Chapter 01 - Fortuitous Discoveries

Saturday 24th June

“What you got there, Little Brother?” my sister asked as I put my bags down on the kitchen table and carefully removed the contents from within. She had, I guessed, heard me as I got home, and had come into the kitchen to see what there was to see, curiosity and boredom making for strange motivators, but what did I know about the motivations of women? With her blond hair tied up into a pony tail, and the ‘glistening’ in evidence over her slightly flushed complexion where it wasn’t covered with an oversized white tee, I guessed she’d been spending the afternoon soaking up as much sun as the Welsh summer could offer, which usually wasn’t all that much, climate change or no climate change.

For a moment I glared at her. Little Brother? She knew ‘little brother’ was the kind of comment that made me cross, and in the past she had used it as a way of reminding me – or teasing me, if I was going to be fair about it – that I was younger than her, hence my normal reaction of grr. This time, however, I could see that when she called me ‘that’ she was smiling and not being mean about it, so with great maturity I decided I would let it pass without responding. After all, we were both now eighteen and the two-hundred-and-ninety-three days between our birthdays was hardly the gap of the ages. As we got older that difference had become less and less something she used to tease me with, and more a sign of affection; I’d even called her ‘Big Sis’ a couple of times in a nice way too – and lived! Of course, her being a ‘grown up’ had maybe led to an increase in the ‘Little Brother’ teases, but I could see she’d been taking her last chances while she could, and that once we were both eighteen that would kind of be it, really.

“These? Just a couple of old books, Simaks,” I said as I sat down at the kitchen table, waving my hands across my little haul.

“Oh,” Stef said as she sat down in front of me and began picking at the bowl of grapes in the middle of the table. “That’s all, is it? Come on, Luke. You got the keys to the city from Mum to go shopping on your own now you’re eighteen and all you have to show is a couple of books? Nuh-huh. I know that tone. What else did you get? I can see your bag isn’t empty, you know.”

“Uhm, this,” I said, slightly sheepishly, as I withdrew a curious mechanical device from my messenger bag and laid it on the table between us, pushing the fruit bowl to one side, though still within easy reach for her. “It’s kind of steampunky,” I said, as though that explained it.

“Erm, it’s ‘steampunky’ is it? Really?” Stef asked as she reached out for The Thing I’d bought, and yes, that was exactly how I thought of it, initial capitals and all.

I shrugged. “Well, I don’t know what it is, so how else should I describe it?” I asked. How do you describe the indescribable? It was a small mechanical ... thing, clearly old or old looking by the style of lettering used, and absolutely unknown of purpose, if any. It was triangular in design, about twenty-five centimetres per side, with greatly rounded corners taking up about three centimetres of each corner, and inset at each corner was a straight knurled wheel about seven centimetres in diameter. From the few tries I’d given them, I knew these three wheels turned and that somehow they moved some of the dials on the main face, though there had to be some kind of gearing involved as the dials didn’t seem to move at the same pace as the wheels. The circular glass domed main face on the top was maybe fifteen centimetres across, covered with a selection of dials, some with numbers and others with curious symbols around them which seemed almost familiar. I’d seen some move as I’d sat and played with it on the bus on my way home, but others seemed not to move at all, though whether that was because of design or defect, I had no idea. The main triangular body of the device was about five centimetres high, and the glass-covered face about another two centimetres or so deep. As I’d examined it on the bus, it had seemed to me that the glass itself was old, somehow, something more like the glass in old bottles than the glass in windows. The glass aside, the whole thing seemed made of brass or some brassy metal, though it was not as heavy as I had imagined it would be when I first saw it. It was substantial, but not weighty.

“So, you get some money for your birthday, you go off to town, you leave me here all alone when you were shopping, shopping, and you come back with this?” Stef asked as she waved The Thing gently in her hand for dramatic effect. “You’d better not have spent all your money on it, either, or you know what Mum and Dad will say.”

“It wasn’t that much. In fact, I got a really good deal on it,” I proudly announced.

“Oh this should be good,” Stef said as she popped a grape into her mouth, her attention now on me and not The Thing.

