by Jason Ayres
The programmers achieved quite a lot with a machine with 48k of RAM, a tiny fraction of the capacity of the computers of the 21st century. Jet Set Willy, Sabre Wulf and Knight Lore were among some of the biggest games of 1984, and if you could get over the simple block graphics and horrible colour clashes they were quite addictive.
Most games were controlled by the keyboard, but I did have something called a Kempston joystick as well. I attempted to use this several times, but it appeared to be broken. Eventually one day it started working which was the day I discovered how it had got broken – with some rather overenthusiastic waggling during the 100 metres whilst playing Daley Thompson’s Decathlon.
The most frustrating thing about this computer was that I had to load in the games using a small tape recorder. It took several minutes and frequently the computer would crash at the end of the loading process.
This tape recorder doubled as my only way of playing recorded music, the Walkman now long gone. I used to listen to my top 40 tapes in the evening until John Peel came on to Radio 1 which I listened to on a tiny handheld AM radio.
Peel used to have indie bands in to the studio to do sessions, and I looked forward to those late nights listening to sessions from such greats as Depeche Mode and The Smiths on 275 metres medium wave.
I was becoming aware of my own mortality. Although everyone had to face the fact that they were going to die at some point, most were spared knowing exactly when. But I knew that I had just fourteen years left.
In reality, it would be less than that, as I wasn’t going to be able to do a lot in the first couple of years, remembering Stacey as a baby. What would it be like? Would I remember any of my future life at all? Would I care about anything other than getting fed and having my nappy changed?
Grown-ups couldn’t remember being babies, so was I destined to suffer the same fate in reverse?
As I huddled under the covers, on those cold winter evenings in late-1984, I began to feel very alone and very afraid.
June 1982
It was my final term at primary school and I was adjusting to my new environment. The place was full of little kids and I had to come to terms with the fact that I would soon be one of them.
My memories of my adult life remained with me and at times I felt old beyond my years, but I just did my best to adapt as I went along.
Changes were happening to me, both mentally and physically. I’d been through puberty in reverse and now it was over, I had reappraised my situation with regard to girls.
Having to give up sex wasn’t really any big deal anymore. In fact, I found the whole idea quite distasteful. As for girls, far from finding them attractive, I now just considered them an annoyance. Given a choice between playing football with my mates and hanging out with a girl, my mates won every time.
Even using Martin’s telescope to spy on the woman who lived opposite him when she got out of the shower didn’t excite me anymore. The whole subject of sex just seemed silly and embarrassing to me now.
As for self-pleasuring, I’d packed that in a long time ago, sometime around my 13th birthday. I spent most of my free time now hanging out with friends, either out and about, or on my computer which had now been downgraded to a ZX81. This made the Spectrum look like rocket science, but there wasn’t that much else to do.
Board games were pretty popular, and I was pleased that a lot of the games that I’d played as an adult were still around. I loved a good game of Monopoly, and my clever strategy of building just three houses on each property was normally good enough to outwit my friends.
Football stickers, matchbox cars, marbles and more – all of these things that had once seemed childish to me were beginning to seem like good fun. The adult world I had once lived in seemed distant, and may as well have been on another planet for all the relevance it had to me now.
Occasionally I would go down to the garage, pull out the brick and take a look at the picture of my future family, but the more I looked at it, the more they looked like strangers. I loved my mum and dad; they were my family now, not to mention my grandparents, all of whom had entered my life during the 1980s.
The last time I looked at the photo was one Sunday afternoon in June, when I’d been helping my dad in the garden. I’d gone into the garage to put the lawnmower away. We’d had the radio on in the garden for the Top 40, and I could hear Tommy Vance counting down the chart towards the No. 1, which that week was House of Fun by Madness.
I took out the photo and looked at the faces I would never see again. They meant so little to me now. I put the photo back behind the brick, and went off down to the park to play cricket with my mates until it got dark.
May 1974
I went to play school on two days a week, and on the other three I went to Grampy and Granny’s house, a place full of excitement and adventure for a three-year-old boy.
On Mondays, Granny used to do her washing using an old-fashioned mangle. I loved watching her squeeze the clothes through the rollers. At lunchtime, she would cook me some fish fingers and chips. She used to cook the chips using a big white block of lard she’d melt in a pan. They were delicious, much nicer than the ones my mum and dad made.
I would sit at the round table in their living room to eat them and Granny would put the telly on so I could watch Rainbow. My favourite was Zippy, he was really funny and I loved it when he was naughty and got his mouth stitched up.
After lunch, I would go with Grampy into the back garden to feed the chickens. There were four of them and I had given them all names. He said we were going to eat one of them for Sunday dinner, but I think he was just joking.
