A Window into Time (Novella) (3 page)

It was the bus that did it. Which makes it a trigger, I suppose. I was walking to school. It was raining that morning; it had been raining all night. There were big puddles everywhere, and the street was packed tight with cars and lorries and bikes and buses. One drove right through a puddle next to the pavement where I was walking and sent up a huge splash. I was wearing a coat, but it still soaked my trousers. They laughed, all the other kids walking to school—the ordinaries and the stupids. I could hear them, but all I remembered was another time a bus had done that. On the same road but in winter.

Only I'd never been on that road in winter. I knew it was winter because the leaves were falling off the trees and jamming up the gutter and drains—which is why there were even bigger puddles then. And it was late afternoon, with all the lights shining out of the shops, and rain blurring the headlights. And the road was
different
somehow.

That bit took me awhile to work out, as the memory was only a few seconds. Me getting soaked, doing the whole shaking-my-arms thing, like the way a dog shakes to get water out of its fur. And I yelled “Arsehole!” at the car. That was weird. I'm normally too scared to shout like that in public. When I get angry and do finally shout, the stupids laugh at me. But in the memory, no one laughed at me. Everyone was too busy scurrying past on their way home.

It's really strange having a memory that isn't your own. Some people say they hear voices in their head. Normally nutters, who try to claim the voices told them to commit a crime, like serial killers. That way they get sent to a cushy prison, which is a mental hospital, too, and they get doctors and nurses fussing around them all day, and a room to themselves, and nice food; stuff that gets the tabloid sites all wound up with them, saying it's a travesty of justice.

I thought the memory might be my version of voices. It wasn't me, but I knew the chill when the puddle water hit, so that part was definitely real. But the sweatshirt on the arms of the not-me was dark blue, and I'd never had a dark-blue sweatshirt. It's like a school one. St. George's pupils wore a green one. But the trousers in the memory were gray, which were school trousers. And the not-me was definitely taller.

Then there was the road. There was something about it that wasn't right—on top of the whole thing about it not being my memory. I kept playing it over in my mind and saw the people around me. They were ordinary, all wrapped up in coats and carrying bags. But the coats were like really old-fashioned. Nobody wears coats like that anymore.

I concentrated on the cars. They were all old models, too. Three of them were close enough for me to read the number plates. Right now, number plates in England start with two letters, which are the area code, followed by two numbers, which are the age identifier, then three more letters, which are picked at random. Like this: DF64KUS. The numbers on the street I remembered weren't anything like that. They had a letter, three numbers, then three more letters, like this: W358AJP.

In the flat that night, I looked it up on the Internet. Having number plates on a car in the UK only became compulsory in 1904. Since then, the government has changed the sequence several times—first in 1932, then 1963, again in 1982, and finally the current one in 2001. They had to do it because the old sequences kept running out of combinations.

The number plates in the not-mine memory were all from the pre-2001 change. Two of the cars had a T at the start, while the one closest to me had a W. W was for the year 2000, so this not-mine memory was from at least the year 2000.

To start with, I did think that maybe the memory was from back when I was an infant, being pushed around in a pram, and that the puddle splash was a memory trigger. But it couldn't have been. First off, I was definitely wearing a blue sweatshirt in the memory, and I was walking, and I was taller than I am now. Second, I hadn't been born in 2000.

I thought about what I remembered. I thought about it really hard. People say I never know what's going on around me, which is just so ridiculously untrue. I always know. So there had to be a reason for me remembering something I wasn't even alive for.

“I think I've had a brain seizure,” I told Dad the next morning at breakfast.

Rachel made a snorting kind of noise. She was sitting opposite me at the table, eating her muesli. Every morning she eats the same thing: two hundred milliliters of green tea, fifty grams of muesli with skimmed milk, a reduced-sugar muffin, and three vitamin supplement tablets. It's part of her healthy living process. She nags Dad to eat properly, too, so he was having toast and orange juice—but I know he sometimes stops off at the pub on the way home from the office, and in the bin there's packets of chips that he shoves down to the bottom under all the other rubbish so she doesn't see them.

She didn't say anything to me about what to eat, so I made myself scrambled eggs or boiled eggs. Then I had toast as well. Mum always said breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

Dad muted the TV, which was showing the twenty-four-hour BBC news. I don't like the news. It's always about things going wrong, or politicians, or conflicts. They never show any engineering projects or science research apart from climate change, which Uncle Gordon says is all a conspiracy so government can increase taxes. If I was running the newsroom, I'd show people good stuff so everyone would be happier. There are online news sites that only report success. If you check their Web traffic rates, they're not very successful. Uncle Gordon laughed for ages when I told him that.

“What makes you think that, Jules?” Dad asked.

