The Hipster Who Leapt Through Time (The Hipster Trilogy Book 2) (5 page)

“Is anybody talking about it? Any chatter at all?” she asked Tom.

“Not really,” he replied. She could hear the salt in his voice. “Maybe some people somewhere online are talking about how you had a stroke or something.”

“A stroke? I’m twenty-seven, for fuck’s sake.”

“I know, I know, but, there’s not much you can do with the weirdoes who hang around on the internet. Some of them are even claiming you had a vision.”

“What?” she said, trying to chuckle at the idea. “A vision?”

She noticed a group of teens up ahead, hooded smokers, looking over at her from the other side of the road. A small one on a bicycle with a lit cigarette poking out of his mouth. She picked up her pace.
 

“Yeah I know, right?” he said.

An awkward moment passed between the two of them.

“I had an idea for a guest,” she said, finally.

“Go on.”

“Dr Warwick Dalton.”

“The space guy?” he said.

“Yeah, he’s just started a new podcast. I figured it would be fun to get him on to talk about the future of the planet and all that.”

“The future of the planet and all that?” he repeated her words slowly, as if spitting them through custard.
 

As Nisha passed the tribe of youths in hoods, she heard one of them say “Go back to your own fucking country you fucking Muslim.”
 

She walked on, ignoring it. For one, she wasn’t a Muslim; she was born English to Indian immigrants. And secondly, why would that matter? Still, she picked up the pace.

“Well?” she said.

“Yeah, we’ll look into it,” Tom said before putting the phone down.
 

As she neared her building she came to a crossroads. The road ahead — the straight road — led to home, to warm food, a bath, bed, fresh for tomorrow’s morning show. But to turn left … well, it could go a few ways.
 

She took a step forward, towards home, but then instantly pulled it back and whispered “one last time” to herself.

The road going left took to her towards a different sort of familiarity. It took her towards a place she once called home, back when the apartment buildings didn’t reach so high. It took her to her husband’s flat.

On the way, she stopped at an off-licence to buy a bottle of whatever rosé was on offer at the time. She’d normally buy something smaller, a beer or whatever, but she needed a large bottle today. She’d had a stroke, goddammit! She always had the small bottle of vodka hidden in her inside jacket pocket. It was a gift. Something she was supposed to drink after giving birth. A welcoming cheers. Nine months sober.
 

She pushed the thoughts of the bottle to the back of her mind and wiped her eyes as she rounded the corner towards the cinder-block of an apartment building. London life, tired, looking for some sort of reprieve from the hustle of the city, was all around her. Homeless people hiding from the rain and making huts out of cardboard boxes. People on phones with briefcases. More youths. All she was doing, she told herself, was offering some help in finding reprieve, solace, fun.
 

She reached the building. She looked up and could see his flat already. The place she used to call home. The balcony where she used to spend her evenings in the summer, practicing her yoga, and listening to Terry Rowling’s success tapes.
 

Without a second thought, she pushed in the code for the door and made her way in. Into the elevator, to the seventh floor. Flat number 709.

She puckered her lips before reaching the door, just in case he was looking through the peephole waiting for her. He probably wasn’t. But just in case.

She lifted her hand to knock on the door but she stopped herself. What was she doing? Was this another mind spasm? The second of the day? As she questioned her actions her hand felt heavy. An unseen force keeping her from knocking. If there was a time to back out, it was then.

A deep breath inwards and she said, “Fuck it.”

She tapped the door and quietly promised herself to let the Nisha of tomorrow worry about the mistakes of today. Plus, it was too late now anyway. The door had been knocked. The events that would follow were out of her hands. If Edward was in that wouldn’t be
her
fault. If he asked what that was in her plastic shopping bag she’d have to reply. It would be rude not to, and even ruder not to offer him a glass. If, after several glasses of the rosé, their tongues became loose and all the feelings they’d held under their breaths and whispered only to their pillows came out, it wouldn’t be her fault. It would be Destiny’s for forcing her knuckles to rap on the door. She’d merely found a train, stepped on it. Where the train was going wasn’t her fault. She wasn’t driving this thing. She was a passenger.

