Chapter 2

Immediately, I was back in the shower room, and it was empty of people. This gave me time to examine my surroundings more closely. The shower room looked completely new, which reflected badly on my own school as we did not have showers at all. I was not in the same spot, but close to it.

I looked down at my feet to see what the floor was like, and found I was standing on a rubberised and so non-slip mat outside the actual shower cubicles. Perhaps that was why I had arrived there: the presence of such a mat to isolate myself from something below. However, there surely were other surfaces where I could stand safely. Why the shower room, with its bare walls telling me nothing about the name of the establishment?

I took a guess that this target was the selection choice of the previous user. Possibly he liked looking at naked girls, or whatever. Being spotted more than once would lead to a suggestion of an apparition or ghostly haunting, not a good thing for the school, especially a ‘ghost’ that haunted your new showers!

Anyway, this did not give me information about the school. I took a look around, to see if there were any pupils’ schoolbags, or official equipment that might be emblazoned with the school name. I spotted a few towels on rails, and strolled close to see if they were marked. They were, but only said School Property.

I sighed and moved on. There was nothing that revealed what I wanted to know, so I walked to the shower room doors, unsurprisingly no glass in them, and tried the handle. It turned, and I squinted through a small gap, not wanting to reveal myself. It was a corridor, and a few pupils walking away from me. They were all girls. One appeared walking in my direction, so I moved back out of sight and stood against the wall so that an opening door would hide me – provided it was the correct door.

The girl walked straight past, so that concern did not arise. Was there a time when girls showered; perhaps after a hockey game? In that case, why was only one girl in here last time? Possibly taking a shower before going out on a date later.

Time. I cast my eyes around, for any shower room must have a clock so that the pupils knew when their shower time was up.

There it was, above the doors. It told me it was eleven-twenty-five. Ahh, that was close to lunchtime, so showers would be over by this time. The girls would be heading to their last class before lunch.

I was still without an identity for this school, but if I stepped out of the shower room, my male presence would stand out like a lifeboat sitting in a busy street full of wheeled traffic. What to do?

I decided that bravado was the answer: act as if I belonged there. I stepped out and walked softly but purposefully towards the end door through which daylight shone. I met no-one and opened the door, finding a playground beyond, but no pupil in sight. They must all have been in class at this time.

I saw that there was a staggered exit gate to the road, and the back of a sign was affixed to the school railings. I walked to the gate and through the chicane to the exterior pavement and swung round to read the sign.

It read: St. Columba’s School, with no more information. You were supposed to know what street you were on and what town you were in, naturally, for you were already there if you were reading the sign. It made sense for all normal situations.

I had never heard of St. Columba’s as a school, but I would make a point of finding its location when I had the chance. A visit to Greenock’s public library was needed, to consult the reference books.

As I reflected on that, I suddenly found myself back in the vestibule in Gourock. The five minutes setting had passed that quickly, at least fast in my perception. One step forward, though. It was a start.

Pulling myself back to the present and my job, I checked my watch before getting back to my deliveries, putting small batches of greeting cards through letterboxes, with my post bag getting less heavy by the minute. That was odd; the time was only five to ten, yet the clock in the school read 11.25. Either that clock was running fast, or there was a time difference between here and my presence at the school. I was fairly certain my watch was correct, within a couple of minutes, so I was veering towards a time differential due to the transportation machine. Was it also a time travel machine?

That left me wondering, but I had to revert back my attention to my work duties.

When I finally dropped the last few items through a door and headed to the meeting point, the van was there, waiting for me: wonderful!

I was soon back to the sorting office, and had plenty of time to refill my bag for the afternoon route; a different one from the morning. I had a leisurely lunch of a mutton pie from the nearby baker’s shop and a mug of warm tea. Then a visit to the toilet to clear my bladder of some of its load. There is nothing worse than needing to pee when you are halfway down a street of houses. If you are lucky, and there is someone at the door of a house, I might be able to ask to use their facilities, but it is best not to bother them, and not have the problem in the first place.

At the end of my duties, I caught the bus back to Greenock, and as I was only a short distance from the library building, one of these ornate Carnegie edifices, I dropped in to look up their directories. I knew there was no school of that name in Greenock, so I started with the Glasgow and Paisley directories. Neither had an entry, but there was an advert for a St. Columba’s School in Kilmacolm, a village between Greenock and Paisley. From the advert, it appeared to be a private school for girls. This could be it! It was close enough for the former user to know about it, for he or she would not deliberately choose a far away school that they knew nothing about.

That done, I climbed the steep slope of Bank Street towards my parents’ tenement flat at the top end, hundreds of years away, all the time preparing my excuses for being late home. Perhaps the bus being full and having to wait for the next one?

When I arrived and before I could say anything, my mother merely commented, “Kept you late, did they?” and went on with her cooking.

That evening I pondered the girls’ school as a desirable destination. Did I really want to go back there and be exposed as a male intruder? I was too young to pretend to be a new master on the teaching staff. All I could offer was being a new assistant to the janitor, if that was even a vaguely plausible excuse for being there.

There was also the longer-term question: what happens when my temporary post ends in a few more days? Would I be able to continue visiting the empty building and repeatedly explore its possibilities? Would I be noticed by other residents as an interloper and reported to the police as a possible housebreaker intent on stealing? Stealing? What was there to steal, I thought. Who knew what lay inside the remainder of the house, when you could not even gain access through the front door. That was a thought: was there a back door to the place; possibly a real entrance to the interior. I might discover a huge electrical battery, or a series of batteries linked to provide a high enough charge to power the transportation machine. What about the heat that a bank of batteries would produce? How would that heat be dissipated?

