The Yoghurt Plot (6 page)

I cram two more spoonfuls into my mouth, and two more into Lorna's – the large woman is starting to fade.

Another spoon, and another, and another, and the kitchen fades, the woman's gone. So's the kitchen.

I look down at my feet.

Shingle.

‘What?' says Lorna, looking around. ‘Oh my days! What's happened?'

There's nothing. We're on shingle, but it's not by the sea. The sea's miles out there with the remains of the pier. The pier that actually looks more complete than anywhere else here. The beach seems to have come right inland. All there is in the landscape is a huge bank of stones, some patches of grass, reeds, lumps of rusty concrete, a bin and a sign sticking out of the ground.

No houses, no estate, no nothing.

There's the fridge of course. Standing there, all on its own, no electricity – no chance of electricity, humming. Actually, growling.

‘Is this now,' asks Lorna, turning towards me, ‘or have we ended up in, like, 2050? You know, after the end of television and stuff.'

I look around for anything that's going to tell us when we are. Inland, sand dunes stretch away towards a line of pylons, and in the distance are storm clouds.

There's nothing of any use at all. I wander over to the sign.

‘
Approximate site of the town of Shabbiton. Here, during the heavy rainstorms of the summer of 1969, a small but vital land drain was blocked by litter, undermining the subsoil and destroying the small town. One of the few remaining features of the town is the pier, and at low tide the streets are still visible under the sand. 6,600 people lost their homes
.'

I can't actually speak.

‘But that's impossible,' says Lorna, taking one of the gerbils out of her pocket. ‘I mean, where's it gone? Where are all the bricks? All the stuff?' She looks around frantically. ‘Where's the shop?'

I glance in the direction of the shop. It's not there. Nothing's there.

Nothing's been there for forty-five years. The sea's slowly taken over the land, piling stones and sand on what was left.

She goes over to read the sign again. ‘Oh no,' she says eventually. ‘It was that carrier bag, wasn't it? I shouldn't have let it go.'

I nod. I'm so cross with her I can hardly think. First her gerbils, then theft and now her litter – does she have no understanding of time and consequence? For a few minutes I pace up and down the shingle, grinding it under my shoes. And then I begin to wonder where my family would be. If they don't live in Shabbiton, where would they have ended up? And if I did find them, do I already exist? How would my parents react to having two Buggs? Would I become twins? Which head would I occupy, or would I flit from one head to the other – or would I actually just melt into myself? I turn back to the fridge. It looks smug, really smug, like it's taught us a lesson. I open the door. It's completely empty, except for two foil-topped yoghurts in glass pots.

‘I think,' I say, ‘that the fridge is giving us another chance.'

Once again we arrive in the painted kitchen and it's beginning to feel familiar. A millisecond before the kitchen comes into focus I see myself and Lorna, occupying the same space. There is nothing to do but throw ourselves under the table. We watch ourselves leap out through the door, and also watch me and Dilan examine the kitchen. When we've left, we wait for the other Lorna to arrive, examine the kitchen and run out of the back door. I'm terrified that the huge woman will appear, but equally I don't want to rush into any impossible encounters with ourselves. So we watch the clock crawl around to six o'clock before we follow down the path, keeping out of sight and ducking in and out of the hedgerows.

‘What are we going to do?' says Lorna. ‘What's the plan?'

I look over to her. She's still got the faintest trace of blood under her nose. That was today. In the now. But we've been going back and forth for hours, even though it still looks as if it's six o'clock. I'm starting to get tired, and irritable, and once we've solved the drain thing
I AM NOT LETTING HER TIME-TRAVEL AGAIN
.

I am quite sure of that.

In fact, I'm not letting her or her stupid gerbils anywhere near me. Ever.

‘We,' I say, ‘are going to wait for the bag to blow over the sea wall. We are going to be on the beach. We are going to follow it, to the land drain, and you are going to stick your hands into the drain and take it out. Understood?'

