Chapter Text
What the fuck is going on?
Rain dripped from Danny’s hair and ran over his face. His vision blurred with it; he wiped his coat sleeve across his eyes, but it was streaming down faster than he could wipe it away. Half blind, he stumbled over to a closed shop front—its window full of the sort of television sets he remembered from childhood, with aerials on top and faux wood panelling on the sides—and leaned against the door, trying to catch his breath.
A boxy old Vauxhall Cavalier whooshed past on the road, catching the edge of a deep puddle and throwing out a fan of filthy water that came within a hand’s breadth of soaking him where he stood. He fumbled his mobile out of his pocket, turning away a bit to hide it from curious eyes, and checked for a signal again, but there was nothing. The digital readout said 06:13, which seemed to be more or less the right time. If so, it was the only thing that was right at the moment.
He didn’t want to believe what had happened. It absolutely beggared belief, but everything he’d seen in the last half-hour—the cars, the clothes, the shops, the dates on the newspapers—seemed to confirm it. Unless he was having a colossal hallucination and was currently imagining all this from a locked ward in a psychiatric hospital, he had somehow gone to sleep last night in 2008, and woken up in 1985. Just the thought of it made him come over all dizzy and disoriented, as if his brain were exploding in slow motion inside his head.
Perhaps, he thought, he ought to review the facts; create a little mental list the way he would for a thorny problem at work.
Fact one: He'd woken up in his brother Scott's flat, but it hadn't been Scott's flat.
Fact two: There'd been someone in the shower who most definitely had not been Scott, belting out a Rod Stewart song in a terrible off-key bass.
Fact three: He'd stumbled out into the road and seen...but there his brain started doing its exploding trick again and he had to stop.
He stuffed the phone back into his pocket and made another attempt at drying his face. He needed help, but who would help him? In 1985, he was three and a half years old, and Scott was seven, just a little kid who could barely tie his own shoes. His dad wouldn’t believe it—if Danny could even get in to see him without an appointment—and his mum would probably summon the authorities to take him away and have him sectioned.
No recourse within his own family, then. Who else was there?
He flipped through his mental catalogue of everyone he knew, and abruptly landed on Jo, who would be seventeen or eighteen at the moment, old enough to offer genuine assistance, but still young enough, perhaps, to be open to strange possibilities. Grown-up Jo was one of the cleverest people he knew, at least when she was sober; wouldn’t teenage Jo be almost too clever for her own good as well?
Danny thought about that and concluded that she would, and also that he would be able to trust her, if he could only convince her of what had happened, or at least seemed to have happened. Jo could be difficult, but she was a good friend to have in a crisis. He could only assume those things were true in both the past and the present. Future. Whatever.
That still left the small problem of how to find her. He knew her maiden name and the name of the school she’d attended—both were in her official biography, which he kept updated for her—but even in a less creeper-conscious age, he didn’t think it would look good for him to turn up at a Roman Catholic girls’ school and start making enquiries about one of their sixth formers. It probably wouldn’t be too difficult to work out where she lived, but he didn’t think her parents would appreciate him appearing on their doorstep any more than the nuns would, no matter how innocent his intentions. He’d been told by Future Jo herself that he had a ridiculous baby face, but he didn’t look that young.
“Fuck,” he said under his breath, drawing a glance from a woman passing in the other direction. She was clearly on her way to work, dressed in what was probably the height of Eighties business fashion under her black raincoat and matching umbrella.
That gave him an idea. Suppose he could intercept Jo on her own commute from home to school and somehow talk to her that way? In 2008 she’d likely be delivered directly to the gate by a parent, but maybe in 1985 things were different; his mother had certainly complained enough about the daily school run to make him think it was a fairly modern development. At least he could give it a go and see what happened. It wasn’t as if he had much to lose at this point.
All right then, he thought, and set off.
