He looked closer at the other tins and realised that each had its own yellowing label with a year scratched on it in pencil. There was no logic to the collection; some were stuffed with an assortment of old pens, others looked like spare parts for watches, one even had what seemed to be human hair.
The chance of finding more treasure was ended by a noise from the front garden — like a bear wrestling with a dustbin, the colonel had come back. As the front door creaked, Josh moved stealthily along the hallway and into the kitchen. The door to the back garden was wide open, and he bolted through it, hardly noticing the spotless, orderly table laid with a china tea service before he was taking the back steps two at a time down towards the garden.
Time seemed to slow as he descended and somewhere off in the distance he could hear music, an old-fashioned tinny gramophone sound. As his foot left the bottom step, the medal began to tingle in his hand. Ribbons of light were beginning to unravel from it, draining the colour from the world around him. The music grew louder, and he felt himself being pulled in many directions at once. He lost his balance and his grip tightened reflexively on the medal.
Closing his eyes, he felt the floor drop away from him and he instinctively put his free hand out to brace for the impact, but there was none. Instead, his fingers found a cold tiled wall.
3
1944
[Wolf’s Lair, Eastern Prussia. Date: 1944-20-07]
There’d been a few times in Josh’s life when he’d blanked out, lost moments or even entire evenings — usually due to alcohol. Worst case would normally involve waking in someone’s front garden or their shed, not in an underground washroom of the Third Reich.
The walls were covered with dark green and white tiles. On one side there was a line of white porcelain washbasins with gold taps and along the other was a series of wooden cubicles. The hand towels were neatly folded to ensure the embossed swastikas were prominently displayed.
The music he had heard was playing through a metal grilled speaker on the wall above his head. It too had the familiar symbol of the Nazi war machine.
Josh’s stomach lurched. He felt disorientated, off balance, the way you got from reading in the car. The overpowering smell of the toilets finally caught up with his other senses and he felt the clammy cold sweat that told him he had seconds to get to the toilet.
He pushed open the nearest stall to find himself staring into the face of a Nazi officer in full dress uniform. The man was staring at him in amazement, which was when Josh realised that he was totally naked.
The officer was every inch a classic German villain, including eye patch and leather-gloved hand. The gun he pulled out of his holster looked every bit the real thing.
There was a briefcase at the officer’s feet that Josh had knocked out of his hand with the door, and its contents had spilled onto the floor. It was a mess of wires, waxed paper cylinders and what looked like a timer. Part of Josh thought he should apologise and offer to help collect it up, but he changed his mind when the officer pointed the gun at Josh’s head and proceeded to use his gloved hand to scoop everything back into the case. Josh could see from the way he used it that it was artificial.
His nausea was forgotten in an instant, replaced by a cold knot of fear: the kind you experience when a loaded gun is being pointed at you — especially one that was so close that even a one-eyed man had little chance of missing.
Suddenly there was a loud knocking from the door marked ‘AUSGANG’ at the other end of the room. It was quickly followed by: ‘Herr General? Der Führer erwünscht Ihre sofortige Anwesenheit!’
The officer swore under his breath, holstered the gun and picked up the case with his good hand. He pushed past Josh and walked to the door. Before he opened it, he looked back and shook his head in disbelief.
In his rush to leave, Josh noticed that the officer had left one of the wax cylinders behind.
The lights in the washroom flickered and went out and Josh was standing back on the lawn in the garden of No. 42, naked, his clothes a few feet behind him in a crumpled heap. In his hand he was still holding the medal, which glowed every so faintly.
What the hell just happened?
Adrenalin was coursing through his veins as Josh’s mind started searching for a rational explanation, trying to process what he had just experienced, but the smell of toilets and a final wave of disorientation got the better of him and his stomach heaved; he fell to his knees, relieving himself of what remained of his breakfast.
As the nausea receded, he noticed the grass under his palms had been recently mowed — which he found really odd considering the state of the front garden. His eyes slowly adjusted to the brightness of daylight and he wiped his mouth as he sat back on his haunches. He filled his lungs with a deep breath of cool air and waited for the queasiness to subside. Josh realised then that the back garden was immaculately maintained, like something from the Chelsea Flower Show — another one of his mother’s favourites. He looked back to check that he hadn’t landed in a different garden, but the house behind him was definitely the colonel’s.
A shadow passed across one of the upper windows, as if someone was watching him, and Josh instinctively grabbed his clothes and bolted for the back fence.
4
Returned
Mr Bell was waiting for Josh when he appeared from the bushes. He was holding Josh’s Hi-Vis with an expression that fell somewhere between dismay and disappointment — it was a face Josh had grown accustomed to seeing on every adult he had ever had to deal with.
Josh could see the idiot he’d asked to cover for him, standing behind Mr Bell with a smug grin on his spotty face. Delland had obviously gone to the supervisor the moment Josh had left the park — knowing full well that it would result in him getting extra time. It was a challenge of sorts, a dare to score some respect from the others. Josh had met his type before, the over-ambitious mouthy ones that always got you into trouble.
