THE H-BOMB GIRL by Stephen Baxter (beach books txt) 📕

He wants the little girl he met in the war. But she’s gone. Might as well be dead.” She sounded as if she was going to cry. “We did have some fun, though. Just like the old days. But it got worse after that awful man came.”

“What man?”

“You remember. In the wheelchair. The Minuteman. Some kind of senior officer with new orders for Mort. Well, Mort changed, I can tell you. Oh, he was attentive enough to me. But suddenly he was fascinated by you, after that. For something you have, I think. Or something you could tell him. I don’t know. I didn’t care, either.”

Laura said tensely, “You’re my mum. I felt threatened by Mort. You brought him into the home. You should have protected me.”

She gave a soggy smile. “Oh, Laura, dear, look at me. When have I ever been able to protect anybody from anything?”

Suddenly Agatha put her arms around Mum. “Don’t worry. You’re safe now. That’s true, isn’t it, Laura?”

Laura stared at her. Then she said, “Yes, that’s right.”

Mum seemed as surprised as Laura was to be embraced by Agatha. But she softened into Agatha’s hug. It seemed to feel right, to her.

Later Mum tried to nap under her overcoat.

Laura faced Agatha, in the corner of the cellar. “Now we need to talk.”

“I suppose so.”

“You called me ‘Mum.’ You called her ‘Grandma.’”

“I know.”

“What’s going on, Agatha? How can you be—” She could barely say the word. “How can you be my daughter? You must be twice my age.”

“More. But it’s true even so.”

“Where did you come from? How did you get here?” She frowned. “Never mind that. What do you want?”

Agatha dug into the pocket of her ratty overcoat, and pulled out a diary. Laura’s diary. Battered and scorched and stained.

Laura dug her own diary out of her blazer pocket. Except for the wear and tear, they were the same. Leather-bound, gold-edged pages. And she could see from the way the pages were dog-eared that Agatha’s copy had been filled in, long past where she had got to.

This was a copy of her diary, from the future.

Agatha said, “All the answers you want are in here.”

Laura looked up. “There’s something you want in return, isn’t there?”

“Your Key.”

Laura felt oddly disappointed. “You too? That’s why you’ve been helping me, and Mum? Just to get your hands on my Key, just like Miss Wells?”

Agatha’s cold face showed a flicker of shame. “If I get the Key, if I use it properly, it will help everybody.”

“How do I know I can trust you?”

“I trust you,” Agatha said.

Laura thought it over. “All right. Here’s the deal. Give me the diary first. When I’ve read it, I’ll decide about giving you the Key.”

Agatha hesitated. Then she nodded, and gave Laura the diary.

Laura held the two copies together, one on top of the other. They were a perfect match, one from her own bedroom, the other from some unimaginable future.

Bernadette called, “You two. Giz a hand. I think he’s having a fit.”

Laura could see Nick’s long legs in their drainpipe trousers twitching and drumming on the floor. Laura and Agatha hurried over to help.

It was only later, when things had calmed down and Nick had fallen into a post-drugged sleep, and Mum was dozing too, that Laura opened the diary again.

A smell of soot came off the pages as she turned them. Soot and ash.

Chapter 21

Saturday 27th October 1962.

9 a.m. So, Black Saturday.

Will it be as black as everybody’s fearing?

It was utterly weird to see these words, in her own handwriting, but to have absolutely no memory of writing them.

And to see them written down under a date which was still two days in the future.

Noon. News on another transistor radio. Nicked by Nick, ha ha.

Radio Luxembourg says they’ve started fighting in Cuba. American ships blowing up Russian freighters, Russian subs blowing up the Americans. Then the Americans started dropping bombs on Cuba, and the Cubans and Russians started shooting down planes.

Maybe it won’t go any further. But even on Luxembourg there isn’t any news.

Have to speak to Dad.

“You aren’t in this,” she said to Agatha.

“No. This is how things were, before.”

“Before what?”

“Before I came back. The first time you lived all this. I wasn’t here. There was just you and your mum and your friends, hiding in a cellar from the war…”

Saturday 1 p.m. We came up in Whitechapel, in the city centre. Boarded-up stores. Some of them burned out. Nobody about but scuffers and looters playing ticks. Rivers of beer and pee flowing down the gutters.

Managed to call Dad from a phone box.

Dad said it was all an accident, in Cuba. Thousands of nervous Americans and Russians standing around with guns. All it took was one shot, to kick it all off. We’ll probably never know who fired first.

But they’re still fighting.

Dad says it’s got worse during the morning. The Russian army has moved in Europe. They came over the wall and took West Berlin in minutes. Now they are marching into West Germany. The Americans are trying to stop them with battlefield nuclear shells.

“The Davy Crockett,” Dad said. “The M-388 nuclear bazooka. Six-inch nuclear shells. You’d have to be mad to fire the thing because you’d be inside the blast radius. But the soldiers are firing them even so. What do you think of that?”

So they’re using nuclear weapons.

Even so maybe it won’t go any further.

I was going to ask Dad about using the Key. But he was cut off.

When I came back to our cellar Mum had run off. Maybe she’s gone back home. The others wouldn’t let me follow.

I tried to help Mum. I hope she forgives me.

*

9 p.m. Cold and dark. Got to try to sleep.

Maybe it won’t go any further.

*

Sunday 22th October. 9 a.m.

OK. OK. Write it down, Laura.

We heard a siren about 8 a.m. And the church bells started ringing.

We came up to see. Well, you had to.

People running everywhere, screaming, trying