‘Good, so best we get started. The sooner we’re done, the sooner we can leave.’ He turned to address them all. ‘I don’t know about you but come sundown I’d rather be camping out on that big, very wide beach than down here.’
‘With those things out there?’ said Whitmore, looking up the jungle slopes surrounding them. ‘Sure… getting out of here sounds good to me.’
CHAPTER 49
2001, New York
‘Three minutes to go,’ said Sal.
‘Three minutes,’ Maddy echoed. They could both hear the machinery below the desk beginning to hum noisily as it sucked energy greedily from their mains feed. Not for the first time, Maddy wondered who paid the electricity bill for their archway. It had to be astronomical, the amount they used.
She smiled at her dumbness. Yes, of course, no one paid any bills. As far as the world outside was concerned, as far as their neighbour — the car mechanic in the archway near the top of their little backstreet — were concerned, this archway normally sat vacant with a ripped and graffiti-covered sign pasted on the roller shutter outside offering three thousand square feet of commercial floor space at a reasonable rate.
Except of course, for a Monday and Tuesday in September when, to anybody who bothered to notice, it would appear three young squatters had decided to move in, only to vanish again on the Wednesday.
‘Oh,’ said Sal, ‘I forgot… I saw a funny thing the other day.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah, in a shop nearby. A junk shop. Well, not funny really. Just a coincidence.’
‘What?’
‘A uniform, a steward’s uniform… from the Titanic. Just exactly like Liam’s.’ Sal shook her head. ‘Isn’t that weird?’
‘Seriously?’
‘The lady in the shop said it wasn’t a real one, though. Just a costume from a play. But, still, kind of funny. I suppose I could buy it for Liam as a spare.’
‘I’m sure he’s in no big hurry to go back to the Titanic, you know? Given what he’d have to face.’
Sal’s smile quickly faded. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I suppose he wouldn’t
… none of us, really.’
The numbers on the clock flickered and changed. Two minutes left.
Maddy really could have done with Foster sitting right here beside them. Calm, relaxed, with a reassuring half-cocked smile on his old wrinkly face. Skin that looked like weathered parchment, skin that looked like it had seen way too much sun -
… I wouldn’t mind feeling the sun on my face…
Foster’s last words. He’d said that the morning he’d taken her out for coffee to say goodbye.
‘Sun on my face,’ she uttered under her breath.
Sal cocked an eyebrow. ‘Uh?’
… I guess I wouldn’t mind feeling the sun on my face whilst I enjoy a decent hot dog…
That’s exactly what he’d said, wasn’t it? One of the last things he’d said. That’s what he fancied doing with whatever time he had left to live. Sun and a decent hot dog. With all these skyscrapers, she knew there was only one place you could count on un-obscured sunlight in Manhattan, sun… and, yes, hot dog vendors a-plenty. One place and one place only.
‘I think I just figured out where Foster’s gone,’ she uttered.
They watched the clock’s red LEDs flicker to show them 11.59 p.m.
‘Where?’
Maddy stood up and pushed the chair back from the breakfast table with a scrape that echoed across the archway. ‘I’ll uh… I’ll explain another time. We’re about to have guests.’
Sal stood up and joined her in the middle of the floor, both facing the shutter door, and counting down the last sixty seconds as, behind them, the deep hum of machinery began to build to a final fizzing crescendo.
The strip light above them began to flicker and dim.
‘Well, here goes nothing,’ said Maddy, reaching out instinctively to hold Sal’s hand.
CHAPTER 50
65 million years BC, jungle
‘Do you think it’s deep enough?’ asked Liam.
Becks squatted down beside the waist-deep hole in the mud, and studied the oozing sides, slowly sliding downwards, and the bottom, already beginning to fill up around Liam’s ankles with cloudy water. ‘I do not know,’ she said.
‘ Don’t know, is it? Great.’ He wiped at his sweating brow, smearing mud across his forehead. ‘Well, who knows how deep is deep enough? May I have the tablet?’
She passed it down to him.
He turned the brick of clay over in his hands and studied the inscribed letters and numbers.
So, my little silent messenger, you go get us some help, all right?
He bent down and placed the brick writing-side down in the cloudy water and gently pressed it deep into the mud. ‘We’re counting on you, Mr Tablet, counting on you to do your very best for us. Last as long as you can, all right? And, like my Auntie Loretta used to say, you be sure to make a good impression.’ He looked up at Becks with a grin plastered on his face amid the mud. ‘Uh? Make a good impression? See what I did there?’
She stared down at him, grey eyes coolly analytical. ‘A pun,’ she replied. ‘A single word with multiple meanings dependent on contextual framing.’
‘Aye, a pun… you know? It’s meant to be funny.’
She frowned for a moment, and then her face suddenly creased with an insincere mirth and she bellowed a mock laugh. He cringed at the sound of it.
‘Jay-zus, Becks, if it’s not funny… just don’t laugh. I’m serious — it’s embarrassing.’
She stopped immediately. ‘Affirmative.’
Liam pulled himself out of the hole as the wet sides of it began to slop down into the bottom. He and Becks scooped up handfuls of mud and silt and helped the self-filling process until all that was left was a barely noticeable mound on the stream’s bank. Liam produced a length of bamboo and plunged it into the top and tore a ragged strip of neon green material from the bottom of his shorts. He tied it to the bamboo stalk. ‘And that’s so we’ll find it easy enough when we come back for it.’
Becks nodded. A part of the plan she’d insisted was necessary: to return to this time-stamp once everything else had been put right and retrieve every single one of the five tablets that were being put into the ground.
Liam looked downstream. The small trickling artery of fresh water twisted and curled out of sight beyond a thicket of reeds. ‘I wonder how the others are doing?’
Kelly stood up straight and placed his hands on his tired back. Their two tablets were now dug deep into the fine sand of the beach at either side of the small cove, both marked with bamboo flags and strips of material ripped from the sleeve of his office shirt.
‘Done!’ He smiled at the others. There was a muted cheer from Juan, Laura, Jasmine and even Akira, a girl as shy as Edward, self-conscious about her thick accent and faltering English.
He looked up the beach towards the line of reed thickets and clusters of bamboo, and the small delta of fresh water and silt that spread out and trickled down a fan of flow-worn grooves in the beach, down into the warm salty sea.
‘The others should be done pretty soon,’ he said. ‘Then we can head back.’
