*
The day had been long but Odette was too agitated to attempt sleep. Instead she slipped into the front room, where the bookshelves were kept. Following Claire’s unexpected lapse into Kreol, Odette wanted to find the stories they had once brought to England. She finally located them on the bottom corner shelf, dropping to her knees on the rug. Picture books, mostly, which were simple enough for Odette to still understand. She ran her fingers over the illustrations in primary colours and peeled apart the pages that had curled together. Each book took only a few minutes to read. She reshelved the last of them, wishing there were more.
Then a green spine caught her eye. La revanche de Peredur. It was the book she had bought outside the inquest – the old crime story, in parallel French and Kreol. She hadn’t touched it since that day in February.
It fell open at the title page. No publishing house was listed there – and no date of publication. That was odd. But the glue in the spine had grown brittle, and perhaps a page had fallen out.
Her French was sufficiently fluent to read the opening paragraphs. An unnamed woman – referred to throughout as la Mère – challenged drinkers in a bar to a game of Russian roulette.
Odette’s eyes drifted to the Kreol text. A prior reader had circled four words on the page. Get. Disan. Rezilta. Ankar. The words appeared in different sentences, but there must be some connection between them. Why else would they be circled?
Odette took the book to her bedroom. At her desk, she flipped open her laptop, and quickly located an online translator. Get – look at. Disan – blood. Rezilta – results. Ankar – again.
Why would someone circle those words?
On the smooth melamine of her desk, Odette pencilled:
look at
blood
results
again
She rubbed the words into a grey smear with her thumb. The book’s previous owner had been playing at cryptography, sending hidden messages. She wondered who the intended recipient was.
As ever, her thoughts drifted back to the body in the museum. There had been blood tests at the inquest. She sighed, a little exasperated with herself. No matter what distractions she sought, there was always some detail in the film or book or song that reminded her of the case. And now she’d been reminded, she wouldn’t sleep till she’d looked again through her notes on the mystery, for any clue that she’d missed.
Her ring binder was in reach, on her desk, as it had been for months. She flipped to the pathologist’s testimony and tapped her nail on the blood results. The pathologist said the dead woman had bacteraemia. The same bacteria was on the bullets. The bacteria was macromonas.
Odette read the name once more and let out a small cry. The bacteria was macromonas.
Before meeting Jim, Odette hadn’t known that macromonas was associated with time machines. Was it possible the bullets had passed through a time machine? Might they, then, belong to a time traveller? Either the dead woman – or her killer?
Odette closed her laptop and watched her reflection in the dark square of her bedroom window. Zach believed the body was Margaret Norton’s; wasn’t that consistent with a macromonas-ridden bullet? His theory now had extra heft. Odette’s choice, to join the Conclave or preserve her own integrity, grew less tractable. She might be compromised if she was in their ranks. But to ignore this real, physical evidence was immoral too. Claire had told her not to be afraid, which felt like futile advice, because Odette was very frightened of the path that lay ahead. Still, she would have to endure it. She was going to accept the Conclave job.
45
AUGUST 2017
Grace
There was one genie in Grace’s possession that Ruby hadn’t seen, because she kept it beneath the bedroom floorboards. This genie was a book. According to Conclave lore, every time traveller has an acausal book – a volume with no writer, which is passed from silver selves to green selves, and is superstitiously said to reflect something of its owner. The contents are always in the owner’s native tongue and are always bound in a single, unique, unduplicated copy.
Sometimes the contents are little more than word salad with recognisable prosody but no meaning. Angharad, for instance, had a book called Quantum Wombs which she couldn’t make head or tail of. Lucille’s book was a collection of verse titled The Philharmonic Dining Rooms and Margaret owned Daisy, a hefty pseudobiography – which was somewhat opaque but in a literary fashion that could be deciphered with effort.
Grace had received her book soon after the Conclave’s formation, from one of her eldest selves. It was called A Ring of a Very Strange Shape and contained handsomely illustrated allegories, one of which was struck through with fluorescent highlighter. The fables’ relevance to Grace’s life was unclear. She looked for connections to her favourite tales – to the Wyndhams, and Butlers, and Tiptrees already on her shelves – but found none. She resigned herself to not knowing the book’s significance and concealed it beneath the floor of her flat.
But the book had come back to her thoughts the day she met Ruby. Their conversation about favourite stories on the train had brought it to mind. That night, after Ruby had left, Grace rolled back the carpet and prised up the wooden panel to examine the book again. It was in pristine condition. Although some acausal books spring into existence with dog-eared corners and the scent of aging lignin, they are oddly resistant to further damage and decay. Grace leafed through the pages. It was as she thought; there were references to mice, and gangs pretending to be clerics, and Punch and Judy men. This book was the words from The Box of Delights in another order.
Grace reread the paragraph scored in yellow. Now she knew her connection to the book was Ruby, she could interpret the words more easily.
A whole village went fishing in a sea of burning garnets. The oldest gave instructions: take this, hold that, stop daydreaming, and don’t take part with the past. Their haul hit the base of the boat with a slap. In the middle of the net was a woman of rubies, red as the heart, who scorched the wood. The oldest said, By law I must dance with you. The woman of rubies replied: What else must I do by law? The oldest replied: You must keep vigil at my death. But, the woman of rubies said, you must do the same for me, and how can that be possible? Because, said the oldest, my life is a ring of a very strange shape.
The allegory was telling her what her silver selves told her: she was going to end up with Ruby. Sleeping with Ruby had, indeed, felt like completion. But amidst the usual symptoms of infatuation – the short attention span, the dwelling on Ruby’s appreciable charms, the desire to be desired by her – Grace was panicking. Fate was closing in, and she wanted, for just a little while longer, to be only her, without Ruby in the picture.
For it seemed to Grace there were only two ways a couple could survive stretches where one partner was either dead, or yet to be born. The first was to rework one’s understanding of binding commitments, and accept a degree of openness in long-term relationships. The second was to maintain a single partnership which admits no others even after one partner dies – because that partner continues to exist in the past, and is thus still reachable. Grace leant towards the strictly monogamous, fundamentalist approach. She believed this solution was both elegant and romantic – while it was theoretical. Now that reality approached, Grace was frightened. The days before time travelling, when Grace was free to fall in love with any woman or man she met, were officially over. Ruby was it. After her, there was no one else.
*