The rain had slackened a bit, but it was still a long, wet walk to the area where he knew Jo had grown up, and by the time he arrived, the roads were fully awake and buzzing with morning traffic. Along the way, he’d found some tourist’s discarded map stuffed into the top of a bin, only a little damp from the rain, and had plucked it out with two fingers and brushed it off before tucking it into his coat pocket. He was ready to execute his plan, such as it was.
When he thought he was close enough, he shut himself into a phone box to study the directory, trying to ignore an angry man outside who clearly thought he was taking too long. Of a hundred and three Rourkes, eighty-nine had an address listed, and cross-referencing with his map revealed that only two of those eighty-nine lived anywhere near Saint Margaret’s Catholic High School for Girls. The first number he tried just rang and rang. The second one came with a recording informing him that Peter, Elizabeth and Joanne were all out, but he could leave a message if he liked.
Danny declined to do so, and put back the phone handset feeling pleased with himself. This was the sort of thing he did for Jo all day long (only a lot faster, thanks to Google), and now those skills were coming in useful at the most unlikely time. He would have to tell her about it when he saw her. Well, not when he next saw her, but when he saw her—would see her? would have seen her?—in the future.
No one had ever told him that of all the challenges involved in time travel, getting the verb tenses right would be one of the most difficult, he thought, exiting the phone box to let the angry man go in.
“Sorry,” he said as they passed each other, and got a grumbled “fuck off” in response, proving that at least some things were the same in every decade.
He crossed the road and set off toward the address he’d found, dodging cyclists and kids on their way to school. What would his current, three-year-old self be up to on a wet Tuesday morning, he wondered. Probably either at nursery, which he remembered only vaguely as a place where he’d had sand flung in his eyes and fought with other three-year-olds over tricycles with broken wheels, or at home, parked in front of Play School or Postman Pat.
That idea gave him a sudden impulse to go to his own house, try to catch a glimpse of himself through the windows, perhaps even see his father, who was alive and well in this time, but he squashed it down. He was interfering with the past enough already just by being here, and anyway he needed to find Jo. At the back of his mind, he knew he was fixating on her a little too intensely, as if merely seeing a familiar face would somehow make everything all right, but he thought he could be forgiven a bit of irrationality at the moment. He was still thinking it when he turned a corner and discovered the object of his search waiting at an uncovered temporary bus stop, hardly more than arm’s length away.
In their proper lives in 2008, he’d never seen Jo wearing a tartan kilt and blazer and carrying an overstuffed school bag, and he’d certainly never seen her smoking, which she was also doing. These things aside, he recognised her at once by the tilt of her chin and the way she was standing, umbrella popped up over her head to fend off a drizzle that was getting heavier by the minute. He eased up beside her, not too close, and stood there for a moment pretending to watch for the bus. When he thought it was safe, he stole a sideways glance, only to get a nasty surprise when he found her looking back at him.
At first glance, she was shockingly young, her face still softly rounded, her dark hair longer and held back at one side with a plastic tortoiseshell slide. There was mascara on her long lashes, artfully applied to escape the nuns’ notice, but no other makeup, and no jewellery except for a wristwatch and a pair of tiny silver studs in her earlobes. She blew out a curl of smoke, fixed him with the direct gaze he knew so well—even at eighteen, there was no flirting or coquetry from Joanne Rourke, one day to be Joanne Porter, member of Parliament—and said, rather sharply, “Do you need something?”
Yeah, you came automatically to Danny’s mind, but he couldn’t say that without sounding like a stalker or worse. The Jo he knew sometimes accused him of looking like a lost puppy on purpose to keep out of trouble, and now he put on that expression and cranked it up to eleven, doing his best to radiate harmlessness and innocence. Current Jo didn’t seem any more impressed by this tactic than her older counterpart, so he cleared his throat and tried something else.
“Just wondering when the next bus is coming.”
