Out of Time (3 page)

James stayed where he was. He kept watching. Nothing much happened for quite a time. Just before lunch, a stretcher with a covered body-shape on it was carried out and loaded into the station wagon. A few passers-by glanced at it with curiosity but kept walking. The station wagon drove away.

James went downstairs to get some lunch, then returned to his room, stuffed the device in his pocket, and left the house. He went to the entrance of the complex, passed through the security barriers, went past the big white sign saying ‘Between 1800 and 0900 all vehicles must use Gate 3', and through the line of pine trees into the Toyne Paddock.

It was not an attractive paddock. It was on the road to the tip, so plastic bags and sheets of newspaper were always scattered across it, flitting towards other destinations. The field was bare and clodded, with scruffy patches of grass. James squatted near the middle of the field, behind a mound of earth that provided a windbreak. With some difficulty he extricated the machine from his pocket and sat looking at it. He had tried, he thought, every possible variation, with no result. Perhaps after all Mr Woodforde had been old and stupid and had been wrong about the whole thing.

A large piece of paper blew towards him, almost into his face. Suddenly James' mind cleared. He remembered the sign at the entrance to the Centre. ‘Between 1800 and 0900. . .' Wasn't it likely that Mr Woodforde would use military time? Feverishly he started pushing numbers into the calculator. . . 150° 50' 51”, 34° 15' 21”. . . Again he paused at the date, finally resolving on the compromise of a zero in front of the month, but no century in front of the year. And then the time, going back four minutes, and pressing 1327. And, with mouth as dry as corn chips, he pressed ‘Enter'.

Still nothing. He started again, undeterred,
confident. 150° 50' 51”, 34° 15' 21”, and this time the date with the century prefix. The time, 1328. Enter.

Suddenly, for the briefest instant of time, for a blink, James saw nothing. Not a blankness, not a greyness or blackness, not a wall, not a vast open space, but nothing. He felt disgustingly sick in the stomach. Then, at enormous speed, waves of dizziness pulsated through his body, as though he was being rocked by all the storms in all the ships in all the seas of the world. He realised he had shut his eyes at some stage and that they were still shut, but that was the only coherent thought he had. He had no inclination to open them, did not even think of it, could not form intentions. He felt that he was coming apart, ceasing to be. Until, with equally dazzling sudden speed, he felt his body tingling together again, stinging into a kind of giddy, staggering unity. He was on his feet, lurching a little, then stable, settled, with nothing worse than a ringing in his ears. His legs started to move, his senses to operate. He was just a few steps from the mound in the middle of the paddock. He went to it and squatted behind it, then extricated the machine from his pocket and looked at it. A large sheet of newspaper blew towards him, almost into his face. Suddenly he was filled with a tearing panic. Gritting his teeth he pressed ‘Return' on the machine. Again there was the shocking glimpse of nothing before the disgusting sickness rocked through him, and the dizziness, the fuzziness, the sense that he had become empty inside and out.

And there he was, standing on a street corner. He
looked blankly around him, failing to recognise the scene. It took several seconds before he slowly identified it as the corner of Handbury Road and Wilson Street, about two blocks from the Centre, about three blocks from the Toyne Paddock. He looked at his watch. It said 1.33. He assumed that he was back in the present. Then he realised that he would never know.

MOST OF THAT
afternoon James wandered restlessly around his room, picking the machine up and fingering it, putting it down again. He felt confused and shaky, and he thought he had a headache. Several times he felt an overwhelming desire to go and hang around Mr Woodforde's lab, and twice he actually started getting out the window to go there. It was only then that this death, the death of his friend, began to have meaning for him. He realised that it meant ‘never again', it meant ‘an end', it meant changes forced upon him. Now when he swung a leg out of the window he might as well swing it right back in. Once again, a slice of his life had been cut out: it had not been replaced and in its stead was nothing. Eventually some sand might dribble in and occupy the same space, but sand was always and only sand.

Half way through the afternoon he lay on his bed and cried a little into his pillow. His thoughts were for himself; his misery was his own. He did not know that his tears were the only tears shed by anyone as a result of Mr Woodforde's death.

