What You Make It Read online

  I turned the TV off, stood up, and got to it.

  I started doing a little running. I went to the gym. I dropped my beer consumption back down to the level of a normal human being, and then cut it out altogether. I ate healthy food, and not so damned much of it.

  Sorta.

  The thing is, I did all this apart from a beer here and a beer there, and apart from skipping the run every now and then. Most days, in fact. I mean, running is dumb. Animals only do it when they're frightened, right? And why do you think that is? Because it's no fun at all. I didn't really join a gym either: they're real expensive and full of body Nazis. And shit – what's the point of being alive if you can't have a halfpounder with cheese when you feel like it, and a couple beers to wash it down? I mean, really? And do I have to spend the rest of my life dieting the whole time? Is this a reasonable way to live?

  No. I don't think so.

  It's my body's fault, I decide. It's reached a certain age, and it's tired of being trim. Probably even if I kept doing the good stuff it's just going to do its own thing.

  So I come at the problem a different way. What I want, I realize, is the body I used to have back when I could eat what the hell I liked, and do no exercise, and my body would just happily metabolize all that shit away without me having to do anything about it. I don't want this diet and exercise crap: I just want the body I had before.

  Then I get an idea. If I want that body, I just got to go back and get it.

  So I build a time machine.

  It wasn't so hard. Just muse on magnetism and tachyons a while and you'll be on the right lines. I cracked the basic principles on paper, then went down to Radio Shack and Toys R Us and Moss Bros, bought what I needed, and hacked the thing together in a couple evenings.

  When I finished I got a copy of that day's paper, put it on the temporal diffusion plate. I set the dials, and pressed the button. The paper disappeared.

  Then I remembered that six years ago, walking into that very room, I had found a paper with a date from the future on it. I was kind of drunk at the time, and don't remember what I did with it. Probably threw it away. It freaked me a little.

  So I know the machine functions. Now I have to work out how to use it. I don't want to actually go back in time, you see: the early nineties weren't that special a period for me. Or the late eighties, come to that. Plus I've got an okay job these days and I'm halfway through a rerun of the last series of Friends and I want to see what happens.

  So I realize that what I actually want, once I sit down and define my goals properly, is that my body's nature should go back in time say, five years, while both it and my mind stay right where they is. Be free, in fact, to travel forward in time the old-fashioned way, at a rate of one day every 24 hours.

  So I check this idea out. I do an experiment first, because I'm a cautious man. I get one of the houseplants which is looking a little sorry for itself and like it could do with a new lease of life, and I send its nature back three months – to just after I bought it.

  After I press the button the plant shimmers for a moment, and then suddenly it's looking bright and perky, like it used to.

  I'm jubilant, obviously.

  Then it occurs to me it was a crap experiment. Sure, the plant's body has gone back to an earlier state, while remaining rooted in the present – which has got to be enough to win me an award somewhere all by itself. But because it's a plant, and thus not much of a conversationalist, I've got no way of telling what happened to its mind. Did it stay in the present, or has the plant reverted to speaking plant baby talk and thinking the colour pink is cool?

  I may be a tad chubby, but I'm definitely cautious. I needed another experiment. I drink beer for a while, which always makes me think better, and then it comes to me. I've got a dog, called Max. He's a great dog, but he's old. He doesn't hear as well as he used to, and his back legs are getting vague. If anyone could do with a body resurrection, he's got to be first in the queue. Ahead of me even, because my back legs work just fine.

  So I stir the hound from where he's asleep in front of the fire, and I get his dog treats down from the shelf. Even at his advanced age this is news worth taking notice of, and he wakes right up and follows me around. I hide the box of treats under the cushion on the chair, making sure he sees me doing it, then I grab him, lift him over to my time machine, and put him down on the plate.

  Set the dial for five years back. Press the button.

  Shimmer.

