My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time (10 page)

The mans a charmer,
I think, as I watch Fru Schleswig's visage melt like a chunk of lard at the cheap ploy.
Watch out. A
charmer & a balaclava'd spy.

‘I expect you are wondering how it is that you came here all the way from Denmark, dear ladies,' he says with a spasm of his
hand, which cannot seem to sit still, & nor can any part of him indeed, for he is all a-rattle with nerves & tics & little
anxious shudders.

‘Came from it to where?'

‘To London!' he responds brightly, as though the name of that famously moribund and depraved city, full of scheming foreigners,
could be anything other than a happy surprise. At which his eyes flash & flicker again with what I am now beginning to suspect
is madness, pure & simple. But although the worm of anxiety shifts within me, I resolve at that moment to show the man nothing
but the haughty contempt & disdain he deserves until he has explained himself.

‘But London is in England!' I scoff, picking what appears to be a whelk from my hair & letting it fall to the floor with a
clatter.

‘Astutely noted, young lady,' he replies apologetically. ‘It is indeed, I fear. For due to circumstances beyond my control,
& indeed my ken, to do with the kinetic pull of latitude & the parallel push of longitude, & the conflict between local time
& universal time, exacerbated by the volatility of exotic matter,' (what on earth was he talking about? He was fair dizzying
me with hypotheticality!) ‘we find ourselves with a direct connection between the Greenwich Meridian upon which we now stand & Østerbro, where I discovered – & indeed invented – the Krak Time-Sucker, a rare species of cosmic fault-line found only in few parts
of the world, nay the universe.'

‘U did wot?' growls Fru Schleswig darkly.

‘As you may already have learned from your various most enterprising researches in Rosenvængets Allé, Froken Charlotte, I experimented a-plenty with the mechanics of such an initiative,' continues Professor Krak, ignoring
her & concentrating on me, for he has swiftly ascertained that the simple organism of Fru Schleswig's brain owes more to vegetable
and mineral origins than the animal. ‘But alas, geographically we find ourselves limited in our time-travelling possibilities,
for we are dependent on the meridian & the conjunction of this feature with a Time-Sucker phenomenon, known in modern times
as a “worm-hole”.'

‘Whoa, there, sir!' I cried. ‘One thought at a time!' But there was no stopping his fevered science, which continued at a
most egregious pace: as he spoke, one fancied one saw the man's skull straining with the force of all the ideas it contained,
& I wondered what a phrenologist might make of the various cranial bulges that came to the fore as he so energetically emphasized.
Too clever for his own good,
had been Gudrun Olsen's phrase, & now I could see her meaning most starkly. ‘Although Copenhagen is not on the meridian, it
is the original starting-point, & the machine is geared to the Greenwich Line, & points thereon,' he enthused. ‘The conjunction
of both meridian & Time-Sucker is to be found in only a very few locations. Now the Afric isle of Marroquinta has a species
of fault-line which approximates a Krak Time-Sucker. The Basilica of Our Lady of Pilar in the Spanish city of Zaragoza is
also on the Krak map. One can also visit a corner of Algeria which is either a desert, a radical mosque, or a children's emporium
known as Toys ‘R' Us, depending on the era in which you visit it, & an uninhabited rock off Antarctica. A charming place,
if sea parrots interest you. But London, I find, is the most convenient & charming of the meridianal destinations my Time
Machine has to offer, which is why so many Danes from our era find themselves coming here, & assimilating most happily.'

At which my anger bursts forth, for he must stop playing around with me, & spouting all this gibberish about Afric isles and
sea parrots & ‘Our Lady of Pilar', & explain why one moment the innocent Fru Schleswig & I are staring into the barrel of
Fru Krak's blunderbuss, & the next – find ourselves
whisked
to a place he claims is London, quite against our will. He must account for himself properly, & forthwith! ‘I demand to be
told just what you think you are planning to do with us here, sir! For we insist on being returned home without further ado,
do we not, Fru Schleswig? Do we not?' I repeat, kicking her in the leg & thus prompting a most vehement cry of agreement.

‘Ah,' he smiles, quite unperturbed by my forcefulness. ‘Even though – from what I have just gleaned – returning there would
entail getting a bullet in that youthful chest?'

I gulp & feel myself blanch. ‘A bullet? Are you sure?'

‘Most certainly I am,' he says apologetically. ‘For knowing Fru Krak as I do, she will be loitering with that gun for some
time, keen to take a further pot-shot, should you return. In my opinion it would be best to wait a while, for her delicate
feminine nerves to settle. Do not forget, I made the terrible mistake of being married to the woman, & know her blind furies
well.'

