Our world is a magical smoke screen

Oil on canvas (60x80cm)

Entangled

Back then, I was a student: young, demotivated, and bored, looking for the hidden magic in dark forgotten corners, for the mysteries that permeate the spaces no-one knows about, to create a new reality to fill the void of mine. I was studying history, but finding it chokingly dull, lifeless, and irrelevant. I decided to scope out my own methods of uncovering London’s more mysterious past, using randomness and chance as my tools.

I’d been reading The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, and found Dirk Gently’s investigative methods intriguing. Apparently he often got lost in his car because of his “Zen navigation method”, which was to follow anyone in a car who looks like they know where they’re going. I didn’t drive, so for months I’d just been following people at random, on foot. I had no interest in solving crimes through the intrinsic interconnectivity of everything, or whatever it was, as he did; but I was intoxicated by the idea that following someone at random could take you somewhere that you didn’t know you needed to be. Like the Three Princes of Serendip. Or the Lonely Student of Ilford.

On one particular day of playing The Following Game, I picked Bank station as my starting place. Everyone always seemed to know where they were going at Bank. Even if where they were going was dull and pointless, I enjoyed a challenge. It was a game, after all, and I didn’t want to make it too easy. The rules were simple: choose a person at random who looks like they know where they are going, and follow them until they take you to where you need to be. If you lose them, you have either reached the place you need to be, or you choose someone else to follow. Repeat until you find where you need to be. When you get there, you’ll know. I’d begun to uncover many secrets of London with this method.

It’s extraordinarily easy to follow someone around the streets of London. No-one expects to be followed as they go and buy a sandwich on their lunch break, or to meet a friend for a coffee, or wonder into a museum. Almost everyone is so lost in headphones, mobile phones, or inner dialogues that they barely notice they are surrounded by other people at all, as if everyone else were ghosts. I could run into someone I was following four times in a single hour, and even if they noticed they wouldn’t care. Being a small, white, bespectacled woman affords a certain kind of invisibility; I pose a threat to no-one on the streets of London. Of course, I tried my best not to be noticed--it’s all part of the game--but I never really needed to try to be inconspicuous, though it was much more fun to pretend that I did.

So on that morning, the first warm day in London after a long and bleak winter followed by a miserably wet spring, I exited Bank station, and followed the first person I thought looked like they knew where they were going. He was a young man, short brown hair, dark suit, white shirt, some kind of tie. The air had the scent of early summer in it; clouds breaking for sun now and then, a sort of jubilant atmosphere in the air, an unnecessary amount of exposed skin and feet everywhere. I followed, followed, and followed, until I came to the Guildhall Art Gallery. Suit Man continued on, but I stopped there, feeling that this was where I needed to be. I’d visited most of the art galleries in London, and I hadn’t even known this one was here, and although it was rather boring-looking from the outside, I felt drawn to it because it was a complete surprise. I felt enticed by this discovery and decided to go in and see what it held.

As I entered the twirling glass door, a smart-looking older man in an art gallery blazer smiled kindly at me and looked regretful as he asked to search my rucksack. He fumbled in embarrassment around the loose tampons, lip balms, biros, and half-empty chewing gum packets rolling around the bottom of the bag.

“Good afternoon, Miss,” he smiled once he was done. “Are you here to see anything in particular?”

“Nope,” I said, swinging my bag back over my shoulder. “Just having a look.”

“Well, we usually recommend that visitors begin upstairs, at the top of the gallery, and then work their way down to the amphitheatre.”

Assuming he meant “amphitheatre” metaphorically or that it was the name of the downstairs gallery, I grinned back and told him I would do just that. I walked up the grand staircase to the top of the gallery and began to look at all of the gold-framed paintings. After viewing one after the other after the other of dull old paintings I was feeling dreadfully bored, wondering why the Princes of Serendip wanted me to come here. But I was a polite person, on the whole, so I glanced perfunctorily at everything, pretending to give a toss about old pictures of women in smart dresses and whatnot.

Eventually, after having diligently looked all around, I wound my way down to the lower ground floor of the building. As soon as I descended the stairs there I felt something shift. It was colder. And darker. I wondered what kind of gallery needed to be kept in such conditions, and felt my curiosity piqued. I walked down the remaining stairs into the basement space. To my surprise, there were no pictures at all there. It was cold, dark, and empty of people, and all I could see was some old bits of brick piled up on the floor in random places, and some white markings all around the floor.

Seeing a large print explanation of the room hanging on the wall nearby, I strolled over. As I read, my hand involuntarily flew to cover my mouth in astonishment. Holy shit--this was an actual amphitheatre--a genuine Roman relic. I knew, of course, that the Romans had been in London and so something like this was bound to exist, but I’d had no idea that it had actually been found. It was now little more than a pile of stones--but what a pile of stones!

