In which Colin speaks his mind and Freddie and Lee go time-travelling.
Kevin
“Oh my God!” exclaimed Colin, but it wasn’t me he was looking at any longer. Instead he was staring at my brother.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
“Well… I thought it wouldn’t be fair to Kev. He specifically asked me not to tell you he was gay. And actually I didn’t know he and Jeremy were… how long have you two been..?” he asked me.
“Since about midnight,” I told him. “We hadn’t realised that we both wanted the same thing: I was scared to say anything to him because I thought he hated my glasses, and he was scared to say anything to me because he’s small for fourteen and thought I wouldn’t be interested. But last night we found out we were both worrying about nothing, and so… but… look, Col…”
“Why didn’t you want to tell me you were gay?” demanded Colin.
“Well… I didn’t know how you’d react,” I admitted.
“Why would you even care how I’d react?”
“Well, because you’re Chris’s best friend, and because you’re round here a lot, and… well… I like you, okay? Every time you come round you treat me almost like you’re my friend as well as Chris’s, and I didn’t want that to stop, so…”
“What, you thought I’d hate you if I found out you were gay? Gosh, thanks, Kev. I’ve always wanted people to think I’m a hater.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t think I really thought you’d turn out to be like that, but it does happen: Jeremy’s best friend turned very nasty when he found out about him, and they’re only really starting to patch it up a bit now. And I care what you think, too. I didn’t want you to hate me.”
“I don’t hate you. I mean, obviously I wasn’t going to. You know I think you’re a really good big brother, and I don’t think anything could change my mind about that, so you could have told me.”
“I know. Sorry,” I said again.
“Oh, well, I suppose it doesn’t matter. So does this mean that you two are… well, going out with each other?”
“I suppose so,” I said. “We haven’t really talked about it yet, but I hope we’ll be able to get together a lot.”
“Good,” said Colin. “Maybe when Chris and I finally get girlfriends we can triple-date. I like the idea of that.”
I wondered how the putative girlfriends would feel about that, but perhaps they’d find it interesting, too. But that did pretty much answer any lingering questions I might have had about my chances of scoring with Colin: it sounded as if Mark had been right when he said that Colin liked girls.
“Anyway,” said Chris, “What I was going to say before we found you two snogging your noses off was that we’re going swimming after breakfast and we wanted to know if you would like to come with us. Of course, if you just want to go back to bed instead I think I could understand that…”
I looked at Jeremy, who nodded.
“No, I think that’s a good idea,” I said. “After all, we’ll have plenty of time for other stuff.”
“Only one problem,” said Jeremy. “I don’t have any swimming stuff. Can one of you find me a pair of shorts or something?”
“I expect I’ll have one that will fit you,” said Chris. “And we’ve got loads of towels. And if mine don’t fit I’ll give Mark a call and ask him to bring a pair. He’s meeting us at the pool.”
It turned out that Chris’s spare swim shorts fitted Jeremy perfectly, so after breakfast – and after a further half-hour’s rest, which Mother insisted on (“You shouldn’t go swimming right after a meal,” she said, which failed to take into account the time we’d be spending on the bus between the house and the pool) we headed into town. Mark was waiting outside the pool, staring ostentatiously at his watch.
“Yes, I know,” said Chris, before Mark could open his mouth. “Blame my mother. Anyway, we’re here now.”
He turned to go into the building, but I stopped him.
“Wait a moment,” I said. “There’s something Mark needs to know. Mark, Jeremy and me…”
“He means they’re an item,” interrupted Colin. “It’s good, isn’t it? It’s about time Kev found someone. Of course, I didn’t know until this morning that it was going to be a boy, but what the hell, he’s got a partner, and I bet you hadn’t expected that. I know I hadn’t.”
Mark looked at me, and I think that if Chris and Colin hadn’t been there he’d probably have kissed me, but clearly he wasn’t quite ready to tell them about Danny just yet – although Colin’s reaction to finding out about me strongly suggested that there was no good reason not to. Probably he just wanted to check with Danny about it first.
“Nice one, Kev,” he said. “Obviously Jeremy must be mad as well as blind – or did you drug him?”
