I grew up in a house full of paperwork. My bedroom had a shifting Aoor of invoices and parking ticket disputes, some of them older than me. There was documentation for long-canceled magazine subscriptions, savings funds since drained, school reports full of pleasures to have in class. My mother, a British citizen, had a Cambodian passport wedged in the bottom of a drawer. The picture in it showed a young woman with black hair cut in a beautiful helmet. I never knew this woman, though my mother thought of her with pity and a little scorn. There were things the young woman forgot to do, or didn’t think were necessary, and my mother had to live with her mistakes for the rest of her life.
My family lived inside proof of ourselves like crabs in shells. It could be suPocating—literally: the dust, the dry rustle in the summer heat. But no one was going to tell us what we weren’t entitled to or had failed to 1le. Not with duplicates, “your supervisor in copy.”
Growing up in a house like that made me obsessive about archiving. It made me an excellent civil servant and my sister a meticulous copy editor. I adored the world in a reducible format. There wasn’t a man so special that he might not one day 1nd himself in a footnote or one of my green hanging 1les. With my hand over the archives, I had control over the system. It didn’t matter that it was only the 1ling system. It was control, and that was what I wanted.
It’s surprising, then, that I allowed Graham’s drawing of the projection device to enter my 1les as a joke, like a coin minted 70 BC. I thought it was a form of juvenilia, drawn in his earliest years as a modern man, something to remind him of on a signi1cant anniversary of his arrival here; and not, as it would turn out to be, a red letter from another era.
By the start of that summer, Graham was practically a native of the era. He wore button-ups and was clean-shaven to his cheekbones. He had a preferred washing-machine cycle. Most mornings he rose—hours before me—and went for a run. He would sometimes wake me up with a juicy smoker’s wheeze on his return to the house. He started giving me custody of his cigarettes and enforced a predinner smoking ban.
There were others times when it felt as if Graham deliberately disliked the twenty-1rst century, as if assimilation was a form of treachery to his past. I was prickly and defensive about this; I could not look at why directly. I heard the way I spoke to him about it: adjustment, reasonable, citizen, responsibility, values. He blew a lot of pensive cigarette smoke at me.
I couldn’t make him interested in 1lms. He would often fall asleep if I showed him something after dinner; he could sleep through The Blues Brothers as easily as he could The Third Man. Later, I learned his lack of interest in cinema was as baAing to the other expats as it was to me. They all regarded it as my era’s greatest artistic achievement. (Even later than this, Sixteen-sixty-1ve— Margaret Kemble—would persuade him to watch 1917 with her, and he would be shocked into wakefulness. “Poor Arthur,” he would tell me. “I had no idea.”) He was, however, enamored of the concept of endless music, disseminated into any room. It was how he started to learn to type, carefully pecking in the names of symphonies and taking a full minute to 1nd the letter “M.” He said that, in his own time, he had hunted and drilled and drawn up watches to a fragmented gurgle of internal music, like Joan of Arc with a Walkman; now, at
last, he could play the music he had always half remembered.
He listened to a lot of Bach, which I enjoyed, and Mozart, which I tolerated. He liked Tchaikovsky, didn’t mind Elgar, was intrigued by Vaughan Williams and Purcell, but couldn’t stand Stravinsky. Having failed with 1lm, I tried pop music. I tested some early rock ’n’ roll on him, and he shrugged; I experimented with eighties power ballads, and he was exasperatingly polite about it. My attempts to interest him in non-orchestral music fell on deaf ears until he suddenly, inexplicably, independently developed a liking for Motown.
Once a week, the expats were examined for empathy and the bridges were examined for honesty—or so the joke ran. Another hypothesis about time-travel was that it might reduce a person’s capacity to feel compassion. Forcibly removed to a new epoch, meeting all places and people therein as foreign, would lead the expats to defensively “other” the people around them; worse still, these “others” could not be psychologically processed because the expat hadn’t experienced a normative passing of historical time. The empathy theory drew on sleep science. When we sleep, we enter the hadal valley of REM, and through our dreams we process the day’s events. But people with disrupted, nonlinear sleep cycles—for example, people suPering from PTSD, whose excessively high levels of noradrenaline blocked REM-level dreams—couldn’t enter deep sleep to process their memories and chemically defang them, so their recollections of unprocessed violence and fear leaked into their waking world. Just as the right continuous conditions were required to experience good sleep, the right continuous conditions were required to experience temporal actuality with the requisite level of empathy.
Thus, on a weekly basis, the expats were subjected to tests designed to trigger empathy or disgust, and scrutinized. The 1rst tests were conducted in the laboratory booths, but they resembled the Ministry hospital wards so strongly that the expats had tremendous anxiety reactions and it was difficult to get serviceable data from them. Graham, for example, kept asking to be excused for a smoke—heart rate elevated—and struggled to focus on the tests—eyes moving rapidly. I once found him the sole occupant of the 1fth-Aoor smoking area (a pigeon-shit-encrusted balcony), methodically shredding a 1lter of a 1nished cigarette. I watched him for a while, interested in the way that only his 1ngers moved. Most people ripple with surplus motion unless they are concentrating, but Graham only ever moved the parts of him that he wanted to move.
In the end, we converted one of the wood-paneled rooms in the Ministry into a “library” where the tests would be conducted. The Secretary for Expatriation personally paid for the addition of dozens of leather-bound volumes of Enlightenment-era science and travel to the shelves. One of the administrators, who had a master’s degree in art history, bought some framed Canaletto prints
on the tech supply budget, which caused a brief fracas, but the Secretary liked those too, so it got signed oP.
After that, the “empathy exams” returned more useful results—though there were other issues. A controversial test used pictures of soldiers from the First World War, caved and razed by new weapons. The disruption was terrible. Nineteen-sixteen had to be sedated. The other expats were horri1ed too. Even Sixteen-forty-1ve and Graham, who had fought in large-scale battles, were laid out by the ultramodern scope of the harm. They began to resist the exams psychologically, spoiling our hard-won data. It was agreed that we’d delay introducing them to Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and the Twin Towers. Control promised to provide a timeline for the revelations, but it hadn’t materialized.
