SALLY'S FURIOUS MUM.

Two eras separated by millions of years are about to collide...

Chowchow was confused. And he was confounded. This creature with the long blond hair and virtually no fur on her skin anywhere but on her head (where it was so fragrant and long he wanted to play with it) seemed unexpectedly vulnerable. He had never seen and creature like her before, and thought that maybe he should have during some of his ramblings in the great forest.

“Who you?” he grunted in his bizarre language of clicks and squeals and very little else.

And the girl (he didn’t know she was a girl but as that’s what she was then that’s what I’ll refer to her as) quite clearly had no idea what he was asking, yet to him it was a simple enough question, one so simple it was worth repeated, so

“Who you?” he repeated.

Sally Hampton was a bright girl and had the benefit of a twenty-first century education, and in a private school at that, and she thought she knew what the bizarre sounds might mean.

So she pulled herself away from him (she was hugging him still, as if he had been a long lost cuddly toy from her infancy) and pointing at herself, her fore-finger poking her chest.

“Sally,” she said, and then slowly for the benefit of her strange monkey companion, “Sal-ly”.

He looked at her hard and frowned. Then “Chowchow” he grunted. It didn’t sound as much like Chowchow as it might have, but he was satisfied, especially when the blond girl managed to utter a few sounds vaguely related to Chowchow, and pointed at him before repeating her own name and pointing extravagantly at herself.

Communication was being established, slowly, painfully, and with minimal success until Chowchow waved his arm and indicated the forest in all its primeval glory and clicked “home” at the back of his throat.

It was then that the magic happened because Sally pointed into the skies (she didn’t know why, she wasn’t from another planet, yet at the same time she was, her own Earth being considerably different in just about every practical respect to this one. In fact the only recognisable things to her were trees and a monkey, and the monkey was unlike any she’d seen in either a picture book or a zoo. Then, her index finger quite clearly indicating the breadth of the sky, she murmured “home” in such a pathetically lonely voice that Chowchow felt instantly sorry for her.

“Gods,” he muttered, guttural and intense, “Chimpo’s gods...”

oo0oo

And while communication was being established between the two earthlings, the primeval and the twenty-first century versions, Uncle Colin found himself in a pickle. He had lost his charge, and the girl’s mother wanted to know where she was. He wanted to explain that it was more a question of when she was rather than where, but he was nervous of upsetting a woman he usually felt apprehensive of, if not actually scared. Mrs Hampton could be a severe woman. She had a severe hair style, cut short and designed to be as unattractive as a haircut could be. Her wardrobe was similarly scary, from her blouse from the fifties to the most severe skirts he had ever seen.

And her daughter had vanished.

He knew where she was in the sense that he knew to what space she had vanished to: it was right here, where they were both standing, she severely gazing at him through slate grey eyes and he struggling for an explanation that might stand a chance of placating her. No, his problem wasn’t one of the where but of the when.

The silly girl had grabbed the time knob in his laboratory and had yanked it.

That knob was sensitive. It only needed a micron’s movement to lurch the holder back a decade or two, and Sally had more that nudged it by a micron, she had shoved it randomly as she tried to escape him. And to think: it was all unnecessary. He’d meant her no harm, had he? So, he had been drunk enough to be nice to her. His sort of nice, the sort that suggested that as he was her dead father’s brother and he understood that girls like her needed understanding and a man’s touch in their lives, he was there for her. Someone she could turn to for help and advice. Someone who could be like a father to her. And she was a pretty young thing and deserved being understood and treated as a human being, didn’t she?

He had, of course, got it all wrong. Sally was, in actual fact, not in any way cut up about her father’s death but actually rather pleased. He’d been a horrible man in so many ways it was hard to count them all, and the last thing she wanted, the very last, was the dreadful man’s brother wanting to take his place in her life. But he didn’t realise that her needs had nothing to do with fathers or uncles.

“She’s gone,” he stammered.

“Where to?” demanded a severe Mrs Hampton, her pleated and very severe skirt a real threat as she took a couple of steps towards him and those grey eyes seeming to bore so deeply into his brain that they were threatening to turn it into mush.

“When. It’s when,” he stammered. “She grabbed hold of the control without knowing what she was doing and puff! She was gone.”

“What a you jabbering about, man?” she demanded, “When isn’t any sort of answer!”

“My time machine,” he stammered.

She knew nothing about what he called his time machine. He’d told nobody, didn't dare because too many people thought he was a loony anyway. And he was preparing an article for a prestigious science magazine, his wonderful machine would be offered to the world and after its publication he would, amongst other things, be very rich indeed.

“Say that again!” That grim skirt was within inches of him and he fell back into a chair, a fit of faintness threatening to steal his consciousness from him.

“I can find her,” he said, not quite sure whether he could or not.

“A time machine?” She was one for repetition, he thought, when maybe time was of the essence. He hadn’t a clue what era of time on Earth Sally had inadvertently gone to and it crossed his mind that not all periods were as safe as the present, not that the present was ideal, what with wars and stabbings and the like.

“I’ll see what the dial says,” he mumbled, glad for any respite that stood a chance of taking him away from his grotesque sister-in-law.

“What dial?” she demanded.

“I’ll … show you,” he stammered, “but promise me you won’t touch anything. Touching things can have the most dreadful consequences...”

“I’ll amputate that collection of soft objects in your underpants if you don’t produce my daughter here and now, and then you’ll know what dreadful consequences are,” she threatened him, and he guessed she might just be capable of doing exactly that.

“Here’s the dial,” he muttered, reaching his desk where Sally had disappeared, “and here’s what it says...”

And he went pale. Whiter than pale. Whiter than a brand new white sheet. Whiter than snow.

“It says she’s gone around four and a half million years,” he whispered, “into the past...”

© Peter Rogerson 13.11.19