Later, as he hung out of his window, he heard two Americans talking in the square below.

‘. . . yeah, I heard some guy hit the eject button, out in one of the old laboratories.'

‘Yeah, Woodfull, some name like that. Big star once, according to Gary. Child prodigy, you know? Could spell physics when he was six years old.'

‘Hell, I still can't spell it. So what was he doing out there? Was he working on anything?'

‘Just playing around, I think. They let him have one of the old labs, out of respect. Gary said there was nothing in there, just books, and piles of papers, calculations. But the numbers didn't add up to anything.'

‘I heard he was dead three days before they found him.'

‘Not three days. A day and a half maybe. Yeah, pretty sad. That's how we'll all end up.'

They walked across to the canteen, unconscious of the boy in the leaves above them. James, precisely and sharply, peeled a leaf from a twig and sat, twirling it in his fingers. Then he dropped it and watched it fall, spinning, knocked into new alignments by branches and air pockets and other leaves. At last it landed on the ground where it lay still and lifeless. A moment later a security officer walking to Building H crushed it under his unfeeling boot.

*

A
LONG TIME AGO
their parents had gone out, James wasn't sure where, but he remembered them saying, ‘Be good kids, we won't be long.' James was too absorbed in a game he was playing with a long thin string of ants to take much notice. He was trying to build a zigzag highway for the ants, trying to train them to take a new route.

While he was doing that, Ellie was giving her parents a nice surprise by cleaning the house. At the age of three, her idea of cleaning the house quickly and efficiently was to drag the garden hose in, turn on the tap, and wash down all the furniture.

She'd been at it some time when their parents came home, so the house was pretty waterlogged. They'd had to throw a lot of stuff out. The carpet had grown mouldy and the budgie, which had been soaked, got pneumonia and died. It had been a long time before things were back to normal. The funny thing was that James had got in more trouble than Ellie. That didn't seem fair to him. He'd never been able to figure it out.

And there were other times, too. Like in Grade Four when he had a teacher called Mrs Kittenmaster, who at home he always referred to as Kitty, or Pussy. When Ellie came to the school fete James took her to meet Mrs Kittenmaster. He said to Mrs Kittenmaster, proudly, This is my sister, Ellie,' and to Ellie he said, This is my teacher,' and Ellie shyly, innocently whispered, ‘Hello Mrs Pussy.'

It had been a while before he could laugh about that one.

She was a good kid though. He'd been sick with scarlet fever and she'd been terribly upset, hanging round his room all the time and sending in her Teddies and cooking things for him and lending him everything she could think of. She was OK.

THE TELEVISION NEWS
was coming to an end. James sat on his windowsill, languidly watching the small set on the white cupboard. The sports news was over, and the sharp-looking man who read the main stories filled the screen again. ‘This week,' he was saying, ‘is Missing Persons' Week. All week we'll be featuring case histories supplied to us by the Missing Persons Bureau and the Red Cross. If you have any information about these people, or anyone else whom you know to be on Police files, we'll be giving you a number to call. In many of these cases, grave fears are held for the person's safety.

This morning we have Carla Robinson.' A photograph of an attractive smiling teenager appeared. The newsreader's voice went on: ‘Carla disappeared twenty months ago on August 2nd at 3.50 pm near her home in Krogmann. She was thirteen years old. Carla was last seen waiting to cross the road at Krogmann Post Office. She was on her way to post some letters for her mother. The letters were never posted, and neither Carla nor the letters have been seen since. Police believe she may still be alive, but have no clue as to her present whereabouts. If you can help, please ring 008 42 3444. You need not give your name, and all information will be treated as confidential.

James was hunched forward, watching the set. His hands were clasped around his knees and his mouth was open. It was several minutes after the program ended before he broke his concentration. Then he got up and went to his desk, where he added the name ‘Carla Robinson' to a list on the wall. The name immediately above Carla's was that of Benjamin S. Briggs. There was a note beside his name: 38° 20' 15”, 17° 15' 25”, December 5, 1972, 3 pm.