  Max is five years younger. He comes bounding off the plate, looking very pleased with himself. And then, and this is the cool part, he heads straight for the chair, sticks his nose under the cushion and turns it over. Finds the treats, chews them open.

  I let him have half the box.

  By this time it's late, and I've had maybe three six-packs of beer. I go to bed, knowing that tomorrow I'm going to have the body I always wanted. Well, maybe not always wanted, because I don't recall being that psyched with it at the time, but that's because I didn't realize what I had. It was good enough then, and that's good enough for me now.

  I wake up early the next morning, because there's a weird yipping sound next to my ear. I open my eyes and see a puppy sitting on the blanket right in front of me, trying to lick my nose. At first my muddled brain wonders how the hell it got in the house, and then I recognize Max and leap out of bed like someone cattle-prodded my nuts. I run downstairs, the puppy Max still yapping away and trying to bite my heels in play, like he used to about ten years ago.

  Downstairs on the table the plant has almost gone. But not quite. There's a seed lying there. I know shit about horticulture, so I couldn't swear to it, but it looked like the kind of seed which might have grown into the plant I'd owned the day before.

  I played with Max for a while, but after a while his little eyes closed, and then he became a curly foetus. Got smaller still, and smaller, till I couldn't even see him any more. I guess the last thing was an egg and one lucky sperm, and then he was gone.

  I was glad I'd decided to leave my trip overnight.

  I went back to the drawing board, in theory and practice. I tweaked the machine a little and then tried again with next door's cat, but the little thing got younger even faster than Max had done. I tried blipping it forward in time at the last minute, see if that made a difference: but all that happened was the cat disappeared for an hour, then reappeared, having gotten even younger in the meantime. I futzed around a little more, then tried again, with the Great Dane from across the road. Same outcome. Except it took longer. And it bit me.

  Once the body's nature had been sent back in time, it kept just slipping further back.

  Now at this point the whole thing is fucked up and costing me a fortune in replacement pets, plus all the stress is making me drink more beer and eat like a hog, and the cut on those 34-inch waists seems to be going a little haywire.

  Luckily, I'm standing in front of the mirror one night, thinking, ‘36. 36. Fucking 36 …’ when I realize that's the answer.

  I'm not just dealing with time here. There's a matter of space.

  The ‘one constraint’ approach wasn't working. Max knew where the box of treats was until he was the size of my thumb, but that wasn't a lot of help to him. Or to me. You can't go walking into a good men's store and buy jeans when you look two years old and are getting smaller in front of the assistant's eyes. Trust me, no reputable department store will stand for that kind of thing.

  But what if I locked down two constants? What if I kept the mind latched in place, and threw a physical limitation in too, like maintaining the length of my body? If I made it so my body couldn't get any shorter, then it had to stop going back in time when I reached my current exalted height of 5 feet 10 inches, say when I was in my late teens. My mind stays where it is, my body goes as far back in nature as possible while keeping the same length, but remains locked here in time.

  Cool.

  I hit the sums again, and by this time the math is kind of hairy. I'm
way past tachyons and am getting upside charmed quarks and shit. I didn't want my face to get younger, or people might think something weird was going on. So I had to factor in getting my head to stay where it was in time, while getting the rest of my body to go back, but remaining the same length. This is math with big fucking wheels on, I'm telling you.

  But I cracked it. I cracked that equation wide open. It's truly astounding what a man will do to avoid going jogging or giving up his Miller time.

  By this time I've run out of neighbourhood pets, and anyway I'm getting desperate and wearing my 34s with the button and half the fly undone. So I sit myself on the plate, turn the dial. In the second I pressed the button I realized I was going to have to throw away all my new jeans and go out and buy 30 inchers, which was going to cost well over 200 bucks, but the thought just made me smile.

  I felt weird for a second, and I guess I must have shimmered.

  Then suddenly there's enough room in my pants for two people, and even my shirt feels loose. I got off the plate, went and looked in the mirror. It worked. I'm slim again. Took me two months of leisure time, and cost nearly four hundred bucks in parts and another eighty in replacement pets, but it worked.

