News From
the Squares

Robert Llewellyn

Preface

Utopia, Dystopia and Men

I read Anthony Burgess’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ when I was 15 years old. The pages gripped me with terrifying intensity, I thought it was an ingenious, original and exciting book that created a grim future world at once stimulating and nauseating. I quickly followed that by reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, an equally influential book with an utterly convincing and cruel vision of the direction the human race might be heading.

Of course, during the 1970s, in the middle of the Cold War it was mandatory to read Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell because we needed to understand how bad communism was. Nineteen Eighty-Four was part of the English syllabus; we HAD to read it, which immediately made me suspect the motives of the teachers who forced it on us.

Three books by three white men, three books about the future that became enormously influential for many years. Reading them made me suspicious of technology, of the lies of politicians, of the lies of corporations telling us everything would be fine. They taught me to be dismissive and cynical of technological and social development, nuclear power, better guns, bigger banks. In some ways, looking back, and with a better grasp of the history of the period, this was not altogether a bad thing.

It was around the same time that I somehow ended up reading two other books that would have an equally powerful, and in some ways balancing, effect on me. One was Approaching the Benign Environment by, among others, R. Buckminster Fuller. The second was The Limits to Growth by Donella and Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William W. Behrens III. What inspired me to read these books or how I heard about them now totally eludes me; they’re not exactly the sort of thing you’d expect a 16-year-old boy to gravitate towards, but I read them avidly.

Much of the content and meaning escaped me altogether and some of Buckminster Fuller’s ideas struck me as barking mad. (We don’t need to worry about nuclear waste, we can just shoot it out into space.) However, I believe both these books made a huge impression on the youthful culture of the era.

It was around this time that the first pictures of the earth taken from space were seen by the human race. We could suddenly see that we really did live on a little blue-green planet floating in a vast and inhospitable void. The image was used on the front cover of another publication I devoured with nothing short of obsessive fascination, The Whole Earth Catalog, created by the incredible Stewart Brand.

These publications challenged many of the perceived notions of the period; that constant and never-ending expansion, consumerism and ‘growth’ were all good things; that the only financial and political system that worked was based on such notions, and everything else was doomed to fail.

I was still in my mid-teens when I went to see Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although originally released in 1968 when I was 12, it became such a cult classic that art house cinemas ran the film for years, which must have been where I saw it, sitting in the back row sharing a spliff with my teenage hippie pals and saying ‘oh wow, man’ every now and then.

I was entranced by the vision, the extraordinary scope and imagination of this film. Human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence and really cool space ships pointed to a far more hopeful way to think about the future and what it could hold.

It stimulated my interest in computers, in ingenious hardware and body-hugging space underwear. Even now, the vision of this film – the understanding of space, the art direction, the set design and the proposed technology – is nothing short of breathtaking. However, more importantly than any of this, it had an inherent optimism, not that the world would be perfect, but that the human race would continue to evolve and explore.

There are many theories that works of dystopian or utopian fiction are inspired by the era they emerge from. Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, all written in the early- to mid-twentieth century, tell us a lot about the struggles and challenges those generations were facing: totalitarianism, communism and the expansion of state control. But there was also a feeling of optimism in the rapidly emerging ‘subculture’; there was the NASA space program, breakthroughs in technology, achievements in medicine and our understanding of the planet we live on and the universe that surrounds us.

While A Clockwork Orange is a small masterpiece of ‘literary’ fiction, much admired by the well-educated elite, it is still dystopian fiction.

For me then, it sits in the same misery pit as The Road, World War Z, Mad Max, The Terminator, or any number of recent sci-fi films and stories utterly obsessed with doom, the inherent violence and short-sighted aggression of the human condition, the end of days, pseudo-religious nonsense and Armageddon.

All these stories depict a world gone mad, bad and dangerous to live in. So, is the dystopian novel or story essentially a white male fantasy? I suggested this on the social networking site Google+ and was impressed with the breadth and depth of knowledge that flooded in through the comments.

I was pointed to multiple examples of science fiction books, mainly about zombies, doom, death and destruction that were written by women. I was also reminded of The Handmaid’s Tale by the wonderful Margaret Atwood, which, although about as dystopian as you can get, is written from the perspective of an even-further-into-the-future world where, she implies, things have improved.