‘So why did we come here, & how in heaven's name are we to return? And when?' I accuse.

‘You shall have answers to all your questions in good time, my dear, fear not,' he retorts soothingly. But I am not to be
calmed so readily, for my brain is veritably boiling. ‘What's more,' he continues, ‘one of these days I will be more than
happy to show you round the Observatory & explain the scientific mechanism of the meridian time phenomenon & particle anti-particle
annihilation in more detail' (O no, I thought, no more detail please or my addled head will implode with all the unlikeliness),
‘but my concern at the moment is to get you ladies out of here & into a good clean bed where you can rest after your gruelling
ordeal, for having made more than fifty of such journeys myself, I am the first to recognize the physical & psychic toll they
take!'

‘Wot bluddie obzervatry,' boomed Fru Schleswig for whom, despite her brain containing no more intellectual energy than a rotted pumpkin or a sack of brick dust, the øre was finally beginning to drop, & who now, seemingly recovered from having her hand kissed by a gentleman, was turning nasty, her eyes like two mistrustful currants buried deep in pastry. ‘I do notte kno wot wun of them iz but I do notte lyke the sound of it, I kan tel u.'

‘The Greenwich Observatory,' said the Professor with a twitching grin. ‘Established by King Charles who appointed an Astronomer
Royal to apply himself with the most exact care & diligence to the rectification of the tables & motions of the heavens, &
the places of the fixed stars, so as to find out the so-much-desired longitude of places for perfecting the art of navigation.
In other words, ladies, to establish a central & crucial here from which all the theres of this planet may be measured & charted.
That green line above us is a modern laser beam, marking the Meridian Line to the exactitude of a zillimetre.'

And he spread his arm indicating we should look up above us, & follow the shimmering green line, which shot, straight as time's
arrow, out of the window, & seemingly out into the heavens. I went to the window & followed the path it drew, then took in
a sharp breath
– for Sataan,
there before me in the far distance squatted a kind of fairyland, all lit up with a million candles – a collection of huge, geometric monuments, their myriad lights flashing, winking & sparking bright, & it seemed we were on a hill, & this fairyland was down in the valley below, & beyond it I spied the glitter of water, & a faint hum whispered from it, as though it softly breathed, but I could see no sign of life but some oddly-moving rows of lights, it being darkish outside. O curious new world, what mass of glass & metal was this, that met my eyes?

‘The Tin City!' I breathed, for such had I instantly christened it, & despite my pleas to be returned to Denmark forthwith, something in me yearned to step its streets, just once, for the adventure.

He laughed. ‘Actually, Canary Wharf,' he said, smiling. ‘Well, young Charlotte. You are indeed a plucky one. I have been watching
your progress, & was wondering how long it would take you to come here, to the Tin City, as you call it. Though I must say
you are full of surprises, for I hardly expected your mother too! She must have got in with you and activated the starting
mechanism!'

But little did he know what nerve he had hit. All at once the horizon seemed to twist & uglify.

‘Fru Schleswig is not my mother!' I expostulated, & then (I blush at the memory, & might not be recounting it to you, had
I not taken a vow of honesty) burst into tears of pure, exhausted misery. I am not normally one to bawl my eyes out, dear
precious darling reader (oh, and you are looking so attractive today, if I may say so!), but I confess that I was in that
moment floored by the predicament in which I found myself. Here I was in a whole new world, & there on the horizon was Fairyland,
& yet
people I did not even know
were insisting on my kinship to the hideous one! This was a far cry from what I had planned, or would have planned, had I
been the architect of my own destiny!

‘There there, young lady. We are a highly-strung creature, to be sure!' he said, putting his arm around my shoulder in what
he may have hoped to be a fatherly way, but I shook him off roughly, & Fru Schleswig's pawing hoof too, & remained in a dignified
state of silence (or ‘a ryte royle sulke', as Fru S mutteringly referred to it) as Professor Krak led the way down a wide
bright-lit corridor to a cupboard-like room where he picked up a bag from which he pulled two enormous red blankets of a texture
I had never encountered before (which might have seduced me, had I not been in such a state, for soft as the fur on the belly
of a kitten they were, & as sweetly warm!), in which we wrapped ourselves before following him out, passing through an octagonal
room housing brass machines in glass cases, alongside globes & telescopes, & cogged contraptions whose purpose seemed to calibrate
or trap something. ‘The museum,' murmured Professor Krak distractedly, & I spotted that he seemed hurried, & glanced nervously
about him all the while, as though he were trespassing & had no right there. (Which later of course I learned was indeed the
case, & he had only succeeded in gaining regular entrance through bribery, blackmail & extortion.) We exited through a back
door that led to what he called the Fire Escape &, once at ground level, walked some way in the oddly warm night air through
a wide, tree-filled field whose floor was littered with the bobbled seed-pods of the plane tree, as found on Strandboulevarden,
which I was glad to see for at least they looked familiar in this landscape, though my fur-lined boots were drenched, & they
squelched with water at each step. As we made our way across the mown grass of what seemed a sloping park, the humming, roaring
noise swelled out from the bright light-strings, which Professor Krak announced with pride were ‘cars, moving carriages powered
by a motor & fossil fuel. Welcome to the modern world, my dears, where the twenty-first century has dawned!'

