Janus

Following eight hours spent in silent meditation Janus arose from her lotus position and flowed easily to stand upon her bare feet. In the same fluid motion she grasped the hilt of the ceremonial dragon-sword which had lain untouched on the ground before her through the night as an aide-memoire.

From her vantage point, high on a sand dune, she surveyed what had once been a major British seaport vital for trade with the Americas, both North and South, and much of the Western Hemisphere. In a way it was apt: the River Mersey had reverted to the original roots of its name and become a ‘mørk sø, or  "dirty puddle".

She spun a rapid half-circle flashing the sword above her head and touching the first two fingers of her left hand to the tip of the blade as she stopped, facing north with the dried-out riverbed at her back. She gazed on what had once been the commercial nerve-centre of Liverpool. Was it Fate, or just a cruel joke, that the only buildings of any size which had not been destroyed, vandalised, or plundered to jerrybuild housing for the survivors of the war were the Twin Towers of the two Cathedrals, at opposite ends of a street named Hope .....?

She sighed, and casually flashed the sword in a tight, fast, upwards arc, slicing off the tip of a cactus. As it dropped she speared it on the point of the blade. The telltale lens of a camera concealed in the flesh of the plant was revealed. With a scream of defiance she shook it off the sword to the sand at her feet: dropping her trousers she defecated upon the offending instrument.

"Bet you can't see too much now!" she howled. The camera was completely buried. After a few futile clicks the automatic shutter whirred into silence.

The blade flashed once more, taking an inch-thick slice of peotl cactus from the top of another plant. This was swiftly trimmed, and the central flesh chewed and sucked greedily for the refreshing moisture it contained. Water from taps and similar sources had long since ceased to be safe drinking. Having extracted the liquid, she spat out the bitter, stringy vegetable matter which remained. The mind-altering properties of the mescaline present in the cactus was little more than an ‘added bonus'. After all, there were no longer any police or drug counsellors to preach abstention on health or moral grounds ....

Howling defiance at an unnamed, unseen adversary she patrolled the sand dunes, slashing certain cacti, chosen seemingly at random, ignoring others. Every time the blade cut into a plant it revealed a surveillance device of some sort: most often a miniature camera, occasionally a radio mike. Every device was treated with even-handed violence, smashed beyond any possibility of repair or reconstruction.

Apparently satisfied that there was no further monitoring device in the immediate vicinity she returned to the dune upon which she had spent the night.

"You still want to watch me?" she screamed to her unseen adversary. She paused for a few seconds, head slightly cocked as if listening to a reply inaudible to the human ear.

She pointed dramatically to a ruined building further along the bank, above what had once been the river's high-water mark.

"People used to go there and pay to watch me: I was that damned good!" she howled.

"You don't believe me? You want me to prove it? Too effin' right I'll prove it ....!

Climate change and nuclear winters notwithstanding, there was still a fairly dependable power supply, though much of it was locally supplied by windfarms built in the estuary back in the 2000s. The National Grid was now no more than a distant memory from a time before the War which had effectively ended All Wars - though not in the sense intended by the poets of the early Twentieth Century.

The amphitheatre of the Kings Dock was still more or less intact, and having nothing else to do Janus found herself there most days. She climbed onto the stage and lay her sword to one side, opening up the well-worn, much travelled case containing her favourite Richenbacker guitar. She flicked the mains switch on the PA system and was gratified to hear the steady hum which confirmed that there was power available today.

It mattered not to Janus that there was no audience: in truth, she couldn't care less. She played for her own gratification, and because there really wasn't any alternative form of entertainment.

Jacking her instrument into the full-size amplifier bank at the rear of the stage she began to lose herself in her music. Chord sequences and riffs flowed in ever-increasing complexities from her fingers: a frown of concentration appeared on her brow as she strode about the stage, sometimes singing a line or a verse, even a full song from beginning to end. Just as often, she was content simply to play, and listen to the music crashing about the empty auditorium.

It happened during the instrumental ‘break' towards the end of the Queen classic "Bohemian Rhapsody". Janus backed off a few steps, approaching the speakers, experimenting with feedback effects. She screamed in agony as her casually placed sword sliced through the umbilical cord connecting her guitar to the amplifiers and a charge of several thousand volts flowed through her, cooking her flesh, fusing her fingertips to the frets.

