Anachronist

by Andrew Hastie

  ‘Yeah right,’ Josh growled as he walked off.

  The hospital ward was like a waiting room for the nearly departed. Visitors sat beside their sick relatives reading old magazines, sipping tea from cardboard cups or just staring blankly into space while they tried to think of something to say that didn’t involve illness or death.

  His mother was sitting up in bed with tubes running into each arm. She looked fragile and small, like a little doll. Her face had aged — as if the episode had drained her, but when she saw him the dark lines melted away under the warmth of her smile.

  It was in these moments that he remembered how hard it was for her, never knowing when this disease would come back. She was damned to live a life of two halves: one spent suffering and the other waiting for it to return. There were only brief moments of happiness in between: when she would lose herself in a TV programme or score a small win on the lottery.

  ‘Hi, Mum,’ he said, leaning over to give her a kiss on the cheek.

  ‘Hello, dear,’ she whispered hoarsely.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, you know. Same old rubbish. Doctor said it would be a few weeks at least.’

  Joshua sat down and put the bag with her things into the bedside cabinet.

  ‘Yeah, I know. I’ve brought you a few bits and pieces from home.’

  ‘My tickets?’ Her eyes widened.

  ‘Yes. And some underwear and a toothbrush. The usual stuff.’

  ‘And?’ She was like a child at Christmas.

  ‘And a lucky dip for the Euromillions. It’s the largest rollover in two years apparently.’ He handed her the ticket.

  She held the paper as though it were made of gold. ‘This is the one, Joshy. I can feel it in my bones. It will be . . . what’s the word? Kar- something.’

  ‘Karma?’

  ‘Yeah, like that. I always get a win when I’m ill. Check your diary thingy. You’ll see.’

  She was probably right. Her numbers did always seem to come up during her relapses — it came as a small comfort during the long nights to know that at least they would be able to keep the lights on for another week.

  ‘Mum. About the flat . . .’ Josh faltered. There was a lump in his throat. He had rehearsed this conversation in his head all the way here on the bus.

  Her face fell, the happiness vanishing as she shrank back into her pillow. ‘I don’t want to go back there,’ she said, shaking her head.

  That wasn’t the answer he was expecting.

  ‘The council have sent us a letter.’ He produced the envelope, knowing full well that she wouldn’t want to read it. ‘They say we have to be out in a month. We’re behind on the rent.’

  ‘Good riddance. They can keep it.’

  ‘But where are we going to go, Mum? You can’t stay in here forever, and I’m sleeping on Mrs B’s sofa.’

  His mother looked away sheepishly, unable to look him in the eye as she spoke. ‘I can stay with Aunty Julie for a while. Just till I get back on my feet. She came in yesterday and made me promise.’

  Aunt Julie despised Josh. She had always blamed him for his mother’s illness and hadn’t ever been afraid to hide her feelings about him.

  ‘Think of it as a holiday, love.’ His mother tried to make light of it. ‘Just while the council finds us another flat.’

  She had no idea that they were about to get evicted. Josh had hidden the letters and the final demands. He knew that the stress would have kicked off another episode.

  ‘What about our stuff? What am I supposed to do with it?’

  ‘Burn it for all I care. There’s nothing worth keeping.’

  ‘But it was our home!’ he said a little too loudly in the quiet ward. People began to stare.

  She put her hand on his as if to calm him.

  ‘They are only things, love. Bits of rubbish that we’ve collected over the years. As long as we have each other, we don’t need anything else.’

  ‘But Dad’s stuff. It’s all I have of him.’

  She scoffed. ‘Oh, Joshua. Your father never gave us a thing. I just made it up to keep you from asking too many questions.’

  ‘The photo? The one at the beach?’

  ‘That was taken by some stranger who was passing.’ Her eyes closed and she sighed deeply. ‘I have been thinking about it while I’ve been stuck in here — it’s time you knew the truth. There never was anybody that you could call a dad. Just one stupid night at a party. I don’t remember much about it, to be honest, but what he gave me was the best present I could ever wish for.’

