What You Wish For (16 page)

He didn't turn to her as she entered and Carrie locked the door behind her so that they wouldn't be disturbed, then she picked her skirts up and sat down in the middle of the floor. Finally he turned to her, surprised to see her sitting on his floor.

She gestured to the space beside her and for possibly the first time since he was a child, Mr Thornton sat down on the floor.

“
So, are you finally going to be honest with me?” he asked, his words sounding harsher than he meant them to.

“
Yes, but there are some things I want to show you first.” She got her handbag out of the basket and took her purse out. She pulled the picture of her family out and handed it to him.

“
What is this?”

“
A photograph of my family.”

“
Photographs aren't in colour. And their clothes are very strange.”

“
They are in colour where I'm from and as you can see, it isn't on a glass or copper plate either, just paper. That's my mother,” she pointed. “That's my father and my sister and me when I was 12.”

“
What about your brother?”

“
I don't have a brother. I lied.”

He handed the picture back to her and Margaret got her college ID and driving license out, both of which had colour pictures of her on them. He looked at them closely then handed them back.

“
You wear paint,” he said, slightly disdainfully.

“
Everyone does where I am from. Even some men.” He looked sharply at her and she laughed slightly hysterically. “It's true, I'll show you.”

She got her blackberry out and turned it on. She had turned it off almost as soon as she got here to save the battery, so it had plenty of life left.

“
This is a phone,” she explained. “It's a bit like a telegram, but you can speak to the person on the other end. They also do all kinds of other things now, technology has moved on a lot.”

She searched through her music file until she found the album cover of one of her favourite bands. She showed him the picture.

“
Men in paint!” he said softly.

“
They're one of my favourite bands. Musicians,” she clarified.

“
They play music?”

“
And write it. Here,” she took the phone back and played a song from the album. She opted for one of the slower singles, but it was still very different from anything Mr Thornton was used to.

Mr Thornton jumped as the music began and after listening for minute or so, she stopped it.

“
You call that music?”

“
I do. A lot has changed where I come from.”

She next pulled a book out of her rucksack, English Literature in Context, and opened it to the copyright page.

“
Look at the publication date,” she told him.

“
2010?”

“
It was published one hundred and fifty five years in the future.”

“
This is absurd.”

“
Is it?”

She next got her laptop out of the rucksack and turned it on.

“
Where I come from we have something called electricity which powers all kinds of fancy machines. This is a computer.”

“
It looks like a typographer.”

“
It can be used as one, among other things.”

Once it had booted up, she opened Microsoft Word and began typing,
'Hello, my name is Carrie Preston and I am from the 21st century'
.

“
I write my essays on this for university. I'm taking a degree in English Literature.”

Mr Thornton watched as the words she typed appeared on screen.

“
It can do a lot of other things too,” she said. “I can store music on here, I have some ebooks on here, which are novels in a format that can be read off this screen rather than in a printed book. I can store my photos on here.” She opened up the file labelled personal pics so that she could see the thumbnails, then opened a picture of her with her sister. “There's also something where I come from called moving pictures or films.” She opened another file and played one of her music videos, watching as Mr Thornton got closer to the screen while the video played.

“
What are they doing?”

“
Dancing.”

“
Doesn't look like any kind of dancing I've ever seen.”

“
It's street dancing.”

She closed the window.

“
The thing is, I know how crazy this sounds but I'm from the future,” she explained, managing to only cringe slightly as she said the words. “My aunt granted me my heart's desire and somehow I ended up here, and the reason I said that you are destined to be with someone else is because your future is my past. I've read about who you're supposed to marry.”

Mr Thornton didn't answer her for a moment. Her toys were very clever but he had something more pressing on his mind at the moment.

“
What's that,” he asked, pointing to a thumbnail in her picture album. “Can you make it bigger like you did with the other one?”

Carrie opened the picture, though she dreaded his reaction to it. Mark was standing behind her, his arms around her waist as he kissed her cheek over her shoulder. Carrie was laughing.

“
That's me at the Student Union's Halloween party last year. It's customary where I come from to dress up as someone else on Halloween, I went as a sexy nurse.”

“
And that man with his arms around you?”

“
He's dressed as Cary Grant, he's an actor who made a lot of films.”

“
And who is he?”

"Mark. He was... my boyfriend.”

Mr Thornton's features turned positively fierce as he glared at the screen.

“
Things are very different where I come from,” Carrie tried to explain. “People are free to show their affection to each other in public and fashions have changed drastically. It... it's not better or worse, just different.”

“
I have never seen a nurse look like that.”

“
No, well like I said, things are very different. Short skirts like that will become popular in the 1960's.”

“
You look very happy.”

“
I was having a good time. Celebrations and parties are much more jovial things where I come from, very informal.”

“
Is that man why you refused me?”

“
What? God no! I was going to break up with him but then my aunt died and the next thing I knew, I was here so I didn't have a chance, but we were over, I promise you.”

She cupped his face in her hands and turned him to look at her.

“
I love you, not him.”

She leaned forward and kissed him but he took hold of her shoulders and pushed her away, hard. She fell backwards and looked up at him as though she was seeing him for the first time.