“Shut up, Dwarf-man,” I said. “At least Jeremy’s over five feet tall…”
“Just about,” put in Jeremy in my ear.
“Unlike you,” I went on. “If Jeremy had to be mad and blind to choose me, who do you think is ever going to choose you? A professional midget-handler?”
Mark grinned at me. “I think people might be surprised to discover just how irresistible I am,” he said.
“They might, at that,” I admitted, looking at Chris and Colin.
“Maybe I’ll surprise you,” said Mark. “Or some of you, anyway. So, am I going to have to stand here for another half hour, or are we actually going to swim today?”
I’m not a great swimmer. I mean, I can swim, but not all that quickly: Chris is far better at it than I am, just as he is with most other sports. But it was fun, all the same. We splashed around for about an hour and a half and then went back to the changing room
Of course, I’d spent the past few Sunday mornings trying to catch a glimpse of Colin in the changing-rooms without any success at all, but I needn’t have bothered, because now he simply slipped off his shorts and started to dry himself – starting with his hair – while standing right next to me. The only way he could have been more obliging would have been to hand me a full-frontal photo of himself naked. It was nice, too, probably not much smaller than mine and with a few little hairs around the base. He had some good muscle development, too – as indeed did Chris, although Chris was a little smaller where it counts and didn’t seem to have any hair yet.
I looked back at Colin: yes, I decided, he looks amazing… and yet somehow the fact that he liked girls didn’t seem to matter any more, because now I actually had a genuine boyfriend, and not just an impossible fantasy. It’s true that Jeremy was a couple of inches shorter than Colin and didn’t have his muscles, but he was still stunningly beautiful, and even if his equipment was a little smaller than Colin’s, the difference was that I was never going to get near Colin’s, whereas Jeremy had already demonstrated that he was perfectly happy to share his with me.
Mark caught my eye and gave me a little nod, and I smiled back at him. I hoped it wouldn’t be too long before Danny could come swimming with us – I decided that I liked the idea of double-dating with him and Mark…
Colin and Mark came back home with us and stayed for lunch, and after lunch we had a mass video games session.
“This might be my last chance to whip everyone,” Mark said to me quietly at one point. “Danny’s going to kill all of us if we let him play.”
“Are you going to tell Chris and Colin about him?”
“Yes, of course I am – provided Danny’s okay with it. I want to ask him first. I mean, I don’t suppose for a moment that Chris or Col would let anything slip, but I’m not sure how it would go down with Danny’s parents if it got out. Actually I don’t think it would go down too well with mine, either, so we’ll be keeping fairly quiet about it. But as far as I’m concerned I won’t mind everyone here knowing about it.”
Jeremy wasn’t all that great at video games either, but he did seem to be having fun. It was probably the first time he’d actually been with a bunch of friends for quite a long time, and even though they weren’t strictly speaking ‘his’ friends, it was obvious that everyone liked him.
Of course we weren’t broadcasting our relationship to my mother: officially Jeremy was staying in the guest room, so we left all his stuff in there and messed up the bed a bit, but of course this evening as soon as he’d had a wash he simply dumped his washing kit in the guest room and came straight along to mine. We were under slightly better control tonight, so we were able to cuddle nicely without accidents.
“Kevin,” he said, “are we going to have proper sex? Not straight away, obviously, but later?”
“That depends what you mean by ‘proper sex,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned everything we’ve done so far has been proper sex.”
“You know what I mean. I mean are you going to put it in me?”
“Not unless you put it in me too. We’re equals, Jer. This isn’t a one way relationship.”
“Well, okay, but I don’t think I’m really big enough… you know what I mean.”
“I think you probably are, actually,” I said. “But if we decide we’re going to do that you’ll definitely get a chance to find out. Although if you want me to do it to you as well, I’m sure I won’t mind too much!”
“I’m not completely sure if I do or not. That’s really why I asked. I like the idea a lot, but I’m scared it’ll hurt.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Well, you’re pretty big… you see, Peter wanted to do it to me. He really liked the idea – we were talking about it that night in the tent. But he said that although he really wanted to he was afraid it would hurt me too much, and even when he was still seriously angry with me he didn’t want to hurt me as much as that. I mean, I think it would be a lot different if you did it, because we’d be doing it because of how we feel about each other. If he’d done it he would have been trying to humiliate me and hurt me at the same time. But physically it would be the same basic idea…”
“If you really want to do it there are ways of getting ready,” I told him. “Mark’s got something… maybe we could borrow it, or he might be able to get us one for just us to use…. Anyway, I’ll talk to him. But I promise I’m never going to do anything that hurts you, Jer, okay?”
