Friday's Whims of the Time Traveler 42.1: October 7th, 2011

This is an untitled, unfinished novel that was technically left alone in late 2008. However, the last time it was modified and checked for errors was 2011, where upon I decided that the absurdity of the plot combined with the sloppy British research was too much for the story to continue.

However, seeing as this is Whims of the Time Traveler, it's a perfect example of my first attempt at long fiction, so I've decided to unabashedly display it.

Have fun.

Untitled: Chapter Two
by Belinda Roddie

If someone asked me, “What was it like going down that river? Terrifying, am I right?” I wouldn’t be able to give them a straight answer. I don’t remember it very well at all. It’s already bad enough that these random people, after all this time, still ask me about it. Because from what I can tell, not a whole lot of people know or are friends with a girl who was found in a bloody coffin when she was ten years old.

Of course, I don’t use it for casual conversation. When I first meet someone, I don’t say, “Well, I had quite an adventure when I was ten years old. I was stuck in a coffin on the river Thames for two days, and nobody bloody noticed!” No. It’s not a starter I use. But people indirectly find out about it and they’ll come up to me with a, “Hey, aren’t you that girl who—” “Coffin? Yes. Played Hermione in the Harry Potter movies or whatever, in case you weren’t going to say coffin? No.”

The only people I’ve directly told are the people I trust and love the most. I told my boyfriend after we started going steady. He didn’t mind that I was considered a phenomenon; in fact, he told me not only that it was a miracle that I had survived, but a miracle that he had been able to find me. We married a year later and have been together for six years. I have yet to tell my children because I believe they’re too young to understand.

But again, even when my husband asks me what it was like, I can remember only remnants of being in that coffin. Mostly they’re just the sounds of water and muffled voices in my ears. Other memories are the smells of dry wood and the pain in my fingers from allegedly trying to open the coffin. But most of what I remember is just darkness and silence.

I don’t think a lot of people truly understand what’s it like to be shut in that small of a space, especially if it’s a box they put you in when you’re supposed to be dead. It’s bound to make someone at least claustrophobic. It certainly happened to me. Even nineteen years later I can’t go into a small space. I can’t even go into a lift, so I always take the stairs to my flat. The only cramped space I can tolerate is being in a crowd. That way I know there are people around me, and I’m safe. In that way, no one thinks I’m dead. Which is always nice to know.

But unlike what some people think, and it’s logical that they ask this, I don’t have a fear of coffins. You don’t see me scream and run away when I see men carrying one of those black caskets to a cemetery. I actually go to funeral homes often, to look at the coffins. Why? Well, after being in one, I find them to be fascinating. I still wonder how that coffin was able to carry me across the river without its respective raft sinking. I know people studied the coffin for a while; it was kept and tested by a research center before they finally stopped the useless studying and burned the damn thing.

When I said that people indirectly find out about my little adventure, I meant it; again, it’s not too often that someone survives a trip down the river in a casket. The media was more than happy to get its paws on the story after years of the police and doctors blocking it from the papers for the sake of my privacy—after all, I was only ten when it happened. I first declined to comment; I had just recently found out my origins and I wasn’t interested in being a circus act for the world. However, my lawyers were able to coax me into telling my story, with some guidelines. One, if I didn’t want to answer one of their questions, I wouldn’t have to as long as it wasn’t crucial to the story; two, there was nothing wrong with trying to find the humor in the situation, but if anyone treated it like an absolute joke, I had not only the permission but also the obligation to get up and leave the interview; and finally, I would be allowed to say any sort of public service announcement on anybody’s behalf, such as helping the abused or the suicidal.

