into the air one last time.

  Or were they?

  I had seen sci-fi movies like this, where the idea that different moments in time can co-exist together like lanes on a motorway. A change of direction, a moment’s indecision, and anybody could find themselves in King Harold’s army or in a Victorian workhouse. So were all these very solid objects, people, concerns, feelings, were they all just shouts in the distance? Could I be witnessing something thrown up, for a brief, forgetful instant, then gone forever? Or were these things very solid and very real? Would Lizzie grow up to be a beautiful young woman? Would she live to find her brother again? And as we walked I stole a glance at Lizzie bouncing and smiling beside me. She would be an old woman, a pensioner, in my time. She might still be smiling, maybe showing false teeth. If she was still alive then that it wouldn’t be just ‘my time.’ It wouldn’t just be ‘Lizzie’s time.’ It would be 'our time'

  It seemed hard to believe that I could have passed her as an old woman on the street.

  At that point my mind went wobbly and the math became really hard to do so I concentrated on the here and now.

  We stopped briefly outside what I took to be a small newsagents shop. Beneath a window a large piece of paper had been jammed behind a crooked wire mesh showing the headlines of the day. I squinted to read as Lizzie stood beside me.

  “What’s this all about?” I asked her.

  Lizzie stooped and read the sign slowly. “Nur-em-berg Nazis con-demned to death.”

  She stood up and I looked at her.

  “Any ideas?” I said, mildly interested.

  “No,” she shrugged and moved off.

  Turning into Charlotte Street (the street sign was still there in my time) I made out the shape of the school in the dark distance but our attention was drawn to two men wobbling and singing towards us. I looked at them from under my hat and saw that they were two soldiers. In the drakness I could make out that they both wore green uniforms and wore heavy boots that clicked heavily on the pavement. Lizzie hesitated. Any obvious decision to avoid them would probably only make them curious so I led Lizzie forward.

  They had been drinking, that was for sure. And they both held onto each other for support. Both held cigarettes. Both were laughing, smiling happy and both were attempting to sing snippets of songs together. Now, let’s be clear, these soldiers were young. Late teens maybe. In my time most people approaching a pair of drunk teenagers on a dark night might have crossed the street to avoid them. But we didn’t and I needn’t have worried. Surprisingly, they both removed the soft caps they had on. Then they parted and made a point of letting us pass between them.

  “Good evening kind sir,” one slurred and the other one giggled good-naturedly. “And, oh, good evening young lady.”

  “Hello,” replied Lizzie sweetly.

  The smell of alcohol and cigarettes was strong as we passed through them. But then we were clear and we crossed over the road and the soldiers straggled on. Laughing. Singing. Smoking.

  “Phew,” I said to Lizzie.

  “That’s disgraceful,” she muttered.

  “I thought they were nice.”

  “They were drunk!”

  “But polite.”

  “I s’pose.”

  “Cause I tell you what, in my time anything could have happened.”

  I could tell Lizzie was thinking about this, was forming an idea of what the future might be like beyond what she’s seen of our house. It wasn’t good. I made a mental note to describe it to her, to even take her down our street sometime.

  I smiled at the idea.

  From a distance The King’s School wasn’t a bit like Brimson College. As far as I could see the school was just a collection of old stone buildings with slate roofs. There was also a small church on the grounds as a tall spire rose up darkly with a cross sat squarely on top. We stood by a grey stone wall that I suddenly realised was still outside the school in my time. Well, bits of it anyway. Because even now some parts of the wall had collapsed and there were gaps. I held out my hand and ran it over the rough stones as my mind tried to close the gap of decades. The wall was here now, had clearly been here for a very long time, and parts of it still stood in my time. Who knows how many people had walked by where I stood now. What the wall had seen.

  I found this amazing

  Lizzie
was getting anxious and jittery. “C’mon, Jay. Mum and Dad will be worried.” She had obviously picked up that I was having a moment. “Do you recognise any of this?”

