Slowtime

I

5.43 a.m. The man’s eyes opened with a jerk and he found himself staring short-sightedly at the June sunlight filtering through the orange curtain material. He blinked rapidly before closing his eyes in the hope of getting a few minutes’ more sleep, but the orange light had seared itself onto his retina and even with closed eyes he found himself looking at a bluish rectangle that refused to fade. The man turned from his side onto his back and opened his eyes again, this time to look at the ceiling and slowly the rectangle faded from his blurry vision. His wife lay beside him, completely motionless, deep in sleep.

Finally the man summoned up the willpower to abandon the comfort of their bed and got to his feet, rubbing the bleariness from his eyes before taking his spectacles and looking out between the crack in the curtains into the emerging day. Everything outside was still and the silence complete. He looked at the bedside clock. 5.43 a.m.

The man walked barefoot to the bathroom, taking light steps, anxious not to wake his wife. The carpet beneath his feet felt more cushioning than other mornings, as if it were much thicker or brand new, more resistant to the weight of his tread. He turned on the tap to wash the sleep from his face and was disconcerted to find that the water did not come, except in slow drops. This was the first time in decades that the water had been cut off, he thought, ever since the drought of 1975, it must have been.

Resignedly he took his bathrobe from the hook on the bathroom door and made his way downstairs to the fridge, where a bottle of mineral water would have to do the job, wetting his hand with the open mouth of the bottle to warm the water. He did not fancy washing in water only a few degrees above freezing point, but it was better than going in to work with his face still numb with sleep. The fact that the fridge light did not come on when he opened the door to it was the second surprise of the day, closely followed by the discovery that there was no electricity – the clock displays on both the oven and the microwave were both blank.

The man opened the door to the understairs cupboard and looked at the meter, only to find that the wheel was completely motionless. First no water supply, now no power. It was not shaping up to be a good day, he thought to himself.
The man returned to the kitchen, cut a slice of bread and buttered it – his morning slice of toast and marmalade was clearly out of the question, as was a cup of tea. The tea would have to wait until he got to work. The man quickly ate the bread and tiptoed up the stairs to the bedroom to dress.

It was only after he had got to the top of the stairs that it occurred to him that the third step had not creaked gently as it usually did when he stepped on it. His wife lay in the same position, her long blond hair across her face, still deep in the embrace of Morpheus. The man dressed silently, put his watch on his wrist without looking at it, and returned downstairs, closing the bedroom door as quietly as possible behind himself. The bedside clock stared at his retreating back, its hour hand slightly to the right of the number six and its minute hand set at two minutes below the number nine.

The man took his cycle clips from the drawer by the front door, slipped them round his trouser leg bottoms and slid his stockinged feet into his work shoes before letting himself out into the cool morning air. The silence of the morning was total, to the point of being deafening. He unlocked the shed door and wheeled out his bicycle, for years now his preferred mode of transport.

He locked the shed again and led the machine to the front gate and out onto the pavement before mounting it and pushing off on his six-mile ride into the town centre. This had always been his favourite time of day – in fair weather and the warmer seasons – and was his own personal time, a time when he could think and detach himself from the humdrum of daily life. Starting work at six-thirty in the morning meant that his ride to work was a peaceful one, the morning traffic yet to develop into the rush hour that would have made a cycle ride rather less enjoyable. Besides, his route was such that he avoided the town’s busier thoroughfares, opting for the back streets of the southern residential areas, leafy avenues and the occasional pavement shortcut between housing estates. It was only in the last mile or so that he was forced to resort to more heavily frequented roads, and even then they were still quiet at that hour.

As the man pedalled, he began to realize that there seemed to be a headwind against him, one that ran counter to the utter stillness of the air that he had encountered on stepping from his front door. But it was unlike any other wind he had felt before whilst cycling to work, the air seemed syrupy in its resistance to his passage and the feeling was the same when he turned a corner, as if the wind was changing direction in tune to his own turns. He changed down a gear and pressed on. Ahead motionless on the road sat a car, astride a pelican crossing, the owner sitting at the wheel, staring fixedly ahead of him. The man cycled past the car and looked curiously at the driver, but the driver did not look back at him; in fact, the driver seemed totally concentrated on some distant point, deep in thought, his hands holding the wheel.

The man cycled on. The morning was exceptionally quiet, as if it were a good hour before his normal commute time. The man glanced at his watch and looked back at the road before looking back down at the watch on his wrist, a puzzled expression creasing his face. His watch had stopped and showed five forty-three and thirty-two seconds. Glancing briefly ahead of him along the road he was cycling down, he shook his left hand in the hope of seeing the watch return to life, but it remained uncooperative. Mentally adding to his list of things to do in his lunch hour a trip to the jeweller’s to get the battery replaced, he cycled onto the footbridge which crossed the river flowing in a westerly direction across town and it was then that it happened.

A large brown object appeared in his vision, seemingly suspended in mid air, and as he ducked to avoid its rush towards his face it brushed the side of his head, knocking his glasses from his face into the air and he swerved the bike in shock before steadying the machine and braking to a sudden halt some fifty feet or so further on, in the middle of the bridge. The man looked back, dazed and at the same time relieved that he hadn’t come off the bicycle. The man leant his machine against the railings running along the side of the bridge and walked back to retrieve his glasses, hoping fervently that they had not broken on contact with the ground.