I’d thought of myself as a kind of “sexual synaesthete” for a while--anything at all that excited me, excited me. I was so exhilarated by this find that I began to feel sexual arousal build in me. I was the only person down there, so I crept slowly towards the centre of the room, and realised that the markings on the floor were showing where the rest of the amphitheatre would have been. I stood there, in the centre of this ancient space, my arms outspread, and closed my eyes. I could hear the crowd roaring; in the dark and cold of the room I imagined a cold, rainy day in Londinium in the Roman amphitheatre; I could almost feel the violence, the electric charge in the atmosphere; it crescendoed in my body until I began to convulse, climaxing right there in the flipping centre of the basement of the Guildhall Art Gallery.

“It’s kind of astonishing, isn’t it?” a voice said.

I nearly fell over. A body emerged from the shadow behind me. She must have entered while I was imagining myself.

“I come here, sometimes, to feel the history of this city. It’s usually empty at this time.”

I brushed myself down as if I were dusty, glad of the darkness down here. Through the dimness of the light I could see that she was perhaps a few years older than me.

“Do you like it?” she said.

“Do I like it?” I replied stupidly. “Yes – yes. I do like it.” Why wouldn’t proper words come out of my mouth?

She smiled at the side of her mouth. “You do, don’t you?”

Until now, I’d only been mildly embarrassed, assuming she hadn’t seen what happened. But at this point, my entire face turned scarlet. I was very glad of the darkness in there now. “I--I mean—because—but--”

“Don’t be embarrassed. It actually is that exciting.”

I didn’t know if it was the after-effects of the little death, or the chill of the air, or maybe just her, but suddenly I felt an instant jolt of mutual understanding and attraction, as if we’d known each other for a lifetime. It was this awesome, indescribable feeling of warmth and safety, at the same time as tumultuous lust.

“Let me guess,” she said. “You’re a student. History?”

“Yes,” I said, smiling through my embarrassment. “Well, classics. Well, obviously. I suppose.” I was going to have to have a word with my words later.

“I can see why it would have such a powerful effect on you.”

I blushed again, but this time it was more of a reflex than a genuine emotion. “Yes,” I agreed. “But, actually, that’s not why I came here. Actually, I didn’t even know this was here.” Stop saying “actually”, I told myself.

She laughed. “And you being a classicist too.”

I found myself enjoying her mocking me. “I know. What are they teaching us, right?”

“So if you didn’t know this was here, how did you find it?”

Even though I’d never told anyone else about my following game, I barely hesitated before telling her. After all, she’d just seen me orgasm to a fucking brick wall. What would be the point in hiding myself, after that?

I shrugged. “I followed someone. Not in a stalker-y way. It was just a random person. It’s a game I play with myself.”

“You follow random people. It’s a game you play with yourself.” Her words were neither question, nor judgement. It was as if she were just swishing the words around in her mouth.

“Yes,” I said. “To see if they might take me somewhere I didn’t know I needed to be. As you can see, it seems to have worked.”

She smiled that I know something you don’t know smile she’d done earlier again. “You’re a bit weird, aren’t you?”

I shrugged. “Probably.”

“So, this game,” she said. “Is it a one-player game, or…?”

My heart began to race. “Are you saying you want to play my game with me?”

“I think I do. Maybe it can show me where I need to be, too.”

“Well, I--I’ve never played it with someone else before, but I—yes--yes, I suppose--well why the hell not?”

Each of us burst instantly into huge, matching grins. I felt our mutual understanding and excitement fill the whole dark room. It knocked me for six.

“My name is Ogechi,” she said. “My friends call me Chi-Chi.”

“I’m Charlie. That’s what everyone calls me. No-one calls me by my real name.”

We left the gallery together. Outside, the sun was blazing bright.

“So, Charlie, how do we play your game?”

I looked at the hordes of people around us. “It’s pretty simple. We pick a person more or less at random – as long as they look like they know where they’re going – and we follow them. If we lose them, we either stop and see if they have led us to where we need to be, or we pick someone else and follow them. And we can stop at any time if we think we’re where we need to be.”

“How do you know when you’ve found where you need to be?”

I shrugged. “You just know.”

She stood up a little straighter and cast her eye around. “Her,” she said decisively, nodding towards a thirty-something woman in a yellow cardigan, who was striding purposefully away from us. I smiled to myself, appreciating that she had immediately felt that she should not point, even though our target had her back to us. She seemed to have the knack for this.

We walked for longer than I had earlier, meandering the streets of Barbican, up into Clerkenwell, the sun shining fiercely. It always fascinated me, playing this game, how many people in London walk great lengths through the city. I had always assumed we were a city reliant on the tube, on the bus, on cabs, but it was incredible just how many people walked huge strides across the streets of London. Chi-Chi took to it like a tardigrade to anything; she seemed to know right away to keep a respectful distance; to hang back when our target stopped to cross the road; to pretend to be in deep conversation with me when the target turned towards us to check for cars.

Eventually we wandered into Spa Fields, a small green space in Clerkenwell. It was lunchtime, and sunny, so it was packed with lunch-breakers and students starting their evening early with tinnies and rollies. She came to a dead halt at a sign stuck to a post at the outer edges of the park.

“What’s this?” she asked. I watched as her eyes filled with the curiosity that fuelled this game. I felt myself pulled even closer towards her. “I think this is it,” she said decisively. “This is where I need to be right now.” Silently, we read the plaque together.

“A brief history of the Bone House & Graveyard.

