They’re all forgetting except me, he thought. I bet even if I showed them the paper they’d say, ‘Oh yes, that bloke looks like Wobbler, so what?’

Because … they live here. They’ve always lived here. In a way.

When you travel in time it really happens, but it’s like a little loop in a tape. You go round the loop and then carry on from where you were before. And everything that’s changed turns out to be history.

‘You’ve gone very quiet,’ said Kirsty.

‘I was just thinking,’ said Johnny. ‘I was thinking that if I showed the others this piece from the paper they’d say, oh, yeah, that looks like ole Wobbler, so what?’

Kirsty leaned across.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Well? It does look like Wobbler. So what?’

Johnny stared out of the window.

‘I mean,’ he said, ‘it’s Wobbler in the paper. Remember?’

‘Remember what?’

‘Well … yesterday?’

She wrinkled her forehead.

‘Didn’t we go to some sort of party?’

Johnny’s heart sank.

It all settles down, he thought. That’s what’s so horrible about time travel. You come back to a different place. You come back to the place where you didn’t go in the first place, and it’s not your place.

Because here was where no one died in Paradise Street. So here’s where I didn’t want to go back. So I didn’t. So they didn’t, either. When the newspaper picture was taken we were back there, but, now we’re back here, we never went. So they don’t remember because here there’s nothing to remember. Here, we did something else. Hung on. Hung around.

Here I’m remembering things that never happened.

‘It’s your stop,’ said Kirsty. ‘Are you all right?’

‘No,’ said Johnny, and got off the bus.

It was raining heavily, but he went and checked to see if the trolley was where he’d left it. It wasn’t. On the other hand, maybe it had never been there at all.

When he went up to his bedroom he could hear the rain drumming on the roof. He’d vaguely hoped that he might have been a different person in this world but there it all was: the same bedroom, the same mess, the same space shuttle on its bit of red wool. The same stuff for the project all over the table.

He sat on his bed and watched the rain for a while. He could feel the shadows in the air, hovering around the corners of the room.

He’d lost Mrs Tachyon’s paper somewhere. That would have been proof. But no one else would believe it.

He could remember it all – the rain on the moor, the thunderstorm, the sting on his whole body when they’d run through time – and it hadn’t happened. Not exactly. Normal, dull, boring, everyday life had just poured right in again.

Johnny went through his pockets. If only there was something …

His fingers touched a piece of card …

The sound of Australian accents from downstairs suggested that his grandad was in. He trailed downstairs and into the little front room.