Susie’s purple hair with silver highlights, leather skirt and jacket and regulation Doc Martins might not be everyone’s idea of the perfect granddaughter, but she was the only one that Donna had. After years of being alone, Donna found herself energised by Susie’s sassy wit and go anywhere, do anything attitude.

It came at a price, because there was no subject that Susie ever regarded as off-limits.

“I mean,” Susie would say, “what exactly is the ‘correct’ attitude that I should take towards a granny who has a secret time machine in the basement?”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“Gran, why don’t you go and see Grandpa? I know you miss him because you talk about him all the time. There’s nothing to stop you, you’ve got the time machine, you know exactly where and when he was alive. Why don’t you go?”

There was an exasperated tone creeping into Susie’s voice, grandma could be so stubborn at times.

“No.”

“Gran, you make me reason my way through everything, but you cheat. You never say why. What if I went to see Grandpa? I could go and bring him back. I know it would be a bit awkward because I was born after he died, but I look enough like you that he’d believe who I was.”

“No.”

“Why not? Why not?”

Donna started to turn away, and then something in Susie’s face stopped her. For a second she saw herself, her younger, headstrong self. The girl who married that reclusive crazy physicist inventor, against everything her family said.

“You’re never going to give up on this, are you?”

“No.”

“Even if some of what I’m going to say is embarrassing?”

“You mean like you’re too old to have sex with him?”

Susie waited for the explosion. None came.

“You’re closer than you think,” Donna said. “I did go back. Once.” Donna turned away, wiping a tear from her cheek.

“Gran you can’t stop now.”

“Susie, I am not telling this story standing in the kitchen.”

“Where then?”

“In the garden. One particular place in the garden.”

Donna led the way.

“Stand here,” she said. "Look in through the french doors, what do you see?"

Susie shaded her eyes and stared at the window. “I can see the sofa, not much else.”

“But if the light was on?”

“I’d know who was sitting on it.”

“Yeah.”

Donna turned away from the window and sat on the garden bench.

“Sit on the grass and listen. The months after John died — John, the grandpa you never met — I missed him more than you can imagine. The time machine that he built, actually worked, even then, though I’ve made a lot of adjustments and refinements since. I knew I could go back and see John. I didn’t want to go to any of the last few years because I couldn’t face seeing him ill again, knowing what was going to happen. I lived through that once, and that was once too many times.”

“That makes sense,” Susie said.

“I had to pick a date when I’d be sure not to meet myself in the house, so I picked a day when I knew I was about to go away for a fortnight on a field trip. I made a mistake, I was a day out. It was thirty years before, so one day is not much of an error. I aimed at arriving in the garden. I planned on hanging around out there to make sure the coast was clear.”

Donna stopped for a second, choking up, “God, this is hard,” she said.

Susie took her hand, feeling sorry she'd started this, but now she had to know how it ended.

“Let me guess, you saw them through the window, the younger you and John, is that right?”

“This was long ago before your mum was born. I was desperate to make sure I didn’t meet myself, so I was fixed on remembering a time when I was away.  I forgot what happened the afternoon before I left. John was never very demonstrative, but knowing that I was going to be away for two weeks must have triggered something.

“Through the window, I saw him kissing this young girl—”

“That was you? Right?”

“Yeah, but through the window, in the dim light inside, I didn’t know who it was.”

“And you thought you’d already left.”

“I nearly died. I thought John was having an affair, I felt sick and desperate, for a few minutes it felt as though my whole life had no meaning. I collapsed onto the grass and lay there feeling terrible.”

“But you must have known he didn’t cheat on you.”

“Knowing is one thing, but I was tense, wound up, not sure if I should be doing what I was doing. John had died only months before, I mean months before on my timeline. I was a still a mess, and then there he was kissing this girl.”

“How long before you realised it was you?”

Donna laughed. “I don’t know, it felt like forever. When I saw her face, my face, I felt like an idiot. After that, I remembered what that day was like. You may not believe it, but I used to... um, be good at it.”

“Meaning you were an energetic sexual athlete?”

“Something like that,” Donna suppressed a smile as Susie giggled. “It was very strange, seeing my young self pull off her blouse, seeing John throw her bra away and the two of them end up naked on the sofa—”

“Fucking like rabbits.”

“Susie!”

“Oh, so it was a slow romantic seduction?”

“No... but not like rabbits. John had amazing stamina and elegance when he was turned on. I watched them for ages. They were so into each other. I risked getting closer to the window. It was agony. I remembered all the times I’d made love to John and it hurt. I’d only buried him a few months before. I sat on the grass and wept and wept.”

Susie put an arm around her grandmother.

“Sorry I asked Gran.”

“Oh, that wasn’t the end of it.”

Susie said nothing. It didn’t seem fair to press, but after a few deep breaths, they went indoors to apply the English solution to stressful problems; a strong cup of tea.

“That night I slept outside on the grass,” Donna said. “I woke up feeling awful. I sneaked into the house when the sun came up and washed my face. After that, I had to hide in the garden until my young self had gone to the conference.

“I went for a walk around Camden to settle my nerves, but I should have gone home. I had a coffee and cake instead of breakfast and went to see John. It was exactly the wrong thing to do.”

Donna stopped, finished her second cup of tea, and for a moment sat staring into space.

“So you knocked on the door and John had no idea who you were?”

Donna nodded.

“He believed me after a while, but it was too awful. There I was, this old woman, talking to a man who was thirty years younger, telling him that he was dead.”

“Telling him that the time travel machine he was going to invent, actually worked.”

“Yes, that too, but back then the idea hadn’t crossed his mind. He was full of all that Einstein stuff, and quantum mechanics. He was a university professor, he’d told hundreds of students that time travel was impossible.”
“So what you did was vital, it put the idea into his head.”

“True, but at an awful cost. I don’t think it had crossed his mind that either of us would grow old, not in a visceral way. Seeing the older me, when the day before he’d had an afternoon of the most amazing sex with the young me... It was all too much. It put the idea into his head that his time was short. It drove him to work harder, made him more reclusive.

“When I came back from that conference he was never the same. I never knew why until I went back that afternoon. All the times that I couldn’t drag him out of the lab, the times I couldn’t get him to play with Rose, they were all my punishment for being foolish after he died. Punishment in advance for what I was going to do. From that moment on John knew his time was short and didn’t dare waste a minute.”

“So that’s why you didn’t go back again?”

“Would you? I couldn’t compete with my younger self. When I was that age, I was, well, a bit like you, full of bounce and I had a man to captivate. What chance did the old me have? I missed John dreadfully, but it was the old John I was missing. Time travel is a curse, as far as romance is concerned. I didn’t even enjoy watching that afternoon, and yet it was such a special day.”

Susie raised an eyebrow.

“That was when your mother was conceived. When I came back from the conference, I missed my next period. In my memories of that afternoon were so special, yet standing in the garden, watching myself flinging my athletic naked body all over John was awful. I was jealous and resentful. Next day, when I talked to John, I desperately wanted to take him to bed, to re-live that afternoon, but I was older than his mother and grieving for him dying in thirty years time. He couldn’t do it.”

“Why didn’t John understand that?”

“He did, I think, intellectually, in a physics professor kind of way, but Susie love, it’s no fun at all to have the man you’ve loved all your life take pity on you and try to help. The time travel machine is a wonderful invention, but you can’t re-live memories.”