A Future Somewhere Read online

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Today

  Thursday 1st November

  Friday 2nd November

  The Foreseer's Report

  Friday 2nd November cont

  Saturday 3rd November

  Sunday 4th November

  Monday 5th November

  Tuesday 6th November

  Wednesday 7th November

  Thursday 8th November

  Saturday 10th November

  The Foreseer's Report

  Monday 12th November

  Tuesday 13th November

  Friday 16th November

  Monday 18th November

  Tuesday 19th November

  Wednesday 20th November

  Thursday 21st November

  Saturday 23rd November

  Sunday 24th November

  Monday 25th November

  Tuesday 26th November

  Tuesday 26th November, Later

  Friday 30th November

  Saturday 1st December

  Not Now

  Saturday 1st December, 2

  Sunday 2nd December

  Monday 3rd December

  The Foreseer's report

  Tuesday 4th December

  Wednesday 5th December

  Friday 7th December

  Saturday 8th December

  Wednesday 12th December

  Friday 14th December

  Foreseer Report

  Monday 3rd December. 2

  Tuesday 4th December. 2

  Foreseer Report

  Tuesday 4th December. 2 continued

  Thursday 6th December

  Foreseer Report

  Friday 7th December

  Saturday 8th December

  Wednesday 12th December, 2

  Friday 14th December, 2

  The Foreseer's Report

  Friday 14th December 2

  Friday 14th December, 3

  Friday December 14th, 1943

  Friday 14th December

  Epilogue

  Author Note

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Cece Beyer

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses,

  places, events, and incidents are either the products of the

  author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any

  resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events,

  is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher,

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United Kingdom

  First Printing, 2019

  Cece Beyer Publishing

  [email protected]

  www.cecebeyer.com

  Dedication

  Bean bean electric beans

  Cokers and Boos

  I love you

  xxx

  Title Page

  A Future Somewhere

  A Time-Hop Novel

  By

  Cece Beyer

  Foreword

  Time-Hoppers

  This is a record of events leading up to the Cavenden Fire of 2018. Where relevant, I have included extracts from the Foreseer report.

  G Gabel

  Today

  It was Glinda’s idea to cheat in the scholarship exams for Cavies. We both knew I wasn’t getting in any other way. I’m average in class, rubbish at sport, and I can’t play a musical instrument for shit. So when Glin told me about a free ticket to one of the best schools in the country, I didn’t think twice about cheating me a place. I was ready to be someone, get out of that skanky house in that skanky town, away from Mum, away from Charlie, away from everything.

  Where I’m from, there isn’t much emphasis on putting others before yourself, there isn’t much emphasis on anything. When I realised I could trick my way into a posh, private school, I went for it. And so here I am, the academic scholar at one of the best boarding schools in the UK. The irony is that I hate this place. I hate these silver-spoon-in-mouth kids who welly-wangle at weekends and have horses for polo. I hate the pitch-black countryside nights. I hate it all.

  What you should know straight away is that time travel’s overrated. In my experience, it’s mostly bad headaches and confusion. I’m so focused on getting to the end of each day that the rest of the stuff that should matter, like morals and all that, just gets chucked out the window. And of course, keeping on top of the work is exhausting. I can’t use time travel every time I get stuck in class or there’s a test. Instead, I keep my head down and study. I get up at 5.30 am to pre-read and post-read my course notes. I revise until my brain is fried, and then I rest for twenty minutes and revise some more. I suppose it’s a good thing being known as the swotty girl and not the slutty one.

  There are a thousand things to do at Cavies, but all I do is study. I don’t have any friends here, not really, and I deleted all my social media. I didn’t want to know what my mates from home were up to. The constant stream of clubs and pubs and smiley faces was getting me down. The internet became this miserable montage of parties and drinks and nights at the park that I wasn’t invited to. Snapshot upon snapshot of other people having a better time than I was. I figured if my old friends wanted to keep in touch, they had my number, they’d message me. Only they didn’t, Charlie didn’t.

  I don’t blame Charlie for moving on. Not really. Somehow, over the last six months he’s turning things around and “making it.” It was easier when he was just a loser, busting loud, angry hip-hop from his flat, but now his DJ-ing is going somewhere. I don’t know what to make of him anymore.

  He used to do a bit of dealing, nothing too serious, mostly weed. But in all the years I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him drunk or high. One day, I asked him why he never did the stuff he dealt. He tilted his head, flashed his teeth in one of his grins, and said, “Darling, I’ve seen too many people messed up on that shit.”

  Now, somehow, he’s got himself a manager, and he’s doing some of the larger club nights in London. He hangs out in Shoreditch with the reality TV stars and pop singers from gossip magazines. If you knew him like I do, you’d think it’s ridiculous.

  When I left Leyton, I told Charlie that I thought we should stop seeing each other. I’d hoped he’d put up a fight or declare his undying love for me. Instead, his face took on this strange mix of relief and excitement. Then he put his arms around me, told me he respected my wishes, and asked for a hand job.

