What about us? (15 page)

“There are always fewer health
risks.  That’s the reason why Paris is empty now.  Right across Europe, those
that have a choice in the matter escape the cities and head for the countryside
until the start of winter.  The tradition of being in town only for the winter
started long ago and up to a point, continued well into the twenty-first
century, by when it was merely a custom, nothing more.  While winter brings its
own problems of damp, chills and pneumonia, the summer has always been far more
dangerous in places with high population densities.  Don’t worry, there are no
major outbreaks of anything due now, so you’ll be ok; otherwise I wouldn’t have
brought you here.”

“I realise that, but I see what
you mean.  We’ll have to live in winter if we aren’t going to be rich.” I said,
shivering at the thought, “But maybe we can take holidays in the twentieth
century?”

“Maybe we can...” he said and
his eyebrows began to move, the way they always did when he was deep in
thought.

It was over a simple, but
delicious dinner of braised lamb, potatoes and carrots that he told me what
he’d been thinking.

“Exactly; holidays.” he said,
causing me to look around, wondering what on earth he was talking about.

He laughed at me, which made me
cross.

“It was your idea Grace...”

“What was? Mr you’re not making
any sense.”

“If we’re not to settle
anywhere for a while, then that’s exactly what we should do.”

“What...? What exactly is it
that we should do?” I demanded, saying every word slowly, as though he were an
idiot.

“Take a series of short
holidays.  We’ll be harder to trace, because we won’t impact on people’s lives
or be mentioned in conversations and we won’t have routines.  We’ll just pass
through places and as long as we choose times and destinations that are full of
people passing through, we won’t stand out in any way.”

I thought about his idea.  In
some ways it made me sad; we weren’t going to have a proper home, or friends
like Winnie again.  I liked routines, nice normal ones anyway; they made me
feel like a real person, living a real life.  On the other hand, it made sense
what he was suggesting.  There’d be no point to my life if he wasn’t in it.  The
home and the routines would be empty if they were just mine.  So, no contest
really.

“You’re right.” I agreed,
slowly coming to a decision.  “Daft to make it easy for your people to find us
and there will always be summer.”

“Lots of springs and autumns
too.” he said, smiling at me.

It was then that we embarked on
our ‘trips’ as we called them.  It’s so easy to lose track of time living life
that way.  Normal events didn’t happen in the right order.  We had two
Christmases on the trot once, different years but same dates.  Because we never
did a whole year straight at any one time, we didn’t seem to have birthdays
very often, or maybe we had them too often.  I don’t know, it’s difficult to
say... For a while it was endless summer, different places and times mind, but
always summer.

We went on several cruises.  In
fact, once we went on the same cruise four times.  Each time we did a different
leg of the journey and after a week or so, we took a break somewhere else,
before rejoining the boat.

That was a little more
difficult to do, because as you know, most journeys are to safe houses.  Part
of being on the run meant we needed to do the unexpected and Jack always
enjoyed a new puzzle to solve.  He’d figured out how to travel direct to a
place before we left for our life on the run and the first time he’d tried it
was when he’d left me in Margate and had decided to return there to find me.  That
time, weeks had passed for him, but less than an hour had gone by for me.  Doing
it at sea was a bit tricky though.  I mean, what if we missed the blessed boat?

We came here a lot too.  Usually
in-between trips, to take a breather so to speak.  Slowly I worked my way
through that magnificent wardrobe in the apartment.  Each time we arrived, it
was such a pleasure changing into something different.  Although I’ve never
done any of the things here that I used to do in Napier Street, in lots of ways
the apartment and the hotel room became home; the places we left and always
came back to.  Until now of course.

The things we did and the
places we saw... I would never have believed it possible.  I tangoed in Buenos
Aires in the heavy summer night air.  I drank a Manhattan in New York, well
sipped a bit of it really, because it wasn’t very nice.  I did the Charleston
in Rotterdam, with girls who practiced when their fathers weren’t about,
because it wasn’t considered a ‘nice’ dance.  We partied in London during the
war, while bombs fell and everyone was sure tomorrow wouldn’t come and ‘the
moment’ was all that mattered.

We walked for miles and miles
along the coastlines of Britain, France and New Zealand in all kinds of eras.  We
played in the Aegean, in both ancient and modern times.  Twice I watched London
burn.  Once during the Great Fire and then during the Blitz, centuries later,
but neither event stopped the city from living and thriving.  I watched the
rebuilding of my home town, but only after the second occasion; there were too many
health risks attached to hanging about for too long in 1666.

I shopped in Carnaby Street in
the sixties and saw the Beatles and the Rolling Stones before they became mega
famous.  I was in the crowd in the Mall as Queen Victoria, King Edward the seventh,
Kings George the fifth and sixth and of course, Queen Elizabeth the second were
crowned.  Oh, the pomp and circumstance.  Mind you, we did it in five
consecutive days, so we could compare them properly.  My favourite was King
Edward’s, somehow it was more fun than the others.

Oh, we had so many adventures. 
It would take me weeks to tell you all of them and all the time Jack told me
things about the times and places we were in.  With him I got the education
that Winnie wrongly assumed I’d had and what a way to get it!

Sometimes we watched the ‘big’
events unfold.  Always from the sidelines though; we never got in the way.  Like
the shooting of the Archduke that started the First World War and the first man
landing on the moon.  Not from the moon of course, but on a telly in a diner in
Florida.  I got the impression from Jack that travelling away from the Earth
was something that the future held and there I was, there at the beginning of
it, seeing it happen for myself at the actual moment.  Even though it was on
the telly, black and white at that, it was still more exciting than all the
sci-fi films I’ve ever watched.

