The Time Rip (36 page)

They wandered through the yard to the low fence and Freya breathed in the sweet smell of the meadow. It was another beautiful day. The sky unmarred by plane tracks. The air was fresh and clean and Freya ran her hand through the grass at the edge of the field for a moment, forgetting what she was supposed to be doing.

Looking up, she saw Jeremy watching her with a half smile and quickly set off through the field. Jeremy followed her as she waded through the long grasses. Her ankle length skirt made walking difficult and she stumbled frequently, nearly falling once or twice before he caught her.

She glanced up and her heart rate accelerated. In the bright sunshine, she could see the colour of his eyes; a rich brown, like dark chocolate. Perhaps her feelings were not as obvious as she had feared though, because he didn’t appear to notice. Merely preventing her from falling and walking with her as if they were old friends. After a while, Freya began to relax with him and allow her thoughts to wander where they would.

His voice interrupted her: “Have you always wanted to sell flowers, or was it something that you fell into accidentally?”

Freya pondered the question as she ran her fingers through the long grasses. “Um, I guess it just happened. When I was much younger, one of my girlfriends had an older brother who ran a plant stall at Portobello Road. We’d take the train up there on Saturdays, and buy chips.

“We’d wander around the market and spent hours just sitting about with this guy and his friend. Mike, I think his name was. He’d get us kids helping out when it was busy and one thing just led to another, I guess.” She grinned up at him after a moment, “I did employ an accountant at one point, to do the books for me. I guess trying to keep them myself wasn’t the best decision I’ve ever made.”

“Oh, they were not that bad. I have seen plenty worse.”

“Good to know. I spent far too much time doing them, and they wound me up too. I’m glad I gave them to you, now. I can’t imagine doing maths all day for a living. It would drive me nuts. How did you get into it, did you go the university route?”

“Yes. I was an actuary for a few years after I left education.”

“So how come you got to go to work in 1908? I mean, it’s a little weird when you think about it. If someone offered me a job selling flowers in 1808 I don’t think I’d want it.”

“After Black Friday, many things changed considerably in the world. In fact, the financial collapse was the tip of the iceberg. I took a job as a Bounty Hunter to make ends meet, and got involved with a branch of the parent organisation. They were setting up offices throughout time to police the illegal travellers. It is only really criminals and bail jumpers that come back to past eras.”

“What made you decide to work for them?”

“My brother, Brett, suggested it. He was working for a charity at the time, an organisation that hunts down missing kids, and crossed paths with the agency I now work for. He tracked a lead down that suggested the kid he was after had been taken back in time.”

“Did they find the kid?”

“Yes. Daniel decided to involve himself, took a look at their procedures and decided they all needed a new boss. Him.” Jeremy shrugged.

Freya paused to assimilate all this. “Does Brett still work for them? Is he time travelling too?”

“I’m not sure what he’s up to at the moment, but he doesn’t tend to stay anywhere for too long, so I’d be surprised if he’s still tracing lost kids.”

“And Daniel?”

Jeremy rolled his eyes. “Daniel is my boss.” He shook his head in disgust and glanced down at Freya who grinned.

“I can’t imagine time travel being the norm. Don’t you worry that some nutter will go back and try to change things, like go and assassinate some big wig?”

“History isn’t changeable in that sense, because it’s self correcting. If someone were to go back and murder, let’s say Churchill, then another would simply take his place. The outcome may then have been slightly different. Things may have happened in a different order, slightly better or worse, but make no mistake, it would still have happened more or less the way you know it.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh the scientists tell us these things, probably on the basis of first hand experience. It’s why no one bothered to go back and stop Black Friday.”

“Black Friday. Was that like the Wall Street crash or something?”

“No. It happened in 2099. Some lunatic nuked one of the guardian countries on the exchange. The devastation and backlash cost the world greatly. The long and short of it was that the remaining Governments managed to salvage the situation.

“They bought out the strongest of the uprising Armies and peace was restored. However, the cost to the common people was horrendous.

“Your famous old dictators, like Stalin, have nothing on the current Governments, and many people wonder if we would have been better off with the crime networks controlling things. People have very little in the way of freedom of speech or movement now.”

Jeremy gazed out over the fields as he spoke and Freya stopped walking to stare up at him, watching his expressionless face as he described the grim world to come.

“So how come everyone doesn’t want to live in the past?”

“Jeremy shrugged, “Fear of the diseases that were prevalent. The cancers that are unknown and incurable. There are many who place modern day luxuries over issues such as freedom. People are afraid of change and many know nothing of previous eras. They don’t teach history in schools anymore. Only propaganda.”

“Your family are still there, and you only come back here for your job. What happens when you change jobs or retire?”

Jeremy ran his thumb gently over the back of her hand. “It is not all bad. My family are happy where they are. Besides, agents and their families are well looked after. They are often offered the opportunity to locate permanently in the past if they wish.”

“Will you do that? Live here always I mean?”

