Simon Clark - The Fall

Moments later Sam lay on the narrow cabin bunk, feeling the tilt of the boat under him as the current gently pulled at the hull. A night-bird called from somewhere across the water. In the distance a dog barked; the sound had a near musical quality that shimmered on the air. Despite everything, he felt a strange kind of contentment that he’d never experienced before.

It might just be eating the first square meal in God knew how long.

Or it might be a feeling of kinship that he was developing with his fellow time travellers now he sensed they were on some kind of quest together. Where it would lead he just didn’t know.

He heard a female voice singing. Perhaps it was one of the tourists strolling along the banking in the moonlight. She sang the old hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. He couldn’t explain why, precisely, but at that moment it seemed hugely appropriate.

Hearing the words, sung as softly as a lullaby, he drifted off to sleep.

The next morning that feeling of normality was reinforced by a good breakfast of fried eggs, bacon and mushrooms. Jud, Dot, Zita and Sam ate seated at a folding table on the narrow boat deck. To Sam, even the most ordinary domestic activity became hugely reassuring; like using the pepper-grinder to sprinkle fragrant specks of peppercorn onto the egg yolks.

Jud splashed bacon fat onto his trousers and Dot tutted. ‘How many times have I asked you to wear the apron when cooking?’ Then she smiled and made a joke of him beating the grease out of the trousers on a rock down at the water’s edge. Jud, in that typically English way, talked about the weather, speculating that it was going to be a fine day. ‘Good cruising weather’ was how he described it. Which would have had a radically different meaning if used casually in a New York bar. Zita asked if she could borrow some shampoo so she could wash her luxuriant chestnut hair. Dot told her that she had a shampoo with henna that she would be welcome to use and that would bring out the chestnut gloss beautifully.

Ducks and swans glided across the still waters of the river.

Presently a pair of men, both in white shirts, grey waistcoats and bowler hats rowed by in a boat that looked the size of a lifeboat.

The boat itself was piled with fruit and vegetables. Sam saw a basket full of strawberries that shone a brilliant red in the early-morning sun. There was also a pole that at first he thought was some kind of stunted mast. Then he noticed there were pheasants and rabbits hanging from it.

‘Off to market, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Jud said in a low voice. ‘Ahoy there,’ he called to the two oarsmen. ‘What have you for sale?’

He stood up and, resting his hands on the guard rail, began talking to the two men. He talked easily, his Yorkshire accent matching theirs.

The narrow boat and Jud’s plain clothes didn’t look out of place on a river in 1865, but Carswell’s white launch with its sleek lines, radio aerial, satellite dish and radar obviously did. The two 19 thCentury men each removed their bowlers so they’d be free to scratch their heads as they stared at it.

Jud turned quickly back to Sam, Zita and his wife. ‘Give me whatever jewellery you’re wearing. No, dear,’ he said to Dot, ‘not the wedding ring or the engagement ring.’ He looked at Zita and Sam. ‘And if you have anything of too great sentimental value you needn’t hand that over.’

‘It doesn’t matter. We’ll get them all back at the next time-slip.’ Zita unhooked a gold chain from her neck, then another from around her ankle.

‘Which could come at any moment,’ Dot added, slipping off an eternity ring.

Sam worked off his signet ring after rubbing butter on his finger. His mother had bought him it for his eighteenth birthday. But Sam realised quickly enough what Jud had in mind. If they were going to be stranded here for any length of time they would need food. Besides, Dot was right; at the next time-jump all their possessions would be restored to them as if by magic.

Jud did all the talking, handing over the jewellery and his own antique pocket watch on a fob and chain. Then he haggled.

Sam had expected the men to talk slowly, in a kind of farm-yokel ‘Arrr, that be a good field of oats’ kind of way. But their speech was so rapid that he had difficulty in following it, their words running into each other, and there were more than a few phrases he didn’t understand at all. Already speech patterns and language were altering, even though they’d only travelled back a little more than a hundred years.

Ten minutes later the two men were rowing an empty boat away downstream while Sam and Jud began stowing away the foodstuffs down below. The barter had also included a big round cake of a hard reddish cheese. Jud sniffed it and smiled. ‘Real cheese; just smell that. Heaven, mmm?’

‘You’ll never fit all that in your refrigerator,’ Sam said. ‘I could ask Carswell if—’

Jud tut-tutted. ‘You should never put real cheese in a refrigerator. Real cheese is made up of living organisms. Chilling kills it. You see, we’re brought up to eat dead cheese that has the texture of old soap so we don’t know any better. Real, living cheese should be served at room temperature – like red wine.’

Sam marvelled at Jud’s pleasure over such a simple thing as that block of cheese. Maybe for some, time travel had its compensations after all.

Lee Burton found Sue Royston walking away from the visitors’ centre with two ornamental tin drums on which scrolling writing spelt out: YORKSHIRE TEA – THE TRADITIONAL BREW OF OLD.

She’d ditched the Stan Laurel jacket and bowler but still wore the baggy trousers and tweedy waistcoat.

He said, ‘Has Nicole still got the passenger list?’

‘As far as I know. Why?’

‘I was just going to do an update.’

‘You mean cross those that haven’t made it off the list?’

She glanced back at the museum room that served as the make-do morgue.

‘Well, that’s a more accurate way of putting it. Put it down to my tour-rep training but I’d be more comfortable keeping tabs on the clients.’

‘Clients?’ Clutching the drums of tea to her chest, Sue looked round at the people coming off the bus after the night’s sleep, or walking out of the toilets shaking their hands dry after washing. ‘If you ask me, time travel’s a great leveller; the demarcation between service provider and client seems to have blurred one hell of a lot.’ She shot him a tired-looking smile. ‘Sorry. Yes, I think you are doing the right thing, but where Nicole is I’m not sure.’

‘I thought she was with you last night.’

‘I haven’t seen her today.’ Sue’s eyes clouded a little as she thought back. ‘Come to think of it, I haven’t seen her since yesterday lunchtime. Have you?’

‘No. And I didn’t see her at the barbecue last night.’

‘Maybe she found some guy.’

‘I don’t think she’d just go off like that without telling us, do you?’

‘No, that’s not like Nicole… Oh, damn.’ A worried expression spread across Sue’s face. ‘Where the heck can she have got to?’

When William had invited Nicole Wagner to look at her bared shoulder she had frozen. Her heart felt as if it had just exploded into her throat, choking her. Her forehead pricked as perspiration suddenly stood in beads from the skin, cooling immediately so that she felt cold, shivery.

You’re one of us now…

The words sped round and around in her head like fish trapped in a closing net.