Picking up his schoolbag James went swiftly out of his room and down the stairs in a mathematical progression, jumping first one step, then two, then three, and finally four, with a resounding leap. The front door was open but he went out the side door instead. He leapt off the verandah, steered a course in and out of a series of shrubs, then squeezed through a gap in the fence. The Director was walking decisively across the square, face set towards the Computer Centre. He did not see James but James saw him. He crouched behind a tree until the Director was gone, then continued on his meandering journey towards school.

When he arrived in class, lessons had already started. He slipped into the room and sat in a corner, half obscured by a filing cabinet and a pot plant. The students were engaged in discussion of a novel they had been studying,
Displaced Person.
The first question James heard asked by the teacher was, ‘Why does Graeme have a poster of Mars, the surface of Mars, on his bedroom wall?'

‘Because the world he's living in is equally grey and bare,' James thought.

A hand went up and a girl answered, ‘Because it's as alien as the world that he's living in.'

Yes, that's right,' the teacher agreed. ‘And what about the movie,
Beauty and the Beast!
Why does the author have Graeme going to a cinema to see that?'

‘Graeme is like the Beast,' James thought. ‘For a time, he becomes a beast himself.' As he was thinking that, a boy over the other side of the room was explaining, ‘Graeme goes through a time where he knows what it's like to be a beast. He's a sort of beast in the modern world.'

James idly plucked a leaf from the pot plant. The plant was about a metre tall, with shiny green leaves that looked artificial. He flicked the leaf at the soil from which the plant grew. Then he stripped off another leaf, and planted it in the soil, stalk first, so it stood there like a tiny green noticeboard. He planted another leaf beside it, then scattered a few more randomly around the base of the plant. Within a few moments, rather to his surprise, he realised he had come to the last leaf. With only a flicker of hesitation he removed it too and dropped it on the floor. The plant stood, bare and ugly. Was it still alive? James did not know. It looked like an oil rig, or a rocket launching tower. James had thought that by stripping away its leaves he would reveal its secrets. But it had no secrets. Under all its coverings it was just an old stick. The leaves were part of the plant, not just a covering. In stripping its protection to reveal its mystery, he had stripped away its mystery. The implications of this shocked him. He turned away.

‘James! Oh, James. How could you do that? What have you done?' The teacher was swelling in size as she came towards him. Oh, you're hopeless. Get away from there. Marie! Marie!'

The teacher's aide hurried across the room, ‘Sorry, Mrs Chalmers. I was checking Errol's homework.'

‘Take him over to the language lab. He can listen to a tape. Oh, my poor plant. It just makes you want to give up.'

TO GET BACK
from school James tried to take a new route each day. 1f he could not go by different streets he at least varied the way he walked, or the place where he crossed the road, or the side of the street he used. But as the months passed it became harder and harder to make meaningful changes. So he was delighted one afternoon when he noticed that the gates to the football oval were unlocked. This meant he could take a short cut to Wilson Street. He walked through the gates and entered a narrow gap between two grandstands. He emerged into the sun again and clambered across a low fence on to the playing area.

There were about ten boys kicking a football but they were far enough away for James to ignore them. He set out across the oval, a vast plain of green. He took a semi-circular path, to avoid the cricket pitch. As he walked he looked down, watching the way his feet slurred through the wet grass. He did not notice one of
the boys who, with a laugh to his friends, was rubbing the football in a patch of mud until it was well coated. He did however hear the boy call out ‘Hey, you!' Startled, James looked up. As soon as he did the boy, with a huge kick, booted the ball high towards him. James was trapped by it as surely as a horse on a halter. He could not, and did not move. Instead he stood with mouth open and watched the ball drop. It landed about five metres away from him and began bouncing vigorously, with high adolescent hops. But James still made no move. The ball's energy faded; the bounces became limp and weak.

There was something so pathetic about the ball's wasted contortions that even the boys on the other side of the oval did not move until it finally stopped. But a moment later the boy who had kicked it suddenly began screaming, as though a string had been snapped.