During the 1780s the land was leased as a burial ground and provided space for 2,722 interments. Eventually housing was built all around the site leaving an enclosed space. This helped to create the conditions for the burial ground 'Abomination' as activities could go on without disturbance. During 50 years 80,000 interments took place, many more than the 2,722 originally provided for. Each night bodies were exhumed and burnt in the Bone House with their coffins to make room for fresh burials. Local residents got ill from the fumes and suspected that Mr Bird the manager and Steve Bishop the watchman of the burial site were burning bodies after having buried them. A few times they thought the Bone House was on fire and forced entry to find Mr Bird drying out coffin wood with burning coffins and body remnants up the chimney. The Bone House stood where the park building now stands.”

We turned to look at each other in equal measures of dread horror and rapturous excitement.

“Oh, Charlie,” she said, grabbing both of my hands. Her eyes were wide as flying saucers. She hugged me tightly. “This is so perfect. So perfect. What a perfect abomination!”

Desire coursed through me as her body came into contact with mine, the double whammy of my attraction to her and the intense excitement of the find.

“Why perfect?” I asked when she had broken the hug.

“I want to uncover London’s secrets,” she said. “I’m a historian, you see. Like you. I already knew about the amphitheatre from books. Anyone can read about London. But this--this you would never find unless you just happened upon it. This is what I was looking for.”

I laughed. “Stolen graves and bones up a chimney. That’s your kind of history?”

She grinned and shrugged.

“Well, me too, actually. My turn!”

For our next target, I chose a middle-aged woman in jogging bottoms who was walking with extreme decisiveness, and we followed her. We followed her north-westwards, until she disappeared into the British Library. Neither of us felt any special pull by that, so I chose someone else; a young couple arm-in-arm marching in the same direction we had been pursuing. They took us past Mornington Crescent, and up Camden High Street, where they disappeared into a sports shop. I felt my shoulders sag a little in disappointment; this wasn’t right either.

Chi-Chi clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Him,” she said, nodding towards an anxious-looking young man walking hurriedly past us. I nodded my agreement, and we walked on. I was sure he was just going to take us into Camden Town, but instead he veered off further westwards. Eventually we found ourselves at the top of Primrose Hill. It was packed with tourists and Londoners all shuffling around each other to get “the best view in London”.

We stood before the plaque that faced this famed view.

“I have conversed with the spiritual sun. I saw him on Primrose Hill,” I read aloud.

“Hmph,” she said with contempt. “I always prefer to converse with the mysterious moon.”

“It’s William Blake,” I said, continuing to read. “A quote.”

“Is it?” she said. “Oh, look – we must follow this man now.” And with that, she began to march down the hill, towards the trees that stood further down, by a perimeter fence. I loved that I was following her now.

At the bottom of the hill there were no people and our presence in this isolated part was rather conspicuous. The dog-walker we had followed turned around to look to see who else was there, and we quickly stopped by a large tree, pretending to have come here in search of a sitting place and shade. To make it believable, we sat down beneath the shade of the tree.

“Charlie,” Chi-Chi said, looking at me with solemnity as she shuffled in the dirt, her back against the tree trunk. “You know how you’re a weirdo, and everything?” I opened my mouth to answer, but closed it again, not really sure how to reply to that. “I think I might be an even bigger weirdo than you.” She sighed. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “You need to get something off your chest?”

“I do. But it’s weird.”

“Weirder than following random people to see if they can take you where you need to go?”

She laughed. “No, in a way. But also, yes. Yes, very much so.”

Suddenly, I noticed something in the dirt next to her. “Oh! What’s that?”

She followed my pointed finger, and spying what I had spied, cleared the dirt from around of the bit of half-buried paper there. She brushed the dry mud off the piece of paper, held it up to her face, imbibed it, and then handed it to me, her expression full of puzzlement. I took it and perused.

The first thing I saw on it was a roughly drawn picture of a woman. She was white of skin, with blonde hair, riding a horse and holding in one hand a spear, and in the other a burning torch. Above her, only one word was written: “Boudica”.

Beneath that, the writing:

“Only through motion, and in time, can any event happen. Heed not the Siren-Voice of Sense, or the Phantom-Voice of Reason; rest in Simplicity and Listen to Silence.”

The leaves above us rustled in the wind. The excited hum of voices up at the top of Primrose Hill swept like a wave over us. The dog we had followed barked in joy as its owner teased it with a stick he would not throw yet. I felt I could hear the movement of my eyes in their sockets as they turned to look at Chi-Chi. My hitched breath sounded like the death-throes of erotic asphyxiation.

“Charlie,” she whispered. I buried the bit of paper where it had been, and sat back, looking at her quizzically. “Where your weirdness ends, mine begins. You follow people. But I have been following you.”

I wasn’t sure if she was still talking about the game or whether things had taken a sinister turn. I let the breeze pass over me and waited for her to carry on.

“It wasn’t an accident that I found you in the amphitheatre today. I was looking for you.”

I frowned and titled my head. What was she talking about?

“I’m from the future, Charlie. A kind of time-traveller, as we call it in this era. But in the future we think of it more like...do you know what quantum entanglement is?”