As to the bridge “honesty exams,” these were like something out of a 1960s Cold War spy thriller. It involved a polygraph and everything. Operators squished on electroencephalograms and asked us about how we were feeling. Unlike the Ministry-funded therapy, these sessions were mandatory. Our progress was charted against an enormous 1le sustained by Control—although where they came up with their benchmarks was anyone’s guess.
Adela was always present at the honesty exams, often intervening in them. I got the impression that she was listening to oPstage prompts that only she could hear, being the only one among us who was aware she was on a stage, and was trying to chivvy us along the right course of action.
One day she asked me, “How would you describe your work?” “Meaningful,” I said promptly. (This was a regular question.) “Anything else?”
“Challenging. Unusual.” “Anything else?”
“Uh. Sometimes I feel like I’m a bit in the dark? Like. What are we going to do with the time-door if it works?”
“Would you say that you found your work erotic?” asked Adela.
The operator sucked his teeth and made some rapid notes about whatever my readings had just done. I don’t think he expected the question any more than I did. I visualized sinking backward into black mud.
“No,” I said, very placidly.
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t know, ma’am, am I?”
Adela smiled with about a third of her mouth. Her face had changed again. She looked pinched and hungry, and hauntingly as if her skin was held in place by a bulldog clip at the back of her skull.
“No. You’re not,” she said. “I don’t need to look at your readings to check that.”
“I suppose it depends on what you mean by ‘erotic.’”
“No. It doesn’t. What do you think of Commander Gore?” “I think he’s an interesting man.”
Adela looked at my readings and increased the percentage of her smile. “That will do. Unhook her, Aaron.”
Not all of my job was this confrontational. Going through Graham’s pro1ciencies with Quentin was fun. Today my overgrown son told a man on an e- scooter he was riding a coward’s vehicle. Today my overgrown son tore off his headphones and gave me a blow-by-blow account of the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb because he’d been listening to a podcast about ancient Egypt. Today my overgrown son put metal in the microwave, deliberately, even though I had told him not to do that, because he wanted to see what would happen. We’d sit there trying to decide if his actions demonstrated alienation or acclimatization. Often I thought that they demonstrated that he was Graham Gore. I began to think of him as his own benchmark, which was dangerous. Adela had spotted something in me that I hadn’t, not yet, and if I’d been less charmed by my own levity, then I might have been moved to wonder why she wasn’t trying to stop me.
I gave Quentin Graham’s drawing at one of our regular meetings. I thought that he would 1nd it as charming as I had.
“What do you reckon he actually saw?” I said. “Game console? Stroboscope? My money’s on a handheld umbrella that opened fast enough to startle him, by the way.”
But Quentin gawked at the drawing—his complexion growing fungal—then crumpled it in his 1st and shoved it up his sleeve. He smacked at his desktop keyboard until, on the other end of the office, the belligerent laser printer started up. He pulled me over to it.
“Why are you printing the Wikipedia page for”—I craned my head—“the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event?”
“Because this printer is noisy,” hissed Quentin, “and I’m fairly sure all the offices are bugged.”
I smiled at him. “Are you sure, Quentin?”
The printer hummed itself into silence. Quentin’s mouth writhed about under his nose. “Am I sure about what?” he said, with strained lightness.
Far from wondering if I should have looked at the sketch more carefully, I thought about the semaphore Aags of weakness visible in the facial muscles. Contractually, we could not be signed oP from the time-travel project; we could only, mysteriously, be “reassigned” by Control. I’ve seen people burn out—not with drama and de1ance but with the damp blue despair of something being cooked oP for disposal—and I’ve seen how such a 1re spreads to others if it isn’t contained. I patted Quentin on the shoulder, and told him to keep the drawing if he liked.
Graham continued to acclimatize to the concept of me. “You seem very busy,” he might say, almost shyly, watching me rattle at the laptop. Or: “That looks complicated,” and sound both teasing and wistful. He would nearly always follow up with a story that began, “When I was sailing with Captain Ringsabell, on the HMS Youshouldhaveheardofthis.” I don’t think he was boasting but rather trying to 1nd a way to relate to me, a permutation of womanhood rendered sexless by authority. I came to understand that this bothered me, and I felt embarrassed about that, as if I’d been caught complaining that men on the street had stopped catcalling.
The Ministry provided the house we lived in, and we didn’t pay rent or bills. I 1nally had a savings account that looked like it might withstand a life emergency rather than crumple at a dentistry bill. I was in the economic bracket my parents had hoped I might enter, and having been brought up so thriftily among so many thirty-day-guarantee receipts, I had no idea what to do with the cash. So I bought a hand-sewn bag in the shape of a hen. It was the sort of purchase that
would force him to recognize my girlishness, which I was, by this time, desperate for him to acknowledge.
I showed him the bag, distracting him from his seventh or eighth reread of
Rogue Male.
“Look. Chicken bag.”
“I see that even in the future, women remain fascinated by impractical accessories.”
“It’s not impractical. It’s a bag.”
“Nothing will 1t inside it. I do not think it could even carry this book.” “I can put a coin purse in it. See.”
I reached inside the hen and pulled out the coin purse that came with it. It was in the shape of a small yellow chick. He smiled.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “I think chicken bag is very good.”
What to do with money? Social media was full of stories of mothers keeping sewing kits in biscuit tins and 1lling childhoods with biscuit-related working- class/immigrant malaise. I’d laughed at all of them, of course, because they were aimed at people like me. Making do ceases to be habitual and becomes a matter of conscience. My mother had been a cleaner, I’d told Quentin, and I’d never had a cleaner until Graham refused to mop and I had to ask Quentin for one, because my own mother, my own mother—! What was I handwringing about? Sorrow, I suppose, that my parents hadn’t had easier lives. I kept thinking: I should save. I expected that it could all be taken from me. But wasn’t I safe? Wasn’t I Ministry?
