My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time (13 page)

‘It's just everyday pollution, for there is a hole in the ozone layer,' he explained with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘But
Nero fiddles while Rome burns. I have seen the devastation it will lead to a hundred years hence – but heigh ho, man will
be man.'

The street was still heaving with people, many of them as fat as Fru Schleswig, with skins of all hues, like a foreign bazaar,
many of them seemingly speaking aloud to themselves, with strange, ugly black jewellery clamped to their ears or dangling
near their mouths like laces of liquorice. I saw tattooed sailors adorned with silver face-jewellery such as one finds in
illustrations of Amazonian tribesmen, and ruffian females, too, similarly bedecked, some pushing small perambulators containing
babes whose little mouths were stoppered by handy corks. Amid the bustle, no one paid the slightest heed to either me or Professor
Krak, camouflaged as we were in the uniform of that freakish era: I in my unflattering men's trousers, loose shirt & the grotesquely
bulbous footwear that seemed
de rigueur
among England's future-folk, & my companion shod likewise, but clad above in a monkish hooded jerkin & flapping long-johns.

‘I will admit' – here he had to raise his voice to be heard above the roar of the horseless vehicles, ‘that solving the riddle
of time became something of an obsession to me.' I remembered what Gudrun had said about the way Professor Krak locked himself
down in the basement, where she would leave meals outside his door, & hear strange shrieks & noises emanating from his rooms.
‘And then along came Pandora. My first pioneer.' A note of terrible portentousness entered his voice then, & although he was
much taller than me (I fair had to skip to keep up with his lanky-legged pace) & I saw him in profile, it seemed to me he
blinked away a tear.

‘Who is Pandora?'

‘She was an orangutan from Borneo, originally. I purchased her from a Moroccan trader who ran a carpet shop. As soon as I
saw her climbing his curtains, I knew I must have her. Herr Couscous drove a hard bargain, for he was fond of the animal &
said she was more intelligent than his own wife.' Here Professor Krak broke off & seemed to wipe another tear from the corner
of his eye, then got out his hip-flask – ‘at, the great human antidote!' – & slugged a mouthful down, then passed it to me,
but I declined for I needed to keep my head clear to digest the progression of events. Blimey, had I not seen a stuffed animal
with a dejected-looking face, in the Oblivion Room, opposite the bicycle? Yes, indeed I had!

‘This is the train station,' he said as we next joined a mixed herd of scoundrels, gentlefolk, tarts & ragamuffins all queuing
before a tall metal box. ‘I'll take you to a place where things are more modern & a lot cleaner, in case you get the wrong
idea about London. Rents are very high and we Danes have to duck and dive.'

The machine spat us two pink tickets & we waited on a platform where a sleek vehicle glided in with speed & slyness; entering,
we then stood packed together in a bemusing state of wordlessness which I later discovered to be the norm on such transport.
I was once again feeling queasiatious, & prayed that we would soon reach our destination, but Professor Krak was now taking
up where he had left off. ‘When I sent Pandora travelling, I think she went looking for her ancestors,' he said, ‘or at least
in search of others who resembled her, & could share her primitive urges. Be that as it may, she always returned with intriguing
clues about the societies she had visited. I never knew when or if she would reappear, so as you can imagine, my life began
to revolve around her arrivals & departures. She taught me courage, & I am forever grateful to her for that' He wiped another
tear away, & blew his nose. ‘She had gone on twenty missions before she met her most untimely end.'

The train stopped, disgorged more passengers, then restarted its hair-raising journey into the vortex of God-Knew-Where.

‘But how did she get back, pray?'

‘I fitted her with a magnetic device, for by now I had calculated the physics. I concocted a special collar which picked up
earth tremors: I trained her to respond to them by heading for the source, which was always the spot where the Time-Sucker
& the meridian conjoined. Then she would go through the situational magnetism routine I had taught her, & the next thing she
knew, she'd be back in Østerbro.' He laughed. ‘My, she had the strangest taste in the souvenirs she brought home. For what takes the fancy of a female orangutan
will not closely coincide with whatever objects of interest one might select oneself, if one were free to plunder riches from
the Great Beyond.'