‘Having a little problem with your bladder, Mr Jones?’ his supervisor asked sarcastically.
‘No, sir,’ Josh replied, squaring up to Mr Bell and staring directly into his eyes. Josh was taller than the man and more than capable of taking him down. ‘Is there a problem? I told twat-face to let you know,’ he added, nodding towards Delland. ‘I wasn’t gone more than five minutes.’
‘Ten actually,’ Bell responded, his eyes looking agitatedly from one side to the other. Josh had learned the staring technique from Lenin years ago. It intimidated people, and anyone who couldn’t hold it had already lost.
‘Ten!’ Josh could have sworn he had been away for longer. ‘Is there a law against that?’
‘Well, legally you’re under my supervision during the s-s-service,’ Bell started to stutter.
Josh continued to stay in his face. ‘So you’re going to do what exactly?’
‘W-w-well, I should report this.’ Josh shifted his weight as if preparing to fight. ‘B-but as this is o-obviously Delland’s mistake I think we can overlook it this time.’
Josh nodded and walked towards Delland as the others watched carefully, expecting a fight.
‘Crash, I didn’t mean nothing,’ Delland whimpered as Josh approached.
‘No, of course you didn’t,’ Josh said, holding out his hand. ‘No hard feelings?’
Delland took the hand nervously and Josh gripped it tightly as he leaned in to whisper: ‘Next time, I’ll leave the machete in your leg.’
As Josh trudged towards home, he could feel the weight of the medal in his coat pocket — he didn’t dare touch it, but the constant thudding against his leg brought back visions of the officer in the washroom. He was trying to convince himself that it was a flashback — a result of smoking too much dope when he was younger. His friends were always talking about the weird experiences they had months afterwards — but he hadn’t touched anything in over a year and it felt too real to be a hallucination. Even if it was, why would his subconscious conjure up some Nazi officer in a toilet? And what
was he doing with a bomb in his suitcase anyway?
There were too many questions flying around in his head, and no way to answer them. He considered going back to the colonel and asking him about where he got the medal, except that would involve admitting that he’d stolen it in the first place.
Josh tried to focus on the more immediate problems, like offloading the medal and settling up with Lenin for good. He would take it to Eddy, the local fence — who would shaft him on the price, but Josh had little choice. Everyone who went to Eddy was desperate.
The Bevin Estate was a thirty-minute walk from the Churchill Gardens. It had once featured on a Channel 4 documentary as a classic example of sixties inner-city planning gone wrong. Everywhere else in the country they were tearing down tenement blocks like his and replacing them with ‘social housing’. Someone had obviously forgotten the Bevin. Fifteen concrete high-rise monoliths glowered over the leafy suburbs of South London like the ugly second cousin that you try to avoid at family parties, but who followed you around silently with that sad look on their face.
He toyed with the idea of going straight over to Eddy’s shop and getting rid of the medal, but it was too close to dinner time and Josh had to make sure his mother ate.
Over the years his mother had slowly become a creature of habit. Everything had its place and meals were served at the same time every day. Multiple sclerosis was an unpredictable disease; her diet, and her medication had to be strictly regulated. Through years of trial and error, they had found a routine that had given her some sense of normality. But every so often, for no apparent reason, her MS would flare up, and he would spend weeks stuck in the flat nursing her back to something approaching normal.
He’d been doing this since he was twelve. His teenage years had been nothing like the others’ in his class. While they all had mountain bikes, Xboxes, iPhones and laptops, he had an agoraphobic mother who hadn’t left the flat in the last five years, and a list of debts as long as the opening credits in Star Wars.
What he’d discovered during these monotonous weeks of caring was a love of cars, or, more accurately, speed. His only release from the self-imposed prison sentence of his mother’s condition were the midnight joyrides around the empty streets of his town. Josh found he had a knack for getting into other people’s cars. There was something about his touch that short-circuited their alarm systems, and allowed him to override the ignition. He drove them fast so that the world became a stream of light beyond the window. For a few wonderful minutes, there was no past, no future, just the now.
Josh stopped at Malik’s corner shop to get something for dinner and some Rizlas for his mum. He checked the time: it was 5.30pm. The news channel was playing on an old TV that Malik had wedged into a shelf behind the counter. Footage of fireworks going off over Berlin were overlaid by a ticker tape feed running across the bottom stating:
GERMANY CELEBRATES 15 YEARS SINCE REUNIFICATION.
Josh read the words quietly under his breath. It was the way he had taught himself to conquer the dyslexia, to stop the letters from jumping around.
‘Hey, Malik. What’s with the party?’ he said, nodding at the TV.
‘Oh that,’ Malik said nonchalantly, looking up from his paper, ‘anniversary of the Brandenburg gate, or the Berlin Wall, or something like that. You know, back in the nineties when East Germany rejoined with West.’