Lorna twists her face as if she wants to object, but I refuse to smile, or even meet her eye, so she sighs and shuffles along the track into town. We're back in the fields with the bees and the butterflies, and, if it wasn't for the stupid carrier bag, I'd like nothing better than to lie on the grass and watch beetles climbing flower stalks. The child runs past us, flying a kite, her mother behind, pushing an enormous pram with a huge parasol on the top.

The woman stares. She doesn't smile. ‘Haven't I—' she says.

‘Evening!' I yell, walking a little faster. ‘But  … ' she calls after me.

‘Bye,' says Lorna, kicking a clod of sand from her trainers. Sand from an alternative 2014. Sand that couldn't possibly be there. I let my mind wander into the ramifications of the time crimes we've committed in the last hour or so – or the last forty-five years or so.

Instead of following the path through to the shop, we run straight down towards the sea. This way we can't possibly run into ourselves, although other people have obviously spotted us, or one set of us. I can tell from the strange looks we get. We don't catch sight of ourselves, but I have to keep reminding myself that we could. And that I need to watch out for it.

We don't go as far as the pier. Instead we clamber over the sea wall and drop onto a mat of damp hard sand. The concrete wall runs along the top of the beach. Underneath it, a long metal pipe heads out to sea.

‘Is that it?' asks Lorna. ‘It doesn't seem to have a way in. I'll go down the end and see.' She charges off across the beach, looking for an opening into the pipe.

Actually I haven't a clue where the land drain is, but I'm not going to tell Lorna that. I'm too furious with her, and I suspect that the big metal pipe next to us is sewage, and no matter what happens to Shabbiton, I'm not tangling with it.

Lorna capers back; she's picked up some seaweed and is popping the bubbles.

‘Put it down,' I say.

‘What – seaweed? How can that affect anything?'

‘Just stop. Don't touch.'

‘O–K.' A few drops of rain spot onto the rocks of the beach. She stands and looks up at the clouds. I look up too. Forty-four-year-old clouds, gathering into a grey stormy mass over the sea.

‘Beautiful, aren't they?' she says to one of the gerbils. It looks unimpressed and crawls back into the darkness of her hand.

I turn away and watch the wall. Any minute now, the bag should come over the top.

One, two, three, four
 … 

I assume it will. I assume that we're there somewhere on the other side of the wall losing it, or maybe it'll just pop out of the air. Or maybe we did things differently this time.

Except we couldn't have done.

It has to be coming.

Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one
 … 

Or maybe this time someone else got it.

Thirty-two, thirty-three
 … 

The blue carrier bag floats high over the wall, as if taking off on a longer, higher flight.

‘Oh no, Bugg! It's too high,' says Lorna, galloping sideways along the beach flapping her arms in the air as if the bag might just give up and land on her.

‘It doesn't matter, we just have to see where it ends up.' I say, breaking into a trot.

The bag takes a swing to the right and scuttles along the sea wall, threading its way around the rotting wooden seaweed posts poking out of the sand, moving slightly too fast and too erratically for us to catch it. Finally, just as I'm beginning to wonder if we shouldn't go back in time again and stop Lorna actually bringing the wretched bag, it drops, windless, to lie on the sand.

We race towards it, panting over the shingle, arms outstretched, and as we nearly reach it, it whisks straight into the air like a helicopter and swoops over the wall behind.

‘
No!
' shouts Lorna, clambering onto a boulder that butts onto the sea wall and attempting to scramble over. ‘Come back here!'

I race back towards a set of steps, charge up them and swing out onto the promenade. The bag's lying in the middle of the road, like it's been run over, but I know if I race up to it, it'll just fill with invisible air and skip over the wall again. It's as if it's alive.

I stroll towards it, not exactly looking at it. It rustles over the tarmac, slowly gaining speed before a car trundles past, whipping it into the air again and taking it down a side street. Once again I break into a trot. Whatever happens, I don't want to lose sight of it. The bag jumps and swoops, vanishing under a shiny car. The car's parked right next to the last in a row of cottages, and the front window is open, I can hear voices from inside. I drop down to my knees and crawl towards the front wheel of the car. The ground is dry, so apart from the gravelly bits digging into my knees, it isn't too unpleasant. When I reach the car, I can see that the bag is on the far side, right by a rainwater gully; a little more wind and it might go straight in, but any rain and it would be dragged down instantly. I think about running back and finding a long stick or something, but the bag might just slip down the hole while I was away. Instead, I lie flat on my stomach and drag myself under the car.