“It's stuff I've seen. I didn't actually see it.”

“That sounds a bit like a paradox there, son.”

“I didn't see it; it's a memory.”

“What is?”

“I got soaked by a bus driving through a puddle.”

“Is that why your school trousers were in the laundry last night?” Rachel asked. “They were soaked.”

“Yes,” I said, “but that's not what I remember.”

They both stopped eating to look at me.

“So what do you remember?” Dad asked.

“A bus splashed a puddle on me yesterday. It was a trigger. I remember a bus doing the same thing before.”

“When?”

“I don't know exactly. I think it was 2000; the number plates I remember back that up.”

“Okay,” Dad said very slowly. “Jules, son…you can't remember anything from 2000. You weren't born.”

“I know. That's what I'm saying. It might be a brain seizure.”

“Are the other kids giving you a hard time at school?” Rachel asked quickly.

“Well, not so much. There's a few boys that don't like me. Totally mutual.”

“And it's games today, isn't it?” she said.

“I'm not trying to get out of school!”

“Probably a bad dream,” Dad said. “The doctor said you might have them.”

“What doctor?”

Dad gave Rachel a guilty glance. He cleared his throat. “That one I asked if you wanted to go and see. You know, to talk about your mum.”

I couldn't believe it. After the funeral, Dad asked me if I wanted to go and see a therapist. I'd said no—obviously. Psychiatrists can only help if they're smarter than their patients, and there's not going to be one who could ever figure me out, so talking to one would be a complete waste of time. Embarrassing, too. So now Dad was saying he did go and see one, anyway—behind my back. Great!

“I just checked with her,” he said. “That's all. She said it might take you awhile to get over it.”

“I'm never going to get over it,” I shouted. “I will always remember it. I can't forget. You know this. You know!”

“Grief can affect people in strange ways, that's all I'm saying, son.”

“This isn't grief. This is a memory that isn't mine. Why don't you listen?”

“I am listening,” he said in that over-calm voice he puts on when he's angry. “And I'm worried about you.”

“You don't believe me,” I said.

“I believe something is wrong, and we need to find out what. Do you want to see a doctor?”

I slouched back down and shrugged. There was no way medical tests like MRI scans could find out why I had someone else's memory. And the idiot psychiatrist wouldn't have a clue what was going on. “No.” I shook my head. “I'm fine. I'll go and play games at school.”

Rachel gave a tiny nod of satisfaction. Manipulating her is so ridiculously easy.

There were another nine days of school before St. George's broke up for summer. I did my best to avoid Jeff Murphy and Kenan Abbot. They didn't seem to realize. Which is hardly surprising. See, they had schedules that dictate a lot of their day even though they were too stupid to know they had a routine. I knew where they lived, so QED I knew what roads they used to get to school and I also knew their timetable. It's like the showdown at the end of
Terminator 2,
when Arnie's been knocked down in the metal foundry, and you think he's out of it; then his vision comes up with: Rerouting. Alternate Power. And the CPU chip that's his brain shows a circuit map where the power feed changes direction. Well, that's what I did. Depending on time, location, and their timetable, I simply changed direction and avoided them before contact. Smooth and easy, like I had a digital brain, too.

Obviously I couldn't anticipate random positioning factors, so I did encounter them occasionally, but I certainly managed to make those nine days a lot easier.

After term ended, I had six days before we went on holiday. I walked along the BusSplash Road every day. That's what I called it now: BusSplash Road. Important places always get named after the events that happened there, and this was going to be the most major event of the twenty-first century. The memory had to be some kind of timequake. You can alter the fabric of spacetime with exotic matter, which is what physicists call negative energy. There's a lot of Internet sites on the subject. I mean, really: A Lot.

I worked out that someone in the future must have experimented with exotic matter and caused a crack in time that I saw through. I'm not quite sure how I saw through someone else's eyes, but:
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Everyone knows that. It's one of the most famous quotes ever, right up there along with:
I am your father.

See, I thought about it for days. And if you used Sherlock Holmes logic, there was no other explanation. For a few seconds, I was a really weird kind of time traveler.

That was why the road would be renamed. Because it's the most important thing that happened in Islington. Ever.

Now I just had to work out how it happened.

One thing I thought, which was my favorite theory: Maybe it was me up there in the future, experimenting with exotic matter, because I know it will work. That's not quite a temporal paradox—I think. Supersmart people like Stephen Hawking always say time travel isn't possible because what happens if you go back in time and kill your grandfather—you wouldn't get born so you can't exist to travel back to murder him. Paradox, see? So, time travel can't happen.

I don't understand why that's the example they give. Why would anyone
want
to kill their own grandfather? Unless he was Hitler, I suppose.

