Space Hopper Read online

  ‘It was my engagement ring, in exchange for some roller skates,’ I said, feeling like I was making the whole thing up. ‘Like I say, it was a long time ago.’

  Elizabeth stepped closer to me, closer than etiquette permits a stranger. She looked into my eyes, and then stood back slightly, taking in my whole face. She touched my hairline.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Louis whispered.

  ‘Louis, stop whispering, it’s not a library, and she can hear you. She’s looking at me,’ I said, not letting my gaze leave hers.

  ‘Mum?’ The young man said. He stepped around the counter, clearly confused by his mother’s reaction to me.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Elizabeth said under her breath, to herself, or perhaps even to God.

  ‘Who is it, Mum?’ Adam said.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I think it’s my guardian angel.’

  With those words, I knew that she remembered me. My chin creased upwards, and my eyes stung with tears of relief. I gasped, on the edge of a sob, and she put her arms around me.

  ‘My God,’ said Elizabeth, her teary eyes mirroring mine. ‘All these years, I’ve been expecting someone older.’

  20

  Elizabeth asked her son to close the shop, go and get us some takeaway coffees, and then take the rest of the day off. You could see he was reluctant to leave her, but she said everything was fine, and she’d explain later. Although I bet she wouldn’t.

  She led us up a very narrow staircase to a couple of rooms above the shop: a little kitchenette area painted bright blue, and another room with a single bed and a chair in it. A jumper and some socks were strewn across the messy bedspread. Elizabeth straightened the cover a little and she and I sat on the edge of the bed; Louis took the chair.

  ‘My son is studying and helps out in the shop now and then,’ she said, balling the socks and throwing them towards a laundry basket. ‘When he goes out with friends in town he sometimes stays here rather than drive back to ours, and then he’ll open up the shop in the morning. It’s a great help.’ She leaned over the bed to open up the little window, her speech explaining the tinge of testosterone in the air.

  There was a pause after she spoke, borne of the fact that not one of us wanted to talk about such trivia. But trivial conversation was simply a habit, and there was nothing wrong with it. After all, I’d had many trivial conversations with my mother, and treasured every one.

  Louis was blessedly silent, but smiling a bit too much. He told me once that children born blind are told to smile a lot, because apparently that’s what friendly sighted people do all the time. I explained that sometimes he looked like a grinning buffoon because he smiles too much, and sometimes it seems like he’s either looking over-friendly or telling people to fuck off in the pub; one extreme or the other. So we have a deal that if he’s smiling unnecessarily in company, I clear my throat, and hopefully he’ll get the message. I cleared my throat now, and his faced dropped to normality. Elizabeth thought I was gearing up to say something and looked expectantly at me, with relief, I think, that I was planning to start this conversation.

  ‘You remember me then?’ I said.

  ‘Remember you?’ she said, as though I was out of my mind. ‘You have lived with me for years, in here.’ She put her hand to her chest. ‘I spent a long, long time wondering if you were real, or if I had imagined you.’ She reached out and touched my cheek as if to double-check I was really there in the room. ‘I thought you might have been a vivid dream. More vivid than any actual dream I’d ever had, I had your ring, after all. And then I began to come to terms with the fact that it didn’t matter whether I had made you up or not, because my belief in you – real or imagined – has made my life so wonderful.’

  ‘It has?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth, as though I had missed something obvious. ‘As soon as I met Andrew, I recognised his name, because you had told me it. And I knew we would be married and that I could trust him. I was amazed when he first told me his name, for a moment I wondered whether you and he could have somehow tricked me. But Andrew isn’t wily enough to engage in any deception, and in the end I accepted that fortune tellers sometimes get things right.

  ‘I loved Andrew, and knew that we would be together, because of what you’d said. So I opened myself up to him like I’d never done before. I had a confidence that stemmed directly from you, the confidence to make the business a success. I was happy because you told me I would always be okay.’

  Elizabeth’s eyes welled up and I didn’t know what to say. Maybe this is how surgeons feel when they save a life and the family try to thank them: just doing my job. She blew her nose, and I took out my purse, counting off five twenty pound notes.

