Johnny and the Bomb Read online

  ‘Well, I thought hot chips would be exactly what someone’d like who’d got used to cold chips. Anyway, she didn’t get any supper last night. Hey, there was something very odd about—’

  ‘She is very odd.’

  ‘You don’t like her much, do you?’

  ‘Well, she didn’t even say thank you.’

  ‘But I thought she was an unfortunate victim of a repressive political system,’ said Johnny. ‘That’s what you said when we were coming here.’

  ‘Yes, all right, but courtesy doesn’t cost anything, actually. Come on, let’s get out of here.’

  ‘Hello?’ said someone behind them.

  ‘They’ve found out about the chips,’ muttered Kirsty, as she and Johnny turned around.

  But it wasn’t a nurse bearing down on them, unless the hospital had a plain clothes division.

  It was a young woman in glasses and a worried hairstyle. She also had boots that would have impressed Bigmac, and a clipboard.

  ‘Um … do you two know Mrs … er … Tachyon?’ she said. ‘Is that her name?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Johnny. ‘I mean, that’s what everyone calls her.’

  ‘It’s a very odd name,’ said the woman. ‘I suppose it’s foreign.’

  ‘We don’t actually know her,’ said Kasandra. ‘We were just visiting her out of social concern.’

  The woman looked at her. ‘Good grief,’ she said. She glanced at her clipboard.

  ‘Do you know anything about her?’ she said. ‘Anything at all?’

  ‘Like what?’ said Johnny.

  ‘Anything. Where she lives. Where she comes from. How old she is. Anything.’

  ‘Not really,’ said Johnny. ‘She’s just around. You know.’

  ‘She must sleep somewhere.’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘There’s no records of her anywhere. There’s no records of anyone called Tachyon anywhere,’ said the woman, her voice suggesting that this was a major criminal offence.

  ‘Are you a social worker?’ said Kasandra.

  ‘Yes. I’m Ms Partridge.’

  ‘I think I’ve seen you talking to Bigmac,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Bigmac? Who’s Bigmac?’

  ‘Er … Simon … Wrigley, I think.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Ms Partridge darkly. ‘Simon. The one who wanted to know how many cars he had to steal to get a free holiday in Africa.’

  ‘And he said you said you’d only send him if cannibalism was still—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Ms Partridge, hurriedly. When she’d started the job, less than a year ago, she’d firmly believed that everything that was wrong with the world was the fault of Big Business and the Government. She believed even more firmly now that it was all the fault of Bigmac.

  ‘He was dead impressed, he said—’

  ‘But you don’t actually know anything about Mrs Tachyon, do you?’ said the social worker. ‘She had a trolley full of junk, but no one seems to know where it is.’

  ‘Actually—’ Kasandra began.

  ‘I don’t know where it is either,’ said Johnny firmly.

  ‘It’d be very helpful if we could find it. It’s amazing what they hoard,’ said Ms Partridge. ‘When I was in Bolton there was an old lady who’d saved every—’

  ‘We’ll miss the bus,’ said Kasandra. ‘Sorry we can’t help, Ms Partridge. Come on, Johnny.’

  She pulled him out of the building and down the steps.

  ‘You have got the trolley, haven’t you,’ she said. ‘You told me.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t see why people should take it away from her or poke around in it. You wouldn’t want people poking around in your stuff.’

  ‘My mother said she was married to an airman in the Second World War and he never came back and she went a bit strange.’

  ‘My grandad said he and his friends used to tip up her trolley when he was a boy. He said they did it just to hear her swear.’

  Kasandra hesitated.

  ‘What? How old is your grandad?’

  ‘Dunno. About sixty-five.’

  ‘And how old is Mrs Tachyon, would you say?’

  ‘It’s hard to tell under all those wrinkles. Sixty?’

  ‘Doesn’t that strike you as odd?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you dense or something? She’s younger than your grandfather!’

  ‘Oh … well … perhaps there was another Mrs Tachyon?’

