An utterly charming and heart-warming love story and the perfect tonic for difficult times. Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from David Barnett’s Same Time, Same Place, which is out June 7th 2022!
Daisy is the night security guard at the Manchester Museum of Social History. She takes her job very seriously, protecting the museum from teenage troublemakers.
Nate works the day shift, though he’d be more suited as a museum guide the way he chats with the visitors. Daisy doesn’t approve: how does he find it so easy to talk to strangers?
For five minutes each day, their shifts overlap at handover. It’s the only interaction they have…until mysterious things begin to happen at the museum. Daisy notices priceless objects going missing and then reappearing, with no explanation (and with nothing on the security footage!). No one believes her except Nate, and he agrees to help her investigate.
They soon discover they have a lot more in common than they realized…and their investigation uncovers not only the truth, but new possibilities for their future.
1
Daisy
Before he even speaks, I know what he’s going to say. He just looks the type. He’s got a beard but one of those trendy, hipsterish things that you can buy wax and oil and all kinds of things for in Boots, not a wild, fluffy, bird’s nest of a beard like Uncle Alan used to have. He wears little round horn–rimmed glasses, and his face is shiny with moisturizer. I swear, there’s more things for men than women in Boots these days. His forehead doesn’t move when his eyebrows rise up over his glasses. I wonder if he’s had that Botox? They do that as well, these days, the men, don’t they? And look at her, the one he’s with. Hair done every month, probably costs more than I get paid in a week. Long camel coat. Shiny black boots.
I wonder if I can sidle away from them, but he’s already fixed me with his piercing blue eyes, his waggling eyebrows not making a dent in the smooth tundra of his forehead. Here it comes.
“What,” he says loudly, glancing sidelong at her so she knows there’s a good one on its way, “what on earth is a dinosaur doing in a museum of social history?”
I look up at the collection of bones assembled on a podium at the center of the Horridge Wing, seven and a half meters from the tip of its tail to the end of its crocodile–like snout. To be honest, it’s not an unreasonable question. It’s just that I hear it about three times a week. And always from people like him.
“Because,” he says and, I swear, he nudges her in the arm, “because the ones I saw on Jurassic Park weren’t what you’d exactly call sociable.”
“We’re the Manchester Museum of Social History,” I mutter. “Not Sociable History.”
They share a glance. They obviously thought I was going to collapse into a helpless heap of sobbing laughter. He looks back at me and we stare at each other for a bit. Then he says, “No, not sociable at all.”
I start to tell them that I’m a security guard, not a museum guide, when I feel a presence at my shoulder, and their gazes shift up and over my head, just before a booming voice says, “Ah! You’ve found Barry, I see!”
“Barry?” say the man and the woman together, as though almost fainting with relief that they don’t have to talk to me anymore. Nate steps in and points up at the skeleton. “Lived in the Early Cretaceous period, about a hundred and thirty million years ago. They found this one in a quarry up in Cumbria. Baryonyx, which means ‘heavy claw.’ But we just call him Barry.”
No, we don’t. Only Nate calls the pile of old fossilized bones Barry. But their attention on Nate means I can wander away and stand by one of the glass cases filled with bits of Roman pottery and check my watch. Five past five. Nate is holding forth about Baryonyx, but I’ve heard it all before, a million times. He should have done the handover by now and clocked off. Nate’s a security guard, like me. He does nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, and I do five in the afternoon until one. Janice in reception seems to think this is hilarious, for some reason. If I had a pound for every time she’s said, “Daisy does nights and Nate does days… That’s the wrong way around, isn’t it? It should be Daisy on days and Nate on nights!” followed by her silly, trilling laughter, then… I look up at the window, streaked with spring rain. Well, if I had a pound for every time Janice said that, then I could probably afford a holiday.
Besides, it’s not actually true, is it? Yes, Nate does days, but I do more what you’d call evenings. Into the night, I suppose. The guard who does the shift after me, from one until nine in the morning, Harold, I suppose he does nights. Though, strictly speaking, you could say he does mornings as well. Until Nate clocks on.
Nate, who is a security guard, not a museum guide, I note furiously once again as I check my watch. Ten past five. If he wants to be a museum guide, he should apply to be one. If he wants to be a security guard, he should stop banging on about dinosaurs and come and do the handover properly. You’d think he didn’t have a home to go to.
I decide it’s worth risking being talked to by Mr. Hipster Beard again to go over and hurry Nate along. He’s just finishing up as I stand by him, and the man says, “Well, thank you, you’ve been very helpful.” He peers at Nate’s name badge. “Nate Garvey. Very helpful. Five stars on Tripadvisor, I think!”