  ‘One hundred pounds,’ I said, holding it out to her. ‘For the skates, with interest, and for looking after my ring.’

  She scoffed, smiled, and shook her head. ‘No, child, no money. You took my skates, and in return you gave me a better life than I could ever have hoped for.’ She leaned towards me. ‘You gave me the gift of a life without fear.’ Her voice was hushed and intense.

  ‘A whole life without fear,’ she repeated. ‘But the one thing you told me, that I valued above all others was what you said about Adam.’

  ‘Your son?’ Louis said.

  ‘Yes, the one you met, the one who stays up here sometimes,’ she said, directing her conversation towards Louis.

  ‘When Faye first came to me all those years ago and told me what my life would be like, she said my son would go missing, but that he would be all right. She told me he would be found after three days, and he would be absolutely fine.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you have children, Louis?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  Elizabeth looked at her hands and her breathing became ragged, as is often the case when people relive difficult times. ‘Well, when he was nine years old, he did go missing. He went out to play, it got late, and he didn’t come home. At some point I looked at Andrew and I just knew he was feeling the same as me. I had the girls with me and I was putting them to bed, he pulled his coat on and said, “I’ll find him,” but he came back an hour later, alone, and called the police.’

  Louis leaned forward on his knees. ‘But you were okay, because of what Faye had told you. You weren’t so worried, is that right?’ he said.

  Elizabeth shook her head. ‘It wasn’t as simple as that. All the other things Faye had told me: who I would marry, how many kids I’d have, the business, the burglary; when it came down to it, those things didn’t really matter. But this time it did. I prayed like I’d never prayed before.’ Elizabeth looked at me, her eyes shining. ‘But I didn’t pray to God,’ she said. ‘I prayed to you.’ She slid her hand forward on the wrinkled bedspread and touched the tips of my fingers with hers. ‘I prayed for you to be real, and that what you’d told me was the truth. I allowed myself to have faith that everything would be all right, but just for three days, because you told me that’s how long he would be missing. When I was out looking for Adam, I was looking out for you too, but I was looking for a woman about fifteen years older than me, and yet, here you are, and you’re younger…’ She paused, looked at me in bewilderment, not for the first time.

  ‘I was looking out for you, because when Adam was lost, I told Andrew about you, and what you’d told me. He thought I was talking gibberish, and then he wondered if maybe you had something to do with his disappearance, and started to make me doubt you. Your mind plays tricks on you when you’re frightened; you get desperate. It can be hard to believe, even when belief is all you’ve got,’ she said, with an apologetic expression. ‘I remember being on my knees, beside my bed, putting all my belief in you, all my trust. And deep down, I knew that if Adam wasn’t found after three days, I wouldn’t know how to cope, I wouldn’t know how to breathe in and out. I survived for three days because you told me he’d come back safely.’ Her head was in her hands now, slowly trying to shake the memory of it all.

  ‘But you did find
him, obviously,’ said Louis, not unkindly. ‘What had happened to him?’

  Elizabeth sighed. ‘He just roamed off, exploring. He’d read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and he got a tea towel, wrapped some food in it, and actually tied it to a stick.’ She smiled at the thought of it. ‘Then he went off into the woods and walked and walked for hours. He slipped down a hill and broke his ankle. He was miles away, because when he thought he was headed for home, he was still walking the other way.

  ‘After that…’ she continued, looking at me again, ‘believing in you has been tantamount to believing in God. You are my god, because my faith in you made me stronger, a better, more fulfilled person. The type of person we could all be if we really had faith that someone was looking out for us.’

  ‘Stop,’ I said, holding my hand up. ‘I’m not God, Elizabeth, I’m just a normal woman.’ I saw Louis raise his eyebrows.

  ‘Not to me, you’re not,’ said Elizabeth. ‘To me, you are far more than an ordinary woman; you have shaped my life, made it happier.’

  ‘But that doesn’t make me a god,’ I said. ‘Other people do things like that. I was just a person in need of roller skates, and I gave you some information about your life that I just happened to know.’ I was faltering a bit in my explanation.