Whatever. In the future I could be like this amazing scientist with a cool laboratory, same as Tony Stark. If I am, the smart thing to do would be to send now-me a list of share prices from the future, so I could invest money in start-ups that are tiny today but grow into the next Google or Apple in ten years' time. That way I'll have enough money to pay for the experiments.

The only flaw with that was that I didn't have any money to invest in start-ups. Future-me would have to send now-me a winning lottery number instead. Which I'll definitely remember I'll have to do—which isn't a paradox. So it could work.

I walked up and down BusSplash Road, waiting for it to happen again. That was okay for a couple of days. I'd do it three or four times a day, taking it slow. There were differences apart from the number plates that I checked out. Simple ones, like the trees were smaller back in the not-me memory. The shops had changed, too; several in the memory must have shut down, like the big video rental store, which was an organic bakery now. It was strange seeing the ones that were still there. I stared in through the windows, checking if they'd grown shabby since or if they'd prospered. Some of the shopkeepers started to stare back, and I'd move on. I don't think they were suspicious.

On the third day I got hit by a random positioning factor. Kenan Abbot was walking down BusSplash Road and saw me. He was with his crew—a whole bunch of stupids who crowded around me. Sharp facing. Which is just a dumb name for standing in front of someone and acting all tough and shouting things like: “What 'choo at, bruv?”

“It's a
Julian,
look.”

“Julian—kinda handle is that?”

“Ain't you's street, 'dis. Woz you doin' here?”

I didn't answer. It wouldn't have mattered what I'd said. They were standing so close they were jostling into me.

“Dem is right kak treaders, man. You poor?”

They laughed at each other every time one of them sneered at me, to show they were all solid—a real dim-witted loud false laugh. It was as fake as their gangsta-speak. They don't talk like that when they're at St. George's.

I knew all that—that they're bullies, that they're cowards. But it was London. Young crews are all high on drugs. Rival kids get stabbed all the time because of turf wars; it says so on the tabloid sites. And I was alone. And death is so stupidly easy, with pain more so. There were no teachers to stop them, and no police because they don't walk the local beat protecting people anymore; they just persecute motorists to rake in money from speeding fines. And I was frightened. Really frightened. And my mum was dead.

“
Julian,
he got him a special needer badge, bruv.”

“Yeah?”

“Tru.”

“I see you is real.”

“Take my phone,” I told them. I was crying. Trying to pull the phone out of my pocket. If they got my phone they might run off with it, and fence it for more drugs or something.

Kenan suddenly yelled: “OMG, you is vile!” And his face twisted up into shock and disbelief. He started shrieking with this cruel laugh that blocked out every other sound. “Julian, you is pissed yourself!”

And then they were all laughing and pointing at my trousers, which were wet because I was so scared I'd urinated.

“Julian specially needs to piss.”

“Pissed hisself! Pissed hisself!”

It was a chant, growing louder and louder. Their laughter was like a wolf pack howling at the moon.

I pushed through them blindly. Running. Running I didn't care where. All the jeering faded away behind me.

Other people on BusSplash Road were shouting now, calling out as I stumbled past. I'm not good at running. I'm not good at any sport. It was hard to breathe. I could hardly see through the tears.

Then I was off BusSplash Road, staggering through a little park. I got off the path. There were people on the path. I didn't want to see them. I didn't want
anyone
to see me.

My foot caught on something. This sharp hot pain flared in my ankle, and I went sprawling on the grass.

And there it was, another memory that didn't belong to me.

I tumble onto the grass from a very dodgy tackle—
are you effing blind, ref?
—my legs smeared with mud, and cold with it. And the ball gets kicked out of their half toward our goal.

“You okay, Mike?” Hooper asks.

He doesn't really care, I can tell; he is jogging on, looking back over his shoulder.

“I'm on it,” I tell him, and scramble up. My ankle is tender, but to hell with that. The other team is slamming our goal like a hornet swarm, and Al Mamun isn't exactly the greatest goalie in the league. I start running for the penalty box to give the defenders some help. Our supporters along the touchline give a mocking cheer at my heroics, all ten of them: three wives, four girlfriends (Karen gives me this half-sympathetic smile as I go past), and Chaz from the pub, along with some of Gary's mates. Still, at least the other team has only managed eight supporters.

The whistle blows just as I arrive. Their star striker—Russell, in his late twenties and a previously unknown species of landwhale—has kicked the ball over the back line.

“Oh, midfield's back to help, look,” Hooper says, laughing, as I limp to a halt. “Panic over, lads. Nice tea break, Mike?”

I flick him a V-sign and get into position as Al Mamun looks around nervously to see who he should kick the ball to.

Not me, not me,
I try to tell him mentally. My ankle is really quite bad, and—

Of course he kicks it to me.