Then he looks at my badge, and I realize I should have just left them to it. “And you,” he says, then pauses long enough for the woman to wonder why he’s gone quiet, and to look at my badge too. He does a strange thing with his mouth, sucking in his lips, and his eyebrows dance. “And you, Daisy Dukes.”
The woman tugs his arm, and if they think that just because they’re walking away with their backs to me I can’t hear them laughing, then they’re sorely mistaken.
I’m not stupid. I know what Daisy Dukes are. They’re those tiny little cutoff denim shorts that I would be the absolute last person on the entire planet who would look anything remotely approaching “good” in. Named after that girl with the long hair and the long legs on that ancient American TV show, with the car and the sheriff. Ha ha, good joke. Dumpy little Daisy. Imagine her in a pair of teeny–weeny shorts?
I glare daggers at the backs of the couple. If only they knew. If only they knew what I was really like. They would think twice about saying things like that.
“Pay them no mind,” says Nate in his rumbly voice. It doesn’t help that he’s so tall, six and a half foot, I bet. It makes me look even smaller and dumpier next to him. Though I cross–referenced my height and weight on one of those body mass index charts and I’m of very healthy proportions. All those fruits and vegetables that Mother made us eat when we were kids. Never let us have fizzy pop, only had chocolate at Easter and Christmas. Almost makes up for her calling me Daisy when our surname was Dukes. Almost.
“We need to do the handover,” I say crossly. “Your shift ended fifteen minutes ago.”
Which means there’s just forty–five minutes left until the museum will close, everyone will leave, and I will be alone.
I am very particular about the handover. It’s why I come into the museum precisely five minutes before my shift starts, so I can do it and not eat into Nate’s free time. I imagine he’s got a wife, and children, and will take the tram, or a bus, or maybe the train away from the Northern Quarter to his neat little home in the suburbs. At least, I assume it’s neat. I haven’t ever seen it, of course, nor asked him about it. I don’t come to work to chat.
“Item one,” I say. “The Report.”
Nate nods dutifully and scratches his chin. I mentally note that he could do with a shave, salt–and–pepper bristles making an audible skkkrtch sound under his fingernails. In fact, he could do with taking a little bit more care about his appearance all round, now I take a look at him. There’s a spot of dried gravy or bean juice on the front of his shirt, right at my eye level, and his tie is a little crooked. His top button is unfastened. We both wear the same uniform, black trousers, white shirt, black tie, and a black jacket if we need to go outside. If I can keep my shirts clean and ironed, with everything I’ve got going on in my life, I don’t see why Nate can’t do the same. I’m not talking beard wax and Botox, obviously; just a bit of self–respect. But it isn’t for me to say anything; I’m his colleague, not his boss.
“Well?” I say, dragging my eyes from the spot on his shirt and up to his face, which is all scrunched up as though he’s a schoolboy trying to think of the right answer to a particularly perplexing math question.
“There’s nothing really to report,” says Nate eventually.
This obviously isn’t good enough. I instituted the handover so that the security team could share relevant intelligence from their shift that might impact on their colleagues. There’s always something to report.
I have a small notepad, the sort that the police use, in my breast pocket, and I take it out and tap it with the end of my ballpoint pen. Nate watches it for a while, then seems to brighten up.
“Oh! There were three kids hanging around the Malone Room this afternoon,” he says. “I had to tick ’em off for pressing their faces against the glass cabinet. The one with the naked lady in it.”
Nate means the statuette of Aphrodite, circa 1865, from the collection of Theodore Malone, the museum’s founder and major benefactor in the nineteenth century.
“Aphrodite,” says Nate, helpfully, as though I don’t know what he means, though I’m rather surprised that he knows, “springing full blown from the brow of Zeus.”
“Yes, I am aware of that,” I say, making a note. “What time?”
Nate shrugs. “Three–ish.”
“Can’t you be more precise?”
His wide shoulders rise and fall again. “Okay. Three–oh–seven.”
I write it down. “Ages?”
“Thirteen, I’d say,” Nate says with more certainty. I wonder if that’s the age of his children. “And they were wearing St. Mary’s badges on their blazers. Which were green.”
Nate smiles hopefully down at me, putting me in mind of a dog waiting for a pat and a treat. Instead I give him a curt nod and say, “They shouldn’t have been out of school at that time. I’ll phone the head tomorrow.”
“Well, you know, they weren’t causing trouble. Not really.”
I put my notepad back in my breast pocket and glance at my watch. “I might see if I can print off some images from the CCTV as well, to email to the school. It’s almost twenty–five past; give me the flashlight and you can get off.”
