My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time (27 page)

‘Did Professor Krak have travel documents forged for me?' I enquire the next morning.

‘Yes, I believe my husband Georg got you a passport along with all your other British paperwork.'

‘Then we are leaving the country.'

‘What?'

‘Yes, Fru Jakobsen. You and I are going to visit modern Denmark. I have a plan.'

My one concern was Josie. I could not take her, for after turning the house upside-down in search of documentation, I discovered
that she could travel abroad in the company of no one but Fergus. O woe: it seemed there was nothing for it but to leave the
child in the care of the Halfway Club for the weekend, supervised by the snake-tattooed Rigmor Schwarb, who claimed to be
‘good with children' despite having abandoned her own baby on the doorstep of a charity shop when she first arrived in London,
& never seen it since!

When the time came to bid Josie goodbye the child looked anxious, nay alarmed, & I could immediately picture her thoughts:
her father had disappeared; might I, her new stepmother, be about to do the same? Poor little mite! So I promised her I would
come back for her, no matter what, for I was going to ‘the wee theme park to look for Dad', but I would go there by proper
flying-machine, & I would be gone no more than a single night, & what's more, Rigmor had offered to take her bowling, & she
would have tremendous fun, & I gave her a big bag of liquorice sweets & at this she perked up, & Fru Jakobsen & I left for
the airport feeling lighter, but still full of trepidation, for there was nothing to indicate this venture – conceived in
desperation in the wake of Dogger's revelation – was anything other than the most doomed of wild-goose chases.

I have only a blurred memory of the airport: suffice it to say that after we had checked in (a fraught process, to my mind,
but Fru Jakobsen handled it with serenity, having been through the hullabaloo before), we loaded our hand-luggage on to a
moving belt of indiarubber, & watched it disappear into a small cupboard. It was only when my handbag emerged the other side
that we became aware of a tinny blast of music emanating from it.

‘Quick! The mobile phone!' Fru Jakobsen cried, grabbing it from my bag & pressing a button, then clamping the thing to my
ear whereupon I was greeted with much crackling & interference. Good Lord, who might it be? Not the sloppy-trousered ones,
at least, for I recognized their number by now & did not see it (nor indeed anybody else's) featuring on the telephone's little
screen. ‘Anonymous caller', it proclaimed instead.

‘Hello?' I ventured. Again, the line crackled madly with interference, & I was just about to give up when –

‘Iz that u, gurl?' came a loud voice. ‘Cum on, speek up!'

‘Fru Schleswig!' I cried. She had heard the cry of my heart after all! Telepathy! O, never had I been so delighted to hear
that voice! I could have wept with relief. ‘Fru Schleswig, where are you?'

Fru Schleswig thought for a moment: the line crackled more. ‘Anutha place & tyme.'

‘Where? When? Are you all right?'

‘I am verrie well, in fact I hav got marreyed to the Sultan & I am kween of Marokwinter.'

‘WHAT?' (Marroquinta?! That Afric isle now sunk beneath the waves?)

‘An I got the vakume cleener here & I hav made a waye of uzin it for fermentin cokernuts for wyne, & it lives in a tempel
& we all wurships it in a speshal shryne!'

Good grief! I relayed this to Fru Jakobsen & we both burst into almost hysterical laughter – a mixture of relief & incredulity,
first that Fru S was still alive, & second that she had seemingly landed on her feet, & got herself hitched to a sultan, to
boot! ‘What extraordinary & unexpected news!' I cried. ‘Congratulations, Fru Schleswig, or should I say
Queen
Schleswig, on your happiness, & that of your vacuum cleaner – I salute you both!' The line crackled more, which brought me
to my senses, for all of a sudden I realized we might at any moment be disconnected. ‘But what of Professor Krak?' I asked
urgently. ‘Is he with you? I must speak with him!'