These questions gave me an impetus to change my next visit. Instead of exploring the control panel further, I would investigate the rear of the house and see if entry was possible there. Most probably if there was a door it would be locked, and unlikely to be sprung like the front door lock was, as that instance was an oddity due to the ground slope in one direction where the pillar support had slipped.

Never mind, I told myself, a look around the building was indicated as a start. I recalled the ancient Chinese aphorism that every journey begins with a single step.
My mother was starting to wonder at my tendency to sit quietly in a corner and think, but said nothing. While at school I had on occasions done exactly that as I pondered a school textbook or merely wondered about some mysterious aspect of the world. I remembered getting my first school chemistry textbook and the teacher telling us that we would cover one chapter each week. I read the book through to the end that first week at home, and was bored through the repetition in class that term, except for points that I felt needed clarification. I liked the practical experiments, though. Later, I considered going to university to study chemistry with the notion of becoming an industrial chemist, but I got my mind changed later towards a literary bent.

Anyway, my mother asked me what I was thinking, and I said that I kept discovering new things about people as I learned my delivery routes. She laughed and said, “Robert, you will always be learning about people throughout your life, young man; get used to it.”

Truthfully, my thoughts were elsewhere. I was absorbed in pondering the nature of time travel as a feasible concept.

I had read H.G.Wells’ book, but he made no attempt to explain time as a theory. Like most SF authors, he simply assumed certain things and went along with them for the sake of the story. More recent writers had explored the temporal conflicts of time travel: the old question about going back in time and killing your great-grandfather by accident, so that you theoretically could not be in existence now. Then there was the other effects of time travel: changing how the world worked. For instance, doing something that prevented a war from occurring, or producing an invention ahead of its time, leading to the automobile industry starting years earlier.

All of these would change the world, perhaps. Alternatively, and equally likely, the flow of time would adjust itself so that the present would remain in existence, permanent and unchanged. The putative great-grandfather would turn out to not be the provider of the semen into the family line. A prevented assassination of Archduke Ferdinand might be replaced by another event that kick-started World War One; or the earlier practical invention of the motor car might be delayed by some business change that stopped the invention being actually introduced early. There were so many ways that time could reassert itself to prevent a conflicting history.

My mind boggled for a while, then I decided that any changes in time would make no difference as to how I acted in the present time. I would not go out of my way to make changes, but would similarly ignore any possible minor inconsistencies. It would end up as it ended up, was my conclusion. The girl who saw me in the school would either assume I was a ghostly figure with no reality, or consider that she had taken a seizure and that seizure caused her to have a vision. More than likely she would never mention my appearance, for fear of her being seen by teachers or other pupils as peculiar.

Come the next day that I was on that route, I walked up the slope and round to the rear of the house, to have a look at the back of it. The garden continued on as grass, though there was a wooden composter box in a corner away from the house.

The rear of the building had a securely locked door in the middle of the wall, with a small fan window above the entrance, and amazingly the door had a letterbox, duplicating the one on the front entrance. This was an oddity. Who needs two doors with letterboxes? Two letterboxes normally meant two households. There wasn’t even a name on the door to indicate a second resident of the building, never mind one; not that I expected a name, as the front door had no surname indication either. Almost every other home in the street had either a house name or an owner surname on the door frame or the door itself, just like my parents’ home, but not this one. However, it may have been the actual entrance to the building, giving access to the bank of batteries or whatever else was behind the control panel.

I used a finger to push open the flap, and peered through the letterbox, to see if there was another vestibule, but there was just a bare hallway, empty of any furniture; not even a coat rack on a wall. The walls were painted a drab beige, from what light came in from the fan window, and appeared to have seen no new paint for many years. To all intents and purposes, the house had never been lived in since it had been built.

That gave me a thought: when was it built? To gain that information, I made a detour to the council offices before lunchtime, and asked an official when that street had been built and houses added. He regarded my question with some suspicion, but went and found some maps of the town, showing streets existing at certain dates.

“Without digging deeper, it appears that the street was laid out and the houses built between the 1947 and 1956 maps. Does that satisfy you, young man?”

“Yes, thank you,” I answered. I knew that by checking the valuation roll which was printed every year, from that narrowed band I could find when the house appeared on the roll, when the house owner started paying his council rates. The valuation roll might also state who the titular owner was, which might not be the person actually using the building. I believed that the local library would hold copies of the valuation rolls for public inspection, in addition to the district valuer’s own collection in the council offices. The library would make me less noticeable to officialdom’s view.

I had also noticed the unkempt state of the grass round the empty building, so reckoned that if I could borrow a scythe I could cut the grass down to a manageable height, as I had been given a masterclass on scything by a man working at the bowling green not far from my home. He had been delighted that a young man wanted to know how efficient a scythe was at felling long grass.

Okay, perhaps I was a bit odd, wanting to explore this ancient craft, but a scythe was historically the way most field crops were cut before the machines took over. I read that in one of my history texts. The mower man was one of the last who excelled at using this sharp-pointed curved tool with its two handled operation. He had been given this job by the bowling club as the most efficient way of dealing with steep grass slopes that would be a problem for any machine mower. The bowling green block had sloping grassy sides down to street level on three sides of the square that the bowling green encompassed. The streets on two opposite sides had strong slopes, but the bowling green plot had been built up to provide a level surface for the bowlers, resulting in steep sides down to street level and the iron railings that fenced off the block. The clubhouse was entered from the only street that matched the bowling green level, at its highest point.

I reckoned it should have cost a lot to build up that block to make it suitable for a bowling-green, but there was another possibility. Probably a local property developer saw it as an opportunity to use the site to dispose of unwanted rock and soil from one on his developments close by and at the same time become a credit to the community by helping to construct the bowling green facility.