As deictic expressions are frequently egocentric, the center often consists of the speaker at the time and place of the utterance and, additionally, the place in the discourse and relevant social factors.

When Amy heard the classroom door open at the end of the school day she kept her focus on the surface of her desk. The unexpected visitor was likely to be Lydia, who didn’t do well with eye contact.

‘Miss?’

In her peripheral vision Amy could just make out the dishevelled dark curls that framed the girl’s ashen, spot-ridden face. She noticed the crevices that had worn into her forehead, the eyebrows tensed above deep-set, troubled eyes.

‘Yes, Lydia?’ Amy fixed her attention on the English language worksheets she was marking.

‘We’re making time machines in History, Miss.’

‘Time machines,’ repeated Amy, in the slow, deep tone that kept Lydia calm. In the subsequent silence she tried to recall the details of Gareth Jacobs’s most recent pedagogical experiment.

‘I can’t go back in time, Miss.’

Gareth wouldn’t have anticipated that Lydia would be troubled by this project. Nobody could have. None of the teaching staff knew quite what to do with Lydia. She’d mystified the specialists.

Even Amy, the only teacher Lydia had ever opened up to (if these regular after-school interactions counted as ‘opening up’), could rarely put her finger on what specifically triggered Lydia’s manifold anxieties. She certainly couldn’t understand what was troubling her about this particular project, and why it had only occurred to her to worry about it now.

She pictured the child-constructed cardboard monstrosities that were currently cluttering Gareth’s classroom. She caught a glimpse last week of pupils fastening flimsy foil pie plates onto the tops of the packing crates Gareth had somehow acquired. Satellite dishes, she guessed. By now they’d have moved on to the interior design stage of the project. She pictured dashboards sticky with glitter and glue, plastic dials repurposed from board game spinners, which the time travellers could adjust to set their course in their journey to the past.

Lydia’s hands covered her face now. She looked out through the gaps in her fingers.

Amy imagined those same fingers positioning a red plastic arrow to point toward some date from the Year 7 History curriculum—1066, or what year was the Gunpowder Plot? 1605. She wondered which historical period would trouble Lydia most. Did they do slavery in Year 7?

‘You can’t go back in time?’

She rifled through the language papers to take the pressure off the child. They were grammar worksheets, designed to help the pupils conceptualise tense and aspect. Her own pupils had completed the task complacently, if unenthusiastically, colouring in expansive rectangles on a timeline for past progressive and restrained, no-nonsense black dots for past simple. I was minding my own business when you interrupted me. The arrow on the timeline pointed backward, to what had come before the present moment.

None of her children had been troubled by anything about the exercise, not the linear illustration of time, not the leftward pointing arrow illustrating the infinite ineffability of time gone by.

‘Miss, if I go to the past, I won’t be there.’

Amy shifted her gaze from the grammar papers to the anguish on Lydia’s face, and it hit her. The other pupils did not worry about time travel because they had no experience of the precariousness of their own existence. 

So rooted were they in their solid notions of selfhood that they could not see it: any point on the timeline to the left of 2010 indexed a world that ruthlessly refused to contain them.

What could she say to Lydia now that would relieve her of the oppressive instability of her being?

‘How do you think time machines work?’ she asked.

‘You get inside them, and they travel to the past.’

‘Is that the way Mr Jacobs explained it?’

The fingers moved from Lydia’s face to below her chin. ‘I can’t remember,’ she admitted.

That was fortunate.

‘Time machines don’t actually travel through time,’ Amy said, committing her own words to memory so she could brief Gareth later. ‘The way they work is by establishing a deictic centre.’

‘A deictic-’ 

‘Centre,’ Amy confirmed. ‘The time machine produces a sort of force field around you that says you are here now. That keeps you safe and secure. Centred, right?’

Lydia dropped her hands to her sides. ‘So how do you get to the past?’ she asked.

‘You don’t,’ said Amy. ‘Once you’re in your deictic centre, you bring the past to you. You sort of reel it in, like a kite.’

Amy watched this explanation lock into place.

‘OK, Miss,’ Lydia said, and she’d left the room before Amy could say more.

For many long moments Amy found herself staring at the space that had once contained Lydia.

She felt a gripping sensation in her chest, like a fist clutching a reel of lengthening string, the kite flying farther and farther away, a black dot against an insatiable sky.

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it.