Out of Time
Authors: Ruth Boswell
We may well ask when and where men do live. The answer is that they live in the future and in the past and now, or all at the same time; or, more correctly, that when they live at all they live out of time
The Third City
by Borra Bebek
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable
TS Eliot
One
Girls fancied Joe. He was seventeen, tall, dark haired, grey eyed, handsome though this was difficult to tell. A Gap jumper whose hood permanently covered his head and left his face in shadow served as a useful disguise and allowed him to see out but prevented anyone from seeing in. Torn jeans and trainers conformed to the political correctness current among his peers.
Joe and his mother lived alone in a red brick house in Bantage, an unassuming town in the Cotswold Hills. The odd Tudor front, a covered market in Weymouth Square, a few remaining narrow lanes, bore witness to a more ancient centre, almost obliterated by the usual parade of chain stores, a small shopping mall and civil facilities. Where Joe lived, nearer the outskirts, the thirties planners, or unplanners, had taken over and post-war architects added their indelible mark. Their house, three up, two down, small front garden, larger back, was what might have been called ordinary but served its purpose. It was home.
It was this that Joe was now trying to enter. His key refused to turn the lock and open the front door. He gave it a hard kick. This usually worked. Not this time though, this time the door remained obstinately shut. Typical of the day, he thought bitterly. It had started with a fight in which he beat up a boy weaker than himself for reasons he could no longer remember, it had continued with an argument with his best friend Martin who wanted him to go to Dick’s Cafe after school, and it had almost ended for good with a heavy fall outside the local park gates which had left him unconscious for several minutes and with a pounding headache.
Dick’s Cafe was where groups of friends gathered, hyped themselves up on caffeine, phoned friends and if seriously bored went on to punch a few video games at the local arcade. He suspected Sally would be lying in wait for him. He’d been going out with her in a half hearted kind of way for the past term, the last of a succession of girls with whom he had had vague relationships but who, as he had no inclination for commitment, eventually walked away. Sally was more persistent than the others and he was anxious to avoid her.
He wished his mother were back. It was Monday and she worked late at her secretarial job which she disliked but bore with stoicism. She had had no outside financial support since Joe’s father disappeared and she was too proud and independent to pursue him for maintenance. Joe tried to supplement their income, or at least see to his own immediate needs, by working at the local Sainsbury’s on Saturday mornings.
Mrs Harding’s life was devoted to Joe. This Joe knew but instead of helping their relationship, he was left with a burden of guilt which made him resentful. Dimly aware of how unreasonable this was, he tried to express the genuine love he felt for his mother but failed, thus intensifying his guilt. Mrs Harding for her part, also guilty because Joe was being brought up without a father and the masculine guidance she thought essential for a teenage boy, could not break the cycle of tension that marked their daily life. It was an unsatisfactory situation but neither knew how to alter it.
Joe once again tried to open the door. He inserted the key into the lock and twisted and turned it with increasing frustration. It served him right. The lock had been temperamental for some time and he had promised to install a new one; but hadn’t. He tried the side door leading into the back garden but this too unaccountably failed to open.
The air was hot and still and the street quiet. No one was about, blank-faced windows revealed no sign of life, no doors opened or closed, he could hear no voices, no sounds of children. He wondered where they had all gone in a street normally active at this time of day. He felt dizzy and faint and sat down on the front steps. When was Mum due? He looked at his watch. In four interminable hours. Should he go to friends? The idea repulsed him. He wanted to get indoors, flop down in front of the TV, watch a crap programme and go to his room, the only place in which he felt secure enough to relieve himself of being who he was. His head throbbed.
He dragged himself upright concluding that, befuddled by his fall, he had gone to the wrong house; easy enough to do, in these repetitive streets, after a blow to the head. He picked up his bag and walked back into the street. The gate, swinging half open, revealed two white numbers nailed crookedly to the gatepost. They stared at him with the familiarity of old friends and he stared back, remembering the pottery class at primary school where he had fashioned them, brought them home and laboriously screwed them on. It was a lifetime ago, a period he preferred to forget, a time when the house vibrated with shouted or unspoken confrontation between his parents, when he lay trembling in his bed, his ears sensitive to the slightest sound that could herald a storm breaking out either below or in the bedroom across the landing. This was the prelude to his father leaving home. Joe was given to understand he had gone to live with someone else, some ‘tart’ he heard his indignant grandfather proclaim. This his father denied, tried to explain to a puzzled eight year old that he had fallen in love with someone else whom Joe would like when they met. But they never had. His mother had forbidden the contact and eventually his father and new wife moved to Australia. After a time they heard no more of him.
