DEREK SMITH
I joined the workshop in 1989 when it was at Forest Gate school. I was writing short stories then and have since moved on to children's fiction. This story is a variation on a plot I used in an earlier anthology. It was written as a children's story, but I suspect it's a borderline case. I am now attempting to make a living as a children's writer; much depends on whether I can sell the trilogy I am now working on.
ONE-WAY TICKET
It began in the park, in the playground. The afternoon was hot, and I was tired out from running around. John, whom I'd been playing with, had just gone home. Mum was reading a book on a bench. I didn't sit next to her as I was annoyed that she wouldn't buy me an ice cream ('too many sweets already today') so I sat on a bench some distance away. I was trying hard not to look at my mum, to show her how much I didn't care.
Also sitting on the bench was an oldish man. I thought it rather odd that in spite of the hot weather he was wearing a suit. Suits always look so uncomfortable - but to be wearing one on a hot day - and with a tie as well! It was like being in a suit of armour.
The man's face was very red, partly the way he was I think, that fresh boiled look, and partly a reaction to the sun. Well some people tan and some people just go red. And he was red, a redness emphasised because he was completely bald. It's not usual for someone to have not a single hair on their head - and I am afraid I was staring at him, trying to find one. His dome shone in the sun, rather like a pink billiard ball.
He turned to me and caught me looking at him; he pursed his lips, making me feel quite nervous. I didn't want to turn away so I smiled weakly. Then he looked over to Mum, then back to me. For a few seconds his fingers flicked on his knee hesitating. Then he spoke.
'Is your name Joe?'
'Yes,' I said.
'Joe Duffy?'
'Yes,' I said wondering how he knew.
The man thought for a few seconds, bit his knuckle and then said, 'It's my name too.'
This surprised me. I had never met anyone with the same name as me, though I was told I had an uncle in Australia also called Joe. Then it came to me: there was something about him, something difficult to pick out, but something I knew.
'Are you from Australia?' I said. It was just possible.
'I am not your uncle,' he said.
'Then how do you know my name...and about my uncle?'
He smiled. 'It's amazing. I saw you running around just now. Just where do you get all that energy? And that hair...so much of it, so curly. Whoever would have thought?'
'Thought what?'
'How we change. The cycle of our lives. Like an acorn becoming an oak tree. Year on year. No stopping it. No saying this far and no further. On and on it goes...' He stopped. 'Your middle name is Michael - yes?'
'Yes,' I said.
'I see from your expression I am confusing you.'
His eyes were deep blue with cracks in the blue. They were watery, and I wondered whether it was the wind or had he been crying?
'That's your mother isn't it. She's Irish isn't she? Her name is Maeve. You've got a brother Steve and a sister Liz...' He stopped and pulled at his chin. 'No you haven't got a sister Liz. Not yet.' He looked me over. 'Ten aren't you?'
I nodded.
'Next year,' he said. 'You'll like Liz.'
'What are you talking about?'
The man chuckled. 'Oh I am sorry. I thought you had guessed. There's me rabbiting on as if you knew. Silly me.' He took a deep breath. 'There's no simple way of saying this - but I am you.'
'Pardon?'
'Me, you. We are the same person. I just happen to be 50 years older.' He chuckled. 'It must be rather a shock meeting this bald old gent who is yourself.'
'You can't be,' I whispered.
'I am.'
'You're not,' I said as firmly as I could muster. 'You've found out a few things about me. Probably been talking to Mum and now you're trying to trick me.'
'I built a time machine,' he said. 'I worked on it for 30 years. This morning I tried it out. He chuckled dryly. 'And here I am.'
'You tell a good story,' I said. 'I almost believe you.'
'What would it take for you to believe me?' said the Man.
I thought a little. 'What's the name of my hamster?' I asked.
The man thought a little then shrugged. 'I don't know. It was 50 years ago.'
I thought again. I didn't want to ask him simple things like what school was I at. Anyone could have found that out. It would have to be something that only he and I knew.
'Haven't you got a cat called Syrup?' he said.
'Treacle,' I replied.
'Of course Treacle!' He shook his head. 'Poor Treacle.' He hesitated and then said, 'She gets run over.'
'You're terrible,' I shouted.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I shouldn't have told you.'
I turned away. Treacle had got run over three days ago and I was just getting over it. It was just outside the house. She'd been hit by a car and lay in the gutter bleeding and dead. I had been stroking her not five minutes before.
'I'm sorry,' he said again. 'The fact that I can still remember her death must mean it hurts a lot. I must be more careful.'
