THE REMEMBERED MAN

As a tribute to time travel and the BACK TO THE FUTURE films I present this on the 30th anniversary of the first of the trilogy.

THE REMEMBERED MAN

or

BACK TO THE PAST

PART ONE

“I was just looking at you,” murmured Phoebe. “Sitting there reading that book, your brow creased, your lips slightly curled in the way they do when you're concentrating.”

Marky looked up and smiled at her. “It's a crossword,” he said quietly.

“Doing your crossword, then. It made me wonder... ages ago, when you would have been a young bloke, a long time before you met me … did your father live round here?”

Marky shook his head. “I'm certain he can't have,” he grinned, “because my father died when I was three, and back then I wasn't old enough to be called a bloke.”

She wrinkled her nose the way he liked it. “It's just that, for a moment, you reminded me of someone … fifty years ago, when I was a young woman but still living at home. It was scary!”

“Did I? Was he young and handsome, and totally desirable?”

She shook her head soberly. “No. He was spooky. And old. A dirty old man.”

“And I remind you of him? Thanks a lot!”

“I was only about twenty - and he squeezed my bottom.”

“Hey! Only I'm allowed to do that!”

“But, for a moment when you were doing your crossword you brought him back into my mind. I reported him!”

“You did? You never told me!”

“I'd forgotten. As I said, it was a long time ago and I've had a whole life since then.”

“You've got lots of life left, Phoebe. At least, you'd better have or there'll be trouble!”

She smiled at him. “What sort of trouble?” she asked.

“Pop your clogs and you'll find out!”

“I've no intention of doing that yet, Marky. We've not known each other anywhere near long enough for it to end just yet.”

He nodded, soberly. “I know,” he said. “What happened to that spooky bloke?”

She wrinkled her nose �" something else that he liked. “I dunno,” she said. As far as I remember it he just vanished from the face of the Earth. I know the police looked for him, but couldn't find any trace of him. It was as if he was a ghost, or something like that.”

“A ghost who could pinch your bum?”

She smiled. “Well, something like that,” she said.

“If I'd got my hands on him I'd have thrashed him!” Marky assured her. “You can be quite certain of that!”

“He was an old guy and I suppose no danger really. But just then, when I mentioned it, you did look like him.”

“Well, I won't pinch your bottom!”

“You're always doing it! And I don't complain, do I?”

“You like it.”

“Because I love you, Marky. But I didn't love that old man back then. He scared me. It was as if he knew my innermost secrets, and then he put his nasty old wrinkled hands on my bottom and I screamed and screamed!”

“What do you mean, it's as though he knew your innermost secrets?”

“The things he said.”

“Where was this?”

“I can't remember. Maybe at home, where my parents lived. Maybe he visited them … or maybe he came to see me. I really can't remember.”

“He'll have been dead long since, so there's no way he'll frighten you again.”

“He didn't exactly frighten me, it's just that I didn't want to be pawed by a sleazy old bloke who seemed to be able to read my mind.”

“How, read your mind?”

“I don't know. Oh, he seemed to know stuff �" you know, things I like to do, that sort of thing.”

“Well, darling, it was all a long time ago. You got married, had your children, they grew up, you were, sadly, widowed �" and then you met me.”

“Too late,” she whispered. “Much too late.”

“But I love you, Phoebe.”

“I know you do. And I love you.”

“And I'll be your dirty old man whenever you like!”

“You're not old, Marky: not really old, like the farts we see sitting on the bus when we go into town, old and grey and dribbling their lives away!”

“Some of them are younger than me, darling.”

“It's a state of mind, growing old, and you haven't got it yet.”

“Neither have you, Phoebe, darling. So no more thoughts of your dirty old man. He's dead, and the dead can't harm you.”

“It's strange, though...”

“What is?”

“How you reminded me of him, sitting there, doing your crossword...”

Marky smiled the way she liked him to. “Well, I'm me, and I only pinch your bottom when you want me to!”

She stood up. “I'll make some coffee,” she said. “It's about time for elevenses.”

“And I'll tip-toe behind you...” he grinned.

“And why would you do that, pray?”

“To do this,” he smirked, and he reached out and very gently stroked her bottom as she walked into the kitchen.

“You dirty old man!” she laughed.

PART TWO

“It's Brian,” hissed Phoebe after peeking surreptitiously through the front window at the door that had just been knocked.

