The Practicalities of Freezing Time: Chapter Nineteen

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“You’re wrong,” muttered Naledi to herself. “You’re wrong, Schnabeltier.”

     She found herself running, past Miss. Schnabeltier, out of class, across the school field, not looking back as she brushed past classmates and heard them swear or as teachers called after her as she neared the exit of the school.  She did not stop.  She ran straight out of the school gates and started off down the road, muttering, muttering all the time: “You’re wrong. You’re so wrong.”

     She ran on further still.  She reached the town and looked around her, looking for something good to do.  She quickly linked her fingers together to freeze time all around her and ran across the static road to reunite a panicked looking young man with his wallet, which had ‘fallen’ out of his back pocket into the sly hand of a sly-looking lady.  She unfroze time and swivelled round to see a look of relief on his face as he felt the wallet in his jeans once again and a look of confusion on the lady as it vanished from her hand.

     Naledi froze time again, scanning the area for other opportunities; other ways to prove her point.

     She ran, erratic, climbing across bonnets and over boots; jumping over yapping dogs with their yaps stuck in their throats and even across a sofa being carried by two men in blue overalls removing it from a shop that had closed down.  She reached the mall and ran inside: this was where being a hero had started, right? The shoplifting?

     Naledi ran back to the shop.  She noted that the knives had been moved: good.  No accidents there, then.  She glanced round the shop, looking for any more shoplifters, but there was no-one there.  She ran out.

     The mall was busy, which surprised her slightly.  Whilst stuck in school, it was hard to imagine anyone outside, but the mall was full of people in shops or just out of them, drinking tea and buttering bread.

     She ran to a dark area of the mall, one where great pillars cast shadows over forgotten pot plants and vending machines that were unplugged.  She swiftly unfroze time and peered into the daylight.  No-one noticed her staring, listening, seeking out trouble.  They were too busy with buttering and drink, with talk and shopping.

     She heard a cry and swivelled her head to the left, but saw only a baby causing their granddad to moan and grasp his hair in frustration, and a man who had tripped up and hurt his ankle.  She frowned and looked to her right instead.  There was a large amount of scaffolding erected, from the bottom of the mall to its top floor, and at the top wobbled a young woman in an orange fluorescent jacket, fiddling with a screwdriver and mopping her brow.

     Naledi popped out of the shadows and edged towards her, watching carefully as she tipped herself to the right, precariously balanced, shaking slightly, her hands clenched tight for support as she gripped upwards and tried to reach what she was after; a screw that needed seeing to.

     She let out a breath and tumbled back slightly, thudding onto the scaffolding, safe, with a gasp.  Naledi’s heart screamed and she found herself giddy with acrophobic nausea.  The woman trembled slightly and turned back to the job in hand.  Her feet slipped as she tried to climb up a rung on the scaffolding and aim her screwdriver once again.  She fell forwards and grasped harder, as Naledi walked closer and closer towards her still, fingers ready to link together.

     The woman’s shaking hand hovered over the screw and she angled herself back a bit, tipping, trying to edge the screwdriver into place, desperately breathing upwards to flit away a strand of hair, shaking faster now, one of her knuckles bleeding through scraping it somewhere along the line but she wasn’t sure when.  She was so close now, so close.  Naledi walked back a bit, trying to take it in as the woman plunged the screwdriver in and turned it, slowly, slowly, edging it out, teasing it along, so very, very close when she suddenly dropped it and wobbled and there came an incredible scream.

     Naledi darted forward then stopped, aware that the woman’s screwdriver merely clattered down to a platform below, and she was stable, holding the elusive screw in one hand and clinging, scared but safe, onto the scaffolding.

     She heard the throaty scream again and scanned the mall, looking for its source, trying to concentrate over the music wafting out of one shop, an automated security announcement from another, people’s chattering slowly silencing as the scream filled the air once again with an appendage this time: “Help me.”

     Naledi looked to her left and gazed into the distance.  The man who had tripped over and hurt his ankle: he hadn’t tripped over.  His ankle was fine.  It was the rest of him.  A heart attack.

     “Help me!”

     Naledi ran over pushing past stationary shoppers and those pretending not to watch, those stubbornly not watching despite the temptation, and those shamelessly craning their neck towards someone’s horror.  There was the granddad, pram and crying baby to one side, supporting the other man, a lady by the man, screaming, holding the man’s hand tight, absently flitting over his wedding ring with her fingers.  Tears.  So many tears.