It didn’t take us long to dash up against another issue with acclimatization, which was that the expats didn’t make sense to each other either. Nineteen- sixteen was as incomprehensible to Sixteen-forty-1ve as I was. Everyone was paddling in their own era-locked pool of loneliness.
Ed—Seventeen-ninety-three’s bridge—had a romantic solution: once or twice a week, the expats should all cook and eat together, temporarily commandeering one of the canteens for the purpose. This would encourage
bonding. He cited sociological essays about immigrant community restaurants, oral traditions and the ancient banquet, the genesis of Homo sapiens as hunter- gatherers, the creation of the supper club. He sent an email with so many attachments that I immediately deleted it and emailed Quentin for the highlights.
People like to eat dinners that are nice, often together, Quentin wrote back.
I went along to one of the earliest dinners, chicken bag slung over my shoulder. Bridges tended not to eat at the Ministry canteen with administrative staP and the operators on the Wellness team—the office-based employees—and the decorous hostility with which the paper pushers met me was adorable. When I got to the kitchen itself, the 1rst thing I saw was Graham leaning down to light a cigarette on the gas ring, his curls dangerously close to the hob. We’d had to disable smoke detectors in every Ministry room that Graham used. If he couldn’t have a cigarette, he’d throw whatever experiment he was strapped into.
“Forty-seven! Mark your thatch! Or are you that frantic for martyrdom at the pyre?”
Graham straightened up, cigarette between his lips, and beamed.
Directly in the light of his smile was a small woman, barely 1ve foot, perhaps twenty-seven years old, and so beautiful that light seemed to obey unique physics around her body. She had strawberry-blond hair and was wearing an apron that read KISS THE COOK.
I wedged myself into his sightline and he brightened further.
“Oh! A little cat has come in for her supper. Have you met Margaret Kemble?
Sixty-1ve, this is my bridge.”
I turned. Sixteen-sixty-1ve—Margaret Kemble—gave me a broad grin.
“Good e’en. This clodpoll lodges with you? I am sorry for your trouble. A drink?”
I took a few seconds to parse her accent—unplaceable, because it had been extinct for a couple of centuries. “Er,” I said, “yes, please—”
“She’ll get excitable about the garnish,” said Graham. “It will be like drinking a salad.”
“Sauce! I’ll boil your ears. Take that devil’s 1nger out of your mouth and 1nd some parsley.”
“Isn’t she charming?” said Graham, ashing into a small bowl and earning more archaic insults. (“Noddy! Heron-faced fool!”) He’d gone rose pink. It struck me that he might be Airting with Margaret, in a yank-the-ponytail sort of way. The realization came on like indigestion. I stepped between them again.
“Are you helping?” I asked him.
“Yes,” said Graham, at the same time Margaret thundered, “No.”
She put a glass down in front of me—ice, water, an oily suggestion of cordial, and, sure enough, some fussy edible garnishes. I blinked at it and then at Margaret, who smiled.
“I wit the miracle of fresh water is commonplace for you,” she said, at a normal volume. “But I’ve got up this vessel in a holy-day habit, as merits its purity. ’Tis a miracle to me.”
“Oh, of c-course,” I stuttered. “Well, really it’s a miracle for us too. The UN reckon we’re three years away from the 1rst large-scale water war. Er, has ‘UN’ been explained to you? Sorry. It looks very nice.”
Margaret patted my hand with hers. She had small, pretty hands. I’d never thought of hands as being pretty before. My brain was crunching with the ePort of accommodating the variegated categories of Margaret’s attractiveness, which I had begun to block from Graham with my shoulders.
“Drink your tap juice,” she said kindly. Behind me, Graham laughed.
“You’ll make the dinner smell of cigarettes,” I snapped at him.
“Oh, that’s all right. I smoke so many I cannot, in fact, taste anything else.” “I will mash you,” said Margaret. “Bate your breath and fetch me parsley!”
Graham said, “Hm!” and pulled hard on his cigarette. He wandered oP with the expansive air of a man who might pick up some parsley, not because he has been told to but because that might be a jolly thing to do en route to his next footloose and fancy-free destination. I watched him go.
“Do you, er, like cooking?” I asked Margaret.
“No,” said Margaret. She shrugged at my expression. “An’ I forsake this duty,” she said, “we’ll sicken. Forty-seven thinks tobacco is an herb. But womenfolk were cordoned at the stove for centuries. The men mun take lessons.”
“Ah,” I said. “Well. We’re trying.”
“My bridge mislikes such banter withal. But he is a dry old crocodile.” I grinned at her. “Ralph? Yeah, that’s a fair descriptor.”
“From him have I learned much language, but the lessons are mithered and troublesome to hold. What is a ‘feminist killjoy’?”
“Er—”
“Have they a base? Mayhap a uniform? If not, I will design it. Ah, you laugh! But would we not look well in thigh boots and tabards broidered with FEMINIST KILLJOY? It sends a sturdy message.”
She pulled a modern face—crowded with punch line, the sort you see on stand-up comedy specials. I had the sense she’d learned the face and 1gured the Ministry and its employees as an audience, which suggested an instinct for camouAage that I hadn’t expected. I tried to look at her more closely, but her glamour got in the way.
“There is some joy I’d passing love to kill,” Margaret said. “Have you met Lieutenant Cardingham?”
She jerked her chin toward a corner. Graham, a bouquet of parsley wilting in his hand, was talking to a handsome man of thirty or so, not more than 1ve foot 1ve, with striking cheekbones and a trim, tawny beard. His hair was long and wavy. In deference to contemporary fashion, he had pulled it into a bun, but more than any other expat I’d seen, Sixteen-forty-1ve—Thomas Cardingham— looked like he’d time-traveled recently. Whatever Graham was saying to him was tickling his fancy, because he threw his head back and guPawed in a way that stiAed the sound in the room.