I thought about the headphones in my pocket and how they seemed to obey the law of entropy quicker than anything else in the known universe, but I didn’t think she meant that. I shook my head.

“I’ll explain it all. You might think I’m mad. Maybe I am. This morning, I woke up and realised I’m me, but I’m also in the future. I have been wondering if maybe I am mad. But I don’t think so. I don’t think so.”

The furrow in my brow deepened. I opened my mouth to speak, but found I couldn’t find a single word to utter.

“I chose you because we are so alike. We are both historians. That wasn’t a lie, I really am a historian. We both follow people. We’re both looking for the magic in the world, and sick of the mundane. And I--well, I--”

At this, she looked down at her hands. I thought I could see a flush spreading across her cheeks. And then she looked up at me with that half-smile again, sending shock and delight through me. “Well, to be honest? I kind of…liked you. I know--I know that was a stupid reason, and I’m sorry for that. The other reasons were all genuine. But there is something about the way you engage with your world. I just find it…intoxicating.”

I took several deep breaths to steady myself, to survey her face as she expressed regret and desire at once. She was looking at me intently, willing me to believe, to not judge her. I leant slowly, very slowly towards her. Her eyes were dazzlingly bright, joy and hope etched on her face. She moved towards me too, and then suddenly we were locked together: joined in lips, in hands, in tentative touches of shoulder, of thigh, hair in each other’s faces.

I’d never felt this feeling before. I’d liken it to adolescent romance, but I’d never experienced that. I felt powerful, like anything was possible. I felt drunk, like I wanted to do something stupid. I felt overwhelmed with lust, like I did most days. But unlike most days--any day, really--here was someone who wanted to experience that with me.

“Like attracts like, after all!” she said, grinning, holding my hand as we sat beneath the shade of the tree. “What shall we do next?”

“Well,” I said, brushing strands of misplaced hair off my face and tucking them behind my ears. “I suppose we have two choices. Either we can follow someone else, or you can tell me about how you’re a time-traveller.”

“Maybe there’s three choices,” she said, an eyebrow raised suggestively. “I live pretty close to here.”

I exhaled loudly. “Don’t get me wrong. That is a very fine option. But in a battle of sex versus curiosity, curiosity wins for me.”

She tutted. “It’s alright for you. You can cum at the sight of a pile of bricks. The rest of us have to get our kicks the old fashioned way.”

“What can I say? I’m a cheap date. One brick and I’m anyone’s.”

We both laughed. “Okay, Brick Girl. It’s your choice. I’m more curious to continue our game, but that’s because I already know how come I’m a time-traveller. If you want to know my story first, we can do that.”

I swilled the two choices around in my mind for a moment. “No. Not yet. No good story ever happened by rushing into it. Let’s carry on playing the game for now. When it’s time to hear your story, we’ll know.”

She nodded her agreement, and we both stood up and brushed the dirt off our jeans. We each looked around for the next person to follow. The dog-walker had long since walked off. We looked back up at Primrose Hill, still full of viewers, and joggers, and other dog-walkers. None of them really seemed like they knew where they were going.

Suddenly I had an idea. “What date is it today?” I asked.

She half-smiled at me. “In the present? It’s 21^st June, 2017.”

“Summer solstice,” I said. “We need to go to Hampstead Heath.” Excitement began to mount in me so fiercely I felt I might explode.

She looked at me quizzically. “We’re not following people any more?”

“We are,” I said, “except we’re following people who went there fifty years ago, on this day.”

She beamed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I love it.”

“On the summer solstice, 1967, the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids placed a wreath in Hampstead Heath. Bet you can’t guess why.”

“Hmm.” She mulled it over. “Some kind of ritual?”

“Yes, a ritual. But what kind?”

“I don’t know. The summer solstice kind?”

“Yes! But who do you think they honoured at this ritual?”

“I give up. Tell me!”

I crouched down and retrieved one of the cards we had found buried earlier. “The ancient queen right by our feet.”

“Not Boudica.” I nodded once. “For real?”

“For real.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

I shrugged. “Classicist,” I said.

“That you know, but an extant Roman amphitheatre under your home city passes you by?” Somehow, I knew she meant that as a compliment. “Hampstead Heath it is.”

We decided that along the way we would try to find something to take with us to lay for Boudica, as the Order had done forty years earlier in the shadows of our steps. We knew it was something we had to happen upon, not look for, in the manner of our game. As we neared the heath, however, we had not found anything, until in the road leading up to it something in the gutter grabbed Chi-Chi’s attention. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It was slightly damp, and very dirty. We gingerly inspected it, flipping to random pages looking perhaps for a page of poetry within that would be fitting. But nothing seemed to fit. The jolt of connection we’d felt at other points in the day just wasn’t there.

“I don’t think this is it,” Chi-Chi said, putting the book back where she’d found it.

“Sometimes you need to know when to ignore,” I said. “You don’t have to take everything chance gives you.”

We carried on down the street towards the heath.

“Oh,” she said. “How about this?” Someone had uprooted an evergreen tree, something a bit like a Christmas tree, and left it by the side of the road. It was a pitiful, sorrowful sight. Chi-Chi picked up a spring of the tree that had come loose. “We could plant it.”