Josh had no idea what Malik was talking about, and he was too tired to ask any more questions.
‘Settle up tomorrow. OK?’ Josh said as he took the shopping.
‘Yeah, no probs,’ said Malik, going back to his crossword. ‘Say hello to your mum.’
5
The Flat
His mum was in the front room as usual; he could hear the sounds of her favourite TV show and caught the scent of the joint she was smoking as soon as he closed the front door.
Cannabis was one of the best remedies for her spasms. She used to be able to restrict her ‘medicine’ to those times when she was feeling rough, but he had noticed that recently she was smoking every day.
Initially Josh had tried to persuade her to eat rather than smoke the dope, but she was addicted to the nicotine as well, and he couldn’t face trying to force her to kick that habit at the same time.
‘Hi, love,’ she shouted from the other room, ‘had a good day?’
‘Yeah, Mum. Just putting your dinner on,’ he called back as he unpacked the shopping: two pieces of white fish in a boil-in-the-bag sauce — it was hardly a feast, but it was easy, and he was too tired to do anything fancy.
As the pan of water began to bubble, he took the medal carefully out of his pocket. It was cross-shaped, with oak leaves where the ribbon connected. At the centre was a Nazi symbol encircled by letters in a language he couldn’t make out — except for the name ‘Stauffenberg’. It was a name he had a feeling he should know, but the reason escaped him.
As he held it in the palm of his hand, glowing lines began to rise from its surface. Concerned that he might trigger another flashback, he folded it into a piece of newspaper and hid it under some tea towels in a kitchen drawer. He knew it would be safe in there; his mother hadn’t been in the kitchen in years, let alone attempted to help with any washing up.
The name of the German officer was annoying him. The answer was flickering just outside his reach, like a fly buzzing around the back of his head. He would have to ask Mrs B. tomorrow. She lived next door and was the oldest person he knew — she was always banging on about the war. Her surname was Bateman but everyone called her Mrs B. She’d been friends with his mother for what felt like forever, and would sometimes look after her when Josh couldn’t. The lady was ancient, her skin so thin that it had a kind of translucent quality, but she still had all her marbles and an uncanny knack for seeing through every lie Josh had ever told her.
‘How’s Mrs Davies?’ his mother asked as Josh placed the tray of steaming white fish onto her lap. This was not the first time she had forgotten about Mrs Davies.
‘She’s gone, Mum. Left after her husband ran off with that woman from 21A.’
‘Tart. She was always after him,’ she muttered as she dug around under her leg for the remote control.
Josh laughed at the joke again, but he made a mental note to check his diary later. She usually had memory issues just before a flare up, which was the last thing he needed right now.
They ate together in silence, watching some pointless game show. Josh watched her more than the screen — he loved the way she would snort at all of the lame jokes or shout the answer before the contestant. His mum had watched so many of these programmes that she had become something of an expert on unusual and random facts.
‘Did you know that the moon is the second densest object in the solar system?’
‘No, Mum. I thought it was made of cheese.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Joshua. That Brian Cox is a very clever man. It’s fascinating, astrology and all that.’
‘Astronomy,’ he corrected her.
‘Yeah, that too.’ Her concentration lapsed as her eyes returned to the TV screen.
She had told him once that she was studying at university when she had fallen pregnant, but he couldn’t remember what subjects she was taking. They never spoke about who was the father. It was a forbidden subject, but Josh knew that she had dropped out and never finished her degree. There were moments when her mind cleared, and he saw the fierce intelligence still burning behind her eyes, but it was buried deep and was surfacing less and less.
‘Your friend Lenny came round again today,’ she said as she swept up the final remnants of cod and parsley sauce with her fork. She had eaten it all without looking down once, her eyes permanently fixed on the TV screen. Josh never failed to be amazed how she could do that — it was like a superpower — she just seemed to know instinctively where the food was.
‘He’s a funny bugger. Always acting like he’s the big man. I remember when he filled his wellies with wee in reception.�
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Josh had to bite his lip. Only his mother would have the balls to bring up that particular incident. Lenin’s family had been very poor when he was younger and used to send him to primary school in wellies and on one particular occasion he couldn’t be bothered to ask to go to the toilet and simply pissed down his leg into his boots. Josh could still hear the sound of the squelching as he was marched out of the class.
‘Did he say what he wanted?’ he asked, trying to sound disinterested, even though the fact that Lenin had turned up at his flat was a serious issue: a personal house call was unheard of. It was usually one of his minions, all of whom Josh knew well and could handle without much of a problem, but for Lenin to come himself and to have him talk to his mum — that was basically like saying, ‘You’re in deep shit sunshine!’
‘Oh, the usual nonsense. Something about you borrowing something that he needs back by tomorrow. He was quite nasty about it. The sooner we get out of this dump and find you some better friends the better. He’s not good for you.’
‘One day, Mum,’ he said as he lifted the tray off her lap.
Anachronist Page 2
