© Evan Woods 2026
If you want know what’s happened up to now, read part one. Why are you starting with part two?
As Jill clasped Tony’s hand and dragged them both into the glowing green slot his last sight of the party was a glimpse of Keith Moon looking ready to indulge in a spot social disengagement, probably considering blowing up another toilet. Suddenly the room took on the quality of a flat photograph as seen from an angle, then it fractured, the pieces whirled into a globe and the couple were engulfed in a swirling kaleidoscope of colours and vapours.
“Wow, far out! Hey, you’re flat!” Tony’s voice echoed around their spinning cut-out bodies as he noticed that Jill disappeared if he squinted at her edge-on, then he caught sight of his own body. “Hey, I’m flat!” Rather conservative statements considering his sudden transition from party-goer to whatever this is. Go with the flow man, go with the flow…
“We’re in two-dimensional n-space!” Jill’s voice echoed in return. “It’s an effect of travelling through the continuum. Don’t worry you’ll be fine, but do not let go of my hand or you’ll be lost in here, floating in n-space until you collide with another dimension. Far out is right!”
“Yikes! What are these oily-looking bubbles floating past?”
Jill’s voice echoed back to him. “They are the other dimensions – other places, other times, billions upon billions of them contained within the continuum. We’re on a path between them. If you touch one of them you’ll be sucked into it and I’ll have to find you and dig you out which could take a long time unless I have a known reference point. Some of those places are really strange, very unpleasant and dangerous. Without me you’d be lost!”
Tony wanted to be found, not lost and wisely decided to do what he really wanted to do regardless of their whereabouts, or as seemed more likely, nowhereabouts – he pulled himself close in to Jill and hugged her tight.
They were closing in on the bubble Jill had coded for… but to her advanced senses something felt way off.
As they entered the bubble, the swirling psychedelic colours faded and coalesced into flat pictures of vaguely recognisable shards, objects rushing at them and streaming past as they zoomed in on Jill’s target. A street, a door, a window then a brick wall… from the inside out! Then slam. Their two-dimensional patterns ejected from a green slit in the wall, their bodies making a popping sound from air displacement as they snapped out to their conventional three-dimensional forms.
Regretfully, Tony released Jill. She looked around – a Wimpy bar? Wait, Coventry Street W1… not right… wrong place, wrong time? Jill reviewed her coordinates which were more about knowing her location and target rather than simple numbers – her figures were perfect as usual. She concluded that she was right, but this was wrong.
A wireless inside Wimpy’s was hissing feedback from Radio Caroline; the north sea was interfering with Tony Blackburn’s efforts to convince an overweight pickup arm to play Cilla Black’s Anyone Who Had a Heartwithout bouncing across the grooves.
“Woah!” Almost knocked over by the couple’s sudden appearance a rather untidy specimen of early 60s manhood, who might have been Tony’s age back forward in 1968, staggered back. “You’re flat! I mean you were flat! You came outta the green thing in the waaaaall!” His bloodshot eyes were wide as he turned his remaining brain cells to contemplating the contents of his last syringe.
Jill, still clutching Tony’s hand, pulled him back towards her. He didn’t mind one bit. “Ignore him,” she said, “he looks like he belongs to one of this time’s non‐therapeutic recreational deviant subcultures. It was becoming all the rage way back now and it’s a worse problem when you belong.”
“When I belong?” Tony was, well, nonplussed would be a good word. He was mystified about everything that’d happened this evening, the crazy Doctor, this girl… but this wasn’t evening, suddenly it was daytime and Jill was talking past tense and present tense with future tense clogging up the plumbing. But hey, she was the cool fox from the party, she was gripping his hand and he was very happy for Jill to lead on.
In the window of Wimpy’s behind the druggy was an image of a face, a reflection of sorts, with a neat and tidy beard, watching… from somewhere else.
As she dragged him along the street away from Wimpy’s Tony needed answers. “Umm, forgive me if this sounds a bit weak coming from a man… what the hell is happening? I’m freaking out here.” Then he got distracted noticing the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night was playing at the Pavillion in Piccadilly Circus. “Hey, I went to see that film when it first came out.”
“Tony, this is when it first came out! That’s when and where we are now in this timeline. I suppose I do owe you an explanation, but we have to get moving, I’m sure something’s gone wrong and I need to figure it out. There’s a safe pad in Carnaby Street that dad set up during World War One. We can talk there.”
“Carnaby Street, great, great… what’s a ‘safe pad’?”
“Well, dad’s local office really. He was quite busy on this p… um, in Britain during the wars and needed a London base of operations.” He’s missed the plural ‘wars’, well he’s going to find out soon enough.
“Also I need a change of clothing, I am inappropriate for 1964.” Tony disagreed, however looking around as they walked on he saw that the older people looked slightly more buttoned-up than he was used to; still a bit 1950s, orderly and aloof in this earlier semi-swinging 60’s period. In contrast the younger element was dressing in a much bolder manner which he remembered fondly, enriching the positive boldness of a new youth. Amazing how trends and attitudes can change in just a few years, including one’s own. Who knows what people in the future will make of the swinging 60s, maybe it’ll last forever!
Jill’s legs were attracting a bit of attention so he gallantly tried to keep her between himself and the shop fronts as much as possible. It only just worked. Jill startled and tried to hide as they went past Glasshouse Street. “Damn, in all of London? That girl crossing the road, we’ve worked together in the future – she mustn’t see me now. We have to keep out of sight of fashion types until we can change. I keep an era-specific wardrobe at the flat and some of dad’s clothes are there, they might fit you but they’re a bit old-hat and some are frankly bonkers. You’ll do as you are in a pinch, it’s not so important for men. And if you see someone you know, duck! Let’s zigzag through the crowd as much as possible, we need to hurry.”
