“Who are you?”
He threw the newspaper aside at this with a sudden energy, as if he’d been pent up waiting for that question. “Franklin Phearson, sir,” he replied, thrusting out a flat pink hand. “An honour to make your acquaintance at last, Dr August.”
I looked at the hand and didn’t shake it. He retreated it with a little flap, as if it had never been intended for shaking at all but was rather an exercise in muscle relaxation. The newspaper was retrieved from the tabletop and flicked open to the domestic news, which promised strike action yet to come. I ran my spoon over the surface of my cereal and watched the milk ripple beneath it.
“So,” he said at last, “you know the future.”
I put my spoon down carefully on the side of my bowl, wiped my lips, folded my hands and sat back in my chair.
He wasn’t looking at me, eyes fixed on the newspaper.
“No,” I replied. “It was a psychotic episode.”
“Some break.”
“I was ill. I need help.”
“Yeap,” he sang out, snapping the pages of his newspaper taut with a merry flick of the wrist. “That’s bu-ll-shit.” He enjoyed the word so much it brought a quiver of a smile to the corners of his lips, and he seemed almost to consider saying it again, just to savour the experience.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Franklin Phearson, sir. I said.”
“Who do you represent?”
“Why can’t I represent myself?”
“But you don’t.”
“I represent a number of interested agencies, organisations, nations, parties–whatever you want to call them. The good guys, basically. You want to help the good guys, don’t you?”
“And how would I help, if I could?”
“Like I said, Dr August, you know the future.”
A silence brushed between us like a cobweb in a gloomy house. He no longer pretended to read his newspaper, and I unashamedly studied his face. At length I said, “There are some obvious questions I need to ask. I suspect I know the answers, but as we are being so frank with each other…”
“Of course. This should be an honest relationship.”
“If I was to attempt to leave, would I be allowed?”
He grinned. “Well, that’s an interesting one. Permit me to answer with a question of my own: if you were to leave, where the hell do you think you could go?”
I ran my tongue round the inside of my mouth, feeling healing scars and fresh tears in the soft skin of my cheeks and lips. Then, “If I had this knowledge–which I don’t–what use would you make of it?”
“That kinda depends on what it is. If you tell me that the West will come out of this conflict triumphant, that good wins and the bad fall beneath the righteous sword, then hell, I’ll be the first guy to buy you a bottle of champagne and a slap-up feast at the brasserie of your choosing. If, on the other hand, you happen to know the dates of massacres, of wars and battles, of men murdered and crimes committed, well then, sir–I cannot tell a lie–we may have to be in conversation a little while longer.”
“You seem very ready to believe that I do know something of the future, whereas everyone–including my wife–believes it to be a delusion.”
He sighed and folded his newspaper away entirely, as if even the option of pretence were no longer of any interest to him. “Dr August,” he replied, leaning across the table towards me, hands folded beneath his chin, “let me ask you something, in this spirit of free and frank conversation. Have you in all your travels–your many, many travels–heard of the Cronus Club?”
“No,” I replied honestly. “I haven’t. What is it?”
“A myth. One of those wry footnotes academics put at the bottom of a text to liven up a particularly dull passage, a kind of ‘incidentally, some say this and isn’t that quaint’ fairy tale shoved into the small print at the back of an unread tome.”
“And what does this small print say?”
“It says…” he replied, letting out a huff of breath with the weary resignation of the regular storyteller. “It says that there are people, living among us, who do not die. It says that they are born, and they live, and they die and they live again, the same life, a thousand times. And these people, being as they are infinitely old and infinitely wise, get together sometimes–no one really knows where–and have… Well, it depends on which text you’re reading what they have. Some say conspiratorial meetings in white robes, others go for orgies at which the next generation of their kin are created. I don’t believe in either, because the Klan has really dented the white-robe fashion down South, and orgies are everyone’s first bet.”