Pulling herself back and out of her daydream she realised she’d been standing in the corridor for a good while, and Edward hadn’t answered. She knocked again, this time louder. Nothing. She knocked one more time.
Bang bang bang
with her knuckles. Hard enough to feel the door bounce in its place.

“Shit,” she said as she rubbed the back of her hand.
 

Nisha reached into her pocket and grabbed her phone.
 

“Call Edward,” she said to it.
 

“Call Edmund,” the phone replied with a cocky beep.

“No no, cancel, cancel,” she said.

“Okay,” the phone said.

She dialled in the number from memory and pressed ‘call’.

“Nisha?” he said. “Nisha, is that you?”

He sounded busy. Clinking and laughing and whatnot. The background noise coming from the phone was like thunder to the quiet hallway. It was safe to say he wasn’t home.

“Hey Ed,” she said, giving him the all-smiles routine she used every morning between 8 and 11 am. “How are you?”

“Nisha? Sorry, I can’t hear you. I’m a little busy at the minute. Can I call you back?” he said

“I’m at the flat now,” she said. The all-smiles facade weakened. “When will you be back?”

“Well … I’m … sort of out with someone right now.”

“Someone?” she said, now all the way down into an all-frown.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice quieter, clearer. “Nisha, look, I’m on a date.”

Nisha didn’t answer. She felt her brain quieten. Her skin went numb. She felt—

“Nisha, are you still there?” he said, trying to interrupt her. “Nisha?”

Nisha dropped the phone. The bottle of rosé fell and the glass crashed against the wooden hallway floor. The world started to spin again. Just as it had done in the studio. Her feet came out from underneath her as she fell to her side. She didn’t scream. She didn’t fight. She lay there until the spinning around her turned to black and she was floating in space again.

Moomamu The Thinker

A sliver of light. A daily delivery of some unknown meat (no seasoning). Some rags to sleep on. And a man’s voice.
 

Moomamu’s only regulars.

Days spent lying on his back, staring at the dark ceiling, zoning out to the voice, imagining that he was seeing stars above him, planets, a cappuccino. What he’d give for a cappuccino right now.

The voice was still there, talking nonsense.

“I thought you wanted to go home?” the voice said, as it always did.

He continued to watch the ceiling, ignoring the voice, but then ….

“Don’t you want to go back to Earth?”
 

The words hung in the air, above Moomamu. They didn’t sit right. They didn’t make sense.
 

“Or does the Thinker want to go back to the stars?”

Moomamu sat up. If this voice wasn’t his own, if it was coming from somewhere in the walls, how would it know who he was? Or where he came from?

“Earth doesn’t want me,” he said as the eyes of his companion Gary flashed in his mind. “They wanted me to die.”

He kept his voice as quiet as he could. Any quieter and it would’ve been little more than a breath.

“No,” the voice said, louder now, angry at the idea. “They were simply doing what had to be done … and, for that matter, so did you.”

Moomamu scootered across the floor towards the wall, resting his back against the cold grit.
 

“I just want to go back to my Thinking point,” he said.

“The mind,” the voice said, so close Moomamu could almost smell his smoky tongue, “once stretched by a new idea never returns to its original dimensions.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.
 

“A human said it.”

“Which one?” Moomamu said, appalled. “Was it Luna? The woman with the tired face?”

“No,” the voice replied. “It was a famous one. I don’t know which one. I’m not a goddam dictionary of humans.”

There was silence for a short while. The only movement came from the dust particles suspended in the air.

“Who are you?” Moomamu said. “Are you going to jab me with one of those thump-sticks?”

“No.” As the voice said this, Moomamu noticed a figure come into view in the dark, standing at the far corner of the box room. It could’ve been a trick in the shadows but Moomamu could
almost
see the outline of the feet draw the light from the door. “I’m here to help you.”

Moomamu sat up a little more. His fists clenched.