  Apart from the horrible ex-boyfriend and my lack of friends, the real icing on the self-pity cake are my rubbish grades. It’s a condition of my scholarship that I keep my classwork and course marks to a high standard. But in case you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m no Einstein.

  Every week I have to see Mr. Simmonds, my tutor and the head of pastoral care. The first few sessions were tricky. I’d been put off by his abundance of friendship bracelets and an ill-advised necklace that looked like he bought it on a gap year.

  “I know it’s not all Harry Potter.” He smiled, running his fingers through his shaggy hair. “You need time to adjust. We offer a unique environment at Cavies, and we completely understand that at first you might find it overwhelming. But you’ll find your feet! You’re an incredibly bright girl—you won an academic scholarship—quite a feat!”

  But I’m not incredibly bright. I’m very average with a bad habit of going back in time. I spend hours every evening reading back on class notes, preparing for lessons, doing extra homework, but sti
ll, my marks are in the lower forty percent of the class. I’m terrified I’m going to lose this scholarship, and I’ll have to go back and be who I was before I came here. Only I don’t know how to be her anymore.

  But I can’t, I can’t go back that far, and I can’t get in that mess again. You see, last night something bad happened, something really bad. I killed someone. I killed this boy called Evan.

  Thursday 1st November

  Only it wasn’t last night. It was six weeks ago.

  Weekends aren’t proper weekends at boarding school. Lessons cloud Saturday mornings, and the afternoons are ruined by sports. On Sundays the majority of the student body are lured home by the siren of a home-cooked roast dinner. I live just over an hour away, I never go home.

  Cavenden seems like it’s in the middle of nowhere, but it isn’t. The nearest town is a twenty-minute walk away, and London is only thirty minutes on the train. The city my classmates call home is a very different city to mine. No one’s ever heard of Leyton. This lot are from West or North London “villages,” where the streets burst with artisan bakeries and kooky, little bookshops. My London is all take-away food and taxi-ranks.

  Cavies is more holiday camp than school. There’s a swimming pool, gym, theatre, even bloody circus-training. Each student lives in a “house,” only there’s no sorting hat. Instead, they bung all the sixth form into one large, mixed-sex melting pot. The line to parents is that this will enhance our “independence and life management skills.” It’s bollocks, everyone knows it’s cost cutting.

  There are around eighty hormone crazed sixteen to eighteen-year-olds in Smithies. Girls and boys share the kitchens and common rooms, but whilst the girls all sleep in the main building, the boys are in a purpose-built extension round the back. The doors that separate the common areas from the bedrooms are coded, and teachers boast that it’s impossible to get from one part to another. Yeah, right.

  Smithies is one of the oldest buildings on site. Originally, it wasn’t part of the school, it belonged to some rich local family, but when they let girls in over a hundred years ago, they bought it so it could house the newly hired nuns. The nuns left ages ago, but I swear, some nights, I can see the echoes of piety drifting down the corridors, breezing through the service hatches and laundry shoots. The building is amazing, and I set fire to it at the end of term.

  I’ve never come back this far before and now I’m six weeks behind where I should be. What’s worse, is that the six approaching weeks are terrible. But I can change it this time round.

  If I can make it right I can make sure there’s no fire. I can make sure no-one dies. And where did things start going wrong? I think it was the first foggy Saturday of November, the day Charlie showed up.

  Smithies was deserted. Our housemistress had a lacrosse-stick stuck up her backside and hadn’t been seen since before breakfast when she’d stormed off towards the gym. There weren’t any other staff members around and so Charlie, despite not being on the visitor’s list, managed to enter the school unnoticed.

  Seeing Charlie standing on the doorstep of Smithies was all wrong. My eyes scanned the carpark, looking for his car, but instead I clocked Phoebe Fenton-Rounce and a gaggle of her mates, walking up the path towards us.

  Damn, I thought they were all supposed to be watching the match? Sam has been going on about some rugby tournament, all week. If you were into that sort of thing, it was a big deal, and Mai and all the sixth form had gone to cheer the team. Sam asked if I was going and although I’d promised that I’d turn up later, I had no intention of it.

  Mai and Sam are the closest thing I’ve got to friends here. They latched on to me in the first few weeks and so far, I haven’t been able to shake them off.

  Mai started Cavies at the same time I did. She’s from Vietnam and has a ridiculously over the top work ethic. I baffle her. She can’t understand why I’m always studying and yet I can’t get above a C in any of my classes.

  I wasn’t up for making friends, but she followed me around the library, eyes poking up from underneath her messy Mohawk. Night after night, she’d move closer and closer, until one time she just came and sat in the chair opposite. I think the old me would have told her to get lost, but I’d been on my own for weeks and must have needed some company. For someone with English as a second language, she talks a lot, but she seems happy with my monosyllabic grunts in reply to her never ending questions.