However, I’m going to stand by my claim that dystopian visions are, in the main, created by white males and I wish to put this claim in context; it is in part influenced by the work of the German sociologist Klaus Theweleit and his extraordinary work first published in English in 1987 as two books, titled Male Fantasies, Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History and Male Fantasies, Volume 2, Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror – I love those titles. Male Fantasies are not what they might sound like, i.e. books exploring what men think about when they are busy self-abusing. Theweleit’s works are detailed studies of the thought processes and fears of the men who helped inspire the Third Reich in Weimar Republic Germany.

However, his remit was wider than just a history of twentieth-century European fascism. For me, Theweleit really got to the nub of the European male dilemma. The books were more a study of a group in society who had enjoyed unparalleled power, privilege and cultural dominance for thousands of years.Obviously I’m talking about men. To be specific, white, European men who had created and controlled the monarchy, military, legal and religious systems and national governance without let or hindrance for as long as anyone was able to remember.

What started to emerge around the turn of the last century were philosophies and political movements that finally challenged these well-entrenched arrangements. The struggles of the first half of the twentieth century leading up to the Second World War have always been portrayed as being between ‘left’ and ‘right’ but, with the benefit of hindsight, I think it is possible to see them as being a clash between patriarchy and pluralism; between the rest of the world and white men. They saw themselves standing together against a torrent of what they perceived as unregulated licentiousness, chaos, powerful women and a blatant lack of respect for their male power.

The fascist male is, by definition, terrified of the world, terrified of change, but most of all terrified of ‘the other’. Women, homosexuals or people of other races; yeah, terrifying. They feel themselves drowning under waves of chaos and disorder, mud, blood (always menstrual, they have a real problem with that), faeces, vomit and general human filth.

Theweleit uses writings, pamphlets and personal diaries of the men of the Freikorps, the fledgling fascist army roaming 1920s Germany. The musings of these tragically damaged men are incredibly revealing. Their deeply ingrained misogyny is the one unifying factor; if you think some drunk bloke shouting the ‘c’ word in the pub is a misogynist, he’s got nothing on the Freikorps, baby. Their rampant hatred was conflicted and torturous for them; they all adored their mothers but feared and despised women and the power they possessed.

Obviously their hatred and fear of homosexuals and Jews was pretty full-on, but it was the twisted pain their fear of women created which made their lives so difficult. It was easy to hate Jews, they were different; homosexuals, scary because any man could be one, but just beat them to death and then you feel more manly. But women? You loved them and hated them, you wanted to dominate them but they were clever and would tie you up in emotional knots and you needed them to have babies. Nightmare.

Thankfully, the more violent mass male spasms represented by the Third Reich have largely dissipated in Europe, but the clue that not all is well with the supposedly beleaguered white male, I postulate, is in the preponderance of dystopian fantasy. Without question the unresolved fear men have of ‘the other’ is still very much in evidence. They spend endless years formulating ever more elaborate stories about how the world is about to collapse into the mire, to be engulfed in the filth of the other.

The endless drumbeat of right-wing Christians in America or disgruntled white men everywhere is that society is collapsing, that the rule of law is failing, that we are being drowned by needy immigrants getting everything for free and that the family – as in the institution with a white male at the head of it – is disintegrating. Gay marriage? That’s it, it’s all over, load your guns and start killing, it’s the only answer, seems to be their knee-jerk reaction.

These stories, be they books, movies, TV shows or, especially, video games, are based on fear and always driven by the perceived loss of power and control. Normally this can only be restored by resorting to extreme levels of violence, of being prepared to fight off the hordes. They’ve got around the simple accusations of racism or manic homophobia by painting ‘the other’ as zombies. The zombie is the virtual Jew, woman, Arab – take your pick; the zombie represents the horde.

Then there is the fear of technology. Again, a perceived loss of power and control is, I believe, at the root of this too. Films like The Terminator and The Matrix feed from this fear, that the machines we made will take over and shaft us, extracting power from our bottoms or just crushing us under their merciless tracks. The invasion of privacy is often cited as the first step in this descent into powerlessness.

Let’s just look at this for a moment. A train driver in India, or a factory worker in China, they have been powerless for generations. They eventually manage to get access to the world through a smartphone and the global ubiquity of the internet. Are they suffering from a sudden loss of privacy? They wouldn’t even know what you were talking about.