“Okay.” And he gave me a little hug and a kiss, and then we settled down for the night.
Freddie
When we checked out the weather online on Wednesday morning we found that it was going to be fairly bright but with a bit of a breeze, particularly along the coast. That wasn’t too much of a problem, because we weren’t intending to swim anyway – we didn’t have any Forties swimming costumes, and I wouldn’t have been too keen on wearing one even if we’d found some because apparently back then boys often wore something that looked like a modern girls’ one-piece. I’ll do a lot for the sake of making it look real, but wearing a girl’s swimming costume would have been a step too far.
The important thing was that no rain was forecast – rain would obviously have made it impossible to find anyone to try out our time-travel story on. So after breakfast we packed our Forties stuff in our bags and headed for the station.
Lee was starting to show signs of cold feet by this stage: he was convinced we were going to get caught, and he wasn’t sure that he could remember to speak without using modern expressions. But I managed to persuade him to come with me, telling him that we could always change our minds later. As far as I was concerned, that was definitely not going to happen.
We caught the train to Hastings and then changed onto the coastal line that took us to Eastbourne, and there we got onto a bus heading for Seaford. We got off five miles or so along the road, by which time we were about halfway between the two towns. I’d chosen that point because there was a large forest north of the road where we could get changed and leave our modern clothes, and because the coastal path ran along the top of the cliffs to the left of the road, about a mile away. I was fairly sure we’d find a few people at least there.
There was a path running parallel to the road just inside the trees, but once we got past that the area looked fairly wild and I thought it unlikely that anyone would come past, and so I started to get undressed.
“Are you sure about this?” asked Lee.
“Of course I am! Come on, Lee, it’ll be a laugh – and if we get found out we’ll give them the ‘We’re researching a project for school’ story. Actually I think I could do a rather good project on being a kid in World War Two by now – I’ve done enough research on it.”
I didn’t wait for Lee, I just took everything off and then started to get dressed in the Forties clothes, and after a few seconds Lee started to get changed too. Once we were ready we checked our pockets carefully to make sure that we weren’t carrying anything that could give us away and then put on our caps and picked up our gas-masks – we’d found another one for Lee eventually – and looked each other up and down.
“You look fine,” I assured him. “Ready?”
“No, not really.”
“Tough.” And I set off back towards the road. He hesitated, but only for a few seconds, and he had caught me up by the time we crossed the road. There was a convenient gate a little way along, and once we were through this it was a gentle stroll across the open grass that led towards the cliffs a mile or so away.
To be completely honest I didn’t expect our time-travel story to stand up for ten seconds: any adult we told it to would just say, ‘Yeah, right!’ and I didn’t think even I could try to stick to the story in the face of adult disbelief – and I knew Lee wouldn’t be able to. In fact I was seriously thinking about not even trying the story if the person we met looked sufficiently sceptical: I thought it would be better to switch to the school project story straight away. But then I changed my mind again, because the first person we met wasn’t an adult.
We’d only got about halfway to the cliffs and had reached the point where the land began to slope downhill, and there, behind a scrubby little bush and lying flat on the ground with a notebook beside him and a pair of binoculars against his eyes, was a boy of around our own age, and that really was too good a chance to miss.
“I say!” I said, making him start. “Are you a spy?”
He rolled over to face us, stared, scrabbled in his pocket for a pair of glasses almost as geeky as mine, put them on and stared some more.
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“Well, at least you’re not a bally German,” I said. “At least, you don’t sound like one. But what are you doing? Surely this area is restricted?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“We’re only about half a mile from the coast,” I said. “I’m sure civilians aren’t usually allowed this close. We managed to sneak through a gate that nobody was guarding, but I bet there’s barbed wire all over the place – so how did you get here?”
“Barbed wire? Are you insane?”