There’s an amused look in Nate’s eye which makes me cross, then he gives me a little salute and clicks the heels of his big size–twelve black shoes—-which could do with a bit of a polish—-together, which makes me even crosser. “I’ll just get it from the den,” he says.
By “den” he means the security office. I don’t know why he has to make up stupid names for things, when they’ve got perfectly good names already, such as “security office” and “Baryonyx.” While he’s gone downstairs to get the flashlight I clear my throat and loudly tell the half a dozen people still loitering in the Horridge Wing that the museum is closing in half an hour.
The flashlight is a big old rubber one with a bright beam and a satisfying weight to it. Mr. Meyer, the museum manager, once presented me with some high–tech flashlight—-“newfangled,” Mother would call it—-that had white LED bulbs and didn’t use batteries, but charged itself just by you walking around with it. I never took it out of the packaging. It’s still in a drawer in the security office. When a thing works perfectly fine as it is, why try to improve on it?
When Nate comes back waving the flashlight, he’s wearing his black jacket with a thin green anorak over it. The Horridge Wing is empty now, and when he’s gone I’ll go and round up the stragglers in the other five halls and the café, and then I can get the museum closed up for the day.
“Is it still nasty out there?” says Nate, zipping up his anorak.
“It’s raining. Average for the time of year, I think.”
“Well, I’ll be off, then.” He’s standing there as though he’s waiting for something from me.
I shrug and say, “Fine.” I’m never really sure what else is expected of me in these situations.
Nate smiles and says, “Well, see you, then.”
I watch him walk across the parquet floor and out of the double doors to the staircase, then I look up at the skeleton of Baryonyx. “Barry.” I shake my head and walk in the opposite direction from where Nate had gone, to the Malone Room, to check just how much of a mess these kids have made of the Aphrodite cabinet, so I can give the cleaners a proper report.
On the way through I pass Mr. Hipster Beard and his partner. They both smile at me as we cross over. I don’t smile back. For reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, I’m bothered by them. It’s not the laughing behind their hands; I’m used to that, and worse. It’s not that they obviously earn more money than me, and have more expensive clothes, and better skincare products (even him). It’s…well, I think it’s because they look happy. And I can’t help wondering how that feels.
2
Daisy
By six o’clock I have ushered the few people still wandering the museum out to the double doors at the ground–floor entrance hall, where I wait patiently for the staff to leave so I can lock up and begin my rigorously planned itinerary of patrols for the evening.
First out of the door, as ever, is Janice from reception. Today is one of her three full days; she also works some mornings, often on Saturdays and Sundays, when the museum is open until 1 p.m. There used to be a weekend security guard, but he left due to ill health just before I started here, and now there’s a private security firm that does sweeps of the museum every few hours. Mr. Meyer says he’s still looking for a weekend replacement, but it’s been six months at least now and there’s no sign of anyone starting.
Janice has poker–straight brown hair and wears glasses with huge frames. She’s older than me, maybe forty or so. She pauses by the door and drops her shopping bags on the marble floor. Janice always seems to have three or four shopping bags with her, filled with I don’t know what. She winds a long leopard–print scarf around her neck and says to me, “Did Nate tell you about the party?”
“No,” I say, frowning. “Why would he?”
“Because I told him to.” Janice rolls her eyes. “Men. What are they like?”
“I don’t know,” I answer truthfully.
Janice does her little laugh as though I’ve said something really funny. Her laugh reminds me of the phone we used to have when I was small, the olive-green one that made a high–pitched brrr–brrr sound when it rang. Or maybe more like blll–blll. You’d have to vibrate your tongue very quickly at the roof of your mouth to make the sound, I think.
That phone had the receiver longwise, top to bottom, on it, instead of across the cradle on the top, like other phones. That was the one Mother took the call on when Father phoned to say he was never coming to see us ever again. Leaving all of us forever.
“Anyway,” says Janice, “it’s in about four weeks. We’re going to meet in the Three Tuns around the corner from here and then go on to the Taste of Rajasthan for a meal.”
I stare at her wordlessly. I’m not sure why she would tell Nate to pass on this information. Janice looks at me curiously. “You are coming, aren’t you, Daisy? It’s a Saturday night, so you won’t be working.”
“Oh,” I say. “You want me to come to the do?”
Janice laughs again. “You are daft. Let me have a fiver by Friday so I can pay the deposit on the meal.” Then she picks up her shopping bags and heads out into the drizzle of the Northern Quarter.
