The Day Tripper, page 11
“Thank you for your faith in me, Mum,” I say, voice cracking. The room around us is emptying now. “I will prove you right. I swear to you I’m an innocent man.”
She passes me a tissue. “I should be making a move.”
“I’ll clear my name, Mum. You watch. Please, don’t be ashamed of me a moment longer.”
“Not ashamed, love.” She shuffles to her feet. Checking herself in a pocket mirror, she starts to wipe away her lipstick.
“I’m the victim here. I swear to God. You wait and see.” I recall Dr. Defrates’s exact words when I asked him why this was happening:
You’ll have your reasons.
What better reason than proving my innocence? Justice being done? Saving my own future?
“I’ll tell Dad you said hi,” Mum says, makeup deleted, scrunching her reddened tissue into a ball.
“If you like.”
“Well, see you...anon.”
“Please, could I have a hug, Mum?”
“Is that allowed?”
The warder chuckles as he passes, playing a tongue across the fringes of his silver beard. “No tearing each other’s clothes off. Other than that, you’re fine.”
She’s awkward in my arms, but I hold on to her till I feel her loosen. The last time I hugged her there was nothing to her; so close to the end. Eventually she squeezes me back. It feels like she’s longed for this as I have.
When will I hug her next? Will this all be over by then?
“I love you, Mum,” I whisper into her ear.
She gently pulls away, and we hold each other at arm’s length.
I think of the times I’ve told her I love her since this began, the reply she’s always given me.
“I know, I know,” I tell her. “You can’t remember when I last said it.”
She grins. “I do remember, as it happens.”
“Yeah, well, I’m gonna fix it. What was I, like five years old?”
“You rang me once, totally out of the blue. Just to tell me you loved me.”
I let go of her hands. “When, Mum?”
“I was taken aback. Wondered what on earth had got into you!”
“When was that? Do you remember? Tell me you remember.”
“Would you believe it if I said I know exactly when it was?”
“Go on.”
“Not that a demonstration of affection from you is unusual or anything.”
The guard passes us again, tapping an invisible watch on his wrist. The room is almost empty. “Going right now,” Mum says.
“When, Mum?” I’m doing my best to ask casually.
“A good few years back. It was the day of that eclipse. You remember that? Remember phoning me up? Just because...”
“I do.”
“I was sitting at the table afterward and having a gasper, and thinking—what’s got into Alex? What’s he done now that he’s softening me up for? Has he been drinking?”
“I hadn’t.”
“I was touched.” She squeezes my hand and turns for the exit. “Do it more often!” She doesn’t look back, nor tell me she loves me too.
Rooted to the spot, I watch her go. When I clapped eyes on her this afternoon, I was in the grip of defeat. Is it possible she leaves me as a man in control of his own destiny?
How long till lights out? I can only pray that sleep carries me outside of these walls.
Because there’s someone I have to talk to tomorrow.
JANUARY 23, 2023 | AGE 47
Running Out of Time
I collapse into the low chair. I’ve walked two hundred meters from where the cab dropped me, and I’m hopelessly out of breath. Sweat pours down beetroot calves, so shinily swollen I couldn’t get a pair of trousers over them and had to settle on a pair of Scoutmaster shorts. The receptionist considers me with suspicion above the rim of her glasses and tries the phone again. I urge myself not to panic at this struggle to get oxygen into my lungs. This body is destroyed.
A couple of kids snigger as they pass. I hear the word pedo uttered, for the second time since I set foot on site ten minutes ago.
You’re not going to die here, I tell myself. My heartbeat wobbles in my neck. I clutch the vinyl chair with sausage fingers. In an attempt to distract myself, I watch the notices scrolling by on the LED display above the door. Block capitals inform me that Beekenside Secondary operates a zero-tolerance policy to the possession of weapons.
The receptionist passes me a visitor’s lanyard. “Paul—Dr. Defrates, rather—will be down when he’s finished with his class.”
“Thanks.” My voice is a gurgle, but no amount of clearing my throat has made it sound any more human. I am a man, barely of middle age, broken by booze.
She backs away sharply. I don’t think I smell, but I do have the look of someone who you’d play it safe in proximity to—breathe in through the mouth and do so as little as possible.
The bell sounds and the building comes alive, a thousand pupils making a dash for the gates. I had begun to doubt I’d make it here before the end of the day, but with my pulse rate slowing, I enjoy a moment of private celebration.
I awoke some hours before dawn arrived this morning, sleeping in my family home for the first time since this nightmare began. I was reminded of being sick as a kid, as I flitted from feeling close to death, to terror-filled sleep, and back awake in time for several lurching staggers to the bathroom. Only by daylight did I register that I was not in my own room, but in what had once been my parents’ bed.
A black-and-white portrait of Mum in a gilt frame was among the empty cans and full ashtrays on the mantelpiece. Unmistakably early 1970s, it’s a picture from before she met Dad—all cheekbones and ruler center-parting like her idol Karen Carpenter. I was hollow as I stared at that photo: not so much grieving for the person no longer here, but for the one I never knew.
