Moving History

GEOFF NICHOLSON

I expect you’re a lot like me. You’re basically a sane, decent, healthy, happy human being, and yet every time you go into, say, a fast-food restaurant, you look around and you can’t help thinking how much fun it would be to go on a deranged killing spree.

You can picture the pathetic, horrified faces as you brandish your powerful semi-automatic weapon and begin firing it ‘indiscriminately’, as they like to say, into the lumpen, lard-filled mass of humanity gathered there. You imagine bone and hair fragments being scattered through the air and landing in the deep-fat fryers with a satisfying sizzle. You see blood and brains being sprayed onto the cheerful easy-to-clean surfaces of the counters and tables, onto the floor and walls and ceiling. You imagine people panicking, and puking up the high-fat, high-sugar, highly industrialised sludge they’ve just crammed down their fat throats. These thoughts please you.

It’s okay. We all think about this stuff. There’s no shame in it. You, me, everybody, we all experience the same basic impulses. However, you and I are not quite the same. Whereas you and everybody else only think about it, I think about it and then go ahead and do it. It’s just the way I am. And I don’t restrict myself to fast-food restaurants. I have created bloody mayhem in other places too: shopping malls, cineplexes, water parks, Irish theme pubs; anywhere that modern, leisured man assembles, spends money and pretends to be having a good time. But fast-food restaurants are definitely where I do my best work.

And I know what you’re thinking: if this guy is such a hot-shot mass murderer, how come I’ve never heard of him? Why aren’t his exploits in every newspaper, on every news programme? How come there isn’t a bulletin board and a web ring and a chat room? How come some death-metal band hasn’t memorialised him in song? How come he hasn’t been caught?

And the answer is simple: because until very recently I did all my mass murdering in a kink in the fabric of the space/time continuum. Hang about and I’ll explain.

It started when I bought myself an old car, a classic. It was a Big Fifties Ford, a 1959 Low Line Zephyr Mark 2 - a real period piece, a gorgeous bit of moving history, according to the bloke who sold it to me, from the era when Britain was trying gamely but ineptly to produce American-looking cars. So my Zephyr was two-tone yellow and black, and it had a wide, snarly radiator grille, and it very nearly, but not quite, had fins.

It also had a three-speed gear box with an unsynchronised first gear, and the shift was on the steering column, so it was basically a complete bugger to drive, but you know, that was somehow part of the charm.

But actually, what really attracted me, the real reason I bought the thing - and I know this probably sounds a bit shallow - was the dashboard. In its heyday the car had apparently been used for rallying, so it had all sorts of extra clocks and dials mounted in a big centre console. I didn’t know what most of the stuff was for. I supposed it had something to do with time trials and keeping to an average speed, because that’s what rallying was all about in those days, I think, and one of the dials looked like a giant stopwatch sort of thing. It was all pretty inscrutable, but I thought it looked really cool and retro and authentically Fifties in a mad, boffinish sort of way.

So I bought the car and drove around in it and I thought I really looked the business, though I’m not one of those nutters who dresses up in Fifties clothes - I think that’s just pathetic. I wasn’t trying to relive somebody else’s youth.

A bit of Fifties music might have been all right, but in fact I couldn’t play any music at all in my car. When the mechanics put in all the extra instrumentation they’d taken out the radio. But I didn’t really care about that. Because, I mean, if I’d wanted really authentic English pop music from the Fifties I’d have been forced to play Alma Cogan or Frankie Vaughan or Tommy Steele, and who the hell can live with that?

Same with food. If you wanted authentic English Fifties food and drink what would you have had? Marmite sandwiches and Horlicks? Semolina pudding and Vimto? Please! Authenticity has to have its limits. The Fifties was a pre-fast-food era as far as England was concerned, and the truth is, okay I admit it, I’m a fast-food junkie. Yes, yes, I realise there are many powerful and ironic contradictions here, but what are you going to do?

So as soon as I got the car I drove to my nearest corporate, multinational burger bar, anticipating a totally modern, artery-clogging burger and fries. I walked in and the urge to kill came over me, the same as usual. There are all sorts of things that bring it on. The colours of the decor, the overhead light that’s bright enough to conduct an autopsy by, the sad, hideous proles stuffing their own and their children’s faces with calories and cholesterol. But on this occasion my homicidal impulse was stoked by the space cadet behind the counter. His badge said he was called Gordon, and I knew right away that he deserved to die.

Okay, so life had dealt him a disappointing hand. He probably dreamed of being a metal sculptor or a designer of cool websites, rather than a burger drone, but there he was dealing with sarcastic and hostile members of the public, people like me, and I thought he really ought to learn to like it because he almost certainly wasn’t going anywhere better.

‘What would you like today, sir?’ he said.