‘Wel he iz here in a manna of speekin,' replied Fru Schleswig lethargically. ‘But fakt iz, he iz at deth's dor, with feever.
He said I shud trie & ring u, we iz uzin electrixitie charged up from a sweet potatoe, wot he rigged uppe with wyre & wotnotte.
But power duz notte werk too wel so we hav not got much tyme. He sez to say we ar bothe alyve. But there woz a smorl erthkwayke
so itz dun summink to the Tyme-Sukker, he sez, itz frakchered the connekshun, & he can notte fixxe it coz he haz this dizeez,
probly
malareah!

‘Let me speak to him!'

‘Orlroit,' she mumbled, ‘but u wont get much sence out of him. He iz ramblin & geezerin all sortsa nonsens. Havin nitemares
& wotnotte, & blatherin bout the Tyme Masheen, wot I carnt make hedde or tayle of Upon which there came much crash-banging,
& footsteps, & then the faint sound of muffled & rasping breathing.

‘Professor Krak?' I cried. The line crackled alarmingly.

‘Charlotte?' came the faint but unmistakable voice of Frederik Krak. Fru Jakobsen & I had by now found ourselves seating &
she rammed her head next to mine, that we might both catch what he said.

‘Professor Krak! O, Professor Krak, how we all miss you!'

‘And how we now pray that you may recover, dear sir!' chimed in Fru Jakobsen.

In reply there came a faint groan. Sensing that we might be cut off at any moment, I begged Professor Krak to listen to me
most urgently, & quickly apprised him of our predicament: that Fergus was stranded in Østerbro, that Josie & I were in London, that Dogger had reconstructed the machine, but we lacked the four catalysing ingredients to operate it.

In reply came another groan, most ghostly-weak, & then Professor Krak spoke. It was almost a whisper: I had to strain to hear. ‘I swore I would tell no one.' He spoke liltingly, as though in a dream. ‘It shall go with me to the grave.'

‘But you
must
tell!' I insisted, now quite alarmed. ‘You must, sir, or my life is undone! Not just my life, but many others! Your flock, Professor Krak! Think of your flock!'

‘Undone,' he repeated, still seemingly in another world. ‘Said I would not. To the grave. The only one. Me. Fred-Olaf Krak.
Not Hawking, not Gott' It seemed that in his fever, he was indeed hallucinating, as Fru Schleswig had said. There was nothing
to do but listen. ‘What they don't know is how close to the heart it all is.'

‘Who don't know?'

‘The others looking for the secret. Of time.'

‘Close to the heart?'

‘Time-travel… belongs in the heart. In the muscles. In the sinews. The secret is inside. The secret is pain. Exact quantities
of pain. Two millilitres of each. At room temperature.'

‘Pain? How can pain be a secret?'

‘The three products of – pain.'

‘Pain?'

‘You know pain. We all know pain. Human pain.'

‘The three products of – ‘ I gestured to Fru Jakobsen to make a note & she busied herself finding a pen.

‘How much did you say?'

‘Two millilitres is enough. Of each. Then mix with –'

He broke off, groaning. It seemed that all his talk of pain had triggered another spasm of his own agony.

‘Please, Professor Krak! Speak!'

‘Mix with ten parts – I am talking here of twenty millilitres, no more – of the –'

‘The what?'

‘The great …' He spoke English now: he was clearly beyond hope. ‘The great –'

‘Yes?'

‘Human …' (English again. O, that he had forgot his own tongue meant that he was surely lost to us now!)

‘The great human what, pray, sir? The great human
what?
By now I was perspiring with stress. ‘I beg you –'

‘The great human ant–' But we were interrupted by a huge crackle on the line that broke up his voice into shards.

‘Professor Krak!' I cried, when the crackle had stopped. ‘You must repeat that, I did not hear it '

‘So my dear,' came his voice, most faint, but now at least he was speaking Danish again. ‘I had not planned to tell you. Nay. Had not … but the secret of the machine is yours.'

‘But I did not catch –'

‘Take good care of it. You may never see me or your mother again, dear Charlotte.'

‘But Professor Krak –'

‘Now all the time-travellers of the world, all my pioneers, are counting on you to save our community!'

