The Ministry of Time, page 14
“Look,” I said to him, “the bridges are integral to the project, and I’m the bridge of the most successfully adjusted expat. They can’t touch me. Bring me the proof. And then I can take it from there.”
* * *
I forgot to tell you the end of the spider story. I started visiting Missus Legs. At the time I was working my way through Alice in Wonderland, and I’d go out to read to her, stumbling over Lewis Carroll’s sinister lullabies. I liked the dignity with which Missus Legs appeared to listen, her cherubic stillness among the gossamer panes. And then—so fast I could only express it in plosives—kkkkk! bbbbb!—out from her corner to seize a stuck fly. I’d slam the book shut and watch her work.
I reached the lament of the Mock Turtle during the season of butterflies. A cluster of pupae on the branches of my dad’s yellow rosebush split to reveal scraps of wing. As the butterflies dried and stretched, I noted the grotesque flamboyance of their coloring. Butterflies demand so much attention. A spider just wants to eat.
I reached out and pinched a half-finished butterfly. It felt almost furry—the microscopic scales, hours old, disintegrating under my fingers. A tug, a flick, and I’d thrown it into the web. It struggled for a very long time before Missus Legs was done.
I’d tell this story when I was drunk, to friends at quiet dinner parties or to the men who’d called at my port in the years before I knew Graham. Invariably, they’d think it was a story about my little girl brutality. Who feeds a butterfly to a spider? But I always thought the story was about something else. Of course I was still afraid of spiders. I was eight years old. Missus Legs had a dozen eyes and sucked the life out of the living. Yes, I was still afraid of spiders. I had simply found the only way my child’s mind could conceive of placating the fear. Join up. Take a wing. Get to work.
* * *
Autumn stomped on. The days moldered and dampened, like something lost at the back of the fridge. No matter the weather, there were puddles of brackish rain slung across the pavements.
In early October, Margaret caught a cold.
Over the course of more than three hundred and fifty years, the common cold had mutated. Margaret’s body was astonished into severe illness. She was removed from her bridge accommodation to a Ministry ward.
Adela called an emergency meeting in her usual meeting room.
“We need to infect all of them,” said Ralph. “Get Sixteen-sixty-five to sneeze on them, and then keep them under observation on the wards.”
“It could kill the Sixteen-hundreds,” said Ivan, who was Cardingham’s bridge and whose voice was laden with the suggestion that this wouldn’t be an altogether bad thing.
“The only time they’ve been on those wards was after the traumatic extraction process,” said Simellia. “It could be triggering.”
“Oh, triggering,” said Ralph. “And we don’t want to trigger them.”
“No, we don’t, Ralph. We want them to remain as mentally and physically robust as possible. It is quite literally our job to ensure that.”
It was a fractious meeting. Nothing exposes the seams of a group faster than the fraught world of care. More than death, care reveals too much about a personality to ever be discussed neutrally. Vaccines, palliative care, capacity to consent to treatment, what constituted serious illness, the use and abuse of a taxpayer-funded system: try them on a dinner party and watch the pack animal bite its way through the skin.
I suggested that, to assure Margaret she would be coming off the wards and not pushed backward through the extraction system, we could arrange for the other expats to video call and talk to her.
“Yes,” said Simellia distantly, “I can arrange that.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that you should have to—”
“Thanks, Simellia,” said Adela wearily. “If there’s no AOB, I’d like to make my recommendations to the Secretary…”
Adela was of the “never been to the GP in my life because I’m not a pussy” school of care, and nothing changed. If the expats were dangerously ill, they’d be removed to the wards and never mind the trigger; if they could get a grip and deal with it at home, they should.
Simellia organized a group video call to Margaret’s bedside, negotiating with the Wellness team as if they were hostage takers. The four of us tried to comfort an upset, disorientated Margaret over Zoom. (The expats were disappointed by how clumsy the software was; they had not expected lags, pixelation, or sound issues in this, the brave new future.)
