My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time (31 page)

‘What else indeed,' I replied, still not quite there. It sounded quite
addle-brained to me, yet somehow not uncharacteristic of Professor Krak's way of thinking. Yes: it had a kind of logic.

‘So now we must put it to the test!' he cried happily. ‘The blood and
sweat are easily come by. I will cut myself, & take a jog around the
lake. The antiseptic, your mother can supply us with.'

But what of the tears? Although of a sensitive nature, & not
ashamed to cry when something moves me, I suddenly (& most
frustratingly) found myself quite unable to coax the necessary muscles
on this occasion, & nor could our Scottish friend, however sad the
thoughts he summoned, such as the sale of his daughter to the ‘circus',
& the loss of Charlotte to modern London.

‘What about Else? said Fergus. ‘Is she the tearful type?'

‘Well, she used to be a performer, so maybe she could muster some,' I
said.

As it turned out Else needed scarcely any prompting to cry, for she
missed her friend Charlotte terribly, & thought Fergus's attempts to be
reunited with her a moving & romantic & inspiring story, so when
she had fully blubbed, & we had squeezed a drop from her
handkerchief
into Fergus's blood & sweat, off we set with a vial of the
precious liquid to Number Nine Rosenvængets Allé, full of hope.

Would that I had stopped reading there, & kept my optimism! But I could not desist from turning the pages, I simply could
not! O woe!

When Fru Jakobsen returned an hour later laden with shopping bags & packages, she found me weeping on the bed, the last volume
of Franz's diaries having led me into a state of unconsolable despair.

‘What on earth has happened,
skat?'
she asked, looking most concerned.

‘I do not know! I do not know what fate has befallen my love, & it seems our whole reunion is in jeopardy! Without more of
Franz's scrapbooks from the Sankt Hans, I can discover no more! For the formula I came up with in my dream – well, it seems that Fergus came to the same conclusion about its ingredients!'

‘So why do you weep?'

Unable to speak, I merely moaned & pointed to the relevant excerpt of Franz's diary.

February 11th. Today our Scottish friend appeared especially in
the doldrums, as he had once again tried the antiseptic solution, &
nothing positive had come of it. ‘If I have got it all wrong then how?'
he cried, as we sat by thefireside pursuing our ‘English lesson'. ‘And in what way? It must be to do with the quantities. I'll just have to
keep mixing & trying – but I could be stuck out there in the Time
Machine in the Kraks' garden for ever, experimenting! And in the
meantime, the Christmas trees have gone brown, & are dropping
needles, & I don't know how much longer I can keep the Time
Machine hidden!'

Things are getting most desperate, & all the while Mama & Papa
send our Scottish friend unfriendly glances, & they want to know how
he spends his time, & I can tell they disapprove mightily of what he did
to his daughter. I can see I made a mistake in telling them about the
circus, but I was thinking on my feet! When does he intend to travel
back to Scotland, they want to know. It is most stressful & wearying.
Tomorrow I shall visit Herr Bang & order some pink medicine.

February 17th. ‘Why the hell doesn't it work?' our Scottish friend
asked me today. ‘Is it possible, Franz, that Professor Krak kept a bottle
of antiseptic in the Oblivion Room purely for – well – antiseptic purposes? To treat the cut made by the scalpel when he was extracting blood?'

This was the conclusion Fergus wearily & most reluctantly reached, & relayed to Franz: that he thought he had figured out
three of the ingredients but the fourth remained a mystery wrapped inside an enigma, & – O God! – in any case he knew not
the proportions of the mixture, or at what temperature it should be introduced into the sphere, & … O, how my poor love
was in deep, deep despair! Tears in my eyes, I conveyed this to Fru Jakobsen.

‘And then what happened?' she asked. It was with gratitude that I observed she seemed finally to be paying the matter the
attention it warranted.

