*
Barbara stood before her bathroom mirror, stripped to the waist with a razor in her hand. One of the dolls was propped against the toothbrush mug. Margaret. The ridged, curving pattern on the doll’s neck and chest was clear. Barbara studied the pattern. She held the razor to her clavicle and tried to cut an arabesque into her skin. A line of blood ran down her breast. The cut didn’t hurt, though she imagined it would sting later. She’d gouged a deep groove by the time Antonio, her husband, opened the bathroom door.
His eyes widened and his mouth made a dark O. He caught her wrist.
‘Jesus, Bee,’ he said. ‘Look what you’ve done.’
‘It isn’t what you think,’ she told him.
He stared at her, and didn’t let go of her arm. She could feel his hand trembling.
‘I didn’t do it to harm myself,’ she said.
‘Bee.’ His voice cracked.
‘Look at this doll!’ She pointed. ‘See? She’s a time traveller. Time traveller dolls have these marks. If I have them too, I’ll match.’
‘All right, Bee. All right.’
But he still held on to her arm, so she knew he was trying to mollify her. No matter how rationally she spoke, her illness made her explanations suspect to him. He would think that she was imagining signs where they didn’t exist, because she was psychotic. Her eyes filled with tears. He’d never let her complete the arabesque.
She dropped the razor. Antonio pulled her towards him.
‘I’ll get blood on your suit,’ she wept.
‘It’s all right,’ he whispered to her. ‘It’s all right. We’ll go to the hospital, and they’ll take care of you.’
Nurses stitched her up, and the psychiatrist increased her medication. They all disregarded her explanation of why she cut herself. The psychiatrist told Tony she was a danger to herself. Eventually Barbara stopped disputing this. She’d tried to recapture the past, with a razor and some plastic imitations of friends. Perhaps, she allowed, that was lunacy.
17
JULY 2017
Ruby
After they had tired of the Candybox, Ruby and Bee took Breno to Clissold Park. They kept him on the leash, because of the deer, but he was good-natured about it. Passers-by stopped to talk with him. Not only to him; Ruby reflected that London was a far friendlier place with a dog. Bee was deep in conversation with the owner of a labradoodle when Ruby felt the buzz of her mobile on her hip.
The name on the display said Ginger.
Ruby picked up. ‘Hello?’
She heard laughter in response. A child’s laughter; then two muffled voices.
‘I can’t hear you very clearly,’ Ruby said. ‘I’m outside.’
‘A loser says what?’ said the child, in an ersatz American accent. More laughter. Then footfall, and an adult voice – deep, Irish – scolding. Ruby thought he said: ‘You’re bad and bold.’ The child kept laughing, then implored, ‘Daddy, no, let me have it…’
‘I’m sorry,’ that Irish voice said. ‘My daughter dialled your number. She keeps taking our phones.’
‘That’s OK,’ Ruby said.
She listened to the dead line for a few seconds.
‘Anything important?’ Bee asked. The labradoodle woman had gone, without Ruby noticing.
‘Just a prank call.’
They resumed their walk. Ruby could sense Bee’s sideways glances.
With concern, Bee said, ‘You look ever so shocked. It wasn’t a smutty call, was it?’
‘No… it was a little girl. Messing about.’
Ruby didn’t want to give any more information than that. Despite her qualms about Ginger’s relationship status, it was upsetting to have her suspicions confirmed. Hearing those voices was like discovering the people in a book were real. Till a few minutes ago, Ginger’s partner had been Ruby’s own intangible invention. The invention was never solid enough to sire children – or to have an accent.
Ruby wondered if he knew and consented to Ginger’s involvement with other people. But the possibility felt fundamentally hollow. Ginger conducted herself like a cheater. They always went to Ruby’s. Ginger never spoke of her home life. Ruby felt like a secret. And if Ginger was with a man, that might mean Ruby was a very particular sort of shameful secret.
Bee paused to look at a grazing deer, and Ruby stopped beside her.
‘I don’t believe you’re upset over some prank call,’ Bee said. ‘Is someone treating you poorly, Ruby? I can always give them a piece of my mind.’
Ruby laughed weakly. ‘I’m sure you would. Best I just forget about them, to be honest.’
‘Well, the offer stands.’
‘Thank you.’ Ruby knelt to ruffle Breno’s head. ‘I need a pet. I’m done with relationships.’
‘At your young age! Don’t make lasting decisions while your heart’s bruised.’
‘Maybe I’ll get a house cat. It’d be cruel to keep a dog in that flat.’
Breno barked, though whether in agreement or contradiction was unclear.
*
That night, as Bee slept in Ruby’s bed, Ruby tried to get comfortable on the sofa. Despite her fatigue Ruby lay there for an hour, unable to relax because she kept thinking about Ginger’s husband. She turned on the lamp and rifled through the paperbacks strewn across the coffee table for something to settle her thoughts. She settled on the book she’d bought at Tate Modern: the glossary of time travellers’ phrases, by Sushila Pardesi.
Ruby had expected the phrase book to contain a certain amount of professional jargon – and it did; consistency principle, common chronology, topology change, et cetera. Many of the words described living life out of sequence. To live an incident you’ve already read about is called completion. Returning to an incident you’ve already experienced is called echoing. Feeling angry with someone for things they won’t do wrong for years is called zeitigzorn.
But the real pleasure of the book was the slang. Quite a few of the colloquialisms defined members of in-groups and out-groups. Newly recruited time travellers are called wenches. People whose personal chronologies match well, because they belong to the same team, swim in the same cut. A time traveller may call their younger selves green-me, and older selves silver-me. And then there were terms for people who don’t time travel. These people, the everyday people, were mostly defined by their march through a shared chronology, earning them the names plodders, or one-way travellers, or emus – who can’t walk backwards.
Pardesi’s short introduction explained that time travellers’ slang is associated with the Conclave’s communal areas – the dorms; the break rooms. These are the places where travellers wait to be debriefed. Their slang is immune to change, making it interesting to linguists. Introducing ‘new’ words is impossible in such a context. A word may be new to an individual time traveller, particularly if she’s inexperienced in the field. But she’ll take it back to her own period, which may pre-or post-date the period where she heard it, and it can no longer be associated with usage in a given year or decade or century. The opportunities for this to happen are multiplied many times over, because there have been hundreds of time travellers, hailing from different periods, congregating in the Conclave since the nineteen seventies.
Ruby’s eyelids were now drooping. One final column of words caught her attention. It was the section on sex and romance. Sushila Pardesi noted that time travelling made it particularly easy to be unfaithful without detection. Adulterers had a term for their conquests in far-off decades: exotic material. Wishing she had closed the book ten seconds earlier, Ruby returned it to the coffee table, and turned off the lamp.
18
SEPTEMBER 2018
Odette