One Word Kill

‘Back to the Future, silly. They need a lightning bolt to get back. It’s the only way to get the power they need.’

I shook my head and gazed at the dead power station. ‘There’s not a lot of energy in a lightning bolt . . .’ I nodded toward the chimneys. ‘From what he said, that whole place over there couldn’t do it, not if you ran it flat out. He’d need to drain the national grid.’ I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it earlier. How was he . . . I . . . going to get back?

Mia frowned. ‘I guess he has it covered. He’s a grown-up, after all. And it’s not like he didn’t have time to think this through.’

‘You’re not worried for him?’ I felt slightly betrayed.

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know him. I guess I will, one day. I mean, I’ve only known you for just over a month. And thinking of Demus as you, well, that’s difficult. It’s great that he went through this effort to help me. But . . . you know . . . it’s just really hard to think of any of it as real. It hasn’t happened yet. And, whatever he says, I can’t think of the future as set in stone. I can’t wrap my head around that one. It would be like nothing we do matters . . . The most important thing here is that he says he can get Rust off our backs if we do this.’

‘I guess . . .’ My guaranteed recovery seemed important, too, but she was right, it was further in the future, less tangible.

‘And even if he does somehow make Rust forget about me, I’m still not sure that breaking and entering is a clever move.’

‘Maybe it’s just the least dumb move?’

‘Come on!’ Mia shrugged and set off again. ‘It’s freezing up here.’

She was right again. The wind over the river cut through my coat as if it weren’t even there. I bent my head, gritted my teeth against the ache in my bones, and followed her. I didn’t know what Demus’s escape plan was, but I found it hard to care too very much. He was old, unimaginably distant in time. I cared for him in the same vague way I had always cared for my future self, i.e. I made the occasional short-lived resolve to eat sensibly, I saved my pennies for the future in a high interest building society account, and I took the trouble to acquire useful qualifications. The rest had always been future-me’s business and good luck to him.

We skirted by the Miller blocks, coming close enough to see the black stain above the windows of Mia’s flat. It would be a long time before anyone lived in there again. The council would move them somewhere, but it might not be close.

‘Bastard.’ Mia muttered it under her breath.

‘Could have been a lot worse.’ It still could.

By the time we reached The Spotted Horse we were cold and tired and ready to quit. It looked inviting – the warm light through the puddle glass windows, the hubbub of conversation through the door – but I knew from experience that they wouldn’t serve us in there. Not even a coke and a bag of crisps.

‘I’ll call Elton.’ I nodded to a bank of phone boxes. The others should already be on their way.

‘You realise this is seriously stupid?’ Elton surprised us by coming down the high street rather than up it and stepping in between us, a hand on both our shoulders.

‘We do,’ I said. ‘Mia’s been trying to talk me out of it.’

‘You don’t believe this Demus guy anymore, Mia?’ Elton sounded so grateful that I felt immediately sorry for him when Mia answered.

‘I believe he’s from the future, and I believe he’s trying to help. I mean . . . if you had that power, to travel back and change things . . . There’s so many ways you could help yourself. Why would you waste time doing what he’s doing unless you meant it?’

‘So what you trying to stop us for?’ Elton asked, releasing our shoulders.

‘Because of what you said,’ Mia replied. ‘This is seriously stupid. If we get caught we could get put in an institution. Nick, John, and Simon could get expelled from their posh school and miss out on university. Hell, if there’s guard dogs, they might eat us. And for what? To make me better when I’m forty? I don’t even want to be forty. Me? Forty years old? Whatever Demus says, I can’t believe it’s going to be like that. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. I could. I don’t care what he says about it.’

‘I want you to be forty,’ I said.

‘I do, too,’ Elton said. ‘My parents are way past forty. There’s still plenty of life to live. Don’t give me this die young, stay pretty shit.’ He reached into his pocket and drew out a crumpled bit of paper. ‘Besides, there’s this.’ He offered it to Mia.

She straightened it out. The words were in my handwriting. The note Demus gave Elton in John’s house. Mia paused to find her voice, then read it aloud. ‘You marry him. Your friends and family come to the wedding.’ Her eyes glistened. ‘Who is “him”?’

‘I’ve got an idea. But in the end it’s not the important part,’ Elton said. ‘I want the future Demus has seen.’

‘So . . . we’re doing it then,’ I said.

‘Yup.’ Elton nodded.

John and Simon arrived together about a quarter of an hour later. Just long enough of an extra wait in the freezing cold for us to start cursing them for chickening out.

‘So, we all know what we’re doing then?’ I said, setting off up the street.

‘No fucking idea.’ Elton caught up with me. I tried to remember if I’d heard him swear before.

‘Well,’ John called after us. ‘Not really. But I know where we’re going, and it’s not in that direction. We need the tube station.’ And he headed off the opposite way.

It was a hike to Clapham South tube. I knew I’d overdone it. I doubted I’d be able to get out of bed the next day. But at least the pace kept me warm. Warmish. Warmer than I would have been standing still. We stopped once while I was sick into someone’s garden hedge.

At the station we dug in our pockets for the required fare.

‘It doesn’t seem right, having to pay for the privilege of committing a crime.’ John poked through his change. ‘Really, we should jump the barriers.’

We paid for our tickets, though, like upstanding members of society, and went to stand on the musty platform.

The train was crowded with the people who would be our competition when it came to escaping the city centre in the small hours of the night. The tube trains ran late enough to fill up London’s nightclubs and theatres, then inexplicably closed down before anyone wanted to come home. Since we didn’t have a getaway car, I’d made sure we had enough cash on us for the extortionate return by taxi.

It was a straight shot from Clapham South to Old Street, eleven stops on the Northern Line, back across the Thames. For the best part of an hour we rattled through the subterranean night, passing beneath the river and the heart of the city. We used the time trying to firm up the very loose plan we’d already come up with, shouting over the clatter of the train. John had given us a rough layout of the place and secured the computer passwords from his father. Simon had been hitting his dad’s books, sharpening the edge of his talent for rooting stuff out of computer files without permission. To my knowledge, Elton had never broken a law in his life, but he could climb like a gecko, and from his dad’s stories about keeping bad guys out of buildings, he knew a few things about how to get into them. Mia and I were hopefully just going to be interested observers. We could keep watch or something . . .

‘We’re probably just going to fail to get in and end up coming home again,’ Simon said.

Nobody disagreed with him.

I sat beside Mia and our hands found each other in the gap between us. I tried not to hold on too tight. We clattered through one station then the next, spitting out a few passengers, squeezing in three times as many. I watched our reflection warped by the curving double layer of the carriage window. Our images hung ghostly above the advertisements as they slid by, cigarettes, lingerie, cars, then darkness. I tried to think of us not only on steel tracks thundering inevitably on into the inky tunnel, but on equally un-jumpable tracks carrying us forward into a future just as certainly at a steady sixty minutes an hour whether we liked it or not.

Just before Christmas, as light relief, our English master had set us the task of writing an essay in which we described what advice we would have to offer ourselves if we could go back to when we first entered Maylert aged eleven. Or, if we were feeling more imaginative, what advice our future selves might offer us right now if they could step back from the end of our, hopefully, long and illustrious careers.

I had written something worthy about paying more attention in class then lightened it with some tips on buying shares in Atari. But, right now, it seemed that Mr Arnot’s direction to ‘kiss the girl’ was pretty sound advice. Certainly Demus didn’t seem to have discovered anything in the following decades that he felt important enough to pass on.

‘We’re here.’ John tapped my shoulder. I’d been dozing.