“You mean, there isn’t any? Well, that’s deuced odd,” I said. “All right, I know the Jerries probably couldn’t scale the cliffs without someone noticing, but even so, I’m surprised there isn’t at least a guard post up here.”
By now he was just about speechless, and I suppose that in his shoes I would have been fairly confused too.
“Is this a game, or something?” he asked, finally.
“A game? No, not really. We just decided to come and have a look at the sea – I mean, we knew we wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a proper beach, but we hoped we’d be able to see the sea from up here – even if I expected there to be soldiers about to keep an eye on us. But there doesn’t seem to be anyone except you. And where on earth did you find those clothes? I’ve never seen anything like your trousers.”
He was wearing jeans, of course, together with a zip-up black jacket.
“You think my clothes are odd? He said. “What about yours? I don’t think anyone has dressed like that since about 1960.”
Now that was an absolute godsend, and of course I grabbed it.
“Nineteen-sixty?” I said. “What on earth do you mean? It’s only 1941!”
I was fighting like mad to keep a straight face, though a glance at Lee suggested that he wasn’t having any trouble doing so at all – he obviously thought that sooner or later this was going to get us into trouble.
“It’s two thousand and twelve!” said the boy, gaping at us.
“It’s nineteen forty-one,” I countered. “I think I’d have noticed if I’d overslept by seventy-one years!”
He went on staring, and I just stared right back, still not really expecting him to go for it, but willing to give it a try all the same.
“Oh, come on!” he said. “You’re winding me up!”
“What does ‘winding you up’ mean?” I asked. “It isn’t English.”
“Yes, it is… all right, I can prove you’re not real,” he said. “Let’s see what’s in your pockets.”
I shrugged, dug into the pocket of my shorts and produced a handkerchief, a comb, a paper bag containing half a dozen pear drops (there’s a shop in town that still sells sweets the old way by the quarter-pound, even though I have to translate to work out what a quarter-pound is - roughly a hundred grams, I think) and three and eightpence halfpenny in pre-war coins. Lee’s wallet contained a couple of unused George VI postage stamps and a photo of his great-grandma that had actually been taken in 1938 when she was about fifteen years old – there was a photographer’s stamp on the back that said so – and one and elevenpence three-farthings.
Our victim stared at this lot and then came and stuck his hands in my blazer pockets, which I didn’t mind at all because there was now nothing in them.
“All right, that’s enough,” I said, pushing him back a step or two. “Anyway, are you satisfied?”
“Well, yes, but… I mean… look at this!”
His pockets contained a collection of modern coins and a five pound note, and also a couple of pencils, a cheap biro, some keys and a phone.
“What’s that?” I said, pointing at the phone.
“It’s a phone.”
“No, it isn’t! It doesn’t look anything like one – and where are the cables, then? You can’t have a phone without cables!”
By now he was just about sold. I don’t think I would have been in his position, but then nobody has ever put me in that position. Anyway, he hit a couple of buttons on the phone, held it to his ear, and started talking to someone, beckoning me over and holding the phone close enough to my ear that I could hear the person at the other end, who sounded like another boy. They talked about nothing much – our boy asked when the other one would be back home and was told on Saturday – and then our boy hung up. Clearly it was now time to find out if I could really act or not.
“That’s impossible!” I said, staring at the boy. “All right, I know the army has small radios, but they’re twenty times bigger than that – I’ve seen them on the newsreels! And that money – who’s the woman?”
“Queen Elizabeth.”
“You mean Princess Elizabeth… oh. So… what year did you say this was again?”
“Twenty-twelve.”
I sat down on the grass. “But… how…I mean, it was definitely 1941 when we left Eastbourne!”
“I thought those motor cars looked odd – you know, when we crossed the road,” said Lee, who had apparently decided that he might as well join in. “I said so, remember?”
“Well, yes, but you know I don’t know an Austin from a Bugatti,” I said. “But how could we possibly have got here? It must have been after we got off the bus but before we crossed the road, if you’re right… while we were in the forest! There was that little tremor, remember? It felt a bit like a bomb going off a few streets away…”
“Yes, but that doesn’t explain how we got here, does it?” Lee pointed out.
“No, but if we go back to the same place and just sort of reverse our route it’ll probably take us back,” I said.
