'Twist and Shout' by Daniel Shand
He is in another time, another place. It’s not important to know how he got there, only that a lifetime’s work led up to it. A lifetime spent studying the texts, building the machinery, then one morning, he’s done it: a window opens up in his study and he steps clean through. Now he’s present in a place that is fresh to him, in a time before his own lifespan.
The window deposits him close to a village. Low clouds fill the sky and the air is heavy with moisture. He can hear voices and the thumping of industry from down the valley. At first, it’s tough to say whether the procedure has been fruitful; for all he knows, the window has merely catapulted his body across the country, landing him within his current year. He ambles among tall bushes, heading village-ward, to judge his success.
In the village, they are busy at work. Under thatched awnings, men toil. Elsewhere, animals run in their freedom, shitting and shrieking to their hearts’ content. He wanders the muddy pathway, feeling a little guilty: the remorse of the voyeur, bringing nothing to the table before supping his neighbour’s wine. Still, he cannot help but gawp. He can’t help but peer at the clothing, at the haircuts, at the lips mouthing foreign syllables. Already his shoes are ruined.
He begins to attract attention. The people here, they’ve never seen a folded collar, a short-back-and-sides. They’ve never witnessed a wristwatch. One man, a boulder-shaped specimen, comes out from his shack. He stares hard at the traveller, who does his best to move on. He tries to squeeze by others in the road, other starers; only now does he realise how tall he is among these people. There’s no place to hide, and the boulder-man is soon upon him.
The face that questions him is furious. Even across centuries you can recognise anger in the expression of a short, thickset interrogator. He’s held by the shoulder of his shirt, everyone crowding round to support their colleague, the boulder. At least the traveller has sense enough not to speak. To speak would truly condemn him. Instead he stares blankly at their dirty faces, hoping to engender sympathy by his muteness. The villagers bark at him, they shake him by the shirt, then look to each other in confusion: what to do with the traveller? How does one process an alien presence such as this?
In the end, they barrack him in an outhouse used previously for beasts. He can tell this by its acid reek of silage, the brown spatterings on the shins of his slacks. There’s a dry area in a bleak corner where he squats, his back against a post, his buttocks hovering above the earth. All those years studying the texts and he never developed a plan for once he travelled. In his fantasies, he arrived in the past and was immediately worshipped as a minor deity. The villagers of his dreams hoisted him up onto a litter and carried him through their charming town, pretty young things throwing garlands into his lap. At their feast, he sat at the head of the table, enjoying the sight of a vast glazed pig.
In the outhouse’s soiled darkness, he sniffles quietly to himself instead.
A few days pass. The villagers bring him bowls of water and pasty gruel. At night, he can hear them shouting. He can hear the drumming of percussion instruments, some tinny whistles. He holds it for a long time, but eventually must void his bowel in the opposite corner to the place he sleeps. It’s not long after this that the magician arrives. The traveller hears horse hooves and a half hour later someone comes to drag him out into the road. He sees the magician moving among the villagers, showing off amulets and setting off small explosions at the click of his fingers.
The villagers present him to the magician. They push him forward and speak to the magician in their tongue. He can imagine what they’re saying. This is a demon who wandered into our zone. Please, tell us what to do with it, oh great warlock. The magician’s face lights up. He plucks at the traveller’s cuffs, at his hair. He pulls down his bottom lip to inspect the teeth there. He holds up a finger and retreats to his cart, rummaging in the covered back. As he searches, the villagers scowl at the traveller. He looks away, ashamed.
In a flash, the magician presents what he’s been looking for. The best word the traveller can come up with is: hat. It’s certainly designed to be worn on the head, anyway. It’s shaggy and animal-like and covered in twists of plantlife and patches of fur. The magician plonks it on the traveller’s head and laughs. A look of recognition appears on the faces of some villagers; they laugh too. The magician is rather old, up close. You can see wrinkles around his jaw. His hands, the travellers sees, are gnarled as they begin to clap. The villagers start to clap too, a quick tempo picked up from the magician’s hand. They form a circle with the traveller in the middle. He revolves slowly, facing them all: their hands clapping, their eyes watching him expectantly.
What else can he do but dance?
Now all is well with the world. Now the villagers understand the role he plays. He jigs around the flattened earth of their square and they visibly relax. He is no threat; he is no enemy. He is only a fool, a clown come unstuck from his costumes. For a few minutes, he dances, enjoying the kindly gaze coming from the magician and the villagers, then he decides to up the ante. He can feel a potential building in his legs, then realises it: a pratfall, a sight gag, an exaggerated slip on a pile of effluence and he goes tumbling through the air to land upon his back. Everyone loses it. They howl and cheer and it’s the magician who helps the traveller up, wiping tears from his eyes. The traveller can’t remember ever feeling so good.
They seem sad to see him go, the villagers. He waves goodbye to them as he departs their home on the magician’s cart. He wonders if anyone will throw him a garland, but they don’t.
Now and then, as they travel, the magician speaks to him. He points towards things on the horizon, but they aren’t especially interesting. Squat hills, lank trees, certain shapes of cloud. Nevertheless, the magician is good company. He’s adept at setting camp for the night, producing decent fare from the smoked meat and tubers he stores in the back of the cart. The traveller is worried that the magician will try to seduce him on the road, but all he does is drink heavily from his flagon and let his robe fall open as he sleeps.
In a few days, they arrive at a larger conurbation than the one they left behind. The magician is recognised at its gates and is allowed to drive his cart into the heart of the settlement. The traveller watches his performance from the cart. He lays out cards on a little wooden trestle, presumably making predictions with them. He performs tricks, such as making a ceramic frog vanish from a cup, before producing it from an onlooker’s pocket. After the magic is done, he ushers the traveller out of the cart, prodding his back to get him moving. The traveller can guess what’s expected of him: another jig, another tumble. He obliges; there follows a great deal of hilarity from the assembled crowd. They throw tokens onto the earth at his feet, tokens which the magician hurriedly scoops up.