Sue and Sue, the two women who run the café on the top floor, leave next, swaddled in big coats and pulling woolly bobble hats down over their ears. One is sparrow–thin and the other one is what Mother would call “bonny.” Sparrow Sue smiles at me as she passes through the door and Bonny Sue leans in to me and says, “Put a nice bit of carrot cake in the den for you. It’s wrapped in tinfoil. Have a good night.”
So I see Nate’s got the others calling the security office “the den,” then. Before long it’ll just be me calling it the security office, and what happens then? If the majority decide a thing is true, does that make it so? Even if it’s wrong? Speaking of Nate, I wonder why he didn’t tell me about the office do, like he was supposed to? What reason would he have for not wanting me there?
“Good evening, Daisy,” says Dorothy, leading the day’s trio of museum guides out through the doors. Dorothy is what I’d call a “power dresser” in that she wears very neat skirt suits and very shiny shoes and looks businesslike and yet very well turned out at the same time. I’d say she is almost as old as Mother, but looks about ten years younger. Dorothy is the only full–time museum guide, and working for her she has a small army of volunteers from the Friends of the Manchester Museum of Social History, almost always women of retirement age whom Dorothy tutors in the ways of the museum’s exhibits and stories. To be honest, the guides apart from Dorothy all tend to blur into three or four faces; I’m not sure how many of them there actually are, and I certainly don’t know their names; I’m only in the same space as them for an hour a day, anyway.
Finally, the museum manager, Mr. Meyer, and his secretary, Seema, emerge from the offices located behind the wide, mahogany reception desk. Seema doesn’t like being called Mr. Meyer’s secretary; she says she is his PA. I know this means personal assistant, but I always think of a public address system, because that’s exactly what Seema is like: Mr. Meyer’s town crier, or a herald like olden–time kings used to have. She always walks in front of him and announces things, and speaks more than he does at staff meetings. If Dorothy is a power dresser then Seema is… What would be better than a power dresser? A super dresser? Well, everybody’s heard of Superman and if there is a Powerman then he’s not as famous, so it stands to reason that super is better than power. So Seema is a super dresser. Her heels are never less than six inches, and her skirts are so tight that you can see what she’s had for breakfast, as Mother would say. She must spend a lot of time in the gym, going on the shape of her under that skirt and the crisp white blouses she wears. I bet Seema would look good in a pair of Daisy Dukes.
“Evening, Daisy,” says Seema. Her lipstick is the color of blood, as if she’s a vampire who’s just feasted. Mr. Meyer, by comparison, is pale and what I think is known as “wan.” Perhaps Seema is a vampire, and she’s draining Mr. Meyer of his blood every day. I frown. I don’t usually think silly things like that. It’ll be the influence of Nate, who can be very silly, and his habit of doing things like calling a pile of old dinosaur bones Barry.
“Mr. Meyer,” I say, looking at my watch, “it’s almost ten past six, and the cleaners haven’t arrived yet.” There are usually two cleaners, from a cleaning company in the city, and it takes them an hour to do the whole place. There being six halls and the staircase, plus the café, it’s a fairly cursory clean.
“That’s because we’ve rationalized the contract,” says Seema. “They’re now coming in three mornings a week before we open, rather than every evening. It’s much more cost–effective.”
I think about the smears on the Aphrodite cabinet upstairs, where those three boys were pressing their faces. “But what about spillages and rubbish that accumulates in the day, Mr. Meyer?”
Seema answers for him again. “Sue and Sue keep the café clean anyway. I think we’ll all have to do just a little bit more ourselves, muck in throughout our shifts, for the general good of the museum.”
I glance at Seema’s long, red–lacquered nails, and can’t imagine her doing much mucking in. Mr. Meyer smiles distractedly at me. “Good evening, Daisy.”
I watch Mr. Meyer and Seema walk out together, her putting up an umbrella for them both to shelter under, then I close, lock, and bolt the big double doors behind them.
I like to keep the security office well stocked with items to anticipate any eventuality, so of course I have some soft cloths and a bottle of Windolene. I have polished the cabinet in the Malone Room to a flawless shine; you would never guess that three scruffy little St. Mary’s oiks had been pressing—-from what I could gather by the evidence left behind—-their lips and tongues against the glass. I briefly wonder if it’s the same gang who did this who give me trouble pretty much every day on my way into work. But no. Those boys at the bus stop are thugs. The ones who did this are just oiks. “Oiks” is a good word; it’s one Mother uses a lot. I can almost see my own reflection—-no makeup, dark hair scraped back into a ponytail—-in the cabinet. Once I’ve switched off all the main lights, and the halls are illuminated only by the tracks of dim security night–lights in the ceiling, I will be able to see my reflection properly; if I feel like doing that, which I probably won’t. I’ve worn makeup, obviously. Never as much as Seema, or even as much as Mother used to wear when we were younger, but like so many things in life, I never felt as though I was doing it right. Perhaps I should get some lessons from Rosie before this staff night out.