“They have pierced me with needles! I fear ’twill dispatch me…. Were these not the very tools with which we were plagued at first?”
She held up her white arms, rattling with IV cannulas. Arthur and Graham both flinched.
“I remember those,” said Arthur hoarsely. “But I didn’t until now…. Forty-seven, do you…?”
“Yes.”
“That ward… Maggie, can you tilt the camera? Good God. Was I in that ward?”
Graham didn’t respond, but he turned very pale. Simellia caught my eye, and for a moment we were united again, touching glances across a room. Then she took her face back and began to briskly discuss a schedule of calls with the on-site member of the Wellness team, who blurred the background as soon as they had control of the laptop.
Margaret only spent six days in the Ministry before she was well enough for release. Those six days were bitterly anxious, and I rendered my nailbeds dog food–ish. But once she was out, I felt silly for my lack of faith in modern medicine. It was just a cold, I told myself. Of course she would recover from a cold.
Arthur came down with the bug next, but his temporal closeness to contemporary colds meant he was able to remain with Simellia for the miserable duration. Shortly afterward, I caught it.
“Don’t come near me,” I warned Graham.
“I’m fine,” he said airily. “A mere catarrh in clement weather? I went snow-blind in the northern wastes. I have no fear of a cough.”
I sniffed gloopily through a mask, a hangover from the coronavirus pandemic some several years beforehand. I was trying to cook borbor, but the mere act of measuring stock for the rice was exhausting.
“Let me do it,” he said.
Through snot and eyeballs as hot as peppered eggs, I gave him instructions for cooking borbor, which I kept calling congee. I referred to the youtiao as cha kway and the spring onions as scallions, as I was too sickly to remember which languages I was supposed to be using. I left him to let it simmer, and despite my idiosyncratic instruction, he produced something serviceable. He brought it up to my bedroom.
“Are you decent?”
“Literally never. Kkuugh.”
“Might you… attempt decency?”
“You won’t be able to see anything, if that’s your concern. Hkk. Gggh. Oh, that looks nice. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You seem tense. First time in a lady’s boudoir?”
“I have sisters. Had. What’s that?”
“Hair dryer. Hnnghh. Kkkgh. Yuck. Sorry. It fires hot air directly at your head.”
“How useful. What’s this?”
“My alarm clock. It plays me birdsong in the mornings. Hkk. That half-moon lights up to resemble sunrise, so I don’t wake up in the dark.”
“What a clever invention. What are these?”
“Contraceptive pills.”
“Contra…?”
“I take one a day to prevent pregnancy. Ggggh. Not that I’m having any sex.”
He put the pills down hurriedly, flushing, and muttered, “ ‘Having’ ‘sex,’ what a revolting term. I hope I never hear it expressed again.”
For a day or so, things were, once again, misflavored and uncomfortable between us. Graham’s relationship to sexuality was a mystery. I had no idea if he’d ever had a sex life, or if he wanted one. The most his Ministry psychoanalyst had been able to get out of him on the comparative boisterousness and acquisitiveness of twenty-first-century sex was that he found it terribly eighteenth. I had a copy of his medical records from his extraction, and he hadn’t tested positive for, or been treated for, any STIs. Given the prevalence of prostitution in Victorian England, the nonexistence of reliable barrier contraception in his era, and the fact that he was a sailor, this suggested he was either a virgin or very lucky. But then again, I knew enough about his biography to know that he was very, very lucky.
Inevitably, he caught my cold.
I was first alerted to this because I heard the muffled snap of the bed frame at ten in the morning—by which time, he had normally been up for several hours. I knocked, received a coughing fit in response, and opened the door.
“I’m not dressed!” he croaked, sitting up.
“You are perfectly well-covered,” I said—a lie. The V of the T-shirt he wore—the first time I’d seen him in a T-shirt—came to a point on the flat of his sternum, revealing curls of black hair like a page of question marks across his chest.