We were in Trafalgar square
when the announcements were made in 1918 and 1945 that the wars were really
over.  The difference between the two occasions was interesting.  Oh the
excitement and relief that the people felt, you would never have believed it
unless you’d been there.  In 1918 there was a mood of patriotic joy, while in
1945 it was much, much deeper than that: it was more about how something that
was good or right had conquered something that was bad and that the world was
somehow a better place as a result of the struggle.

There was also more realisation
of the cost and the sacrifice, so the joy was tinged with deep sadness.  You didn’t
have to look far to see the damage that had been done; it was all around you.  London
was deeply wounded, but it just kept on going, like other cities round the
world in the same sort of mess.

Given all that pride in
defeating evil and they were right to be proud after all, it was a bit of a
shock, to say the least, that in the years that followed, the world got somehow
smaller, meaner and darker again.  I saw signs in windows all over my home
town; No Blacks, No Irish, No Gypsies and it seemed that all that hate hadn’t really
been defeated at all, it still needed to show itself.  That made me sad.

We sailed on the Titanic, but
only from Belfast to Southampton.  I comforted myself with the thought that all
those people scrambling up the gangplanks to go on the proper maiden voyage,
would have been long dead anyway by the time I first learnt about the mistakes
that led to it sinking with that terrible loss of life.

Because of the health risks,
not to mention all the other sorts of dangers Jack was constantly fretting
over, we rarely went earlier than the middle of the eighteenth century and the
furthest towards my own time was1969.  I was born in 1980 and we wanted to
avoid even the remotest chance of me inadvertently breaking the golden rule or
doing anything that might influence my birth in any way.  He was never very
clear about what would or could happen if we did, but we thought it best not to. 
There was so much to see and do in all that time, I never minded.  I’d seen the
film Jurassic park and I never had even the slightest wish to go and see all
that for myself.

Only a few times did we go
further back.  There was the day trip to the Great Fire of London of course and
we spent a day in ancient Rome; smelly and crowded it was too, as well as a few
days now and then in ancient Greece, which to be honest, apart from the
clothes, wasn’t that different from some of the later visits we made to Athens. 
I thought of that girl from the agency who’d told us about her long holiday
visiting the islands and there I was doing the same thing, only just a bit
different.  It always makes me smile when I think about her.

Most of the time we stayed in
cities or larger towns; it was easier not to be noticed that way.  Whenever we
fancied a day by the sea or in the countryside, we either went to remote places
until we got too hungry or tired to carry on walking, or we went to seaside
resorts in more modern times, where we could just blend in anyway.  Sometimes
we visited the countryside when there was a big county fair on, when people
would be coming from miles around to sell, to buy or just to be there; so again
we weren’t often out of place.

Naturally, apart from in modern
Britain, I always sounded like a foreigner, while Jack could talk to anyone and
be understood, as well as understand what they were saying to him.  I was
always better than him at knowing what wasn’t being said though, I could judge
the body language and the mood, so together we made a great team.

He never wanted to visit really
sad events with me, because he said he’d done enough of them when he’d been
working.  It had been hard enough for him to just watch tragedy and destruction
unfold and not try to do anything to help and he’d had the training, unlike me.

“Is that what had happened the
second time I saw you, early in the morning, when you were waiting outside the
flats?” I asked, one time when we’d been having that discussion.

“Yes.  How did you know?” he
asked, surprised.

“I didn’t then of course, I
thought you were ill.  But your clothes smelt terrible; nothing good could have
produced a smell like that.” I told him.

“You’re right, of course.” he
said, as a dark cloud spread over his face.

“I’d been in one of the Ghettos
during the Second World War, witnessing one of the round ups.  In order to make
the people do as they were told, that is the ones that had been selected that
day, the soldiers randomly shot people or beat them to a pulp; children, women,
as well as men.  The fear written on every face is something I try not to remember;
it was the end of hope.

I didn’t know what to say, I
could only imagine how hard it must have been not to try to save someone;
anyone.  I wasn’t sure I could do that, just watch I mean.  Then I realised
that I wasn’t actually sure about anything in that moment.  If people could
really do that to each other, then what did that say about us?

“Couldn’t we do some good
then?” I asked, becoming excited.

“Like what?”

“Well we could go back and
smother Hitler when he was a baby, cot death sort of thing, no one would know.”

I think I was beginning to
think we could be superheroes or something and I was probably getting carried
away with the idea.

“And after him we could see
what else doesn’t make sense and needs changing, perhaps the man who started
the whole slavery thing and then...”

He held his hand up, cutting me
off.

“It’s not possible Grace.” he
said, with an awful finality in his voice.

“Why not? We’ve broken so many
rules already and that’s been just for our benefit.  Maybe we should try and do
something better than that, not be so selfish I mean.  Sheep and lamb, but with
a difference...”

With a sigh, he took my hands
in his.

“If only it were that simple.  Don’t
you think we would have done it? Changed things in the past so that the future
doesn’t have the problems it has? It really can’t be done.”

“Tell me Jack, I’m listening,”
I said, hoping to find some sort of loophole in whatever it was he was about to
say.

“Just because things don’t make
sense, real sense, doesn’t mean they can be undone.  Hitler never personally
dropped the gas canisters into the showers.  As far as we know, because we’ve
never been inside his bunker at the end, the only time he killed anything at
point blank range was his dogs and himself.  He was never present at a round up
or even part of a firing squad.”

“Are you saying that he wasn’t
the monster we’ve all grown up believing him to be?” I asked, incredulous.