Somewhere Else Read online

  “I used to live in a house like that. You have a very pretty home,” Susie sighs.

  “What is your name?” The girl asks, dancing a little as she takes all of Susie in.

  “Susie.”

  A gasp explodes out of the girl but her mouth does open and her eyes don’t widened, she just stands and stares. “That’s my name too! Susie Ducker, pleased to meet you, Susie.” The girl thrusts out her hand as she uses rehearsed words, skipping over them just so she can repeat Susie’s name.

  Except her name is both of their names. Susie Ducker.

  “Call me Sue, otherwise we are going to get muddled up. Did you get that jumper for your birthday, Susie?”

  “No, but my birthday is in two weeks today! I want to have a picnic in the heather, but Dad says there is a poultry auction going on in town and that I have to help him carry the ducks he wants back,” Susie pouted at the thought of feathers all down her jumper. Sue knows that it what she is thinking, because she remembers those auctions and the stench of bird shit that clung to your cuffs for weeks after.

  “Can you tell me what the date is, Susie? The year too?”

  “It is August 14th 1998.” There is no hesitation, she had been so eager to impress back then, to show she wasn’t the stupid farm girl.

  She’s nearly eleven, Susie thinks, I could change everything.

  It must have been that shimmery thing she hit. Her mind beings to cave in on itself as she tries to consider the possibility of a time-travelling door being smack in the middle of some forgotten track in the Isle of Lewis. She never believed in God or any deity before, but now she considers it. Sue dreamt of her childhood today – or was it yesterday? – she wished she had made different choices and now she was here in the past. Or maybe it was the present? The future didn’t exist yet, it was there to change. Would she fade if she changed things? And how could she ensure this Susie ended up with a different life? Or were there just hidden cameras and this was one big miraculous joke?

  “Tell me something only you would know.”

  “Why?” Susie taps her wellies in the mud as she talks.

  “Because I have a really big secret and I was sent here to tell you all about it, but I need to know you are really Susie Ducker. I’ve been told all sorts of things about you and I need to know you are not some imposter!” Sue makes a show of the whole thing, waving her hands in the right places. Susie never liked it when people took everything so seriously and never had any fun.

  “I’m not, I’m not!” Susie laughs.

  “Prove it, little one.”

  “Promise you won’t tell anyone?”

  “I swear on all the worms in the ground.”

  Susie shrieks and stamps her feet. “Eww!”

  “Don’t you know how important worms are? They help make things grow. If we didn’t have them, well how would all those pretty cornflowers grow in your Mum’s garden?”

  “How do you know that?” Sue knows Susie is getting really interested because she has begun to gnaw on her bottom lip.

  “I told you, I know lots of things about you and your life. And I’ll tell you why, but first you have to tell me a secret. And not a little secret either, a really big secret. Something you have never told anyone,” Sue knows exactly which secret she wants Susie to reveal to her. No one ever found out.

  Susie looks left to right, gripping her hands in front of her and biting harder on that lip now that she is a little scared of getting found out. She leans in so her head is level with Sue’s own, their matching hair almost touching.

  “I broke my leg so I wouldn’t have to meet Stephen, Mrs Christmas’ son.” The voice slips out of the girl’s mouth and into the woman’s, they are so close together they could have kissed the words.

  “Why didn’t you want to meet Steve?” Sue asks, letting out one long breath. It isn’t too late to convince herself that what she did was wrong.

  “Because Mum says I’m going to marry him one day and I don’t want to get married. I went down the same hill Billy Yule fell down and broke his arm, the one with the rocks at the bottom. It hurt a lot. But I didn’t get to see Stephen. Mum says I still might though when they come back from holiday. She was angry that I broke my leg, but she didn’t find out why.”

  Sue looks straight into Susie’s eyes. “You are going to meet him, Susie. You are going to convince yourself that what you did was a very bad thing and that Stephen is a good guy, but you will end up calling him Steve. And you will tell yourself you love him and you will move in together and when you are twenty-seven years old you will really wish you didn’t.”

  “That’s not going to happen. I don’t want it to!” Tears spring up in Susie’s eyes and Sue wants to hug her, but resists. She needs Susie’s full attention and kindness always made her cry more.

  “It won’t, not now I’m here to save you. You see, Susie, I am you. I am twenty-seven years old and I come from your future, I travelled in time just like the Doctor in those Doctor Who annuals you like? I’m here to make sure you know that breaking your leg was a clever thing and that you must not end up with Steve. Because you know what, Susie?”

  The girl nods very slowly. But this is the important part, Sue knows exactly what to say next, like she is reading a script scrolling behind her eyes and telling her what the next step is. “You know when you went to your parent’s bedroom because of a nightmare and you saw Dad with his penis in Mum?”

  Susie flinches and now her mouth drops. She doesn’t need to answer. Sue knows Susie must have seen it very recently, maybe only last week. Dreams of her parent’s sex life haunted her all around her early teens and she had eventually burst out crying, begging to know why Dad had done that to Mum. The explanation came out nicely enough, a good bargaining point being the birth of her younger brother Matt.

  “Steve will do that to you eventually. But only if you meet him and start being friends with him.” Sue pressed on, she knew the nail has to be hammered straight into Susie’s brain.

  “But Mum will make me! I don’t want Steve to do that!” Susie starts crying and shaking all over. Sue knows exactly what her child-self is seeing, a conjured boy pinning a squealing Susie down, his penis flopping on her hips as she tries to fight him off.

  “No matter what anyone tells you, Susie, you won’t enjoy it. Sex is not for you, it isn’t important to you, you’ve got to escape from the big nothing you are going to feel if you do what Mum tells you.”

