The Lost Girls Page 3
This thought reminds me of my phone, and I take it out of my bag. If this were an episode of Dr Who I could dial up Richard, even in another time, and weep out my story; but again there’s no signal, and I don’t expect one.
The phone battery is down to 65% and I’m not confident I’ll be able to charge it, so I turn it off for the moment. I will go looking for a charger tomorrow, but I have a feeling I won’t find one. I think USB cables were around in the old days, but the small connection we now use for phones might be a bit too recent.
In any case, I don’t seriously expect to wake up in this room tomorrow. The only possible explanation for all this is that it is a dream after all, a particularly elaborate one. I will go to sleep, and when I wake up I will be either at home in my own bed, or still on the bus.
All the same, I decide not to take my clothes off, just on the off-chance that I really have turned into a time traveller. I don’t want to find myself wandering through some unexpected landscape in the past or the future wearing just a flannelette nightie.
6
Consciousness comes back slowly, and I can feel a soft bed under me and a pillow that is not quite right. As my senses sharpen I’m also aware of a faint musty smell, and I open my eyes reluctantly.
I see white walls, the edge of a patchwork quilt, the leadlight window faintly illuminated in the grey light of a winter morning. I feel the slight pressure of a small cat curled into my side, and I know without looking that it’s Henrietta.
It’s hard to guess what time it is, and I forgot to reset my watch yesterday when I had the chance. As my senses sharpen I can hear sounds from the nearby kitchen, indicating that the family are up and getting ready for the day.
My door creaks and I quickly close my eyes. I feel a faint presence in the room and I know it’s Claire, gazing at me. There is a soft plop as the cat jumps off the bed and goes to her. After a moment the door clicks shut, then I hear voices in the kitchen again. She is telling Stella that I’m still asleep, and they are deciding not to disturb me. I’m not sure if I’m actually remembering this, or if it’s just because I know them so well and I know what they would be thinking and doing.
If a strange woman came to stay, a woman claiming to be Linda, surely I would remember it. I wonder if that’s how it works. Yesterday – at least, yesterday in my time, in the twenty-first century – I didn’t remember any such thing, because it hadn’t happened. But that’s me in there, Stella aged forty-something – forty-three, I think – and this is happening to me, to my family in my house. So I should remember it. And it’s true, there’s something niggling in my brain, a new memory that seems to have surfaced, of someone turning up unexpectedly and yes, staying in this room. But the thought is so hazy I could be just imagining it, and I have no sense of who this person was, how long she stayed or what happened.
What do I remember? Julian with Natalie, an annoying presence in the house, right into his early university days when he should have been out having fun. Our pussy-footed attempts to break them up. Julian telling me much later, one New Year’s Eve after we had lost Claire, that Natalie had held him in a complicated web of emotional blackmail and that he had never really loved her. If only I had known.
Julian, my beautiful son who was so casual in his youth and now takes life so seriously. After Natalie he didn’t attempt a relationship for a few years, throwing himself into work. Then the miracle happened, and he, the boy who always kept things to himself, told me about it the same day.
He was walking through the city on his lunch break, hurrying to get back to the office, when he passed a girl coming the other way. She had a thin, sharp face, brown hair in a long shining ponytail and the darkest eyes he had ever seen, and as they passed those dark eyes caught his and she flashed the briefest of smiles. He stopped and turned to watch her melting into the lunchtime crowd, wondering what it was about her that had struck him so. Perhaps it was the way her plain face had lit up and transformed into something beautiful when she smiled.
She turned a corner and he suddenly came to his senses, ran after her and asked her to come and have a coffee with him. She agreed, gravely, and they have been together ever since. Françoise. She had been in Sydney on a secondment from the Banque Nationale de Paris, where she worked, and was due to go home to France at the end of the week. He went after her and they lived in Paris, then Geneva; but they came back to settle in Sydney before their little daughters were born: Garance and Marie-Claire – Gigi and Mimi – three years old and full of mischief. I can’t imagine life without them.
I thought the twins might help me to live with the pain of losing my own girl, my Claire. In some ways they did: I could tease out some of the love that had wound itself into a tight knot around my heart and lavish it on them. In the first, hardest months I would go to the little house early in the mornings and take the babies from Françoise so that she could sleep a little. I would wheel them around the park in the big French pram, and if one or other of them started to wail I would pick her up and gaze into those beautiful brown eyes and remember every second of the life of my precious Claire.
Every second, from the difficult birth and tears of joy, through the wonder of watching a little person evolve, to that terrible night in the alley after four endless days of searching for her. But before I had to relive that night the other twin would wake up and I could cradle them both, burying my face in their downy hair and breathing in that scent of sour milk, vomit and sweet baby.
But now I can see her again, every day while this lasts, and I have a chance to get her back. The thought makes my head swim. What I must remember now is her life from the ages of twelve to sixteen, so I can try to identify the moment when it started to go wrong for her. Then I have to find a way to warn Stella.
