toby at work: comms
When Tom was seven years old, he came closer to death than he ever had since.
But, curiously, the experience of nearly being killed is not what sticks in his mind from that day. What he remembers subsequently—in fact, the memory that comes to him immediately when he emerges from his nine-month coma, the one that is to haunt him for the rest of his life—is the first appearance in his life of the woman he later comes to think of as his guardian angel.
The recollections that adult Tom inherits from his seven-year-old self are generally hazy. He was on his way to school, he knows, so it must have been about eight-thirty in the morning. His mother drove him most of the way, but this particular morning she decided to let him walk the last hundred yards or so from the car to the school gates on his own. The last part of this journey involved crossing a narrow road in front of the school gates, an adventure which little Tom undertook with pride and not a little trepidation; he was a cautious type, even at that age.
As he approached the kerb, lunchbox in hand, something made him look back over his left shoulder. A man and a woman, standing side by side, were watching him from the forecourt of one of the houses nearby.
Tom doesn’t recall just what it was about the couple that caught his attention that day, and in fact he remembers very little of the man: the only details recorded by his seven-year-old eyes were that he was tall and thin. It was the woman whose features imprinted themselves most clearly on the small boy’s psyche. She too was slender, with mid-brown curls around her shoulders and vivid green eyes. She was dressed in a long, one-piece dress, also a light green, that looked odd and unfamiliar. Most striking of all was something that seven-year-old Tom had never seen before: the left side of her forehead was decorated with a tiny jewel which twinkled like a star.
With hindsight, Tom realises it’s impossible that his breathless junior-school self could have taken in all those details in the brief instant before he stepped out into the road, into the path of the oncoming four-wheel-drive which would certainly have killed him if it was travelling just two or three miles per hour faster. Probably he owes a large proportion of those vivid memories to the five subsequent occasions throughout late childhood and adolescence when the same woman appeared fleetingly—sometimes with the same nondescript man, sometimes alone—and watched him silently from a distance. And perhaps some of the details are derived instead, he reluctantly concedes, from the fevered imaginings of his brain during the trauma-induced semi-consciousness following the accident—the nine-month period that he would later come to think of as simply ‘the sleep’.
But in any case, he knew for certain immediately after he woke that he hadn’t seen the last of the woman with the green eyes and the star on her forehead.
This is the story of Tom and Josie.
The season is winter, but the year isn’t important. What matters is that Josie is nineteen, and she hasn’t met Tom yet—or at least, not in any way that matters.
She answers the door in silk pyjamas, and stifles a smile when the postman blinks at her for a long moment before handing her a parcel.
She takes it into the living room, sits on the sofa and turns it over in her hands a few times. It’s about the size and shape of a shoebox, and wrapped in brown paper and string, a combination that looks intriguingly old-fashioned. It’s evenly weighted and doesn’t rattle.
“I thought I heard you up,” says her flatmate from the doorway. “Aren’t you going to open it?”
Josie grins without looking up. “Morning, Amy. No, I’m prolonging the intrigue.”
“So I see.” Amy squints at the parcel with interest. “Expecting something?”
“I don’t think so.” The parcel is addressed by hand in an irregular, angular script. “The writing rings a bell, somehow.”
“Get on with it, then. Now I’m intrigued too.”
Josie glances up at her friend, who looks strangely unfamiliar in a fluffy pink dressing-gown and without her glasses.
“Maybe I want to take my time?”
“Hah. I know you better than that.”
“All right, all right.”
She fetches a pair of kitchen scissors and snips through the string.
Beneath the brown paper is a plain white box with a loose lid, under which lies a pile of loosely-crumpled sheets of newspaper.
“Your true love sent you yesterday’s Telegraph, Josie,” says Amy. “Must be a real romantic.”
“Yeah, well. Whoever he is, he’s about a month early for Valentine’s.”
She reaches into the box and produces a small artefact from among the crumpled paper. It’s a sealed glass cylinder, wide at each end but pinched together in the centre. One end of the hollow tube is filled with a light grey powder.
“Weird,” says Amy.
“I think it’s some kind of hourglass,” says Josie, frowning. “But it doesn’t work. Look.” She tips the device upside down in the air. The sand rests stubbornly in the upper bulb, even when she shakes it vigorously. “Weird.”
“There’s no message?”
“That’s a point.” With her free hand she lifts a handful of paper out of the box, revealing at the very bottom a small yellow envelope labelled in the same spiky hand:
Josie
She stares at it, suddenly apprehensive.
“Well?” Amy sits down next to her. “Come on, Jose, haven’t you woken up yet? Don’t you want to find out who it’s from?”
Josie shrugs. “Yeah. I’m just sure I recognise the writing, that’s all.”
“There’ll be a name inside.”
“Right.”
Puzzled by her own trepidation, she uses a fingernail to tear open the envelope.
Inside is a single sheet of writing paper, folded once neatly. She opens it out and reads silently:
dear josie,
i was wrong.
life is short. change whatever you can—
that’s what it’s about.
all the best for the “future”—
your
tom.
“That’s weird,” says Josie after a minute.
“Too right it is,” says Amy, still peering over her shoulder. “Who’s Tom?”
“I think…” She reads the note again, frowning. “I’ve got a feeling it’s my jazz tutor.”
Amy blinks. “Your tutor?”
“It’s his writing, I’m sure it is. And I’m pretty sure his first name’s Tom.”
“But...” She shakes her head. “Nah. Why would he send you... that?”
“Well, why would anyone?”
“True. And it’s the middle of term, anyway. The letter makes it sound like he’s leaving.”
Josie shrugs.
They sit in silence for a few moments. Josie empties the rest of the crumpled paper from the box, but it gives up no more secrets.
“I reckon it’s a joke,” says Amy at last. “That’s the only explanation. The note’s just strange. Someone’s trying to freak you out.”
“Well, it’s not really freaking me out,” says Josie quietly. “There’s nothing… dubious about it.”
“I dunno. An old music lecturer sending a gift to his young female student? Sounds pretty dubious to me.”
Josie glances at her friend. “Hey, it’s not like he’s sending me lingerie or anything. Anyway, I thought you said it was a joke?”
“Only one way to find out.”
She nods slowly, thinking of her timetable. “I’ve got a sax lesson this afternoon.”
“Well, that’s that. You can ask him then. And I reckon he’ll be as surprised as you are.”
“Maybe.”
Amy takes a deep breath and stood up. “Got time for breakfast before you go?”
“Are you kidding? I’m a music student—I’m not normally awake till ten. Put some toast in, yeah?”
As Amy disappears into the kitchen, Josie picks up the oddly static hourglass and frowns at it again.
She is baffled. For one thing, both the hourglass and the message are thoroughly strange. And she doesn’t know why, but she has an odd feeling that it was her tutor who’d sent the parcel. Even if there is some kind of sense to it which she can’t fathom, it’s hard to imagine why on earth Tom would have posted it to her—to arrive today—when she sees him in class four times every week.
Absently, distracted by the smell of toast drifting through from the kitchen, she lies the hourglass on the coffee table and begins to think through the day ahead.
* * *
Six hours later, Josie arrives on campus with the strange artefact stowed in a pocket of her saxophone case.
To her surprise, she’s met not by her regular jazz tutor Dr Tom Ward but by a senior member of University staff, who quietly explains that due to unforeseen and tragic circumstances her tutor will no longer be teaching in the department.
Dr Ward’s memorial service will be held three weeks later in the University chapel. By then, so much will have happened in Josie’s life that it won’t even cross her mind that she should attend.
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