Time Travelling with a Hamster Read online

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2016

  HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  The HarperCollins website address is: www.harpercollins.co.uk

  Copyright © Ross Welford 2016

  Cover illustration © Tom Clohosy Cole

  Extract taken from Burnt Norton taken form Four Quartets © Estate of T. S. Eliot and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd

  Ross Welford asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008156312

  Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780008156329

  Version: 2015-12-01

  To Gunnel, Astrid and Ewan

  (and Jess)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  One Week Earlier

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Chapter Eighty

  Chapter Eighty-One

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  Chapter Eighty-Three

  Chapter Eighty-Four

  Chapter Eighty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Publisher

  My dad died twice. Once when he was thirty-nine, and again four years later when he was twelve. (He’s going to die a third time as well, which seems a bit rough on him, but I can’t help that.)

  The first time had nothing to do with me. The second time definitely did, but I would never even have been there if it hadn’t been for his ‘time machine’. I know – that sounds like I’m blaming him, which I’m totally not, but … you’ll see what I mean.

  I suppose if you’d asked me before, I’d have said a time machine might look something like a submarine? Or perhaps a space rocket. Anyway, something with loads of switches and panels and lights, made of iron or something, and big – I mean, really big, with thrusters, and boosters, and reactors …

  Instead, I’m looking at a laptop and a tin tub from a garden centre.

  This is my dad’s time machine.

  It’s about to change the world – literally. Well, mine at any rate.

  Just across the road from the house where we used to live before Dad died (the first time) is an alleyway that leads to the next street with a patch of grass with some bushes and straggly trees growing on it. I called it ‘the jungle’ when I was little, because in my mind that was what it was like, but looking at it now I can see that it’s just a plot of land for a house that hasn’t been built yet.

  And that’s where I am, still in my full-face motorbike helmet, sitting hidden in a bush in the dead of night, waiting to break into my old house.

  There’s an old fried-chicken box that someone’s thrown there and I can smell something foul and sour, which I think might be fox’s poo. The house is dark; there are no lights on. I’m looking up at my old bedroom window, the small one over the front door.

  By day, Chesterton Road is pretty quiet – a long curve of small, semi-detached houses made of reddish bricks. When they were first built, they must all have looked exactly the same, but now people have added fancy gates, garage extensions, even a massive monkey-puzzle tree outside old Mr Frasier’s, so these days they’re all a bit different.

  Now, at nearly one a.m., there’s no one about and I’ve seen enough films and TV shows about criminals to know exactly how not to behave, and that’s suspiciously. If you act normally, no one notices you. If I wandered nervously up and down the street waiting for the right time, then someone might spot me going backwards and forwards looking at the houses, and call the police.

  On the other hand, if I’m just walking down the street, then that’s all I’m doing, and it’s as good as being invisible.

  (Keeping the motorbike helmet on is a gamble, or what Grandpa Byron calls ‘a calculated risk’. If I take it off, someone might notice that I’m nowhere near old enough to be riding a moped; if I keep it on, that looks suspicious – so I’m still in two minds about it. Anyway, it won’t be on for long.)

  I’ve worked all this out on the journey here. About a year ago, when we still lived here, the local council turned off every second streetlight in a money-saving experiment, so where I’ve stopped the moped it is really pretty dark.

  As casually as I can, I come out of the bushes, take off the helmet and put it in the moped’s top box. I pull my collar up and, without stopping,
walk over the road to number 40. There I turn straight up the short driveway and stop in the shadows, well hidden by both the hedge that divides number 40’s front garden from the one next door and the small Skoda that sits in the driveway.

  So far, so good: the new owners of our house have not yet got round to fixing the garage doors. In fact, they’re even less secure than they were. There’s a brick in front of them to keep them shut, and when I crouch down and move it out of the way the right-hand door swings open, then bumps against the Skoda. For a dreadful moment I think the gap will be too small to let me in, but I just manage to squeeze through, and there I am, in the garage, which smells of dust and old oil. My torch is flashing round the walls to reveal boxes that they still haven’t unpacked and, in the middle of the floor, the dark wooden planks covering up the cellar entrance.

  Here’s another tip if you’re thinking of breaking in anywhere: don’t flash your torch around too much. A flashing light will attract attention, whereas a still light doesn’t. So I put my torch on the ground and start to lift up the greasy planks.

