Second Chances Box Set

by Jason Ayres

  “Yeah, this new golfer, Tiger Woods, he’s playing in his first US Open this weekend,” he said. “They reckon he’s going to be something special.”

  Although she hated golf, she had of course heard of Tiger Woods. She couldn’t not have, as Alan had idolised him and gone on about him all the time.

  Thankfully the check-in queue was not long at this early hour and she soon was free of her rucksack, watching it disappear on the conveyer. There was an hour and a half left until the flight.

  “I really ought to be getting through to the other side,” she said.

  “Don’t go just yet, darling,” said Alan. “I don’t want to be separated from you until I absolutely have to. Come on, let’s go and grab a coffee.”

  This was word for word what he had said the first time she had been here. The word “darling” grated with her, but she had to smile and go along with it. She knew what was to come, and when it did, she’d be prepared, unlike last time.

  Sure enough, as soon as they were seated, it started.

  “I can’t believe you’re really going,” he said. “I love you so much, I can’t bear the thought of being parted from you for one day, let alone three months.”

  “I know,” she replied. “But the time will fly by, you’ll see. And when I come back, we can be together all the time.”

  In Kay’s current mindset, that was a total lie, but she was sticking to the script for the moment. Although it would have been easier to just get up and walk off with the minimum of fuss, she wanted to see him beg pathetically, just like he had before. But this time she would not cave in.

  Suddenly he began blubbing uncontrollably, like a baby.

  “Please don’t go, Kay,” he pleaded. “I love you. I can’t live without you.”

  This was so typical, she thought. It was all about him and his feelings. It was alright for him, he had his career and his fancy job travelling around vineyards, but what about her plans and her dreams? He had never cared about any of that. All he cared about was how it would affect him.

  “You know I’ve got my heart set on this trip, Alan. I’ve dreamt of doing it since I was fifteen.”

  “Please, Kay, I’ll do anything. You can still travel. Look, I went down to the travel agents earlier in the week and booked us this.”

  He pulled some tickets out of his bag and showed them to her. She didn’t even need to look at them to know what they were. She had been through all of this before. It was a package holiday for two to the Algarve.

  “Two weeks in the sun, just me and you together. I’ll pay for everything, don’t worry, and you can go travelling later. In fact, I’ll get a sabbatical from work and we’ll go travelling together.”

  This was the point at which she had capitulated before but she wasn’t going to be fooled a second time. He never did let her go travelling, despite several attempts on her part to rearrange it. The sabbatical of course never happened – apparently he was too indispensable at work to be spared. Not long after that, he had talked her out of going to university as well by fixing her up with a full-time job in his department.

  As for the holiday in the Algarve, on the first day he met a boorish group of city types and spent half of the holiday going off to play golf with them, leaving Kay on her own by the pool with only her Walkman and a bunch of cassettes for company.

  “Please, Kay,” he whined, tears pouring down his face. “Don’t leave me. I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you.”

  She could quite easily have cut him to shreds right then. It would have been so easy to humiliate him right in front of everyone at the neighbouring tables, whose attention they were beginning to attract. But she didn’t want a scene right now. There would be better opportunities to get her revenge on later trips back to the past. Today, her focus was elsewhere. She just wanted to get away and get on that plane.

  “I’m sorry, Alan,” she replied. “I’m going and that’s that.” Without saying any more, she got up, turned around and walked away.

  “Don’t leave me, Kay!” he shouted behind her. “I’ll kill myself if you do.”

  “Be my guest,” she said under her breath. This was getting ridiculous. She had never seen anything so pathetic from a grown man. It had been bad enough the first time round, but at least he had stopped after she had said she would stay. This was downright embarrassing.

  “Just keep walking,” she kept saying to herself, over and over again, and she did not look back until she had reached passport control.

  Chapter Five

  June 1995

  Only when she was safely in the passport control queue did Kay dare to take a look behind her. It was a relief when she saw no sign that Alan was following her.

  She fumbled in her bag for her passport and had a momentary panic when she thought she couldn’t find it. She wouldn’t have put it past him to have taken it out of her bag as a backup plan to ensure she couldn’t go, but then she realised he couldn’t have. She had shown it when she checked in. Then she remembered she had put it in a small, zip-up side pocket of her bag.

  Once she was through passport control and security a palpable sense of relief washed over her. She was safe now, wasn’t she? She certainly hoped so. She wouldn’t put it past him to buy a ticket for the flight, follow her onto the plane, and either beg her to get off or insist on her coming with him.

  She had seen similar scenes in films, but she dismissed it as unlikely. Things like that just didn’t happen in real life. Besides, he probably didn’t even have his passport so it really wasn’t worth worrying about.

  She browsed around the duty-free shops and bought an overpriced sandwich and a drink. Even by 2018 standards the prices were outrageous. Then she went out into the main departure lounge to see if the gate number for her flight had come up yet.