She handed it to me, and I turned it over in my hands. It was a bright green sprig with five points.

“Perfect,” I said.

We marched through the bushes, trees, mud, insects, and birds of Hampstead Heath, taking ourselves as far into it as we could, as far away from other people as possible. In what felt like the centre of it, we stopped, finding ourselves alone, and surrounded by holly trees and other deciduous trees – the perfect spot to plant our sprig. I’d been carrying it in the pocket of my backpack, so I retrieved it and held it in my hand.

We turned to face each other. “I don’t really know how we should do this,” I confessed.

Chi-Chi took the sprig from me. “I do.” She knelt down, set the sprig besides her, and began to dig at a patch of dirt with her hands. I joined her silently. When we had dug a hole large enough for it, she looked up at the sky, squinting. “Can we see the moon from here today?”

I cast my eyes around too. “There,” I said, pointing. “Half-moon.”

She picked up the sprig and, turning it to face the moon, planted it. We both pushed dirt back around it to keep it in place.

“Boudica,” she said, standing, turning herself also toward the moon. I followed suit and did the same. “Let there be life, let there be growth, and let there be hope!”

“Boudica,” I said. “Let there be hope, let there be dancing, and let there be sex!”

Chi-Chi turned to me with a devilish grin on her face. “Oh, it’s like that now, is it?”

“I think we can safely say the game is over,” I said, returning her grin. “And I think we won.”

“Lovers never lose,” she replied, and we fell to the earth together, as one.

#

She picked a twig out of my hair, and took my hand. The world opened up to me in ways I had never known it could as I felt her fingers intertwined with mine. “I think it’s time for you to tell me your story now,” I said. “Tell me about being a time-traveller.”

She took a deep breath. “Okay. You see, Charlie, London doesn’t exist in the future. Of course everything ebbs and flows, but we’re not talking a million years into the future here--only three hundred.”

“What the hell happens to it?”

“It gets destroyed in the third war.”

“The Third World War?”

“The Third Nuclear War.”

I felt chills run down my spine. “I don’t know if I want to hear about this. Is this going to be too weird for me?”

“Don’t worry. It rises from the ashes again, eventually. It’s that kind of place, isn’t it? But the problem for us--another two hundred years after that – is that everything was destroyed. Not just the physical place of London, but the digital records as well, after the solar flare. No-one was prepared for it, because it came right in the height of the third war. It never rains, but it pours, right?”

I must have been sitting there with my mouth hanging open. “This is really hard to hear.” My head was beginning to hurt, but I had an idea. “But, so, you must be here to stop it, right? To do whatever you need to do to change the past so that London doesn’t die?”

She looked at me sadly. “Charlie, this is history. This already happened. I can’t change it any more than you can change the Great Fire of London, or the Roman invasion, or the Battle of Hastings, or British imperialism, or the Blitz. All of those events of history were just as horrific and pivotal as what I’m telling you. It’s just that they happened in my past, and your future.”

“But you came back from the future. Doesn’t that mean it’s now your future, too?”

“Not exactly. Well, kind of. Okay--listen to this. You’ll like this,” she said, half-smiling at me. “There are actually two of me.” She wiggled her eyebrows suggestively. I couldn’t believe she was joking about that in this moment. “One that’s in the present, sitting in Hampstead Heath with you; and one that’s in the future, living right now in virtual reality identical to this reality.” She waited for me to reply. When I didn’t, she said: “I sound insane, don’t I?”

“Yes. Sorry,” I said quickly. “Not insane. But you’re not saying things that are possible either.”

She laughed. “I don’t blame you at all for thinking that. Honestly, I’ve been wondering it myself. But future me has arranged a demonstration for both of us, to prove it’s real.”

My head was spinning now. “Maybe you’d better explain it to me some more. You said London was obliterated. Is going to be obliterated. Whatever. But that you can’t stop it. So why are you here?”

“I said that in the future not just London the city but all digital records of London are lost. All that’s left in the future me’s time are the paper books that refer to London that have been salvaged from around the world. In the generations before future me, historians that specialise in London pieced together its history with this method. But recently, technology advanced enough for us to now be able to actually experience it in the past. You see, the me that’s in the present eventually has children who have children whose children’s children’s children--or whatever--leave London forever. My great-great-great-great-great-great-whatever escape London’s later demise, so my lineage lives on. Lived on. Because of that, using the technology they have five hundred years into the future from now, they are able to clone me by using their new DNA-regression technology, and then they were able to entangle future me and present-me. We’re twins, if you like. Or she’s my doppelganger. No, that sounds sinister. Twins. I prefer twins. But a very unique kind of twin, because we share information. What I know, she knows, and what she knows, I know.”

“Well, I’m a fucking history student. I have no idea what you’re talking about. I want to believe you, but I have zero frame of reference to understand whether what you just said is plausible or Star Trek-like technobabble.”