“I'll get rid of him,” muttered Marky, confidently. “There's nobody we want round here less than Brian, not on a day like today.” He didn't say what sort of day today was, but Phoebe understood.

“Hail fellow well met!” boomed Brian when the door opened.

Brian was an oddity. He was always apparently introverted to the point of being mousey, but he boomed, He couldn't help it, and it was so annoying that the number of his friends could be counted on the fingers of a double-arm amputee. He called himself an inventor, but Marky couldn't think of one thing that he'd invented.

“What can we do for you... we were about to go out soon,” said Marky quietly, lying.

“I have something for you.”

“Something for me?”

“A gift.”

“Why? It's not my birthday or Christmas.”

“I notice something every time I come round here.”

“You do? What?”

“If I can come in I'll show you.”

“We're going....”

“I know. Soon. But this won't take above a couple of minutes.”

He pushed past Marky and made his way into the front room where Phoebe was standing, still close to the window.

“That!” Brian pointed towards the sideboard, an old-fashioned affair that Phoebe had inherited from her parents years ago. On the sideboard was a photograph, a black and white image of a young woman dressed in a polka-dot dress and with the least of smiles touching the corners of her lips.

“That's Phoebe, long before I first knew her!” said Marky.

“I know. You've told me: and wasn't she a beautiful young woman!”

“It was a long time ago,” put in Phoebe. “It was a week or two before I married Daniel.”

“I hadn't even heard of her back then,” murmured Marky. “If I had it would have been one hell of a contest �" me versus Daniel!”

“You'd have won,” whispered Phoebe. “That picture's got to be fifty years old if it's a day!”

“And you want to see what she was like all those years ago?” asked Brian of Marky.

“I've got that picture: it's enough. You can't bring back the past, no matter how hard you try,” said Marky.

“That brings me to my present,” grinned Brian, and he handed what looked very much like the remote control of a television set* to Marky. “This will take you there,” he added, mysteriously. “I've used it and I know that it works. It traps something we know absolutely nothing about, an aura if you like, something each of us has. And it diverts it from the present to another time in our lives, taking whoever's holding the device with them. So if you want to you can go back fifty years and see your Phoebe when she was having this photo taken.”

“What nonsense!” snapped Marky. “This is no joking matter,” he told Brian. “Phoebe was going to have a long and happy marriage to her late husband and the last thing she'd want is her relatively new fella putting his nose in!”

“And the past should stay where it is!” added Phoebe. “It had it's bad times as well as its good, and old hornets nests should stay undisturbed where they are.”

“I'll leave it with you anyway,” said Brian, almost mysteriously. “I've been back to when I was young, you know. I'm always going. The seventies were much better than now. I was … almost happy … back then.”

“I don't want to hurt your feelings, Brian...” began Marky.

“That's all anyone seems to want to do,” boomed Brian. “But I gave you the gift and you can take it or leave it.”

“Why?” asked Phoebe.

“Why give it you? Because I've known Marky for years and I can see that he's happier now than he's ever been. I think it might help...”

“If I'm that happy I can't see how I need any help...” put in Marky.

“You never know,” said Brian with uncharacteristic quietness. “I know that seeing the past has helped me. Be warned, though, you can only go back to a time within your own life. If you try to go back to a time before you were born you enter a black featureless bleakness which is no joke, I can tell you. You can't go into the future at all, either. That's not possible. If you think about it the future hasn't happened. But the past's a doddle, and getting back to now is too.”

Marky was feeling impatient.

“We really must be going...” he told Brian. “Thanks for the present and I don't think we'll use it...”

“Never say never,” whispered Brian, and he moved swiftly to the front door. “I'll see myself out,” he added.

And he was gone, leaving Marky holding the remote-control lookalike.

“What was that all about?” asked Phoebe, quietly.

Marky shook his head and held the small plastic device towards Phoebe.

“I've no idea,” he said, quietly. “Come on �" let's go out. We told Brian we were, and it's a lovely day.”

“To the shops?” asked Phoebe.

“Or the park,” he said: “to watch bowls or something, or feed the ducks.”

“I'll get some bread,” smiled Phoebe. “Put that damned thing away. The last thing you want to do is try and change channels on Freeview and end up in 1966!”

“Or anywhen,” whispered Marky: “or anywhen.”

PART THREE

Marky lay in bed next to Phoebe and glanced towards her. She was lying on her back and all he could see outlined against the dark curtains was the shape of her nose, which was responsible for the hum of snores that were keeping him awake.