“
You expect me to have anything to do with a woman who behaves like that?” he asked, pointing to the laptop screen. “Cavorting, practically naked in public? You disgust me.”

Carrie felt as though she had been punched in the solar plexus and physically couldn't catch her breath for a moment. She had heard of a broken heart but she had never believed that the pain could be this acute.

She stumbled to her feet, feeling disoriented and out of sorts, and ran for the door. She pulled on the handle for a few moments, frustrated that it wouldn't open, until she remembered that she had locked it. She finally got it open and ran, her tears blinding her so that she was unable to navigate around people and was forced to push them out of the way.

She ran all the way home, making something of a spectacle of herself, and once home she ran up to her bedroom, threw herself down on the bed and sobbed until she was too tired to cry any more.

Mr Thornton watched her go, his heart was also breaking but he was unable to forgive her for loving another man. He leaned over the laptop and, though it took him a while to learn to use the mouse pad, he remembered how she had closed the previous photograph and he closed this one. He opened the next one. Carrie and Mark were dancing in this one, her arms around his shoulders.

He went from picture to picture. Each photograph of her and Mark was like a knife in his heart. She wasn't with Mark in all of them, in some she was alone, in some she was with other people and some photographs she wasn't in at all. Some of the people wore so few clothes that they were practically naked.

He had never witnessed such a wanton display of immorality before.

Then the photographs changed from the Halloween party. The next one showed Carrie sitting on a blanket on hillside, dressed in blue trousers and a knitted top. She seemed to be having a picnic with another girl. Her hair was loose and blowing in the wind. In the next picture she was smiling towards the camera against a backdrop of mountains, her face alight with pleasure. He had never seen her look so happy before. The pictures changed once again, this time to a dinner party. In the next she was with a group of friends. In the next she was sitting at a piano on stage. He wondered if she could play.

Then there came a cluster of pictures that seemed to be from another country since the buildings and plants were so unusual. Some pictures were just of buildings, while others had Carrie and one or two other women in them. In many pictures they carried large bags on their backs and in all of them, the girls were wearing trousers. The people in the background looked Asian.

The country obviously changed again, as the other people in the photographs now had black skin, so perhaps she was in Africa or the Caribbean.

In the next picture she was a few years younger and sitting atop a horse but sitting astride it, not riding side saddle as was customary for ladies. She was smiling and there was a blue rosette pinned to her horse's bridle. In the next she was again astride a horse but wearing clothes much like his, including a top hat.

In the next she was in a field, feeding carrots to the chestnut horse and a black pony, her clothes were shabby and her boots filthy but she looked so happy. In the next she was grooming the chestnut horse, then seemingly mucking out its stall. That was no job for a lady! In the next photograph she was riding bareback with only a bridle on the horse. In the next she was jumping.

Then came a few pictures where she was wearing what looked like blue pyjamas with a green belt, but she seemed to be fighting in two of the pictures. In the third she was bowing to someone else.

In very few of the pictures was she painted, and in none was she as painted as in the Halloween photographs. Perhaps she wasn't such a loose woman after all, and painting one's face was something of a tradition on Halloween. After all, hadn't her... No, he couldn't bring himself to even think the word. After all, hadn't
'that man'
with her in the photograph also been painted?

He had run out of pictures so he closed the window, only to see the file that she had played the moving pictures from. He opened another file and watched, fascinated as the people moved and spoke to each other.

The women were all dressed in form fitting clothes and trousers and the rules of society didn't seem to be kept to at all. Two men with unusual accents were speaking about a crime with a lady. Another man had been slain and the language they were using was quite vulgar to use in front of a woman. The men, however, seemed to be taking their orders from her; she was their boss!

The boss-woman had a third man with her but he seemed to be her friend rather than her employee, yet he still did what she said. They went to see some military people and he was shocked to note that some of the military people were women, and they were dressed in exactly the same uniforms as the men!

Then there was a gun fight and the friend-man cowered, while the boss-woman withdrew a very small gun and began shooting, protecting the man!

If this was where Carrie came from, he could see that things were indeed very different. Suddenly the screen went black. He shook the machine a few times but it remained black. He had obviously broken her magic toy.

He leaned away from the laptop, surprised to realise that he had gotten so close to it in the first place, but he didn't get up off the floor. Instead he began going through the other items in her basket.

She had some other photographs in her purse, which was unlike any purse he had ever seen before; one picture of her with her horses and one of her father.

There were lots of printed scraps of paper detailing prices, and the dates on all of these pieces of paper were 2011. She also had a number of strange coins, squares of something like card with bank names and long numbers on them, and probably thirty or forty thousand pounds in diamonds, stored in the same pocket as the coins! A diamond ring, a pendant, a brooch and earrings. Stones of this size just weren't seen outside of the aristocracy and those with immense wealth.

He looked at the coins which declared themselves to be 1, 2, 5, 20, 50 pence as well as 1 and 2 pound coins. Each coin was dated sometime between 1987 and 2009 and declared the Queen to be Elizabeth II rather than Victoria.

Next he took out the paper money, which were much smaller than the notes he was used to. He counted them up and she had nearly one hundred pounds in her purse! Of course it probably wasn't legal tender.