  Sam had a little trouble coming out, and now everyone pretty much hates him. Don’t get me wrong, they don’t hate him because he’s gay. They hate him because last term, when he was in year eleven, he was dating Phoebe Fenton-Rounce. They went out for over a year (a lifetime here), until he got off with her older cousin, Thomas, at her grandmother’s birthday party. It was in front of her entire family and so was a complete dick move. Even Phoebe didn’t deserve that, and that’s saying something.

  Sam says he and Phoebe had this massive showdown at the end of term speech day. She was screaming at him, and he told her he only dated her “cause she looked like a man.” Evan had told him to take it back, but instead Sam pushed Evan, knocking him into Father Joseph, the school priest. This was in front of parents, teachers, and the rest of the school. Both boys were almost kicked out.

  This term, things have shifted for Sam. He’s no longer one of the good guys. He spends most his evenings at the library, avoiding his old mates, trying to impress me and Mai with shady lies about men he’s met in Soho bars. But he doesn’t look old enough to order a mocktail, let alone the real thing. I don’t mind him so much, underneath his bull-crap, he’s okay.

  “Hey, princess, how you doing?” I really should have gone to watch Sam’s match, instead I was standing in the doorway to Smithies open-mouthed, gawping at Charlie.

  “What are you doing here?” I felt queasy.

  “Come on, sweetness. You said you wanted to see me. I got your text saying you were lonely.” Charlie’s head wobbles a lot when he talks. I think he thinks it’s cute, but I find it off-putting.

  “I was just having a bad time. That’s all. You can’t just turn up here.” My stomach churned, and I actually thought I might throw up. I wasn’t panicky enough to lose it yet, but I wasn’t far off.

  It was my fault; a few nights before, he’d sent me this crappy sext and I’d replied instantly, telling him how much I missed him. It was a particularly pathetic message, in which I told him I loved him and would do ANYTHING, if he made the trip to Cavies.

  Not knowing what else to do and desperate to keep Phoebe from spotting his wobbly head, I grabbed his arm, pulling him as quietly and discreetly as I could, down the stairs and into “The Bar”. The Bar isn’t a bar at all. It’s a small room in the basement of the building, filled with books, posh furniture, and an old TV. It has one of those windows that looks out to a staircase and lets the tiniest amount of light in. During the seventies and eighties, it was an actual alcohol-serving bar for the sixth form boys, but of course, they’ve done away with in-house drinking now.

  Everyone’s welcome to use The Bar, but it’s dark, damp, and bloody freezing, so most of the time I’ve got it to myself. Upstairs, there’s a main common room with a big TV and pool table, just as you walk into Smithies, and that’s where everyone else hangs out. The only time anyone else goes down to The Bar is after lights out so they can smoke out the back window. They worked out a way to disable the fire alarm, which as you might guess, turned out to be disastrous.

  “Where’s your car?” I didn’t want anyone to know he was here.

  “I parked it over by the main building.” He leaned forward to kiss my lips, but I turned my cheek. If he noticed, he didn’t let on.

  “This place is incredible! Now I get why you were working so hard last year.” His eyes gobbled up the royal blue chesterfield sofa, ornate tasseled table lamps, an oak writing desk, and walls filled with ornate frames holding elaborate oil paintings of a time gone by.

  “I should tell them you’re here. You’re suppo
sed to get permission and sign in!” I stepped away from him and began to turn towards the door.

  “If we bothered about permission, I wouldn’t be allowed to go to your room would I?” He gave me a wink and moved closer, placing his hand on my hips, gently pushing me into him.

  “No way are you going up there!”

  He bent lower to kiss me. “Come on, Max, take me upstairs.”

  “Stop it!” I pushed him away, “Stay here, I’ll be back in a minute.”

  My mind whirled through what would happen if they caught me with a strange male guest (especially one like Charlie), and I figured the best thing to do would be to report his arrival to Mrs. Strangelove, the aforementioned Lacrosse-stick-up-arse housemistress.

  She wasn’t in her office, so I knocked on the door of her flat and then checked the kitchen, before realising she was still on the sports pitch. Reluctantly, I headed back to the common room but I’d been gone longer than I should have, and my heart sank when I saw Charlie had left the basement and was now standing in the main entrance to Smithies with Phoebe, Rosie, Priya, and a few other girls from their crowd.

  I stood behind them, speechless. Eventually, Phoebe glared at me and nudged Rosie.

  “Oh hi, Maxine.” I could hear the poison in Rosie’s sugary sweet voice.

  “Max.”

  “Yeah, of course, sorry!” She turned her attention back to Charlie, who grinned like a bloody pug dog.

  “Was telling the girls here that I’m DJ-ing at Sargent Kelp’s next week.”

  “You are?” Sargent Kelp’s is a bar in West London, famous for reality TV stars and well-publicised visits from the cooler members of the royal family. A couple of the kids here say they’ve been, but they’re talking crap.

  “Awesome, isn’t it?” Rosie squealed. “God, I wish we could go.”

  Phoebe jumped up in the air with excitement. I was struck by her unfaltering eyebrows. “Ohh! Why don’t we have a party on the last night of term? Priya’s parents are away! Charlie, you can come and DJ if you like!”