Hey, if you just joined us. Of course you are welcome, but you may wish to be mindful of spoilers if you don’t start at the beginning. If you wish to start at the beginning, click here for my intro, or here for the prelude & scene one.
Then again, it does strike me that if you did want to just jump straight in then this would be a great time to do it. You will certainly pick up the gist of what’s going on soon enough. Also, up till now the pace has been necessarily slow burning. From now on, though, stuff starts to happen, and the pace is going to increase. So yeah - jump in here! (although I’d advise reading the previous instalment as well). It would be lovely to not know what’s really going on. That’s the tragedy of being the writer, of course - I already know, so I can never experience the joy of finding out that you can.
And you can always go back to the start later should you so wish…
So, if you are mindful of the previously on Katrina, then that was the very touching scene which is one of my favourites when Audrey meets Katrina, and they begin to understand each other.
In these three scenes, Tom’s day gets worse, and Katrina gets to go swimming.
There’s also a little philosophy about the parallel world differences if your grandfather did or didn’t die on the Eastern Front defending the innocent from an all night attack by Stalin’s, or Trotsky’s red terror/psychopaths known euphemistically to history as ‘partisans’…
And if that makes you feel uncomfortable, well good. It’s called history… But are Katrina’s memories real, or programmed?
Who is she, really?
Welcome to the Grandfather Paradox…
Tom’s day, predictably, did not get any better on the investigation trail. He wasn’t surprised.
He suddenly wished he was back home. And young again.
Firstly, the station security officers regretfully told him the previous day’s CCTV footage had already been digitally transferred to central storage and then, as with every day, erased to make way for the new day’s recording. He should’ve known that.
Peter did.
And then Tom made something of a fool of himself both on their CCTV monitors and to the assorted passengers in the waiting area by curiously rapping his knuckles on the walls on the off chance there might be some concealed portal to another world.
There wasn’t, by the way, in case you were wondering.
Clearly an Englishman, the passengers mused. Probably goes out in the midday sun too. With a dog, no doubt.
So he sighed, and took a taxi to central storage. He had the ignominy of having to phone Peter and then pass the phone to them to confirm authorisation for transfer of the relevant footage. He sensed Peter was enjoying that, and knew that would happen.
Tom stopped for a drink on the way, even if it was still only ten in the morning. He blamed the whole thing on her. Part of him knew he should’ve blamed Peter, rather than her, but part of him was still young enough to be deferential. Something would have to be done about that. What would his father have done? There were times when he wondered which one of them was the more senior. Completely different departments, to be sure, but it was the immediacy that did it.
So he got to central storage and had the digital footage transferred back to the Embassy. He would look at it later. Maybe after lunch, he decided.
He thought about Audrey again. Two beers before twelve. That should’ve told him everything.
But Tom wasn’t really in the mood for listening.
Drinking before midday is a recipe for introspection. Semiotics. Tom was just about getting to the age where he understood that kind of stuff. But still young enough not to like it.
He ordered another. And then Markus phoned from the German Embassy.
Kristophe Johann Meyer. Killed. Eastern Front. 1943. Skirmish with partisans. That’s all the Wehrmacht record said. Him and his entire squad. Seven of them, in total.
No Iron Cross, first class. No Katrina.
What happened to the sixty villagers, not recorded. The men would’ve been killed probably. The women, gang-raped and left for dead. Just like the previous village. Kristophe and his comrades came across them the morning before, trying to get away. They decided to stay and fight. They set up their defences. The attack would happen after sundown. So clever. Give the enemy cover, then yank on the ropes to pull down that illusion.
But then came the ricocheted bullet.
It sliced through his pre-frontal cortex. So fast, he didn’t even have time to think of his other life, in her world, when he prayed before the firefight. Give me the courage to save these people. Not for me, for them. He never said that in this world. It never happened. That scar he wore with pride for the rest of his days. He’d lost faith by then, with all the horror, the horror that he had seen.
He never saw Dresden again.
In this world, no one in that family survived.
But Tom wasn’t to know that. Markus wasn’t to know that. As far as he was concerned, it was just a fucking statistic.
It’s not as if it changed the world, now, is it?
Tom got back to the Embassy as the bells rang. Peter just raised his eyebrows and didn’t bother asking why. He was an astute judge of character and he had Tom down to a T. Just like his father, he knew. Although he kept that to himself. That inner smile. That inner knowledge.
The kind of thing the likes of you aren’t supposed to know.
He feigned a sigh. “The CCTV’s arrived, by the way, whilst you were out drinking away your Exhibit A issues.”
Tom didn’t answer that one. It was true, after all.
“I presume the annoying thing for you,” Peter said, with alarming insight, “is that those issues are so completely mixed up with our mademoiselle from the parallel world, eh? Maybe,” he pushed home the advantage, “it’s Lady Fortune fucking with you again. What say you, Thomas?”
Tom took a massive breath and resisted the urge to lunge at Peter. “You know this forthcoming CHIS bill, Peter?”
Peter’s eyes widened at the apparent non-sequitur.
Tom pressed home himself. “It gives any agent of the state immunity from prosecution for practically any crime they commit, right?”
Peter frowned. “Even without a psych assessment. I don’t approve. Why do you ask?”
