Grace cut to another Fay, with pepper and salt hair, and lines bracketing her mouth. She spoke animatedly of collecting thistles during her last field trip into the past.
The petals were golden, like lions’ manes. And they grew on every English lawn, but I picked them less than a mile from my mother’s primary school. She was probably in lessons. I really felt I was gathering something precious. As soon as I got back to my timeline, I took them to the Conclave garden. My mother had died of a stroke while I was away, so I’d said I’d visit my sister at some point to talk through funeral arrangements, but I started chatting with one of the horticulturists about a trip he’d just made to Japan, and I lost track of time. It was quite late when I arrived at my sister’s. She kept going on about how we’re orphans now. (Long pause.) It’s not that I don’t know how she feels. I know she believes Mum’s gone for ever. But I don’t want to be reminded of feeling upset in that way. It doesn’t seem very… relevant… any more. Not to my life. I hate admitting this, but I wished my sister would shut the hell up.
The fourth Fay was thinner – almost gaunt – and subdued. Ruby could see, on the timeline along the base of the video, that several minutes of footage remained.
When you’re a time traveller, the people you love die, and you carry on seeing them, so their death stops making a difference to you. The only death that will ever change things is your own.
Ruby hit the pause symbol. She let the phone go dark, wishing she’d never started down this particular rabbit hole. Until the meeting with Grace, the last thing she should be doing was dwelling on death. She really should be trying to distract herself.
One distraction was a woman named Ginger Hayes, who worked in a nearby brain injury unit. Technically, Ruby was single. But Ginger made an appearance at her flat once a month or so, for sex, and to drain Ruby’s reserves of red wine. Ruby had never been to Ginger’s house – which was apparently in Tring – and this exclusion from her everyday life made Ruby suspect she was married.
Later that same week, Ginger lay naked on Ruby’s bed, with flakes of mascara haloing her eyes. While Ruby was in Cornwall visiting Bee, Ginger had been in Brittany. Her skin was dense with freckles: a gift from the Breton sunshine. Ruby traced the constellations that adorned Ginger’s chest. Cassiopeia. The Seven Sisters. Had Ruby believed in astrology, she would have read their future from the patterns on Ginger’s body.
‘I assessed a new client this afternoon,’ Ginger said. ‘She was injured on her bike. A motorist opened his car door in her path, and she was thrown into the road. Now she’s aphasic. When she tries to talk, nothing comes out but a stream of swear words.’
Romantic pillow talk, by any measure.
‘Can you do anything for aphasics?’ Ruby asked.
‘This woman will probably benefit from speech therapy. She’s still young, which is in her favour. But her family want her to be the way she was before, and she won’t be.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Twenty-seven. Mother to a toddler.’
Ginger’s comments were downbeat, but Ruby appreciated the importance of Ginger’s job. They shared stressful working lives. Rarely did they discuss anything other than their clients.
Ruby’s arms circled Ginger’s waist and they kissed. Ginger’s lips were tannic. All week Ruby had fretted over the origami rabbit, how the body might be connected to Barbara, and what Grace could possibly be playing at. It felt so comforting, now, to be held. The closeness tricked her into an admission.
‘I’m sleeping badly,’ she said. ‘I keep worrying about my grandmother.’
‘Oh.’ Ginger fell back on her pillow. ‘Is she ill, then?’
‘No,’ Ruby said. ‘I mean – yes; she has bipolar disorder.’
‘Hm,’ Ginger said.
Ruby’s urge to confide in her ebbed. Had she overshared? By the usual constraints of their relationship, yes. She knew nothing of Ginger’s family. Ginger didn’t speak of her interests or where she was from. The secrets she shared were her patients’ rather than her own. Telling Ruby where she’d been on holiday was the most intimate detail she’d ever revealed. Picking up Ginger’s left hand, Ruby looked for a white circle among the freckles on her ring finger. The evidence was inconclusive.
Ginger pulled Ruby’s hand to her mouth, and kissed the inside of Ruby’s wrist. Maybe Ginger was right to shy away from personal revelations. Hadn’t Ruby wanted her for a distraction?
So Ruby let Ginger distract her. Afterwards, she fell asleep swiftly – for the first time that week.
*
The next morning Ruby heard Ginger in the kitchenette, opening and closing cabinet doors. Normally she would have left before dawn. Perhaps trouble at home had kept her here.
Ruby got out of bed and crossed the little hall to the kitchen doorway. Ginger was wearing Ruby’s dressing gown. Her hair was bright as marigolds against the green fabric. She filled the kettle.
‘I’ll make you breakfast,’ she said. ‘If there is anything for breakfast. D’you know what’s in your cupboards? A torn bag of rice and a very sticky bottle of Worcestershire sauce.’
‘There are eggs in that ceramic chicken.’
‘Perfect.’ Ginger busied herself with frying pans and butter. ‘I don’t have any clinics today. I’m giving a presentation on neural plasticity, but that’s not till noon.’
So they were to talk of work again. ‘Who’s the presentation for?’
‘Some new rehab workers. They always love the London cab example. You know, where the drivers memorise so many routes it physically restructures their brains?’
Ruby nodded. Her own day would include two clients with depression, and a third with PTSD. According to the usual pattern of her conversations with Ginger, she should volunteer that information now. But her new impulse to make personal admissions was back. Her previous attempt to discuss Bee had failed, and Ruby was not quite brave enough to talk of her explicitly again. She found herself drawn to a halfway position: couching personal concerns in professional interest.
‘There’s something I’ve been thinking over lately. Do you know if time travel changes the brain?’ Ruby had plausible grounds for ignorance. She only knew the basics of brain anatomy; she specialised in talking therapies.
‘Time travel doesn’t do much in the short term.’ Ginger pushed a stray lock of hair behind her ear. Heat shimmered over the pan. ‘But more experienced time travellers generally have a weird hippocampus.’
‘No one wants a weird hippocampus,’ Ruby said, wryly. ‘What causes that?’
‘One theory is that time travel places your recall abilities under unusual stress.’ Ginger cracked two eggs into the spitting fat. ‘Let’s use your memories for comparison. Think of something that happened a long time ago.’
‘OK. I remember my grandmother reading me The Box of Delights.’
‘The Box of What?’
‘The Box of Delights. It’s my favourite book. It has puppeteers, and schoolgirls who love pistols, and a magic box that takes you to the past—’
‘When exactly did she read you this?’ Ginger interrupted.
‘No earlier than 1990. I could read the words along with my grandmother, so I was old enough to be at school. We probably read it in the winter. I remember the wool of her smock on my cheek. That would make sense, because the story’s set at Christmas.’
‘Right. You don’t automatically recall when the event occurred. You can piece a likely date together from hints and trifling details. A time traveller goes through the same process with events that she’s witnessed in the future. Sometimes she gets the date wrong, and mistakenly places it in the past. She expects her friends and family to remember something that won’t happen for years. If she works in intelligence, that kind of mistake can be dire. Have you got a fish slice?’
‘Second drawer down on the left.’
Ginger found the slice, and slid an egg onto a plate.
‘I didn’t know you were so domesticated,’ Ruby said.
‘Don’t expect me to make a habit of playing housewife.’
Ruby’s mobile was ringing in the bedroom.