“How do you know?” asked the boy.
“Well, I don’t, obviously, but if we walk back the way we came we should end up in the same time as we started from as well as the same place. That’s logical, I think. But since we’re here… well, there are no guns or barbed wire, so has the war finished?”
“Of course it has! It ended in 1945!”
“And do we… I mean, did we win? Only you’re not speaking German, so…”
“Yes, we won.”
“Hey, we’re going to win!” I said to Lee, and we both tried to look really happy. “But I don’t quite see how… I mean, I know Winnie keeps saying the British Empire cannot be beaten, but to be completely honest things didn’t look terribly bright this morning. The Jerries are in France, I don’t think things are going terribly well in North Africa, and we’re about the only country still fighting them. Our navy and air force are wizard, certainly, but… well…”
“I bet the Yanks came in!” said Lee.
“I bet they didn’t!” I replied. “Why would they? Germany is no threat to them, and you heard Mrs Lamb say the Yanks know better than to get dragged into this one. It must have been something else.”
We both looked at our audience, who looked uncertain – perhaps he wasn’t old enough to have studied World War Two yet.
“The Americans did come in,” he said. “The Japanese attacked them without warning and sank their fleet, and after that the Yanks had to come in on our side. There was a film about it on TV a little while back. And I think the Russians joined in, too.”
“What, on our side?” I said. “That sounds mad! I thought the Jerries had a pact with them, or something.”
“Sorry,” said the boy. “I don’t really know. But I can find out. If you come home with me I can look it up on my computer.”
“What’s a computer?” asked Lee.
“Oh! It’s a sort of… it’s a bit hard to explain. But I can show you.”
“I think we ought to try to get back,” said Lee. “What if something happens and we can’t? Suppose we get stuck here?”
“Well, it’s probably better here, because there’s no war,” I said. “But maybe you’re right. And I wouldn’t want to put your parents to any trouble, either,” I added to the boy.
“Oh, you won’t. There’s nobody home, and there won’t be until about six o’clock. They’re both at work, and my sister’s gone shopping.”
“Well… how far away do you live?”
“Not far. I live on the edge of East Dean. It’s only about ten minutes away.”
“Shall we?” I said to Lee. “I don’t suppose it’ll make a lot of difference to our chances of getting back.”
“I suppose we could,” he agreed.
“Great!” said the boy. “Look, I’m Josh – Josh Morden. Who are you?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever met a ‘Josh’ before,” I said. “I’m Freddie, and this is L… George.”
“I think it’s short for ‘Joshua’,” said Lee. “Does that mean that you’re Jewish?”
“No! Why would you think that?”
“I just thought it was a Jewish name,” said Lee. “Sorry.”
“Well, I suppose it was originally, but now there are a lot of people called Josh.”
“I bet there wouldn’t be if the Jerries had won,” said Lee, and I hoped he was going to shut up, because of course we weren’t supposed to know anything about the Holocaust.
“So how long have you lived round here?” I asked quickly.
“All my life. I go to school in Eastbourne. It’s okay, I suppose.”
“What’s ‘okay’?” asked Lee, which I was quite impressed by, because I wouldn’t have picked up on it.
“You know – it means ‘all right… oh, perhaps you don’t know,” said Josh. “It’s American, and it might not have been around before the war.”
I hid a little smile, because it was now fairly clear that he’d bought the story. All we had to do was play along for a bit longer, express amazement at his computer, and then we could count the mission a complete success…
Josh
At this stage I wasn’t completely sure that this was a wind-up – after all, there were clearly no hidden cameras around to catch my reaction, and there was nothing about either the appearance of the two boys or their speech to yell ‘Fake!’ at me. Nor was there any obvious reason for them to be trying to wind me up. But it’s not easy to believe that two people standing right in front of you have just popped out of a time warp, and so I was far from convinced. I’d decided to go along with it for a while to see what happened.
“So if you’re not a spy, what are you doing here?” asked the one with glasses – Freddie, if that was really his name.
“I’m bird-watching - well, I was hoping to, anyway. There aren’t too many birds around except for gulls, but you never know. Hence the binoculars. I don’t think there were ever any military posts up here for me to be spying on even if now was then, or however we’re going to put it, although there are a couple of gun emplacements down beside the river, but they’re in ruins now. I expect they were properly equipped with guns and men in your time, though. Would you like to come and have a look? It’s not far.”