“Oh. Probably another five minutes, but it’s anyone’s guess really.” Jo turned her wrist over and looked at her watch, an expensive model that she would still be wearing, twenty-three years from now, with a brown leather band instead of the black one it currently sported. “They’re so slow when it rains. You’re going to be soaked by the time it does come.“
“Yeah, I—I forgot my umbrella at home. I’m an idiot.” Danny tried out a smile, hoping it was friendly and not creepy, and the corners of Jo’s mouth turned up just a bit in response. She dropped her fag end on the wet pavement and ground it out with the toe of a tasselled school loafer. Danny watched her do it, noticing as she did that her bare legs were pale and blue with cold between the hem of her kilt and the tops of her knee-high socks.
She must be freezing, he thought, and then abruptly remembered himself and returned his eyes to her face. He was so used to being younger than Jo, and having her call him a ridiculous boy and tell him to grow up for fuck’s sake, that it felt extremely weird to think of himself as her elder. But he was, and he would have to be careful. Future Jo wouldn’t hesitate to have a stranger arrested (or possibly push him in front of the oncoming bus) if she thought he was behaving inappropriately. He was quite certain Current Jo would as well.
They hadn’t even got to the part yet where he would have to explain the time-travel thing to her, he thought, and wondered if he’d been temporarily insane when he came up with this idea. Waking up in 1985 could do that to a person.
“There’s the bus now.” Jo pointed behind him, and he turned to see it approaching. It stopped with a whoosh of pneumatic brakes, and they both automatically queued up behind a withered old lady in a brown cloth coat and pink scarf, who had been standing a little distance from them.
As she made her slow but determined way up the steps, Danny looked past her, saw a bright yellow notice with black letters commanding him to PAY HERE EXACT FARE PLEASE, and realised for the first time that he was armed with nothing but an Oyster card that wouldn’t work for another two decades, and a handful of coins with the wrong years and designs on them. All right, the bus driver was bored and probably wouldn’t look too closely at anyone’s money, but what would happen when it actually changed hands? What if objects from the future dissolved into dust when someone from the past touched them, or caused some sort of temporal collapse that would turn the bus into a black hole?
Don’t be stupid , he told himself. He’d been touching things ever since he woke up here, and nothing had imploded yet. His body might technically be part of this time—at least, a form of Danny Foster existed here, probably having a nice morning cup of milk as this version of him stood panicking at a bus stop—but his clothes and shoes were all from 2008 and seemed to be doing just fine in the rarefied air of 1985.
“Are you getting in?” Jo was clearly running out of patience with him. She’d folded up her umbrella in preparation for boarding the bus. A cloud of tiny, silvery raindrops clung to her hair. “Only I’m already going to be late, and you’re wet enough as it is.”
“Right. Sorry.”
Danny mounted the steps, fumbled in his trouser pocket, and fished out a coin. He held his breath as he handed it over, but nothing happened, and he moved farther into the mostly full bus in a daze, scanning for an empty seat that didn’t have too many mysterious stains on its upholstery. All the other passengers around him looked like extras for a scene in a film about the Eighties—right down to the three youths spread out across the long row of seats at the back, with their lace-up Docs and their studded belts and their aggressively dyed hair—and it all seemed so perfectly staged that he wondered for a wild moment if he were the victim of some elaborate prank for a hidden-camera series. But then teenaged Jo didn’t fit into that picture, did she?
Thinking about Jo made him look for her, just in time to see her sit down two rows ahead of him, wet umbrella at her feet and school bag on her lap, and whip out a vintage-looking Sony Walkman and a set of black adjustable earphones on a thin headband. He watched her twiddle the radio tuning wheel and wondered what she was listening to. If Current Jo’s media habits were anything like Future Jo’s, it was probably the BBC World Service.
Never mind that, he told himself. Think about how you’re going to explain yourself.
The air in the bus was damp and smelt of wet wool and people’s boots, and the window next to his seat was nearly opaque with rain and greasy fingerprints. He rested his head against it and considered his situation as the bus jolted along. He had to get Jo to stand still and listen to him for long enough to tell his story, and he had to do it without frightening her needlessly. He had a few photos on his phone of the two of them together, including one from her disastrous fortieth birthday party, that might serve as evidence, but he wasn’t certain she’d believe they were real. Until a few hours ago, would he have believed it if a strange person had turned up and wanted to show him photos of his forty-year-old self? Like fuck he would have.