  ‘But how did you “happen to know” this information?’ she said. ‘And why haven’t you aged? How can you not be some sort of god or angel?’

  ‘To me, all this happened just a few days ago,’ I said. ‘Saturday to be precise. I had the conversation you’re talking about, with you, on Saturday. That’s why I haven’t aged.’

  ‘Well, you’re about three days older,’ Louis said.

  ‘Thanks, Louis,’ I said, looking at Elizabeth as if to say typical.

  There’s an animal-like quality to a person when they tip their head to one side – waiting for information, or an explanation, or a doggy biscuit – that is quite charming, and Elizabeth was doing this now.

  ‘It’s hard for me to explain, because it’s preposterous,’ I said.

  ‘Are you serious?’ Elizabeth said. ‘Look at what I’ve believed all my life. Do you think I’ll find anything you have to say unbelievable? If I can trust anyone to tell me the truth, no matter how far-fetched, then it’s you.’

  ‘Blind faith,’ said Louis, very quietly.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I have blind faith in you.’

  I felt dizzy with the responsibility I’d had over Elizabeth’s life. What if I’d got it wrong: the number of days Adam had been missing? What if it had been five days, or a week? It didn’t matter that I wasn’t God, or an angel. It didn’t matter that I was just a woman with a family, a job, friends, and ordinary dilemmas. To Elizabeth, I was more important than that, whether I agreed with her or not. And that gave me responsibility. I told her about travelling back in time, how I’d done it, the meetings with my mother and my younger self. I told her why I’d felt the need to steal the roller skates and why I was glad now that she’d caught me. I talked for ages, and she listened without interruption, captivated.

  ‘It’s like a fairy tale,’ she said, in a soft, reverent tone.

  ‘And now that I’m back again, I’m thinking about my return, thinking about what I can do for my mother, to help her,’ I said.

  Elizabeth suddenly sat up a little straighter. ‘Oh, you mustn’t go back again,’ she said, concern lining her face.

  ‘Why not?’ I said, glancing at Louis, his expression impenetrable.

  ‘Well, because you might get hurt, and you might mess things up.’ Elizabeth also glanced at Louis in vain. Sometimes a third party in the room is most useful for their reaction-expressions. But Louis was not the right person for this job.

  ‘You went back a few days ago and what happened between you and me made my life wonderful, without you even intending to.’ Her voice was kind and quite low, but there was an urgency to it. ‘So surely it would be just as easy for you to go back, and make things go terribly wrong, with no intention of doing so whatsoever.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go near you, I promise,’ I said, leaning toward her.

  ‘Faye can’t change what’s already happened,’ Louis said. ‘Whatever’s already happened has already happened, it can’t be amended one way or the other.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ she asked.

  ‘I, um, I googled it,’ he said.

  ‘You googled it?’ she said, laughing. ‘You know that doesn’t make you an expert, don’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, I realise,’ said Louis. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘These are real lives we’re talking about, and changes that could generate a whole thread of different consequences,’ she said. She looked faintly terrified.

  ‘We’re pretty certain that I can’t change anything that’s already happened,’ I said, completely certain of that conviction, with no real evidence, except that it did seem to be that way.

  ‘Faye, you’re talking as though you are an expert in time travel, but you’re not. You’ve travelled in time, but that doesn’t mean you understand how it works. That would be like someone saying they know how a television works just because they watch it all the time. It might be that you’ll never understand the rules of what you’re doing. You can’t play with this, it’s not a game,’ she said.

  ‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t play games that nearly kill me, without putting a lot of thought into it.’ But I did question how much thought I really gave it; my desire to see my mother did seem to stop me looking, as closely as perhaps I should, at the worst case scenarios, the possible unpleasant outcomes of my journeys back and forth.

