The Disappearing Act

UWW Prompt: 6


Your character has found a gizmo in a local park. He/She picks it up and takes it home. While fiddling around with it, he/she pushes a small button that sends him/her into a totally different time period and place. Write about your character’s experience, and show how the experience has changed him/her upon return to his/her own time and place.



The Disappearing Act.



Tom was sitting, as ever, on the blue painted park bench overlooking the Royal Military Canal, adjacent to Waitrose car park. From this vantage point, he could monitor the myriad of cars and people that came and went from the supermarket, and the ducks and moorhens on the canal. The slope up to the seat was steep, and difficult to negotiate when Mildred accompanied him, but afforded a clear view over the canal to the allotment gardens to his south. A squeal of brakes drew his eyes to the lower level, where two cyclists narrowly avoided a collision. It’s safer up here he thought, less in the way of hazards.

Mildred wasn’t with Tom that afternoon because the nurse was coming to check her legs. Tom knew that meant he would not see Mildred again until tomorrow, when she had calmed down sufficiently. `Acting up’, they called it, when Mildred expressed her dislike of what was happening, as if she were a child. Tom snorted with derision, it didn’t take a genius to work out that the arrival of the nurse meant pain to Mildred, and it was no wonder she `acted up’. Either way, Tom knew he would spend the evening on his own, and that it would drag.

A young woman with two small children, and a very large pushchair sat down on the bench alongside Tom’s. The back of the pushchair was laden with carrier bags and a dark brown satchel from which a roll of blue coloured paper stuck out. Reaching into the satchel, the elder of the two children, a lad of about five years of age, took out a small black box and put it on the ground beside the bench. “I didn’t eat all my sandwich”, the boy said, “I was saving it for the ducks.” Reaching back into the satchel, the boy took out a paper bag with grease stains on it, from which he retrieved a rather squashed piece of bread, which he threw into the canal.

The child in the pushchair began immediately to clamour for a piece of bread to throw, and was appeased only by the appearance of a roll from one of the carrier bags behind her. Tearing it apart, she flung the soft dough down the bank towards the ducks who fought half-heartedly for a morsel. They must be the best-fed ducks in the southeast, thought Tom, he himself had just fed a bag of leftover bread to the selfsame ducks not an hour since. There was always a lot of leftover bread at Beech House, which Tom collected up after each meal to take to his feathered friends. There was a flurry of activity as the young woman and her children departed, followed by a return to the soporific late afternoon warmth of early summer.

Gradually the number of visitors to the supermarket dwindled, and the shopping trolley collector began to fasten his brood to railings. Gardeners from the allotments were stowing their tools away in ramshackle sheds, their bags of homegrown produce having doubled in size since their arrival earlier in the day. Guessing the time to be coming up to six pm, Tom gathered his bread bag from the bench, folding it neatly into his jacket pocket. It wasn’t a good idea to be late back to Beech House on the days that Mildred’s nurse had called: an afternoon punctuated by her shrieks of protest did little to calm the mood of the staff on duty.

Turning away from the canal, Tom spotted the small black box at the side of the neighbouring bench. Remembering the young family who had sat next to him, Tom decided that they were probably frequent visitors to the canal, and that the chances were that he would see them again. Judging by the children Tom saw at the bus stop, the lad would probably miss the box as soon as he got home: it wasn’t often that you saw a youngster without a small device to which his or her fingers seemed to be glued. He doubted that the family would return to search for the box that evening; it was more likely that the boy would drag his mother there after school tomorrow. If that were the case, he would be able to give the box back to the boy if he took it home with him tonight. Unfolding the bread bag from his pocket, Tom carefully placed the box inside, and slowly made his way along the canal bank towards Beech House.

Uproar greeted his ears as he opened the large front door: the nurse had obviously seen Mildred, who was protesting loudly from her room. Peter was marching back and forth along the hallway, his hands clapped firmly over his ears. “Bloody woman, Shut up”, he said repeatedly in monotone. Tom didn’t like Peter. His dishevelled appearance irritated him, especially because he knew how long Peter took in the bathroom each morning. It was Tom’s misfortune to share a bathroom with Peter, and being kept waiting for seemingly hour’s everyday was a constant source or irritation. Taking advantage of Peter’s about turn, Tom slipped quickly through the door on his left, which he closed firmly behind him.