“It was just £25,” I said, already beginning to wilt under her gaze, and her gaze was nothing compared to Mum’s.

“£25? For this? This had better be really good, Luke. So. What is it? And, does it work?”

“I don’t know, and I’m not sure.”

“Luke...” Stef said, her tone clearly requiring the whole narrative from me and not a clever attempt at avoiding same.

“Okay, okay, but first, do you mind if I get a drink? It’s kinda hot out there y’know, and the bus had open windows but that’s not air conditioning,” I said, and it was true; today was supposed to be the hottest day since 1976. Thank God we lived in a small town in Wales and not down in London, where it was so hot they were running out of ways to say how hot it was.

“Okay, Little Brother, bring your ... Whatchamacallit with you, and you can bring me a Pepsi too,” Stef said with a grin as she got up and headed back out into the garden where a briefly-glimpsed beach towel on the grass with a book and a bottle of sun tan oil beside it confirmed how she had been spending her Saturday afternoon.

When she had come into the house, she had pulled on one of her almost infamous baggy tee-shirts that she wore around the house when she was ‘going casual’. Lazy Sunday breakfast muesli, and her over-sized tee; that middle of the night quick pee meant her over-sized tee as I’d heard Mum caution her about sleeping in the nude; and covering her bikini when she heard someone come in and wasn’t sure who it was or if they’d be cool with her in her bikini, that too meant her over-sized tee was called into service.

However, now she knew it was me she was already peeling off her tee and folding it up into an impromptu pillow, a purpose which, I realised, it had probably already been serving before I got back. And that, of course, meant Stef was now solely in her bikini, a pale lime green little thing that went well with her blonde hair and grey-green eyes. Following behind as I was with Pepsis in one hand and The Thing under my other arm, this afforded me ample opportunity for yet another example of my shameful enjoyment in watching her bum, a view made all the more impressive as she leant over, picked up her round-framed sunglasses, and settled down, tailor style, to await my arrival with her drink.

Thank God she hadn’t seen me as I watched her, but what could I do? When you’re a teen-aged boy coming out the other end of puberty it seems almost everything reminds you of the great big mysterious thing called sex, and when you get to see your sister hunker down in her bikini, it really doesn’t help. As if to make matters personally worse for me, Stef’s addiction to early morning cycle rides and occasional yoga sessions had resulted in the kind of figure that, as an adolescent boy, I found to be quite a challenge not to contemplate.

Ahem.

I did my best to push such thoughts as far away as they ever got, which wasn’t all that far and right now certainly didn’t feel like far enough, and sat down opposite Stef as I passed her her drink.

“Thanks, Luke,” she said as she held the can to her forehead for a moment, letting its chill infect her before she popped the seal and took a healthy gulp.

How that would taste after grapes, I could not imagine, but she seemed okay with it.

I popped the seal on my can, and Stef patiently waited until I had swallowed my first gulp. “So, this ... this Whatchamacallit. what is it, where did you get it, what does it do, and anything else you think you might need to tell me?” she asked as I handed The Thing over to her. Stef loved details, and always had. I think that was the reason she did so well at school, because learning what the teachers told her wasn’t enough, and if something interested her, she wanted to know everything about it, which was great most of the time, but at other times, when her interest was on something such as her addiction to geology last summer, it could be less than useful, though it made her happy to know these things. Not so, those of us who had to listen to her mini-lectures on her latest discoveries in the field.

“There’s not much to tell,” I began. “You know the new charity shop that’s opened towards the end of Rose Lane? I got it there. They didn’t know what it was either. They had just cleared some old guy’s house from one of the villages over the back,” I said, ‘the back’ meaning the other side of the small hill that overlooked our town, and might refer to one of the small villages, a smallholding, or a cottage in the middle of nowhere – we had all these and more. “I was passing, so I went in, and when I did the boxes were out on the floor. I asked the guy in there, and he said just to rummage about and if I found anything he’d sort out a price for it. Most of it wasn’t anything interesting, but at the bottom of one of the boxes, next to some old books about disused train routes, there was this. I fished it out and asked the guy, and he didn’t know anything about it, so he took a look at it and because it wasn’t working but it looked ‘antiquey’ he let me have it for just £25.”