For a little while neither of us spoke. Then I was aware of the Man fishing around in his pockets. He seemed to be trying them all. At last he gave a cry and brought something out. He held it in his palm for me to see.
It was my lucky cowboy. He was on a white horse riding like the wind, one hand holding the reins, the other in the air.
I ran over to my mother who had my coat. I searched though my pockets.
'What you after?' she said glancing up from her book.
'Something,' I said, and came out with my cowboy. I ran back to the Man, and without talking we compared them. They were as identical as anything could be, two cowboys on galloping white horses, except his white horse was a little yellow.
'How can it be in two places at once?' I croaked.
'The same as we can,' he said.
I was struck dumb. I had the two cowboys, one in either hand... Why would anyone prepare such an elaborate trick? And who knew apart from mum about my cowboy... And yet I couldn't believe that I would become like him. Fat, bald. And yet it must be so.
In frustration and confusion I threw his cowboy at him and went off to play on the roundabout. I pushed it furiously and then jumped on and sat on it. The world whizzed about me. I could see him watching me, I could see mum quietly reading and the rest of the kids in the playground. I thought of the future, of me becoming him.
It was horrible. You should never be told such things.
I jumped off the roundabout. 'How dare you!' I yelled.
He looked down at his feet. 'I'm sorry,' he said with a sigh, 'but I had to.'
'No one has to,' I exclaimed.
He shook his head. 'I had to.'
'No - you didn't,' I exclaimed. 'You could have just watched. You didn't have to say anything.'
He shook his head and put his hand on my shoulder. 'Please listen to me. Believe me - I just meant to come and see. But...' he stopped for a second, holding me with his cracked blue eyes. 'My machine didn't come with me,' he added.
I looked at him puzzled. His eyes had closed, his hand dropped from my shoulder.
'I can't get back,' he said.
I let him explain. His Time Machine was supposed to have accompanied him, but somehow it had dumped him and shot off somewhere. Who knew where? And now he was penniless and knew no one at all. It was he said like being in a foreign country. Everything looked so different from the way he remembered.
I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what he wanted from me. I tried not to look at him, but I couldn't help it. At last I said:
'Your hair. What happened to your hair?'
He rubbed his hand over his dome. 'Oh that. I had to shave it off for the Machine. Not that I had much, and it was going grey. I think I prefer this way. Nothing to comb.'
'It's horrible.'
'I'll get a hat,' he said.
'Have you any children?' I asked.
'Two girls,' he said, 'both grown up. I was married, but well we got divorced about ten years ago.'
'What do you work at?' I asked only half wanting to know.
'I work in a bank.'
I groaned. 'Is that the best you could do?'
He shrugged. 'It's where I ended up. And it gave me time to get on with my inventing. To work on my Time Machine.'
I flapped a hand helplessly. This was all beyond me. I was frightened and at the same time flattened. Frightened by this view of myself, flattened by the boring person I would end up being.
'We can't all change the world,' he said.
'Why not?'
He smiled then said, 'You'd better introduce me to Mum.'
Snakes alive I thought: she's his mum too!
All considered Mum didn't take it too badly, not at first. There was something in him that she recognised. I can hardly think what. He was not at all like me. You would never in a hundred years guess by looking at the two of us. Well I don't think so.
Mum was very polite. Well he was over twenty years older than she was, and wearing a suit. I worked it out as they were talking; he was the same age as her dad.
'I don't know what your father will say,' she said.
Dad didn't believe it. Lucky cowboys didn't convince him at all.
'You're a con-man,' said Dad. 'I don't know why you've picked on us - but you can clear off.'
'He's not a con man,' said Mum.
'How do you know?' said Dad annoyed.
Mum said, 'I just know.'
Dad said, 'This is crazy. A man comes along with this half-baked tale about time machines. He gives a few details that anyone could know and then shows a toy cowboy that anyone could buy in a shop - and you both believe he's come from the future.'
'I have,' said the Man.
'Hm,' said Dad.
'You were born in Nottingham in 1951,' said the Man to Dad. 'Your middle name is Stewart and you have a brother and sister. Your sister went to America but she came back.'
'She hasn't come back,' said Dad.
'Sorry,' said the Man, 'I get in some confusion about dates. She will be coming back. In a year or so.'
'Will I be promoted to an Inspector?'
'Yes,' said the Man.
That pleased Dad, and when the Man gave a list of police stations that Dad had worked at, with only a couple of minor mistakes on the dates, Dad was impressed. Not quite believing but definitely impressed.
'Alright,' said Dad grudgingly, 'you certainly know a lot about us. But that isn't proof.'