Safe in the confines of his own room, Tom took the box out of the bag, and hid it amongst his vests in the chest of drawers beside his bed. The pale yellow walls and chintz curtains gave the room an almost cottagey feel, but the sparsity of the furnishings, together with the linoleum flooring, betrayed its institutional origins. A small bookcase under the window held a cassette player and a few tapes; a couple of framed photographs; and a battered box containing the remaining pieces of a once-favourite jigsaw. Although his motives were pure, Tom felt an inexplicable need to keep the box a secret, and, folding the bread bag neatly into his jacket pocket once more, left to join the others in the dining room.

Tea was a raucous affair of top ten tunes blaring forth from the radio on the food counter; individual pizzas with chips, and frozen peas that refused to stay on the plates. The peas that had escaped were now lying squashed on the floor, their brief period of freedom having been ended by the volume of feet they had encountered. Unconsciously trying to appear as normal, Tom gathered up the leftover bread that remained from the meal, and put it into the bag, before trying to make his escape. That Mildred hadn’t appeared for her tea complicated matters for him, as he would usually be preoccupied with helping her leave the room. It was customary for Tom and Mildred to spend their evening listening to tapes in his room. No reason why I can’t still do that, Tom thought to himself, he’d prefer to be on his own.

Back inside his room, Tom pulled the chest of drawers in front of the door to prevent unwanted visitors. Plugging his cassette player into the mains, Tom carefully selected a tape to play before opening the drawer that contained his vests. The box was where he’d left it, and Tom sat down on his bed to investigate it further. It was the size of an older mobile phone, but with buttons marked with the same symbols as his cassette player on the front. Logically, the button marked play was green, and the one marked stop was red. Rewind was yellow, and fast forward was blue. Nothing too complicated about that, thought Tom, but there was no opening for a tape, and besides, the box simply wasn’t big enough to hold one. Leaning back against his pillow, Tom stretched his legs out in front of him to avoid getting cramp.

Turning the device repeatedly in his hands, Tom noticed a small, round, black button on the underside that he hadn’t seen previously. “The eject button?” he wondered. If he pressed the button, at least he would see what went inside the box. His mind made up, Tom pressed the button cautiously. A whirring sound was heard, and a small aerial protruded from the top of the box. The tape he had been playing on his cassette player ended, and Tom jumped at the sharp click made by its mechanism, so intent was he on the box he was holding. Perhaps it was a transistor radio, and the yellow and blue buttons were for tuning it in? Tom pressed first the yellow, then the blue buttons, but nothing happened. Then he tried pressing the yellow button repeatedly, but still nothing happened. In exasperation, Tom pressed the green play button.

Gradually the room stopped spinning and the brightly coloured flashes of light before his eyes abated. Tom felt giddy and nauseous. He was sitting on a strangely familiar blanket on a lawn, his legs outstretched in front of him. Where had his trousers gone? The romper suit he was wearing revealed a pair of pink, chubby knees that belonged to a bygone era. He could hear the sound of voices, but could not see from whence they came because the flowers in the flowerbed seemed to have tripled in size. “Look at Tom,” a female voice said, “He’s watching a butterfly!” Two women in long, full dresses came towards Tom, the younger of whom bent down to pick him up. The smell that assailed him was unmistakably that of his mother, yet Tom did not recognize the face before him. His mother had been older, and grey haired; this woman could be no more than twenty. “Why Tom,” the woman’s voice addressed him, “What have you got hold of there?” Tom was still holding the black box in his hands, and although he was having trouble recognizing himself, he knew it was vital that he didn’t let go of the box. He wished he could remember what buttons he had pushed, and in what order. He knew he had pushed the play button, but didn’t know if that was before or after he’d pushed the yellow button, or how many times he’d pushed it. He could try pressing the red, or stop button, he supposed, anything was worth a try.

The scene before him shuddered to a halt, almost as if the handbrake had been applied on a car. He was still being held by the younger woman, but he alone could move, all else had simply come to a standstill. There was no sound, no breeze, no colour, no smell, nothing. The red button obviously meant stop, but how long would it stay like this for? Perhaps more importantly, how had he come to be in the garden in the first place, and what did it all mean? The longer questions kept flooding into Tom’s head, the more relaxed he became, after all, nothing had changed since he’d pressed the stop button; he wasn’t being pressured by time. One thing Tom had always hated was being rushed; sometimes it was a while before he could make sense of things, especially something as puzzling as this.