“They like each other well,” said Margaret quietly, “but i’faith, he will not speak to me or Mistress Spencer. He called me a stale and Mistress Spencer a natural.”
“That’s bad,” I hazarded. (Later I would look these up in the Ministry online cross-era dictionary and discover “sex worker” and “mentally disabled person.”) “He’s very striking, isn’t he?”
“Aye, as is a poison toadstool.”
The doors of the canteen swung again. I looked up, hoping to see Simellia with Nineteen-sixteen, but was surprised by the sight of the Brigadier.
He hesitated a moment, taking in the uniformed (and armed) operational staP supervising the supper, then nodded stiAy at no one in particular. Despite being out of uniform, he looked oddly formal, as if he was the sole person in serif font. He was a much less convincing spy for Defence than the boy in the pub had been, and I found myself looking for the telltale bulge of a gun in his jacket.
“He looks suspicious,” I said.
“Hungry,” said Margaret. “Discomfortable man! Sometimes he comes with his varlet and they sup together i’th’corner.”
The Brigadier drifted closer. He did look hungry. He looked like I did as a student when I ate nothing but buttered toast and apples. He turned the white of used candlewax when Margaret opened the oven to better squint at her roast potatoes.
“That smells delicious,” he said slowly. “Ah… Sixteen-sixty-1ve? My… colleague Salese will be joining us.”
“’Tis all the same to me, sir,” said Margaret, “though I fear this cod will grow legs and walk afore my ‘colleague’ returns with my parsley.”
The Brigadier looked me up and down, presumably for his report. “Is your chicken all right?” he asked.
I cleared my throat. Chicken bag was slightly agape to accommodate the novel I was reading.
“These hardbacks are too big,” I said. “I could use this one to brain a badger.
Do you… read much, sir?”
“I have some favorites,” said the Brigadier. He had shifted to watching Margaret slap 1llets of cod into a dish of Aour, to astonishingly cloudy ePect. “Elizabeth Bowen. Evelyn Waugh. Graham Greene.”
“The English Catholics?”
He looked back into my face. He looked much too intensely, and I felt his gaze sting my pores. “I suppose they were,” he said. “But I think of them as war writers. It’s my specialism. The war.”
“How… interesting,” I said. “Do you have a favorite? Author. Not war.” “Graham Greene,” he said. “He wrote a superb 1943 novel that I think of
often. Have you read it? The Ministry of Fear.”
We had our hellheight heat wave soon after—four days at a hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit, cooler and shorter than the previous year’s heat wave. Despite that, the chief meteorologist handed down a sentence of three months’ tropical heats, so the summer water ration was reinstated. Graham’s baths dropped to inches.
Because we lived in a government-owned residence, there were also restrictions on how long we could have the air-conditioning on. Graham picked at this, irritating and irritated.
“You’re lucky we’ve got air-con at all.”
“But why would the government punish its own workers?”
“We’re supposed to be aiming for carbon neutrality. We’re way the fuck oP, like way oP the targets, but every little bit helps, apparently.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Look, it’s all government-owned residences. Council houses have an automatic limit on air-con and energy use too.”
“What?” he said again, but in the itchy-voiced way of someone who doesn’t want an answer and is speaking as a distraction from self-Aensing.
Movement was anathema. I slept, mostly, naked and poaching in my sweat. The water ration forced Graham to switch 1nally to thirty-second showers. I didn’t see him for the whole of the heat wave. We left our bedroom doors open with the intention of letting the air circulate—though the air hung like an executed corpse—and said lackluster things about making a salad to each other from our separate cells.
You’ll have lived through heat waves by now, and you’ll know that they make time go utterly Dalí clocks. I was always semiconscious, whereas Graham had spasms of insomnia. I know he often lay on the carpet rather than on his bed, because his voice issued at Aoor level. I could hear him praying at night. That was difficult, like feeling his tongue in my ear. We had patchy conversations at 3:00 a.m., in our overlapping shadows of wakefulness.
“The garden is dead,” he might say, apropos of nothing, after hours of breeze- blocked silence.
“It’ll come round.”
“Can you see the moon?”
“Yes. There’s a reAection on the tarmac. I think the tarmac’s melted.” “It’s a handsome moon tonight.”
“We’ve gone there. To the moon.” “Oh.”
On the last night—the bleeder night, they were called, because of how many people had nosebleeds—the temperature dropped fast and I felt my 1rst breeze in four days. It must have stirred him too. Toward dawn, I heard him say, “My England wasn’t like this.”
I needed to distract him. Any melancholia he exhibited would be my business. In fact it would be my failing.
I had never owned a bike that was not secondhand and coming apart. Brakes were more of an ideological pursuit than a mechanism. So I bought a brand-new bike, cycled it home from the shop, and wheeled it into the kitchen. He was at the table, staring glumly at his cigarettes. A half-1lled spatial reasoning test was open at his elbow—the Ministry’s latest line of expat questioning.
He looked up.
“Oh. A velocipede.”
“Bicycle. Bike for short. They’re good for getting around. Isn’t it lovely?”
“It looks like a torture device. They were not popular in my time. Unhealthy, I think, not something you would like to take over cobblestones. Though we did not have these… what are these called?”
“Tires. They’re made of rubber and 1lled with air, as a cushion. Stop ringing my bell.”
“Will you not be Aattened by a car?”
“Yeah, it’s a risk, especially in this city, but I could be Aattened by a car when I’m just walking around.”
“I have seen people on them. It appears very dangerous.” He said this with interest. He had a gleam in his eye.
I said, “The closest I’ve ever got to Aying is going downhill on a bike when I’m drunk.”