The twenty-first century?! Lord, spare us! I thought, but said nothing, & merely pondered the Professor's words as we tramped
on in silence through the dusk or dawn or whatever this half-light was in the shadow of the Tin City, for it seemed infected
& false, & clearly bore no relation to sun, moon or stars. He had knocked me down with a feather, of course, with this talk
of leaping more than a century forward in time. But on the other hand – well, although it was not entirely clear to me what
manner of a place this was in which we had landed up, I was beginning to surmise that we were in a world that existed invisibly,
& in another sphere to our own. Not an afterlife, so much as a side-stepping of death, a kind of cosmic cheat, or parallel,
or chimera which (if Professor Krak was to be believed) was taking place far into the unthinkably distant future. Well, so
be it, then! A dream it was! I would wake up soon & all would be well! And I would laugh at the whole absurd story over breakfast,
& perhaps even recount some of it to Fru Schleswig & make her spray the room with
rundstykker
crumbs as she in turn guffawed. But the dream did not end, & could not be escaped from so easily, & indeed it then most swiftly
turned nightmarish, for waiting at the black wrought-iron park entrance (which we scaled with the assistance of a ladder that
stood there, the gates themselves being padlocked shut) stood a shiny black carriage of iron, horseless, on four wheels, that
growled like a foul-tempered hippopotamus. Professor Krak bade us enter it through a door that he swung open in its side:
‘Our means of transport, ladies,' he said, & then, in a foreign tongue which I presumed to be English, commenced a rushed
conversation with the driver of this vehicle, who was – Lord! I could scarcely believe my eyes! as black as a coal-scuttle,
just like in the illustrations of man-eating cannibals I had seen in the cellar at the orphanage! But before I could scream
in terror & make my escape, the machine roared to life with a smooth lurch & we sped into the pellucid gloaming which in that
place seemed to pass for night

The journey was punctuated by the frequent halts we were compelled to make in order that Fru Schleswig & myself who, having
found ourselves unaccountably hungry, had quickly devoured between us the cylindrical packet of chocolate biscuits proffered
by Krak – could vomit, which we both did copiously, arousing the wrath of the cannibal driver, whose white-teethed fury scared
the wits from me, for I had visions of him tearing us limb from limb & munching on our bones, just as they do in the godless
realms of Afric, or shrinking our heads to wear as tasteless jewellery. ‘Fear not, ladies,' said Professor Krak. ‘I have told
him you have been to a fancy-dress party, & become merry, & I will tip him well for his pains.'

Us? Fancy dress? Merry? Kidnapped, more like! The nerve of it! But I could say naught, so sick & discombobulated was I feeling,
& so anxious about the cannibal, whom I prayed had assuaged his hunger with a good meal earlier, though his fearsome mood
would indicate the opposite. London was first of all to me a land of seasickness. First the driving-machine made us sick,
& then as soon as we were free of the enraged blackamoor (what dizzy relief!) we were led (– dragged! Screaming!) into a building
bedazzled with lights (all up the front steps, embedded in the pathway, & shining from above, & from the sides, & all directions – never had I seen so much light at evening-time) & then bundled into a box whose door closed on all three of us. Professor Krak pressed a button & all at once we were scooped vertically upwards, leaving our stomachs at floor-level. My brain heaved, & had Fru Schleswig not caught me, I would have fallen to the floor & smithereened my skull there & then. Finally, the box's motion ceased, the door slid open (do not ask me how, & what is more I care not to know!) & we exited, veering wildly as two bagatelle balls along a brightly lit corridor, where Professor Krak pointed us onward until we came to a door which he unlocked not with a key, but seemingly with a small piece of dull-looking ivory which he inserted in a hole until an odd noise sounded
& a small red light winked.