What was it she had said earlier? Her most startling recollection from her younger years was of a dirty old man patting her bottom!

What a thing to chase her down the years! What a dreadful memory! A reprehensible old idiot thinking he could provide a lifetime of nightmares for the young woman in his power! Such behaviour was plain wrong...

And there was Brian's ridiculous invention. What did he say it was? A kind of time machine in miniature, something that somehow (not magic, but something possibly indistinguishable from magic) could take the person pressing its buttons to a time in his past to see what things had really been like.

He thought of the dirty old man who had cast a shadow over the lovely Phoebe's life all those years ago, and his mind flipped back to the remote control time machine.

It was where he'd put it, in the top drawer in the spare room where he kept his underwear, under, in fact, an untidy pile of boxer shorts.

"I wonder,"he whispered to himself, and the idea was there.

He might see if it worked and then use it to sort Phoebe's dirty old man out once and for all.

Five minutes later, in that other room, dressed in trousers and a shirt, he was examining the buttons on what looked very much like a television remote control and nothing like anything else.

The red button switched it on, and a little screen glowed.

He pressed what looked like a cursor and numbers started moving on the screen. The date? Or a date, rather. That's what it looked like.

He tip-toed into the front room and picked up the old black-and-white photo and turned it over. On the back it, on a label stuck on, in faded pencil he could make out another date. July 7th 1962.

"I wonder if this works,"he asked himself, staring again at the remote control, and he set the little number flicking back until they read the … same date as the picture ... July 7th 1962.

"If that's all I have to do to go zooming through time all the science fiction writers have got it completely wrong," he mused, and pressed a button marked "go".

There wasn't any speeded-up passing of time. There was no sensation whatsoever, but after he blinked in an involuntary sort of way he found himself, no longer in the front room of his 2013 bungalow but standing in the middle of a sunlit road with a car screeching to a standstill inches from him.

"Bloody idiot! Where on Earth did you spring from!"roared an enraged voice from the driver's seat.

He didn't know.

"I dunno,"he said, honestly.

"Then bugger off, you silly old fool!" roared the man, and Marky took a step back as he roared off, and then jumped onto the pavement, pale and breathless.

"You nearly got killed," said a quiet voice.

He looked at the girl who has spoken. He knew that voice. Of course he did! The girl might be only around twenty and her face might be young and unlined, but she sounded very much like the Phoebe he'd left in bed mere minutes earlier, only this one wasn't snoring.

"I ... I ..."he stammered, lost for words.

"You ought to be more careful," she added. "You seemed to come from nowhere! I've never seen anything like it!"

"I'm Marky..."he said, feeling foolish. Of course he was Marky, and wouldn't she know? They'd been married for five years by now! Though this girl was so young. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe she merely sounded like his Phoebe. But:

"I'm Phoebe Richards,"she said, her voice like he knew it. "Will you be all right?"

"Oh, Phoebe,"he muttered, his confusion almost complete. After all, it's one thing to contemplate a situation when you bump into a loved one fifty years ago, young and no doubt desirable, and quite another to actually do it.

"Hello Phoebe,"he almost whispered, and couldn't help it.

He took a step closer to her. "I know you. Will know you," he said quietly.

"Hey! You're spooky!"she exclaimed when she perceived he had closed the distance between them until it was almost nothing, and he was in her space. She took a step back. Somehow, how could he have done it? Somehow he reached towards her, confused, he told himself he might have been stumbling but he wasn't, but everything happened quite wrongly, certainly unintentionally, and he found his hand sliding on the back of her dress, by her bottom, touching her.

"What the hell are you doing!"she screamed at him, loud suddenly.

"S-sorry..."he mumbled “I ... I slipped..."

"Liar!"she screamed. "You lunged for my bottom!"

"No!"he gasped, "No ... I wouldn't..."

"Then how come I can feel where your dirty old hands touched me!" she screamed, becoming hysterical.

A man detached himself from one of the houses.

"Phoebe? What is it?"he asked.

"Dad! This dirty old man - he touched me..." screamed the young woman. "He went for my bum!"

"He did?" shouted an enraged father.

And Marky did the only thing he could.

He pressed the button marked "RETURN"and flickered out of being in that time to end up shaking uncontrollably in his own front room, and on his own.

PART FOUR

“That dirty old man,” asked Marky to wife Phoebe, lying in bed after a poor night's sleep, “the one who manhandled your bottom...?”

“Why do you want me to talk about him?” asked Phoebe, an edge of annoyance in her voice.