  She stroked his cheek, her eyes glistening with tears. ‘I’m sorry, son, but I don’t want you to waste time looking for something that never existed.’

  As she spoke, the facade that he’d built of his father crumbled away. For years he had pasted layer upon layer of false memories over the gap where his dad should have been — using half-remembered stories or photographs he’d found in boxes of old polaroids. Like old wallpaper, the layers peeled off in one go to expose the isolation he’d been hiding from for so long, and he realised it didn’t matter.

  He’d never had a father — no amount of wishing for one would change that. His mother was all he’d ever known and that was enough. So he didn’t have much to show for the last seventeen years. A few fading photographs and two swimming medals didn’t really sum up his life — his criminal record was far more extensive and they were about to be sealed by the courts.

  This was his chance to start again.

  He was a survivor. No matter what life had thrown at him so far he had adapted and overcome it. All for her, she was the only thing he cared about, the reason he took the risks. The doctors were hinting that soon she would need full-time professional care. He couldn’t bear the thought of her stuck in some residential home with a bunch of strangers, but he was running out of options.

  He needed a plan. First, he had to get Lenin off his back and move his mum away from the estate — into a better neighbourhood. Perhaps he could even use her condition to get placed higher up the waiting list.

  Her breathing had softened, and he knew she had fallen asleep. He’d wanted to tell her about the colonel — not the whole time-travel thing, but something to whet her appetite. He wasn’t sure how it was going to help them, but he had a feeling that it was an opportunity to get them out of their situation. He just needed to find the right angle.

  17

  Training

  Josh went back home to pick up the last of his things: some clothes, his diary and a shoebox of old photos, which he had hidden under a floorboard in his bedroom.

  He didn’t realise there was someone else in the flat until he was leaving. The electricity was off, and it was getting late — making it virtually impossible to see who was rummaging around in the front room. He put down the last of his belongings carefully and picked up the baseball bat they kept behind the door. He gripped it tightly, as if he were going in to bat for the Redsocks.

  There might not be much of his home left, but it was still all he had. It was probably a squatter or a junkie looking for somewhere to bed down for the night. He didn’t care. This would be retribution for all the shit he’d been put through in the last week.

  Josh crept quietly towards the front room, catching the woody aroma of pipe smoke as he got closer. Squinting into the gloom, he could just make out a large figure sitting in the armchair; the unmistakeable frizzy outline of the colonel’s hair was silhouetted against the glow of the street lights that shone through the window behind him.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Joshua. I’ve been waiting for you,’ the colonel’s gruff voice announced. His face was suddenly lit up by flame as he re-ignited the pipe and puffed furiously on it. Josh couldn’t help but notice that his beard had grown back to its usual bushy size again. He looked like a dark Santa Claus.

  ‘They appear to have done quite a number on your home,’ the colonel observed, once his pipe was alight. />
  Josh looked around the room. Someone had used the walls for graffiti practice while he was out. If it had been a car, they would have set it on fire by now. He dropped the baseball bat onto the sofa and sat down.

  ‘Not my home, not any more,’ Josh conceded, as if finally admitting defeat.

  ‘Nonsense! This is merely temporary. We could go back a few days and fit better locks on that front door of yours — or even a better door if you wish?’

  ‘No — it’s OK. I’m done with this place,’ Josh replied. He got the impression that the colonel had been drinking.

  ‘Good,’ the colonel said, getting unsteadily to his feet. ‘Then I have a job you can help me with.’

  ‘Why?’

  The colonel took out a candle and lit it, placing it on the mantelpiece where the fake fireplace used to be.

  ‘Because you have a talent, and it would be a great shame to waste it.’

  Josh had never been told he had a talent for anything, apart from stealing cars.

  ‘Will I get paid?’ asked Josh.