“Well,” Tom continued, nonchalantly, “it essentially means if I choose to rip your head off, like maybe in a fit of pique if you piss me off too much, I’d be fine, law-wise, I mean. What do you think?”
Peter’s eyes went all startled. Headlights. That kind of thing. He hesitated. A beat before responding.
He didn’t really know how to.
In the end, he just erupted into laughter.
Tom, clearly, he suddenly understood, had just grown up.
And if that wasn’t a threat to national security, he didn’t know what was.
It would be many days before Tom got to see Katrina in a swimsuit. Or swimming, for that matter. He heard about it later, of course, but he always came to regret not seeing that first time.
Her chaperones were, understandably, a little sceptical, but they were under orders to indulge her. So they sat themselves down in the near-empty spectator gallery whilst Katrina got herself changed. And then emerged through the little hygiene pool into the short course arena. It hadn’t proved difficult at all to arrange it, as it turned out.
They didn’t notice Audrey on the other side. At least not at first. They didn’t know her, after all. She was just a pretty French girl. Maybe she was just there to see her boyfriend, or her sister, or her mother, or her cousin. Who knew. Didn’t matter.
No one else mattered.
Katrina took a deep, satisfying breath, and smiled. She’d been given a whole lane to herself. Lane three, as it happened. She just stood there for a moment, tried to remember what it was like when she was only seventeen. How good was she then? She couldn’t remember.
She’d made the national team by then, she knew that.
Except at that time, she’d only just got out of hospital.
She was only ever thinking of Nicci. By that time, she’d only ever been able to remember what really happened once. It took her three weeks of sedation to let it out. She’d entered that place unconscious. She had an episode, as they called it, in the police station, when they tried to ask her what happened. Explain those dead bodies. It was you.
You did it, Katrina.
Do you want to tell us about it?
She tried to. But then she started screaming.
Sometimes, twenty-five metres looks short. Sometimes it looks long. Depends what mood you’re in, I suppose. Katrina tilts her head slightly and can’t decide. She looks down that lane three and thinks of somewhere else. But this is Paris. This is a different place.
She takes another deep breath. Glances over at her chaperones, thinks twice and then strides determined over to them.
“Can you time me? For a hundred metres?” she asks. “That’s four lengths. Obviously.”
She glances across at her colleague for consensus. They were told to indulge this girl, after all. He shrugs. That’s good enough.
She has a standard issue watch, of course (the one with the microphone). A stopwatch is the least of its features.
So she smiles at Katrina. And Katrina smiles back.
She takes her position at the end of the pool. The starting blocks aren’t there right now. Maybe they will be later. Katrina doesn’t care. And it’s not the best swimsuit in the world, so she wouldn’t be as fast as she could be, but all that would come in time. She wasn’t going to mind that kind of thing just yet. She looks across at her chaperones and nods with a smile on her face. She is going to enjoy this. Something that makes her feel young again.
She is young again.
One. Two. Three.
Her dive into the pool is beautiful. She slices herself into the water. She doesn’t come up for a breath for a good ten metres or so. Maybe not strictly within the rules but she doesn’t care now. And they wouldn’t know.
Her turn is beautiful. Perfectly judged. It’s like riding a bike.
It’s all about the love of it. You don’t forget that.
I think it was just after that first perfect turn that her two chaperones began to have faith. It was a kind of epiphany.
They were perfectly willing to accept a girl who just wanted to swim and who was, well, I don’t know, ok at it, or something. Even a girl who knew how to do tumble turns wouldn’t have phased them too much. But a girl who does three perfect turns as if the wall was just a friend, a wall that does not slow her down, a girl who only takes breaths every six strokes and just seems to glide through the water as if it isn’t even there anymore, well, that’s not the kind of girl who really exists in their world, is it?
It was the fluidity, I think. And the grace. What she lacks in height and power she more than makes up for in pure style. There is something magical about watching Katrina swim. You suddenly forget time. You don’t even notice. Maybe it’s like being in a different world. A different place.
She took a deep breath, and so did he. They didn’t even look at each other. They didn’t need to.
They just watched.
It’s what watchers are supposed to do, after all.
She glances down at the watch. The third turn. As if the wall doesn’t even matter anymore. About forty-six seconds or something like that. You can’t really time someone properly with a stopwatch. Katrina knows that. She just wants an indication. Something to work from.
All that important training stuff, all that coaching and that sports science and the diet and nutrition and the hard work, that will come, in time.
But for now, it’s only love. It’s only for the love of it. And just see how well you do.
So she touches the wall. The watch is stopped. She smiles. They both smile.
Glances down. Sixty-two seconds. One hundred metres. Sixty-two seconds.
At her best, Katrina could swim ten seconds faster than that.
But she wasn’t unhappy. Truth is, she felt energised. She smiles at the water. The water is her friend. She loves it, and it loves her.
So there she perches, with her dangling feet in the water, just on the edge, and for a moment, she is back home again.
She stares up the length of the pool, and smiles inwardly to herself. Sure, there’ll be work to do. Time to get used to being in her new, young body again. But she knows she can do it. It will not be long before she beats a minute. And then she’ll take another second off, and another. And another.
It’s all for the love of it, you see. That’s all it is, in the final reckoning. It was only ever about the sheer love of it.
I can be happy here, in a different place.
And the Goddess smiled.
To be continued…