Now compare those two with a couple of old white guys who use computers in the ‘developed world’. An invasion of their privacy has a whole different flavour. They are used to being powerful and in control and all this technology is taking away that power, it’s redistributing it and of course that is frightening and seems unfair.

But if we look at the big picture in human history over the last thousand years, and here I agree with the linguist Steven Pinker, contrary to the dystopian male vision of oncoming hell, the world has generally got better, kinder and less violent. Sounds bonkers, but all the figures seem to bear out Pinker’s theory that we are living in the least dangerous, most civilised era of the human story so far, and all the signs indicate this is set to continue. Contrary to all the endless drip, drip of dystopian fiction, the world has and is continuing to get better for most people most of the time.

Therefore I would like to suggest that News from the Squares, and indeed the first book in the trilogy, News from Gardenia, is not utopian fiction. The world depicted in these pages is not static, a vision of a perfect society where all problems have been solved. There will always be problems, there will always be differing opinion and that is as it should be. The human story is constantly evolving. The days of dystopian or utopian visions are numbered. We are finally reaching a point where we can have a better-informed and clearer vision of which way we might want the great eclectic society we live in and the planet we live on to develop.

1

Rough Landing

‘What do you think you’re doing you silly little man?’

That was the first thing I heard as the darkness slowly dissolved. Something was keeping my head still but I looked about as best I could. I wasn’t in any pain, if anything I felt surprisingly comfortable and relaxed. There was a woman’s face to my left, sort of peering up at me. She looked quite annoyed. I then realised she was holding my head in position with one hand, not violently, more like she was just supporting my head.

‘Hello,’ I said eventually. I wanted to reassure her that everything was okay and she didn’t need to get upset.

‘Are you hurt? Are you in pain?’ asked the woman, this time sounding a little more sympathetic.

‘I’m fine thank you, Susan,’ I said. I know that’s what I said but I don’t know why. Why did I call her Susan? I didn’t know her name, where did the name Susan come from and why did I say it? No idea but for some peculiar reason it amused me and I started giggling.

I realised at that point that I was still in the Yuneec and as everything started to come into focus my slightly elated mood began to sink.

‘Oh dear,’ I said.

The Yuneec was clearly in a mess. The windscreen had cracked, there was dust everywhere, wires hung out of the control panel, or rather what was left of the control panel. I could make out what might be a very badly damaged propeller beyond the cracked windscreen and then some sort of tree branch.

‘There will be assistance here any minute, just stay still for now. You can explain what on earth you were doing later on.’

‘What was I doing?’ I asked. ‘I’m not exactly sure what’s happened.’

I seemed to be half buried in bits of plastic and seat padding, the cockpit was a right mess. I couldn’t remember anything. How did this happen? I felt something slightly salty in my mouth, warm and salty, I wiped my mouth on my bare forearm and saw at once it was blood.

I was beginning to feel alarmed. I couldn’t sense any pain but I was starting to become mildly nauseous.

‘You’ve landed in our square,’ said the woman. ‘Why you chose our square I have no idea, why you were droning through the air I have no idea.’ She turned away from me and looked back. ‘It’s okay, assistance has arrived.’

The woman slowly removed her hand and disappeared from view, downwards which was rather confusing.

I moved my head slowly, nothing hurt, I glanced around as best I could and what I saw was very distressing. Where the wing should have been was just torn fabric and twisted aluminium struts, broken off at different angles.

I let my head rest back against the mess behind me but after a few moments – I have to say moments of great peace, there was no alarming noise or sudden movement – two other heads arrived at my side.

‘Let’s have a look at you then,’ said a woman. She was young and seemed to be wearing some kind of uniform; her hair was tied tightly behind her head. She slipped something around my neck which immediately inflated and tightened in some way, it wasn’t uncomfortable and even as my head rose a little I understood this to be some kind of sophisticated neck brace. The man was running his hands up and down my legs, I couldn’t see what he was doing but I could feel him.

‘Legs seem okay,’ he said.

‘I think I’m fine, I’ve got some blood in my mouth though.’

Before I could say any more the woman was wiping away at my face with some kind of cool spongy thing. She didn’t say anything, but I was reassured by her confident manner and quick actions.

‘Get on the other side if you can, we’re going to have to manually extract him,’ said the woman.

