Free The Yoghurt Plot by Fleur Hitchcock Page B

bees and the butterflies, and, if it wasn’t for the stupid carrier bag, I’d like nothing better than to lie on the grass and watch beetles climbing flower stalks. The child runs past us, flying a kite, her mother behind, pushing an enormous pram with a huge parasol on the top.
    The woman stares. She doesn’t smile. ‘Haven’t I—’ she says.
    â€˜Evening!’ I yell, walking a little faster. ‘But  … ’ she calls after me.
    â€˜Bye,’ says Lorna, kicking a clod of sand from her trainers. Sand from an alternative 2014. Sand that couldn’t possibly be there. I let my mind wander into the ramifications of the time crimes we’ve committed in the last hour or so – or the last forty-five years or so.
    Instead of following the path through to the shop, we run straight down towards the sea. This way we can’t possibly run into ourselves, although other people have obviously spotted us, or one set of us. I can tell from the strange looks we get. We don’t catch sight of ourselves, but I have to keep reminding myself that we could. And that I need to watch out for it.
    We don’t go as far as the pier. Instead we clamber over the sea wall and drop onto a mat of damp hard sand. The concrete wall runs along the top of the beach. Underneath it, a long metal pipe heads out to sea.
    â€˜Is that it?’ asks Lorna. ‘It doesn’t seem to have a way in. I’ll go down the end and see.’ She charges off across the beach, looking for an opening into the pipe.
    Actually I haven’t a clue where the land drain is, but I’m not going to tell Lorna that. I’m too furious with her, and I suspect that the big metal pipe next to us is sewage, and no matter what happens to Shabbiton, I’m not tangling with it.
    Lorna capers back; she’s picked up some seaweed and is popping the bubbles.
    â€˜Put it down,’ I say.
    â€˜What – seaweed? How can that affect anything?’
    â€˜Just stop. Don’t touch.’
    â€˜O–K.’ A few drops of rain spot onto the rocks of the beach. She stands and looks up at the clouds. I look up too. Forty-four-year-old clouds, gathering into a grey stormy mass over the sea.
    â€˜Beautiful, aren’t they?’ she says to one of the gerbils. It looks unimpressed and crawls back into the darkness of her hand.
    I turn away and watch the wall. Any minute now, the bag should come over the top.
    One, two, three, four
 … 
    I assume it will. I assume that we’re there somewhere on the other side of the wall losing it, or maybe it’ll just pop out of the air. Or maybe we did things differently this time.
    Except we couldn’t have done.
    It has to be coming.
    Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one
 … 
    Or maybe this time someone else got it.
    Thirty-two, thirty-three
 … 
    The blue carrier bag floats high over the wall, as if taking off on a longer, higher flight.
    â€˜Oh no, Bugg! It’s too high,’ says Lorna, galloping sideways along the beach flapping her arms in the air as if the bag might just give up and land on her.
    â€˜It doesn’t matter, we just have to see where it ends up.’ I say, breaking into a trot.
    The bag takes a swing to the right and scuttles along the sea wall, threading its way around the rotting wooden seaweed posts poking out of the sand, moving slightly too fast and too erratically for us to catch it. Finally, just as I’m beginning to wonder if we shouldn’t go back in time again and stop Lorna actually bringing the wretched bag, it drops, windless, to lie on the sand.
    We race towards it, panting over the shingle, arms outstretched, and as we nearly reach it, it whisks straight into the air like a helicopter and swoops over the wall behind.
    â€˜
No!
’ shouts Lorna, clambering onto a boulder that butts onto the sea wall and attempting to scramble over. ‘Come back here!’
    I race back