The Time-Traveller's Choice

staring at your empty hands

This is what it feels like: the object becomes warm and rough, and something reaches out to take you around the waist, squeezing the air from your lungs. You see what it wants you to remember. A moment or scene all around you, bleeding into you.

Then it lets you go.

Or sometimes it doesn't, and you feel the brush of memory turn to hooks, pulling you backwards. Should going through time feel "backwards"? Well, it does to me.

Then the object is gone, and you're standing, trying to get your bearings, in a new place. Trying to figure out what you're supposed to be seeing.

There are four ways to respond to time travel.

The first is to avoid it. Prevention is, in this case, better than a cure. Since the first time it happened, I'd got quite good at avoiding getting pulled backwards. I had learned the difference between a memory that brushed and one that pulled, and learned to throw the object away from me before it pulled me. I'd also learned to avoid the kinds of objects that were likely to have memories they wanted to share.

The second is to try and prevent the memory from happening. Return that dropped toy to its distraught owner. Prevent that fight that severs the connection between father and son. That sort of thing. If you manage that, then the conditions that pulled you backward cease to exist, and you find yourself dropped unceremoniously back in the present--your present, holding an object that has nothing to say to you.

The third is to try and prevent yourself from touching the object. Find it and post it to Argentina before the past/future you can pick it up. Problem solved, and you're back where you're supposed to be.

The fourth is to wait it out, to live the last day, week or year over again.

You can only exist in one place at a time. When you get pulled backwards, the you who just spent the morning hanging out in your PJs watching breakfast shows ceases to have existed, and is replaced by the you who is standing somewhere unfamiliar staring at your empty hands and trying to figure out what that chicken-in-a-basket ornament you picked up in a thrift store four days into the future was hiding.

And then you hear shouting, or crying, or screaming. The memories that are intense enough to turn into pulls are almost never happy.

* * *

There was a stuffed bunny lying in the street outside our house. Its white fur was tipped with greyish-brown, and one ear listed sideways to reveal stuffing. Its natty red waistcoat was missing a button.

"Mummy," I said, "look, he's so cute!"

"Don't touch that, darling," said mum. "It looks filthy."

I picked it up. I was aware of the damp spot on the bunny's side where it had been lying in stormwater. It became warm, and I felt like I was falling, flying, from a boy's hand out the window of a speeding car, into the gutter.

My hands were empty. The bunny was on the ground. My mother was gone.

Losing interest in the stuffed bunny, I wandered inside.

Mum rushed over to me. "Emma," she said. "What--" She crouched down, held me by the forearms, and looked me up and down. "You just disappeared."

"We went outside. I found a bunny in the road," I said.

"No," said mother. "We were inside. One minute you were next to me building a tower, the next--what are you wearing?"

Here's what had happened. At 10.21am, a boy had lost his stuffed bunny out the window of a speeding car, while mum and I played with blocks in the living room. At 11am, we had decided to go for a walk to the park. Mum had made me put on my wool coat and wellingtons. Outside the house, at about 11.10, I had picked up the bunny, and it had carried me back to the moment of its loss.

Because I couldn't exist in two places at once, the me inside playing had vanished, replaced by the me outside in my coat and wellies.

The me who wandered outside and picked up the bunny still existed; I remembered it. But nobody else did. Like a knot in the thread of time. Of course that was way too mind-bending for my ten-year-old mind. Perceiving my mother to be upset at something I didn't fully understand, I opted to start crying.

Mum stood. "We're going to see Granny Alice," she said.

Granny Alice listened with a thoughtful expression while mum told me what had happened and what I said.  Then she had settled back in her chair, crossed her wrinkled hands over one another, and said, "Would you like to get the cake, darling? It's in a tin on the counter."

I saw her one more time, a week later. We went over, as usual. Granny Alice said something--I was sent out of the room--when I came back, mum was packing her things, every movement a choreography of fury. "Come on, Emma," she said. "Time to go."

Grandmother sent me cards on my birthday and at Christmas, which my mother opened and scanned before giving to me.

Once, I heard mum on the phone, almost shouting: "No, mum, you can't talk to her. I can't trust what you'll say." Then, "You're not her mother. You don't get to decide."

By the time I was fourteen, my relationship with mum was strained. It didn't help that I'd gotten pulled a few times since that first one. And those were only the ones mum knew about. Quickly enough, I learned that if I could undo the pulling, it was best just not to tell her.

Sometimes it was unavoidable, like when I got trapped two months in the past, halfway across the country, where a book I'd picked up in Camden Lock had witnessed a murder.

For mum, I disappeared from my bed and called her from a payphone in Manchester two hours later, having been interviewed by the police and had some trouble explaining why I was four hundred miles from home, dressed for a day's shopping in the middle of the night, at the site of a murder. 

And then, after a scolding from mum for being stupid enough to go into a second hand bookshop and pick up the books, I had to go to school the next day and sit through the next term's worth of calculus again.

Meanwhile that murderous bookseller's store had been dismantled by his wife, his books sent to whomever would take them, and that old copy of Sons and Lovers had ended up in Camden Lock.

If you were wondering what my most unpleasant experience was, it turns out that before cows die they can have emotions, and after they die, they become objects that can have those emotions imprinted on them. The experience of getting pulled backward to the slaughterhouse where my burger met its fate was one I've never cared to repeat.

It always makes me faintly nauseous to be reliving the past. It's like that moment when you think the train you're sitting on is moving, but it isn't. Then as I reach the day and time where the previous me has got pulled, there is a moment of world-spinning vertigo while the universe snaps back into place.

I don't know why I am this way. Granny Alice probably knew, but she's gone, and mum made sure she'd never have the chance to tell me her secrets.