  Except in one niggling regard.

  About a week afterwards, I noticed that my back was looking a little hairy. I figure what the hey, maybe some hormonal thing.

  Then it started getting harder to hold things. My thumb seemed to be going a little weird, not as opposable as it used to be.

  There were a couple of days when it looked like there was some kind of tail deal developing. That passed off, and the hair went away. My skin started getting a little scaly instead.

  I'm still the same height.

  But now I've got these, like, fins.

  THE OWNER

  When she realized she'd been staring at the flame from her lighter for more than five minutes, spinning the wheel time and time again in a mindless daze, Jane decided it was time to go to bed. She glanced at her clock on the filing cabinet – 12.35 a.m. – then let her head loll back, listening to the bones click in her neck and trying to summon up the energy to move. The flat's owner, a Mr Gillack, had wallpapered the ceiling and it was coming apart in a line down the middle. There was a crack in the plaster by the window, the baby sister of another running down the wall by the kitchen.

  It cost £230 a week to live here. £1.36 an hour. Jesus Christ. Just having a bath was 60p.

  While she waited for the computer to finish juggling 0's and l's she stood with her mug at the window, looking down into the garden of the flat below. Thin moonlight glinted off a few pieces of iron furniture. One of the white chairs had been half-painted black in a desultory way, making it look like a frozen Dalmatian. The set looked like a tableau, the kind of thing the self-proclaimed avant garde at college would have celebrated as subconscious art. Unconscious shite, Jane had always felt.

  Jane had been living in the building at 51, St Augustine's Road for two weeks, but still hadn't spoken to the young couple who owned the ground-floor flat. She hadn't spoken to anyone in the building, in fact. They never seemed to be in. Mail came and went from the downstairs hallway, and sometimes she heard voices and thumps at night from the flats above and opposite. That was all. It was like living in the Marie Celeste, but without the view.

  As she walked across to the tiny kitchen to rinse her mug, the floorboards creaked massively. The boards were right at the top of the list of things which most irritated her about her new flat, along with the tiny kitchen full of hideous 1980s cutlery. Her mug was the only thing in there which was hers.

  When she walked back out, the floorboards in the centre of the living room squealed extravagantly again. ‘At least I don't live underneath,’ she muttered, suddenly feeling a little better. It really was time to go to bed. If she kept staying up so late she was bound to get tired, and if she was tired she was bound to feel grumbly. There was no point doing that. Upwards and onwards.

  In the hallway she clicked the catch down, then pushed it again as hard as she could, counting quickly to eight out loud. It was a source of more than a little irritation to her that she seemed to feel compelled to do this. She wasn't especially concerned about the prospect of intruders, and the house's main door was double-locked. So why this big thing over the lock?

  She pushed down on the catch once more, and counted to eight again, twice, maintaining the pressure throughout. Then she twisted the knob hard, reassuring herself that the door was indeed secure. It was, not surprisingly, but she twisted it again, counting to eight three more times to make sure.

  In the bedroom she undressed quickly and hopped beneath the duvet. She smoked her customary final cigarette propped up on one elbow, looking at her room. She hadn't got round to moving any of the furniture around in it, simply stowing her clothes and leaving it at that. It was the biggest room in the small flat, unhelpfully. She would have preferred an extra couple of feet on the living room. A large bedroom seemed too much like a taunt.

  Catching yet another negative thought romping through her head, Jane stuck out a foot and tripped it up. Christ, she thought, what a wingebag. Shut up and go to sleep.

  She rolled onto her side and snuggled up into the duvet. At least the pillows were good and thick.

  A few minutes later she was on the edge of sleep when she heard a creaking sound. When it came again, louder this time, her eyes flicked wide open. She stared at the wall, listening. The creak had sounded as if it was coming from the hallway.

