The Time Bubble Box Set 2, стр. 295
I knew now, arriving on 31st December, that continuing tosearch for Rachel would be pointless. I hadn’t found her before and I wouldn’tfind her now. Her body had never been found, presumably swallowed up by the sealike so many others. There was only one thing I could do right now – the samething that I had ultimately done before, several days later.
I abandoned my search for my sister and joined the reliefeffort. The other aid workers were only too grateful for my help. Joining inwith them before had given me a sense of purpose, and it was this that hadinspired me to begin working with the Red Cross in the years that followed.
As for Rachel, I had to stop her coming here. It was assimple as that. But would it be that easy? I remembered my attempts to stop mymother drinking. She had rubbished my claims of time-travelling from thefuture, and who wouldn’t? Rachel might well do the same.
It’s not as if I could even provide her with any proof thatthe tsunami was going to happen. If I could take a picture of this beach righthere and take it back through time with me, I would. But that wasn’t possible.
I couldn’t prove the tsunami was going to happen, but Ididn’t need to. When I next went back a year in time I would have only two daysto convince Rachel. I had already done my homework and intended to pump herwith so much irrefutable proof that I could tell the future that she wouldensure she was nowhere near the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day.
I looked around me once more at the devastation.
No Rachel – there is no way you are dying here.
Chapter Sixteen
2003
The trouble with trying to remember things that took placeover twenty years ago was that I could remember major events, such as the partyto celebrate my coming of age stuck in my mind, but not the details aroundthem. The human brain, mine anyway, had only so much storage capacity on thehard drive and selectively sent anything not considered important to therecycle bin.
This made planning ahead difficult, particularly when I hadsuch an important task in front of me. Fortunately, the time I had previouslyspent on the laptop researching past years was about to come in very handy.
My bedroom had changed noticeably since the last time I hadarrived in it. The rocky bands I had been into in the mid-noughties were nolonger in evidence, and the walls were now decorated with posters of the SpiceGirls.
Had I really still had those up approaching my eighteenthbirthday? Even in 2003, which seems like a lifetime ago now, they wereseriously old hat. The group had long disbanded by this time and most of thegirls were enjoying solo careers.
I had been woken up by my digital clock radio alarm goingoff, which was tuned into Fox FM, the local radio station at the time. It wasplaying, appropriately enough, one of the Spice Girls’ solo songs, “Free Me” byEmma Bunton. She had always been my favourite Spice Girl and was having astring of hits around this time.
The song finished and was replaced by “Mad World”, which Irecalled had been Christmas Number One that year. The list of festivechart-toppers had been one of the things I had memorised during my internet research.
I lay in bed for a while, wondering where all the years hadgone. 2003 really didn’t seem like more than twenty years ago. It felt like adecade at the most. Had I wasted my life, letting the years fly the way theyhad?
It was the same for everyone, I guess. No one can fightagainst the inevitable passing of time. That’s what I used to think, anyway.Now my perspective was somewhat different.
My musing was interrupted by my mother calling me fromdownstairs.
“Are you coming down, Amy? You’re going to be late forwork.”
I was temporarily flummoxed by this. Where was work? Thatwas something I had neglected to check up on. I thought for a moment thenremembered that, over that Christmas and New Year, I had been working in a caféin town, waiting tables.
This was one of many different jobs I had held as ateenager, trying to save as much money as I could so I could emulate my sisterand go travelling in the future. It was largely money earned during 2004working everywhere from Burger King to B&Q that had enabled me to joinRachel in Thailand that ill-fated Christmas.
Was I going to work today? I had ducked out sick so manytimes from the hospital during my time travels that a shift serving coffee andsandwiches in the Covered Market wasn’t any big deal. However, I had reallyenjoyed that job, and saw no reason not to go. It would all be rathernostalgic, like much of my life.
My home couldn’t have looked more different to how it hadduring my mother’s declining years. As I descended the stairs towards thekitchen I could see that everything looked spotless. There wasn’t a hint offluff on the fawn-coloured carpet that covered the stairs, nor was there aspeck of dust in the hallway.
The kitchen, likewise, was immaculate, surfaces sparklingclean, a vase of freshly cut flowers in the centre of the table and the smellof home-cooked bread filling the air. My mother was smart and carried the poiseof a happy and confident woman as she turned at hearing my approach, handing mea freshly brewed cup of coffee.
“Here, you’d better get that down you,” she said.
Happy as I was to see my mother back to her old self, beforethe tsunami shattered her world, it wasn’t her I needed to see.
“Where’s Rachel?” I asked.
“Down in London,” replied Mum. “I thought you knew. Shewon’t be back until after New Year.”
This was a bad start.
“Where in London?” I asked.
“You’re not thinking of trying to go down to join her, byany chance, are you? We already discussed this, remember?”
Now she mentioned it, I did remember. I had wanted to go andsee in