“You… do not look well,” I added.
“Don’t tell the Ministry.”
“If you get any sicker—”
“I am fine. I simply need a day or so to mimic you and remain indolent.”
“Don’t sass me from your sickbed.”
I reached out, and he drew the covers up to his throat in a parody of chastity.
“I’m going to check your temperature,” I said, and flattened my palm over his forehead before he could flinch out of my grasp. He looked up at me—cautious, watchful—and visibly tried to anticipate my next move.
His skin was shockingly hot to touch. “You have a high fever,” I said, pulling my hand back. His sweat glimmered on my palm.
“I am fine. Truly.”
“I’m going to call—”
“Don’t.”
“Maggie and Arthur. They’ve had it already. They might be able to compare how badly gone you are.”
Margaret and Arthur arrived within half an hour.
“Forty-seven!” wailed Margaret, flopping onto the bed. “You look beastly! Hanged be, this sack is soaked!”
“He’s running a horrid temperature. Look. Feel his forehead.”
“Sixteen, get these women off me,” he said, a little desperately.
“Perhaps some tea?” Arthur suggested. Margaret and I traipsed out, with Margaret pulling at her sleeves.
“Oh, monstrous! His face is as soiled linens!”
“I can hear you.”
“You mun remove those vile garments,” Margaret called to Arthur. “With a blade, should he resist it. Their vapors will worsen his malady.”
We went downstairs. Margaret suggested that an apple would be a welcome victual (her words), so I put the kettle on and started to cut an apple. Margaret told me that modern apples tasted both bland and unpleasantly tart, and I started explaining intensive farming. Upstairs, we could hear the low voices of the men.
There was the sound of heavy footsteps, then the domestic thunder of water: Arthur, presumably, was running a bath. More low voices, this time at a ricochet speed that suggested argument. Then, suddenly, Arthur said, or rather snapped, “You can barely bloody sit upright. I’m not going to leave you to drown. For God’s sake, Gray—” and then he said something else, soft and fast. I couldn’t hear the words, but I raised my eyebrows in sympathy because I recognized the melody of pleading.
The voices stopped for a few minutes. Margaret and I exchanged glances. Then there was a hollow splash, which sounded very much like someone being dropped bodily into a tub of water. Margaret grinned. Upstairs, I heard a petulant “I can wash my own hair, thank you.”
“Maybe we should eat this apple and cut him another one,” I suggested. “It’ll just go brown.”
Margaret bit into a slice. She had bright, even teeth. I wondered what she was using to clean them in the seventeenth century that had left them so pearlescent. She swallowed, and the white column of her throat contracted prettily. I got confused and went to make the tea.
“I have attended many ‘screens’ of the season at the British Film Institute,” Margaret announced to my back.
“Oh yes? What are they showing?”
“Films from the land of Korea,” she said. “They place the script in English at the base of the screen so that we might follow. I have seen many romances.”
“Have you watched much old Hollywood stuff? I think you’d really like it.”
“What is ‘Hollywood’?”
I smiled. It was so hard not to treat the expats like blank slates onto which I might write my opinions. I understood the adage “knowledge is power” whenever I looked into Margaret’s face, the sultry peach color of her mouth and her acne glowing with unprinted newness. There was something hauntingly young about all of them, a scarcity of cultural context that felt teenaged, and I didn’t know if my fascination with it was maternal or predatory. Every time I gave Graham a book, I was trying to shunt him along a story I’d been telling myself all my life.
Margaret propped her chin in her hand and said, “Is Carol a film of ‘Hollywood’? I took much pleasure in that.”
She twinkled at me, and I twinkled back. She was just too charming; untwinkling was not an option. When she was alone with me, she pitched her voice slightly lower than she did around the men. Even for her, girlishness was a habit that was hard to break—for safety, for camouflage. I knew that. Sometimes, just under my tongue, I felt the exclamation marks I put into my speech, demarcating the sentences I didn’t mind being broken off from my agency, as long as I was assured I would be protected from the outcome.
