What about us? by Jacqui Henderson Page B

the watch.  “This is our time machine.  Look...”
    He opened the watch and then
pressed the button on the side, which flipped open the face and revealed a
screen.  As his fingers passed over it, different coloured lights flickered on
and off.
    “As you’ve seen, we don’t only
move in time, we can change location too.  We choose the year, the month and
the general locality, then the watch automatically defaults to the nearest safe
house.  We maintain these places so that we can change clothes and prepare
ourselves accordingly for the era.”
    I looked up at him in amazement. 
“It’s such a tiny thing.” I said, smiling.
    He nodded in agreement.  “There
is always one in the safe house that suits the period, so we just exchange it. 
That way it never looks out of place and the one we leave behind is destroyed
with everything else in the fire.  Clever piece of kit really,” he explained
proudly.  “It looks like metal, but it’s actually similar to what you know as
plastic, with an organic electronic core”
    I thought about the one he’d
had on before and remembered that it looked like a divers watch.  I had to
agree, it was very clever.  I had no chance of understanding it technically,
but it didn’t matter.
    “What happens in the periods
before watches were invented, I mean it would look odd wouldn’t it?” I asked
uncertainly, a bit out of my depth.
    “Yes, it most certainly would
look odd.  And not only that, you’d be showing the world a piece of the future,
which we mustn’t do.  For those periods it becomes a piece of jewellery or something
else that can be easily carried without it looking out of place.  However, in
those cases there is only the return setting, to the place and time you left
from.  Normally that would be my time, but we will return to whenever we set
out from.”
    He looked a bit uncomfortable. 
Maybe he’d said too much, but anyway, I got the general idea and that was
enough.
    He reached for my hand and we
went downstairs to the hallway, where I put my bonnet on and took a short cape
and a thick shawl from the stand.  He wrapped himself up in something more
substantial and then with a flourish, put a bowler hat on his head.  He’d also packed
a small bag.  At the time I didn’t know what was in it, but later he told me he
had taken things from the house that we could sell, if and when we needed to,
along with the stash of money.  We opened the front door, took a deep breath
and stepped out to start our life on the run in the winter of 1888.
    The weekend had been good
training for me, because we walked.  In fact we walked flippin’ miles.  The
safe house was in Lewisham, not a place I knew and we walked all the way to
London Bridge, so I was glad the boots I was wearing were sturdy.  The weather
was dry but cold and the sights and smells, mainly stinks I have to say, were
incredible.
    It’s funny; I’ve always thought
of the past as being in black and white and in some ways, that day it was.  Of
course there was colour, but the trees were bare, the sky was grey and most of
the people we saw were dressed in dark colours.  The carriages were all black
and the horses were mainly brown or grey, all covered in dark leather straps
and stuff.
    Given that Christmas was only a
few days away, there wasn’t much to make me think of it.  Some of the houses
had holly wreaths outside, but there were no street decorations.  Some of the
windows of the shops we passed had made an effort, but most of them just gave
Christmas a nod, nothing more.  Very different from my time, when Christmas
seemed to start soon after my birthday, at least as far as most shops were
concerned, or Halloween at the latest.
    Mind you, it’s never been my
favourite time of year.  The only good memories I have of Christmas time are
the ones with Jack and maybe one or two with Nan.  In our house it really was
the season to be jolly, or in Mum’s case, blind drunk for three weeks and