“All right,” said Freddie, and so I led them in the direction of the trig point that overlooks the valley of the River Cuckmere, and from just past there you can see the remains of some of the old fortifications that had presumably been put there during the war.
”Crikey,” said Freddie. “I think that proves you’re telling the truth, because it’s not possible that it could look like that where we come from. I’m sorry for not believing you, Josh.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Now, if we follow the path along the cliff-tops it’ll take us back to my house – if you still want to come?”
“Yes, please. I’m rather intrigued to discover what a twenty-first century house looks like.”
“Where do you come from, then?” I asked as we set off.
“Well, we live just south of London, in a town called Croydon, but we got evacuated when the blitz started because we lived too close to Croydon Airport. We ended up billeted in a village about halfway between Croydon and Hastings. It’s not too bad there, I suppose, but it’s not as nice as it is at home. At home we were just about due to get electricity put in, but at the place we are now there's nothing like that.”
It didn’t take that long to walk back to my house, maybe twenty minutes or so – of course, going to the trig point first had increased the distance. We didn’t talk a lot: they seemed happy to admire the view, and I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound like I was testing them.
My house isn’t particularly big or even particularly modern, but compared to a place with no electricity it would seem positively amazing – and in fairness to them, amazed was how they appeared when I showed them our TV.
“I bet you’ve never seen anything like that,” I said, turning it off again.
“Well, no. I know televisions exist, of course: they started five or six years ago – it was on the newsreels. But I’ve never actually seen one, and the ones in the news didn’t look anything like that. But I suppose seventy years is a long time, and it would be normal for things to get better – after all, motor cars today… I mean, in our time – don’t look anything like the very early ones did. So what else have you got?”
I was about to show them the kitchen, but then I had a brainwave and took them upstairs to the bathroom instead.
“You said your place doesn’t have electricity,” I said. “Does that mean you don’t have hot water either?”
“Well, we can heat water up on the range,” said Freddie. “You mean you have hot water without having to heat it up first?”
“That’s right. You just turn the tap.”
“Crikey! I wish we had that. We have to use a tin bath in the outhouse, and we have to heat up the water for it on the range a bit at a time. And we have to share, too, because otherwise we’d use up too much water, and it would take ages to heat enough of it up.”
“Well, why don’t you try this one?” I said. “Have a proper bath in hot water. I bet you’ll enjoy that a lot more than your tin thing.”
“I think we ought to go back,” said the other one.
“It won’t take long,” I said, “especially if you share – after all, you’re used to that.”
They looked at each other, and I thought this would be where I found out if they were for real or not: if they were, and if they really had to bathe the way they said, they would surely fall over themselves to try a proper bath. If they were faking it they’d just go. And maybe they realised that, because Freddie said that he’d definitely like to try it.
“Okay,” I said, starting to run the bath. “Come through to my room and get undressed, and I’ll find you some towels.”
They looked at each other again.
“I’m not getting undressed in front of you!” said George.
“Oh – I thought you be used to it, what with having to share a bath,” I pointed out. “But that’s okay, I don’t mind getting undressed too.”
“All right,” said Freddie, although George still looked as if he wanted to argue.
So I found a couple of towels in the bathroom cupboard and then took them through to my room.
“That’s my computer,” I said, indicating my machine. “Once you’ve had your bath I can try to find out exactly what happened in the war for you.”
I waited for them to get undressed.
“You first,” said George, distrustfully.
“Oh, okay. But I bet we look the same, even if you are seventy years older than me!”
I turned the computer on, pointed the webcam in their direction and set it to capturing and then switched the monitor off.
“It’ll warm up while you’re in the bath,” I told them, and I started to get undressed. Of course this really was the clincher: if they were faking it they’d know exactly what I was doing, so they now had the choice of either giving themselves away by moving away from the camera or risking ending up on video. Or they could simply throw in the towel and admit they were trying to con me.
But they didn’t move, and they did start to get undressed, and at that point I found myself almost believing them again. Of course they might not have seen me activate the camera – my body had been between them and the screen, after all. And when they removed their shorts and I saw their underwear I was almost completely convinced, because I couldn’t imagine where you could find underwear like that in this day and age.