'Fingerprints,' I said.
Dad got annoyed then, and told me to keep out of it. He said he was just going to say fingerprints and he didn't need any help from a cleverdick. A lot of thanks you get in our family.
Dad got an inkpad. He took the Man's right and left thumbprint. He had to press hard on to a sheet of paper with his inky thumbs. Then I had to do the same on another sheet of paper.
Dad looked a both sets of prints closely through a magnifying glass. He spent half an hour inspecting them from all sides. My left thumb against the Man's left thumb, the Man's right against my right. He kept switching from one to the other making noises which might have been disbelief or they might have been puzzlement. Or they might have been both.
After a while he got up, took the prints and said, 'I'm going over to see Sid. He's our fingerprint expert. What he doesn't know about prints hasn't been written. I shan't tell him they're from two different people. Just see what he has to say.' And Dad left us.
An hour later he returned.
'Identical,' he said.
'I told you,' said Mum.
'Alright, alright,' said Dad. 'Let's not have an argument. It's not everyday your son turns up from the future aged 60, especially when he's still here aged 10 - is it?'
Mother admitted it wasn't and she went to make some dinner.
Dad settled down to read the paper but I had the feeling he wasn't really reading it. He was nervous of his own son, and the paper was a way of avoiding talking to him. The man looked though the bookshelf.
'Ooh I remember that one,' he said, and got off the shelf a book I got for Christmas last year.
It was an awkward dinner. There were lots of questions we didn't want to ask. Like when people, ourselves and our relatives, were going to die and what they were going to die of. Or what people would do with their lives. There is so much when you think about it, that you don't want to know. The dinner mostly consisted of him asking us questions, as if to refresh his memory. We didn't want to ask him anything in case something unpleasant came up.
Mum and Dad gave him the spare room. They couldn't exactly kick him out. He was their son after all. But he was uncomfortable to have around. One evening Mum and Dad were discussing with me the secondary school I wanted to go to. And suddenly we just stopped talking, all three of us together. He'd come in the room, and it seemed a silly thing to talk about when he knew for certain which one I would go to. He had all the answers to all the questions.
Another problem was, that he didn't have any money. He was an extra mouth to feed, and he had quite an appetite. Also the problem of clothes. He only came with those he was wearing so immediately he needed socks, shirts, underwear - and in a week or so his trousers and jacket were getting grubby. Mum and Dad weren't pleased but they gave him some money to buy a pair of trousers.
Instead he put it on a horse, and lost.
Dad was furious.
'I must've got the year wrong,' said the Man.
'Again,' said Dad.
The man went to his room and Mum and Dad had an argument. It was about him, about money, about living with him. They were in the middle of it when the Man came down with a carrier bag.
'I'm leaving,' he said.
'Where you going?' said Mum.
The man shrugged. 'I just know I can't stay here. I'm not a kid and it makes life too awkward.'
'You haven't got any money,' said Dad.
'I'll have to earn some,' said the Man. 'I'm on my own. I'm out of time. I've got to make the best of things for myself.'
Then he left. At the door I saw Dad slip him some money. I don't know how much. I just saw some crinkled notes crushed into his hand. When he'd gone we didn't talk much. Dad turned the TV on, and Mum started to cry. I went and sat by her. And Dad said:
'Oh let's go and get him!'
We rushed out into the street but he had gone. Me and Dad got in the car and we drove around, up and down the streets close by but we must have missed him.
'Do you think he could've gone back into the future, Dad?'
Dad said, 'What with?'
'How much did you give him, Dad?'
'Twenty quid. Enough to stay somewhere for the night and a meal.'
'What about tomorrow?'
Dad didn't say anything and we keep on driving and looking until late. Then we went home. The next day we put an ad in the paper asking for Joe Duffy to get in touch. We even informed the police but they said as he was adult and left of his own freewill there was nothing they could do.
And that was that. It really was. We talked about him, we wondered about him. From time to time I looked on the street for him. Every tramp I saw I looked at closely - could that be the Man, bundled up in rags, bearded and dirty? Sometimes it was difficult to tell, and once I even asked a man if he was Joe Duffy. He wasn't.
Time passed. Years. I went to secondary school, and I hated it. The work, the routine, being told what to do all the time. I had lots of rows with my parents about schoolwork, but it didn't do any good. I might do a little bit for a few days but then I stopped. I liked loafing around, getting up late. I liked computer games. I got interested in girls. I never got interested in school and got in with a crowd who thought the same.