Tony recognised the girl as Mary Quant in 1968, but then of course Jill had whisked him back to 1964, so maybe a tad early in Mary’s career… he could foresee situational adjustment problems so gob shut, eyes front and follow Jill.
The ‘safe pad’ turned out to be a flat adjacent to Gear. The rooms were a musty setting of battered old furniture, the walls covered with black and gold poppy flower art-deco wallpaper. “This place looks like it hasn’t been touched for years.”
“It hasn’t, dad likes old junk.” Jill wrestled the sash window up to let some fresh air in along with the twangs of the Rolling Stones floating faintly up from somewhere below with Mick Jagger whooping It’s All Over Now. Jill was talking while rustling through racks of clothing. “In this time Gear is still fairly new but over the 60s dad developed a soft spot for the goodies it sells. It helps him to fit in some places. The owner, Tom, does well in the future as you might know, being from there. I accidentally put the idea in his head to open a wine bar in the King’s Road when I spoke to him a couple of months ago in this timeline, very naughty of me and very much against the rules. He did, but not yet though. But perhaps you shouldn’t repeat any of that.”
Tony wanted to zonk out again. “Then please don’t tell me! I’m still wondering if I’m in a cuckoo ward hallucinating all this.”
Jill finally chose an uncomplicated, plain knee length yellow dress that she’d picked up from Sears in New York at some other ‘time’ – probably ’62 by the look of it – and black low-heel pumps. “We can take turns changing behind the wardrobe door if you’re feeling modest.”
“Yes please. You can talk while we’re changing.”
“Oh, alright. I’ll give you the nutshell version of what’s happened and a few hints about me, just what I think you can handle until you get used to this roller coaster ride. You see, I can create portals that allow me to travel through and across time and space. It’s been my thing since I was born, although I wasn’t able to control it properly until my late teens. Good job I had private tutoring, phasing in and out of classrooms would’ve been embarrassingly revealing to say the least.”
The Stones faded out, the regular Carnaby Street hubbub was temporarily unaccompanied. “uhh, crikey. I can understand that, oh yes it would’ve been terrible…” mumbled Tony to cover a slight hint of reserved gentlemanly panic. Some of the clothes in the wardrobe were either just plain ridiculous or obvious fancy-dress party fodder. He found a conservative grey casual jacket and black trousers which were tight but just about fitted if no-one looked closely. He couldn’t find a pair of shoes that fitted, they were all too big for his feet. So Jill’s dad has a small body and big feet, eh? On a small table next to the wardrobe was a Collaro and a rack of vinyl. “Are these your records?”
“Yes, help yourself. Hmmm, you’re a bit bigger than dad in most places but you’ll do. All right. Let’s just get on to you and your sudden presence in my life, even though I don’t really know why although obviously dad does; I reckon he’s got plans for you. Some of that info dad blew your mind with was a dimensional transposition code, some of the rest was stuff I knew since childhood. There’s something else in there too, but it’s not clicking. Dad was identifying himself to you so I’d know it was him when you met me. He planned it, he knew we’d meet at that party. Sounded like gobbledegook to you but I saw what it was even through your rendition. You did quite well by the way and even if it had been nothing more than a load of old chatup I’d already decided I like you. Something else dad already knew of course and I don’t know if I should be annoyed about that or not.”
“Thanks, I’m glad I met you too.” And of course he meant it, whatever strangeness was evolving.
Choosing a record from… err, ‘earlier’ years for him but ‘now’ years, Tony rested the Collaro’s crystal on Just Like Eddie by Heinz. “All this timey-wimey stuff is gonna drive me crackers, if I’m not already! No idea what’s going down, just going with the flow. I only wish I knew what the flow is.”
“Timey-wimey, that’s funny. Let me think a while and maybe I can make sense of it for you. For both of us.”
Privately Jill was worried about dragging Tony through whatever’s going on, because without travelling forwards into her personal future which would screw the heck out of the universe she could not see or intuit where he slotted in. Something weird was certainly happening. She could not have been off-target with her calculations, even though those calculations were subconscious and intuitive – her brain was incapable of failure in that department. No, there had to have been some form of interference, highly advanced technical power or an astonishing mentality, pushing her away from where she was trying to be and that, undoubtedly, could only be another being of comparable abilities to her and dad. To what end, what purpose? In the absence of any other immediately available evidence she glanced at Tony but no, it definitely wasn’t him. Her well-tuned senses told her there was nothing devious in his psyche, only that he was a nice guy, smarter than many, artistic, a creative thinker, good with the girls but not really a bedhopper – actually he’s respectful and honest, whatever else he may believe about himself. Right now though he’s very confused which she found rather cute and pleasantly distracting. Oh darn it, now she had to look after him.
She’d always thought humans were likeable people, even though rather basic on occasion, but she was pleased that dad had fought to grant them and their world protected status. Earth was by far her favourite planet. Tony was staring out the window while Jill mused; sweet boy, he still thinks I’m human. I wonder what he’ll do when he finds out I’m an alien.
Aloud she said, “Valentine’s Day will be expensive when you find out I’ve got two hearts.”
“Pardon?”
“Oh, nothing.” Back to the mystery at hand…
Evan Woods 