Simon Clark - The Fall

And there, in the car park, three lost, bewildered people. Zita, looking as if she was suffering from the mother of all headaches. Jud Campbell, tired, harassed and as worried as if he’d been left in charge of a child who’d become lost in a wolf-infested forest. And himself, Sam Baker, sitting with his hands in his pockets, his chin almost touching his chest as he stared at the tarmac wondering what the hell they should do next.

It was as though they’d fled the scene of a natural disaster. But unlike a physical hurricane that tears through a town, flattening houses, hurling cars about, knocking people off their feet, this particular psychic storm had torn through their minds.

The tourists sat on the bus feeling emotionally bruised. They didn’t move and none of them felt inclined to discuss what they’d experienced.

The driver of the County and Coast Tours bus muttered to himself as he drove. He stared glassily through the windscreen. Once he missed a red light. Drivers sounded their horns; a car missed him by a whisker.

In the front seat of the bus Nicole in her gorilla suit and Sue as Stan Laurel tried to decide where to go.

‘I mean we can’t just take the coach back to the office and say, “Sorry we’re a week ahead of schedule,” can we?’

‘I was in the office last week,’ Sue said in a small voice. ‘They’d asked me to stand in for Toni Burke in admin. If I go back I’ll meet myself. I was wearing that silly dress with the pink flowers.’ She pushed her fist into her mouth and a hard, machine-like laugh came clacking from her throat. Yet her eyes had a scared cast to them, like she’d just found a severed hand in her shoulder bag. ‘I’ll say hello to myself. What then? Ask myself to go out for a coffee and talk about what I’m going to do about Graham? I mean, I can hardly tell him he’s got two identical girlfriends now, can I?’

Nicole sat with the gorilla head clenched in her two hands. She felt dangerously hot in the stupid suit that bristled with black nylon fur. And here was Sue, going over the edge. Oh, Lord, she didn’t feel far behind.

In the seat behind her, Ryan Keith sat with his face in his plump hands, the Oliver Hardy bowler still wedged on his head.

Behind him the passengers sat and stared at the passing scenery. Dumb from shock, Nicole guessed.

At one point on the drive to York a man had slapped his wife.

A full-blooded slap straight across her face.

No-one knew why.

No-one asked.

No-one reacted.

It was as if it had never happened.

Then both husband and wife had sat there in silence. Only her cheek was now a brilliant red and tears filled her staring eyes.

They were all coming apart at the seams.

Because each and every one of them knew time had come adrift.

Nicole ran her fingers through her beautiful blonde hair and tried to imagine what had happened.

The best she could come up with was that the present – the here and now – was like a group of rafts all tied together. These rafts drifted steadily down a river that was time. For some reason their raft of now had somehow broken away. It had gone spinning away from the rest of the here and now, away from the rest of the world of 23 rdJune, and somehow it had been stolen away on another current that ran backwards. That raft had floated a whole seven days back, from 23 rdJune to 16 th.

My, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun? The saying suddenly seemed extravagantly absurd.

Like Sue beside her, Nicole found that her fist had made it into her mouth and that she was biting her knuckles. Whether it was to stop herself laughing out loud or plugging a scream that threatened to erupt from her throat she just didn’t know.

But right then a crazy idea struck her. A neighbour of hers had died suddenly on 20 thJune. Mr Thorpe was a cheerful 60-year-old who lived with his wife of 40 years in a house full of cats. Every spring he’d bring Nicole sticks of fresh pink rhubarb from his garden and glowingly tell her what marvellous crumbles they’d make. On Saturday afternoon he’d just clutched his chest and rolled over dead in his chair.

It occurred to her, seeing that today was, as far as the rest of the whole wide, shining green world was concerned, 16 th, she could see him alive and well again (at least, outwardly well if you discounted the artery ballooning in his chest) – and she could talk to him .

She bit her knuckle harder. Wouldn’t that be a scream?

To talk to a man who she knew would be dead within days.

She screwed her eyes tight shut as the world gave a slow, sickening spin around her.

But the idea that occurred to her now – the overwhelmingly powerful idea that rushed through her skull like an express train – was that she could save his life.

She could get off the coach, take a taxi to Invicta Parade in the suburbs of York, somehow persuade Mr Thorpe that he should go to hospital. A quick test would reveal the man’s swollen artery on the verge of rupture. They’d operate. Take a section of healthy artery from his leg. Cut out the damaged section in the region of his heart; then splice in the strong section. Why, he might live for another 20 years.

Nicole stared out of the window at the houses and hotels on the edge of York. Her reflected eyes, wide with astonishment, stared back at her.

God, yes. She could do that. She could save his life.

She climbed to her feet.

‘Bill… Bill!’ She struggled out of her seat. ‘Bill! Stop the coach. I have to get off”

The man who sold ice creams found himself down by the river bank. He wasn’t exactly clear how he had got there. Only that he’d been wandering aimlessly in a daze. Birds swooped above the surface of the water catching insects. The plop of a water rat slipping into the river sounded overloud to his jangled nerves.

He looked round, eyes creasing into two thin slits against the brilliance of the sun. Through the V-shaped cleft in the grass slope he could see the timber seating of the amphitheatre.

It was deserted.

He realised he must have left the ice-cream van unlocked.

But at that moment he didn’t give a merry chuff. He was just coming to terms with seeing a man humping his wife.

But it wasn’t just any man.

Now that he’d thought about it for a bit it wouldn’t even seem so bad if it had been a stranger or… or the bloody window cleaner, if it came to that.

No, the man he’d seen had been none other than himself.

That’s something you don’t expect , he thought, for the twentieth time since coming to his senses a moment ago.

Not yourself. You never expect to walk into a room and see you there as large as life, do you?

He knew the Germans had a word for meeting your exact double: doppelgänger . It meant ‘double walker’. If you met your doppelgänger it was a bad omen. It probably meant you’d die soon.

Another rat plopped into the water by his feet, where it swam just below the surface, leaving a muddy trail.

‘ Doppelgänger .’ He rolled the unusual word across his tongue. ‘ Doppelgänger .’ Was that it?

He’d seen himself.

His own doppelgänger .

Did that mean he was he going to die soon?

Jesus Christ.

Forty-five years old. That isn’t old, he thought. I don’t want to die at 45.

A few yards ahead of him an old man stood on the bank looking out across the river; he leaned forward, taking his weight on his walking stick.

Beyond the man a couple of boats bobbed at their moorings on the water. One was a huge white launch on which a blond-haired man in white linen trousers and short-sleeved shirt sipped from a glass.