They repeat the performance at countless other towns. Wherever they stop, the traveller is considered the belle of the ball.
A few years pass. The traveller grows comfortable in his friendship with the magician. He’s kept well-fed and well-watered and his skills in dance and buffoonery grow. He learns a high-legged marching hop that earns them heaps of currency. His clowning is second-to-none; he’s able to pass wind on cue and his gurn must be seen to be believed. Perhaps the only thing he misses is conversation. All this time in this past and he hasn’t exchanged a single word with another human being. At times, he thinks he recognises certain consonant sounds, but nothing with enough weight to build upon. He gets by with points and grunts. He’s fluent in gestures of the hand. It’s only when he’s sure that magician is asleep that he dares to voice modern English, whispering the lyrics of his favourite records to himself in the night.
‘Well shake it up, baby, now,’ he hushes into the straw of his pillow. ‘Twist and shout, yeah. Twist and shout.’
Such are his talents, that at one fateful stop their show is attended by a young warlord. The individual is flanked by guards and wears lavish furs; this is how the traveller recognises his status. The townsfolk wait for the warlord’s reaction before they laugh or throw out their coins. Luckily, the warlord basically pisses his pants when the traveller gets his head stuck in a cooper’s barrel; they make bank.
He rarely thinks about his old life, but the traveller does nurse an ambition to return home. He suspects that, if he were able to get back to the original location, the window might still be open. There was nothing in the texts to suggest the window would be impermanent. It’s something to hold on to, anyway; hopefully the magician’s route is circular and one day they’ll revisit the site of his travel. That desire has kept him sane these years on the road, and it’s the first thing he thinks of after realising he’s been gifted, or sold, to the warlord.
The magician doesn’t even say farewell. One minute he’s there, the next he’s gone. Suddenly, the traveller is being pulled along by the warlord’s men, struggling to keep the big hat on his head as he’s jerked towards the warlord’s keep. There, he’s given a room of his own, a comfortable cell with a bunk to sleep on and a table with some carved figures. How will he return now, he wonders. How will he get back to the place he arrived at? The question plagues him for a while, but the bunk is much more comfortable than the magician’s camp and soon he is asleep.
In the warlord’s keep, he’s expected to do two shows a day, sometimes extra if the warlord has guests. This is more than he’s used to, but without the drudgery of life on the road, these additional duties are negligible. He has free time now, space in his day to wander the keep and its environs. He finds he can get away with a lot. No one minds if he steals food; they look the other way if he honks someone’s ass. At his shows, he can disrespect the warlord as much as he likes—aping his gait, even breaking wind in the warlord’s lap—and everyone finds it hilarious. At times he thinks: can life get any better than this?
More years pass. He keeps the warlord entertained and is a celebrity of the growing settlement. Everyone recognises the fool in the outsized hat. He is greeted as friend in any room he enters, slapped on the back and given as much mead as he can drink. At times, he begins to doubt the reality of his old existence. Could it really be true, that he travelled through time? It doesn’t seem reasonable, not now. He looks around and sees the faces of the townsfolk, the happy laugh of the warlord: those were real. Cities and medicine and plumbing and jazz: those were surely fantasies. At times, he reckons he must’ve been dropped as a baby. That was why he couldn’t talk, why he carried these images of men golfing on the moon and teenagers landing kickflips. A vision of lips supping brown water from a bright red cylinder, accompanied by the sound ‘Always the Real Thing’: the rambling of a damaged mind, surely.
As he approaches old age, he finds he can’t clown as well as he used to. His sight gags grow laboured and slow; he avoids his flatulence routine for obvious reasons. He does his best to hide it though, fearful that the warlord will inflict bygone, unsentimental euthanasia upon his antique jester. However, one day, to his surprise, his employer visits him in his room. This hasn’t happened before. The warlord is aged too, well into his middle years, but still powerful. He sits at the foot of the traveller’s bed and they share a moment together. The warlord meets his eye and the traveller feels something vast pass between them. He’s led by the hand, out of the keep and towards a hut at the village’s centre. His new home, decked out with everything necessary for a comfortable retirement.
He doesn’t wear the hat anymore, but he’s still recognised and well-liked as he wanders the village in his dotage. They look after him, the townsfolk. They keep an eye on him and watch he doesn’t slip into the moors at night. His mind is fuzzy now. As he wanders, he babbles, unaware of where the sounds come from and clueless as to their danger.
‘Show me the money,’ he yells.
‘Have a break,’ he murmurs. ‘Have a Kit Kat.’
A high piercing falsetto: ‘I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here?’
The townsfolk shake their head at his nonsense rambling: an entertainer never truly retires.
After he dies, they bury the traveller among the barrows of the warlord’s family. They put his hat into the ground with him, along with the shredded remains of what he brought: his running shoes, his cords, his wallet. They perform the standard ceremony for him, burning the usual herbs and making the appropriate glyphs in the earth. There’s genuine grief at his passing. Everyone remembers the fool and his performances; some folk’s earliest memories were his legendary shows. The warlord never quite recovers and takes a spear to his liver the following spring, dying shortly afterwards. The magician, seriously decrepit, comes through town on one last tour and hears the news. He visits the site of the traveller’s grave and pours out a measure from his cracked flagon, remembering the good old times of their illustrious heyday.
A few short miles away, on a lonely hillside, the traveller’s window closes, unobserved. It will be some time before it reopens once more.