“Very dangerous.” “Want a go?” “Yes.”
I bought a second bike. His legs were longer than mine. I expensed it and let Quentin deal with it.
We walked up to the heath one afternoon. He gripped the handlebars tightly and frowned when the bike wobbled over the pavement.
“It’s as bad as a horse.”
“Can you ride? Horses, I mean?” “With careful interspecies negotiation.” “Ha.”
“If I’d wanted to have some great animal look at me with its teeth and step on my feet, I’d have joined the army and made the acquaintance of some colonels.”
“Ha!”
We strolled up the side of a slight incline. It was a sultry summer day. The sky looked like tissue paper and the heath lay swooning in the sun. Insects made their opinions known.
“Right. So. I know this looks counterintuitive, but you catch your balance and you just… go.”
He got on. One foot scrabbled for the pedal. He fell oP. “Ow.”
“Don’t worry about the pedals for now. Just focus on getting your balance.
We’re at the top of a hill, see? So if you just let the momentum take you…” He got on. He moved about a meter. He fell oP.
“Ow. Will you mount yours and give a demonstration of how this is supposed to work, please?”
I swung my leg over my bike. Since living with Graham, I’d started wearing skirts with hemlines that fell below the knee, so this was a performance.
“Very unladylike.”
“Don’t worry, my womb is 1rmly strapped in.”
He Aushed from his forehead to his throat, but continued, in his usual mild voice, “And would Artemis be so kind as to demonstrate the driving of her team?”
I pushed oP and sailed down the incline. I didn’t even need to pedal. Warm wind tugged my hair. I touched the brakes lightly and grazed to a halt.
Behind me, I heard, “Oh da—dear.” I looked. He’d fallen oP again.
I stumped my bike back round and cycled up toward him. He was lying on his back, one arm thrown across his eyes.
“Hello.”
“I would like to remind you that I am an officer of the Royal Navy.” “You’re on the Aoor is what you are.”
“My captain commended me for gallantry at Aden.” “On the Aoor. With the bugs.”
“You say children learn to ride these things?” “Yep. Little ones.”
He Aung his arm oP his eyes and stared at the sky. “I’m too old for this,” he muttered.
I started to ride around him in slow circles. He propped himself up on his elbows and regarded me balefully.
“You are a little annoying, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m a lot annoying. Watch this—wheeeeee…”
I whizzed back down the hill. Behind me, he said, “Huh!” I counted to 1ve, and I knew that I’d judged right. Nothing made him work harder than the sense that he was getting irritated. He simply refused to be irritated. He would learn to ride a bike so that he could go back to being “a man of great stability of character” as soon as possible.
He whooshed past me with a “Ha!”
“Yes, very good,” I shouted after him. “Now you need to pull on the brakes.
Pull on the brakes! Pull on the—”
A few days later, when the heat had dropped to a mild eighty-four degrees, we cycled to Westminster. I’d suggested an easier, shorter route to a quieter destination, and he’d said, “Why?” so we went to Westminster. He was nearly run over twice, and it put him in a good mood. He was really going native if he knew how to best the London traffic.
“What have you done to the Thames?” he demanded.
“You did it, actually. The Victorians. Cleaned it up and—embanked it, I think the word is? Congratulations for missing the Great Stink of 1858.”
“‘The Victorians.’ You know, Queen Victoria was on the throne for less than a third of my life.”
“Pretty signi1cant third, though. Got your commission. Got that very foxy daguerreotype taken.”
“I assume, by ‘foxy,’ you are referring to the size of my snout in that portrait.” “‘Foxy’ in this context means—eh—‘alluring.’”
“Can you swim?” “What?”
“If I push you in the river, will it be murder?”
We cycled across the river, past the Globe, and had lunch at the Anchor, a pub which had stood on the site since 1616 and was one of the few London establishments familiar to all the expats. It had low ceilings, paned windows in scarlet frames, and coPee-brown wooden beams. I could call it “quintessential” without feeling too ridiculous.
We’d been cohabiting for 1ve months and had never been in a pub together before. I don’t think he’d ever been out with a woman one-on-one in his own time. I’m not certain he had even had women friends. He found the whole thing very daring and mischievous and kept smiling at me as if we were getting away with a visionary practical joke.
“Smugglers used to drink here,” he said. “In my day.” “Tourists drink here now.”
“Am I a tourist?”
“I suppose you are, in a way. How are you 1nding our fair city?”
“Underdressed,” said the man wearing trousers and a shirt in micro-mini- everything weather.
We had battered 1sh ’n’ chips, another grand British tradition that he predated by two decades.
“I don’t know what you mean most of the time when you talk about ‘Victorians,’” he’d once said to me. “I don’t recognize anything ‘Victorian’ about this city. It’s like ancient Rome at its most orgiastic. A war would see you right.” He seemed to be serious.
I started telling him about my mother’s disappointment when she 1rst arrived in England and ordered fried 1sh, expecting pan-fried mud1sh and receiving a lump of oily white cod in a crusted parcel.
“I sympathize,” he murmured.
He used his knife to lift a chip suspiciously. I pushed the ketchup at him. “There was an inn, close to where we set sail,” he said, “called the White Hart,
where Lieutenant Hodgson made himself terribly unwell eating periwinkles.”
“I promise that ketchup won’t give you food poisoning. Probably the winkles had cholera or something, which we don’t have anymore, and certainly not in condiments.”
“Hmm.”
I started tapping at my phone, which was, incidentally, an instrument he hated.
“Put that machine away. We are lunching.”
“I was looking up the White Hart in Greenhithe. It’s called the Sir John Franklin now.”
His cutlery clattered on his plate.
“Ah. Sorry. What a thing for me to bring up at lunch.” “There’s no need to apologize.”
He put down his knife and fork carefully, and stared at his 1sh. “You can’t bring them here. As you brought me.”
“No. I’ve not been involved with the technological part of the project, but I’m told this isn’t possible.”