“Oo, do you like Star Trek? Next Generation or Voyager? I bet you’re a DS9 girl, aren’t you? Never mind,” she said, shaking her head. “Of course, I anticipated you’d say that, so like I said I have--or future me has--arranged a demonstration to show you that this is all absolutely true. But first, I need to finish explaining it. I’m not the first temporo-anthropologico-historian to get entangled. I’m the second. The first one was a colleague of mine. She was entangled with someone fifty years into the future from now, when the First Nuclear War was just beginning, to get on-the-ground data from that era. While she was there, she was able to transmit all the records that exist fifty years from now that she could get her hands on to her future twin, including things like who won which election and so forth. And because we knew we might have to confide in and convince the odd normal person from the present about what we were doing, she also collected records from more trivial events, but unpredictable ones, so that we could convince. To that effect, I have the lottery numbers for tonight’s draw, to try and convince you that I’m not kidding, or mad. I’m sure you know the odds of me guessing them right are millions to one. If I get them spot on – and the bonus ball too – would you be convinced?”

“Yes. But, aren’t we going to buy a ticket?!”

She tutted. “We’re historians, Charlie. We’re not here to make money.”

I rolled my eyes. “Do you know how much student debt I’m in?”

“Not as much as the students that come after you will be. Oops! I shouldn’t say things like that. Try to forget that, okay?”

I narrowed my eyes at her. Was this all some elaborate joke? Was this woman that I thought I might have a real possible connection with really a temporal--a temporo--a thing? Or was she actually living in a fantasy world?

“Alright. We go to yours. You write down the lottery numbers. I keep hold of them in my hand and we watch the draw. If they exactly match, I believe you.”

She jumped up and clapped her hands. “Yay! I have popcorn at mine. And pop tarts. And Ben and Jerry’s. We can gorge on them while we watch.” I must have looked faintly disgusted, as she said: “What? Future food is so healthy and practical. The Sugar Era was much more fun.”

#

When the first number came up and it was right, my heart jolted, but I steadied myself. One number didn’t mean anything. When the second number came up, I was almost already convinced. The rest was a pretty much formality after that. She got every number right.

“So you see, Charlie! I really am from the future. But I’m also 100% me as well.”

“You are, aren’t you?” I said appreciatively. “We could have just won millions of pounds.”

“Do you really care about that?”

I silenced myself for a minute to think. “No. I don’t, actually. I found you. That’s unimaginably better.”

She beamed. “We’d better go and fuck, then, hadn’t we? You know, what with the apocalypse coming, and all.”

“Oh, well, we have no choice, in that case.”

We bounded up to her bedroom, and gave her neighbours a great excuse to put their music on loud that evening.

The following morning, we lay in bed together, cuddling and reminiscing about the day before.

“There’s something you still haven't cleared up,” I said. “I get that you’re a historian from the future, and you’re here to collect data on this era, and everything. But that really doesn’t explain why you needed to follow me, to involve me.”

She shrugged and exhaled on her cigarette. “I didn’t, really. I just hate to travel solo. It’s so much better to share it, you know? So I did a little digging to try and find a companion. You were perfect.”

“A perfect abomination?”

“Exactly!”

“Chi-Chi, do you think your future twin and all the scientists in that future could clone me? Can I experience what you’re experiencing, too?”

“It’s possible,” she said. “If you have children, and we can trace your lineage.”

“Wow. That would be so cool.” I leant over to the bedside table to roll my own cigarette, wanting to join her in her post-coital nicotine bliss.

“It’d be a hard sell to the academy,” she said, “but I can be pretty convincing. I mean, I convinced them to--”

She stopped talked suddenly. “To what?” I asked, putting the tobacco in the little cigarette paper. “To what?” She didn’t reply. I turned around to ask her what was wrong.

But she wasn’t there.

I jumped out of the bed: cigarette papers, tobacco, bedsheets, the breakfast tray that was on the bed, everything that was within my vicinity, overturned and tossed into a clattering mess.

“Chi-Chi?” I whispered, looking around. “Is this a joke? It’s really not fucking funny if it is. You’re freaking me the hell out.”

I took in the whole the room, but she was nowhere. I looked under the bedcovers, looked under the bed and checked her en suite bathroom. I raced through the rest of the rooms of the house, ran naked into the front and back gardens, calling her name. But she was gone.

#

I stayed in her bedroom that night, crying and wailing in confusion and loss, terrified and anxious and yet all the while convinced that she would come back at any moment, but she didn’t.

I stayed in her house another few days, barely functioning. I didn’t eat, and the tiny amounts of sleep I had were punctuated by paralytic nightmares in which I lay helpless in bed while a demon or ghost or some other malevolent being swept in and kidnapped the Chi-Chi I had dreamt back into life.

After a week had passed, I couldn’t bear to be there any longer, so I went home, showered for the first time, ate a bird-sized portion of food, brushed my teeth, and went to the amphitheatre to wait for her. I continued this routine every day--getting up, going to the amphitheatre, waiting all day, and then going home--for another two weeks, until the art blazer man who had smiled at me the first time I went there kindly told me questions were being asked about me and perhaps I’d like to visit some other galleries the next week.