‘He began trying various other liquids as the fourth component, in varying quantities,' I told her. ‘Dissolved pig-fat, paraffin,
vinegar, milk, lemon juice, elderflower wine, diluted soda crystals & many others, in all manner of combinations. But then
came two calamities: first Pastor Dahlberg & Fru Krak – who I suppose we now call Fru Dahlberg – took it upon themselves one
night to venture out in order to observe the full moon, & surprised Fergus in the garden, where they presumed him to be a
burglar, & the next day they procured themselves an Alsatian guard-dog – attached by a long chain to its kennel by the front
gate – that barked at the slightest disturbance. Next the Poppersen Muhls warned Franz that Fergus must leave by the end of
the week, for they considered him a “hectic influence" on Franz, & O, Fru Jakobsen, we are quite, quite undone!'

‘And then?'

‘And then the diary comes to an end, & we cannot find out what befell them unless we return to the Sankt Hans & procure more
volumes!' I cried, by now quite distraught.

‘Come now, I'm sure it's not as bad as all that,' proclaimed Fru Jakobsen matter-of-factly. ‘I think you must simply abandon
hope of Fergus coming to London under his own steam, & instead concentrate on what you can do to reach him. Your lively imagination
will rustle something up, I am sure of it. Come now, apply your mind to those ingredients again. Blood, sweat and tears go
together, don't they – but I'd say antiseptic is the misfit, for it is not something one would normally carry about one's
person. Think of how practical Professor Krak is, dear. What might he always be able to come by? I know! Why not try looking
in your dictionary for an English word beginning with
ant?'

Upon which, without further ceremony, she announced that she was going to take a stroll around the botanical gardens, & thence
to the cinema, & she would leave me with the bottle of schnapps she now produced.

‘Abandon me here, in this state?' I wailed. ‘Doing all the investigating myself?'

‘Well, two of us can't read a dictionary at once,' she argued. ‘And you seem to enjoy looking up words; indeed, it's quite
a hobby, is it not?'

In the seemingly militant absence of support from my companion, I had to admit that my choices were limited at this point,
for regaining access to the Sankt Hans archive in the wake of our theft seemed an impossibility, given that our flying-machine
departed in a mere four hours. So I reached for my red English dictionary, with its wafer-thin pages bearing thousands of
definitions & sub-definitions, my first & only gift from Fergus, & how the tears came to my eyes when I reread the inscription
inside, written in his plain Scottish writing, so different from my own loopy & curlicued hand: ‘For Lottie, with love beyond
words.'

O! Feel my fevered brow, dear reader! Does your heart swoon with mine?

‘But look at all these pages!' I cried despondently, urging Fru Jakobsen to at least measure the weight of the volume in her hand, for it seemed to me heavier than a whole bag of flour. ‘So many words! And when you consider it, does not
every single noun
have an “anti" version of itself? Where to begin?' But Fru Jakobsen had donned her jacket & headed for the door, leaving me, I shall confess to you, with a sharp nudge of disappointment at her laconic attitude, which seemed uncharacteristically ruthless under the circumstances. Had I misjudged her?

‘Have a stiff drink,' she counselled, waving an airy goodbye. ‘Then begin at the beginning, go on until you come to the end, & then stop.'

Upon which she took her merry leave, seeming quite determined to enjoy her time in Copenhagen, so there was naught to do but follow her advice & reach for the schnapps bottle, at which a warm glow instantly spread through my chest, bringing with it a tiny flicker of hope. Bottle in hand, I sprawled on the bed, working my way patiently through the nouns, trying out each with the prefix ‘the great human', & considering what might be classified as a liquid, or produce same.

The great human antic. ('
Antic: fantastic action or trick!'
Yes, I had been tricked all right, but not fantastically!) The great human anticathode. (Krak was certainly a man for blinding one with science!) I swigged some more, & felt the warmth expand further through my chest. My face felt a blood-rush & I realized I had very swiftly made myself somewhat drunk. Good: maybe it will help, I thought, as I took another swig & contracted an immediate bout of hiccups. The great human antichrist (ectoplasmic? But how to catch him?).
Hic.
The great human anticlimax. (Exactly what I had just suffered!) A further swig & I began to feel quite dizzy. The great human anticonvulsant. (Aha! Hic. Possible). Might a ‘great human anti-devolutionist', if chopped into small enough pieces, be successfully liquidized in a modern food processor? Soon the words were dancing before my eyes &, before I knew it, I had fallen into a queasy slumber …

It was afternoon when I was awakened by a knock at the door. I staggered to my feet. Fru Jakobsen had returned from her trip to the cinema, & she was now sniffing the air. She spotted the schnapps bottle. ‘Charlotte-
pige
!' she exclaimed. ‘I suggested, I think, a small pick-me-up, rather than –'

‘O Fru Jakobsen!' I cried, & burst into tears. ‘How plunged into gloom I am, & how mightily drunk, & what a headache I am in for! How I curse Professor Krak, for making life so difficult!'