“Yes. I do not mean to make you repeat yourself.” (He had asked twice before if he could be returned to the same spot.)
“I know you feel… sorry for them.”
“I feel responsible for them. I was the third most senior officer after Sir John passed on. And I was with them for two and a half years. They were decent, deserving men. I wish you could have known them.”
“Yes. So do I.”
“I cannot imagine—what you say happened. That they walked, and starved.
Left the bodies where they fell. I knew those men. They had good souls.”
He passed his hand across his forehead, then shielded his eyes, head bowed. “Sometimes, when I see something that strikes me, I imagine trying to explain
it to the wardroom. Radios, for example. I think they would have been tickled by those. Or feminism. They’d have found that very good fun too.”
“Unusual use of the word ‘fun,’ but I’ll allow it.”
He unfolded his arms to bother his peas with his fork tines. “Your heat wave,” he said.
“It wasn’t my heat wave. It was a multinational responsibility. But yes. The heat wave.”
“You said it was caused by historic… emissions? Pollution?” “Yes. Fossil fuels and so forth.”
“Can you go back and stop it from happening?”
The bridges were due to have a six-month progress meeting with the Vice Secretary, but Ralph called it early.
Adela took bridge meetings in a soundproof room deep in the Ministry’s chest. She always arrived 1rst, and we’d 1nd her sitting at the top of a long table like a mannequin awaiting the gift of demonic possession. But this time I arrived a quarter of an hour early and she wasn’t there.
I trotted down the corridor to the nearest kitchen. Kitchens in restricted areas are farcical, by the way. All paperwork that enters restricted areas has to be accounted for, which means that if people put Post-its on their lunches, e.g, SANDRA’S. DON’T TOUCH, PLEASE, they had to be stamped with UNCLASSIFIED. The project’s operators and administrators couldn’t even start a
Ping-Pong league without getting Secretary approval—which they did, and which the bridges were explicitly not invited to join.
Adela was standing at the sink and anarchically disobeying the water ration by running her wrists under cold water. She looked unwell, but God alone knows how her plastic surgeon thought she was supposed to look.
“Ma’am.”
“Oh. You’re early. How unlike you.”
“Could I ask a question about the time-door?” “No.”
“If the expats survive, are we going to experiment with using time-travel to change history?”
Adela turned oP the water, then ran her thumb along the spigot, her 1nger squeaking on the metal.
“You misunderstand how history works,” she said. “History is not a series of causes and ePects which may be changed like switching trains on a track. It is a narrative agreement about what has happened and what is happening. I am astonished you have worked in the civil service for as long as you have without understanding that.”
“So we’re not going back in time to strangle baby Hitler.” “You’re a stupid girl.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“History is what we need to happen. You talk about changing history, but you’re trying to change the future. It’s an important semantic diPerentiation in this 1eld.”
Adela’s hands were already dry by the time she’d delivered this splendid work of didactics, but she scrunched a paper towel and pulled open the under-sink cupboard to drop it in the bin. As she did, she revealed a frill of paper edges. They were in a distinctive procedural green, with black seals. I recognized them because they were the 1les which the bridges used to deliver their core reports on the expats—the observations that we’d been told were so vital. The seals weren’t broken. Adela had thrown them into the bin without reading them.
“Congratulations,” she said to us at the meeting. “They’ve all made it through half a year without dying. I’ll save the brie1ng for the end of the session, as several of you have asked me to attach urgent business to the agenda.”
Adela talked to us as if we were pissing lavishly all over her time. Why she applied for the position of Vice Secretary, or how she got it, was a mystery. She didn’t enjoy the prestige, as the Secretary did, and she seemed bizarrely overworked for the proxy boss of a project in its pilot stage.
Ed said, “Thanks, Adela. I think we should reconsider post–bridge year goals. I appreciate that this year is intended to give the expats the skills to live independently in this era, but I think they would bene1t from extended, structured contact—”
“Noted,” said Adela. “We’ll return to the matter in three months.” “That doesn’t give us much—”
“That’s the Secretary’s decision. Simellia?”
“I’d like to raise what I believe is a labor issue,” said Simellia.
Adela unnerved Simellia too; she hadn’t made a single superAuous noise or movement, with the perspicacity of a prey animal.
“Speak.”
“Much of the data gathered from the expats is contributing directly to the time-travel project, but they’re making a signi1cant contribution to other schemes. I’m thinking of the History of Britain project in particular, and Department for Education analytics. They’re essentially working as consultants for the archivists, especially Eighteen-forty-seven and Nineteen-sixteen—”
“Excuse me,” said Ralph, loudly. “I called this meeting early because I have an
immediate problem.”
I tried to catch Simellia’s eyes to roll mine, but she’d powered down. Ralph was the only bridge she did this with. She’d once told me it was because she couldn’t even 1nd the energy to despise him.
Ralph was another former old-school 1eld agent—a dinosaur, really. He was stiP as a train track with a thin, awful, manta ray mouth. For some ungodly reason he had been assigned Margaret Kemble. I expect he thought he’d get a nice old-fashioned girl who’d read him Donne and do the laundry.
“I 1nd myself in a position I am eminently unquali1ed to handle,” Ralph continued. “It’s about Sixteen-sixty-1ve’s… predilections.”
Graham was already home that afternoon. He’d had a “day oP,” a telling term that bolstered Simellia’s labor argument, and had spent it at the Tate Modern with the other expats, trying to understand contemporary art.
“I have some questions for you,” he said severely as I came through the door. “Well, I have some questions for you.”
“Oh?”
“About Miss Kemble.”
He emptied his face of all expression. “Yes?”
“Well,” I said. “Did you know that she’s a lesbian?”
“This is a sitting-down conversation, isn’t it?” said Graham. “Oh dear… what a revelatory day I’m having….”