  The airport was still quiet given the early hour, so it was easy for her to get a seat in front of one of the boards giving out flight details. She was not best pleased to discover that her flight was one of a number that had been delayed.

  It had been pushing it, aiming to reach Rovaniemi by midnight, even if the flight had been on time. When she had initially planned this trip, back in 1995, she had not intended to do the whole journey in one day at all. She had planned to stay in Helsinki for a day or two and then get an overnight train north, saving the cost of a night in a youth hostel by sleeping on the train. It was a long journey, something she had discovered when she realised that the Scandinavian countries were much larger than she had originally thought.

  The capitals of Oslo, Stockholm and Helsinki were more or less on the same latitude, but far further from the Arctic Circle than she had believed. Initially she had considered travelling to Norway, but had been put off when she found out that it was over a thousand miles from Oslo to Tromsø, which was the main city in the north. That was some serious mileage.

  She had settled on Rovaniemi as it was a more achievable five hundred miles, but even that was going to take over twelve hours on a train. Under any normal circumstances that wouldn’t have mattered, but these were not normal circumstances.

  She only had one day, and she wasn’t even sure how much of that day she had. Would it end at midnight, whisking her away back to the dismal reality of her flat? Or would she get a full twenty-four hours? She should have asked the angel when she had the chance.

  It was clear that with the flight delayed, reaching Rovaniemi in one day wasn’t going to be possible by road or rail. But the angel had said it was achievable, and there was one other option open to her.

  She reached into her purse where she had a wallet containing her cash and traveller’s cheques. The money was meant to last three months, but she didn’t need it to last that long anymore. It only had to last a day, so she may as well make use of it.

  Because of the cost, she had not originally planned to take any additional air travel other than the Helsinki flight and a flight back from Athens in September. Now things had changed. She could afford to get a domest
ic flight north once she arrived in Helsinki.

  There was no way for her to find out what flights were available at the moment; she would have to wait until she got there. If she had been in the modern world, her smartphone would have been able to give her this information in minutes but she wasn’t, so she was just going to have to trust to luck that things worked out for her when she got to Helsinki.

  Despite not being able to find out anything about flights she was actually feeling quite glad that she did not have a mobile phone. It gave her quite a liberating feeling. Not only was she not a slave to Facebook or feeling the temptation to take selfies of everything she was doing, but it also meant she could not be contacted.

  That meant she did not have to cope with calls, texts and messages from Alan, pleading pathetically at her not to go. Thankfully she was going to be spared all of that. The less technological past was not a bad place to be right now at all. She was to all intents and purposes incommunicado, and she liked it.

  She munched on her cheese and pickle sandwich and watched the board, willing the red DELAYED label to disappear from next to her flight. Once she had finished eating, she passed some time by wandering into the duty-free shop to check out the prices of the alcohol and tobacco.

  Although her forty-three-year-old self had taken up smoking in a big way, she had never touched cigarettes as a clean-living teenager. Looking at the incredibly cheap duty-free prices on offer now for boxes of 200, she realised she no longer felt any desire to smoke.

  Why was that? she pondered. She was reminded of her libido that morning after she had woken. It seemed that the messages her body was sending to her brain were the genuine physical reactions of her nineteen-year-old self. Yet the cognitive parts of her brain and her memories were very definitely those of her older self.

  It was a powerful combination – the unspoiled body of youth with the wisdom and experience of age. Most people never got to experience those things working in tandem. By the time they had gained the latter, the former was gone. But today she had it all and felt like she could conquer the world.

  Looking at the cigarettes right now, she felt repulsed and made a mental note that as soon as she got back to 2018 she would do her utmost to stop, even if that old, addicted body’s cravings were telling her otherwise. Stopping smoking could be her first step in the right direction. It was unlikely she would have come to this conclusion if she had not come here. The angel had said experiencing the past would help her change the future. Perhaps this was the first example.

  Alcohol was another matter. The bottles of half-price spirits were very tempting. She was pleased to see that there were no restrictions on their purchase, recalling that in modern times you couldn’t get the duty-free deals if you were travelling within the EU. It seemed that in 1995 these restrictions had not yet been implemented, so she picked herself up a duty-free bottle of vodka. She had no qualms at all about this. Vodka had been her favourite drink since she had started sneaking into The Railway Arms with all the other underage drinkers when she was seventeen.

  Maybe she should cut down on her booze, too, but not today. If all went according to plan, she hoped to be celebrating come midnight with a drink in her hand as if it were New Year’s Eve. With this in mind, she also picked up a half-bottle of champagne. Why not? It would be extra weight to lug about, and she had no way of chilling it, but if there was ever a special occasion that demanded it, tonight would be it.

  Emerging from the duty-free shop, she was delighted to see that the delay was over and her gate was being called.

  As she wandered through the airport, it struck her that things had not changed very much in the world of air travel in the past quarter of a century. There was very little around her to suggest that she was spending a day in the past.