Swimming through a haze of pain, she sensed unfamiliar voices.

"Lucky to be alive ...... no ID ........ electric shock ....."

"She's coming round."

With a great effort she opens her eyes. Four, five faces, none of them known. All dressed in white, including a woman with an unfamiliar headcovering.

"Wh - where .......... ?"

The woman poured water into a glass and bent to help her drink from it. Remembering the disease and contamination she had come to associate with drinking any water which she had not personally collected from a clear stream, she tried to refuse. Firmly but irresistibly, her head was held, her lips moistened. A few drops of water slid past her lips, and she gulped greedily for more despite her fears.

"This is a hospital: you've had a massive electric shock, but you're safe."

She nodded. So many people, and all in one room!

One of the men glanced at his wrist. He caught her gaze.

"It's almost ten o'clock: that's ten a.m. Monday 16^th June , in the year of the Lord 1925 to be exact ............. "

Janus was too shocked to respond immediately. As far as she could tell, this was almost exactly a century before ‘her' time in Liverpool's post-nuclear apocalyptic future, but the information she hoarded jealously. In a society where currency, and paper notes with a  ‘promise to pay' had become worthless, possessions meant status and knowledge was power. Every other survivor she had met guarded what specialist knowledge they possessed, to be used as a barter tool, trading for things they needed to survive.

"Can you tell us your name?"

She hesitated, thinking swiftly, but could see no advantage in withholding this basic piece of information.

"Janus"

"Janice? Can you remember your surname, family name?  Is there someone we can contact?"

"No, no contact  ..... can't remember  ............. "

(after all, if the date was right, nobody she knew had even been born yet!)

But that wasn't true, she could remember, but what she could remember were things which hadn't yet happened .... and there were other things.............

For instance:

In 1925 nobody had even dreamed of the genius of John Lennon.

In 1925, a megalomaniac housepainter known as Adolf Hitler had yet to make his mark with anything more deadly than a distemper brush ....

And in 1925 she, Janus (or Janice? That was how the doctor had spelt it on the card over her bed: for some reason, she preferred that spelling and decided to use it from now on).

Anyway, she had been presented with an opportunity to Give Peace A Chance...........

The first thing she had to do, she decided, was to ‘acquire' a surname, some sort of ‘family history' (which in her case would not be "history" in the true sense of the word) and with these basics to establish some sort of "street cred" she could depend on once she was discharged from hospital .............

Her memories were intact, which pleased her but did not particularly surprise her: after all, she reasoned, they were, after all, her memories, weren't they, and nobody else's business! She might have been rather more surprised if she'd had any medical knowledge at all, but this was truly a case in which ignorance was bliss.

By feigning total amnesia for a couple of days and requesting all the local and national newspapers she could get during her stay on the ‘Observation Ward' she managed to build up a picture of society. Her foreknowledge of events which were still mercifully hidden over the temporal horizon gave her an added advantage. She began to see the Shape of Things to Come, like Scrooge and the visions shown him by the last of his  visitors. Her reaction was very similar to Scrooge's: she liked not what she saw.

Her instinct for survival had sparked the germ of an idea, and on her second day in ‘Obs' she found what she needed in the Notices of the Liverpool Echo.

The O'Neill family consisting of Mother, Father and seven children (including one Janice O'Neill, only 2 years younger than herself) had been amongst those lost, feared dead when a ferry bringing a large number of families fleeing the Potato Famine in Ireland had been lost off Holyhead as it approached Liverpool. Some survivors had been picked up, but the whole of the O'Neill family seemed to have been lost, and a commemorative service was planned for upwards of 150 missing passengers.

As far as she could tell, the dates tallied with the time she had appeared on the Mersey banks - soaked to the skin, and close to an electric sub-station on the Dockland Light Railway, she'd been told: this seemed to be accepted as the reason for her having suffered an electric shock, and she was canny enough not to try to disprove this misconception.

It had the advantage of conveniently explaining her lack of luggage or personal ID papers. In the Britain of the Twenties, DNA was not an option, and the only fingerprint records kept were those of people with criminal records, so those of the ‘real' Janice O'Neill would not have been available.