  Susie pushes back her tears and puts that determined frown on. Sue had lost that somewhere under the moving boxes. “What do I need to do?”

  “Come with me. We need to change things.” Sue stands up and motions for Susie to get into the passenger seat.

  Susie rocks from foot to foot, looking back at their home on the hill. She stares into the Fiat, which looks bright, shiny and new compared to their Dad’s truck.

  “I promise to bring you back at the end of the day.” Sue promises. And she will, she just needs to plant enough seeds into Susie’s head to want to rebel and escape. That’s what she needs: the drive to run.

  Susie nods to herself a few times. “One. Two. Three. Go.”

  Susie leaps past Sue and into the passenger seat, her wellies dangling just above the footwell floor and she struggles with the seatbelt. Sue grins, she can’t believe this is working. A headache is working its way into her brain but she feels more alive now than in a decade, so she leaps in after Susie and starts up the engine.

  “When was this made?” Susie asks once she is safely strapped in.

  “2014.”

  “Wow!” Susie laughs and claps her hands.

  “Where shall we go? We could go anywhere!” Sue reverses up the road, away from their house and back she came the previous night. But they wouldn’t go to Newmarket, they would go towards Uig or somewhere else completely!

  “The Callanish Stones!” Susie cried. “I’ve seen paintings b
ut Mum hasn’t taken me there.”

  No, Sue had taken herself there. It had been an early…..no….late? Sue struggled to remember it. It must have been in the summer right? She wouldn’t have tried to get there in the snow. Had she even been?

  “Okay! There’s a map in the glove-box, can you get us there, Susie? I know you are very good at map reading. I – or rather you – really want to go to New York you know.” This is a lie. Sue never really thought about New York, but it was far away and she needed Susie to want to be somewhere else, anywhere else, other than here. Paris, New Zealand, Japan, New York, hell even Kent, just so long as she got away from home.

  “Why do you want to go there?” Susie asks.

  “Why wouldn’t you want to go there! There are buildings as tall as the sky, cafés filled with the most delicious pastries, bookshops full of history and a giant stone lady in a toga called The Statue of Liberty.”

  “What does liberty mean?”

  “It means freedom, Susie. Freedom to be whoever or whatever you want to be. That is what I’m trying to give you Susie, but you have to do it yourself too. If you stay here, if you meet Steve, you won’t be free. You’ll feel so trapped.” Sue began to feel tears in her eyes. She knew she could dump her child-self right now and go start her own life. There had to be a protocol for someone with no identity. She could use the pound coins made in the 90s and hide the ones made after that. The notes should still work. But she couldn’t. Susie had to be saved.

  The headache grew worse as they drove on curving around Newmarket and Stornoway, where in some future time Steve would be out-cold from drink. He would way up groggy, his head pounding like Sue’s now, and he would find his pretty captive girlfriend had vanished. Sue nodded, yes that would be it, he would just have to find a goat or a new girlfriend. It wouldn’t take him long. Or maybe if she changed things, it wouldn’t be like that at all. Maybe he would be happy too, in the band he always loved with a wholesome, pregnant wife.

  “Is Steve a bad person?” Susie asks. They are nearly there.

  “Yes. Very bad. He hits you, he forces you to have sex with him, he locks you in your room for hours and hours so you have to pee in a corner.” The lies spill out.

  “Is that true?” Susie gasps.

  “Is what true?”

  “What you just said about Steve?”

  “Who is Steve?” Sue asks. She suddenly couldn’t remember. The name didn’t sound familiar at all. A wave of dread washed through her lungs, so he must not be a nice person. “What did I say?”

  “You said Steve was a bad man and that you want to go to New York.” Susie says. They slow down now, Sue slowly takes her foot off all the weird pedals under her feet. She knows it’s a car, but how does it work?

  “Do I? Well….which way? You have the map? What is your name again?”

  “Susie Ducker.”

  “That’s a pretty name. What’s mine?”

  “You’re Susie Ducker too. You came from the future to save me.”

  The headache hurts so much now, Sue drops her head into her hands and moans as pain floods through her skull. She can’t hold onto anything, she forgets the question before she can grab hold of the answer. The fields around them are purple, filled with heather. Sue can’t remember seeing a prettier sight.

  “Oh? Have I saved you now?”

  Susie undid her seatbelt and jumps out of the car. Sue doesn’t know what to do, except to follow the child. She can’t drive anyway. She stumbles out of the Fiat, wobbly with pain. She shouts at the girl. “Hey! Hey do you have any painkillers?”

  “You’re forgetting everything!” Little Susie cries, shaking all over as Sue stumbles towards her. Susie has read enough Doctor Who to remember that two people cannot exist in the same time. Something has to happen.

  “Girl, where am I?” Sue’s drooling now. Big gobs of spit trickle out of her mouth, which hangs open in a gasping way. She stumbling like a lot of the monsters do on TV.

  “I’m Susie! Susie, Susie, Susie!” Susie screams. “I don’t like this anymore! I want to go home! I’ll never see Steve I promise!”

  Sue moans, her head flopping a little to one side. She looks over at the purple heather fields and starts to go towards it, a crooked smile on her lopsided face.

  Susie runs and doesn’t stop until she is completely out of breath, choking a little as she turns round. Sue is standing in the middle of the heather field, swaying in the breeze. Susie watches for a long time, waiting for something else to happen. The sun is setting when Sue finally falls over into the heather, splayed out like an angel on a purple cloud, a nobody from a time that never happened.