I could just see the man nodding obediently and he disappeared. The woman continued to wipe my face, she pulled my bottom lip down and I tried to open my mouth, it was difficult with the neck brace in position. She inserted a small tube and I heard quite loud sucking sounds as she presumably cleaned out the blood that had collected there.

The man appeared to my left and without further explanation I was lifted out of the shattered cockpit by two clearly very strong people.

‘Don’t do anything,’ said the woman. ‘I just want you to let us manage your body for now.’

‘’K,’ I said through gritted teeth as the neck brace was now holding my head rigidly in position and things were just starting to get uncomfortable. I regretted letting them move me, I just wanted to stay in the cockpit, it was so warm and comfortable.

The man and woman eased me up onto some kind of stretcher seat thing that was right beside the cockpit, I remember it had a light blue cover. This was the first time I got a look at where I was. Basically about fifteen feet in the air, the Yuneec was completely wrecked, the main fuselage was essentially resting in the upper branches of an enormous tree.

The woman eased me back onto the stretcher and her powerful hand on my chest indicated with no confusion that she wanted me to lie down. I did so, staring at the cloudless sky.

I clearly remember seeing some house martins flitting about overhead, I could hear them chirruping to each other. I felt movement and suddenly broken tree branches and bits of tattered wreckage came into view. I was being lowered down at speed by some kind of mechanical device, the movement was very smooth and there was no noise associated with it.

The view then changed again as I was manoeuvred into some kind of enclosed space, a white roof above me, I couldn’t see much to either side. The stretcher thing stopped moving and a moment later the man and woman appeared beside me.

‘How are you feeling young man?’ asked the woman.

‘I’m okay,’ I said as best I could. ‘Did I crash?’

The woman glanced at the man and made a peculiar expression I didn’t quite register. ‘You crashed,’ she said.

So that was how I landed in the square. My memory from before that moment is very dim, I can remember coming out of the cloud, the anomaly as William had called it. I came out and saw a grid pattern on the ground that seemed to go on forever. I can remember that, but not much else.

The grid pattern, I soon came to realise, was because the dwellings I saw in the distance as I was lowered down from the wrecked Yuneec were arranged in large squares. Essentially rows of terraced houses facing onto a large space dense with vegetation.

I can only assume that I was trying to find somewhere to land, had made a fairly catastrophic error and ended up colliding with a tree.

Whatever I was lying inside started to move, I could sense that it was a wheeled vehicle of some sort but it made very little sound as it progressed. I am guessing that it was making its way across grass or something, there were a couple of small bumps and then I felt it accelerate along a very smooth surface.

The journey was short, within minutes I was being removed from the vehicle, I was slightly surprised to see that the vehicle was inside a building.

I assumed it was some kind of hospital and again I started to feel anxious, if I was in a hospital I must be injured and yet I was not conscious of any pain, only the slight discomfort of the neck brace.

The bed I was lying on moved along so smoothly it felt as if I was stationary and the building was sliding along over me. I glided through a door and looked up at a more complex ceiling, this one fitted with numerous lightweight mechanical arms and equipment.

A woman appeared in my field of vision which was still quite limited; she was wearing goggles and an elaborate breathing mask over the lower half of her face. The mask was transparent, I could clearly see her mouth, she was smiling, it was a sort of pained smile a mother might make toward a fractious child.

‘What have we here then?’ she asked. Her voice sounded peculiar, the only explanation being that she was speaking through some kind of wireless communication system being fed into speakers I couldn’t see. I was hearing perfect stereo.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid I’ve had a bit of a ding dong with a tree.’

‘I should think you are afraid,’ the woman snapped. ‘Didn’t you work that out before you got into that ridiculous thing?’ I could hear her sigh and then witnessed the rather odd sight of her slowly shaking her head inside the bizarre face mask as she uttered, ‘I don’t know.’

She shook her head as she watched what I imagined was a screen below my field of vision. I then saw a white object move over my body at great speed, utterly silent, not a bleep, whoosh or any mechanical noise.

‘What a silly little fellow you’ve been,’ said the woman in the facemask. ‘You are very lucky, no fractures, no internal distress, just a cut lip.’

She held up a small, pen like device, I noticed it had a silver tip, she ran it over my top lip. The feeling was peculiar to say the least, cold, with a slight tingling sensation.