I took my GCSEs when I was 16 but it was hardly worth bothering. I got one half decent pass - in Art. The rest were all Ds and Es and fails. I always remember the day I got the results - I got it in the neck from everyone in the family. Mum, Dad, Uncles, Aunts - everyone was keen to tell me what a lazy so and so I was. How I would never get a job. Who the heck would want me?
The next day I didn't get up till two, and then I went straight out. And met my mates - who'd also got lousy results. And we didn't care. Well you have to say that - don't you? It's a bit late saying you do. Everybody had been telling us for years what was going to happen.
And it had.
Mum and Dad insisted I had to get a job. They were not having me lazing around in bed. So I went looking. I got a job in a shop where I lasted 3 days. It was so boring and the money was lousy. Then I got a job in a warehouse. I lasted 3 months, and that seemed to be forever. It was a really depressing place, gloomy. We wore brown overalls and some of the guys had been there 30 years, and still doing the same as I was, the new kid!
When I left I couldn't get anything. I got to getting up late and having rows with Mum and Dad. Was I going spend the rest of my life in bed? Dad always said that. Mum would accuse me of being just a lazy, good time boy. I wouldn't have minded if I had been having a good time - but I was just passing the time. Waiting for something.
I didn't need to be told I wasn't going anywhere. It was obvious.
One day I got a letter. I remember it distinctly. It came in a white envelope with a first class stamp. And I never got letters like that. In fact I didn't get many letters, and apart from cards they mostly came in mucky brown envelopes, inside were cold letters from the Careers Office, and the tax people. But this letter, white as snow, was from a bank, and it was inviting me for an interview the next day.
If anything, Mum was more amazed than I was. 'You'll have to wear a suit,' she said.
'There'll be 200 other blokes after the same job I bet,' I said.
Mum said, 'You've got to try.'
The next day I got up early. I washed, I shaved, I put my suit on with a white shirt and tie. Then I looked at myself in the mirror. There was a face and hands sticking out of a blue suit - God save me! I looked like a twit, I felt like a parcel. I just needed the sticky tape and string.
I took off the suit and put on my jeans and T-shirt. Then I set off for the interview. You might ask at this point why I bothered to go. Well firstly, Mum would yell all morning at me if I didn't, and second I would get hassle from the Careers Office. It was easier to go and not get the job.
It was a City bank and I had to go in with all the commuters on the train. The men all done up like parcels, the women didn't look so bad, in fact some of them quite nice. I wondered about that. Why men had to spend their lives trussed up in suits? What was special about suits? I thought in the end it was like school uniform - you didn't have to think what to wear.
At the bank the receptionist gave me this up and down look, so I gave her one back. Then she lead me without a word to the manager's office. A Mr Duffy, a Mr Joe Duffy.
Yes it was the Man. And we had a chat about my life, where I was going, what I wanted to do. He was looking quite well, hardly any older. He said he used to tell people he was 62, although he must've been in his late 60s now. He told me he had got married to a woman 25 years younger and she'd had a child. There was a picture on the desk of a little girl on a rocking horse.
'The last time I saw you,' I said, 'you had £20 in your pocket and a carrier bag. How did you get here?'
He laughed. 'I'm not telling you.'
And the old so-and-so wouldn't.
But he did offer me the job. One condition - I'd have to wear a suit. When he saw my face at that, he said he couldn't help it - that was the way it was in banks. In the end he left me to think about it.
I shook his hand when I left. He smiled at me, he'd done well, he was pleased with himself. I smiled back, it'd been a nice chat, we'd had a coffee and chocolate biscuits - and I was happy to know that things had worked out for him.
The next day I got another letter in a white envelope with a first class stamp. It was the offer letter for the job, saying what the money would be, the hours, and when I would start if I accepted.
And I did. That probably doesn't surprise you if you've read this far. I mean I had to do something, and the money was good. Dad and Mum would stop moaning at me. I'd be able to buy some things. Yes - I'd have to wear a suit, but I supposed you could get used to it. Like school uniform. But there was one main reason why I took it.
Him. The Man. I didn't want to let him down. I had misjudged him first time I saw him, all those years ago in the park. I had written him off as a boring banker. Yet here was a man who had worked in a bank - that is true, but he'd also brought up a family, and at the same time worked on his Time Machine. Then when most people are thinking of retiring - he'd travelled back in the past, to the time when he was a kid. And couldn't get back. So what did he do? He built another life. From nothing.
There was so much I didn't know about him, and so much I wanted to find out.
I did two important things that morning. I wrote off accepting the job, and I went to the public library. In the reference Library I went to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and there I read about time.
My future was just beginning.
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