Having established that time was working in his favour, and that he didn’t have to make decision until he was ready to do so, enabled Tom to consider all the possibilities. That his decisions were not judged by others gave him a freedom that he hadn’t experienced before, no matter how fantastical the reasons for those decisions. Sometimes Tom just knew that something was right, even when all the logic in the world indicated that it was wrong. The reverse was also true. A logical explanation to the puzzle before him was that he was dreaming, and that he was in fact asleep in his own bed at Beech House. Tom knew, however, that his size and clothes were wrong, that he had heard voices, and had smelt his mother. Although his size and clothes were wrong, he had been addressed by his name; he was known by the two women he had seen in the garden. He had even been picked up by one of them, so he was actually there.

That he had an answer to one part of the puzzle immediately presented him with another: how had he gone from being in one place, to being in an entirely different one? To Tom, the most logical explanation was that of time travel. Many had been the time when the reality of the present had been so awful that he had simply removed himself from it. What he hadn’t realized was that others did the same. Correction, it isn’t quite the same, it seemed that the others relied on a different energy source to make the move, for Tom it was simply a case of thinking himself somewhere else. Presumably, though, the different energy source was easier to regulate if he was right in his presumption that the black box was that source. When he removed himself from a reality, he had little control over where and when he went. The buttons on the black box were understandable if you thought of them in terms those on a cassette player. Because he was where he was due to an energy source other than himself, he would need to return using the same source, and therein lay his problem: he couldn’t remember what sequence of buttons he had pushed, and he was, therefore, stuck in the current reality, whenever that might be.

Tom scrutinised the black box yet again, trying to remember his cassette player at the same time: the equivalent of the play button was definitely green, the stop was red, rewind was yellow, and fast forward was blue. He remembered pressing both the yellow and the green buttons, which indicated to Tom that he had travelled backwards in time, but by how much? The only clue was his appearance in this reality, and by his clothes, stature, and the fact that he was seemingly in his mother’s arms, Tom deduced that he must be an infant. On his last birthday, Tom had been fifty-six, and although an exact calculation was beyond him, fifty-something years was a long time, his lifetime in fact. Images from various points in his life came into his head: playing cricket in the garden with his dad, a rollercoaster ride at Margate, when England won the World Cup, watching a man land on the moon on a black and white television in the front room. Good things, thought Tom. Of course, there had been bad things as well, but there had been a lot more good things. Tom supposed that if he couldn’t go back to Beech House, it would be fine to stay where he was, that way, he’d get to do the good things all over again.
On the other hand, he could simply continue to time travel, it could be quite good fun to jump in and out of time for the rest of his life. Perhaps he should try going into the future; that way he could see if his dream of marrying Mildred and owning his own car came true. If he didn’t go back to Beech House of course, it couldn’t come true. For him to have a future, he would have to return to his present. All this thought about time travel was beginning to give him a headache, just as it always did he reflected. Each time Tom returned to his own time, he arrived with a headache that lasted for days. Often, the severity of the headache deterred him from making the journey in the first place, and on the odd occasion that he did venture forth, he suffered for his audacity. This time however, a different energy source had powered his flight, and he was surprised that the headache had found a way to accompany him. He needed to go forwards in time, which meant pushing the blue button, together with the green button, an indeterminate number of times. If he ended up in the wrong time, would it really matter? He could easily go backwards and forwards in time with the box, it was simply a question of finding a reference point that showed him when he had landed. Tom pressed the blue button three times, followed by the green button.

The garden spun kaleidoscopically around his head, and a dull throb pulsated through his bones: the headache had accompanied him this time for sure. Closing his eyes, Tom waited for the nausea to pass, aware that his palms were sweating. This was certainly his least favourite way to travel, even if it did have certain advantages. Opening his eyes, Tom found himself sitting on his bed at Beech House. Something was different though, his hair for one thing. Tom had always had his hair cut short, now however, it was curling over his collar. His room had also changed, now there were pictures on his wall, and photos in a wooden frame. When Tom travelled using his own energy source, he always returned to the time that he had left. This time he had returned at a later date. Maybe he had pressed the blue button too many times. Suddenly, Tom felt a compelling need to see Mildred. His recent experiences had risen in his chest like an enormous bubble, and were now threatening to explode unless he confided in someone. Mildred was the only person to whom Tom felt he could entrust his secret, the only person who would not ridicule his tale. At the time when he had first left Beech House, Mildred was confined to her room following her objection to the nurse’s visit. He had arrived back later this time, so with any luck, he had returned on a nurse-free day. Tom put the black box in amongst his vests again, and left his room to find Mildred.