As the bus came to a halt under a looming horse chestnut tree, Jo stood up, gathered her things and disembarked along with a group of other passengers. Danny followed her out into the cold--pleasantly bracing after the warm soupy atmosphere inside the bus--and got his first look at St Margaret’s Catholic High School for Girls. It was a tall, sprawling building with a red brick façade, rows of arched white windows, and a large stone relief of the saint herself standing guard over the front doors. The black wrought-iron gates were open to admit a stream of uniformed girls that was rapidly diminishing to a trickle. At the top of the steps that led into the school, Danny spotted a terrifying nun who had clearly missed the Vatican II memo about switching to modern dress, watching them go in.
Abruptly, he realised Jo had got a head start on him and scrambled after her. Always a fast walker, she was going at top speed so as not to be late, and he barely managed to catch up with her before she reached the gates.
“Sorry, can I speak to you just for a moment?” He did a sort of awkward sidestep and got in front of her so she’d have to stop or run him over.
“What? No.” Jo tried to dodge round him. “I’ve got to go in. Why are you following me? We don’t have some sort of relationship just because I told you when the bus was coming, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I know, and I’m not following you. Well, I am, but not like that. I’m not doing it to annoy you. I need to talk to you about something important.”
“What can you possibly have to talk to me about? I don’t even know you.”
“You do, though,” Danny said, feeling wretched. He hadn’t expected it to be upsetting for Jo not to recognise him, but it was.
“No, I really, really don’t.”
“You do. I can explain, Jo, if you just–”
“How do you know my name?” Now she was starting to look frightened, which was the thing he’d been hoping to avoid. Her hand clenched round the grip of her umbrella as if she thought she might have to hit him with it. “You’re not some sort of stalker, are you?
“No! God, no. I’m not going to break into your house and boil a bunny or anything like that.”
“Boil a—”
“You know, like in Fatal Attraction .” Jo was shaking her head, looking mildly nauseated. “It’s a film. Erm, you probably haven’t seen it yet.”
Because it won’t be released for another two years, he thought . Well done, Daniel.
“Look, I’m doing this all wrong,” he said aloud. “Let’s start over. My name’s Danny Foster, and I promise I’m not a stalker or a nutter. I’m just–I’m having a very strange day.”
“Oh, are you? Because I’m beginning to think I’m having one as well.” She gave him a pointed look, and he squirmed.
“I know. It’s all my fault and I’m sorry, but if you could just give me five minutes. That’s all I’m asking for. We don’t have to go off alone together; we can just stand here and talk if you like.”
Jo let out a sharp, disbelieving laugh that reminded him more of her future self than anything she’d said or done so far. “You must be joking. This place is absolutely crawling with nuns. If they see a strange man talking to one of us near the school, they’ll kill you first and phone the police after, and they’ll probably be right to.”
Danny ran his hands through his wet hair in frustration. “All right, I get that, but isn’t there someplace else public where we could go? Someplace where you’d feel safe talking? I swear that’s all I want to do.”
“Yes, you said.” Jo bit her lip and glanced over her shoulder at the last stragglers disappearing inside the school’s main entrance. “Shit. Look, I really do have to go, but…you don’t actually look like a murderer, and you’re just odd enough for me to want to know what you think you need to tell me so badly. I’m busy all day, but can you come back at four?”
“Yes,” Danny said, relieved. “I’ll be here—”
“No, no, not here. There’s a café in the next road over. Meet me there.”
“Of course, whatever you like. Thanks very much.”
“Don’t thank me yet.” She readjusted the strap of her bag on her shoulder. “I’ll wait for ten minutes and that’s all, so don’t be late. And don’t do anything weird, or I’ll have the nuns after you, and believe me, you’ll wish it were only the police.”
“I won’t.”
“We’ll see about that,” Jo said forbiddingly, and departed through the gate, leaving Danny alone on the pavement.