‘What did she bring?' I asked, for I will admit I was intrigued despite myself, & could feel my hostile stance beginning to
erode, for it was plain there was no malice in the Professor: only the most reckless & foolhardy enthusiasm.

‘There was a whole collection,' he replied. ‘A human skull she brought back once,' continued Professor Krak. ‘A handbag made
from scaly hide, padded with fabric. A ram's horn. She tended to forage much for exotic fruit, which she devoured most happily
on her return. Once, a small black box with a curious disc inside, which I did not understand the meaning of until I came
to this century & discovered it to be a music CD.' (He ignored my bafflement.) ‘A prayer mat. A mobile telephone likewise.'

‘I saw what I now know to be such a speaking device in Fru Krak's home,' I confessed. ‘Fru Schleswig found it'

He smiled & nodded. ‘No use to anyone there,' he said. ‘Though I have a theory that there is no reason why today's telephone
signals should not transport easily to the past, if positioned at the correct angle on a Time-Sucker fault-line in an area
where there will
one day
stand a transmitter. Ah, I see that the next stop is ours, my dear: prepare to disembark. Anyway, to return to poor Pandora:
the nightmares she would have, after she came home! How she screamed in the night,
stakkels lille skat.
I fed her grapes & pastries & marzipan, for she had the sweetest tooth I have ever come across. O, I treated her like a princess!'
he sighed happily, and it struck me then that, the Kraks being childless, this dumb creature might have filled a sentimental
void in the basement world of Rosenvængets Alle. ‘But in the most cruel of ironies, the one thing I was unable to protect
her from was the danger lurking in my own home, the very place I thought to be the safest in the world,' he went on, his tone
of voice now heavy with dejection. ‘For it was there that the dear creature met her dreadful fate.' Here he stopped to gaze
out of the window, his eyes misting over with tears.

‘What happened?' I asked, as the train came to a halt and we disembarked on to a clean and mysteriously empty platform, upon
which stood a bench where he gestured we might sit.

‘What happened was a housekeeper woman by the name of Gudrun Olsen.'

‘Oh my,' I breathed. And there, on the bench, with the occasional tin train whirring in and disgorging passengers, all more
neatly & pleasingly dressed than those we had seen before, Professor Krak pursued his tragic theme.

‘Gudrun, as housekeeper, was under strict instructions not to enter my workshop, no matter what strange cries she heard. But
for all her many qualities – & she assisted me a great deal in the construction of the machine – Gudrun has the most insatiable
curiosity, & she could not leave well alone. One night Pandora was recovering from a particularly difficult mission – I knew
this for she had come back bloody & scarred, as though animals had attacked her. Anyway, that night she had one of her nightmares.
It was quite a screaming fit'

Here the Professor sighed.

‘And then?' I prompted.

‘Well, despite being barred from my quarters, in walked Gudrun, brandishing a poker. Pandora awoke at that moment & leaped
up, & so did I, shouting to Gudrun to move not a centimetre, but Pandora had by then attacked her poor face.'

I shuddered, horrified, as I pictured Gudrun's eye-socket split raggedly by a swipe of the creature's filthy claw, the wound
gushing crimson blood upon her impeccably starched pinafore.

‘And then – ‘ he broke off, unable to continue.

But I imagined the rest: the screaming Gudrun, blood pouring from her cheek, bashing the monkey with her lethal poker, cracking
open its little skull like a walnut, uncasing the throbbing brain, a pale translucent mauve, spotted with gore, & ending that
small, brave life. And what followed: a man racked with grief for his murdered monkey, & a beautiful woman, disfigured for
life, lost to a world of laundry & steam, never to marry, or fully understand what had transpired on the fateful day she entered
the Professor's territory unbidden.

