I Remember

I remember I’d spent almost the whole day making bunting out of coloured paper. It’s a lovely thing, to devote yourself so industriously to something so fundamentally trivial. It took all 6 of us house mates to hoist it onto the ceiling once it was made, but it looked perfect. And what with cooking for everyone who came early, and deciding how much make up looks like you haven’t really made an effort, the party started before I had time to agonise about it.

I didn’t notice him at first. No, sorry, let’s start again. I want to tell the story with no foreshadowing, because real life so rarely gets any. There were a few new people at the party, and I did my hostess duty and introduced myself to most of them, then folded myself into a corner with two of my best friends for come catching up. A guy I didn’t know kept looking at me from across the room, and every time he did, he got less subtle until it was very hard to politely pretend not to have noticed. Amy and Gemma kept exchanging glances about him, because he was good looking and it’s usually the ones who aren’t who exhibit the most sleezy behaviour. Not that he was being sleezy, of course, as it turned out, but that’s how it seemed. He sidled up to me eventually, and asked if I could show him which room was the coats room. It’s a big house, so I had to go with him. As soon as we were alone, he said:

“It’s you, isn’t it? I know you.”

This being one of the worst lines ever, I was as brisk as it was courteous to be. He carried on, though.

“Sorry, that sounds awful. I’m not trying to chat you up. It’s just…you’ll never believe it anyway. This is stupid. Sorry.”

Of course, there was no way I was going to let that go, so I poked and poked but all I could get out of him was some shadow play about how he had to be sure for his own sanity. Then he said something like:

“Look, you already think I’m mental,” (this was true) “so I might as well ask: do you own a necklace with a bright yellow stone set into a sort of coiled nest?”

I breathed in pretty sharply. I didn’t have that necklace, but I didn’t have it because the woman in the jewellers had put it behind the counter for me and promised faithfully not to sell it until I had saved up enough to buy it from her. At that point, I think it had been in the shop about 3 months.

“Right,” he said. “There is definitely a perfectly logical explanation for this.”

“Really? Do go on.”

He looked uncomfortable for a moment, then plunged in.

“I think I’m just going to tell you everything.”

He looked at the bed, and then at me, and I remember thinking how strange it was that he was asking permission to sit down when he was talking about something so open. I gestured that he should sit, and then listened to his story.

“I was on my way home last night – not drunk, before you ask – and I was on a fairly isolated bit of road…sorry, this pre-amble isn’t helping. I saw an old woman, basically, standing directly in my way, and looking straight at me. I couldn’t see her expression from there, but I saw she was wearing a dressing gown. I thought…there must be a home somewhere around here, and she’s got out and now she’s lost, so I slowed down and tried not to look intimidating. Then she said, “James”. That’s my name. I said “hello” and something awful like “have we met”, and she looked very sad, but she smiled at that. She said no, we hadn’t met. I started to notice a few more things about her, then. She wasn’t senile, for a start. Her hair was tidy and her dressing gown was clean and well-kept. And she wasn’t there. I can’t explain how I knew that. For a start, it was raining a bit and she was completely dry, but I noticed…you know how you can feel it when someone’s looking at you? I couldn’t feel that. She was reaching from somewhere else, I’m sure. Or else I am going mental. She said, “James, you’re going to meet me tomorrow night, and it’s very important that you stay away from me. Go to the party, if you like, learn who I am, and then stay away. It causes only pain, in the end.” I noticed she was carrying a sleek bit of technology in her hand, then – it shimmered, it wasn’t like anything I’ve seen elsewhere – and she held it up. “Oh,” she said, “my name is Katie.” She pressed something on the device and vanished.”

He wouldn’t look at me after he’d finished, and I think it might have been that that made me think he might be telling the truth. And no-one knows about my necklace. I like to keep things sacred, so I’ve kept that just for myself – secrets can feel like talismans. The funny thing is, no-one calls me Katie. My dad did, but to everyone else I’ve always been Katherine.

“Katie,” he said, and I’ve never heard anything sound so natural as my name on his tongue. I just said “yes”, and he looked up. “What do you think?”

Naturally, I had no idea what to think, and none of the options were particularly good, but there was a sort of a hint of something funny in this ludicrous situation, so I smiled a bit. He did, too, and it was amazing how much his face changed – I think he must have been fretting a lot.

“Well,” I said, “I think either this is a wind-up, and somehow you’ve found out about my necklace, or you’re mental and the biographical details are flukes, or else a future version of myself has travelled back in time to the night before we met to warn you off me. For some reason.”

“I swear it’s not a wind-up. Maybe I’m mental, but the only place I’ve ever seen that necklace is on her.”

“Just before she vanished?”

“Look, I’ve acknowledged it sounds mental.”

“Sorry. All right. We might as well indulge this for the sake of discussion. She…I, possibly…must have had a pretty good reason for wanting to undo something from 50 years ago. Thing is, I never want to change the past. Honestly. Even when bad things happen, it’s still part of my experience. I don‘t want a time machine, I don’t want to be perfect.”

“So what could possibly make you do that?”

“I don’t know. Someone else’s pain, possibly. Or just something really awful…”

“There’s another possibility, of course.”

“Go on.”

“Well, we wouldn’t be talking now if she hadn’t turned up.”

“You think my future self was match making?”

“Why not? She could have remembered this conversation, and known what she had to do. She might have known I’d be scared off if she said she was my girlfriend or something.”

“Ever heard of a temporal paradox?”

“Yes, but time travel existing at all means there must be a way round it – either both are physically impossible, or neither are.”

“So you’re saying we should get to know each other precisely because she went to the effort of going back in time to stop us?”

We laughed at that. It’s strange how funny things that are really quite awful can seem, and he is such nice company.

“What if we fell completely in love and then you died and that was the source of the pain?”

“Can you imagine wishing a life-long relationship away?”

“I don’t know. I can’t imagine being old at all. Maybe, just afterwards, or if it was my fault in some way.”

“What do you want to do, then?”

“What, take her advice literally and never see each other again, or assume she was either being clever, or blinded by grief, and do the exact opposite?”

“Flip a coin?”

“Why not!”