‘But there's no way they'll ever let you do that by the pier,' says a woman's voice. ‘It's for kiddies and ice creams and that, not cars.'

‘Of course, love, but we'll never get anywhere if we can't expand. It's hopeless trying to sell all the cars from the garage out here, and those new Minis are  … ' A car passes so that I can't quite hear. ‘We need something to do them credit. We could use your sister's place out there in the fields. Or the plot on the seafront. Would make a lovely forecourt.'

I reach my hand towards the plastic bag and close my fingers. It sags in my hand, as if it's finally giving up.

‘You'll never get either. Madge wouldn't agree. She loves that house. And the seafront? Not in a month of Sundays. You'd need the luck of the devil to have that happen. More tea, Ed?' says the woman's voice. ‘George?'

‘Thanks, Mum,' a boy replies.

I shuffle backwards, grazing my elbows on the tarmac. But I'm not really aware of that. I'm thinking about all the things I've heard back here in the past. This is the same father and son talking. The ones that I saw in 1970-something, polishing cars in the shiny new showroom. In that reality, the pier burned down. In this one, where we caught the gerbils, the pier shouldn't burn down. But it did, because Granddad said it did and it's not there in 2014.

So why did it burn down the second time?

‘Bugg?' It's Lorna. She's standing there, holding one of her gerbils, looking really worried. ‘Did you get it?'

I hold the bag out past the car wheel and her face creases into a smile. ‘Oh, what a relief! Mum would have killed me if I'd lost the shop.'

‘Lorna, if you'd lost the shop, she'd never have known it existed in the first place. She'd have grown up somewhere else, with another shop.'

‘What?'

I sigh. Some people don't understand the very simplest principals of time travel.

The man is back in the garden, planting the tree which means that the big apron woman will be back in the kitchen, ready to shout at us. We stop at the garden gate.

‘Perhaps we should try a different way?' suggests Lorna, stuffing the gerbils deep inside her pockets.

‘Like what?' I ask, but I'm too late to have doubts, because Lorna swings in through the gate.

‘S'cuse me, any chance of a glass of water?'

The man straightens up, putting his hand on his lower back as if to push the bottom of his spine into place. ‘Ask the missus; she's in there.'

‘Here?' asks Lorna, eyes wide, her hand on the kitchen door handle.

The man nods and drives his spade into the ground.

Lorna opens the door and smiles sweetly. ‘Hello,' she calls. I lurk behind, ready to run, although where I'd run I can't imagine.

‘Yes?' Big apron woman fills the doorway.

‘Could we please have a glass of water?'

The woman stares hard at Lorna. ‘Do I know you? Were you  …  ?' but she shakes her head, as if dismissing the thought.

I peer past the woman to the clock over the doorway. Seven thirty-five. We're later than we were last time, she's already met us, but looking at her face she's confused, rather than angry. Which of course you would be if you had two children who appeared and broke into your fridge before disappearing into thin air. And it happened more than once. In fact, from what she said before, several times.

‘Water?' says Lorna, stepping right into the kitchen, so that I can stand behind her, my back to the fridge.

The fridge purrs. It lets out a long low rumble.

‘Oh yes.' The woman turns her back and reaches up into a painted cupboard for two rounded glasses. ‘Water.'

Lorna nudges me, but she doesn't need to. I whip round, yank open the door to the fridge and grab two modern-looking yoghurts. There are no spoons, so I pass one put to Lorna and rip back the lid of my own before tipping the contents down my throat. I gaze out of the window towards the pier as the surroundings fade. It's still there as we go, flag fluttering in the breeze, but by the time everything stops changing, like the blue and white lino on the floor, it's gone – it's burned down.