‘All done,’ said the woman brightly, again in a tone of voice medical professionals would use having just administered an injection to a child.

She brushed her hand over the side of the mask and it came loose and was retracted off somewhere by the thin breathing tube it was attached to. She then gently removed the neck brace thing from around my neck and the bed contraption I was lying on slowly became a chair. I don’t mean it materialised from one thing to another like a badly rendered CGI effect, it folded itself from a flat bed into a chair shape allowing me to adopt a sitting position with no effort.

It was clear that I was indeed sitting in a brightly lit room in a hospital. I didn’t immediately recognise any of the equipment that was either hanging from the ceiling or neatly arranged along the walls. What ever it was, it was very modern-looking and clean.

‘Can I ask something?’ I said eventually as the woman started to make a move toward a doorway.

‘Me?’ she asked, turning to look at me.

‘Well, yes, there isn’t anyone else here,’ I said.

‘Why d’you want to ask me something?’ she said, she looked mildly offended as if I’d made an unwanted proposition or told her that her bum looked fat. Which it didn’t, by the way.

‘Well, I’m a little confused. The last thing I remember I was flying through a dense cloud, I came out of it and saw…’

The woman put her hand up to stop me talking. It was a very effective physical signal. I stopped mid-sentence. She turned and walked through the doorway. I say doorway as there was no door fitted in the doorway, it was just a gap in the wall, beyond it was another wall, as she went through the gap, she turned to her left and disappeared.

So I was left, sitting on the folded-up bed that had become a chair, feeling quite stable, not in pain, but still utterly confused.

All I could remember was coming out of the cloud, realising I was much lower than I expected and clearly not back in 2011. Wherever I was, it was very different to the world I had just left. I could remember seeing this peculiar grid, mile after mile of squares stretching to the horizon. The squares were buildings, I knew that now. Each side of the square was made up of long terraces of what I took to be houses. There was something vaguely Georgian about them, very regular and clearly all built at the same time. By that I mean it wasn’t a higgledy-piggledy mash-up of buildings from different eras and different styles that just happened to be crammed up together. This was designed, built at the same time to the same specifications, and when I say Georgian I only mean that by styling, not size, these building were huge.

One thing I can clearly remember from my arrival over the Squares was the very severe lack of anything that looked like a landing strip or even a piece of open ground. There was certainly nothing like the oil seed field I’d spotted when I arrived in Gardenia.

I dropped my head as I tried to recall what had happened next. There was nothing, no re-call. I’d never experienced this before. If I had ever been on a journey or witnessed an event in the past, I could always run through it in my mind’s eye and recall it in immense detail. Not so now, I was able to recall waking in Gardenia, getting dressed in front of a crowd of anxious looking people, running into the Bow field, seeing the anomaly, getting into the Yuneec, seeing Grace through the window, Grace. Suddenly the memory of Grace hit me like a sledgehammer in the guts.

Where was Grace?

What had happened to her, to my potential child, to the life I was slowly getting used to in Gardenia? Why wasn’t I there and, more importantly, where was I now?

I heard a movement at the doorway, I turned and saw another woman standing looking at me.

‘Would you like to talk?’ she asked.

I smiled and nodded. The woman raised her eyebrows as if making a mental note. She turned to her side and said, ‘I think it’s all fine.’

She then walked into the room, put her hand on the wall opposite me and part of the wall folded down and made a chair. The woman sat down facing me. She seemed quite young, clear dark skin and black hair, she was wearing a kind of slightly weird looking one-piece body suit with no obvious seams or opening. It didn’t look like a wet suit or flight suit, it was lighter material and slightly tailored. Just as I know little about architecture, I know even less about clothing. I’d certainly never seen anything like it before, either in the real world of 2011 or Gardenia. The people I’d seen in New York, Beijing and Mumbai certainly didn’t wear anything like it.

‘How do you feel about it?’ asked the woman.

Again I smiled as what she said to me made no sense.

‘D’you think it’s funny?’

I sat in silence for a moment. I think everything I had gone through in Gardenia had made me a little more aware of myself and the difficulty I clearly had in communicating anything when my mind was bursting with complex questions which would require equally complex answers.

‘You’ve scared people, upset them, destroyed a garden, risked your own life and put many people to great trouble to protect and repair you, and yet you seem to find this amusing. Is my analysis correct?’