“Soon, you’ll be taken from here,” the voice said.

Moomamu thought himself to be losing his mind. The voice was surely a dream created by his human flaws. “You’ll be put through several tests. Physical and mental tests that will determine who you will become in the future. You’ll also be made to kill.”
 

Moomamu tried to reply, but his throat was too dry. No words came.

“Promise me that when the time and the opportunity comes, you will take it. You will kill.”
 

Moomamu coughed and forced out the words, “Who am I going to kill?”

“It matters not. When the time comes, you must take a life,” the voice said as the outline of the figure fell backwards into the dark, as if never there in the first place.
 

The second the figure vanished a guard walked to the door, his footsteps echoing throughout the cell. A series of crashing keys against the wood. The door opened, washing Moomamu in candlelight so bright it burned.

***

“The name is Snuckems,” the alpha growled.
 

Moomamu had cats in front of him and cats behind — big ones, standing on their hind legs. The tips of their ears reached his shoulders. They’d wrapped chains around his hands and legs and yanked him along, pulling him through the prison. The cats behind were all too ready with the thump-stick for laggers.

The walls were brick after brick with the occasional hole in the side, allowing the morning twilight to enter. There were candles, though, lining the walls too, offering their own luminance. Moomamu missed the electric lights of Earth. They were much easier to operate. A simple flick of a switch. Clever humans, he thought.

After walking through a corridor, the cat in front, the alpha, raised his monstrous right paw and shouted, “Halt,” and within a second the cats stopped. The alpha was a beast of a cat. His fur was old and grey and scarred with lines of broken flesh. He’d taken a claw to one of his eyes at some point. The right one. It lay still in his skull. Milky, white, and useless.
 

The alpha used his keys to open another of the cell doors, where they wrapped up another prisoner in irons; another cat, ginger like Gary, but this one had both of its front paws. They connected the front of Moomamu’s chains with the back of the second prisoner’s and, with the signal of the alpha, they marched forward. Walking further and further through the dark prison.

After picking up a few more cats, they stopped and picked up another human — a skinny, olive-skinned one. Dirtied, yellow robes covered his reproductive parts and a darker, thicker material wrapped around his head, covering all but his eyes.
 

Moomamu wanted to shout out to the human, to ask how he got there, but he didn’t have the energy. Humans, or humanoids, were fairly common in the universe. Not as common as cats, but they got around. He felt the need to scream to the human, to ask him for help, but instead looked down at the chains around his wrists. Bloodied and sore around the rusty edges of the metal. He felt the nerves in his physical body screaming at him, but he didn’t have time to listen. Listening to his pain would only give it a platform to shout even louder.

The human was the last one they collected. They walked on further and found themselves taken outside into the cold dawn air. Moomamu’s eyes watered at the harsh wind. The planet in the sky was peeking its head, just around the corner. The stars and the moons were still present.
 

When he was first captured he was knocked on the head by a group of villagers. He had vague memories of being dragged through the town and into the stone walls. Now outside, he could see it was far more than a prison. The cells were merely a part of the whole. The giant blocks of stone piled up, peaking in two giant towers above him, with windows and guards and fiery torches for light. It was a place for royalty to oversee their land. He looked around himself and could see the hundreds more torches in the distance, lighting up parts of the town — brick and mortar establishments as far as he could see, and a great stone wall surrounding them all.
 

“Move,” said one of the cats as he slammed the thump-stick into the bottom of his back. Moomamu winced as he skipped forward to pick up the pace. Their collective chains and irons rattled throughout as they were taken across the field to another set of stone stairs going downwards.

It seemed he’d been allowed to breathe fresh air for only a minute before being taken back down into the ground.

The steps led them into another dungeon of sorts. Bigger, though, too big for one person. The smell of rot and damp and rust. Wooden benches lined the sides, and on the walls were weapons — eating sticks, but bigger, attached to the ends of thump-sticks. Spiked balls. Wooden shields. It was an armoury. The guards sat them down and locked their chains against the wall.