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 21st 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.