And yet there was no sign of his glasses on the concrete surface of the footbridge but it was only a matter of a minute or so before he found them. The man’s glasses were suspended in mid air, moving almost imperceptibly downwards and to the right in exactly the same way that the bird that had collided with him was moving downwards towards the railings a foot away, its wing bent unnaturally back over its body, clearly broken. The man stared, a cold wave spreading from the back of his head down his neck and across his chest. Glasses and bird were virtually frozen in time.

The man stood for what seemed an age, awestruck, watching as the bird slowly approached the railings at a rate of about an inch every two seconds. It was a full half a minute before it collided softly with the railings, passed through, twisting clumsily through the air and continued oh-so-slowly down towards the water some four feet below. The man leant against the railing, breathing hard, and watched in horror as the bird headed inexorably towards the still waters of the river, gradually growing blurred as its shattered body retreated sluggishly from his defective eyes. As it touched the surface of the water and was slowly enveloped by the dark surface, the man’s mind admitted the unacceptable – the water was still, it was not flowing.

The man turned back to where his glasses had been and found that they were no longer there but a few inches from the ground, dangerously close to the edge of the footbridge. He rushed across to them and grabbed at the metal arm, pulling them towards himself. To his surprise, the arm bent with the sudden movement, as if it were made of paper, and he had to bend it back to the straight before he could put them on again. His eyesight restored, he stared around himself, his mind reeling at what had just happened. The river below him was still and yet rippled with small waves, not the mirror surface of a still pond. The wind he had felt pushing against him before he had collided with the bird was absent, the air totally still. And there was the silence. Not one sound.

Out over the bank of the river, some fifteen feet from him, was another bird, this time a larger creature, possibly a blackbird, but similar to the horrible scene he had witnessed only a short while previously; it too was suspended in the air, its wings arched high above its body, its distorted reflection clearly visible to the man on the water below. He stood rooted to the spot and watched for a long while as the bird’s wings gracefully descended through the horizontal to arch below its body and then, much like a tide, begin to rise again, as the bird inched forward through air, a movement only to be perceived by comparison with the background scenery of the fencing lining the riverbank. The man dragged his gaze from the bird down to his watch and realized that the hands stood exactly where they had been when he had first looked at it many minutes earlier – with the exception of the second hand, which had advanced from the previous thirty-two to thirty-three.

II

The man walked back to his bicycle, a numbness crushing his mind. He remounted and turned back the way he had come, turned back towards home. He stopped when he reached the point where he had seen the driver in the car, but it was not the same point. The man inside was still staring fixedly ahead of himself, hands still clasping the wheel, but the car was no longer astride the pelican crossing, rather its rear wheels were still on the black and white surface and its front wheels a few feet from it.

The man dismounted and walked with his bicycle to the side of the car and looked in at the driver, but again received no reaction. But again, almost imperceptibly, the car was creeping forward about an inch every three seconds, and the silence was broken by an occasional low booming sound. Horrified, the man backed away from the car, stumbling in the increasingly inescapable realization of what was happening around himself. He almost fell as he tried to get back onto his bike and pedalled hard to get away from the car and its driver. With a loud crack the bicycle’s chain broke and the man fell left and sideways to the ground with the sudden release of downward energy from his right leg against the pedal no longer being used to power him forward. The shock of the fall and sudden contact with the ground was monumental amid the intensity of the shock he already felt, and he lay on his side, his arm aching badly, for what seemed an age, before dragging himself up and onto his feet. His bicycle stood at an unnatural angle to the vertical and was also edging forward, all the while decreasing the angle between itself and the ground.

The man started to run towards it but then stopped. He hesitated for some seconds before grasping the handlebars and pulling the machine towards himself, leaving the broken chain in the road. His thoughts swimming, he walked away from the scene, towards home.

The man stepped through his front door and closed it behind him. He leant with his back against the inside of the door and his head resting on the stained glass pane, breathing heavily. Some minutes passed before he could persuade himself to climb the stairs towards the bedroom and, when he did, there was again no creak from the damaged third stair.

The man opened the door to the bedroom noiselessly and looked at his wife. She still lay in the same position, the hair still draped across her face. He went to the bed and brushed the hair from her face and looked down at her cheek and lips and listened. She was not breathing. Panic instantly slammed into the man’s mind and he went to grab her arm but something stopped him before he touched her, and he froze, mindful of what had taken place when he had grabbed at his glasses. His eyes fell on the bedside clock and the face gave him the final confirmation of what he felt he already knew: the hands on the clock stood at five forty-three.
The man wheeled round and ran to the bathroom, no longer worrying to make no sound, for he knew that no sound he could make would wake his wife.

He pulled open the bathroom cupboard and searched frantically for his wife’s compact and the mirror it contained. Finally, he discovered it in a small beige zipped bag and he returned to where his wife lay. He knelt down by the bed beside her prostrate form, held the mirror close in front of her nose and slightly parted lips and waited. Gradually, after some twenty minutes of his waiting and watching the mirror, he could see that it had clouded over with the warmth and condensation from her breath. Yet more mind-numbing confirmation, but all the same she was alive. In her time. But not in his own.

And then the alarm rang shrilly, waking the man from his nightmare. It was 5.45 am and time to start the day.