The anthropologist, part 1

Mr Heston is putting up the skeletons for Hallowe’en. He’s standing on a chair even though he is very tall and he’s got the little plastic ones and the much better rubber ones that jiggle and he’s mixing them together all hanging on the washing line that I can tell he borrowed from Miss Rea because it’s her red one and everyone always pitches in on Hallowe’en. Mummy says it’s because we remember, but she says it like this: we Remember. She says it’s to do with all the time before, and all the ghosties. She didn’t say it like that - she said it’s about all the other times when other people were with us and we have to be careful not to forget and anyway it could be us some time. But it sounds like ghosties to me. Mummy says we use our brains much better when we have Hallowe’en, she says it’s like brain exercise because we have to remember now now and what now was then. She says don’t worry sweetie you’ll get there. Sometimes when things change it’s very different, and sometimes it’s only tiny little differences and then it’s hard to remember whether your shoes are red or green this time. Sometimes I look down and check, but mummy says don’t look, just concentrate and know.

I wonder whether Mr Heston would like Miss Rea to come to his Hallowe’en party and I think he would because he’s always giving her cuttings from his geraniums and …

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… things have changed. Mrs Heston (who used to be Mrs Rea, but never was tonight any more) trips across with Millie (who is a baby anyway but is new altogether tonight) and gives me a cookie-skeleton with currant-eyes. I think that tonight was only a very small change for me because I didn’t feel it much. Sometimes in BIG changes I feel tingly and confused. Mrs Heston likes the coat that Mr Heston gave her five years ago and which I never saw her wear before but only remember seeing her wear before. Except that I did.

I get up and walk into the house again but I trip on the step and I wake up in a different time, again. It is summer in this time and I am sitting on the pavement and I see someone who looks like daddy but young like Tommy-my-cousin. He sees me and knows I am out of time so he stops to say Hello and someone else comes over and she is a girl, and they meet over my head and then I am gone and this time it is a VERY tingly change …

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I am, now, back in my own time, and everything is just as it has always been except, of course, that it had never been this way at all before this change that I have just caused in a trip into my parents’ past when I was seven. So now, I know two stories: In one of them, my parents met ten years ago on a horticulture course, and proceeded to tell everyone delightedly that it was simply destiny that they should meet as they had been living in the same neighbourhood for years. But in my current understanding, this new story that has always been and that I have just created, my parents met twenty years ago, in their teens, when my father stopped on his way the shop to help a little girl who was evidently displaced in time. “Sometimes you just know”, they say when I ask them about their decision to keep a child conceived at the age of 15.

Everything needs continuity. We travel through time without warning or control and simply act. Sometimes we change things, without having any idea what we are doing until we return and the whole universe has shifted, or some small part of it. Sometimes we like the change, and sometimes we don’t but the point is we can’t choose it. Lives are altered radically and sometimes lost altogether. When I was seventeen, my best friend whipped himself out of existence, quite by accident. There’s a part of me, somewhere in my carefully preserved memory, that still feels … heavy that he isn’t here, but to the dominant part he has never been. So at Hallowe’en we let down our walls. We allow our minds to muddle up entirely and remember everything as equally, impossibly real. And the next day we go back to living stolidly in whichever version of now we have woken up to.