  ‘When there is a big catastrophe and lots of innocent people die, people use it as a reason to suggest that God doesn’t exist.’ Elizabeth’s voice was softer now, and she held my hand. ‘Because if there was a god, how could he let that happen? But the thing is, we don’t know what God’s rules are, there may be things that are out of His control.’ Her voice dropped to almost a whisper. ‘You don’t know the rules, Faye, you’re playing with fire. You said only three hours or so pass when you’re away, but what if that’s not the case next time? What if next time fifty years have passed, and you’ve missed it all? What if you cannot be there for your children? You can’t live in the past.’

  ‘I’m not living in the past,’ I said. ‘I’m just visiting.’ I felt my eyes well up, and my voice shuddered with a veiled sob.

  ‘You have visited the past, but what if next time it’s not a visit, what if you get stuck there?’ She looked at me like a mother does when she is telling her child why she mustn’t put her fingers in the socket, even when she really, really wants to. ‘You have to choose between the past and the present, and there really is no choice, Faye, it’s a no-brainer. You can’t live in both, and if you don’t choose between the past and the present, then one day that choice may be made for you, and you might not like the way it goes.’ Tears rolled silently down my face, and she wiped them away. ‘You were there for me with some information that has undoubtedly given me a better life than I would have otherwise had,’ she said. ‘Now let me return the favour. My advice to you is leave the past where it is, and stay in the present. You have your memories; that’s what they’re for. They will be tinged with sadness, that’s just life, a sadness to make you appreciate the good things you have. Don’t lose sight of your purpose. You’re a mother.’

  ‘My mother will be expecting me,’ I said, tasting my tears.

  ‘She wouldn’t expect you to do this, would she? To risk everything, risk yourself? Would you want one of your daughters to risk her life or her health just so she could sit with you in the garden for an afternoon?’

  I wept, and she held her hand to my cheek and I leaned into it, her hand taking the weight of my head.

  ‘Don’t let your children lose you. You lost your mum, and you have hurt all your life because of it. Why would you risk doing that to your own children?’

  ‘I hear what you’
re saying,’ I said. ‘I’m taking a risk, but wouldn’t you do it?’

  ‘I think I’d be too scared, to be honest,’ she said.

  ‘But so far, there’s nothing to suggest that anything has changed as a result of what I’ve done. In fact, quite the opposite. It feels like going back in time made lots of good things happen just as they should. Nothing’s changed.’

  Elizabeth gently lifted my left hand. She ran her thumb over the indent in my fourth finger, and we both stared at the skin that was whiter where it hadn’t seen the sun for years.

  ‘My ring,’ I said, wiping my nose with the back of my other hand. ‘Have you got it?’

  Elizabeth hesitated. ‘Something has changed,’ she said, and she lifted her eyes from my fingers to meet my gaze with steady unease. ‘I don’t have it anymore. I haven’t had it for years. Your ring was stolen in the burglary.’

  I looked at Louis and in a flash his expression, which had started to be a bit too smiley, was suddenly alarmed.

  * * *

  We stayed a little longer, but when we were back down in the shop and about to leave, Elizabeth asked us to wait a minute. She disappeared, to the storeroom I guess, and came back lifting the lid of a box and folding back layers of white tissue paper as she walked.

  ‘I have something I’d like to give you, Louis,’ she said, putting the box on the counter and lifting out a heavy-looking roundish object.

  ‘What is it?’ he said.

  ‘Here,’ she put it in his hands.

  ‘It’s a big egg, or egg-shaped,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right, an enamelled egg, and it’s so beautiful. The colours on the outside are like jewels: sapphire blue and emerald green,’ she said, coming closer and touching it as he rotated it in his hands.

  ‘I don’t know colours,’ Louis said.

  ‘They’re as crisp as an ice-cold drink on a hot day,’ she said to him, and he smiled. ‘Feel the clip?’ she said, and he rested the egg in one hand, while skimming the surface with the other, until he felt the tiny hook. He lifted it, and helped the top of the egg flip back slowly on a strong hinge. Inside, the bottom half was a smooth, white enamelled surface, with a raised bump in the middle, painted gold, like an egg yolk. She described it and he explored it with his hands. While she spoke, a grin broke on his face, not just a polite smile.