“I have considered it. There are pros and cons, of course. We are only a few years away from the World Wars that dominated the first half of this century.”

Freya sucked in a breath, “I had forgotten about that.”

“Don’t let it worry you. It is not a situation that will impact on us very much here.”

It was Freya’s turn to gaze over the silent fields glowing in sunshine. She imagined planes roaring overhead and bombs dropping.

Jeremy’s voice brought her attention back to him. “Tell me about your family. Do your parents still live around here?”

“My parents? Um, yeah, they live in Redhill. Why?”

 He ignored her question and asked another, “Do you see them often?”

“Not really, we’re not that close. What about you, do you see your family still? I guess it must be difficult if they all live in the twenty-second century.”

“I come from a large family, five brothers and a sister. I go often to see my parents, sometimes as much as two or three times a month. Although I don’t see all my siblings that frequently. We usually all meet a few times a year to catch up.”

“Five brothers! You have five brothers.”

Jeremy smiled at her disbelief. “Naturally they all believe they are far better looking than me, and now and then we dispute this. However, it is my sister, Louise, I feel most sorry for. It cannot be easy for her to have six older brothers. Imagine what she goes through every time she brings a boyfriend home.”

Freya smiled as she looked down at her hands. They had stopped in the middle of the meadow. She looked at the beauty all around and it struck her that here, in 1908, Nathan was yet to be born. It gave her a strange kind of peace to think that he was not dead here, because he had not yet been conceived.

Grief struck her a transitory blow and then Jeremy reached for her hand. She looked up feeling connected again. “What are your brother’s names?”

“Daniel is the oldest at thirty; then we have Brett at twenty-eight. Rory is three years younger; then Seb and Ethan, twins, who are two years younger than me, closest to me in friendship and who I see most of, and finally we have little Louise who has recently turned sixteen.”

Freya bit her lip. She didn’t know what to do with the chaos of her thoughts. No wonder she had thought Brett was an older version of Jeremy. “You’re twenty-what then?”

“Twenty-two. An old man compared to you. There are what— four years between us?”

A small smile twisted her mouth, “More like a hundred and four.”

Listening to his laughter, Freya was unable to stop herself voicing a thought she wasn’t certain she wanted to say. “Jeremy,” she hesitated and looked away across the field. “Can I meet your family some day? I’d like to meet your other brothers.”

Freya could not meet his eyes as she spoke. It was an innocent enough request. The implications behind it were what made her hesitate to ask, that and Jeremy’s perceptive nature.

The whole time travel issue had opened up a dark well of grief over Nathan that Freya had thought long buried. She needed to move on from her brother’s death, and forming new friendships and putting herself out there a bit more seemed a better idea than thinking of Nathan every minute. He was long gone and she should try harder to let him rest.

Since learning of the time device, she had instinctively avoided thinking about the possibility of going back to save Nathan. To prevent his death. She could not allow herself this consideration, even were she crushed under the weight of her guilt.

It was wrong, wicked, that she should not wish to go back and save him, but after all the years of grief, she saw a dark road that way. As much as she wanted him, his memory had become more distant now, and if she went back and changed things, would she still have Janet?

If Nathan had lived, Janet may never have been more than one of his many friends that touched her life fleetingly. The thought that she might have to choose between Nathan and Janet was horrifying.

How could she contemplate swapping one for the other? Impossible. After all the years of coming to terms with Nathan’s death, if she went back to prevent it, would she regain him only to lose Janet?

Jeremy’s hand was warm in hers. If Nathan had lived, would she have even been on the road to Reading that day? She thought of Brett. Of him telling her they were good friends, and fleetingly, of Daniel who had taught her an atrocious game of cards and spent all evening laughing with her.

Then there was the issue of fate. Karma. Freya did not believe in any particular deity, but she could not rule out the possibility of such a thing, especially after Nathan. If she prevented Nathan’s death in the car accident, would he then die in some other, more horrible way? Would she have to go through the whole thing again? Jeremy had said as much about larger events in history. She shuddered.

Jeremy’s family were a different matter, independent of her past and friendship with Janet, and she felt a thread of hope unfurl that the grief and guilt she was bleeding might begin to heal more fully.

Jeremy looked down at Freya. She looked almost ethereal to him. She was clutching his hand tightly and gazing out over the field, the sun touching her blond hair making it gleam. A straight curtain of silk shot through with gold, as though she were an angel with a halo of sunlight. He felt his heart lurch at her request and wondered at her single-minded strength: that she had never mentioned her brother despite all she now knew of time travel.

He waited until she looked up at him, her tumbling thoughts having reached their conclusion. “Of course I will take you to see my family. My brothers will be delighted to meet you.” He grinned wickedly, “When they embrace you as another little sister to boss around, you may, of course, regret it. Unfortunately it will be far too late by then, and if you think I second-guess your thoughts a lot, you will get a shock when you meet Brett. He has an uncanny ability to know not only what you are thinking, but also what you are about to think and do as well.”