Page 24 of Never Tear Us Apart
My head is heavy; exhaustion drags my body down into the comfort of cushion and pillow.
Sleep is a constant traveller; there are no borders in dreams.
Chapter Sixteen
Thursday 6thAugust 1942, 2 p.m.
‘Are you quite all right, my dear?’
Professor Salvatore Borg lights an oil lantern, which illuminates the small, vaulted shelter. It must have been used as cold storage once. Chisel marks can still be seen in the stonework. Now, there is a rickety-looking bookshelf in one corner, a chair and a small school desk with papers and notebooks balanced precariously across its surface. Some of them are open and scrawled with notes. In one corner, there is a metal-framed bed with a slim mattress and a battered-looking pillow. In another is a bucket. I don’t want to think about what that’s for. There’s also a small table with a covered jug and a bread tin on it.
‘I’m not sure,’ I say. I’m lying on the cool stone floor. There’s a battered-looking brown velvet cushion under my head. I can see by the creases in the material that it was once ruby-red and trimmed with gold.
‘You fainted,’ the professor tells me, peering at me. ‘Did you return? To where you came from? Or another place?’
‘Another place? How long was I out for?’ I ask.
I struggle to sit up, and he helps me with a gentle hand under my elbow. My instinct is to shuffle away from his touch, leaning against a wall for support.
He seems to understand and backs away a step. ‘A few minutes, perhaps five. Maybe one or two more.’
‘That proves it – you’re just in my mind. I was awake for more than twelve hours back in my real life, and then I went to bed. I was back for a whole day. That’s why this must be a hallucination or a delusion – a dream. It’s my fucked-up brain making everything too real again.’
The professor frowns fleetingly at the swear word but says nothing. ‘Yes, I recall thinking much the same thing when it first started happening to me,’ he tells me. ‘At first, it only occurred when I was asleep – easy to dismiss. Vivid dreams, I told myself. And then later, time started to come for me at any moment.’
Wincing a little, he crouches and then sits on the floor against the wall opposite me. He produces a handkerchief from his pocket and mops his brow. I hardly know him, but I know enough to know that the initials sewn into its corner are not his.
If this was real, everything about him would be waving red flags at me. But this is not real.
‘What do you mean: “Time comes for you”?’
Part of my therapy was to keep a dream diary. My therapist told me it might help me make sense of the secrets my brain was keeping from me. So it makes sense to try to understand why here, why him, why this.
‘It’s hard to explain, but you will understand soon enough. At its peak, it happened often, and it was always shocking. You should prepare yourself for that. It felt like constant vertigo: the ground would not remain beneath my feet and the world would disintegrate and reform itself around me, and I would be in another time. Still in Malta, but always in another time. Once, all I saw was the dark sky and a billion stars. I heard the roar of something in the night. I don’t knowfor certain, but I think that is the earliest time I was ever taken to.’ He pauses. ‘Like you, I tried to explain it all away. I told myself that I was simply dreaming, that any moment I would wake up at home beside my wife.’
‘You’re married?’ I ask.
‘I am,’ he says. ‘Or at least, I was. Or I will be. The only thing I know is that I miss her. Anyway, I didn’t die. Instead, the fluctuations, as I call them, started to slow down. But it wasn’t my own time that I seemed anchored to. I’ve lived almost permanently here now for thirty years – long enough to become part of the community, to almost forget that war was inevitable and that one day the siege of the island will end – which it will, though of course I can’t be certain it will end the way it has before.’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
‘I mean that whenever you are, there is only now. And in the now, nothing is predetermined. I mean that anything you do here might change everything. You might even erase your own existence, which would mean you had never travelled in time at all, which would make your present self something of an anomaly and present us with the kind of paradox that makes Einstein very unhappy.’
Noise crashes through the earth, filling the tiny room for several long seconds with a sound so powerful I feel it in every cell of my body. Fear flushes through me. Everything feels as if it is twisting and tearing apart. I long for one second of quiet, just enough to take an inward breath. I want to go back to a world where this horror belongs to other people.
‘You are quite safe,’ the professor assures me as the roar gradually dies away, leaving the air quivering in its wake. ‘That was close, perhaps the closest for now. Yes, I think the worst has passed.’
Sinking to the floor, I fold in on myself, tucking my head between my knees, searching for the courage I used to know.
When I made that terrible mistake in Syria, I had been there a month. From the roof of my hotel, I could hear the sounds of warfare like the boom of distant thunder. Not that one powerful aggressor bombing his own people to oblivion can really be called a war. I bore witness to plumes of smoke that curled into the sky, knowing only in abstract that each one grew from a place of devastation. I reported on children sheltering in bunkers, wrote stories about how they would sing to pass the time. I experienced the rolling blackouts across the country, the acute medical and food shortages. I sent news home, hoping my articles might help raise awareness, influence politicians.
I’m not sure that anything I’ve ever done has really helped anyone. The only solid evidence I have is of the harm I’ve done. So, the war my mind has dropped me into is hardly a subtle metaphor. My brain bombards me with guilt formed by experience. It was my fault. I put her in harm’s way.
There is no recovering from a mistake that cost a child her life.
Chapter Seventeen
‘Here.’ The professor passes me a tin mug of water. He listens for the next explosion. It’s a little fainter. ‘See, it will be done soon enough, and you are not dead. Some have died; some will die. But here on the island, the houses are made of stone, so fires, like you have had in England – they are rare. The shelters hold firm. Many live. Take comfort in that.’