‘Oh, let’s see,’ I said, sounding sarcastic and hostile, ‘maybe I’d like a little Chilean sea bass, or kidneys flambé, or perhaps quail rubbed with fines herbs, or perhaps . . . now that I think about it, oh, let me see, how about a burger and fries.’

He didn’t say anything, but I could tell what he was thinking, and I had the intense desire to order a number of those killingly hot, microwaved, so-called ‘apple’ so-called ‘pies’ and to shove one of them into each of his orifices. But I didn’t. I took my burger and tries and went back to the car with them. At least that way I could eat while sitting in elegant and stylish surroundings.

I finished the burger and it was really unsatisfying and I was wishing I’d got another one, but I couldn’t face going back and dealing with that twerp again. So I just sat there and drummed my fingers on the dashboard and I idly messed about with the instruments on the console, including the one that looked like a stopwatch, and suddenly something happened. I couldn’t have told you exactly what. It was partly like blacking out but there was also something weirdly pleasant about it, as if I’d fallen asleep just for a second but that had been long enough to have a dream that I knew was really great even though I couldn’t remember any of it. Then, almost immediately, the feeling had gone and I was my old self again, but then I saw that I still had a burger in my hand.

Obviously I wondered if I was going mad, but I ate the second burger, and somehow I knew that it wasn’t actually a second burger, it was just the first one that I was eating again, or in fact for the first time. So it wasn’t any more satisfying than it had been before, and that seemed significant.

Something very odd was obviously going on, but I didn’t immediately think, ‘Ah yes, I’ve travelled back in time,’ because you wouldn’t, would you? But I did suspect I’d come upon something to do with clocks and duration and reliving history.

So I drove home and started to experiment. The first thing I did was root around in the car’s glove compartment and I found a pen and wrote the word ‘Burger’ on my hand, and then I turned back the stopwatch thing again. Along came that weird feeling and before I knew it my hand was clear and the pen was back in the glove compartment where it had always been. Interesting.

I did a few other things that involved melting ice cubes and burned matches and slashing the back of my hand with a razor blade; dealing with irreversible processes that magically reversed themselves when I put the clock back.

After I’d messed around for most of the evening I concluded that, baffling and improbable as it surely seemed, the old Zephyr was a kind of time machine; a very basic model, obviously. It could take you into the past, but not very far. After a great deal of trial and error I discovered that the most you could go back was fifteen minutes. And you couldn’t just turn the stopwatch thing back time and time again, and keep receding. No, you could only do it once and then you had to wait for it to come back to zero before you could do it again.

The other major thing I discovered was that this form of time travel wasn’t, so to speak, retroactive. I mean that if you turned the clock back by fifteen minutes and then, say, cut the head off a beloved domestic pet, then the head stayed cut off even when the clock went back to zero. But if you did it the other way round, cut the head off and then turned the clock back, the head miraculously reattached itself to the body. The system obviously had its limitations, but I didn’t think I had any grounds for complaint, and I could see that it definitely had possibilities.

So the next day I went back to the same burger bar and I said to the snot boy behind the counter, ‘Still no Chilean sea bass then?’ And he said, ‘Excuse me, sir?’ so I smacked him in the mouth. I didn’t do the hot apple pie thing because it would have taken far too long. Then Heft the restaurant. A couple of people shouted after me, but nobody tried to stop me. So I went back to the car and waited. After a couple of minutes, as expected, the boy and his manager came out looking for me. They spotted me in the car and as they were approaching I reached for the console and turned back the stopwatch thing and that weird feeling came back, and then it was fifteen minutes earlier. (I looked at my own watch to make sure.) I was still sitting in the car. I hadn’t gone into the restaurant, I hadn’t hit the boy, and none of it had ever happened. So no harm done, right?

Obviously my first thought was that this discovery of mine could be a profound force for good. But then I thought about it a bit more and realised it probably wasn’t going to be as profound as all that. I mean, there are real limits to how much you can improve the world in just fifteen minutes. And I realised, as everyone always does, that you have to change yourself before you can change the world. So I decided to change.

I decided that instead of being my sane, decent, healthy, happy self, I would become the sort of person who goes about committing hideous crimes involving violence and death, but only for fifteen minutes or so at a time, and then I would turn the clock back and all would be fine again: neither I nor my victims would live to regret it. Okay, it didn’t make me a saint, but for entirely obvious reasons it didn’t make me a criminal either. And as with all these impulses, I thought better out than in. And definitely better exorcised in a kink in the fabric of the space/time continuum rather than in the real world.

After that, I got myself a powerful semi-automatic weapon and pretty much went on a killing spree, or to be more precise, a long series of short killing sprees, each one restricted to no more than fifteen minutes.

Basically I’d go into some burger bar or pizza slum or Palookaville Fried Chicken joint, and for about a quarter of an hour I’d let rip. Basically I’d shoot the place, its staff and its customers to absolute buggery. You know the routine: blood, guts, facial wounds, mewling babies, people losing control of their sphincters; old and young, male and female, people of every race and creed united in the messy indignity of death. But only for fifteen minutes at the most.