After that I began to feverishly follow people around London, expecting that eventually they would take me to her. But unlike my games earlier, when I had followed people at random, not expecting to be taken anywhere in particular other than somewhere I didn’t know I needed to be, now all I was getting was dead-ends and empty spaces. If I ended up at a museum, or gallery, it was always just past opening hours, or full, or closed for renovation. One time I was wandering so aimlessly that an American woman stopped and asked me if I was lost, could she help me find where I needed to go. After days upon days of failed following I realised this was a hopeless endeavour--the following game was to help you find where you didn’t know you needed to be, not to find a very specific thing.

I realised I didn’t know anything about Chi-Chi apart from her name and where she lived. I couldn’t even search for her on the internet or ask her friends where she was, because I didn’t know her surname, or who her friends were. Or what present-day Chi-Chi did for a living. Or anything.

As time went by in this grief-stricken manner, I began to doubt the events that were in my memory. Had it really happened the way I thought? I began to wonder. I started to wonder if I’d completely misremembered it all, or maybe I was mad.

One morning I pulled on my rucksack as usual and began to wander the streets of Ilford aimlessly, not knowing what to do with myself. I had completely given up on going to my lectures or engaging with my course at all. I only cared about Chi-Chi. As I sat down on a step in the mid-morning, I noticed something sticking out of one of the pockets in my bag that I rarely used. Pulling it out, I saw that it was the Boudica card. Water sprang into my eyes as I recalled the day we had spent together.

Wiping my eyes on the back of my sleeve, I noticed that someone had come and sat next to me and was looking at the card. He smiled sadly at me.

“A tragic story, Boudica’s,” he said to me. I grunted a reply. I was in no mood to talk. “I’m sorry to intrude on your memories, but is your name Charlie?”

My heart skipped a beat. I eyed him closer. He was about Chi-Chi’s age, maybe a little older. “Who are you?”

“I’m Chandra,” he said. He ran a hand through his hair and sighed in relief. “I’ve been looking for you for ages. Chi-Chi never knew where you lived, other than “Ilford”, so I’ve been wandering around the town, looking for you.”

An intense wave of relief washed over me. It had been real. “I’ve been looking for her,” I said, welling up again. “Do you know where she went?”

He nodded sadly. “I do. That’s why they entangled me with future me, for this exact reason. We’re all really broken up about what happened. We thought you deserved to understand. But it took a while to find my DNA, and then a little while longer to create future me. I’ve only been entangled for a week.”

I nodded. “Chandra, where is she?”

To my surprise, he welled up too. “We fucked up, Charlie. We’ve only had this technology for a few decades. Chi-Chi was only the second person to experience person-to-person entanglement. We’re still learning about how to handle it. Maybe we got too excited about it; didn’t weigh up the consequences properly. You know how it is.”

“Where is she?” I asked again.

He sighed. “The day we entangled our Chi-Chi with yours was a momentous day for us. Not only were we going to gather data from fifty years earlier than our first entanglement, we were going to gather data from fifty years before that, too. We had planned to work our way backwards, fifty years at a time. In our haste and excitement, we figured what the hell--the first one had worked so well, this time we’d try two at a time--our Chi-Chi was entangled with your Chi-Chi in the present time, and our second operative was entangled with their past self fifty years earlier. We sent him “back” to the London of fifty years before now. Like with Chi-Chi, we thought him choosing a companion to share his experiences with was great. We thought it would be more authentic, would give them better access to that world, without actually changing it.”

I scoffed. “Do you hear yourself? How stupid is that? Surely any change to the past, even a tiny one, could result in a massive one in the present?”

He nodded. “We thought of that. But we also thought that history was history. We thought if we entangled our present historians with their past selves, then that must have already happened in the past. Perhaps the past people were seen as mad, or never told anyone what had happened, but it had already happened. We didn’t think we were actually changing anything. We thought we were in a Closed Timeline Curve.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It just means what I just said--that we weren’t actually changing anything – that what we were doing in our present had already happened in the past. That we were just doing what was always determined to happen.”

“I take it you were wrong?”

He gulped. “Big fucking time.”

I sighed heavily. “Tell me.”

“The man we sent back to before your time--he chose a companion he thought he would get along with. But that choice had knock-on consequences. We aren’t quite sure exactly how it happened yet, but it would seem that his choice of companion somehow meant that Chi-Chi’s grandmother was killed in an accident as a child, the morning after we sent Chi-Chi and the other guy back. As a result, Chi-Chi was never actually born.”

“So you weren’t in a Big Time Loop, or whatever it’s called.”

“No. We weren’t. We discovered that our experiments with entanglement actually changed the past. In fairly small ways on a global level, but--”

“In a completely devastating way for some people. Well. For me.”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s obvious what you need to do then, isn’t it?”

He frowned. “Is it?”

“Of course! Entangle your person again and have them not meet their companion this time. Let it all go back to normal.”

“None of this is normal, Charlie. We won’t ever be allowed to entangle again, now that we know it changes the past. I was allowed to come back and talk to you only because we all unanimously agreed we owed you that. Once they have dis-entangled me, the programme will be indefinitely closed--or at least, closed unless we can get the maths right next time.”

I stood up quickly. “No! You have to bring her back!”