After that it’s time to do my first patrol, turning off the main lights as I go. I always start in the entrance lobby, double–checking the main doors even though I know they’re secure because I locked them myself. But you have to do everything in order, don’t you? You have to have a system, procedures. The minute you start cutting corners, that’s when you make mistakes, you miss things. That’s when things start to go wrong.
I check that the doors into the offices where Mr. Meyer, Seema, and Dorothy work are locked, which they are. I have keys if I need to go in there, but it’s usually enough to shine my flashlight through the glass walls and check everything is in order. On the ground floor there’s one exhibition space, the Standish Hall. This is where the museum hosts its temporary exhibitions and shows. Currently it’s a display of photographs by a man who used to work for the New Musical Express in the seventies and eighties: black–and–white pictures of sulky young men smoking cigarettes on bridges or standing awkwardly on patches of wasteland, all singers or guitar players in bands with nihilistic names. Nihilistic is a good word. Not one Mother would use. I think it means believing that life is meaningless. Mother would probably relate to that. Most of the young men in the photographs are dead now. I don’t think the pictures are all that good, to be honest. Most of them are very grainy and blurry. You could take better photos on your phone. There is one, though, that keeps drawing me in. A young man with dark hair, lifting a cigarette to his lips, a look on his face like he’s been caught doing something naughty. He’s not what you’d necessarily call handsome, but there’s something about him. Something vulnerable. The caption on the picture says he killed himself forty years ago. Hanged himself in his own kitchen. And him a pop star and everything. How could life be so bad that you’d go and do yourself in? Right in your own kitchen? When you’ve got everything handed to you on a plate? It’s just selfish, that. Some people don’t know they’re born.
I turn all the lights off and create a pool of yellow light with the flashlight to step in as I climb the wide staircase that leads to the first floor and the three main halls—-the Horridge Wing with the fossilized bones of Baryonyx on the left, the Malone Room with its newly cleaned Aphrodite case in the center, and the Lever Wing beyond that. In the Lever Wing the walls are covered with thick tapestries; they’re actually trade union banners, from all over Greater Manchester. Bury and Wigan and Salford, all with biblical or Masonic scenes picked out in cotton, invariably against a red backdrop. I point my flashlight beam at each one in turn; someone could hide behind one of the big banners, if they were of a mind to. No one ever has, though. The banners have slogans such as United We Stand, Divided We Fall and Unity Is Strength, and a very elaborate one that says The Great Appear Great Because We Are on Our Knees—-Let Us Rise! I’ve never been a member of a trade union. I’ve never been what you’d call a joiner. Not like Rosie.
Up the stairs is the café, a fairly modest affair that sells hot drinks, pop, cakes, sandwiches, and sometimes baked potatoes done in the microwave, all served up by Sue and Sue. There are two smaller rooms up here, one with desks and chairs where local schools sometimes come for educational sessions, and the other where the personal effects of Theodore Malone and his family are on display, including the skull of Theodore himself. That’s probably the room I like the least. I think it’s something about the skull, sitting there on a velvet cushion in its glass cabinet. It’s what Theodore wanted, apparently; it was in his will that his skull was to be boiled and put on display in the museum he founded. Why would you want that? Why would you want to remind people of death? I stare at the skull for a moment, its bleached white bone dome, its hollow, dark eyeholes, then turn off the lights. All the way down the stairs to the ground floor and the security office nestled between the entrance lobby and the Standish Hall. My first patrol is over.
In the security office I write my report, which I will update after each patrol—-I will do them every hour. The handwritten reports I will hand over to Harold when he comes on duty at one o’clock. He won’t read them. The wastepaper bin in the security office is overflowing with my reports from the previous evenings. He should at least put them in the recycling bin in Seema’s office. It irks me that I am never there to see Harold hand over to Nate at nine. I shudder to think how lackadaisical their handover will be. I bet Harold doesn’t even do a verbal report, like I had to reluctantly allow Nate to do when it became evident that he was never going to give me a written one.
When I’ve written the report I watch the CCTV feeds from each room, split over two computer monitors on the desk. Nothing stirs. I do two more patrols and then take my break, eating the chicken sandwiches I’ve brought from home and then the piece of carrot cake that Bonny Sue left on the security–office desk.
And then I go to get the book.
