Young Writers Society

We arrived at the library at precisely nine-forty. It wasn’t far from my house, though it was a little out of the way for Chris, who had had to catch a bus to my house first, and had loyally done so for the past five years we’d known one another. We loitered outside the library for a bit, scuffing our shoes against the pavement while I hissed and sputtered and told Chris of the A-bomb that had struck my house that morning. He kept patting my back at intervals, looking quite concerned as I grabbed fistfuls of grass from the cracks in the pavement and shredded them into small, fine pieces.

‘She couldn’t have waited!’ I kept on mumbling in-between the narrative. ‘Two weeks! And she couldn’t have fecking waited!’ My stomach felt like it had been tightened and knotted into an intricate pattern; bile rose up my throat and I coughed, tears pricking at my eyes. I had refused to cry after Dad passed away. Refused, because Mum was an absolute mess and I’d told myself I would not dissolve in front of her. But now, out on the pavement, with the sky heaving like gelatinous blue broth above our heads, and the sun seeming to cackle as it streamed over the rooftops—I felt like my ribs had collapsed, their sharp edges sticking into my lungs and making it hard to breathe. And so I cried. And cried. And cried in a way that would have driven Mount Vesuvius to shame.

Chris was a real good sport about it. He’d seen me cry before, though I’d only seen him cry once, when he fractured his arm really badly in a football game. He patted me on the back and supplemented my rant with a consistent stream of swears he’d picked up from his cricket-playing friends. Chris’s dad was a pizza delivery man. His mum ran an electronics shop in Soho. It was always interesting, visiting him, not least because his home was so very different from mine, all linoleum flooring and tons of cats. A washing machine crammed in a tiny kitchen. Monet’s best artwork printed and tacked to the walls. I loved it there. Mum was stylish enough to want marble flooring and silk brocade upholstery in our house, but stingy enough to not buy a washing machine. The Remingtons, despite their incredibly posh-sounding name, lived simply; their apartment was small, I admit, but it had a fantastic view of the skyline.

I would’ve killed for that view.

And Chris, too, was as different from home as it could get. And I was grateful for the comfort he brought, from his little corner of Soho, a weird half-Japanese, half-Arab kid whose Dad had migrated from Oman and found a job and a wife here. He wasn’t rich. He wasn’t snobbish. And I was so grateful for the day he won a scholarship to my school, because if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been his friend. And who would have kept me company in this time of need, if not him?

‘I didn’t even know who our neighbours were,’ I said to him now, plaintively. ‘I didn’t know he was our neighbour. But she can’t expect me to know—I’m at school for more than half the year….’ I huffed. ‘A sloth, Chris, an actual sloth. What on earth did she see in him? And she couldn’t have talked to me about it before? And all the aunties—gosh, Chris, congratulating her like she’d just become a Nobel laureate. It’s … it’s…’ I struggled to find the right word.

‘Sickening?’ Chris offered.

‘Worse!’ I moaned and hid my face in my hands. ‘Dad hated company. I wonder what he’d say if … if he saw all the peacocks strutting around in the living room today.’

Chris laughed. ‘If I know anything about your dad, he’d have scared them away with an umbrella—you know, that big, red one, with the dragon’s head that wobbles on top?’

‘Oh!’ I laughed, too, remembering. ‘Yeah, I think that one’s in his study. I’ve’nt seen it around the house, anyway.’

‘Have you been up there?’ Chris asked, leaning back and resting his palms on the gravel. ‘In his study, I mean?’

I thought about it. A miserable-looking tabby cat came and sniffed at my feet, and an old Volkswagen trundled by, but otherwise, the street was rather empty. I stared at the back of my hands, tracing the veins with my eyes. Chris fiddled with the pages of his book, running his hands along the dusky-orange cover and flipping it open and shut as he waited for me to answer. Across the street, shops had started to open, and a worker was sweeping the front steps of The Ladyrinth Boutique with a surprising amount of gusto. We watched as sunlight trickled over the trees, clouds beginning to drape the horizon in strands of grey chiffon. I stared at them, without really seeing anything, my mind having travelled back to a small attic-like room in my house.

I saw a broken spyglass kissing the sunbeams that shone in through a round window. A strange assortment of mirrors—convex, concave, and other kinds, that wouldn’t be out of place in a circus tent. And books. Books upon books. Cupboards filled with them, shelves that always threatened to burst but never did. A floor that shone like honey. I screwed up my eyes, trying to give clarity to the disconnected images that rushed through my head. The memories were all like pieces of mosaic, and I felt like I’d cut my fingers open if I tried to bring them together. Sighing, I looked at Chris.