  ‘That isn’t very likely, is it?’

  ‘So you’re saying she’s a hundred years old?’

  ‘Of course not. There’s bound to be a sensible explanation. What’s your grandfather’s memory like?’

  ‘He’s good at television programmes. You’ll be watching, and then he’ll say something like, “Hey, him … the one in the suit … he was the policeman in that programme, you know, the one with the man with the curly hair, couple of years ago, you know.” And if you buy anything, he can always tell you that you could get it for sixpence and still have change when he was a lad.’

  ‘Everyone’s grandad does that,’ said Kasandra severely.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Haven’t you looked in the bags?’

  ‘No … but she’s got some odd stuff.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well … there are these jars of pickles …’

  ‘Well? Old people like pickles.’

  ‘Yes, but these are … kind of new and old at the same time. And there was fish and chips wrapped up in a newspaper.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘No one wraps up fish and chips in newspaper these days. But they all looked fresh. I had a look because I thought I might as well give the fish to the cat, and the newspaper …’

  Johnny stopped.

  What could he say? That he knew that front page? He knew every word of it. He’d found the same one on the microfiche in the library and the librarian had given him a copy to help him with his history project. He’d never seen it apart from the copy and the fuzzy image on the screen and suddenly there it was, unfolded in front of him, greasy and vinegary but undoubtedly …

  … new.

  ‘Well, let’s have a look at them, at least. That can’t hurt.’

  Kasandra was like that. When all else failed, she tried being reasonable.

  The big black car sped up the motorway. There were two motorcyclists in front and two more behind, and another car trailing behind them containing some serious men in suits who listened to little radios a lot and wouldn’t even trust their mothers.

  Sir John sat by himself in the back of the black car, with his hands crossed on his silver-topped walking stick and his chin on his hands.

  There were two screens in front of him, which showed him various facts and figures to do with his companies around the world, beamed down to him from a satellite, which he also owned. There were also two fax machines and three telephones.

  Sir John sat and stared at them.

  Then he reached over and pressed the button that operated the driver’s intercom.

  He’d never liked Hickson much. The man had a red neck. On the other hand, he was the only person there was to talk to right now.

  ‘Do you believe it’s possible to travel in time, Hickson?’

  ‘Couldn’t say, sir,’ said the chauffeur, without turning his head.

  ‘It’s been done, you know.’

  ‘If you say so, sir.’

  ‘Time’s been changed.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Of course, you wouldn’t know about it, because you were in the time that it changed into.’

  ‘Good thing for me then, sir.’

  ‘Did you know that when you change time you get two futures heading off side by side?’

  ‘Must have missed that in school, sir.’

  ‘Like a pair of trousers.’

  ‘Definitely something to think about, Sir John.’

  SirJohn stared at the back of the man’s neck. It really was very red, and
had unpleasant little patches of hair on it. He hadn’t hired the man, of course. He had people who had people who had people who did things like that. It had never occurred to them to employ a chauffeur with an interest in something else besides what the car in front was doing.

  ‘Take the next left turn,’ he snapped.

  ‘We’re still twenty miles from Blackbury, sir.’

  ‘Do what you’re told! Right now!’

  The car skidded, spun half around, and headed up the off-ramp with smoke coming from its tyres.

  ‘Turn left!’

  ‘But there’s traffic coming, Sir John!’

  ‘If they haven’t got good brakes they shouldn’t be on the road! Good! You see? Turn right!’

  ‘That’s just a lane! I’ll lose my job, Sir John!’

  Sir John sighed.

  ‘Hickson, I’d like to lose all our little helpers. If you can get me to Blackbury by myself I will personally give you a million pounds. I’m serious.’

  The chauffeur glanced at his mirror.

  ‘Why didn’t you say, sir? Hold on to something, sir!’

  As the car plunged down between high hedges, all three of the telephones started to ring.

  Sir John stared at them for a while. Then he pressed the button that wound down the nearest window and, one by one, threw them out.

  The fax machine followed.