“I just wondered...”

“Well don't! He coloured my life, sort of … he taught me that men can be beasts, the way they put their clammy hands all over you, the way they maul a woman … he was old, Marky, and so ugly … a dirty old raincoat … he tried to expose himself to me … and to think he almost got knocked down by a car, appearing from nowhere like he did … now please shut up about him...”

“A dirty old raincoat, Phoebe?”

“Yes! I said shut up. I don't want to remember … if it hadn't been for him I might not have rushed into marriage like I did.”

“You rushed that first time, Phoebe? I thought you were always happily married.”

“Oh, I was, don't get me wrong, but at the back of my mind I've always had that dreadful old man pawing at me. I probably married to get away from him! I guess it's silly, really, and I ought to get over it...”

“And he appeared from nowhere, like a ghost?”

“I told you, I don't want to think about it! It was all a lifetime ago! But yes, the first I knew of him was the screeching of a car's brakes and there he was, almost being knocked down. I wish he had been. Then he wouldn't have been the shadow on my life that he's been. A dirty old man, greasy raincoat open at the front so's I might have seen everything he'd got, and that horrible old hand pawing at my bottom...”

“And your dad coming out to sort him out?”

“My dad? Coming out? Why, yes, I remember him … but how did you know that, Marky?”

“Oh, I suppose I … it doesn't matter … but are you sure about the greasy raincoat?”

She looked at him oddly. “You don't think I'd make something like that up, do you?” she almost flared.

“Of course not, love. You'd never make anything like that up! But over the years ...”

“I'm sure he had a greasy raincoat!”

“OK, OK! And he made you rush into a marriage you didn't want?”

“No! Not exactly … but I sometimes wonder … you see, Marky, I wish I'd met you years and years ago, that there'd always been just you and me … but we didn't, and I spent most of my life being a little wife and housekeeper, and it wasn't until I was widowed ... that we met.”

“We did meet before, once, Phoebe.”

“You what? Now what are you on about, Marky? We didn't meet until months after the funeral …”

“We did, once, Phoebe.”

“I can't remember any such thing!”

“I think you can.”

“I know what I remember, Marky! I'm not senile yet, you know.”

“Last night...” He paused for a moment.

“Last night what?”

“Last night … I couldn't sleep. It was your fault: you were snoring!”

“You snore more than anyone!”

“Anyway, I got to thinking...”

“That's a novelty!”

“Brian's remote control thing. I went to look at it. It's got batteries in it, you know, and a little window with dates...”

“Are you...”

“I set it for the date on the back of that lovely old photo of you and almost got knocked down by a black car with an angry driver when I pressed the button.”

“How dreadful! But it's not true, is it? You've been dreaming again, haven't you?”

“There was this girl … in a red dress with white spots, lovely long hair all round her shoulders, a pretty smile...”

She had turned pale... “There was?” she stammered.

“And I stumbled towards her. I didn't mean to but I knew who she was … and she said her name...”

“Marky, don't!”

“She did, Phoebe.”

“She said her name …?”

“Was Phoebe. I didn't mean it, though, when I stumbled and grabbed for her bum … she was so young and pretty and I knew I was an old fart with wrinkles and a paunch … but it had been a shock … the car, the day, the sun, her father...”

“Marky!”

“But there was no raincoat, Phoebe, no greasy raincoat, nothing but an old man with crappy knees stumbling on a sunny day....”

She was silent for ages. Then, quietly, “tomorrow, Marky, tomorrow...”

“Tomorrow, Phoebe?”

“I should have known. I should have remembered you … we'll see how we feel tomorrow...”

“We'll be all right, Phoebe...”

“You know that? You think so? Spying on me like that? You think that was an all-right thing to do? Driving me into a marriage I didn't want, an old man with horrible, gnarled fingers... and all because...?”

“All because I wanted to give that dirty old man you told me about a piece of my mind and possibly a damned good thrashing, Phoebe, … but I couldn't … I really wanted to but I really couldn't … because it was me!”

“You?”

He nodded, praying for understanding. She looked at him and saw, in that moment, the dirty old man of her life-long terror.

“We're over, Marky, we're over,” sighed Phoebe, and when he looked up he saw the saltiness of her tears, the way they streamed down her face like a nightmare melting away.

“We're over,” she added, “we're over...”

*The remote control time machine borrowed from my children's book, Officer Gentry and the Ghost of Mavis Adder (Lulu.com)