* * *
Graham was adamant about not informing the Ministry about his illness. It was the closest I had ever seen him to entreating. I thought about it a lot. I liked being entreated by him.
With the remedies of house and hearth, it took him a week and a half to get back to full strength. In this time, Arthur, Margaret, and I plied him with care and got on his nerves. He didn’t like to be touched or fussed over, and, after the first few days, became tense with irritation when we tried. Arthur and I took it personally (Arthur was once almost reduced to tears). Margaret didn’t, so she was the only one who could get away with forcing him to accept help.
Despite how interesting I found Graham’s pleas for secrecy, by failing to report a significant change in physical health or my meeting with Quentin, I was pushing my luck with the Ministry. I avoided going in for a couple of weeks, hoping to blend into the beige background of generalized bureaucracy. Toward the end of Graham’s convalescence, the Vice Secretary emailed me to let me know I’d been assigned a new handler, and I assumed I’d gotten away with it.
I took the tube in. The streets were beset with the cacophony of constant rain—enough that the local councils had started prepping for a flood.
Adela was sitting at Quentin’s old desk, hands neatly crossed over a small pile of paperwork, with an air of a wind-up doll about to be set into motion. She was visibly waiting for me, and her demeanor suggested that I’d missed my cue.
“Adela. Good to see you.”
“Sit, please.”
“Er. Thanks. When will I meet my new handler?”
“I am your new handler.”
I goggled at her. I must have looked like a demented bowling ball, because she added, “In light of Quentin’s defection, the Secretary and I considered it wisest if you and Eighteen-forty-seven were kept close to Control.”
The roof of my mouth abruptly dried. I unstuck my tongue from it like a strip of jerky.
“What do you mean, his defection?”
“He has attempted to make unauthorized contact with a man who claims to hold the rank of brigadier. Something to do with an irrelevant sketch by Eighteen-forty-seven.”
Time happened to me very quickly, and then very slowly. Panic as much as grief warps the way internal time works; I just had the wherewithal to wonder if this would be worth raising with the Wellness team.
“You know I gave the sketch to Quentin.”
“I do. I know you’ve met with him too.” She didn’t sound angry. Not even expectant. But she left her sentence trailing for me to catch.
“Look,” I said, “I think Quentin’s—a bit delusional. I’ve been trying to persuade him that I’m trustworthy. I don’t want him to lash out and leak things and endanger the project or Gra—Eighteen-forty-seven. You say he’s been slipping stuff to Defence via the Brigadier?”
“The man who appears to hold the rank of brigadier, yes. And his associate Salese.”
“What does ‘appear to hold the rank of brigadier’ mean?”
“He’s a spy. Not for Defence. I mean that he does not work for the British government in any capacity, and never has. He works for one of our allies—technically an ally—certainly not a country we were expecting to send intelligence agents into our sovereign territories. We knew from the beginning, but I thought—that is, the Secretary, Defence, and I thought—that it would be prudent to monitor him and establish the parameters of his mission before we alerted them, so that we could contain any fallout. Unfortunately he has since gone underground. As, it appears, has Quentin. You have been working with a traitor and aiding a saboteur. But you are… a good bridge.”
Even this, she said with brick-wall calm. I sensed retribution judiciously withheld, and I was bitterly grateful for her restraint. The way she watched my reaction reminded me of the stingingly intense way that the Brigadier had stared at me. As if they were both double-checking the whereabouts of my jugular vein.
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, and lifted a thumb to my mouth to bite the skin.
“Don’t!” said Adela sharply.
I jumped an inch in my chair. She grimaced and bunched her hands into fists, so the knuckles bulged like marbles.
“You need to break that habit,” she said. “It’s a dangerous tell.”