It was a lot of fun, but you had to know what you were doing. Timing was everything. If the slaughtering took more than fifteen minutes then obviously I couldn’t turn the clock back far enough to ensure that it had never happened. See what I mean? Let’s say, just theoretically, I got myself into a hostage situation where I killed one person per minute for seventeen minutes and then turned the clock back; well obviously the first two victims would still be dead because they were killed outside the fifteen-minute time span that I’d recouped. And that would have been just terrible.

And in reality I never had the full fifteen minutes because within that time I had to do the slaughtering, get from the scene of the crime back to where the car was parked, then mess with the stopwatch thing. So I had ten or twelve minutes of slaughtering at the max.

Inevitably I did meet the odd idiot who wanted to play the hero, confront me and slow me down, and that was irritating at first and potentially disastrous, but somehow I always managed to deal with it, and eventually it became part of the process. Regardless of how well things were going, a moment would always arrive when I had to just walk away from the scene of mayhem and get back to the car, and if the restaurant was full and I hadn’t managed to kill them all, then sometimes one or two of them would take it into their heads to pursue me, and that could be the best bit of all.

By the time I got to the Zephyr the pursuers would sometimes be only ten or fifteen yards behind, but that was enough. I’d slide behind the wheel, and sometimes I’d wait until they were just a matter of feet away, and then I’d turn back the stopwatch thing, and all was right with the world again. It was subtle stuff.

Over the months I tried to ring the changes with my murder scenes. I operated successfully in furniture stores, in opticians, in cybercafés, railway stations, and they all had their attractions. But when the local mall opened a spanking new food court, I knew it was what I’d been waiting for.

If fast-food restaurants make you want to kill, then food courts make you want to commit genocide. It’s all there, everything you could possibly want and despise. Oh the variety of loathsome food! Not just burgers and fries, but fake American-style ‘do-nuts’, fake Chinese, fake Mexican, fake cappuccino bars and French bakeries. Every possible irritation: children’s parties, plastic cutlery, unwiped tables, people hangin’ and chillin’. Is that Phil Collins being played through the tinny speakers?

So I got my powerful semi-automatic weapon and I went in there and I was like a kid in a sweetshop; firing at random, glass shards cascading into the chop suey, wounded cashiers bleeding onto the baguettes, men in nylon track-suits getting their genitalia blown off. I could have carried on all night. But I didn’t.

I stayed in control. I knew the exact moment when I had to tear myself away and get back to the car, and I duly did. I walked out of the food court so casually that the two security guards standing outside the automatic doors didn’t even seem to recognise me as the crazed gunman, which was actually a disappointment. So as I walked by them I said, ‘Hey, I’m the one you want.’

Even then they seemed a bit reluctant. It probably had something to do with the gun I was brandishing. So when I got to the car I called to them and threw the gun aside so they could see I was unarmed. Then they realised that since they were supposed to be security guards they really ought to do something, so very gingerly they started to approach the Zephyr.

I leaned against the front wing. I was feeling good, and maybe I was feeling a bit cocky, but I knew that time was on my side. When the guards were about twenty feet away I opened the car door and got in, and my hand was halfway towards the stopwatch thing before I realised something was terribly out of joint. There was no stopwatch thing, no centre console, nothing.

It appeared that some bastard had broken into the car (well, not broken in per se, because I always left the door unlocked so I could get in quickly), and presumably he intended to steal it, but then he must have taken one look at the olde-worlde technology and realised he’d never be able to drive the thing. So as a parting shot he’d decided to do some major vandalism and he’d ripped out the centre console and taken it away with him as a souvenir. Pathetic, eh? Who can understand the banality of the criminal mind?

So I was left with a more or less conventionally equipped 1959 Low Line Zephyr Mark 2, without any rallying instrumentation. I was stuck right where I was in the present, and there was nothing I could do about it. I didn’t panic. I didn’t try to drive away. I just sat back and waited for what was coming to me. I started to feel a familiar and overwhelming need for a burger.

* * * *

Geoff Nicholson was born in Sheffield and now spends his time commuting between homes in London and New York. The author of thirteen novels, including Street Sleeper, Hunters and Gatherers, Everything and More, Footsucker, Bleeding London (shortlisted for the 1997 Whitbread Fiction Award), Flesh Guitar and Bedlam Burning, he previously appeared in Dark Terrors 4. ‘When I was a kid,’ recalls Nicholson, ‘my Uncle Oliver actually did, briefly, drive a big 1950s Zephyr. It was yellow and black, and (at least in my imagination) it had leopardskin seats. When he owned it, of course, it wasn’t history at all, it was the very latest thing. Later he swore by Toyotas.’