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“What have you got there?”
“A kaleidoscope.”
“And what can you see through that thing?”
“The future.”
The first future Toby sees with Dr Laing in it isn’t too bad. He doesn’t even see it, really, it’s just the sound of Charlotte’s too-loud ‘quiet’ voice saying something he can’t make out (though maybe he could if he actually wanted to), answered by a lower mumble of more words Toby doesn’t quite hear. It’s a brief non-conversation and it ends with the door of the flat closing with a soft thud and the scrape of the chain that keeps the rest of the world safely outside where it belongs.
He recognises the second voice from the night when he saw too much on the balcony, but thankfully doesn’t ever hear it again so late at night.
Charlotte’s picky about men. Not picky enough, in Toby’s mind, but neither she nor anyone else has ever asked for his opinion on the subject.
In one of the less picky futures, the voice becomes a regular night-time visitor for a few months before Charlotte changes her mind and stops answering the door to it.
She holds a finger to her lips to keep Toby quiet, not that she needs to. He rolls his eyes and goes back to his room to take the radio apart so that he can put it together again.
“Toby! If you’re not ready in five minutes you’re making your own way to school!”
Toby has no intention of going to school and Robert has no intention of driving him there, and both of them know this because the same lack of intentions happens every morning in this future.
Charlotte can sleep in now that she has backup in this daily battle - the fact that her reinforcement always loses makes no difference to that, since she only rarely won it herself and so nothing’s really being changed here, except perhaps Toby’s future. Education is important, now more than ever. If you can’t get a job then you can’t go on strike and then you can’t get on television to give your opinion on the pressing issues of the day like industrial action.
Toby has opinions on many of the day’s issues: the main one being that he isn’t going to school and even if he was he’d go on the bus.
“Are you going to eat that or not? You shouldn’t be so picky, there are starving children on the fifteenth floor who'd kill for such a nice bit of dog.”
“I don’t want a stepdad,” says Toby, which will make no difference to this future.
Charlotte sighs and lights her cigarette. “You can’t have everything you want, Toby. You’ll need to learn that someday,” she says, a number of years after she first taught him that lesson.
He stares at her until she changes to another tactic. “I’ll buy you something. What would you like? How about a telescope? You could spy on people in the other towers.”
“I don’t want to spy on them, they’re boring.”
Defeated again, Charlotte attacks as she retreats. “Well, so you are you but they don’t complain about it.”
Maybe they do. It’s not like either of them's been out and about recently to ask anyone about it.
“I don’t want a stepdad,” says Toby, which will make no difference to this future.
Robert sighs and twists the cap off the vodka bottle to pour himself a refill. “Tough shit, you’re getting one.”
“I’m not changing my name to yours.” This is an important thing to state, in case anyone gets any ideas about making Toby into a different person.
“I didn’t offer it to you.”
“You’re really crap,” observes Toby. “None of this would be happening if you hadn’t got Charlotte pregnant. You should have kept your trousers on and then we’d both be a lot happier.”
“Well, what’s done is done.”
Toby watches his unwanted new parent until he judges him drunk enough for the right answer to the question before he asks, “Can I have a drink?”
He gets a scowl, then a shrug. “I don’t see why not. How old are you anyway?”
“A hundred and seventy.”
This time he gets a laugh while his first ever glass of vodka is pushed across the table to him. “You lying little shit.”
This time Toby sets the flat on fire, deliberately.
He’s a very troubled child, having seen much more than he should have in such a short life.
Sometimes he thinks Charlotte should get a boyfriend, but he knows he would hate having to share her with anyone so he leaves that suggestion in his own head where it won’t cause any trouble.
“Are you going to school today?” she asks, because she’s supposed to make at least a token effort to get him to do that.
“Maybe tomorrow,” he answers, not meaning it. He digs into the box of cornflakes in search of the plastic aeroplane promised by the packaging.
It’s quite a good one. Not the worst on offer, anyway. It’s yellow.
“Is your mother in?”
“No,” he lies.
“When will you be back?” he asks, watching Charlotte’s reflection as she puts on more mascara.
“After your bedtime. I’ve told Laura not to let you stay up late, so don’t tell her I said you could because she’ll know you’re lying.”
“Can I have a kaleidoscope?”
“Aren’t you a bit old for that sort of thing?”
“Aren’t you a bit old for going on dates?”
Charlotte rolls her eyes, mascara making the whole thing more dramatic. “I’m only going one floor down, it’s not a date.”
“Are you lonely?” he asks.
“No,” she lies, returning to the task in the mirror.
She comes home well after bedtime, at two in the morning. Toby pretends to be asleep when she looks in on him.
Toby peers down from the balcony as his mother laughs. She looks happy but she’s very good at making her face tell lies so he can’t be sure if she really is. That’s one of the worst things about Charlotte, and Toby hasn’t yet learned how to do the trick himself, which is even worse.
She hasn’t spotted him this time. He spies on her for a bit to try and catch her face between expressions, but she’s too quick for him. That’s another trick he needs to learn.
He goes back inside when she kisses Dr Laing.
Toby’s dad tells him all about the building. All the secrets, all the good stuff. It’s the architecture of the future, one day everyone will live in a place like this.
Toby’s dad lives in a white room on the roof of the building, out of reach of all the little people below like Charlotte and himself. It’s a very nice building and Toby’s dad is very proud of it. It’s tall and strong and it’s going to stand for decades as proof of his genius.
Toby’s dad gives Toby a kaleidoscope, claiming it will show him the future, which is an obvious lie even to a child.
Toby leaves a smudged grey fingerprint on his father’s plans, halfway up the unfinished fifth tower, and is never invited back up to the roof.
“Will you be alright on your own if I nip downstairs for half an hour?”
“Are you going there for sex?”
“You don’t even know what that is.” Charlotte can be quite optimistic, sometimes, and has a poor understanding of how thin the walls and the ceilings are in this building.
“I’ll be alright for half an hour,” he tells her. “Don’t get pregnant,” he adds, in case she has an equally poor understanding of how much Toby doesn’t want a little brother or sister.
She’s gone for well over an hour, but she’s not pregnant when she comes home so he doesn’t mind.
“Who was that at the door?”
“Nobody important,” he says, truthfully.
“Toby! If you’re not out in five minutes you’ll miss the bus!”
Toby has no intention of going to school and Robert knows that the bus will be well on its way to the next stop already, if not beyond that. It’s a little play they act out every morning before Robert goes to work and Toby stays at home all day.
The fact that he doesn’t care whether or not Toby actually goes to school is the best thing about Toby’s new dad. If he has to have a new parent then this is probably the best option. Someone responsible would be difficult to get along with. There’d be a dim future ahead of him if something like that happened.
When Charlotte returns from her visit to the doctor in the flat below, Toby asks, “Can I have a kaleidoscope?”
“Aren’t you a bit old for that sort of thing?” She takes her heels off and flexes her toes, happy to be free of their constraint.
“It’s an investment in the future.” This is something he heard on the radio. It makes her laugh.
“And what do you want to be in that future of yours? An engine driver? An astronaut?”
“Better than you.”