There was no clear evidence as to how long I’ve been living alone there. Unopened bills in red envelopes were tossed about the place. Dad’s answerphone blinked urgently at me in a way it never had when he used to insist it was essential for his work. Eight messages, all from Ross. My brother’s ever more frustrated voice fluttered and slurred on the worn tape. “When are we getting the house on the market, Alex?” “Stop ignoring me. I can’t afford to pay another month of Dad’s fees at the home, Alex. Too many obligations here.” “Are you there, Alex?” “Have you found somewhere else to live yet, Alex?” “Call me.” “Christ’s sake, Alex. If I have to fly back I will.” “What is wrong with you, Alex?” “Will you just call me already?”
I didn’t call him back. It would have been easier to write the day off, sleep off the agony of this body. But I can’t risk waiting for a better day tomorrow. Today I am a free man, at least.
Finding Dr. Defrates meant finding some cash. I tore through the house: not even pennies under sofa cushions or in clothes pockets; I’d swept the place already, it would seem. I remembered the fireproof lockbox Dad kept in the base of his wardrobe, home to valuables including his gold watch. It was where he always kept Mum’s Midland Bank passbook, which she’d occasionally be allowed before having to check it back in again.
I’d beaten myself to it: lock already smashed open, metalwork buckled and torn. Just some insurance paperwork remained.
Among the mess, I did find some receipts from a pawnshop on the high street called The Cash Angels. Instantly the missing television and hi-fi made sense. Nothing of value left in the house: Dad’s cufflinks and bracelets missing, no power tools in the shed, even the cake mixer gone. Self-preservation stopped me dwelling on this too long; safest to think of the perpetrator of these acts as a stranger to me. But it made searching out Dr. Defrates all the more pressing.
At the pawnshop, I was greeted like a minor celebrity by the girls behind the safety glass. “That old thing again?” one asked as I waited for them to value my guitar. “How many times you bought that back from us?” Even the other customers laughed when I said I couldn’t remember. “We’ll keep it to one side,” the girl told me as she counted out thirty-eight quid. Parting with it seemed no great loss; going busking with it today is out of the question. I’d tried a few chords back at the house, but my fingers, swollen and numb, made playing infuriating—like using a typewriter whilst wearing boxing gloves.
Despite the brain fog, I could still remember the address Dr. Defrates gave me, and I was soon in a cab. The mid-terrace cottage in the suburbs looked alarmingly disheveled. I peered through a filthy bay window at books stacked to waist height and at a fireplace that had avalanched ash past the hearth and onto the many overlapping rugs. Back in 1999, he’d been so insistent that I’d always find him here. What—twenty-four years ago? I rapped on the door a fifth time. My heart sank and my hangover gripped harder.
“Excuse me,” I said to a neighbor as she emerged from her own front door. “Is there another way in?” I gestured to the stack of catalogs and newspapers in the porch, blocking the doorway.
“God, no!” she said with a smirk. “Paul just steps over them. Always has. Not sure he even notices such things. Mind on far bigger things.”
“Paul? Paul Defrates? He still lives here?”
“Never lived anywhere else, I don’t think. But he’s at work now.” And she gave the address of the same inner-London school that Dr. Defrates himself had given me nearly a quarter of a century ago. Furious with myself for the wasted jaunt out to the suburbs, all but the last quid of the guitar proceeds were gone by the time I arrived outside this building.
“Aha! Alex Dean!” Dr. Defrates booms as he strides through reception. “Long time no see.”
Bizarrely, it feels a lifetime since we last spoke, though it’s only been four days—for me. He limply shakes my hand, and I’m forced to grab on to him in order to extract myself from the seat. I’m short of breath again by the time I’m on my feet. “I never imagined you’d still be working at the same school,” I tell him as we weave through corridors. “I’d have been here much earlier today if I’d known.”
“I’m something of a lifer. That’s what the staff here call me.” He chuckles, as if the joke is on them. “Thirty-two years and counting.”
“I’m impressed,” I tell him. “Tough job, I’m sure.”
He laughs again, walking such that he leads with his chin. When I met him that day of the eclipse and we strolled beside the river, he’d seemed so much older, as though he could have been my own schoolteacher. But the years have been far kinder to him than to me. He’s still the egg-shaped giant he was, the pounds he’s packing keeping him wrinkle-free—face and bald head so taut they have a sheen to them.
Dr. Defrates’s office is no more than a storeroom attached to his classroom, and it’s in the same disarray as his house. I move a tower of files and some plates to uncover a stool to sit on. He pours himself a glass of tomato juice and takes a deep swig. It leaves a red moustache which he wipes away on his sleeve. “Alex?” he says, holding the carton aloft.
I hold up a palm. If he had a shot of vodka and Tabasco to go with it, I’d accept the offer in a flash.
“Good for the intellect,” he mutters as he squeezes behind his desk. Not a square inch of the surface is visible.
I glance around the place, but nothing among the squalor gives anything of value away about this man. I know nothing of him, other than that he’s my only hope.
“What is it you teach?” I ask.