I shook my head and took a big breath. This was going to be complicated.

2

New Reality

Two women dressed in white overalls guided me from the room in which I’d been medically examined. They didn’t say anything to me, just gestured for me to walk with them. I didn’t say anything in case they didn’t speak English, I didn’t feel like trying to work out how to communicate, the sign language they used to tell me what to do was perfectly understandable.

I walked along a short windowless but well-lit corridor and into a rather pleasant room that did have windows, big windows that looked out onto a garden. The two women stood by the door and watched me for a while. I say door, but again there was no actual door, no hole-closing device, just a gap in the wall.

This room was yet again very familiar, but with one or two details noticeably different from the world of my birth, as opposed to the world I had just come from.

For a start it was very quiet; I assumed I was in some sort of city but the only noise I could hear was birdsong from the garden. The weather was good, a clear sky with bright sunshine was visible through the large windows but the interior of the room was cool, the air smelled fresh. I glanced back at the doorway entrance and the two women had gone. I shrugged, who knew what was going on, all I could hope for was that someone did, because I didn’t have a clue.

I stared out of the window, trying not to worry about where I was. I didn’t want to find out I had jumped yet further into the future when I was hoping so much that I would return to 2011. Whatever I’d seen from the Yuneec when I came out of the cloud, it wasn’t 2011.

I looked around the room. It was sparsely furnished but comfortable, a large sofa-type of thing facing the window, a single armchair-type of thing to one side. I say ‘type of thing’ because I’m not sure how to describe them. Their function was clearly designed to be comfortable sitting devices but I don’t have any capacity for describing furniture. I don’t have any taste apparently, that was what Beth had always told me. I suppose if I was confronted with a sofa in bright orange with gold trim and moulded plastic feet that looked like snakes I probably wouldn’t like it, but if it was comfortable I’d still sit in it.

The furniture in the room wasn’t like that, the big sofa looked odd but quite old, it had a high back, much too high for any functional reason. It was covered in numerous pieces of colourful cloth and some big cushions.

There was a low wooden table between the two chairs containing an elaborate flower arrangement sitting in what looked like a handmade pottery vase.

I stood looking at the flowers for a while, I was feeling fairly sleepy and more than a little disoriented. My mind was slowly ploughing through a mass of memories, worries and deep confusion. What had happened to Grace? Was I now further into the future and would I be able to read about her in some kind of databank, about her and my child? Was I going to have to go through the same weird experience I had been through in the woods in Gardenia? Reading about her death, and my child’s death, and my grandchild’s death, and then travelling around the world to try and find my great grandchild who could be a hunchbacked woman living in Mongolia or something?

I understood by this time that I was capable of being a little disconnected with the world I lived in, with people I knew and possibly loved, but my recent experiences in Gardenia and now wherever I’d ended up were not helping me connect, in fact quite the opposite. I realised that although I’d gone through an absurd amount of trauma, I felt oddly calm. It didn’t seem right. Surely I should be writhing about on the floor, screaming and soiling myself in profound madness?

I sat down on the sofa-thing and indeed it was very comfortable, I stared around the walls that were covered in paintings, maybe festooned with them is a better description. All framed, all without any obvious glass covering them, I don’t know how many but in the hundreds. Some large, some tiny, they were hung very expertly from waist height to the ceiling and this room had a very high ceiling. The proportions reminded me of Georgian houses I had been inside in Bath and Brighton, and yet it clearly wasn’t Georgian, it was recently built. I’m not sure why I felt confident of this fact. It must have been the cleanliness and smooth lines of the structure, it somehow smelt as if had just been built.

Some of the paintings looked very old, I mean pre-2011, some of them looked like the unfathomable splotchy etchings I’d seen in galleries in London but had no idea what they were for, let alone what they were meant to be.

I felt my eyelids getting heavier and heavier, and I must have dozed off. I have no idea for how long, but it could have been a while. When I eventually opened my eyes again the light was different, more like a late summer evening light, I could see sunlight was filtered through the trees outside the window, it looked very calm and peaceful.

I sighed deeply and stretched my legs out straight on the sofa, then a small movement caught my eye. I started a bit, a woman was sitting in the chair on the other side of the table and she was looking at me. I pulled myself up quickly and rubbed my eyes, blinked a bit and stared back at her.

