Archive of Our Own

Things Written in Martin Blackwood’s Floppy Red Notebook

Location: Somewhere Else

Differences:

• There’s an extra month???? It’s really weird. It goes January, February, March, April, FELICITAS, May etc. There’s also jiggery-pokery with how long the months are to get that one in so the rhyme doesn’t work anymore. Mum’s birthday doesn’t exist here (January 31^st), which is also weird. Not sure when to raise a glass and fondly reminisce about the annual shunning of my lovingly crafted cake. I’ll pick a day. July is spelt with an ‘ie’ as well, so it’s Julie, as in Waters (who exists!) but it’s pronounced July. Looked it up and Felicitas is the Roman goddess of luck. I’ll wait and see if she’s any good before deciding if she’s worth the trade off-of not knowing how a calendar works anymore.

• Cars never really took off as a thing. Which is nice! A few people have them, but it seems to be sort of the equivalent of owning a boat in the old world. Their posh friends think it’s very impressive and people outside their posh circle think it’s a bit of a daft, more money than sense thing. Bikes and motorbikes are big here, and trains are way more reliable. They do magical things like turn up on time. Clock time is the same, by the way, the month thing hasn’t affected that. Kind of feel like it should have??? Can’t be bothered to figure it out. Will have to wait for the seasons to change to see if I notice any daylight weirdness. But yes! Lots of trains, lots of bikes, barely any cars.

• Sometimes I wake up and I’m picking a fight before I’ve even woken up properly. Sometimes Jon doesn’t remember why.

• Important one: crisp packet colours. Salt and vinegar: blue (correct). Cheese and onion: green (correct). Ready salted: PURPLE??? (bad bad bad baaaaad). Roast chicken: red (eh). Smoky bacon: black (can’t remember if that’s the same, don’t care, taste like charcoal). Prawn cocktail: doesn’t exist (fair – what even was that??). Also, tomato is big as a normal flavour, not a gimmicky one, although obviously tastes nothing like tomato. I have no way of checking this but I *think* you get slightly more in a packet?? Should have paid more attention to gram sizes or whatever in the old world. Note to self: if ever find interdimensional portal, do not push luck but shout if anyone minds chucking a pack of Walkers through.

• Music: Beatles yes. Bowie yes. ABBA yes, BUT, brace yourself, THEY LOST EUROVISION. Shat the bed during the live final, but shat the bed so much that it became a bit of a cultural moment (Agnetha’s hat fell off) and they ended up just as famous. Probably even more famous, so famous that an “Agnetha’s Hat” moment is a saying for when you make a tit of yourself but it works out okay. Hope it will be a useful one for me. Queen yes but no Deacon so no Another One Bites the Dust or Under Pressure. Bassist is a guy called Mike, not as good. No Smiths, no Nirvana, Fleetwood Mac only did two albums and neither of them are Rumours. Banjos don’t exist so Kermit plays the ukelele. Note to self: if run out of money, invent banjo.

• Jon doesn’t like it when things work properly anymore. When things were comparatively normal (ha) in the archives, I’d always walk in on him balancing precariously on chairs to wiggle flickering lightbulbs, or on his hands and knees poking cupboards with a screwdriver, or with his head in the fridge scowling at the dial. I even caught him mid-plunge once, shirt rolled up to his elbows, and Jesus Martin, how did that GROW your crush not shrink it?? He was weirdly good at stuff like that and yeah, okay, I found it quite hot. I’m alright with getting stuff to work, (have to be when calling an expensive plumber isn’t an option, woe is, woe is, shut up, I’m allowed to woe is to myself) but I’m no handyman. Nothing wrong with kicking a washing machine until it springs to life, I think, but he seemed to have a knack for working out how stuff connects up. I’m not going to think too hard on that. About whether it’s a knack or something he was He couldn’t stand anything to be in a state other than how it was meant to be. ‘Maximal efficiency’, *wags Jon-like finger with Jon-like scowl*. That’s why the archives drove him so mad. Well, that and the… madness. And the evil. And the things trying to kill everyone.

He’s not like that anymore. He picks at the seams of his clothes until they unravel and fall apart. We’ve still got these chipped plates from the charity shop from when we first got here and he won’t eat off anything else. I catch him occasionally, in the bathroom. The tap drips in there, and sometimes, for ages, he just stares at it.

It’s probably nothing. He probably just got used to roughing it. I don’t know how he lived (‘lived’) in those last few months in the archives, and that’s not even to mention the apocalypse pilgrimage. Stuff hardly worked beautifully there, did it?

But it’s the insistence on using broken stuff that I can’t get out of my mind. There’s an option now, like – we have plates! We have new plates that came out of a box. There’s no cracks in them. They’ve got bees on them!

I might be a bit scared that… I don’t know. It’s a way of slipping back into survival mode? Playing at scarcity, and necessity because he can’t get his head round it not being like that anymore. I don’t know. Probably not. Not like he could fix the tap right now anyway.

Besides, we’re concentrating on fixing other stuff.

• I will. I will check, but it’s too early now. Jon hasn’t brought it up, and with his memory a bit all over the place (but getting better! Slowly, slowly getting so much better) I don’t want to send any shockwaves. And either answer would be shockwaves, wouldn’t it? So… for now, the answer is I don’t know. I don’t know if this world has a Sasha James or a Timothy Stoker or a Basira Hussain or an Alice Tonner or a Melanie King or a Georgie Baker or an Elias Bouchard or a Jonah Magnus.

And honestly, I don’t know what I want.

• There are natural blue roses?? WEIRD.

• I’m a murderer.

• Jon has a pacemaker.

• Sometimes I really, actually hate him.

• I wake up every morning and there’s a miracle snoring into my chest.

That’s not too much, is it? I mean – it is literally a miracle, he came back from the dead.

Actually, no, it isn’t too much. It’s nowhere near enough. Because it’s a miracle made up of a million miracles, and a million moments, and a million things that should have and did go wrong. And I can be as reverent as I want about the whole thing, put the insufficiency down to the fact that it’s too big picture, too metaphysical, too cosmic to apply to this new messy little life where Kermit plays the ukelele.

That isn’t it.

We’ve invented a new type of miracle, a patchwork one, made up of terror, and grief, and terrible, terrible choices.

And I like to think that our patchwork miracle, is no lesser a miracle for it.

• Apples are bigger and sweeter.

• Birds sing louder and longer.

• Grass is softer and greener.

• There is so much hope.