Tom and Marnie and the Thief of Time

Tom and Marnie and the Thief of Time

Early one morning in 20__, just shy of eight o'clock, as the grey
outriders of what would be a perfect, corn-yellow sun touched the early
autumn dew, Tom Leverne, head hung, came carefully down the stairs of
Grummidge's Guesthouse in the hills of England's North Yorkshire
Moors.

A rough and bulging daysack was slung over his right shoulder, and it
tumbled down under gravity towards his wrist each time he extended his
right arm to hold the banister. Whenever this happened he was forced to
stop and twist his whole body to put it back in place, a movement he
accompanied with a squeeze of his small eyes and high forehead, and
which was followed by a short tug to the arm of his long-sleeved
T-shirt.

Into the country, where an arboreal choir whistled mathematically, he
followed a track that was crowded over on one side by a small wood and
skirted the edge of a yellow field on the other. It smelled strongly
like hay fever. The track was directly from Constable, rutted and light
brown and ran through with patches of sky reflected in pools of muddy
brown water. Footing was difficult, but as the hours passed he made
good progress by flirting with the edge of the yellow field where a
flat grass bank gave more purchase. When the sun touched the grass it
reflected like tiny silver ground-stars were nesting there.

"Excuse me. Excuse me sir!" Tom turned around but there was nobody
nearby. "Over here," the breathless voice continued and a slender
yellow arm waved along with the corn in the yellow field. "Excuse me,"
and the arm merged from the corn into the body of a grinning young
woman wearing blue overalls. "Sorry to bother you, but you don't have
the time do you please?"

Tom did not as it happened, having never liked to trap time on his
wrist and watch it slip away. Instead he looked up at the sun, which
was now almost overhead.

"I don't. Sorry," and he showed his empty left wrist as evidence. "But
I imagine it's about midday," and he shielded his eyes and pointed up
at the round ball, butter-dripping radioactively directly on to their
heads.

"Oh," she said, "I knew that, but I wondered if you knew the exact
time." He shrugged and while he tried his best to smile, wondered what
else he could say. She looked at him for a moment. She had hair almost
blonde enough to be white under the sun, and skin the same colour, made
paler where it met the dark blue of her clothes and where the sun
glowed white on the corners of her shoulders. "Where are you going?"
she asked suddenly, smiling as she had been smiling from the beginning,
and Tom saw that her eyes were dark brown, not blue as he had
imagined.

"To the train station," he replied and pointed again, this time up the
track he had been following. "Then to York."

"Are you in a hurry?" she asked.

"No, not really, no. I was going to stop for lunch in a bit."

"Then why don't you stop now and have it with me?"

He shrugged again and his voice rose noticeably when he said, "Er, I
guess so, yeah."

Tom fumbled while they ate. They sat down on the bank by the track with
their backs to the yellow field and the corn swaying over their heads.
"I'm Marnie," Marnie began and held out her small hand. It was rough on
the palm like young bark and smooth on the back like sanded wood.
"Tom," Tom replied and a slice of tomato fell out from the squashed
sandwich he had just liberated from his daysack. "What are you doing
out here then?" he asked hurriedly. "Do you always ask complete
strangers to stop and have lunch with you?"

"No, we don't see many people on this track anymore. I'm working out
here actually."

"Really," said Tom, although he wondered why he found it so incredible
given the overalls and heavy boots she was wearing.

"Yes," she talked excitedly but unwrapped her small bundle of
sandwiches very calmly. "That's my mother's farm and the harvester's
broke, so we're bringing the corn in by hand, like they used to do in
the olden days. It's fun but really tiring in this sun."

"That must be tiring," Tom said, then realised that she had already
said that.

"Well I'm just helping Yardie really, he's the hired help, big as an ox
he is, I swear he can clear a whole acre with one swing. I just go
after him and pick the corn up."

"But you don't do that all the time?"

"No, just in the holidays. I'll be going to University soon, but it's
so nice to be outdoors while it's still nearly summer don't you think?
Anyway, what are you doing out here? Nobody ever comes this way
nowadays."

Tom couldn't help but think about Yardie, all imagined eight foot of
him, standing somewhere nearby with a very sharp scythe. "I'm going to
visit some friends in York."

"Strange route to take."

"I know, I've been sort of wondering around on my own for a few days."
It never hurt to appear slightly mysterious Tom always felt.

"With just a daysack?" She turned to look him briefly in the eyes and
the softness of her smile didn't change when he looked up too. "And
trainers?"

"Well, OK, since yesterday afternoon then," he admitted and
smiled.

"I was going to say, you don't look quite the country type. Where are
you from?"

"Around here. But not from the country. I've always lived in towns. I'm
in Birmingham at the moment." Which was not true he thought, because he
was evidently in the middle of the North Yorkshire countryside, but
normally he lived in Birmingham.

"Really, I don't believe it. I'm going to university in Birmingham.
Just next month. Do you go there too?"

Tom looked up again and smiled again because her voice had scaled an
octave and the look she gave him ran eagerly all the way up the short
corridor of space to his own eyes. "I graduated just last year," he
said. "I did physics. But I work there now."

"God that's amazing," she cried. "What an amazing coincidence," and she
proceeded to tell him many things about how she was worried about going
to spend her first year in the city; how she had been overwhelmed by
its size when she visited; but how the time was going so slowly now she
was just waiting to go; and how she was looking forward to it so much
although she didn't like to leave her mother and Yardie alone; and how,
now that she had met Tom, which couldn't be just chance, not out here
in the middle of nowhere, she would have a new friend, she hoped, when
they were both there. And eventually Tom began to relax and enjoy the
sun and the conversation as the sound of the corn sweeping in the
breeze and the rolling tone of Marnie's voice and his own, more
animated than usual, began to merge. And at its very peak there were no
gaps between Tom and Marnie. There was no field, no sun, no track and
no time of which either of them were aware. Talk came and went and
charged the shrinking space between their two bodies and through these,
their gestures, their touches and mostly their eyes, two minds met out
of space and out of time with just a flow of disconnected ideas,
proton, electron, quark, down to the quantum stuff of the universe
itself and even more elemental, that old trickster chaos, fate,
randomness from which comes order, brought these two together, these
two came together, brought themselves together, became aware together,
awareness came and no hand moved that did not move itself or was not
moved. With time the shadow of the corn grew over them and picked out
the little ruts in the track and the two valleys they had formed with
their bodies flattening the grass upon the bank. Old chance slipped
away unnoticed back into the fabric of space, and space again spun time
before it, and time took a quantum leap that made the sun to wax and
the shadows to grow and the corn to ripen, year after year upon
year.

"I had better go," said Tom who was looking at the dark tops of the
corn in shadow.

Marnie didn't reply but stared at the darkened grass.

Tom reached out a hand and squeezed her shoulder. Marnie hunched her
shoulders and squeezed her eyes shut.

"It'll be al..." he was saying but he stopped when she shook her
head.

"I just feel as if I've had not control over it, any of it," she
said.

"I know."

"And the time has gone so fast."

"I know."

"It's like, it just slipped away from that day we first met."

Tom shrugged. He looked at his watch. He would be late for the train if
he didn't hurry. And two miles to walk with a heavy suitcase when it
was getting dark.

Marnie looked at the suitcase. He would be back to collect his other
stuff, briefly. Could she go back and get the time?