When channels found out I had agreed to be interviewed by some of the most prestigious talk show hosts, they were quick to pounce on me with their requests. Since then, it’s as if I’ve been dissected like a lab specimen. There’s not one piece they’ve left behind in the stripping down of my story. I’ve been interviewed, casually questioned, and downright interrogated. I’ve had police, scientists, and doctors from all around the world discuss any strategies used for my survival, trauma or other symptoms due to the experience. I’ve been on the Today show, 60 Minutes, the BBC, and Dateline. My interviewers have included, but are not limited to, Barbara Walters, Larry King, Matt Lauer, and even Dick Cavett. I’ve been asked questions from “Are you going to get the people who were responsible for your predicament put on trial?” to “Are you planning to write a biography?” and especially to those two questions I’ve always said no. And through all of this, I have been known as “The Girl on the river Thames.” And I’m twenty-nine years old.

As if that wasn’t enough, I’ve also had Chris Columbus, Stephen Spielberg, and Joel Schumacher all come up to me asking me for the story rights so they can put it on film. This is where I draw the line. Yes, people around the world already knew the story; I couldn’t avoid that. But I was not planning to make the whole thing into a piece of entertainment. Directors, both British and American, have begged and pleaded with me to give them permission to make the film. One French director even attempted to make a film about it without any consent, except he turned the protagonist into a boy. If he thought that was going to give him permission, he was wrong; I had my lawyers block the movie from theaters, but there is still a pirated version of it floating around on Youtube.com somewhere. I still do not allow anyone to adapt my story into a film, and anyone who attempts to do so will have a heavy lawsuit slapped on his forehead. If they want to attempt it when I die, they can have a long talk with my children about it. Any decision that my children make, I’ll respect.

The complete rejection of a film adaptation of my story is one of my greatest achievements when it comes to preserving at least some of my dignity, but I think one of the moments I’m most proud of was during an interview I had with Stone Phillips, who actually returned especially to talk to me, when I was twenty years of age. It was also the last interview I ever did. As I sat on the couch that I had seen so many times as I watched Dateline on the telly, I remember his question. He asked me, “How has all of this, from being in the coffin to finding out the story of how you got there, affected your life and you as a person?” And I remember saying something like this:

“Well, Stone, I have to say that if you had asked me that five years ago, I would’ve told you that it was everything to me. It haunted me every day, every night, in my thoughts, and in my dreams. But ever since I’ve found out how it’s happened, well, I’ve just accepted it and moved on. I’m happily married with two children and I couldn’t be better. I do exactly what other people do. I read books, I watch movies, and I take long walks with my husband. I laugh, I cry, I dream. And just like my old guardian before his passing, before he even knew me, I am a completely and totally average person.”

I had my husband record that segment when it was repeated on every news channel the next day, and sometimes, I’ll watch that clip again and again. And it’s true. Not just the fact that I’m a completely and totally average person now, but at the age of fifteen, I went out in search of myself. I wanted to know who I was and what had really happened to me. I know you’re tired of me saying this, but there are three different kinds of people in the world, and they are all born with a disadvantage. But to tell you the truth, I wasn’t born just once with that inability. In a way, I was reborn in that same sort of innocent, naïve fashion.

Because if you had asked me, nineteen years ago, “What was it like?” or “How did it happen? How did you end up in a coffin on the river Thames and live to tell the tale?” I wouldn’t have been able to answer.

Because nineteen years ago, I didn’t know how it happened. I didn’t know how I had ended up in a coffin. I didn’t remember who could have put me there or even if it had been an act of violence. I didn’t even remember being in a coffin, period, until someone finally told me five years later.

But you know what else I didn’t remember? I didn’t remember anything about my life. Not my friends, not my family, not my home, not even where I was born. I didn’t even know my own name.

In fact, I didn’t remember anything at all.

So when I woke up in Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading, England, three weeks after ten boys and two old men had found me on the river, I couldn’t answer a single question that anyone asked me. And, as hard as they tried and how much they investigated, they couldn’t find out who I was either. They could only hypothesize that I had lost my memory due to a massive head injury I had received, and I still have the scars to prove it.

And it was in that hospital, unbeknownst to me at the time, that I became known as “the girl on the river Thames.”

The work you see here has not been edited nor modified since October 7th, 2011.