He made two cups of tea. A packet of cigarettes fell out of the cupboard where we kept the cups, and he shoved it into the bread bin.
“A lesbian,” I said, “is a woman who is only attracted to other women.” “Attracted to…?”
“You know what I mean. Come on. You were in the navy, I’m sure you’ve come across the concept of—I’m not even sure what word you were using
—‘homosexuality’?” “No…?”
“Carnal and romantic desire for members of your own sex.”
Graham put down his mug. He was blushing in that watercolor way that I found so beguiling, and I caught up with what I was looking at: an isolated man who had just discovered that a woman with whom he was spending a lot of time would never be interested in him. I frowned, and he frowned, and we were frowning into our tea.
“I think this era ascribes too much importance to what people consider of themselves in private,” he said, very coolly. “What you are referring to, as far as
the service was concerned, was—well—it was punished harshly, if you were caught. But to make an identity out of a set of habits does not strike me as wise or even very useful.”
“We think about it diPerently these days.” “Evidently.”
For the rest of the day, Graham treated me as if my recipe had been changed and my Aavor was unpleasant. He cut restlessly around the rooms, running his 1ngers along the spines of books. I should have used this as a teaching moment that would improve Margaret Kemble’s quality of life, but I was hurt in a manner I couldn’t examine.
It was my turn to cook. I made the dish I thought was most likely to symbolically kill a Victorian child with the ingredients I had on hand, which was mapo tofu with a belligerent amount of garlic and mala. It had an ePect, though not the quasi-fatal one I anticipated. He stopped morbing and started touching his lower lip with amazement. He had a second helping.
Afterward, he fetched his cigarettes from the bread bin and lit one, pushing the packet across to me with the edge of his hand. I watched him get down half a cigarette in silence.
“You told me that Robert McClure discovered the Northwest Passage,” he said at last.
“Yes. You knew him. From Sir George Back’s Frozen Strait expedition.”
“A dreadful expedition. Did you know we had to wrap Terror in chains to stop her falling apart on the journey home? The officers had to help pump out the seawater. No one got more than four hours of sleep at a time, and the ship screaming all the while. To say nothing of the ten months trapped in pack ice—”
“I know.”
“Mm. Well. When we made port at Lough Swilly—in sinking condition— they couldn’t 1nd temporary lodgings for everyone. He and I had to share a room. I don’t know how much you know about Robbie—”
“Grim and opportunistic. Well, don’t pull that face. History records and all that. He almost killed himself and all his men on the expedition where he found the passage.”
Graham blew smoke out through his nose reAectively. “I see,” he said. “I’m not sure it’s fair to call him ‘grim,’ though you wouldn’t be the 1rst to say it. He was a severe disciplinarian, it’s true. Held grudges. But he was a very lonely person. Romantic, too, which made his loneliness worse.”
“He went out after you twice. He must have been lonely.”
Graham had reached the end of his cigarette, but he kept pulling at it restlessly.
“He said he’d never go back,” he said. “In Lough Swilly, he—I think he really believed we’d die out there, which I never did, and—well. He clung to me. Every night. And wept.”
He ground out the cigarette and said, quickly, “I was posted to the Modeste two months later and I never saw him again. So when you say that he came out after me—”
I waited. He absently touched one of the curls by his ear. But his color was quite cool. Drained, even.
“He was very lonely,” Graham repeated.
I didn’t write the story up in my weekly report. I couldn’t tell what it was supposed to mean. Whether he was giving me an excuse or giving me an example.
It was around this time that diPerent parts of the project started to individually, in tandem, and at random get on my fucking nerves.
I was lightly haunted—at the level of a chronic but manageable digestive complaint—by the memory of those “vital” 1les in the bin, seals unbroken. But Adela didn’t issue any new orders. The bridges kept turning in their core reports, and the experiments kept running. Given how much of our working day the data collection took, we all assumed that the time-travel project was running to the stated purpose. Every day I had to record his heart rate, his blood pressure, his temperature; every day a written record of what he wore, what he ate, how much exercise he took; every week checking progress against the imaginary benchmarks set by Control, use of phone, use of transport, use of media
and the assessment of how harmful or useful each medium was; all the time the corrective tests for vocabulary and habit; novelistic observations on his character and temperament. It seemed that the job continued. I suppose if you switch on your lights and boil your kettle with energy provided by a nuclear power station, you don’t spend much time reAecting on the fact that the atom had originally been split to kill cities.
Not long afterward, I received three emails in a row: 1rst, from the Wellness team, indicating that there were irregularities with the results of some of the medical scans done on the expats; then a second from the Secretary for Expatriation, denying the existence of irregularities and demanding forgetfulness of the 1rst email; then a third heavy-handed message reminding its recipient list of the consequences of breaking the contract of the Official Secrets Act as it pertained to our work.
Graham hadn’t exhibited any behavior more eccentric than usual, but as he was a difficult man to read, I didn’t know whether I was witnessing a series of neurological events. He’d lain motionless in the garden for two hours, on a wet and putrid night, to shoot a fox, and pulled out one of his own rotting teeth (he showed it to me afterward; it was the color of a tombstone, caped with gelatinous red)—was this Victorian, or was this “irregularities”?
I called my handler.
“Quentin. Accepting as I do that you’re unlikely to tell me what the fuck is going on: What the fuck is going on?”
“Seventeen-ninety-three has stopped showing up on scanners.” “What?”
“Did you call me from your work phone?” “I—yes? This is a work matter?”
He hung up.
I got oP my chair and sat on the Aoor, chewing at the skin around the nail of my thumb. Anne Spencer (Seventeen-ninety-three) had been picked up from Paris. Her husband, a Frenchman, had already been guillotined. At the bridge meetings, Ed reported that she was responding badly to expatriation. I had understood this to mean she was mentally unwell. Now it seemed he’d been referring to the physical ePects of time-travel.