  ‘What?’ barked the colonel, seeming rather taken aback by the question.

  ‘Well, I kind of need cash — and you said “job” so I’m thinking I should get paid?’

  The colonel burst into raucous laughter, the kind that came up from the belly and took a while to die out.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Josh asked.

  The colonel wiped a tear from his eye and blew his nose on a large handkerchief.

  ‘Sorry. It’s been a while since I’ve had a good laugh.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So you’re the first apprentice that has ever asked to be paid.’ He chuckled again.

  ‘Well, the others must all be mugs, then. Or loaded.’

  ‘Sorry. Yes, of course. It’s just I haven’t thought about money in such a long time. You forget what it means to not have it.’

  Josh had never thought of the colonel as a rich man. In fact, he had always assumed the opposite. By the look of his clothes and the state of his house, it was reasonable to think that he didn’t have a penny.

  ‘Are you rich?’ asked Josh curiously, ‘like some eccentric millionaire?’

  ‘Not as such no . . . But let’s just say my “employers” make sure that I have everything I need.’ The colonel walked around the room picking random objects up off the floor and placing them back into their original positions. Josh was astonished to see that the old man knew exactly where they should go.

  ‘So they have a lot of money?’

  ‘Amongst other things.’

  ‘So I get paid then, yeah? Say, like, three hundred quid a day?’

  ‘Whoa! You don’t even know what the job is yet! Three hundred pounds may seem awfully low when you find out what it is we have to do.’

  Josh shrugged. ‘Well, I need three Gs by tomorrow. So is it worth as much as that?’

  ‘Where we’re going, tomorrow will feel like a lifetime away.’ The colonel took out his watch and tapped one of the many dials, as if it were stuck. ‘This is not the place to have this conversation. Let’s take a walk back to my house and I’ll tell you all about it.’

  Josh was about to leave when he remembered the diary and ran back into his bedroom to retrieve it. He took one last look around his room and waved it a mental goodbye — he had a feeling he was never going to see it again.

  ‘Got your own almanac, I see,’ the colonel said, pointing to the diary. ‘Useful things, books.’

  ‘There is just one other thing,’ Josh said as they walked out into the hall.

  ‘Ask away.’

  ‘What is it with your hair? Three days ago you looked totally different. Does travelling through time make your hair go weird?’

  The colonel looked at himself in what was left of the hall mirror and patted his hair down.

  ‘Three days may have elapsed for you, but it’s been more like three months since I saw you last — I realise it may take some time to get used to all this.’

  Outside the rain lashed the pavement. It had cleared the streets of all but a few of the hardiest of pedestrians. A gang of boys sat silently on their BMXs under the cover of a dripping walkway watching the colonel and Josh as they made their way out of the estate.

  ‘What’s Crash up to now?’ asked one of them.

  ‘No idea,’ said another, taking out his phone and typing:

  CRASH HANGING OUT WITH CRAZY COLONEL. WAT 2 DO?

  Lenin’s response was almost immediate.

  FOLLOW.

  18

  The First Lesson

  ‘Before we embark on anything too adventurous, there are a few ground rules I need to go through with you,’ the colonel said as he pushed the overloaded shopping trolley of bric-a-brac along the pavement. There wasn’t a lot of room under his pink umbrella and Josh was beginning to question whether he should even be seen in public with the man; he smelt of booze and was acting strangely. Yet, certain things he’d said were starting to make sense — which wasn’t a great indication of Josh’s own mental state, but he ignored the alarm bells in his head — he needed the money.

  The rain was beginning to tail off as they walked through the shopping arcade. They passed the last of the late-night shoppers who were slowly dragging themselves homeward — arms loaded with plastic bags. Josh watched the way they actively avoided the colonel and his trolley. It was a clever defence mechanism; no one made eye contact with a crazy man, especially one who was pushing a load of rubbish. A perfect way to make yourself unapproachable, if not invisible. Josh would’ve had exactly the same reaction as everyone else a couple of days ago.

