The Time-Traveller's Choice

Mile End Road

NOTE: The first 20 episodes of this are available free on Wattpad; after that you will need to visit Radish Fiction to read the rest (or you can start the story free on Radish Fiction as well - https://radish.app.link/jmfsJGdOmqb)

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"To my granddaughter Emma Scott I leave an emerald ring owned by my mother," the lawyer read from the paper in front of her.

I looked up from my hands. "That's me," I said, even though the lawyer and I had been introduced earlier.

The lawyer leaned over her desk and handed me an old crocodile skin ring box. I sat back in the chair and opened it. Inside was a gold ring with a tiny emeralds and pearls in a claw settings. The ring was lovingly cared for, bright gold and emeralds so clean it was easy to see that they were small and flawed.

"Thanks," I mumbled, snapped the box shut and tucked it into my coat pocket.

When I looked up, my mum was looking at the pocket, wide-eyed. "Perhaps I should look after that. It's valuable, and your dormitory probably isn't the safest place for it."

My hand, still in my pocket, closed around the ring box. The ring had stories - I could feel it whispering to me from its little velvet casing. That was why mum wanted it away from me.

"No, thanks," I said. "I'll keep it. Grandma Alice wanted me to have it, not you."

"Just be careful, Em," said mum.

"Obviously," I replied.

The reading continued. Alice's possessions had been split between her four children, aside from three bequests. Her brother Edgar's war medals to their surviving brother Lionel; the ring to me; and Alice's mother's journal to mum.

Mum had accepted it without a word, but her face had gone white as she tucked it under her hands in her lap. Her fingernails were neatly trimmed, and the last knuckle curled over the marbled binding of the book. The pages were buckled and yellow; unlike the carefully cared-for ring, this journal had seen some sights.

"Can I see?" I said.

Mum's fingers tightened around it. "You can--read it when I'm finished," she said.

I grimaced, not keen on crawling through some old lady's spidery handwriting to hear about darning socks and changing nappies.

* * *

The ring box was in the front pocket of my bag when I boarded the train from King's Cross back to Durham.

It was a Friday afternoon, and the train was crowded with people escaping to the North for a summer weekend.

The train journey passed quickly; I was lost in my thoughts, sort-of mourning my grandmother, although I'd barely seen her in nine years, ever since a shattering argument between her and mum.

The train deposited me on the platform at Durham in the early afternoon. I tucked my light cardigan into the handles of my overnight bag and walked down into the town to the college. As I walked, I slid my hand into the pocket and my fingers brushed the ring box.

For a moment, I was walking along a different street, wide and flat, crowded full of street-vendors and women in aprons and black straw hats. A tram trolley rattled down the middle of the street, and girls in dirty pinafores dodged across the tracks, weaving around old motor cars and horse-drawn carriages.

The dominant impression was of noise, from every direction, reaching out towards me.

Then I was back in Durham, shaking. Not from shock per se; memories like that were a fairly standard part of my condition. But it was hard to become completely immune to the feeling of being drawn into a memory, like a rollercoaster at the top of its arc.