The Cronus Club in my fifteenth life was not the Club of my first eight hundred or so years. Its members were coming back, those who had survived Virginia’s purges. Those who had been forced to forget were now on their third lives, and the messages were slowly trickling back through the generations–the Club of the twentieth century is back, and we have dire warnings for all. Messages were received in carved stone from the 1800s, enquiring after us, asking what had happened to the Club to cause the twentieth century suddenly to go so quiet. The messages from the future were darker, passed down from child to pensioner, whispered back from the twenty-first century.
In our last lives, the voices said, the world was not the world we knew. Technology had changed–time had changed–and many of us simply were not born. We haven’t heard from the twenty-second century at all. We have no idea what happened to them. Please leave your answers in stone.
So the effect of our calamity rippled forward, spreading its wave through time. I dared not give an answer to the future Clubs, not even a time capsule sealed for five hundred years’ time. The risk of it being discovered by Vincent in this time, of him learning how close we were to pursuing and punishing him, was too great. I would not risk the safety of everything I had sought simply out of compassion for a century I had not seen.
My contact with the Club was therefore strictly limited. In the early years it was with Akinleye alone–she alone did I trust with the secret of what I was doing. In later years, Charity too was admitted to the fold. Charity’s role was crucial, for she generated the paperwork relating to my fictional life that I needed, documents which confirmed the story I had told Vincent in my previous life: of being an orphan, of Mr and Mrs August in Leeds, everything which might be needed to prove to Vincent that I was who I claimed to be. Now, my memory wiped again, I had to live the life of an ordinary linear boy, become my cover story, and so I went to school every day in Leeds and did my best not to embarrass anyone or myself, performing with the aim of achieving an average B+ grade until the age of seventeen, when I was resolved to give myself some chance of going to university and studying something I hadn’t studied before. Law, perhaps. I could see myself becoming lost very easily in the dry but thick volumes of wisdom that subject contained.
As it turned out, obtaining B+ came more naturally than I had expected. Questions designed for a fourteen-year-old brain baffled me in my old age. Asked to write an essay on the Spanish Armada, I presented six thousand words charting its causes, course and consequences. I had tried very hard to stop myself, losing nearly three thousand words from the overall bulk before submission, but the more I looked at the question the more I could not conceive what the teacher desired. A blow-by-blow account of events? It seemed the most obvious, and so I tried to give it but found myself utterly unable to avoid writing why Philip II chose to link up with the Duke of Parma or why the English fleet sent fireships into the Armada off Calais. The eventual grade for my essay was a grudging A–and a note in the margin requesting that I stick to the matter at hand. I chose from that point on to disregard my teacher entirely, and occupied my brain in his class by inventing first a shorthand derived from Sanskrit, then a longhand derived from Korean designed to ensure the minimum motion of the pen between each letter and the most logical calligraphical unity between letters of certain types. When I was finally caught doing this, I was dismissed as the world’s most idle doodler, given three lashes on the hand with a ruler and made to sit at the back of the class.
Two boys, a would-be alpha of the pack, supported by an omega too slow to realise that the top dog needed his minion’s adoration to assure himself of his superiority, attempted playground bullying after that incident. My name not rhyming with anything particularly obscene that their young minds could come up with, they settled instead for a little pushing, a little shoving, a little shouting, and when finally, bored with their discourse, I turned round, looked them in the eye and politely informed them that I would rip the ears off the next one who laid a finger on me, the omega burst out crying, and I once again received three smacks of the ruler to my left hand and also detention. To spite my teacher, my next week’s project was learning how to write ambidextrously, creating no end of confusion as to which of my hands was the one that could be most conveniently smashed about with a stick while leaving me best able to do my homework. My teacher finally realised that I was in fact able to write with either hand just as I was beginning to step up the quality of schoolwork in expectation of the slog through to university, when…
“Are you Harry?”