Just One Damned Thing After Another (The Chronicles of St Mary's, #1)

by Jodi Taylor

The pay is terrible and the conditions are worse, but it's a wonderful place to work – they have some talented people there.

‘Go straight up the drive and through the front door. You can’t miss it.’ A bit over-optimistic there, I thought. I once got lost on a staircase.

One of his expansively waving arms caught a beaker of something murky that could easily have been embalming fluid, the Elixir of Life, or Socrates’ hemlock and knocked it off the workbench to shatter on the floor. Everyone stepped back. The liquid bubbled, hissed, and looked as if it was eating through the floor. I could see many other such damp patches. ‘Oh, my goodness! Jamie! Jamie! Jamie, my boy, just nip downstairs, will you? My compliments to Dr Dowson and tell him it's coming through his ceiling again!’

‘You name it, we’ve got it somewhere,’ said Doctor Dowson, the Librarian and Archivist who appeared to be wearing a kind of sou’wester. ‘At least until that old fool upstairs blows us all sky high. Do you know we sometimes have to wear hard hats? I keep telling Edward he should house him and his entire team of madmen on the other side of Hawking if we’re to have any chance of survival at all!’

Thinking carefully is something that happens to other people.

‘Think of History as a living organism, with its own defence mechanisms. History will not permit anything to change events that have already taken place. If History thinks, even for one moment, that that is about to occur, then it will, without hesitation, eliminate the threatening virus. Or historian, as we like to call them.

We entered a large foyer area with another set of big doors opposite. ‘Blast doors,’ he said, casually. Of course, what was I thinking? Every historical research centre needs blast doors.

We finished with a tour of the grounds, which were very pleasant if you discounted the odd scorch mark on the grass and the blue swans. Even as I opened my mouth to ask, there was a small bang from the second floor and the windows rattled. ‘Hold on,’ said Chief Farrell. ‘I’m duty officer this week and I want to see if the fire alarms go off.’ They didn’t. ‘That's good, isn’t it?’ I said. He sighed. ‘No, it just means they’ve taken the batteries out again.’

They say owners get to look like their dogs but at St Mary's it was a case of the trainees getting to look like their institute. St Mary's was shabby and battered and after a few weeks, so were we.

Regular soft explosions from R & D didn’t help with the preservation of the building. One memorable day, early in our training, Professor Rapson put his head round the door and said, mildly, ‘If it's not too much bother, may I recommend you evacuate the building right now, please.’ Chief Farrell paused from revealing the secrets of the universe and said, ‘Right, everyone out. Immediately. No, not the door, Miss Nagley, use the windows. Move!’

Now I got to know the security section rather well. As well as you usually get to know people who have their hands all over you five times a week. I suspect there are married couples who have less intimate physical contact than we did. I met Big Dave Murdoch, Guthrie's number two, a real gentle giant, calm and polite. ‘Good morning, Miss Maxwell. Today, I’m going to rob, rape, and strangle you. Shall we begin?’

Major Guthrie threw down his clipboard and walked off. ‘Oh dear,’ I said to a watching Murdoch. ‘No, you’re OK. He's gone round the corner where no one can see him laugh.’

I liked Tim Peterson. He wasn’t nearly as bad as Kalinda Black who was tall, blonde, and terrifying. She looked like a Disney Princess, spoke with a broad Manchester accent, and, rumour had it, drank the blood of newly qualified trainees to keep herself young.

‘By the latrines!’ ‘It's the romance in my soul. See you.’

‘I mean it. Any sign of heroics and I’ll kick your arses from here to Dr Bairstow's office, pausing only to pick up your P45s on the way. Is that clearly understood?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said, because that's what you always say, even if your head's just fallen off, but clambered to my feet.

She glared at him but he only smiled. Did he not know how close to death he was? Mind, he was built like a large brick shithouse. Two large brick shithouses actually. In fact, he was so big it was possible he distorted time and space.

‘Miss Maxwell, Box 5. You are not five feet seven inches tall and never will be. Live with it and correct your paperwork.

Exactly thirty minutes later we stood outside the door. Time is important in our organisation. If you can’t even get to an appointment in your own building on time, they argue, you’re not going to have much luck trying to find the Battle of Hastings.

The ground never opens up and swallows you when you need it to.

I was roused hours later by Doctor Dowson, part of whose job was to ensure historians didn’t lose all track of time and become welded to the furniture.