“Come on, then,” I said, and I picked up my phone and took them through to the bathroom.
“Why do you need that?” asked Freddie.
“In case my sister decides to come home early. She’ll call to see if I’m in. You don’t want a girl walking in on you while you’re in the bath, do you?”
Once again they were on the spot: if they were fakes, surely they wouldn’t let me film them naked in the bath? If they were genuine, on the other hand, they’d have no idea that I was holding a camera. By now I was genuinely unsure, and when Freddie took his underwear off and got into the bath I was just about sold. George seemed a little more reluctant, but maybe he was just shy.
“Take yours off first,” he said to me, so I slipped my boxers off, and then George took a deep breath, removed his own underwear and got into the bath.
“This is spiffing,” said Freddie, sliding down with his legs on either side of his friend’s. “I say, you wouldn’t have any soap, would you?”
I handed them the soap, turning the video capture of the phone on at the same time. I was aware that Freddie in particular was checking me out, which I didn’t mind too much – after all, there’s nothing wrong with me.
They washed themselves and then started larking about and splashing each other, and in the end I had to stop them before too much water ended up on the floor. By now I was completely convinced, because I didn’t think they could possibly have acted as relaxed as that otherwise, so I handed them a towel each and filmed them drying each other’s backs. I grabbed their underwear as well as my own and headed back to the bedroom, telling them to put the towels on the radiator and to follow me as soon as they were dry, and by the time they came through thirty seconds later I had Googled a timeline of World War Two. The webcam was still running, of course, and I realised I might have to edit myself out of the final film, but I wasn’t too worried about that.
“Come here,” I said, as soon as they entered the room.
“Can’t we get dressed first?” asked Freddie.
“No, you might as well see this,” I said, stepping back out of the way so that they could see the screen – and stand right in front of the webcam at the same time.
“Look,” I said. “You can see that Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, and that America entered the war in December. After that it was just a matter of time. So you’re going to win, however it feels where you come from.”
“How does it work?” asked Freddie. “Is there somewhere sending this stuff out, like with a television?”
“No, it’s more like you turning on your television and telling it what you want to watch. All this information is out there – you just have to find it.”
“Oh, wow! We’ve got to find out more about this!” said Freddie enthusiastically.
“Well, get dressed, and then I’ll see what else I can find out for you.”
I filmed them as they dressed and then put the phone away while I got dressed myself. By now I was totally convinced: I couldn’t imagine for a moment that they would have let me film them naked without arguing if they knew what I was doing, and the way I’d held the phone in the bathroom would have made it completely obvious. So I almost didn’t bother with my final attempt at cracking their cover.
“Now,” I said, once we were all dressed, “if you’re really from 1941 you’re not going to understand a single word of what I’m about to tell you, but if this is a wind-up you need to know that I’m going to upload everything from the webcam and the mobile to the web as soon as you’ve gone. So if you don’t want to go viral on YouTube this is your last chance to come clean.”
Freddie was staring with me with something close to a stone face, but George looked agitated: first he whispered into Freddie’s ear, and then, when Freddie just shook his head, he stood up.
“All right,” he said.
“Lee! Shit, I mean George!” said Freddie.
“Shut up, Freddie. I’m not going to let him put pictures of me online. It’s time we stopped this, okay?”
Freddie sighed. “All right,” he said, “we surrender. What gave us away?”
“To be honest, nothing at all,” I told him. “You were completely convincing. The only problem is that I don’t believe in time travel, and that meant that I started out not believing you at all. The fact that I did just about believe you by the end is pretty impressive, to tell the truth. Where did you get the clothes? They look completely real.”
“They are completely real. There’s this shop I know. See, it started with me having to wear a pair of really geeky glasses…”
“Even geekier than mine, you mean?” I interrupted.
“Well, just about. Then I started deliberately trying to look geeky, and then a friend made some comment about my hairstyle looking like it came from 1940, and everything else sort of followed on from there. I wanted to find out if I could act as if I really came from 1940, and so here I am. Lee… that’s his real name, by the way, but it isn’t very 1940 – wasn’t so keen, but I more or less dragged him along with me, so… well, you are going to delete those films, aren’t you?”