  Under the planks there’s a concrete stairway, and once I’ve gone down it I’m standing in a space about a metre square and to my right is a small metal door that’s about half my height with a dusty, steel wheel for opening it like you get on ships. The wheel is secured into place by a stout bolt with a combination lock.

  I try to give a little whistle of amazement, a “whew!”, but my lips are so dry with nerves and dust that I can’t. Instead, I set the combination lock to the numbers Dad instructed in his letter – my birthday and month backwards – grab the wheel with both hands and twist it anti-clockwise. There’s a bit of resistance but it gives with a soft grating noise, and as it spins around the door suddenly pops open inwards with a tiny sighing noise of escaping air.

  I grab my torch and aim it ahead of me as I go through the little doorway, crouching. There are more steps down and a wall on my right and my hand finds a light switch but I daren’t try it in case it’s a switch for something else, like an alarm or something, or it lights up the garage upstairs, or … I just don’t know, but I’m too nervous to flick the switch so I look at everything through the yellowy-white beam of torchlight.

  The steps lead to a room about half the size of our living room at home, but with a lower ceiling. A grown-up could just about stand up.

  Along one long wall are four bunk beds, all made up – blankets, pillows, everything. There’s a wall that juts out into the room, and behind it is a toilet and some kind of machinery with pipes and hoses coming out of it. There are rugs on the white concrete floor and a poster on the wall. It’s faded orange and black with a picture of a mum, a dad and two children inside a circle, and the words ‘Protect And Survive’ in big white letters. I’ve seen this poster before when some guy came to talk about peace and nuclear war and stuff in assembly once, and he’d made Dania Biziewski cry because she was scared and he was really embarrassed.

  This is what people built years ago when they thought Russia was going to kill us with nuclear bombs.

  I turn round and see what’s behind me. The torch beam picks out a long desk with a chair in front of it. On the desk is a tin tub, like you would bath a dog in or something. In it is an old-style Apple Mac laptop, the white one, and a computer mouse. There’s a lead coming out of the back of the computer leading to a black metal box about the size of a paperback book, and coming out of that are two cords that are about a metre long, with strange sort of hand grips on the end.

  Next to the tub is a coffee mug printed with a picture of me as a baby and the words ‘I love my daddy’. The inside of the mug is all furred up with ancient mould.

  And beside the mug is a copy of the local newspaper, the Whitley Bay Advertiser, folded in half and open at a story headlined ‘Local Man’s Tragic Sudden Death’ above a picture of my dad.

  I sit down in the swivel chair and run my hands over the underside of the desk. When I can’t feel anything, I get on my knees and shine the torch upwards, and there it is: an envelope, taped at the back, just as Dad said there would be.

  But there’s no time machine. At least, not one that looks how I imagine a time machine might look.

  That’s how I end up staring at the tin tub and its contents.

  Surely, I’m thinking, Surely that’s not it?

  But it is.

  And the craziest thing? It works.

  This whole thing – the breaking and entering, plus robbery, arson, stealing a moped and killing someone (sort of, anyway), not to mention time travel – started on my twelfth birthday.

  That day, I got a hamster, and a letter from my dead dad.

  I suppose, if you were being precise – and precision, as Grandpa Byron says, is everything – it started when me and Mum moved in with Steve and The Stepsister From Hell, Carly. That was just after Mum and Steve got married in the world’s smallest wedding (people there: Mum, Steve, Grandpa Byron, me, TSFH, Aunty Ellie.)

  If you were being super-precise, it kind of started when Dad died, but that was a long time ago and I don’t really want to get into that. Not yet, anyway.

  So there we were, on my twelfth birthday, which is May 12th, so I was twelve on the twelfth, which only happens once in anyone’s life, and some people have to wait until they’re thirty-one by which time I guess it’s not so much fun.

  Steve is always trying to make me like him so he spent a lot of money on my present, a replica Newcastle United shirt with my name and age on the back: “Albert 12”. Except my name’s now Al, not Albert, and I don’t really like football. I’ve sat and watched a few games with him, because it makes Mum happy to see us ‘bonding’, but to be honest I don’t really see the point of the whole thing.