  “Just this wall,” and I continued touching the past.

  Lizzie was right. We had to go. I had seen what I wanted to see. I had reached out and held a part of me. But a long time ago.

  So we turned away from The King’s College and went back the way we had come, back under the weak light of the few street lamps, past the terraced houses shaded and dark, the flowers and shrubs of the semi-detached and the quiet shops. Lizzie had taken a short cut that I didn’t recognise. It took us through a back alley that was just a dirt track covered in weeds and loose stones. An aeroplane droned way overhead and I stopped to look up into the night sky of 1946.

  How I came to recognise the house I can’t remember, but I know that I could see a lone street light some distance away flashing on and off, spluttering and coughing its thin yellow glow out towards us. This light could have been the trigger.

  Without this faulty light I might never have come back.

  Whatever the cause I suddenly felt the wash of fear I experienced when I was in the cupboard with the bucket and the coats and the lamp. It was horrible. I felt an urge to run. To get away. To escape. I remember putting out a hand to steady myself against somebody’s back wall. Lizzie came to kneel worriedly beside me.

  “Jay? Are you alright?”

  I wasn’t alright. I was being physically sick. Coughing up fluid and bile and some of the food I had earlier. I felt dreadful.

  “G…get me a…away from here,” I managed to say to Lizzie in between retching. Lizzie’s Dad’s hat fell to earth and rolled away.

  Lizzie was concerned. “Jay, what’s wrong? What’s happened?”

  All I could manage was a shake of my head. Lizzie was small but she was determined. She put one arm around me and helped me to some sort of upright position where I could at least attempt a shuffle.

  Then the house came into view.

  It seemed to struggle to its feet like some heavy beast to stare at me from over its back wall. It seemed like the two windows on the second floor studied me as I studied it. The lids of its eyes were half-closed, as if half asleep, but it knew I was there, was warning me to stay clear. The grey face surrounding the eyes was cracked, maybe a hundred years old, and where repair had been attempted they only seemed like running sores. I now stood completely upright. I was transfixed and hypnotised with the horror of what I thought I saw. Lizzie followed my stare.

  “What is it?” Almost a whisper. “What’s wrong?”

  I could only manage a brief shake of my head. It felt like any sound would wake this monster further and would send it lumbering all claws and teeth after us. For now though it made no sound. There were no lights. No further clues to what it was thinking or about to do.

  The feeling passed and the beast slowly returned to its quiet sleep.

  Of course the house couldn't be alive, and it wasn't. But I thought it had. I had actually felt it was alive and watching me. Pretty soon afterwards I had flashes of the cupboard. These flashes passed through me like scissors through paper. I saw the bucket, the back of the door with the coats hung up, the dust and an old spider web seen by the light of the weak lamp light. Then it was gone again. Fluttering into distance like bats.

  I took hold of Lizzie then, held her thin arm tightly, and led her running out of the back alley.

  “Jay? Jay? Ow, you’re hurting me!”

  I had no idea where I was running too. All I knew was that I had to get out. To get away. Just get away before the feeling returned.

  We erupted from the back alley and onto the street just before the turning into our road. There was nobody to witness my panic and Lizzie’s shouts and whines. But as soon as we were out of that alley, were clear of the blinking light and the sleeping creature there, I felt what remained of the horrors tumble away like rocks thrown from a cliff edge. I slowed and caught my breath. Lizzie had broken free and was staring at me with wide-eyed concern.

  “I think you should explain.”

  “I need to go home,” I said guiltily. I couldn’t really explain. Not now, anyway.

  Lizzie didn’t take my arm for what remained of our journey home. We walked in silence and I simply retreated back into my shell. I realised that I didn’t have a hat. It had fallen off in the alley and there was just no way I was going back to get it.

  Lizzie said she’d get it in the morning.

  Not for the first time in the last few weeks I was troubled. What now? What does this mean?

  I was starting to think that these ‘special powers’, these ‘gifts’, were becoming a curse.