  After some effort he managed to detach the two screens, and they went out too, exploding very satisfactorily when they hit the ground.

  He felt a lot better for that.

  Chapter 4

  Men in Black

  The bus rumbled along the road towards Johnny’s house.

  ‘There’s no sense in getting excited about Mrs Tachyon,’ said Kasandra. ‘If she’s really been a bag lady here for years and years, then there’s a whole range of perfectly acceptable explanations without having to resort to far-fetched ones.’

  ‘What’s an acceptable explanation?’ said Johnny. He was still wrapped up in the puzzle of the newspaper.

  ‘She’s an alien, possibly.’

  ‘That’s acceptable?’

  ‘Or she could be an Atlantean. From Atlantis. You know? The continent that sank under the sea thousands of years ago. The inhabitants were said to be very long-lived.’

  ‘They could breathe underwater?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. They sailed away just before it sank, and built Stonehenge and the Pyramids and so on. They were scientifically very advanced, actually.’

  Johnny looked at her with his mouth open. You expected this sort of thing from Bigmac and the others, but not from Ki— Kasandra, who was already doing A-levels at fourteen years old.

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ he said.

  ‘It was hushed up by the government.’

  ‘Ah.’ Kasandra was good at knowing things that were hushed up by the government, especially considering that they had been, well, hushed up. They were always slightly occult. When giant footprints had appeared around the town centre during some snow last year there had been two theories. There was Kir— Kasandra’s, which was that it was Bigfoot, and Johnny’s, which was that it was a combination of Bigmac and two ‘Giant Rubber Feet, A Wow at Parties!!!!’ from the Joke Emporium in Penny Street. Ki— Kasandra’s theory had the backing of so many official sources in the books she’d read that it practically outweighed Johnny’s, which was merely based on watching him do it.

  Johnny thought about the Atlanteans, who’d all be two metres tall in Greek togas and golden hair, leaving the sinking continent in their amazing golden ships. And on the deck of one of them, Mrs Tachyon, ferociously wheeling her trolley.

  Or you could imagine Attila the Hun’s barbarians galloping across the plain and, in the middle of the line of horsemen, Mrs Tachyon on her trolley. Off her trolley, too.

  ‘What happens,’ said Kasandra, ‘is that if you see a UFO or a yeti or something like that, you get a visit from the Men in Black. They drive around in big black cars and menace people who’ve seen strange things. They say they’re working for the government but they’re really working for the secret society that runs everything.’

  ‘How d’you know all this?’

  ‘Everyone knows. It’s a well-known fact. I’ve been waiting for something like this, ever since the mysterious rain of fish we had in September,’ said Kasandra.

  ‘You mean, when there was that gas leak under the tropical fish shop?’

  ‘Yes, we were told it was a leak under the tropical fish shop,’ said Kasandra darkly.

  ‘What? Of course it was the gas leak! They found the shopkeeper’s wig in the telephone wires in the High Street! Everyone had guppies in their gutters!’

  ‘The two might have been coincidentally connected,’ said Kasandra reluctantly.

  ‘And you still believe that those crop circles last year weren’t made by Bigmac even though he swears they were?’

  ‘All right, perhaps some of them might have been made by Bigmac, but who made the first ones, eh?’

  ‘Bazza and Skazz, of course. They read about ’em in the paper and decided we should have some, too.’

  ‘They didn’t necessarily make all of them.’

  Johnny sighed. As if life wasn’t complicated enough, people had to set out to make it worse. It had been difficult enough before he’d heard about spontaneous combustion. You could be sitting peacefully in your chair, minding your own business, and next minute, whoosh, you were just a pair of shoes with smoke coming out. He’d taken to keeping a bucket of water in his bedroom for some weeks after reading about that.

  And then there were all these programmes about aliens swooping down on people and taking them away for serious medical examinations in their flying saucers. If you were captured and taken away by aliens, but then they messed around with your brain so you forgot about them and they had time travel, so they could put you back exactly where you were before they’d taken you away … how would you know? It was a bit of a worry.