‘Sorry, must have dozed off,’ I said through what felt like a mouthful of cotton wool.

The woman continued to stare at me. She had a kind face, Mediterranean dark skin, dark hair, brown eyes. I would guess she was in her late forties but after my experience in Gardenia, she could have been anything between forty and a hundred. I smiled at her, then remembered how this had been frowned on by the women who’d treated me in the hospital room, so I stopped.

I turned myself and sat upright on the sofa, I noticed the woman glance up behind me, I turned and looked over my shoulder. The middle-aged women who had led me to the room was standing in the doorway with her two quite substantial arms folded in front of her.

I felt the need to re-assure them I was no threat, but due to the silence in the room I also felt I had enough time to consider the possible consequences of saying anything. I turned back to the woman in the chair, put my hands on my thighs and relaxed. I waited. Nothing happened. It was almost annoying, what did they expect me to do? This little surge of anger eventually resulted in my mouth taking over.

‘Okay, I’ll start,’ I said finally. ‘My name is Gavin Meckler, I’m thirty-two years old, I was born in 1979.’

I paused; I was waiting for questions, for doubt, for some kind of query. Nothing.

‘I have accidentally travelled through time to the future, a place called Gardenia. While I was attempting to return to my own era using the same method, an anomaly taking the shape of a large and unusually formed low-level cloud that gathered around the base of a power tether, I came out above your city. I have no idea where I am, what the date is or who you are. I mean no harm and only wish to get back to the period of history I belong in.’

I sat back, suddenly aware that in being completely honest and explaining things as best I could, I felt like I had come across like a complete madman. Not even a funny nutter who’s a bit confused, but a dangerous psychotic loon, someone who thinks he’s had an alien controlling device shoved up his nose by a three foot grey bloke with a big head.

‘I realise this may sound just a bit mad,’ I said after a while. ‘I wish I could give you a simpler explanation but that’s all I know.’

After a long pause, the woman opposite me nodded.

‘Would you like to tell me how you came to be in the drone?’

‘It’s not a drone, it’s a plane, an aeroplane. I was piloting an aeroplane, a drone is remotely controlled.’

‘Very well, would you like to tell me how you came to be in the…plane?’

‘I’d very happily tell you that,’ I said trying my best to sound sane and rational. But I was forewarned now, I knew I had gone through some kind of wormhole time dilation bizarre weirdness I didn’t understand but it was possible this woman did understand. So I added, after a thoughtful pause, ‘In return I’d like you to tell me, if that’s okay, who you are, where I am, what date this is and if anything like my sudden appearance has happened before?’

I felt really clever and ahead of the game with the request. I was looking at the woman as I spoke and noticed no particular reaction, but as I had learned on many previous occasions I am not terribly good at judging the mood of another person, more specifically the mood of a woman. For all my experience I didn’t have a clue, she could have been entering a life-threatening panic and I probably wouldn’t have noticed.

She gave a tiny nod at the woman at the door and as usual I had no idea what this implied. I turned around half expecting to see the overall lady approach me with the special jacket with the very long sleeves. However, I saw her nod curtly in response and leave the entrance without giving me a glance.

‘This is very interesting,’ said the woman. There was another long pause. ‘You say you come from another time, is that correct?’

I might, as some have suggested – OK, Beth has suggested it on many occasions, jokingly I hope, although I’ve had my doubts, anyway, Beth has suggested I might have mild Asperger’s. I’ve not been officially diagnosed or anything, but when Beth described the symptoms to me it did all sound a bit familiar. However, even from my alleged position on the autistic spectrum, I could surmise that this woman didn’t believe what I’d just told her. She was just humouring me in an attempt to get more information. My ploy wasn’t working, she thought I was bonkers.

‘I was born in 1979, my name is Gavin Meckler, my mother’s name was Jane Meckler, my father was David Meckler, I was born in a town called High Wycombe in a country called Great Britain, or the United Kingdom, or England. Probably where I am now. I’m sure you have some kind of database you can look this up on.’

‘Nineteen seventy-nine,’ said the woman slowly. I nodded.

‘So you are two hundred and thirty-two years old,’ she said.

‘Ahh, so it is 2211 is it?’ I asked. I felt huge relief at this fact. I’d clearly just flown through a cloud and come out somewhere else on the globe, just a spatial jump instead of a time jump. I could find my way back to Gardenia and Grace and Goldacre Hall and all the wonderful people there. I could see my child, maybe even be there when he or she was born.