     Naledi reached them and saw the waxy sheen of the man’s skin and the sound of phlegm and effort in his chest as his breaths stuttered out of his mouth like the rattle of an old engine that refused to start.

     “Help him… somebody help him.”

     Naledi froze time and walked over to him, holding his hand.  She went to put her mouth over his, to breathe into him, but didn’t know if it would work.  Freezing time seemed to stop that sort of thing: no matter how much she was told to ignore the rules and just go along with things, she knew that there were some things she simply could not do, and breathing him back to life was one of them.  She felt his cold skin and the beads of sweat on his head.  She could not save him.  She did not know where to start.

     She stood back and unfroze time as doctors reached him and took the wife and the granddad away and she watched them as they grabbed his body, surprisingly roughly, hurled things onto him, listened for breaths and ticks and tocks inside, pinched his nose and opened his eyelids.  She watched them as they put lips to his then masks then opened his bare chest.

     She watched as he died and she couldn’t save him.  She couldn’t save him; she couldn’t save anyone.  Time did not reverse; it did not rewind.  The second she had unfrozen it, she had known that he was going to die and there was nothing at all that she could do about it, nothing at all.

     She backed away, head numb and blank, a vague niggling thought that she should be at school, and ran back home.  She ran to her room, paced the floors, took off her top, put her top back on, tugged at her hair, and finally, out of nowhere, cried, a sudden tear, then ran to her mum’s room, stripping cupboards bare as she looked for her old scrapbooks, determined to find the lie; the heroic picture.  Her dad, doing what she could not do and saving the day like a real hero.

     She found old spelling books which revealed that she could never spell ‘occasionally’, not even back then; paintings created by affixing the right blob of paint to the right number; scraps of stories using characters from Beatrix Potter books she so adored.  There were crude drawings in thick grey pencil of toys she liked to play with, a photo from a local newspaper of her dressed up as a pirate at a school fête, a leaf which she had pressed together, a memory she’d long forgotten but now burst to life in her head.  The days she’d waited for the leaf to be ready, sat by the fire, burning her back slightly as the skies were totally dark and nothing visible out of the windows save for the raindrops draping over them.

     No firemen, though.  No Dad.

     She sank against one side of the bed, when something caught her eye.  A fat book, something Mum was pretending to read but had long ago given up on, sat by her bedside.  There, a few dozen pages in, poked out a scrap of paper acting as a bookmark.  Slightly discoloured with sun and time at the edges, it was folded over like a fan, but Naledi knew it at once.  She could see the fading red of a bus she had drawn so carefully and the first licks of a dangerous flame.

     She pulled the paper free and unfolded it, smoothing out folds nearly as old as the picture itself, and gazed at it.  It wasn’t anything much now, she could see that; just a child’s drawing, though one she had struggled with.  She could see the slight wobble of concentration over the straight lines, the desperation to be tidy with her scribbles.  It wasn’t much to look at, but it was the best she could do, probably then and now.  Definitely now.  The best she could do was pretend to save lives.

     Naledi felt a tear roll down her face again as she looked at the drawing.  She held it up and tried to flatten out the creases, the paper thin and almost translucent as the sunshine hit it from outside, highlighting greasy marks in the four corners where magnets had desperately held it onto the side of a fridge for years, and… something else.  Some writing, spider thin, in light pencil.

     She flipped it around.  There was a phone number and a name underneath: CLIVE PLANT.  Perfectly legible, written so carefully in her mum’s handwriting.  As old as the drawing itself.  Call-me-Clive, scribbled over her dad.

     “Naledi? Naledi! There you are…”

     Naledi turned to the doorway.  Her mum was stood there, Mr. Plant and Miss. Schnabeltier just behind her.  Naledi linked her fingers together, further scrunching up the paper, and couldn’t quite understand when everyone carried on walking towards her.

     Naledi stopped linking her fingers and held up the paper instead: “What… what’s this?” She indicated the phone number. “I don’t get it. I don’t get it, Mum. I don’t understand.”

     She heard Miss. Schnabeltier, angry and stern, disgusted, even, addressing her mum: “So. You lied, Jo. You are a liar. You haven’t told her anything.” And with that, she fainted in a pool of tears and utter, crushing fatigue.