  ‘First, and most importantly, you never go back into your own timeline,’ instructed the colonel, holding up his index finger as if to indicate there would be at least four more rules.

  One of the wheels stuck on the trolley, and he spent a minute kicking it back into alignment.

  ‘Changing your own line causes all sorts of complications and paradoxes, and it’s not something you’ll even remember afterwards. Like drinking a bottle of tequila, you almost always end up dead or worse.’

  ‘What could be worse?’

  ‘Excised. Expunged. Redacted. Removed from history, disappeared, never having existed.’

  Josh wasn’t sure that was really worse, since the dead didn’t tend to care if anyone remembered who they were, but he decided now was probably not the right time to push the issue.

  ‘The second point is about the future —’ the colonel began as they came to the corner of the high street and he proceeded to walk straight out in front of an oncoming bus. Josh instinctively reached out to grab him, but the old man was too quick. The bus driver had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting him. Passengers on board went flying forward, and the driver blared his horn and swore at him through the glass.

  Josh went after the trolley as it began to rattle down the road under its own steam. The colonel, meanwhile, was gesticulating at the driver.

  He managed to control the trolley and drag the colonel to the other side of the road before the bus driver got out of his cab.

  ‘What is wrong with you?’

  The colonel grabbed Josh’s hand and tapped a button on the side of his watch — time reversed around them — seconds later they were back on the other side of the road waiting for the bus to pass. This time, the colonel waved at the driver as he went by.

  ‘Nobody can travel into the future. As Shakespeare said: it’s the undiscovered country, too many unknowns, too many variables. There are no paths to follow.’

  ‘You’re fricking crazy,’ Josh said under his breath, watching the bus disappear round the corner.

  ‘An unfortunate side-effect of the job. Years of a non-linear existence can slightly disconnect you from reality, like jet lag. By the way, I don’t care for the attitude. It really doesn’t suit you.’

  ‘All right, Grandad. What century are you from anyway?’

  ‘Well, since you ask. I was born in 940 — in your
terms, that’s the tenth. We tend to use a different system, though, one that has a longer perspective.’

  They turned onto Churchill Avenue.

  ‘So you have travelled into the future,’ Josh stated smugly.

  ‘Yes. In the same way that most people do. One day at a time.’

  Josh calculated the man’s age in his head, maths had been one of his only strong points at school. ‘That makes you over a thousand years old.’

  ‘If you take into account that I’ve spent more than three hundred and fifty years in the past, I’m actually nearer to fourteen hundred. Ageing doesn’t stand still when you go back, you know. You’re still subject to the same temporal laws of the universe, but they seem to affect us less.’

  ‘So how long do you live?’

  ‘Barring accidents and other terminal situations, fifteen-hundred years, but some of the High Council are allegedly nearer two millennia.’

  ‘So you’re, like, nearly immortal?’

  ‘Now you’re beginning to understand my predicament. A lot of memories to try to keep track of,’ the colonel said, tapping the side of his head, ‘and birthdays are not quite what they used to be.’

  He left the trolley in the front garden and marched up the front steps of No. 42 two at a time.

  19

  Cabinets of Curiosities

  The first floor of the colonel’s house was like a museum, in stark contrast to the chaos of the hallway and stairs. The large Victorian rooms on this level were full of glass display cabinets, each containing meticulously labelled artefacts.

  ‘These are cabinets of curiosities — mementoes from previous missions,’ the colonel said proudly. ‘Each one represents a point in history that I’ve had to repair.’ He tapped on the glass of a case. ‘So which one shall we try for your first real test?’

  Josh walked along the line of cabinets until he reached one with a vicious-looking cutlass lying on a bed of purple silk; it looked like something out of a pirate movie. The label read ‘Ocracoke Island, 22-11-11.718-Nexus 20’.