A Slip in Time by Maggie Pearson

1
Fog
    There’s nothing quite like a London peasouper. Not any more. You don’t get the right sort of smoke any more. If you wanted to mix up a real pea-souper, you’d have to travel back a good hundred years to begin with, to a cold winter’s night with the river mist rolling up from the garbage dumps downstream. Mix equal parts of river mist and coal-fire smoke. Season to taste with the smell of horse dung, cabbage cooked to death and rubbish left festering in a hundred backalleys. Leave to settle till it’s thick enough to scoop up by the shovelful and carry right through the house and out the back and never spill a drop.
    That’s your pea-souper.
    Fog.
    Fog wasn’t so bad, if the place you called home was as near as you could get to the grating where the warm air curled upwards from the basement kitchen of Mrs Tidy’s Hot Pie Emporium.
    Fadge quite liked fog. Twining itself round him like a damp, oversized cat, licking at his grubby face.
    Yes, fog was all right. Better than winter rain or sleet. Better than the wind that had been blowing the fine snow back, day after day, over the path he’d cleared so people could cross the road without getting their feet wet. You had to earn a penny or two where you could.
    Later on, there’d be gentlemen rolling home from a night out on the town, losing their way in the old pea-souper and looking for an honest face to set them back on the straight and narrow. Good for a penny or two. Once one of them tossed him a golden guinea by mistake. But the Masher had taken it off him before Fadge got a chance to see if he could spend it without getting himself arrested.
    The smell from Mrs Tidy’s Hot Pie Emporium was singing a siren song to Fadge’snose. With expert fingers, he counted the coins in his pocket. Enough for a mutton pie to take away, but no sitting down in the warm.
    Fadge sighed. He told himself it was early yet.
    Not far away, a barrel organ started to play.
    Fadge swept the slush off his crossing once more for luck, flicked a stray lick of fog off the end of his broom and settled down to wait.

2
The Great Detective
    The sound of the television reverberated through the house, echoing in and out of every nook and cranny.
    Grandad was hard of hearing. That was his excuse. Who did he think he was kidding? Jack wondered. Watching
Sherlock Holmes
videos back-to-back was just Grandad’s way of pretending that Real Life wasn’t happening.
    â€˜You’ll like it when you get there, Dad,’ Mum said for the zillionth time, as she whisked away the cup of undrunk tea from the table beside him and put another, fresher, one in its place. Jack could fill in the rest from memory, he’d heard it so many times. ‘Much nicer than living in this big, draughty house all on your own. Sheltered housing! All your own bits and pieces. Someone within call if you need help.And in the country, too!’
    Silently, Grandad reached for the remote and turned up the sound.
    Sherlock Holmes’s voice boomed out: ‘The vilest alleys of London, Watson, do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.’
    Mum flinched, rolled up her sleeves, and went to excavate another kitchen cupboard. She was finding stuff at the back of some of them – like half a tin of powdered egg with the lid rusted shut – that must be from the War.
    Jack took refuge in the attic, the furthest away from both of them that he could get. ‘Help yourself!’ Grandad had told him. ‘Take anything you want! Anything. Everything. Everything must go!’ Like this was some kind of closing-down sale. Except no one was buying.
    Gloomily, Jack gazed around the attic. There was stuff here older than Grandad. Older than Grandad’s grandad, probably. Stuff so old it seemed to have taken root, weaving itself into the fabric of the building. Move the wrong thing and the whole house would come crashing