Given Time Read online

  Given Time

  Also by Anthony Burn

  The Last Echo

  Scrap Metal

  Escape from Migration

  Your Place or Mine (Screenplay)

  The Wars of the Roses (Screenplay)

  Non-fiction

  The Art of Suffolk - with Jacqueline Cockroft

  GIVEN TIME

  Anthony Burn

  Copyright © Anthony Burn 2018

  The moral right of Anthony Burn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by Free Time Books.

  Acknowledgements

  There are many people I would like to thank for helping me bring this novel to life. First and most importantly, my wonderful partner, Jacquie, who not only believed in and encouraged me, but also put up with many months of me being locked away at my desk and living in a world of my own. It takes an extraordinary amount of patience to live with a writer, and I can’t begin to thank her enough for her resilience.

  A large number of my family and friends waded through the typos, bad grammar and questionable writing of the early drafts to offer invaluable advice and support. My thanks to: Richard Burn, Philip Burn, Simon Burn, Gloria Sherwood, Diane Gooding, John Sherwood, Wendy Witherspoon, Kate Cheasman, Simon Johnson, Beth Clarke, Matthew Brownsword, Ben Mills, Emily Gleeson, Vicky Pierce and Rick Timms.

  A special thank you to Ben Gooding for allowing me to describe his stunningly beautiful work of art, 1593, within these pages. More details of Ben’s incredible work can be found at www.bengooding.co.uk. I urge you to take a look.

  Finally, my enormous gratitude to my sublime editor, Sophie Playle, who took my rough prose and painstakingly polished every line until it shone in a way I could never have imagined. I have no hesitation in recommending her. Find Sophie at www.liminalpages.com.

  I

  Time is what we want most, but what, alas! we use worst.

  William Penn (1644–1718)

  One

  Two years ago I found a device that would change my life, well beyond my wildest dreams and far, far beyond my cruellest nightmares. It might be more accurate to say the device found me, except that would have been impossible.

  Having said that, everything about the device seemed impossible: where it came from; how it came into my possession; how it worked; and, in particular, what its purpose was. These simple mysteries couldn’t be solved without defying logic or wisdom.

  Although I would never understand exactly how it worked, what the device did was essentially quite simple. What it did to me, on the other hand, was a completely different and more sinister matter.

  It never affected me physically. It’s what it enabled me to do, and what it allowed me to become, that led to my current tormented state. Before I found the device, I was an average guy. I was good-natured, easy going, kind and considerate; the sort of person who avoided conflict and walked away from trouble wherever possible. I believe I am still all of those things – but now I have secrets. Dark, terrible secrets. The kind of secrets I could never share, not even with my closest friends or loved ones.

  Not that they would believe me anyway.

  The day I found the device couldn’t have been more ordinary. Ordinary, that is, for a self-employed web designer who worked from home and would work weekends to accommodate his most demanding clients.

  My home was a top floor flat in Mortlake High Street in South West London, within one hundred metres of the River Thames but, sadly, with no view of the water. I’d lived in the property for six years, since my grandfather left it to my brother and me in his will.

  I’d inherited two things from my grandfather: his flat, for which I was truly grateful, and his middle name, Keegan, as my given name, for which I was less grateful. My family and friends called me Kee for short, which strangers often misheard or mistook for Keith, and by the time I’d reached my teens I had pretty much given up on trying to correct them.

  While I may have originally been lukewarm about my name, the same could not be said about my second inheritance. The gift of the flat had been as timely as it was welcome. Having finished school after A levels, I had decided not to go to university and instead set up my own business, but it had been a struggle to find work in my home town of Stowmarket in Suffolk. The opportunity to relocate, rent free, to the capital and to charge London prices for my work was too good to miss and gave my business the boost it needed to make me a comfortable living.

  That Saturday morning, I was not in the best of moods; I’d been looking forward to a relaxing weekend, but had been given a rush job at short notice, which had left me more than a little exasperated with my client. Although he provided me with plenty of work, he often annoyed me for two reasons: first, his lack of planning would become my emergency, and second, his demands for my services always seemed to be inversely proportional to the amount he was prepared to pay for them. It was bad enough that he’d phoned me at around eight on Friday evening to say he wanted several new pages added to his website. But it was particularly galling to hear that he’d been working on the project for weeks, and he was telling me about all this for the first time. With his customary discourtesy, he insisted I have it finished by Monday morning.

  I’d set an early alarm and, after a quick shower and breakfast, sat down at my computer. As I waited for it to boot, I quietly recited my mantra: ‘If you want to be a millionaire, you’ve got to put in the hours.’

  To be honest, though it was a nice dream, I knew my work would never propel me to that level of wealth – the mantra was just a spur to get me going.

  Fuelled by coffee, the morning flew past, as it always did when I was coding, and by early afternoon I’d finished building the new pages and had integrated them with the rest of the website. All that was left to do was upload the images my client had emailed to me and write the copy for each page based on the information he had provided.

