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. . .
my train of thought?

My throat is dry. Dry and scratchy. I think this is the most talking that I have ever done in my life. In one go, that is.

Funny thing is, I don’t even know if anyone will ever listen to these tapes. I’m not even sure why I thought it was such a good idea to make them. I just wanted to leave a record, for the four of us, for any more people like us that are left, so that we will not be forgotten.

I think that’s what we all want, in the end.

To know that we left footprints when we passed by, however briefly.

We want to be remembered.

So remember us.

Please.

Remember us.

Things never happen the way you think they are going to. Too many random factors between thought and action, I guess. My dad used to sum it up with this weird golfing saying:
there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip.

We left Mrs O’Donnell’s house in a flat depression. The idea was to go back to Mr Peterson, check he was OK, then head out of the village on the Crowley road to see how far the phenomenon stretched.

Easy plan.

We were halfway down the road when Mrs O’Donnell stopped walking.

‘They’ve gone,’ she said, and I realised she was at the house where the boy and girl had been standing, frozen in the act of coming out of their house.

Had been.

They weren’t there now.

The hallway was empty.

We hit the high street at a run.

Gone was the heaviness that had settled over our minds and bodies, now we felt light as clouds. If the Cross children were gone, then surely it was likely that
they had moved themselves.
If that was true, maybe everyone else was moving again.

Suddenly we stopped running. People were moving down the high street.

People.

Were.

Moving.

In fact, it was a great number of people and they were walking, as a crowd, away from the village green and heading for, I guessed, their houses.

People.

Moving.

It was wonderful.

And if they looked a little dazed – staring about as if seeing an unfamiliar place – then that was probably to be expected after what had just happened to them.

I wondered if they realised anything
had
happened at all, or whether they had just been switched back on, with no sense that time had even passed.

Relief flooded through me, as if my world had suddenly been set back on to its proper axis. I saw Lilly’s face register her own internal relief. Tension replaced by excitement and a hint of a smile.

I knew that the smile was for Simon and I felt an eel of jealousy uncurl within my stomach.

It didn’t last.

Whatever it was that had occurred was over now.

The people of the village were making their way back home.

I noticed my parents and brother in the crowd, turned to Mrs O’Donnell and she offered me a reassuring smile.

I smiled back, nodded at Lilly, and made my way through the crowd to join them.

There was the oddest of moments when my mum’s eyes met mine and she seemed to look straight through me, as if she didn’t recognise me, or was looking past me, in search of . . .

In search of what?

I couldn’t even finish the thought because suddenly her eyes flicked back to me. They
saw
me as if I had just materialised out of thin air. They locked on me then, and I saw recognition flood into her eyes. Her mouth turned up into a smile.

‘Kyle,’ she said, and there was a softness to her voice that hadn’t been there for a while. The way she said my name
before
Dad went and broke her heart.

I ran to her and she hugged me tight.

‘I was so scared,’ I told her.

‘Scared, poppet?’ she comforted me. ‘Now what on earth is there to be scared about?’

Dad squeezed my arm.

‘There’s nothing to be scared about,’ he whispered, and again it was a voice from the past. ‘We’re here.’

I was crying then, with hot, fat tears rolling down my cheeks. I didn’t care how it looked, or whether people I went to school with were watching.

‘I thought I’d lost you,’ I said.

‘We’re here,’ Mum soothed. ‘And we’re not going anywhere.’

‘What’s all this about?’ Dad asked, and his voice was concerned and open, instead of defensive.

We made our way back home as part of the crowd, with the sun shining down upon us. I felt exhausted, utterly frazzled.

Mum and I sat down in the front room as Dad rattled about in the kitchen making cups of tea.

Then we sat there, my parents’ faces looking full of compassion.

Dad reached over and grabbed hold of Mum’s hand, something he hadn’t done since he came back to us – at least not without Mum bristling like a terrified cat.

We sipped tea, and the madness faded away.

‘You were shaking when we found you,’ Mum said. ‘I haven’t seen you so frightened since your father told you about the bogeyman and you thought he was under your bed.’

‘He
was
under my bed,’ I said and smiled.

Dad laughed.

‘So what did happen?’ he asked.

‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’

‘Try us.’

For a moment I didn’t want to tell them, I didn’t want to think about what had happened, what it all meant. It was all right now.

But I
had
to tell them.

I had to at least
try
to get some kind of explanation for the weirdness.

Would they think I was mad? If they did I had witnesses to prove what I was saying.

So I took a deep breath and started speaking.

It all poured out in a mad gush, interrupted only by sobs and chokes.

The whole story.