  “Well, put it on, Al – see if it fits!” says Mum, and she’s smiling this too-smiley smile, and I’m smiling too to make up for the fact that I don’t like the present, even though I know it’s kind of him, and Steve’s smiling a sort of puzzled smile, and about the only one smiling properly is Carly, probably because she can tell I don’t like the present and that makes her happy.

  It’s on the big side, so no chance I’ll grow out of it soon, which is a shame.

  Mum’s present is much better. It’s there on the countertop: a big box, wrapped up in coloured paper, with a ribbon and a bow, just like presents look in drawings, and I have no idea what it is until I unwrap it and the box inside says ‘Hamsterdam – The City For Your Hamster’. There’s a picture on it of tubes and boxes and a cage and everything, and I’m grinning so hard because I have guessed what’s in the small box that Mum’s holding, and sure enough there’s a hamster in there – a cute, small one that’s not fully grown yet, and he (or she, I don’t know how to tell yet) has got this twitchy nose and light brown fur and I love him (or her) already.

  I’m wondering what to call him, when Steve says, “I’ve got a great name for him!”

  “Steve,” says Mum, “let the boy choose his own name.”

  Steve looks a bit disappointed, so I say, “It’s OK. What’s your idea?”

  “Alan Shearer!” Steve sees me blinking, blank-faced, so he repeats: “Alan Shearer. Greatest striker the toon ever had? Premier League’s all-time top scorer?” I still look blank. “Bloke on Match Of the Day?”

  I nod and force a smile, but as I’m doing so, it kind of turns into a real one, because whichever way you look at it, giving a hamster a proper name like ‘Alan Shearer’ has got to be better than ‘Fluffy’ or ‘Hammy’ which was as far as my imagination had got. So Alan Shearer it is.

  I notice that Carly has stopped smiling. She comes over to me as I’m unpacking the plastic tubes and bends down close so that only I can hear. “A hamster?” she murmurs. “They’re just rats for babies.”

  You know what, though? I don’t care.

  Then Grandpa Byron arrives to give me a ride to school like he always does since Mum and I moved further away to live with Steve and Carly.

  I open the front do
or and he’s standing there in his long saffron-coloured robes, grey hair in a braided plait, little round sunglasses and huge biker boots. Under one arm, the bad one, he’s holding his motorbike helmet, and in the other, the good one, is a birthday card in an envelope.

  “Happy birthday, bonny lad,” he says, and I give him a huge hug. I love Grandpa Byron’s smell. It’s a mixture of the minty oil that he puts in his hair and these sweet-smelling cigarettes he sometimes smokes called beedis that he buys in boxes from a man who runs a Lebanese takeaway, even though he’s from Bangladesh, and the liquorice-flavoured toothpaste he uses, which I have tried and is pretty gross, but it smells nice.

  As I hug him I take a deep breath. He waves through to the kitchen, which isn’t far from the front door. “Morning, Byron!” calls Mum. “Come on in!”

  Carly shimmies past me to go up the stairs. “Hi, Byron,” she says, sweetly. “Lovin’ the robes, dude!” It’s only when she has passed him and is out of his sight that she turns to me, wrinkles up her face and wafts her hand in front of her nose, as if Grandpa Byron’s smell is something bad, which it totally isn’t.

  He’s got a funny way of talking, my grandpa: his Indian accent sounds Geordie and he uses Geordie expressions and old dialect words all mixed up together. He’s my dad’s dad, but my dad didn’t really talk Geordie, not much.

  Grandpa comes in and sits at the breakfast bar with a bag in his hand. “Sorry, mate – I wasn’t having a chance to get your present.” He wobbles his head in that Indian way, probably just because he knows it makes me laugh, and he’s smiling as he does it so I can see his big gold tooth.

  “S’OK,” I reassure him, and I open the card. Out fall two twenty-pound notes.

  “Thanks. Thanks a lot!” And I really mean it.

  Then Mum says, “I’m glad you’re here, Byron. It’s time to give Al the letter,” and she gets up and goes over to a drawer. She’s behaving a bit strangely, like flighty and excited and nervous when she skips back with this big fat envelope. Steve’s watching her, smiling quietly, but it’s clear from Grandpa Byron’s face that he hasn’t got a clue what this is about. Mum puts on her serious face.

  “Now, Al. This is for you, from your dad.”

  I don’t know what to say.