Page 98 of Right Place, Right Time
‘Shall we come?’ Barney asks, still full of excitement.
‘No!’ I snap at him. ‘No,’ I repeat a little more gently. ‘I’ll tell him. There’s a few things I want to ask him while I’m there.’
Barney opens his mouth, but Adam speaks first. ‘I don’t know about you, Barney, but I could do with something to eat. Shall we nip out and get some lunch while Eve speaks to Ben?’
I smile gratefully at Adam as I leave the shop, stopping immediately outside to take a few deep breaths. Everything is moving too fast right now – I just need some time to think. Both about what we’ve discovered and what’s the right thing for Barney.
But time, ironically, is something I don’t have enough of right now. Because Ben spots me from his shop window and waves me over.
‘Eve, my dear!’ he says as I enter the shop. ‘Are you all right? You looked a little stressed outside your shop just now.’
‘A little shellshocked might be a better description, Ben, and not only about what you told us yesterday.’
I tell Ben everything that happened this afternoon. From our ideas about the tree and the brass calendar, to me actually travelling back in time, and our meeting. But I leave out the conversation I overheard between Harriet and Luca.
‘Oh, my,’ Ben says, looking shocked. ‘You actually did it?’
‘But you worked that out already when I bumped into you in February?’
Ben smiles knowingly. ‘It depends what timeline of events we’re following. Remember, that meeting between us didn’t happen originally.’
‘It’s very confusing.’
‘The ability to time travel is, that’s why it’s only granted to those who can handle both the knowledge and the pressure. But you’ve learnt how to control the portal, Eve. The first person in … well, it could be centuries, for all we know. You are truly worthy of this honour that’s been bestowed upon you.’
‘It’s very early days, but I think we might have a loose grip on it.’
‘I think you are too modest. It really is truly incredible,’ he continues, looking amazed and at the same time emotional. He shakes his head in disbelief. ‘I can’t believe that after all these years, not only were the predictions on the tree and the doors correct, but now there’s actually a chance for me to return.’
‘Why do you want to go back, Ben?’ I ask, knowing the reason, of course. But I want to know more. ‘I know it’s to see your mother, but what else is making you want to take this enormous risk?’
Ben looks at me as if he doesn’t quite understand.
‘You don’t know what will happen to you if you time travel. You might remain as old as you are now, or you could revert back to the ten-year-old boy you were when you came here. Will you have memories of what’s to come in the future? How will it all work?’
‘That’s the beauty of it,’ Ben says, smiling. ‘I don’t know. No one does.’
‘Then why do it? Forgive me for saying this, but you’re old, Ben. You’re fragile. Being old at the turn of the last century isn’t like being old now – it will be tough.’
‘I know it will be,’ Ben says sombrely. ‘But I haven’t got many more years on this earth, whether I decide to spend them here in the present time, or back then. IfI don’t go back now, I’ll never do it, and therefore I’ll never feel truly at peace with myself.’
‘But what if you didn’t knowwhereyou came from? You didn’t know you’d time travelled here and you had no memory of your original life. Do you think you’d want to know the truth?’
Ben gazes steadily but silently at me. Only breaking eye contact to blink.
‘Barney,’ he says eventually. ‘Who told you?’
‘No one told me. I found out earlier when I travelled back to the twenty-ninth of February. I overheard a conversation between Harriet and Luca that day.’
Ben nods, as though it doesn’t surprise him the two of them would have been gossiping together.
‘Barney doesn’t know he came through the tunnel,’ he says. ‘He doesn’t know he was actually the last person to do so as well. He was just a small child when he came through, barely walking. Actually, that was the problem. He wasn’t walking – he couldn’t.’
‘Barney told me he couldn’t remember his parents because they’d died in a house fire when he was four, and that was when he lost the use of his legs.’
‘That part is true. That is exactly what happened to him. But it didn’t happen in the year 2004 like he thinks it did, it happened in 1908.’
I try to process the dates as well as what Ben is telling me. ‘How did he come through the tunnel if he couldn’t walk?’