Dots danced before his eyes and he shook his head to clear them but his vision, when he read the street name, was unclouded. Fairfax Road. That was where Joe lived. Twenty-two Fairfax Road.
His knee hurt. He limped back to the house, sweat starting out in groin, armpit and forehead. He needed tea, something to eat. He had, he suddenly realised, on this unsatisfactory day, dashed out in the morning on only a cup of tea. Should he go to a friend’s house? He automatically reached for his mobile phone. The back panel had split, probably in his fall. The line was dead. He threw it in disgust into the nearest flowerbed.
He would have to get in through the bow windows but these, with safety locks in place, were impossible to open. His only hope was to break a pane and climb through. This seemed a drastic measure but he would square it with Mum, replace it himself if necessary. Joe no longer felt reasonable, his sudden and urgent need to get in the house overriding all other considerations. He picked up a stone from the garden, wrapped it in a dirty handkerchief - no point in raising the alarm with the shattering noise of broken glass - and prepared to throw.
The stone never left his hand because he now saw that, in place of the mirror that normally hung over the sideboard, was a charcoal drawing of a man’s head, heavily framed in black and executed in strong, bold strokes. Joe gazed at it, mesmerised by its extraordinary power, by the dark malevolent eyes staring straight into Joe’s. He drew back in alarm, his only wish to flee; but he had noted with astonishment that the room that he was looking at was not his, was not the one belonging to Joe and his mother, was not the room inside twenty two Fairfax Road. Averting his eyes from the hypnotic stare of the portrait, Joe drew near again and registered foreign furniture, heavy and dark, hessian curtains and, he now noticed, thick, roughly hewn wooden shutters swinging loose either side. How was this possible? He had checked the address. Were there two Fairfax Roads in Bantage? It seemed unlikely; yet there was no mistaking that the right address had brought him to the wrong house. He withdrew to the garden hedge where the portrait’s eyes could not follow and tried to work out logically and calmly a plausible explanation for his predicament. He had no doubt that there was one but for the moment he was too bewildered to work out what it could be.
He was interrupted by a harsh voice.
‘What the hell d’ you think you’re doing?’
He whirled round. Facing him was a small swarthy man, dark featured, heavily bearded, staring at him with hostility. Joe shrank back as the stranger laid a heavy hand on his arm.
‘Take your hands off me!’
He responded by grasping both Joe’s shoulders and giving them a shake.
‘I don’t advise you to be insolent,’ he hissed. He was looking round furtively as though caught in some illicit act. Clearly mad, an escapee from the local hostel. On drugs probably. Joe decided to handle him with care.
‘I am trying,’ he explained, as though addressing a recalcitrant child, ‘to get into my house’.
But it wasn’t, from what he had seen, his house. Someone else’s house, perhaps this man’s.
‘Your house?’ the man whispered. His pushed his face into Joe’s.
‘The key won’t turn in the lock,’ Joe offered in a conciliatory tone. If he kept talking perhaps he could edge him onto the path, back him into the street, find help.
The man gave him a sharp push.
‘Scram!’ he said, ‘before I call out the nets. Run!’
His mouth was pressed against Joe’s ear, the word exploding from him in a tone so low Joe was uncertain he had heard it. The man again looked to either side and then, taking a key from the loose folds of his shirt, opened the front door. Joe watched with astonishment. Pausing, the man whispered again,
‘I warned you,’ and disappeared inside.
Joe stood stupefied.
A bell began to ring, tolling from near at hand. Then another, and another. Looking up Joe saw, outlined against the sky, wooden structures on all the roofs, two uprights and a crossbar from which, their clappers following the rhythm, dark bells swung back and forth. The summer afternoon resounded to their peals. This was not the comforting sound of church bells but threatening, alarming, an imperious summons… to what?
The front door opened and the man came out carrying a long pole with a large net suspended at its end.
‘I told you to run!’
Joe needed no second bidding for the sound of other doors opening, other people shouting, galvanised him into action. He took off down Fairfax Road, turned left at the corner into Sydenham Road and on into Forest Lane. Behind him pounded a gathering momentum of feet, shouts, bells and whistles. More people emerged from their houses. All were holding man-sized nets.