Each day I went out, did what had to be done, and came back. I talked to the photo. I talked to myself. I think I even chatted briefly once with a rock.

I spent the last two days heaving all the kit back to Three. That bloke who said, ‘Give me a lever and a place to stand and I can move the world,’ obviously never stood up to his knees in a Cretaceous swamp, trying to manoeuvre a refrigerator-sized packing crate uphill.

The reason I can’t deal with sympathy is because I never bloody get any.

‘I’m better. I was … sad … when he died. Then angry with him, but now I’m back to sad again.’ I smiled. ‘It's because I’m shallow. I can only do one emotion at a time and even that not for very long.’

‘Do I look all right?’ ‘Not in any way. You look wanton and dishevelled and knickerless and outrageously desirable. I’m a lost man.’

‘Are you two OK?’ he asked. ‘Because you don’t look it. Bloody hell, Max, sit down will you. You too, Chief. I think you’re both in shock.’ ‘No, we’re fine.’ ‘You crashed the Boss's Bentley, Max. I’d develop shock if I were you; and severe internal injuries. It's the only thing that will save you.’

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘There's always tomorrow night.’ But there wasn’t. It only goes to show – take your eye off the ball and Fate, Destiny, History, call it what you will, steps up and just pisses all over your chips.

‘Jesus,’ whispered Dieter, ‘I am never going anywhere with you again, Max. Ever. I’m not even using the dining room if you’re there. You’re a fucking disaster! ‘

Shouts of ‘Cover your eyes in there!’ would possibly have been more helpful if they had been uttered before impact. Still, let's not be picky.

There's a protocol for this sort of thing. Certain information should be broadcast calmly and clearly, giving location, routes, warnings, number and disposition of rescuers – all that sort of thing. I’d done it scores of times in simulations and now, now that it really mattered, now that lives depended on it, I couldn’t remember a bloody word. Worried that my voice would let me down as badly as my memory, I switched off the music and opened my mouth. ‘Gooooooood morning, St Mary's! This is your early morning wake-up call.

One last, lung-bursting effort, we all fell through the door together and the mission ended in the traditional St Mary's manner with a panic-stricken tangle of limbs on the floor and everyone yelling for the door.

I didn’t work for him any more and for a brief, suicidal moment considered asserting my independence and remaining standing. Good sense and cowardice prevailed.

We were all shunted off to Sick Bay, even Barclay. Apparently, there's something in the Geneva Convention or the Human Rights Thingy about leaving people lying around bleeding. I was going to require some convincing.

‘Dr Dowson is the best person for that,’ said Professor Rapson. ‘He should also supply us with a list of desirable scrolls, just in case we have time to pick and choose, rather than the approved St Mary's method of just grabbing anything and running like hell.’

‘Peterson, stop writing on the walls. Don’t you know this is a listed building?’

‘Professor Rapson, I believe you’ve been to Alexandria.’ He had too, cunningly disguised as an absent-minded academic. Not much disguise needed really. We’d just wrapped him in a sheet, wound him up, and pointed him at Alexandria.

You can say this about historians, we may be the tea-drenched disaster-magnets of St Mary's but bloody hell, can we think quickly when we have to.

He did not manage to set fire to himself in any way. No screaming was involved. No alarms went off. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘That was dull.’

The Christians, showing a level of intelligence not normally associated with the religiously fervent, had pushed off.

He smiled. ‘It went OK then?’ ‘How can you tell?’ ‘You’re all here. No one's on fire. The pods are intact. There's no screaming. An intelligent and perceptive man can read these small signs.’ I nodded. ‘Do you think I’ll ever meet one?’

Twenty-four hours later, I lay in the blessed cool of Number Six, along with all the other walking wounded. They’d found my arm. It was between my shoulder and my wrist, exactly where it should have been. I’d been lying on it. I felt a bit silly.

‘Don’t you come near me you devious, double-dealing, underhand, rat-bastard. I’m going to gut you with a rusty breadknife and then stake your honey-covered arse over an anthill in the noonday sun.’

It was just like us -noisy and gloriously tasteless.

In the distance, I could hear shouting. And screaming. Familiar sounds. St Mary's thundered past on their way to make a crisis considerably worse. It was nice to be home.

‘Oh,’ said the Professor. ‘That's not a problem. It's here,’ and he pulled the priceless document from under his jacket, wrapped in a Tesco carrier bag. The Boss closed his eyes briefly.