The Unlikely Time Traveller (16 page)

“Saul, did you remember to bring the biscuits?”

I showed Agnes the huge pack of choc-chip cookies that Mum had given me. Agnes ticked them off her list. I also showed her Mum’s camera. We were in the den, getting ready for the big sleepover. It was already going dark and we all had torches round our heads. I called them Immunity torches.

“Will, you got the crisps?”

Will rummaged about in his rucksack and brought out four bumper-sized packets of cheese and onion crisps. “Crisps, here, Miss,” he said, grinning. “Dad changed his mind about giving me the telescope, though.”

“No worries,” Agnes said. “We won’t need one. And Robbie, did you bring sausages and flasks of hot chocolate? And paper cups?”

Then it was Robbie’s turn to pull things out of his bulging sports bag. “Yeah, plus that’s not all. Mum made us loads of prawn and mayo baguettes, and a strawberry cheesecake, plus she insisted I bring this whole bag of grapes.” I expected a white rabbit to come out of that bag too. He was doing his magic trick after all.

“Wow,” said Agnes, but she sounded slightly flattened. “So I didn’t need to bother bringing this bumper bag of peanuts?”

Agnes had probably used all her pocket money to buy those peanuts.

“I so love peanuts,” said Robbie quickly, pushing what looked like a box of chocolates back into his bag. “Salted peanuts are totally my favourite snack food. And they’re a luxury in the future. So enjoy them while you can!”

Good old Robbie.

He had definitely changed. The Monday after we got back from the future he actually stood up to Max in school. We were in class and Robbie had given some wrong answer, so next moment Max tittered and called Robbie “Dough-ball” and Robbie swung round and said, “Eejit-mouth. Don’t tell me what I am!” He stood up tall. “If you can’t say anything decent, shut up!”

Max was totally stunned. So was the whole class.

Next thing Mrs Flynn said, “Exactly Robbie.” Then she said the words he probably really wanted to hear. “You are brave, Robbie.” Then she glared at Max. “Which is more than can be said for people who call other people names.”

Now here was Robbie, with his mega-bag of goodies and a huge smile on his face, actually looking forward to sleeping out overnight in our wild overgrown garden. “I slept out already,” he shrugged, like it was no big deal. “In a tree house, remember?”

I grinned, howled and jumped on his back. “Don’t eat me,” I whined. “Please, don’t eat me! Mum! Help!!”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, all American and birling me round on his back. “This here used to be a shop where you could get fish and chips on polystyrene plates, and you could choose between red sauce or brown sauce.” He giggled. “Oh, and hi means hello. Try it out! Hey, and over there, used to be – wait for it… a car!”

I punched him. We wrestled and couldn’t stop laughing.
Agnes said I sounded like the unlikeliest tour guide in Scotland.

“He was,” Robbie said, panting, “believe me, he was!”

“But Robbie,” I said, remembering what Ness had called him, “was the unlikeliest time traveller ever.”

“But I did it!” He was grinning from ear to ear. “Unlikely or not, I did it!”

Then we all ran about gathering wood for the bonfire. Agnes said it was going to be a long night. As we heaped the sticks into a spire, I could see Agnes chewing her lip, looking worried. “I so hope we’ll see the Aurora Borealis tonight. After all this preparation it would be seriously disappointing if it didn’t happen. Clouds could come. It could rain. The people who said it would surely happen tonight might have got it all wrong.” She looked up to the sky. It was clear and already the first stars were twinkling.

“It’s gonna be fine,” Will said, and he squatted down to help build up the wood spire.

“Yeah,” Robbie said, twisting paper into fire-lighters. “I so can’t wait to sleep outside in this garden. What a feast we’re going to have.” He smiled at Agnes. “Lights or no lights, we’ll still have a good time.”

I grinned at Robbie. “So long as the wolves don’t howl!”

We lit the fire. Flames shot up, wood crackled and spat. We skewered sausages on the end of twigs and cooked them. Dad turned up just in time for a burnt sausage, which he said was his favourite kind of food.