  Most web designers I knew kept well away from copywriting, preferring to cut and paste what their customers had written so they couldn’t be held responsible for typos or bad grammar. Nevertheless, I had always offered the service, partly because I’d seen some exceptional websites ruined by poor copy, but mainly because I enjoyed writing and it made a pleasant change from wrestling with functions and deciphering ‘parse error’ messages.

  By two-thirty my lunch was overdue, so I grabbed a pre-packed sandwich and a bottle of beer from the fridge and took myself up to the roof for a half-hour break.

  I’d put an old glass-top patio table and a few dilapidated chairs on the terrace – my sole effort at a roof garden – but after sitting at the computer for over six hours, I ignored them in favour of stretching my legs. I wandered to the back wall, which came to just below chest height, and leaned against it, enjoying the afternoon sunshine while surveying the panorama of rooftops and backyards stretching into the distance as I alternately munched my sandwich and gulped my beer.

  As I made my way back inside, I noticed something strange on the table. It looked like a black snooker ball. Glancing around for a clue to its presence, I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t seen it earlier. I hadn’t consciously looke
d at the table, and supposed in my preoccupation with work, I’d simply missed it. But where had it come from? I quickly dismissed the idea that it might have dropped from a passing jet; my home was almost directly under the flight-path into Heathrow, but the aircraft were two thousand feet above me. A fall from that height would have been enough for the object to have shattered the table top, and significantly damaged the roof.

  I doubted it had been put there by one of my neighbours. The rooftops were arranged in pairs, with a three-metre-wide drop to ground level between each two. Some of the residents had made extensive gardens, using potted plants, on top of their flats. None more so than my adjoining neighbours, who had erected a high wicker screen above the dividing wall and placed tall plants all along their side, making it impossible for them to have climbed over onto my terrace.

  My neighbours on the opposite side would have had to traverse the gap, ten metres from the ground, and since they were an elderly couple, that was equally unlikely. Even if they had thrown the object, from that distance its momentum would have carried it off the table top and onto the ground.

  It could only have been placed on the table, but that really was a problem. To do so, the person would have had to come through the flat to the roof, but I’d been home alone for three days. In fact, the window of opportunity was smaller than that. I’d already been to the roof that morning for a quick break and a coffee. I’d sat at the table, and the ball had definitely not been there.

  The idea that it might be my brother playing a trick on me entered my head. When we’d first inherited the flat, Drew had just started university in Birmingham, but he’d enjoyed having another base, one close to the attractions and amenities in London where he could stay as often as he liked without parental supervision.

  Initially, he had come most weekends, usually without notice and often with friends in tow, who would crash out either on his bedroom floor or in the living room, but as the years moved on and the novelty wore off, his visits had become increasingly sporadic.

  I’d rarely objected to the unannounced intrusion, unless I had a lot of work to do. Usually I was happy with the company. I’d left most of my school friends behind when I moved to the capital, and working for myself left little opportunity to make more. There were people I called friends at my local pub, which sat on the riverbank at the end of the road, but they were more like acquaintances. They knew not to include me in any social plans because I often had to work late or at weekends, on the type of rush job that was currently in progress.

  However, I was sure that neither Drew nor anyone else had been up to the terrace that morning. My front door had been double-locked all day. Moreover, my computer was next to the roof-access stairs, so I would have noticed anybody going up or down.

  As perplexing as it was, I put aside thoughts of how the object got there. I put down my beer bottle and sandwich wrapper and picked it up for a closer look. Its similarity to a snooker ball increased as I lifted it; the weight of the object was about what I had expected, even if it was a little smaller. It was only as I turned it in my hand that I noticed a couple of differences. Rather than spherical, the object was very slightly egg-shaped: its point, if you could call it that, was almost imperceptible until held at eye level. As I rotated it, I felt sure that it was weighted at the opposite end. To test the theory I put it back on the table and gave it a small push. It rolled a short way and then, sure enough, it wobbled to a stop with its almost unnoticeable point on top.

  I frowned and picked it up again, wondering about its possible uses. I examined it closely. I noticed a tiny line around its equator and, testing it with my thumbnail, I discovered that it was a miniscule indentation. The likelihood that it might be a container of some sort occurred to me. I tried to unscrew the two halves, but they wouldn’t move. I applied a little more pressure, with the same result, so I gripped it hard enough to turn my fingertips white. Still it wouldn’t budge. I attempted to pull it apart, but that didn’t work either, and the ridge was too small to get my nails into, which ruled out prising it open.

  Frustrated, I tossed it from hand to hand while I wondered again what it could be and what I should do with it. I supposed I should keep it, in case somebody came to claim it – in which case they were going to have a lot of explaining to do. At least then I might then find out what it was, though.