“Maybe,” I said, grinning. “But why the hell did you let me film you in the first place?”
“I don’t know, really,” said Freddie. “I suppose I just dug myself in so deep by agreeing to try your bath that I couldn’t get out of it without giving myself away. To be honest I didn’t think you’d really post them – after all, that could get you into trouble too. But I’d still like to watch you delete them.”
“I think I’d have thrown in the towel as soon as I saw the phone,” I said.
“So would I,” said George, or Lee. “I didn’t want to let Freddie down, otherwise I would have. But I’m still going to beat him up later, even if you do delete the films.”
“Oh, really?” said Freddie. “That’ll be a first, then!”
“Shall we look at the films before I delete them?” I suggested.
And so we sat and watched the webcam film of the boys getting undressed – that one wasn’t too bad because of course they didn’t remove their underwear until they reached the bathroom.
“This is just a good film showing what boys of our age wore during the war,” I said. “I might keep it to use at school – the war is bound to come up sooner or later, because it always does, and I think I’d get some good marks for this.”
“I suppose I wouldn’t mind that too much,” said Lee, and Freddie nodded.
“I’m not so sure about this bit, though,” I said, and ran the film on to the point where the three of us came back into the room, all naked, and started looking at the screen.
“No, I think that can definitely go,” I said. I opened the editing software, cut the film at the point where Freddie and Lee left the room in their underpants and dumped the rest. Next I downloaded the video clips I’d shot in the bathroom onto the computer – it's a lot easier to watch them there than on the phone's own screen. I’ve got a good phone and the quality wasn’t bad at all, and so it wasn’t all that surprising that they wanted that deleting too. So I duly deleted it.
“And from the phone!” demanded Freddie.
“Damn!” I said, grinning. “I was hoping you’d forget about that.”
I let him watch as I deleted the clips from the phone.
“Thanks,” he said. “I hope you’re not too hacked off about us trying to convince you…”
“No, not at all. It was a lot more fun than looking for birds that weren’t there. If you want to try again – as Victorian chimney-sweeps or Saxon peasants, or whatever – you can certainly come back.”
“I think once is enough,” said Lee.
“I don’t know,” argued Freddie. “It might be interesting. Or you could come and see how you like living in 1941. I’d quite like to see you trying to cope with a tin bath in an outhouse. I’ll have to see if I can find one.”
“Don’t bother,” I said. “I’m quite happy staying in twenty-twelve. But you obviously know loads about the war, so I wouldn’t mind staying in touch – just in case I ever get asked to do a project on it.”
“Yes, all right,” said Freddie, and so we swapped Facebook details and phone numbers.
“Did you really come all the way here dressed like that?” I asked. “You must have got some funny looks on the train.”
“No, we only got changed after we got here. Our stuff is up in the forest – and probably we ought to go now. It’ll take us a while to walk back, and I don’t want to be too late home.”
“You don’t have to go all that way back. If you just walk up to the top of this road and turn left it’ll take you back to the main road.”
“Thanks,” said Freddie, and I took them down to the front door and showed them which way to go. They walked away, and I went back upstairs, sat at the computer, opened the Rubbish Bin and undeleted the two bits of film. It’s amazing how many people think that simply deleting a file gets rid of it for good.
Of course I wasn’t going to post it anywhere, just keep it for my own entertainment. After all, they both looked good naked, especially Freddie – even with his geeky glasses on – and I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t keep a little souvenir!
***************************
I guess that comes under the heading of 'close but no cigar'. And at least Freddie and Lee don't know about Josh's souvenirs... meanwhile, back with Kevin, it looks as if everything has worked out pretty well: now that he knows Colin is on board he should be able to relax and enjoy life.
'Woe, woe and thrice woe! The end is nigh!' as the soothsayer on Up Pompeii used to say. Well, she's right: there's only one more chapter to come, so if you've got any thoughts about the story there isn't a lot of time to tell me about them. If you want to do so, send a mail to gothmog@nyms.net
Copyright 2013: all rights reserved. Please do not reprint, repost or otherwise reproduce this or any part of it anywhere without my written permission.
David Clarke