The woman smiled at me, a gentle smile that implied she could see right through my game, that it was indeed 2211 and that I must be a bit stupid to assume this would fool her. I tried not to let her attitude get to me.

‘I flew in my aeroplane and went into a rather unusual looking cloud over a town called Didcot, that was back in 2011.’

‘Twenty eleven,’ said the woman slowly.

‘When I came out of the cloud I found myself on the same date, the same time of day, the same geographical location but in 2211, essentially two hundred years later. I am not suggesting I have any ideas on how that happened, and I would readily agree it sounds very unlikely, but all the evidence I gathered over the next few months implied that this really is what happened. So a few hours ago the same cloud formation appeared around the power tether, this is near Didcot in Gardenia, except Didcot isn’t there any more. I was hoping that for whatever reason if I had once been propelled into the future, then flying through the cloud again in the opposite direction would return me to my own time, what for you is the past. However, what appears to have happened is that I have merely travelled through space, not time. I don’t mean space as in outer space, my plane doesn’t go that high.’ I realised two things, I was speaking too fast and I was smiling.

Mad alert.

I returned my face to stern as fast as I could and tried to speak more slowly. ‘I simply mean geographical space. So my request is very simple, I’d like to go back to where I came from. To do that it would help me if I knew where I was now. Geographically I mean.’

Another long silence followed, I think there would have been a time when I found such a long silence uncomfortable, but since I had spent time in Gardenia, where silence and time seemed to be in fruitful supply, it didn’t bother me so much. Eventually the woman took a big breath, held it and then said.

‘Okay, Gavin Meckler, you are in London.’

‘London!’

‘Yes, London.’

‘You mean, like, the city of London. But hasn’t it…hasn’t it been flooded?’

At last I noticed a reaction, the woman registered this information, it meant something to her.

‘You ask if London has been flooded,’ she spoke very carefully, clearly thinking about it. ‘Do you mean the old city?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, of course, the old city,’ I said, ‘I flew over what I would expect to be London a few months ago, when I was in Gardenia. It’s just a big tidal inlet, it’s completely gone, well, the centre of it has.’

‘Mmm.’ That was it, a small sound, barely audible. Again we sat in silence for a long time.

‘You’ll forgive me if I find your situation quite challenging. I’m going to seek some help in trying to understand.’

Another long silence, it’s possible my mouth was hanging open as I waited for her to finish.

‘I have never, how shall I say this, never experienced such an unusual situation previously. Although I have worked in this Institute for many years your circumstances are a little beyond my skill level. I will make sure you are comfortable and well looked after but I request that you remain in the Institute for the time being. I will return shortly with some colleagues who may be in a better position to help us.’

I took a deep breath and shrugged. There wasn’t much I could do. It was obvious I’d wrecked the Yuneec, I had no idea where I was and no idea how to get anywhere else. Once again I had the uncanny impression I was actually dead and this was my spirit’s way of assimilating the sudden change of circumstance. That did of course require a belief in things like spirits and afterlife, a belief I sadly lack.

‘Don’t worry Gavin Meckler, you are not dead,’ said the woman with a kind smile.

Hearing this I froze. Had I just said something out loud without being conscious of it? I’d just been thinking I might be dead but it was a fleeting moment of thought. I wasn’t saying the words ‘I might be dead’ either out loud or silently to myself. I was just rushing through a series of images and memories, of being in Oak House when I was told about the date, of drinking the weird tea with honey in it on my first day in Gardenia and suddenly this clear-faced woman just answered my question.

She stood up, that was a shock because she was hugely taller than I expected, she suddenly reminded me of someone, an actress from my era, the communist one, Vanessa Redgrave. She really looked like a Mediterranean version of Vanessa Redgrave.

‘My name is Doctor Markham,’ she said. ‘We will speak again soon.’

She walked out of the room without making a sound. I mean not even a tiny rustle of clothing or the merest suggestion of a footfall. Once she had gone I brushed the finger and thumb on my right hand together to see if I had gone deaf. I could hear the skin rub together very clearly, and yet this woman had just moved right across the room, right past me and I could hear nothing.

I think it was around that time that I started to get properly alarmed.