My parents listened, almost without comment, occasionally asking questions where I wasn’t clear enough, or the story got a little confused in my head.

When I was done, Dad looked puzzled.

‘Well, Kyle,’ he said. ‘That’s just not the way we remember it, I’m afraid.’

His voice had an odd edge to it, as if there were something sharp and hard beneath the surface.

I noticed he was still holding Mum’s hand as he spoke.

He smiled.

‘We watched you go up on stage,’ he said. ‘We saw Danny hypnotise you.’ His smile deepened, as if at a private joke. ‘Actually, he made you pretend that you were a man with no control over his limbs, trying to direct traffic in the centre of rush hour London – and yes, before you ask, we laughed a lot.’

Mum and Dad exchanged a smile at the memory and my cheeks felt hot. I must have looked like a total idiot. In all honesty it was probably as embarrassing as my stand-up act. I had a memory flash of Dad with his phone camera and
hoped he wasn’t about to get out photographic proof of my unconscious humiliation.

Instead he went on.

‘Danny made Lilly Dartington think she was walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. He made our postman think he was called Mr Peebles, and that he had a dummy called Rodney Peterson. He ended up doing his ventriloquism act again, but in reverse. And Kate, the woman from Happy Shopper, he had her auditioning for the Sydney Opera, but realising she was naked halfway through her first aria.’

Dad laughed.

‘He’s very good,’ he said. ‘Danny, I mean.’

‘But what happened
after?
’ I asked him.

There was a blank look from my parents, which was kind of similar to the look my mum had given me when I met her on the high street. A kind of look at me that seemed focused on something past me in the distance.

‘Nothing,’ they said together.

In unison.

The word came from each of them at precisely the same time, with the same kind of intonation.

‘Nothing happened,’ Dad said, as if reading from a cue card.

‘Nothing at all,’ Mum said, as if reading from another cue card.

‘Danny woke you all up,’ Dad said. ‘And we all went home.’

They were acting very . . .
weird
, like they were slightly . . . I don’t know . . .
out of synch
with the world.

Or with
my
world.

If that makes sense.

Something had changed, but I couldn’t work out what. They looked like my parents, sounded like them, but something about them was off. I was getting a peculiar vibe off them.

And they hadn’t noticed the odd thing that Dad had just said.

Danny woke you all up. And we all went home.

I left it at that. My head hurt from all the input. I was coming down off adrenaline and had a sick feeling in my stomach that just wouldn’t go away. As if it was the air I was breathing that had somehow turned sour and was making me ill.

I gabbled something about feeling tired and needing to lie down.

My parents nodded and agreed.

I went to my room to think.

My room is small and poky and isn’t tidy.

Ever.

And quite often it smells of socks.

There are posters on the walls, a couple advertising films –
Serenity
and
Blade Runner
– a couple promoting bands – Pendulum and Kings of Leon – and then a storage system that uses the floor more than it does cupboards. My mum is always on at me to clean it and I usually argue that my room is just too small for me to keep all my stuff AND keep it tidy.

I ignored the mess.

I looked at my watch and saw that everything that had happened – from Danny calling us up on stage, right through to the present moment – had all fitted into just a little over an hour.

I didn’t believe it.

But my bedside clock confirmed it.

Time is such a weird thing. A physics teacher once tried to tell me that time is relative, not constant, but I still have no idea what that means in practical terms. I mean I tried to find out, but only managed to read about ten paragraphs of
A Brief History of Time
before my eyes started to bleed. I
do
know that boring hours last forever, and excitement makes time run like a film on fast forward.

It had felt like a fast-forward kind of day.

Lying on my bed, hands behind my head, I tried to think it all through.

However much my parents might say otherwise, something had happened.

But what?

What had happened to the four of us that were hypnotised?

And what had happened to the rest of the people who weren’t?

The last question was the one that I was obsessing over. It lay there behind my eyes, a trapdoor spider of a thought taking bites out of the relief I’d felt when everyone started moving again.

What had happened to
them?

Mr Peterson thought he saw something, and it had made him curl up on the stage in utter terror. He had said that ‘they are to us as we are to apes’ – whatever that was supposed to mean – and he had been pointing to the people sitting, frozen all that time. He believed that something had happened to
them
, not to
us
.

He said that we were the last four left.

But what did that mean?

Did it mean anything at all?

I thought maybe it did.

Mum and Dad were getting on with each other. Not just
getting on, though, they were behaving as if the cold war of the last few months hadn’t happened at all.

So what had happened to bring them together so suddenly?

So
unnaturally?

What had changed?

What
could
have changed?

It wasn’t as if watching me behaving like a hypnotised numpty was going to make them forget their differences.