It felt good to have Dad there. He brought his guitar along and sang us a couple of old songs, but then he got a call and had to go and fetch someone in his taxi.

After he had gone, we sat around the fire, gazing into the flames. Agnes kept glancing upwards anxiously. It looked like business as usual up there in the sky. I
couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. There were a few stars and the moon was coming up over the hills. Agnes said we might have to be patient. “The Northern Lights might not appear until midnight,” she said, biting her lips and twisting her hair. This had all been her idea. She’d be well disappointed if the merry dancers didn’t show.

Will flicked on his phone to check the time. “That’s another hour,” he told us.

The light from his phone picked up something else too. “Hey! We’ve got a wee visitor.”

“What is it?”

“A mouse!” Will trained his phone on the tiny furry thing with the twitching face and black beady eyes. Agnes pulled a scrap of burnt sausage from her stick and gave it to the little creature.

I watched Robbie. “Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie,” he whispered, then this big smile lit up his face. “O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!”

Then we all joined in because this was the one poem we knew off by heart. “Thou need na start awa sae hasty, Wi’ bickering brattle!”

The little mouse didn’t seem fazed by having four kids reciting a poem to it.

“Don’t fear the future,” Agnes whispered to the mouse.

This wee mouse didn’t seem to fear anything. Will fed it more sausage. Agnes passed round the peanuts. The wee mouse got a peanut. “It’s wanting to see the Aurora Borealis too,” said Agnes, and we lay down in our sleeping bags near the fire. We pulled up fleece blankets and made ourselves comfy.

Then looked up at the sky and waited.

I could see loads of stars. The more I looked the more I
saw. No one said anything, but it was like you could hear everybody’s wishes…

I thought of 2115, and Ness whose real name was Agnes, and how excited she was about the harvest festival. And I thought about the Aqua Park and the boats on the river and the high-speed train and how I-bands twinkled like stars in the sky, and the way people bowed and smiled and worked together in the fields and saved up their power and thanked the earth… and made garlands of flowers for the Lass of Fortune, and how in 2115 the Fortune Lass was Ness.

“Look!” Agnes yelled. “Look! It’s starting!” She sat up. She shook Robbie awake. “This is it! The Aurora Borealis has come! I knew it would. How amazing! Look!”

Above us, the sky exploded in green and pink light. Huge columns of shimmering turquoise glided across the sky, like sweeping lighthouse beams. Red bursts of colour appeared and disappeared. Shapes emerged, changed, then faded. Golden light swirled in the dancing sky. Curtains of glowing white light waved and pulsed. We gasped. “Wish on the Northern Lights,” Agnes cried, and with the next flash of gleaming colour we were stunned to silence. Balls of crimson exploded. Flickers of brilliant orange light trembled and shot over the sky. Enormous beams of emerald-green swung like searchlights back and forth.

I grabbed Mum’s camera and took some photos, then for a long time we watched, and it was more fantastic than anything I had ever seen.

“Imagine, Saul,” Agnes said, leaning over to me, “sometime in the twenty-second century, Ness will watch the Northern Lights and they’ll look like this.”

“And Frank and Elsie will have seen them in the
twentieth century too,” I said.

Under this fantastic sky of blazing colour anything seemed possible.

“And Agatha Black,” she added, “in the nineteenth century. She loved nights outside. She probably saw more of the Northern Lights than any of us.”

Maybe Agnes was right. I hoped so. Maybe Agatha Black two hundred years ago, with her pet monkey in a red jacket, would gasp and gaze up at the sky, and exclaim how ‘majestik’ it was, and believe that magic could happen.

I remembered that Saturday in December 2012, at ten o’clock in the morning, and how my time-travel adventures had begun with snow swirling down from a wintry sky.

Now they were ending with exploding light and bright colour dancing in the night sky.

Robbie and Will yelled as an enormous ball of turquoise light spun right above us. It reminded me of Ness, dancing and spinning, so the seasons would go on returning.

“We’re having the time of our lives!” Agnes cheered.

And the whole sky, as if it was cheering too, shimmered with a million flashing rainbows.

THE END