He stood up too and tried to put his hand on my arm. “Charlie, we can’t.”

I threw his arm off and punched him in the face. “Fuck off! Yes you can! Do it!”

Holding his bloody nose, his voice nasal and thick, he said: “Charlie, we can’t. I’m sorry.” He blinked hard several times and shook his head. “Oh…oh.” He looked at me and blinked a few times. The expression on his face changed. He transformed in front of my eyes. “I’ve been…disentangled,” he said. “The future me has gone.” He looked confused, uncertain, and then quite scared.

“I’m sorry I punched you,” I said. “I was really punching future you. I bet his nose doesn’t hurt.” I handed Chandra a tissue from my pocket. “Is there even still a future you?” I mused.

Present Chandra looked even more confused and scared. I could see he was started to disbelieve the whole scene as his memory of being entangled with future Chandra began to fade. I sighed.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I’ve got to go.”

I slung my bag over my back, picked up Boudica, and trudged off to be alone somewhere.

Over the coming days, weeks, months, and years, the memory of Chi-Chi faded, as memories do. I managed to get through my degree, completed my final year dissertation on chance encounter as a fieldwork method of historical discovery. I almost failed that. They didn’t really go for it. I never really expected them to. But I passed, just about, still in love with history, still in love with Chi-Chi. And through my dérives through London I felt she lived in me still.

I decided to become a history teacher, and once I was qualified I sometimes took my classes on excursions through London, emphasising the power of serendipity and randomness. They got it much more than my lecturers had. They enjoyed the stupid pointlessness of it, the occasional gems of discovery it created, and appreciated the hilarity of when it didn’t work at all and they just ended up in dead-ends and supermarkets.

One year, I decided to set my A Level class a fieldtrip challenge. I told them to devise a game of chance to uncover something about London, and, with me as judge and jury, the most interesting discovery in the city would win a fiercely coveted prize of a box of mini Toblerones. They split themselves into groups of three or four, and I unleashed them on the city. It was a flippant class, I knew, but it was almost the summer holidays, and I thought they deserved a break from revising for their exams. I set myself up in a coffee shop where they knew to find me at the end of the day. As they all buzzed off in excitement, all shorts and t-shirts, sunglasses and sunscreen, I sat back with an iced tea, drinking in the summer atmosphere that I so loved in this city. I thought about Chi-Chi, and what might have happened if she’d stuck around. I knew for certain that we would have been married in the year that it became legal here. I wished she could have seen that happen in her lifetime. But then, I mused, she had, hadn’t she? She’d seen things I couldn’t even imagine.

In the afternoon, one by one, the groups of students appeared back at the coffee shop. The first group, three girls, bounded up to me, eyes ablaze with excitement, telling me about how they’d found the Cross Bones Graveyard in Borough. They told me it had been dug up when the Jubilee Line was being expanded, and a huge graveyard full of the skeletons of paupers and “ladies of the night” had been uncovered, and an incredible success story of local campaigning saw the site being given a protected status, and was now a sanctuary and remembrance site for all of the outcasts of London. One of the girls showed me a book she’d bought there, The Southwark Mysteries, which she gave to me as a present. I was overwhelmed by their discovery, and their generosity at gifting me this incredible text, an insane psychedelic voyage, a gift from “The Goose”.

The second group, four boys, each one talking over the other, poured forth their story of how they found the London Mithraeum, a Roman Temple to Mithras still extant in Temple. They showed me how they had looked up the Mithraic Mysteries on their phones, and how this led them into hours of discovery about Persian, Zoroastrian, and early Christian religions. I felt my heart bursting with pride and excitement.

Another group came by and showed me their photos of the Crypt Gallery in Euston; and then another came and showed me photos of the peculiar collection of items held at The Viktor Wynd Museum; and then another came and laughed about how they had followed someone who looked like they would take them to where they needed to be, and they followed them for an hour walking through streets and even on a bus for a while, and when they finally lost them they were at a Bureau de Change. This one confused me at first, until one student in the group explained that she was flying out to the US the next day, and hadn’t managed to change up her money yet, and urgently needed to. I couldn’t deny that the game had taken her to where she needed to be!

The last group chattered away at me, nineteen to the dozen, explaining how they’d ended up near Whittington Hospital, which was actually named after Dick Whittington!, they said, showing me photos of the statue they’d found of him with his cat outside the Whittington pub. I suspected they’d got waylaid there, since they were the last group back and hadn’t found or done anything else.

I bought them all a coffee each, and sat back enjoying myself listening to their stories. The experience was intensely bittersweet; the pride and delight I took from their excitement infused me, but cut deeply as it reminded me of what I had had for a day, and then lost forever. It had been ten years since she disappeared, and it still hurt like it had happened that very morning. I’d tried to move on, tried to meet new people, but I couldn’t let her go. I still expected her to come back, but of course she never did. She’d never really existed. She was, in essence, in my imagination; a memory of something that had never actually happened. Even so, I knew I’d never stop waiting. Who knew what the technology of six hundred years might provide? All I could do was keep searching the secrets of London, hanging around in hidden corners, waiting for the city to give me what I didn’t know I needed.