  She had found more signs of change in her handbag than in her surroundings. The lack of a mobile phone was compensated for by other devices that did jobs that her phone did in 2018 – a disposable camera and a cassette Walkman. Looking inside, she had found a TDK D90 cassette tape with “Kay Compilation Volume 4” written on it.

  Seeing the tape brought a host of memories flooding back. She had spent hours in her teens recording tracks from CDs onto cassettes, trying to create the perfect compilation tape. It was a much more complex process than the modern equivalent of dragging tracks into a playlist.

  When making a tape, there was only one real chance to get it right, as they never sounded as good when they had been recorded on more than once. There were all sorts of factors to take into account, the most difficult being to get the songs to fit correctly into the amount of time on the cassette.

  Kay always used to try and plan her recordings so that there was no blank space left at the end of the tape. So if she had only five minutes left at the end of one side, it was a case of finding two short tracks or one long one. The worst possible scenario was losing the last few seconds of a song because the tape had run out.

  Running order was just as important. It couldn’t just be a random collection of favourite tracks. It had to flow, just like a decent album did. And most importantly of all, it had to kick off with a killer track to set the scene.

  Putting the headphones to her ears, she pressed play and her eardrums were instantly assailed by the opening bars of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana. She listened for a bit, remembering how much this song had inspired her as a teenager, then switched off as the time had come to board.

  She could listen to the rest on the flight, indulging herself in this simple, uncomplicated pleasure. She never seemed to spend any time listening to music anymore. There were simply too many other distractions in the modern world.

  She didn’t have her tapes anymore either. Alan had taken them all up to the local tip when he was having a clear-out without asking her. When she had protested, he had said they were obsolete. They no longer had a cassette player in the house, so what was the point in keeping them?

  He didn’t understand that there were memories locked up in those tapes, and all the hours of fun compiling them. Now they were gone forever, buried under a mountain of decomposing chicken bones and babies’ nappies.

  Boarding went smoothly and in a matter of minutes she was seated on the plane. The plane was something else that didn’t seem to have changed much in the last quarter of a century. It was exactly the same design as pretty much every other plane she had ever been on.

  She now had time to relax and listen to her tape. It wasn’t a long flight, no more than an hour and a half, which gave her time to ponder what she should do with the remaining five days she had. She had barely had time to take stock of her situation until now, but sitting in her seat, the truth of what she was doing suddenly hit her.

  “I am really here! This is really happening,” she said out loud, attracting on odd glance from the middle-aged woman in the seat next to her. Kay had a habit of speaking out loud to no one in particular and right now she felt so liberated she wanted to shout out, “I’m free!” at the top of her voice but resisted the temptation to do so. Instead, she sat back quietly and thought carefully about how to make the best of this amazing opportunity she had been given.

  She could use her days for pleasure, reliving the highlights of her life in a sort of greatest hits compilation, rather like one of her tapes.

  She could go back to pivotal moments like the one she had just experienced in the airport with Alan, and see how things might have turned out differently, for that day at least.

  Or she could make a bucket list of things to do, like seeing the midnight sun. The only restriction was she only had one day to make these things happen, but you could do a lot in one day, provided it didn’t involve anything on the other side of the world.

  There may have been limitations on travel due to time, but there were no such restrictions where money was concerned. Anything expensive could go on a credit card that would never need to be paid off.

  Those were all positive ideas, but she had darker th
oughts, too, invariably involving Alan. What would it feel like to kill him? She found herself picturing the shocked expression on his face as she plunged a carving knife into his chest. Could she really bring herself to do something like that?

  No, she couldn’t, but she could sure as hell humiliate him in some way. Her mind mused over the possibilities. Jilt him at the altar? Expose his infidelities? All these ideas were satisfying in one way or another, but would they really be worth it? Was petty revenge really what she wanted to do with her days? She was better than that, wasn’t she? Surely there must be better ways of utilising her time.

  There were so many possibilities that she was finding it difficult to narrow them down into anything concrete. The angel had said six days were enough, but were they? Kay could easily have thought of sixty things to do if she had put her mind to it. Perhaps she needed to try and combine some of her ideas in some sort of time-travelling multitasking.

  Maybe she could right a wrong, live out a missed experience and make some positive contribution to her own future all in the same day if she picked the right day. She had done a pretty good job with it already in the current day. If she could build on that, then she had a very interesting few days ahead of her.

  She found it frustrating that she couldn’t do anything to change history, but she could see the angel’s point on that. She knew all about paradoxes from the time travel films she had seen. If she changed the past so she didn’t end up in the flat in the chip shop, then she would never have ended up in the depressing mess that had brought the angel to her door in the first place.

  Not being able to take anything back into the past or forward into the future was also very restrictive, but that rule only applied to physical things. It didn’t apply to her knowledge. She already had the benefit of hindsight when travelling to the past, which allowed her to make the most of her trips back, but could it work the other way?