Time passes and I doze a little. Once all is silent in the house I get up and venture inside. Stella has left the breakfast things out and there’s a note and a transport ticket for me on the kitchen table.
Welcome again, Linda, and here is a key for you. The blue card is a Travel Ten to use on the bus or ferry. Take the 433 from Gladstone Park to Central if you want to pick up your things. See you tonight. S xxx
Tiptoeing around, even though I know they’re all gone for the day, I eat, shower and dress again in my clothes from yesterday. Catching the bus into the city seems as good an idea as any, and has the advantage that any nosy neighbours who happen to spot me will see me doing what Stella expects. I need to use my small amount of cash to good effect, and there should be some cheap shopping around Central and Chinatown.
7
As it turns out, it takes me most of the day to get the few things I need. I start with a plastic overnight bag from a two-dollar shop in George Street, but then walk all the way up to King Street without finding any of the ridiculously cheap Chinese clothes stores that I’ve been counting on. It seems they haven’t opened yet, and clothes in the other down-market places are more expensive than in my day. All I manage to get is some underwear from Woolworths before I go searching through the suburbs for half-remembered charity shops.
Late in the day I find a hole-in-the-wall computer store and ask if they’ve got a USB cable with an end that will fit my phone. I don’t know much about USB technology, but I feel that connecting my phone to a computer will either blow it up or charge it, and I might as well take the risk.
The young Chinese guy behind the counter is very interested i
n my phone, which I try to keep covered by my hand, only showing him the connection point.
“Is it camera?” he asks. “Very skinny. Where the battery go?”
“Oh . . . um . . . there’s room inside.”
I can tell he has spotted the Samsung brand name and he’s not convinced by my story, but I snatch the phone away and put it in my bag. That would be all I’d need – for a bright young IT whiz to get a good look and consequently invent the smart phone about fifteen years too early. That would upset the world economy all right.
“No USB cable for that. Too small,” he says, looking offended.
“Do they make them? Could I get one somewhere else?”
“No. No cable anywhere.”
When I finally haul myself onto a bus home my money is almost exhausted and my overnight bag is less than half full with the new underwear, a toothbrush and a few basic cosmetics, a couple of jumpers smelling faintly of deodorant, some lumpy second-hand jeans and a few pairs of socks. I couldn’t find any affordable shoes, so I’m going to look strange in socks and sandals, but at least they are teamed with a rather nice trench coat for which I paid too much. Perhaps this will be Linda’s signature style, I think wryly. In any case, my feet will be warm and I’ll look even less like Stella.
The bus lumbers out of the city and up onto the Anzac Bridge, still known as the new Glebe Island Bridge and not yet guarded by statues of an Australian soldier at one end, a Kiwi at the other.
I believe in science and logic. I don’t believe in magic, religion or any other kind of mumbo-jumbo because it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. If Jesus turned a couple of loaves and a fish or two into a feast, where did the extra molecules come from to make that additional food? Were the fish real enough to have once been alive, to have had parents – in which case Jesus would have been manipulating the past – or did they come into existence already dead? And, with all those new molecules, the total mass of the Earth would have been marginally greater, so that must have had an effect on time and gravity. Does God not know about the law of conservation of matter, of which I think he’s supposed to be the author?
If I were here as a result of a mad scientist bundling me into a time machine and dialling up 1997 I would be pretty surprised, but at least it would make sense. I might also have the comfort of knowing I could summon up the time machine again and take myself home. Or perhaps it would be a portal on a bus, like this bus, like the one I was on yesterday when it all started.
But what’s actually happening doesn’t make that kind of sense and it doesn’t conform to any rules that I know of. All I can suppose is that it’s happening entirely inside my head. If it is a dream, then sooner or later I’ll wake up. If it’s a cataclysmic event like a stroke or a psychotic episode there’s no guarantee it will ever end. In either of those scenarios my actual body is somewhere other than what I am experiencing: lying in a bed, or maybe bound in a straitjacket in a padded cell, doctors probing me with lights to my eyeballs. It seems strange that I would feel so clear and rational if that’s happening but after all, why not.
Perhaps the solipsists are right and my whole world, my whole life is an illusion. In that case there’s no reason why I couldn’t jump into another time continuum. There would be no physical laws to worry about, as I’d probably be just floating in an environment of sensory deprivation, and nothing around me would exist at all, except in my imagination.
However that may be, beguiled by the real-ness of what I am experiencing: the whiff of BO from that man holding onto the strap in the aisle; the kid behind me kicking the back of my seat as he whines, “But why, Grandma? Whyyyyyyyyy?”; the tinny strains of “Life on Mars” escaping from that girl’s headphones – I can only go along with the experience as if it were real, and worry about the implications later.