I opened my contacts on my work phone, wrote Quentin’s personal number on the back of my hand, and cycled some 1ve miles to a phone box. The phone box only accepted contactless payment cards. I called the phone box a bastard and cycled another mile until I found one that still took coins.
“Quentin. I’m on a pay phone. Costs like a quid now. I used to phone home from school for twenty pee.”
“Right.”
“You need to tell me what’s happening.”
“Seventeen-ninety-three isn’t showing up on scanners anymore. Body scanners. Metal detectors and things. We put her through another set of MRI scans, and they’re coming out blank.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do we. She’s been recalled to the Ministry. Her bridge is standing down.”
“Does this have anything to do with Commander Gore?”
“I don’t know. I hope not. I have to say, he’s not really the most important thing on my mind right now. Listen, did he tell you anything else about that device he sketched? Who was holding it? What they looked like? What they were facing?”
I’d barely thought about the sketch since I’d handed it oP. “Quentin,” I said, “you’re not talking about the—the glori1ed Nintendo console?”
That was a mistake—a pebble Aicked at the scalp of an avalanche, though I didn’t know it yet. Quentin swallowed sharply. He must have been pressing the phone to his face, because the sound was large and liquid, the sort of noise someone makes when they’re trying to choke down tears.
“Are you even aware—” he began, then broke oP and barked, “Do you hear clicking?”
“Um. Could be the pay phone?”
Another stressed, esophageal noise. “This line isn’t secure,” said Quentin. “For God’s sake. Hang up.”
I hope you will forgive me. I couldn’t take him seriously. I thought the high stakes of the project—the potential of the universe to eat its own tail and swallow us for dessert—had made him hysterical, paranoid. I didn’t need him to embroil me in a conspiracy theory. The fact that I lived with a Victorian naval officer was astonishing enough for me. I hung up the phone, heard my coins splash against other coins—the phone box was in use. What had other people needed it for? I wondered. An adulterous tryst, a whispered plea to the Samaritans? In an era of mobile phones, there were only a few things that mouthpiece would have heard. Love and endings. Panicked calls to the emergency services: Please, please, I don’t know if he’s breathing. I don’t know if he’ll make it.
4
The next day is cold, as expected. They are, after all, in the Arctic. But sometimes, the days are blessed with glorious sunshine. On those days, the stewards hang the laundry on ropes stretched from the rigging. At least one man aboard the *Erebus* owns a pair of red flannel underwear. (Gore, following McClure’s decade-old advice, wears leather breeches beneath his woolen trousers.)
The sunny days, however, bring snow blindness, as the summer rays reflect off the ice like a thrown knife. The vast emptiness of the landscape—or rather, the seascape, since they are trapped in pack ice—causes sound and movement to distort. A daily walk around the ship risks hallucinations, making tins or boots appear as lurking assassins or phantom visitors.
Today, the weather is overcast and sullen. Gore sets out alone across the frozen sea towards King William Land. He prefers hunting by himself. On this barren earth, he becomes nothing more than a moving point of muscle and sinew, free of thought. When he spots prey, he doesn’t reenter his body; instead, he focuses entirely on the bullet. If he had company, he’d be forced to remember that he is fully inhabited by Graham Gore.
During the 1836 Frozen Strait expedition, he once spent ten hours on the ice, hoping to catch a seal (which had the frustrating habit of sinking once killed). This grueling ordeal left him snow-blind, the only thing that drove him back to the ship. That was ten years ago. Now he’s older, with experiences that include siege warfare, dysentery, and morning backaches. These days, he tends to return to the *Erebus* when his body reminds him that they are still connected.
On land, he shoots two brace of partridges, limp-feathered bundles that will barely add substance to a soup. He keeps walking, aiming for the next hillock, which always seems the highest until he reaches it. No caribou, no musk oxen. Not even wolves to make his natural history studies more interesting. He can’t feel his feet. Each step feels like the heavy blows of a dream. Strangely, he enjoys this discomfort. He’ll pay for it later when the frostnip sets in, swelling his limbs like a waterlogged corpse.
It’s thirst that turns him back. He runs out of water within a couple of hours. A swig of brandy from his flask strips a layer of skin from his lip as the freezing metal touches it. It’s summer; he’s fortunate. Had he tried drinking from a metal container in January, he would have lost more than just a bit of skin.
The frozen waves piled against the shore of King William Land resemble the crumbling walls of a temple. He has to use his pick to descend the other side, searching for footholds with his numb feet. He’s seen etchings of the Arctic in the *Illustrated London News*: flat, a washed-out landscape beneath a gray sky. But the northern seas are anything but flat. They’re treacherous, filled with pressure ridges and shifting drifts. It will take him over an hour to reach the ships, though the distance might take twenty minutes across a lawn.
The sky presses down as he trudges across the floes. A storm is coming, squeezing the visibility from the air.
Gore notes this without emotion. Either he’ll make it back to the ship, or he won’t. He’d like to survive long enough to have a cup of cocoa, but he avoids indulging in thoughts of it. Fitzjames had once asked him how he could face life-threatening peril and minor annoyances with the same calm, and Gore had simply shrugged.
“It doesn’t improve my mood to catastrophize, so I don’t.”
“And what about hope? Have you ever been in love, Graham?” Fitzjames had pressed. “Ever lived for the favor of a fair smile?”
“Ah, love, life’s greatest catastrophe.”
The wind picks up, and the icy light stings his eyes. He pulls back even from the thought of cocoa, focusing solely on the rhythm of his steps. One foot in front of the other. Swing, push. Swing, push.
He is in this state of mind—mindlessness, really—when he spots a dark shape crouching beside a black circle in the ice. A seal hole. The shape moves, ever so slightly. Perhaps a stretch—it’s a languid motion—though his vision is too strained to be certain. He is aiming his gun before his mind realizes it.
The gun fires with a resonant bark. A cry echoes across the ice. A fractured sound. Terribly, terribly human.