  Then voices boomed from the hallway outside the door, and the light in the corridor flicked on, sending shadows through the pane of glass over her front door. The boards obviously stretched from her hallway into the corridor. The people returning to the flat opposite had set them off. That was all.

  Jane closed her eyes and headed back towards sleep.

  She felt much better when she got up the next morning, and determined to shape up. It was pointless dwelling on negative things. There was no problem in the world which could be solved by feeling depressed about it, and the world was a much drabber and more dangerous place if you allowed yourself to feel down.

  This state of Genial Positiveness took a heavy knock when she discovered that there was no hot water. Again. Swearing vigorously, she turned the tap off and stalked into the kitchen to boil the kettle.

  Before leaving the flat she stood on the creaking floorboards in the hallway for a moment, checking the lock. It seemed fine. Reassuringly sturdy.

  A man in overalls was touching up the paint on the steps outside the house. She wondered briefly who'd hired him, and then dismissed the thought.

  When she walked into reception at FreeDot Communications, Whitehead was standing in the middle of the main office area smugly surveying his empire. On seeing Jane he stared theatrically at his watch.

  ‘Bright and early this morning,’ he beamed, surprising her. She'd been expecting a dose of his running joke about part-timers sneaking in at the last moment. Then she realized it was only 9.50, and that she was ten minutes ahead of schedule.

  ‘Keep forgetting I don't have to leave home so early.’

  ‘How is the new flat? Compact and bijou?’

  ‘Compact, mainly. Compact and expensive.’

  Whitehead glided alongside Jane as she walked down the corridor, heading towards his own spacious lair at the far end. ‘Ought to buy, you know,’ he opined. ‘Buying's the thing.’

  ‘So everyone tells me,’ said Jane. They did, and it was beginning to piss her off.

  They paused briefly outside the door to Jane's room. ‘I'll pop in a bit later,’ said Whitehead. ‘See how you're getting on.’ Then he ducked into his own office, where his phone was bleating. He spent most of the day murmuring into it, reassuring people that the association he ran really did have a purpose. Up until recently Jane had been his right-hand person in that endeavour, and it wasn't something she missed.

  Walking into her room, she took her filofax out and got straight
to phoning Klass 1. It was only as she sat listening to the phone ringing that she noticed something had happened to the office. A desk had been placed along the window wall, and a computer sat squarely on its empty surface. Not only that, but one of her shelves had been unceremoniously cleared, its contents stuffed into crevices in the shelf above. Jane reached out and pulled one of her software manuals from where it had been wedged. The cover was crumpled and torn.

  When Victor – the tall and elegant Indian half of the double act that was Klass 1 Accommodation – eventually answered, Jane was too distracted to be properly cross about the hot water. The letting agent expressed sympathy, tutted, and promised to get something done about the boiler that very day. Jane replaced the phone, then went back to frowning as she took in the room once more.

  As she stood in the kitchen area, waiting for the kettle to boil and smoking her third cigarette of the day, she was joined by Egerton. Her heart sank, as always.

  ‘Morning!’ he sang, rosy-cheeked face beaming with idiot good humour. ‘And how are you!’

  Jane had tried long and hard to work out quite why Egerton irritated her so much. Her provisional conclusion was that it was partly his continual chirping banter, partly the fact that he swanned about the place as if he owned it, partly that he had a ten-word job title which didn't actually define whatever it was he spent most of the day avoiding doing, and partly that his hair was so bloody curly. But mainly it was just that he was incredibly irritating.

  Egerton yanked the lid off the kettle and peered into it, checking the amount of water inside. He looked like he was appearing in a pantomime for intellectually challenged children. Satisfied, he nodded curtly, slammed the lid back on, and went back to beaming at Jane.

  ‘How was your weekend?’ he shouted.

  ‘Fine,’ she replied, dismissing a conversational sally that had palled for her after the first fifty or so Monday mornings she'd spent at FreeDot. ‘I couldn't help noticing that there appears to be another desk in my office.’