  As inquisitive as I was, I had work to do and this curio was not giving up its secrets, so I decided to take another look at it later. I was about to put it in my pocket when, with little thought, I tried turning the top of the object in the other direction. To my surprise, it moved freely. I gave it a couple of full twists, but then stopped abruptly.

  The sky had turned pitch black, plunging the city into darkness.

  Two

  It took less than a moment for a combination of fear and primitive instinct to overwhelm me, and I threw myself to the floor, cradling my head with my arms as I curled tightly into a ball. With my eyes closed tight and my heart thumping, I tried desperately to catch my breath, which was coming in rapid gasps.

  I didn’t know what had happened, but I was more scared than I’d ever been in my life. Crazy ideas went through my head. I thought maybe a bomb had gone off and I was just waiting for the explosion to rip me to shreds, or perhaps the sun had imploded and the whole world was going to freeze in a few minutes. It didn’t feel like it was getting colder, but I didn’t know how long it would take for the earth’s residual warmth to evaporate.

  After a while, and when nothing else happened, I realised I was being stupid and opened my eyes. It was still dark, but not as totally black as it had seemed before. I supposed my eyes had adjusted, and when I looked up it was just like typical night-time, but I couldn’t understand why it had unexpectedly become night in the middle of the afternoon.

  I stretched out lengthways on my stomach and then rolled tentatively onto my back to see a blanket of cloud overhead, dimly reflecting the lights of the conurbation. There was nothing unusual about the clouds, yet it registered as odd because the sky had been clear just a few minutes ago. But for now, there were more important concerns than the state of the atmosphere.

  I wondered what mayhem must be going on in the streets. I hadn’t heard tyres screeching or horns blaring. I got to my knees and noticed for the first time that the ground was wet. That was another puzzle. It had rained heavily late the previous evening, but by the time I’d had my lunch, everywhere had dried out. I got to my feet, and after rubbing my hands dry on my jeans, I peered over the end wall into the darkened neighbourhood.

  What I saw confused me further. The outlook couldn’t have been more ordinary. It was the same night-time scene I’d viewed a thousand times before, and there was nobody running around or screaming. As far as I could tell, people hadn’t come out of their houses to see what was going on, and I could see the lights of cars in the distance, travelling at normal speeds as though nothing had happened. It was as if no one had noticed that day had suddenly turned to night.

  I pulled my phone from my pocket, and brought up the Facebook app. Something as momentous as this should be trending within seconds. My anxiety grew as I flipped through page after page and couldn’t find anything. I switched to Twitter but there was nothing there either. Instagram and Snapchat produced the same lack of results. This was stupid; it was unexpectedly dark at two sixteen in the afternoon, and nobody cared.

  There had to be something about it on TV so I made my way inside, but halfway down the stairs I stopped in my tracks and checked my phone again. It had occurred to me that I’d just read the time on my phone screen as two-sixteen, but I hadn’t finished working until two-thirty, and I’d been on the roof for a good half hour, so it ought to be around three. I switched on the screen and saw ‘02:17 Saturday 12 September’.

  Two in the morning? That couldn’t be right. I must have somehow damaged my phone when I dived to the ground, but it was odd that only the clock was wrong – the apps had worked without any problem.
I glanced at my wrist, but I hadn’t put on my watch that morning, so I continued with my original plan and switched the TV to the news channel. A clock in the corner of the screen showed that the time had now moved on to two eighteen.

  My confusion gave way to trepidation in an instant. Somehow I’d lost just over eleven hours. The only explanation was that I must have been unconscious, but that didn’t feel plausible. If I’d knocked myself out when I fell, then I would have been groggy as I came round again, but I felt okay. I checked my head for bumps or pain but could find neither. In any case, the sky had darkened before I threw myself to the ground. I had never suffered from blackouts, so I wasn’t certain how they worked, but I was pretty sure if the blackout had started while I was standing, I wouldn’t remember hitting the floor. Yet my decision to curl up on the ground, though instinctive, was definitely conscious.

  I decided to sit down, just in case I collapsed again, but as soon as I did I felt foolish; I felt fine. I still couldn’t believe I’d lost all that time, but it was the only rationale that explained why there had been nothing on social media and no breaking news on TV. I pulled my phone out of my pocket to check Facebook again but didn’t get further than the home screen before a significant thought occurred to me.

  I stared at the display in disbelief, and switched the television to the programme guide to confirm the day and date. It was now two twenty on Saturday. If I’d lost eleven hours, it would be Sunday morning – not Saturday.

  My mind whirled. Half an hour earlier I’d been in my ordinary, comfortable little world where everything was natural and worked the way it was meant to, but now I was caught in some kind of chaotic madness, where strange objects appeared from nowhere and time abruptly ran backwards. I shook my head. This couldn’t be happening. Time travel wasn’t possible, but unless I’d dreamed the whole day so far, that was exactly what had happened.