‘But Professor Krak, you did not finish, or at least I did not hear the last ingred–'

But the line had gone stone dead.

‘Hardly surprising,' said Fru Jakobsen, ‘if all that powered the telephone was a yam. You won't get much wattage that way.
It's a miracle they got through at all.'

By now we were in the departure lounge. Fru Jakobsen & I quickly agreed that given the garbled nature of what Professor Krak
had divulged, it would be foolish to cancel our trip in the hope that sense would emerge from it, so we went through his words
again & again, but, like a persistent fog, our bafflement would not lift. What on earth did he mean by ‘the three products
of pain', mixed with ‘the great human something-beginning-with
ant
that is probably an English word? Lord, our lives & happiness were at stake: fever or no fever, how dare the man speak to
us in riddles! We phoned Fru Jakobsen's husband & relayed to him what we had learned: Georg said that he would call an emergency
meeting at the Halfway Club to share the news, & see what the others made of Professor Krak's fever-garbled utterings – including
Dogger, who might yet redeem himself. ‘Georg says this all reminds him of a book he once read about a murder in the Louvre,'
said Fru Jakobsen. ‘Everything was a conundrum, & as soon as the hero had cracked one set of riddle-me-rees, up popped another;
it went on & on apparently but you couldn't put it down because it was all about Jesus having sexual congress & squiring progeniture.'

The dry, expensive ‘tapas', the foul coffee, the punishing seating, the laconic drone of Captain Morten Skagerak over the
loudspeaker with information about how many metres we would hurtle deathwards from the sky if the flying-machine exploded
in thin air & we were left clutching an inflatable orange life-vest & tooting pitifully on a plastic whistle: you know the
routine of air travel better than I, dear one, so I will spare you the gory details of our journey, including the ingenious
& original way in which Fru Jakobsen & I disposed of my sick-bag as we bore north over Amsterdam. Suffice it to say that within
four hours of leaving home we were back in Denmark – though so changed it was, we might as well have landed on the moon! How
flat & pallid had my homeland become, in the hundred-odd years since I last was there! How neat, clean & dull its lines, how
horribly discreet its architecture, how plain its bicycles, how disconcertingly fair-haired all its women, as though an invisible
celestial hairdresser had poured a giant bottle of bleach over the whole population, but somehow missed most of the men, &
some of the women's partings – & how militantly white-skinned & homogeneous everyone, after the colour & variety of exotic
London! We sped through the city: though much changed, it still had some buildings intact, thank the Lord, such as Parliament
& Amalienborg & the Royal Theatre on Kongens Nytor – but my, how baffling & amusing to see, everywhere in the streets, men
doing the work of women, pushing perambulators & wielding heavy bags of groceries! Good Lord, if someone had told me there
& then that this new breed of Danish man (so different from any I had known) could also clean & cook, in addition to (here
I presumed, though maybe I was wrong) providing for his family, I swear I might almost have believed them!

Our taxi driver was a genial fellow, but the journey of discovery I made in his car left me fair reeling with shock at the
unaesthetic nature of the ‘progress' Denmark had made since last she was mine. However Østerbro proved easy enough to recognize, which gave me some solace: though the trams had gone, & the little fishermen's huts on Sortedams
Lake, the swans were still there, & other birds, among them cormorants, & the sun still dazzled welcomingly on the water's
surface, & – the Devil's knickerbockers! – how the once dolly-sized trees along the lake's bank had grown into hefty, flourishing
specimens! Østerbrogade itself was a grey sweep of motorized vehicles & huge swarms of cyclists, male & female, with such serious expressions on their
faces that you might think they were contemplating suicide, which perhaps indeed they were, & who could blame them, living
in such a drab world where (according to Fru Jakobsen) they paid such monstrously high taxes, &, when crossing the road, such
slavish heed to the green man? A world in which Else's once-glorious flower boutique was now part of a small supermarket,
& Herr Bang's pharmacy on Trianglen a video rental store, & Herr Møller's bakery on Classensgade a ‘feng shui consultancy'.