Page 32 of Never Tear Us Apart

Chapter Thirty

As I’m leaving, I hear the sirens mount their call and the radios playing through open windows, announcing that a fleet of bombers is incoming.

I can already hear the distant thrum of the approaching aircraft.

The sound vibrates in my bones. It’s deeper and more sonorous than the fighter jets I heard over the skies of Ukraine or Syria, but it brings the same message, one of mindless death and destruction.

For a few seconds, I freeze. I am back in the collapsed building, trapped under rubble with a small girl’s hand in mine. It’s growing cold to the touch.

The Maltese hurry towards the shelters, parting around me as though I’m a rock in a stream. This is not a moment to lose my grip, I remind myself. If anything, here in this time, I am absolved. That terrible day is decades in the future.

I haven’t killed her yet.

That thought gives me strength enough to move my feet.

Moving against the flow of the crowd, I head towards the half-house, where I think Sal will still be.

There’s a familiar comfort now in the deep, dark shelter, but more than that, there is an unfamiliar comfort in knowing him.

He is like my one fixed point in time, somewhere I can return to and know he will welcome me.

Just as I get to the door, the first of the bombs drop on the harbour.

Turning towards the sight, I see that the sky is black with heavy bombers slouching towards us.

Just above their massing swarm, I can make out the trails of distant dogfights cutting swathes in the clear blue sky.

Up there are men like Danny – and Danny himself – fighting for us and their lives far above the earth.

Bombs fall from the bellies of the aircraft, gliding softly down beyond the horizon.

The ground shakes under my feet as snakes of smoke and rubble unfurl a few streets away.

When I look up, the planes are right overhead.

It hasn’t happened yet. I don’t deserve to die. Not yet. The girl I will one day kill isn’t born and won’t be for decades. It hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it never will – maybe the future can change.

Throwing myself through the unlocked door, I race through the hallway as the cloud of planes blots out the sunlight streaming through the broken building. The gate to the shelter is propped open, waiting for me.

‘Maia?’ Sal shouts above the din as I clang the gate shut behind me.

‘I’m here,’ I say, almost falling down the steps into the small shelter. ‘I’m safe.’

Sal nods. ‘Your meeting with Miss Strickland?’

‘Yes, she will give me a by-line if I uncover the right story. Now I just have to find one.’

‘Excellent.’

It’s remarkable how my body has already learnt to tolerate the noise of the raid, recalibrating and reassessing the new normal.

Taking a second chair that Sal must have brought down here, I join him in the near-dark, and we listen, our gazes directed upwards as each pounding explosion releases another wave of fine dust to rain down on us.

We brace our bodies against the noise and fear, and we wait for the raid to pass.

The noise recedes in slight increments until we can tell the worst is over. I wonder about the bright blue sky above, now filmed with the grit of battle. I wonder if Danny has made it back in one piece.

And finally, right here in the shelter, on my fourth day as an accidental time traveller, I accept it all.

The relief of not fighting to make sense of it is profound.

It just is this: this life and the other one.

If you think about it, I’m lucky. How many people get to experience two lives?

Perhaps I am meant to be here, perhaps there is a hidden purpose to all of this, or maybe the ancient universe got her wires crossed.

It doesn’t matter, not in this now. This is the only now I have.

The all-clear sounds, breaking me from my thoughts, and Sal gets up at once, dusting himself down. ‘I must go to the church – the children will soon be waiting for me to teach them mathematics.’

‘You really have made a life here,’ I say with admiration. ‘After you were ripped away from everything, you started again and made it work; people love you.’

‘Eventually, there was no other choice.’ Sal shrugs, a brief shadow of sadness passing over his face. ‘Oh, I had word that your papers are ready earlier than expected. We will fetch them tonight.’

‘No need to come with me,’ I say, seeing an opportunity. ‘I know where to go now. I’ll get the bus this afternoon and pick them up.’

Sal frowns. ‘I’m not sure. Elias is not a good man . . .’

‘Exactly,’ I say. ‘I’m looking for stories, remember? He is a good story.’

Sal’s frown deepens. ‘The Mafia are here on the island, Maia. Perhaps for now, the war has stopped some of their business. But Elias . . . he is dangerous.’

‘And I am used to danger,’ I tell him. ‘I can take care of myself.’

‘Can you?’ He twists his hands with worry. ‘You are coping with a lot. And . . . forgive me – I know little of your life before – but you said you had some problems with your . . . mental well-being.’

‘Well, yes,’ I reply, not wanting to discuss how broken I was before I ever arrived on this island. ‘But it was my job to work in war zones and seek out stories, even when I was in danger. Don’t worry – I’m tough enough.’

‘And if you fall out of this time, while you are on the bus or in the catacombs? You will be undefended and vulnerable.’

‘You’re right.’ I nod. ‘But I can’t sit still.

You’ve had more than thirty years to try to find out what has happened to us, and now it’s my turn to take up the mantle.

I’m not embedded in this time yet, so we need to be ready for if – or when – I go back to my time, so that I can show someone what’s happening and get some answers. You want that, too, don’t you?’

‘I do,’ he concedes. ‘Though it’s too late for me, I’d rather not die without knowing.’

‘Then trust me.’ I offer him a smile that’s braver than I feel. ‘Now, go and make your poor kids learn maths in the middle of a war.’

* * *

You’d think I’d rush out into the sunlight.

Instead, I sit in the dark for a while, letting the minutes wash over me.

Am I a different version of me, or the same me in a different universe?

Or the same me in the same universe? I don’t see how it can be the last, because I have a body here and a body there – and perhaps in a thousand other times.