In a dream, practical considerations evaporate, but I don’t think that’s going to happen here. So what, I wonder, will I do when my money runs out and I wear out my welcome in my old home? I can’t present myself anywhere as Stella Lannigan, with her tax file number, her bank accounts, her healthcare, her credit cards. That identity is already taken. I can’t use her qualifications and experience to get a job commensurate with her talents – and mine – even if anyone would consider a down-at-heel old bag-lady for such a thing. I could, I suppose, get hold of Linda’s birth certificate and set up a detailed impersonation of her, but either she has no qualifications and no work history, or the real Linda is out there somewhere, ready to jump on me in indignation.
I get home before the others and hole up quietly in my room, but Stella ferrets me out.
“I’ve brought you some coat hangers,” she says, entering after the briefest of knocks. “There are some hooks on the back of the door you can use for your clothes.”
She takes in the overnight bag and the absence of anything much else. “Is that all you’ve got?”
“I had some trouble in Perth,” I tell her, my eyes downcast. “There was a house . . . this bloke I was living with . . . I had to leave in a hurry.” Her eyebrows are raised, but I know she’s always imagined Linda leading a racy life, somewhere on the fringes, so she’s not going to doubt my implied story.
“Okay. Well, if you need any help to get things sorted out . . .” Her voice trails off and she makes her escape. The offer is genuine, I know, but the last thing she needs in her life is more complications.
At dinner, I ask questions to encourage them all to talk about themselves. My memories of this time have inevitably blurred and lost detail, so I am overjoyed to hear exactly what subjects Julian is doing at school and the names of his teachers. I try to draw out Claire, but she seems overcome by shyness.
In the end Richard does most of the talking, eager to explain his job in the computer department of a big trading bank. “They’ve asked me to head a special project to prepare for the year 2000,” he tells me. “It sounds good to me, and I think it’ll be fairly long-term, because there’ll probably be ongoing problems after the millennium bug hits.”
“What’s the millennium bug?” I ask, feigning innocence.
“Well,” says Richard, “I don’t know how much you know about computers?”
“A little bit.”
“Yeah. Well, in the early days, when computer memory was really expensive, the software developers had to keep everything nice and concise. So in lots of instances, instead of putting in the date as, say, 01/02/1985, they’d just put 01/02/85. That saves two characters every time they use it.”
“Why didn’t they make it 1/2/85, then?”
“No, no, no, it has to be regular syntax. Forget the slashes, dates were in the format DDMMYY, okay? Anyway, the point is they weren’t really thinking about what would happen when the date’s 01/01/00, or anything after that. With only two digits for the year, the computer will assume that’s 1900.”
“So it will think that 01/01/00 is earlier than 31/12/99, not later?”
“That’s exactly right, and everything will go haywire. Anyway, these old computer programs lasted a lot longer than people thought, and they’re everywhere, especially in banks and government departments and other big organisations.”
“Can they be replaced in time?”
“No. There are systems built on systems built on systems, and it’s turning out to be a house of cards. So we’re starting this big hunt and fix operation, finding all the two-digit-year dates and reprogramming those bits.”
“It sounds hard.”
“It’s very hard, and a lot of the programming was done in languages that people don’t learn any more, like Cobol and Fortran and other languages you haven’t even heard of.”
“Dad!” says Julian. “She hasn’t heard of Cobol or Fortran either!”
“Yes I have,” I say. “In the old days I worked in a few places where they had computers, and I do mean computers – the first one I saw took up a whole room. There were people lining up with boxes of punch cards to run their programs.”
Stella’s
eyes light up. “Right! Some of the people I worked with in the early days used to tell those stories.”
“Yeah,” says Richard. “One of my first big responsibilities was to approve the purchase of a one-gigabyte hard drive. It costs about fifty thousand dollars. These days you can get a cheap PC with one gigabyte!”
I imagine showing them my sliver of a phone, with its 32-gigabyte capacity. They would think it was some sort of trick, and they’d start viewing me with suspicion.
“Do you work with computers too, Stella?” I ask innocently, to change the subject.
“Only incidentally. I’m a technical editor. People give me boring, badly written documents full of mistakes, and I fix them up.”
“Really? That’s a bit like what I’ve been doing,” I tell her.
“Is that so?” She’s sceptical.
“Well, at the place where I’ve been working in Perth, they have to prepare a lot of tenders, and they’re always a mess,” I say, thinking on my feet. “So I sort of put it all together and make sure it looks right.”
I’ve had a bright idea. If this is one of her busy periods I might be able to do some work for her and earn some money. She does employ extra people at times – I remember a few lost souls who turned up from time to time and helped her out – and I wouldn’t be out of place among that crew. First, though, I’ll have to convince her that I can do it.
8
Once again I sleep longer and more deeply than I have done for years. Before my dream slips away I clutch at wisps of a balcony, a view of the sea and Richard saying something about a crocodile. White chairs and a glass-topped table.
I think the dream was about my life, my real life in the apartment with Richard, but I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps, I muse, that’s all that other life is: just a recurring dream. Perhaps I really am Linda and this is how my crumbling brain is starting to deceive me. If that’s true then I know nothing of life beyond 1997, and Claire is not going to die.