“All sorts. History to the younger years. Economics and philosophy at A-level. Latin on the rare occasions when the interest’s there.”
“Wow.”
“We live in an era of specialists, Alex. Modern life says that to be successful one must know one subject, inside out. But I find it’s far more interesting to know one thing about everything, than to know everything about one thing. Don’t you think?”
“Sure.”
He browses through an exercise book before groaning and scribbling with a red Biro. “Tell me—to what do I owe the pleasure?” he asks.
“I don’t have anyone else I can talk to. About this. Sorry. You don’t mind me...showing up?”
“I’m delighted you have. Touched, even.”
“Something has...come to light. I think so, anyway.”
“Tell me more,” Dr. Defrates says.
“I think maybe I can change things. Can I change things?”
“Let’s start with what’s happened to bring you here.”
“It’s nothing terribly scientific,” I say, suddenly embarrassed about what I’ve come to discuss.
“Pleased to hear it,” he says. “Science is a wonderful discipline—the best, perhaps—but it does rather get in the way of new ideas, what with its incessant belief that everything it already knows is correct.” He gives a deranged tomato juice smile. “Go on.”
“So, a while back, I met my mum in 2019. She was...dying.” The horror of the word assaults me.
“Oh, I am sorry.”
“I told her I loved her. It was weird, like it was really hard to say it to her. And she said I’d never told her that before. That was 2019, right?”
“I am listening,” Defrates says, one eye still on his marking.
“Then the next day, for me anyway, was that day I met you. In 1999. The eclipse day. I rang her up, just to—you know—say hi. And I told her again. I said I loved her. And she—again—said I’d never told her that before.”
“Understood.”
“But this is where it gets interesting. I saw her again yesterday. My yesterday.”
“Year?”
“2008. I was in...prison.”
“How awful,” Defrates says in passing, like I’m describing a nasty common cold.
“And I told her I love her, again. And I’m ready for her to say how I’ve never said it before. But she doesn’t.”
“She remembered you saying it in ’99?”
“Yes!”
“What’s your point? You said it and she remembered.”
“Don’t you see? In 2019 she told me I’d never said it before. So when I turned up in ’99 after that, I changed something. I changed...history.” It sounds silly to say out loud, and Defrates emits the snigger the statement perhaps deserves.
“Steady on. A minor detail of history. Not the sort of event on which civilization hinges.”
“But maybe my civilization hinges on it.”
“Well, perhaps.”
“So, am I right? Can I change things?”
“We can all change things, Alex.”
“Look, you said that my life already exists in its entirety. I’m just visiting it in the wrong order. So if it’s all already happened, how is it that I can do something in an earlier year, and it have an effect at a later time?”
Defrates stares at me with excited eyes. “The great mystery of agency!”
“Is it a great mystery?”
“The greatest. You may also recall that I told you how everybody’s life already exists. Before your accident and your trip into the Thames, Alex, you’d have assumed your actions had the ability to change your future?”
“Of course. Basic cause and effect.”
“So we accept that something can already exist, yet be unfixed?”
“I don’t know.”
“No one knows, Alex. But you’re a highly intelligent man, a fellow Cambridge alumnus, but for circumstances beyond...”
I nod, glad of the recognition.
“Your life,” Defrates continues, “just like mine and everyone’s, exists. But only when a day is lived, does it become observed.”
“Right.”
“I want you to imagine a body of water. A lake, let’s say. Picture it if you will?”
“Looking at it right now.”
“You are, say, fifty meters from the water. Now tell me, Alex, how deep is it?”
“How would I know that?”
“Well, of course you can’t know, can you?”
“I can only guess.”
“So, that water could be anywhere from, what—a meter deep, to maybe a thousand meters deep. Agreed?”
“Sure.”
“And if you were to jump in and swim to the middle, say, only then, once you’ve left the shore, once you’ve actually ventured in, would you be able to find the true depth. So here’s the question. Before you jump in and measure the depth, how deep is it?”
“Interesting.”
“You understand me?”
“Maybe I do,” I tell him.
“Until you measure it, it is both a meter deep, and a thousand meters deep. And every possible increment in between.”
“The depth only becomes a fact when it’s observed.”
“Oh, I do love it when a student of mine gets it,” he says, grinning.
“You think that’s how it works? How my life works?”
“If it is, it’s how everybody’s life works. The future already exists, and yet there is free will. As I say, the great mystery of agency. What exactly do we have control over?” He grabs a fistful of exercise books and continues to mark them at speed, big looping Well Dones and See Mes and 11/10s in red pen. “They keep telling me I should let my students submit their work electronically,” he mutters. “Over my dead body.”
“So, let’s get this straight,” I say. “I’m visiting a life that’s already been lived. But if I do something different to what was done before, if I change something, I’ll see the consequence of that the next time I’m in a later year. My life will update.”
“That seems a safe enough bet. Do something different, and there will likely be an effect down the line.”
“So I can change this...life...” I’m short of breath again, and a sweat breaks. It’s my only hope.
“Within reason.” He says it like it’s obvious.
“What does that mean?”
“None of us can change the world to suit us. We can only change ourselves.”