The tumult of voices from the lounge was overpowering, and Tom walked quickly away. Mildred was sitting alone in the small courtyard garden to the back of the house. She was staring intently at a bumblebee that was drinking in the heady scent of honeysuckle from the trellis at her side. “Mind if I join you?” Tom spoke quietly.

He was rewarded by a beam from Mildred. “Long time” she replied. Tom was confused, by rights Mildred should not have realised that he had been away. He would normally have had a day in bed following a journey, and that was the only time that Mildred was aware of his absence. This time he had walked straight back into her reality, albeit in a different time to the one he had left, so his absence should not have existed for Mildred. Perhaps she could see for herself what was happening whenever he went away; perhaps she too, was different.

“Yes, it has been a long time,” Tom, agreed with Mildred, “there’s something I’ve wanted to tell you.” Sitting on the wooden garden chair next to Mildred, Tom related his tale, starting with the young woman and her two children. “So you see, I thought we might travel into the future together this time, we might have a home of our own, we could be married, and we might even have the little blue car we’ve talked about?” Implicit within this suggestion was the possibility that they need not necessarily return, a possibility that Tom had yet to consciously formulate, but which was nonetheless present. As Tom was telling Mildred his story the shadows had lengthened, and he realised that it was getting quite late, no doubt they would be summoned to participate in the bedtime routine any time now.

“Tomorrow” said Tom, “think about it, and we’ll decide tomorrow.” He looked anxiously at Mildred, hoping her expression might give him some clue as to her decision, but no, the one she wore was in readiness to face the staff. Tom wondered who was on duty.

Tom found it hard to sleep that night, every time he slept, he dreamed he had travelled to another time with the box, and every time he had failed to return to the time from whence he had travelled. The headache and the nausea had worsened with each journey to a level where he could barely stand. He would need to conquer this affliction if he was to travel with Mildred, she would be relying on him. Would she travel with him tomorrow? Tom wished he knew, but if he didn’t get some sleep neither of them would be going anywhere. For the umpteenth time Tom checked that the box was amongst his vests. The box was there alright, but this time Tom remembered to turn the small aerial button off, you never knew, it might save some power.

Tom woke late in the morning, too late to get into the bathroom before Peter, whose monotone could be heard through the door. Washing would have to wait, he needed to see Mildred urgently, oh, and he was hungrier than he had ever been. Passing the kitchen on his way to the dining room, Tom was pleased to see Martha Bridges presiding. Martha wasn’t somebody that Tom actually liked, but she was by far the best cook at Beech House. Entering the dining room, Tom saw Mildred seated at their usual table in the corner, where she was nibbling on some toast. Helping himself to a bowl of cornflakes from the sideboard, Tom joined her. There was a pot of tea on the table from which Tom poured a drink. He’d rather have coffee any day, but tea was all that was on offer before eleven. “What do you think,” he asked, “are you ready for a trip out?” It was a long time before Mildred answered, giving Tom the chance to eat bacon and eggs, as well as toast.

“Yes” she said when he’d finished his breakfast, her eyes gleaming, “I’m ready.” Tom and Mildred went to sit again in the courtyard garden, where they were unlikely to be disturbed.

“I’ll just go and get the box, I won’t be long.” With that, Tom left Mildred by the trellis, and went quickly to his room. He returned in a couple of minutes with the bread bag in his hands. Sitting down again on the garden chair next to Mildred, Tom unveiled the box from the bag with shaking hands. He pressed the little black button on the underside, and the aerial protruded yet again, with the same whirring sound as before.

“You press yellow to go backwards, and blue to go forwards, though nothing actually happens until you press green. Oh yes, and if there’s a problem, its red for stop, and everything does.” As he spoke, Tom was aware that he was making it all sound terribly easy. He debated warning Mildred about the sickness and the headache, but decided against.

“To find our house we need to go forwards,” said Tom, pressing the blue button four times. He was suddenly reminded of the small boy whose box it was.

“Ready? He asked.

“Yes,” replied Mildred, “Let’s go.”

Tom pressed the green button firmly, and there was a slight shimmering in the air.

On the lunchtime news the disappearance of three people from Hythe was reported. A small boy was reported to have vanished from the canal bank adjacent to Waitrose car park, where he had apparently been looking for a toy that he had left behind the previous day. A residential care home had also reported two clients as missing, both having been seen going into the garden after breakfast that morning. Police were appealing for witnesses to come forward, but confirmed that they were treating the cases as unrelated incidents.