Slowly, I shook my head. ‘I don’t … think I’ve been in there. Like, I remember it vaguely, so I think he must’ve let me in at least once, when I was a kid, but it’s one of those blurred-at-the-edges kind of pictures. Blurred at the edges, no definition, a cloud of dust that slips from between your fingers, but not without some of the dust settling down on your palm.’ Tears threatened to spill from my eyes again.

‘I’m such a sodding nancy,’ I said bitterly. ‘He would’ve been so disappointed. Do you know, before I left for school, after Christmas, Dad quipped that he’d never forgive me if I didn’t tell him a knock-knock joke at his funeral. He was always f—fond of those.’ I sniffled and wiped my nose on the hem of my dress. ‘And do you know, Chris? I didn’t. I didn’t tell him a knock-knock joke and—and—’ I dissolved into tears again.

‘Hey.’ Chris slung an arm around my shoulder. ‘I bet your dad’s not angry, just disappointed. We could borrow a couple of joke books today—I’ll help you pick out the best ones. And then we can tell them to your dad. How’s that sound?’

I made an odd gurgling sound through the tears. ‘It sounds … it sounds good,’ I said, although I felt distinctly as though my stomach had been punctured, and a dead weight was pressing down on my chest. I wiped at my face with my now-sodden sleeve and pulled a face. Chris jumped to his feet.

‘C’mon, Nick Bottom,’ he said teasingly. ‘That’s enough crying for today.’ Half-laughing, I swatted at his arm, but he just grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me down the street, past the shops, and into the library.

Unfortunately, the reception area was blocked. Not by a crowd of people, as one would expect, or an angry mob of teenagers complaining about the poor wi-fi or some other tosh—no.

A huge slab of granite stood in front of the reception desk, and behind it, in a swirling mass of gold and silver, and muted shades of blue and black, was what appeared to be a whirlpool. At first glance, I thought it might be a black hole, before I realised how utterly senile a thought that was. Besides, you couldn’t see black holes. And as much (or little) as I had learnt from GCSE Astronomy, I knew that black holes were not in the habit of forming in places like public libraries.

Beside me, Chris was gaping at the scene, his eyebrows nearly touching his hairline. ‘Do you think Mrs Bernard is in that—thing? What is that thing? Jude—bleeding hell, Jude, the police, should we call the—where the hell is everyone?’ His frame shook visibly, all nearly-six-feet of him. I didn’t even want to know what I looked like, but my palms were sweaty, and my arms and legs were as wobbly as silicon forks.

‘I don’t—know,’ I whispered. ‘Should we go?’

Chris nodded fervently.

I gulped. My eyes swept the entirety of the reception area; it looked perfectly fine, with not a portrait askew on the walls, or a thing misplaced on Mrs Bernard’s vigorously-organised desk. Gaze finally landing on the strange whirlpool behind her desk, I started. It hung there like a tapestry. There was no magnetic force, nothing that pulled the desk or its various articles into the whirlpool’s muted depths. Not a page flickered. Not a pen rattled in its holder. It was oddly mundane, like looking at something that was made of cardboard.

Yet, I was seized by a sudden fancy to touch it. I couldn’t explain it then, and probably can’t even now, that feeling that shook me, rattled my bones and swung a want open within me, like a hidden door I’d never cared to notice before. It was, simply put, a feeling.

I had to touch it. Barely stopping to think, I walked around the block of granite and climbed onto the desk. The polished wood was slippery underneath my sandals. I nearly tripped over a stack of folders, unseeing and uncaring of what came in my way. Different sensations flooded me, warping my senses and turning my thoughts into incoherent rabble. I could not think. I did not know who I was. I could smell freshly-baked bread, the scent of blood and sweat, dew, flowers, rubbish—battlefields and dinner tables, gardens and alleyways and paths of broken pipes and fragmented glass. I could touch them, taste steel, feel iron burn against my skin. I felt like I was everywhere and everyone at once, my hands still stiff by my sides, exhaling in short gasps, the world slitting into my throat inch by painful inch—

I had never felt so alive. So I did what any other person would have done, had they been me instead.

I laughed. Reared back my head, black stallion-esque, the blood thrumming in my head like rain against drums, and laughed.

Nothing matters any more, I thought ecstatically, somewhere within the din of myself.

‘Jude,’ I registered Chris hissing from somewhere behind me. ‘I thought you said—oi, don’t touch it!’

One of the clearest things I felt as my fingers skimmed the whirlpool’s watery surface was something slamming into the side of my face. In an instant, I was knocked aside, eyes blurring and head clearing miraculously as I slammed into the marble floor. I could hear Chris running towards me, saw a flash of blue speed by the desk and disappear. The whirlpool blinked shut, like it had never been there at all.

Later on, I learnt that the flash of blue had a name. I learnt why he had come to Chelsea, and who had sent him, and that he had saved me from potentially losing myself to Time by hitting me on the head with the Oxford Dictionary.