‘You did not solve it, then? I'm going to pack your bag for you now, Charlotte, while you try to concentrate on how the Professor's mind works, for there I am sure lies the key to your riddle.'

But how did his mind work, exactly? As Fru Jakobsen tutted & mother-henned around me, I groggily tried to picture the Professor as I most clearly remembered him. That man is surely paying the price for being so secretive now, I thought, stuck with a malarial fever on Marroquinta! My first sight of him had been in the Observatory: a tall gangling man with a flapping jacket & waistcoat, wind-milling his arms, & twitching all over with neurotic intensity. And then his telephone call, so recently: ‘the three products of human pain'. Blood, sweat & tears: all ingredients that came from the human body under duress. Pain had been the key, he had said. Human pain. Then dilute in
ten
parts
of the great human
ant
–'. I pictured Professor Krak again, that first time we travelled on the underground. Attempting to calm me, he had offered me a swig from his hip-flask: I remember refusing, but he himself had taken a vast gulp & I recognized the distinctive smell of schnapps. What had he called it, then? A wonderful restorative? Thereafter I noted that the surreptitious quaffing of alcohol was quite a habit of the Professor's, especially when his nerves were on edge …

Suddenly I sat up so fast that my head spun. Good grief! What if, when the Professor first offered me a swig from his hip-flask,
he had called it ‘the great human antidote'? Surely that was possible? It fitted, too, for had I not just used it as an antidote
to my own pain, a means of numbing my own agony, & drowning my sorrows?

‘EUREKA! I have it! I have it by the nose!' I scream, & am just in the process of gabbling the details of my discovery to Fru Jakobsen – (‘you clever girl, I knew you would solve the conundrum!') – when a tinny blast of music sounds from my handbag.

‘Quick, Charlotte, the telephone!' she cries. ‘Someone is calling you!'

I delve into the bag, fish out the device & snap, ‘Yes, who is this?' into the receiver. My brain is quite fizzing.

‘It is Rigmor Schwarb, in London. There is terrible news, Charlotte: I am so sorry.'

O no! Josie! My heart was gripped with woozy panic. Rigmor Schwarb was a woman who had abandoned her own baby in front of
an Oxfam shop: what madness had I committed, to entrust her with my lover's precious babe!

‘The authorities. They came round,' she said. ‘A policewoman & a social worker, who have been following you. The teachers
at Josie's kindergarten became suspicious some time ago, & contacted them. They interrogated Josie about you, & then they
took her away!'

‘No!'

‘Yes!'

O, woe! The one thing that my lover had counted on, surely, when we were riven asunder, was that I would take care of his
darling child – & I had failed him! O fool that I was! I burst into tears: the contrite Rigmor, too, was sobbing.

‘And they said that unless Fergus himself comes to get her, Josie will be fostered by someone on the list!' she went on, when
she had blown her nose noisily. ‘Georg Jakobsen has been trying to make them see reason, & has barely been off the telephone,
giving assurances that Fergus will return, & that you are Josie's official au pair, but they say that without written evidence
to back it up, their hands are tied, & they have to follow protocol!'

Oh,
for Sataan.
If I did not immediately soberize enough to conjure up a solution to this new predicament then we were quite undone!

‘Quick, let me speak to Georg,' I tell the now bawling Rigmor.

‘Hello?' comes Georg Jakobsen's oddly calm voice.

‘Now listen carefully, Georg,' I tell him. ‘If this doesn't work, we will lose both Fergus & his daughter so I am counting
on you!'

‘I'm all ears, Charlotte-
pige
?,' replies the good Georg.

‘Can you have the Time Machine set up in Greenwich, on the meridian, tonight?'