  Kasandra seemed to think all this sort of thing was interesting, instead of some kind of a nuisance.

  ‘Kasandra,’ he said.

  ‘Yes? What?’

  ‘I wish you’d go back to Kirsty.’

  ‘Horrible name. Sounds like someone who makes scones.’

  ‘… I didn’t mind Kimberly …’

  ‘Hah! I now realize that was a name with “trainee hairdresser” written all over it.’

  ‘… although Klymenystra was a bit over the top.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘About a fortnight ago.’

  ‘I was probably feeling a bit gothy at the time.’

  The bus pulled up at the end of Johnny’s road, and they got off.

  The garages were in a little cul-de-sac around the back of the houses. They weren’t used much, at least for cars. Most of Grandad’s neighbours parked in the street, so that they could enjoy complaining about stealing one another’s parking spaces.

  ‘You haven’t even peeked in the bags?’ said Kasandra, as Johnny fished in his pockets for the garage key.

  ‘No. I mean, supposing they were full of old knickers or something?’

  He pushed open the door.

  The trolley was where he left it.

  There was something odd about it that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. It was clearly standing in the middle of the floor but managed to give the impression of moving very fast at the same time, as though it were a still frame from a movie.

  Kasandra-formerly-Kirsty looked around.

  ‘Bit of a dump,’ she said. ‘Why’s that bike upside down over there?’

  ‘It’s mine,’ said Johnny. ‘It got a puncture yesterday. I haven’t managed to repair it yet.’

  Kasandra picked up one of the jars of pickle from the bench. The label was sooty. She wiped it and turned it towards the light.

  ‘“Blackbury Preserves Ltd Gold-Medal Empire Brand Mustard Pickle”,’ she read. ‘“Six Premier Awards. Grand Prix de Foire Inter
nationale des Conichons Nancy 1933. Festival of Pickles, Manchester, 1929. Danzig Pökelnfest 1928. Supreme Prize, Michigan State Fair, 1933. Gold Medal, Madras, 1931. Bonza Feed Award, Sydney, 1932. Made from the Finest Ingredients.” And then there’s a picture of some sort of crazed street kid jumping about, and it says underneath, “Up In The Air Leaps Little Tim, Blackbury Pickles Have Bitten Him.” Very clever. Well, they’re pickles. So what?’

  ‘They’re from the old pickle factory,’ said Johnny. ‘It got blown up during the war. At the same time as Paradise Street. Pickles haven’t been made here for more than fifty years!’

  ‘Oh, no!’ said Kasandra. ‘You don’t mean … we’re in a town where no pickles are made? That’s creepy, that is.’

  ‘You don’t have to be sarcastic. It’s just odd, was all I meant.’

  Kasandra shook the jar. Then she picked up another sooty jar of gherkins, which sloshed as she turned it over.

  ‘They’ve kept well, then,’ she said.

  ‘I tried one this morning,’ said Johnny. ‘It was nice and crunchy. And what about this?’

  Out of his pocket came the newspaper that had wrapped Mrs Tachyon’s fish and chips. He spread it out.

  ‘It’s an old newspaper,’ said Johnny. ‘I mean … it’s very old, but not old. That’s all stuff about the Second World War. But … it doesn’t look old or feel old or smell old. It’s …’

  ‘Yes, I know, it’s probably one of those reprinted newspapers you can get for the day you were born, my father got me one for—’

  ‘Wrapping fish and chips?’ said Johnny.

  ‘It’s odd, I must admit,’ said Kasandra.

  She turned and looked at him as though seeing him for the first time.

  ‘I’ve waited years for something like this,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you?’

  ‘For something like Mrs Tachyon’s trolley?’

  ‘Try to pay attention, will you?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Haven’t you ever wondered what’d happen if a flying saucer landed in your garden? Or you found some sort of magical item that let you travel in time? Or some old cave with a wizard that’d been asleep for a thousand years?’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact I did once find an old cave with—’