But bless you: let us expunge the image of that ghastly female inter-species confrontation & move on. Professor Krak & I left
the bench, & rose upwards on another moving stairway, this one shining & clean, adorned with gleaming brass. Carried heavenward
by this, amid a throng of other passengers, all gentlefolk it seemed, we were next propelled into an airy balconied temple
of light, high-ceilinged & dotted with magnificent exotic plants, the like of which I had never seen before except in paintings
of the jungle. I gasped in wonderment, half expecting an Indian tiger to pounce at us from its upper reaches, or a troupe
of minstrels to burst into a glitter of harmonies. And all above us & around us, folk, folk, folk, & dwarfing them, glass,
glass, glass! Never had I seen such huge sheets of it, so unsmudged, so unbroken & so unadorned by colour or leadwork! Outside,
water shone flat, reflecting the highest buildings, and in them, the skies reflected back, until it seemed there were a thousand
mirrors, out-staring one another. We exited through a portal & found ourselves upon an odd-shaped, curving bridge, that straddled
a stretch of water, below which a row of manned vehicles sat, clawing into the water with articulated arms, & dredging out
mud that they swung aloft, dripping. Above us, in the sky, buzzed a giant metal insect which Professor Krak said was a ‘helicopter',
bearing intrepid humans; & all around, the buildings reared up like magical steel cliffs, blank-faced & heroic.

‘Seductive, is it not?' he said, as though reading my thoughts. At which a pang of loyalty to my own place & time overwhelmed
me, & I retorted that Canary Wharf was all very well but I saw neither canaries nor wharves, & in any case it was nothing
in comparison to Amalienborg, & all of a sudden the memory of that noble palace made me long for Copenhagen so sharply that
I felt the tears prick.

‘So exactly how do I get home?' I asked, as we passed a mirror in which at first I did not recognize myself, for I looked
so like a prisoner, or a simpleton, or the inhabitant of an asylum, in the ugly garb of that century.

He glanced at me with what I feared was pity. ‘Let us find ourselves a little coffee house,' he suggested. ‘And I will explain the, er …
parameters!

And it was, in a nutshell, just as Franz Poppersen Muhl had described – only far, far worse. The predicament was thus: the
arrival of Pastor Dahlberg in Fru Krak's life compromised the Mother Machine, as Krak called the contraption – which he referred
to like a nautical vessel, as ‘she'. The house was no longer a safe place to keep her, & yet because of her shape & size,
& the fact that her inventor had (foolishly, he admitted with hindsight) assembled her in the basement in such a way that
she could not be removed, swift action must be taken before the contraption was discovered & destroyed in the wake of the
forthcoming nuptials. All this Professor Krak explained as a black savage (whom to my extreme discomfiture I found to be most
attractive, so much so that I even wondered, pervertedly, what it might be like to have him in my bed) served us the frothed
coffee known as
latte,
and fresh, moist croissants as good as anything you might buy at Herr Møller's bakery on Classensgade. Just like the driver of the vehicle we entered when we first arrived, the blackamoor spoke fluent English.

‘Do normal people not find it disturbing to have cannibals in their midst?' I asked Professor Krak, as we watched the disconcerting waiter walk away. He merely laughed & told me to ‘keep an open mind, for the world is a wider place than we Danes can easily dream of', & then returned to the subject in hand, viz how to rid the Krak homestead of its occupants, and save the Mother Machine.

‘But why on earth should I help you?' I asked, as his logistical plight became apparent. ‘You spied on me, did you not? Wearing a balaclava?'

He nodded in the affirmative. ‘I needed to see how curious you were,' he admitted. ‘And what you would do with the information
you came by.'

‘And then you lured me to the machine.'

‘By warning you away from it!' he smiled. ‘Remember? I knew you would not resist that challenge. The manner of your arrival
was a little unexpected, I must admit, due to the intervention of Fru Schleswig: I had planned it otherwise. However, here
you are!'