And yet I don’t think it can be a parallel universe either: everything that happens here seems to have an impact there.

Either way, perhaps there are millions, maybe billions more of me reprinted throughout the universe.

And perhaps, out of all those versions, one is living in perfect happiness.

I smile for her, whoever she is and whatever she’s doing. Suddenly, I have infinite sisters.

When I get upstairs and into the house, I find a covered pitcher of fresh goat’s milk on the table and a small loaf of bread.

Drink milk quickly , a pencil-scrawled note on a page torn from Sal’s notebook tells me, before it turns .

Hungry, I do as I’m told.

‘Hello? Anyone home?’ I hear Christina’s voice calling in the hallway.

I hurry to greet her. ‘Hello!’

‘Oh, there you are.’ Christina greets me.

She looks beautiful in a light cotton blouse and long, wide-legged trousers that gape at the waist. ‘I’m on my way to work, but I just had to drop by.

Last night, Alex had a perfect brainstorm!

He remembered our old landlady’s cotton sheets down in the basement – bright yellow, don’t you know?

We’d thought about running something up with them before, only yellow makes me sallow and Alex says he’d rather die than be compared to custard.

But then we thought of you, with your complexion – when it’s not red – and your dark hair.

You can carry it off very well. So, he stitched you a frock in double time, and I’m delivering.

I had him put pockets in it. A woman needs pockets in time of war, darling.

’ She thrusts her hands into her own, as if to make a point.

‘And so much better in this heat than what you’ve got on.

’ She notices that I’m still in the same altered outfit I left her house in the day before yesterday.

‘And now you have a change of clothes, though I’m not sure what we are going to do with your hair. None of my setting lasted on that mop.’

‘I quite like it as it is,’ I tell her, touching my hand to where my hair has sprung back into its natural curls, sitting lightly on the nape of my neck. ‘Easy to care for.’

‘It does rather suit you, I suppose, in a sort of rural way,’ Christina says. ‘Well, come on then. I want to see how it looks.’

She presents a neatly folded garment to me, which I take with delight, shaking it out so that I can hold it up against me.

A simple cotton shirt-dress, darted at the bust and gathered at the waist – and after being stuck in this uncomfortable skirt and blouse, it’s the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

‘Well, go on!’ Christina urges me. ‘Put it on. No need for modesty – it’s only you and me. It’s stitched in blue thread, because that’s the only colour we had to hand, but I think it’s rather nice. See how Alex made a feature of it on the collar and buttonholes?’

‘It must have taken him hours,’ I exclaim as I strip off. ‘How will I repay him?’

‘Not hours – he’s a whizz. Wants to go to Paris after the war.

If there still is a Paris, that is. And you know, it takes his mind off things.

It’s not easy for Alex, being two people at once.

What a stupid world we live in, when a man isn’t supposed to love another man, but war and power and violence is something to be proud of. ’

‘I hear you,’ I say.

Christina cocks her head. ‘Well, of course you do, darling, I’m standing right next to you.

I say, your brassiere is marvellous.’ She leans in to peer at my M&S plunge underwire.

‘All that cleavage with no corset. I used to have breasts once, you know? Nothing like your ample bosom, but perfectly respectable. Of course, since rations, they’ve gone the way of my shapely behind. ’

‘They’ll come back one day,’ I tell her.

‘Perhaps, darling, but being dreadfully thin never goes out of fashion.’

Hastily, I button up the dress. There are ten white buttons – no two are matching, but they are all of almost equal size. And it fits perfectly.

Christina holds a fragment of broken mirror for me to look at myself in, moving it up and down so I can get the full effect.

‘This is so kind,’ I tell her. ‘I must do something to return the favour.’

‘I am sure we will think of something,’ Christina tells me with a laugh.

‘Actually, you know, we need another plotter at Lascaris. One of the local girls has gone down with “Malta dog” dysentery, darling, and we have no backup at all. And as you are at a bit of a loose end, perhaps you could apply?’

‘Oh, I’ve just started working for Miss Strickland,’ I tell her. ‘Words are my thing. I have all the hand-eye co-ordination of a rock.’

‘Well! That is a good way of supporting the war effort, I suppose. We all need the morale boost of the Times every day.’ Christina observes me with her grey eyes. There are a dozen questions there that she wants to ask me, and yet for some reason, she refrains.

‘Christina . . .’ I begin.

‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘I know there’s something mysterious about you, Maia Borg, but I also know that whatever it is, you aren’t here to spy on us.

If you are, then everything I thought I’d learnt from a lifetime in music halls is wrong.

I trust you. I don’t know why. I can’t explain it, and it makes no sense, but from the first moment I set eyes on you, I felt as if we had always known each other and that you were my friend. ’

‘I feel that, too,’ I say.

‘So, don’t tell me anything. But if it turns out that I’m a deluded fool and I’m wrong about you, then it won’t be the military police you have to fear. I’ll put you up against a wall and shoot you myself.’

‘It won’t come to that,’ I tell her.

‘It had bloody well better not. Well, I’m late, so I’d better run.’ She kisses me lightly on each cheek. ‘ Ciao! ’

It seems to me that, if nothing is real, then nothing is a lie and nothing is true either.

And yet I have met very few people as palpably alive as Christina Ratcliffe, and not to tell her everything feels like a betrayal.

So, I promise myself – and her – that one day I will try to explain this impossible thing.

When the time is right. One day, I’ll tell the truth to everyone who matters.

It won’t matter if they believe me, just as long as I have stayed true.