The one thing which might have presented a problem would have been the advent of a close relative to welcome her back from the dead: this would have exposed her as a fraud. The gods were kind: no relative came forward. Soon after being discharged Janus had a full set of ID papers stating her to be Janice O'Neill, spinster of the parish of Allerton ...

She sensed that time was short, and threw herself immediately into a frenzy of activity.

Her musical skills and knowledge were unabated, but she lacked funds to replace the instruments she had lost. Two day jobs went a long way towards this, and she spent every spare moment rehearsing and playing, but as far as possible from others. As yet, she felt, the world was not ready for John Lennon's lyrics, either standing alone or combined with Paul McCartney's musical influence...........

The Richenbacker was a serious loss and in 1925 it was irreplaceable, but soon she managed to obtain the best available electric guitar her limited funding could purchase. By the end of the year she had moved twice, each time to more isolated (and therefore cheaper) lodgings further out along the waterfront but still served by mains electricity.

Her own musical talents were inevitably being honed and refined at the same time. By the turn of the year, she had squared her conscience, accepting that she was not plagiarising Lennon's music but was actually arranging it and producing music of her own which could genuinely be termed ‘original'. Word spreads; sooner than she would have in all honesty liked, she had a reputation as a musician, and began to attract followers and fans - though the latter term was something of an anachronism as far as mainstream UK music at the time was concerned.

"Ladies and Gentlemen! On behalf of the Neptune Theatre, which has always brought new and innovative music to Liverpool, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Miss Janice O'Neill who will entertain us this evening with her own compositions for voice and electric guitar."

"Thank you. My first  piece is called "Omnes Pacem Amant" and shows how the guitar may be used as accompaniment for a variety of musical styles, from Gregorian plainchant - hence the Latin title, meaning "All that is Needed is Love" - up to and including popular music of today .......... "

"Last night another star was born at a theatre here in Liverpool. Your local Echo office has been inundated with telegrams and telephone calls from all the major national newspapers with requests for more information about Miss Janice O'Neill and her unique talent ........... "

As the ripples from a pebble cast into a placid pool spread outwards, so the twin concepts of Love and Peace travelled wider from day to day, becoming firmly established as the mind-set of Europe.

The vitriolic rantings of a failed painter and decorator achieved a brief notoriety in Germany when he became an object of savage lampoon on the front page of Der Spiegl. Many of his countrymen breathed a sigh of relief when he was eventually led away to a padded cell where he remained for a few brief years until his death (from a surfeit of choler, according to the claims of one of the less dependable German tabloids).

Janice O'Neill's success came at a tragic personal price. Her unique musical talent and the style of her compositions had made it necessary for her to invest more time (and more money) in better instruments, bigger and more powerful amplification systems, larger venues and correspondingly more and more technicians, support staff, managers, agents...

She found herself in so much demand that she had no private life at all, and was prevented from touring, taking her message of Love and Peace to all and sundry by the logistics involved in producing musical performances. Increasingly frustrated by this unexpected drawback caused by her success she became moody and reclusive, turning her back on the world and seeking her own company, preferring the life of a total recluse.

She took to meditating in solitude, as Lennon had done, and investigated the precepts of transcendentalism. She acquired a ceremonial dragon-sword, which she claimed helped her to focus her attention on a single physical object when she needed to do so.

One evening she called together the few staff who normally worked at her purpose-built amphitheatre in Liverpool Docks, saying she wished for total privacy and giving them all the night off. She was seen to enter the theatre, carrying her dragon-sword and a case containing her favourite guitar: they heard her lock the door behind her before they respected her wishes and left for the evening.

The following morning, after several attempts had been made to call to Miss O'Neill through the still-locked door, it was broken down. Miss O'Neill was nowhere to be found: neither were her dragon-sword, or her guitar. The auditorium had the distinct ozone-like smell of electrical discharge in the air. This was quickly aired out, but there was no evidence of any fire, or the charring which might have resulted from a random lightning strike.

Theorists have argued for years about what might be the consequences of two objects attempting to occupy the same space simultaneously .....