“Oh come on, Luke!” Stef said, shaking her head in the manner of all older siblings who can’t believe how little their younger siblings know of the workings of the world. “You paid £25 in a charity shop?”

“Hey, it’s a good charity,” I protested, and it was; the monies it raised went to support some of those farms that were failing, trying to keep them going long enough for the economy to turn around so that nobody would have to leave and local people could still live locally and not get drawn off to the cities.

“Yeah, it is, but Luke? £25 good?”

“I know,” I sighed, recognising that I wouldn’t win defending that one to her, so I tried another angle. “But you have to admit, it does look cool,” I said. “Plus I got a couple of old books as well,” I added, as if that made it better somehow.

“Well, I guess for someone into scifi like you are I suppose it might look cool, plus you didn’t spend all your money so Mum won’t kill you, but what does it do?”

“Nothing, I think.”

“Nothing?” Stef asked as she held it up to the light and turned it over in her hands; she even pushed her sunglasses back for a better look. “You think it’s broken then?”

“I don’t know. I know that the wheels on the corners move some of the wheels on the top, but what they mean I’ve no idea; they’re all symbols and squiggles,” I said, and they were. Round the outside there were three narrow concentric circles with numbers on them, 1-17, 1-31, 1-79, and although I knew those were primes so their choice must mean something, what that was I had no idea. As for the other smaller dials that were set inside ‘the three’ frankly it was anyone’s guess what they did, if anything. Some of them didn’t even seem to be round, but more oval shaped, so there was no chance they could move. So far, although some of the dials had moved a little, overall, nothing.

“Do you think it needs winding?” Stef asked.

“Maybe, but I’ve tried winding the three wheels, and they move the circles, but I can’t hear them winding anything, whether I wind them clockwise or counter. Plus, there’s nowhere on the back or the sides to put a key, even if there’d been a key with it, and there wasn’t.”

“Uh-huh,” said Stef as she did what I’d also done and turned the thing over to see if there were any marks on the base where something might come away where there might be somewhere where a key could go, but there was nothing like that. Instead, mirroring the glass face on the front, a great circle had been marked out on the back, and inside it there were a lot of complex and interconnected scrolling patterns which were pretty, but just not much use. “So what’re you going to do with it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Probably just hang it on the wall somehow, or prop it on the bookcase,” I said, not wanting to let Stef see I hadn’t really thought through what I was going to do with it, only that I liked it and so I’d bought it on impulse.

“What about taking it to the repair shop, you know, the one who does clocks as well as jewellery?”

“Jensen’s? Maybe,” I said as she handed the device back to me. “But that might be expensive, and I can’t see any screws to undo it. Maybe something slides back, but I haven’t found anything like that yet either. Anyway, I like it as it is and besides, if it started ticking I’d never get to sleep!”

Stef laughed. Her rising with the sun was a family joke in counterpoint to my love of my duvet.

“Okay, Luke, so you bought a thing and a couple of books and you didn’t splurge out all the monies you got for your birthday. Dunno if I’d say I was proud for you not blowing it on more X-Box games, but at least you’ve enough left for some new shorts.”

“Huh? What do I need those for?” I asked, fairly sure that the shorts I was wearing – deck style, black, and with plenty of useful pockets – were perfectly adequate.

“Okay, let’s get this straight, those one’s you’ve got on now? They’re the only good pair you’ve got since you got that last growth spurt.”

“I guess,” I admitted, having started the year by gaining a couple of inches in height, meaning Stef and I were now both around one-seventy centimetres, though she claimed a couple more centimetres on me, but I put that down to her hair.

“But those shorts, they’re not really for sunbathing, are they?” Stef asked.

“No, and they’re not meant for sunbathing, like me,” I said, feeling clever at the way I’d twisted what she’d said.

Unimpressed, Stef sighed. “Oh Luke, don’t you know the local girls aren’t going for ‘pasty boys’ this year? That whole ‘vampire chic’ is such a myth you know.”