In the afternoon Grampy liked to go and get his paper from the shop at the bottom of the street and he always took me with him and gave me 6p to spend on sweets. I would point at one of the jars on the shelf and the nice lady behind the till would weigh a few into a little white paper bag for me.
I was a little confused about how life worked. I heard my parents and other people talk about growing up, but it didn’t seem to make sense to me. Sometimes my parents started sentences with phrases like “When you were a baby, you used to…” but I didn’t have any memory of being a baby. I thought I used to be bigger.
Sometimes at night I’d have strange dreams about people that seemed vaguely familiar to me, and faraway places I couldn’t remember ever seeing. It all made very little sense to my three-year-old brain.
Some of the things that my parents said confused me. They would say things like “We’re going on holiday tomorrow, are you looking forward to it?” when it would seem to me that we had just come back. Perhaps they were getting their words mixed up. When they said tomorrow, they must have meant yesterday.
Or maybe it was me. I was still learning words and I got them wrong sometimes. I was sure I’d figure it all out eventually.
Prologue: Birth
21st October 1970
It was warm inside, dark, wet and comforting. I hadn’t been here before, but I liked it. I tried to breathe but I couldn’t. It seemed like I didn’t need to, though. I was aware that there was some sort of tube attached to my stomach, but I had no idea what it was for.
There wasn’t much room to move about, and before long, I started to feel a great weight pushing me forwards. There were contractions all around me, forcing me into a tight tube, head downwards. I didn’t know where I was going but I didn’t like it and tried to fight against it.
Suddenly, there was a bright light, forcing my eyes shut against the glare. I was outside, in a world full of light and noise. I involuntarily cried and gasped for breath. There were people around me and I could hear voices. How I knew that, I didn’t know, but I knew I had been here before.
I didn’t know the meaning of the words the people spoke. Had I been able to, I would have heard a nurse say: “Congratulations, Mrs Scott. It’s a boy.”
And then I was in the comforting arms of my mother, recognising her immediately. I definitely had been here before. I lo
oked greedily at her nipples, my own personal milk machine, and couldn’t wait to suck on them.
The rest of the day was a blur of feeding, sleeping and having my nappy changed, much like any other day. I didn’t really have any concept of time, but my instincts suggested I’d be back inside the warm, wet place soon.
I was wrong.
22nd October 1970
It was morning. I was in my cot, next to my mother’s hospital bed, when my father came in. Something didn’t seem right, but it wasn’t something that my immature brain was able to work out.
I watched as my father moved over to my mother’s bedside table, and listened to the conversation. The words made little sense to me, but the voices were familiar and comforting.
Something told me I shouldn’t be here. I should be snug in the warm, wet confines of my mother’s womb. That was the way things were supposed to work.
I couldn’t read. If I had been able to I would have noticed the sticker on the side of my cot that read “Thomas Scott, born 21st Oct 1970”. I couldn’t read the calendar on the bedside table either. It was one of those little square ones with a page for every day of the year that you tore off.
“You didn’t change the calendar,” said my father, as he tore the page reading “21 Oct”, leaving “22 Oct” exposed.
None of this meant anything to me. If it had, I would have realised for the first time in over 54 years that time was moving forward for me once again. I wasn’t destined to shrink inside my mother’s womb until all that was left was an egg and a sperm. The moment of my birth had restarted the clock.
“He’s amazing,” said my mother, “and he’s got his whole life in front of him.”
“I wonder what he will be like,” said my father. “Just think, when he’s grown up it will be nearly the 21st century. He’ll see amazing things in the future, things we can’t even imagine.”
None of this meant anything to my newborn ears. I was tired, and wanted to go back to sleep. I had a long life in front of me.
The end…but if you want to know more about the mysterious time-traveling Josh, all is revealed in the author’s accompanying Time Bubble series. You can also read the next story in the series which tells the story of nurse Amy who appeared in the first chapter of this book, in Happy New Year.
Happy New Year
Chapter One
2016
I’ve really grown to hate New Year. What do I hate so much about it? Pretty much everything, if I’m honest, and that was even before I got stuck in this time loop. Now I’m living every depressing detail of each and every one of them all over again.
Where do I start? Well, the biggest problem is that it’s my birthday. I was born on 1st January 1986 which makes me thirty-nine years old, or at least I was before all this time-travelling business started. People say I look younger – men mostly who are trying to get me into bed. That isn’t meant to sound bitter. It’s just the voice of experience from one who’s been there, done it, and bought and thrown away the T-shirt as far as men are concerned – or one man in particular, if truth be told, but more about him later.
If I am being brutally honest, and hopefully reasonably modest, until recently when I looked in the mirror I would say I could pass for thirty-five. That’s not first thing in the morning, obviously, but no one looks great at that time of day unless they’re in a movie waking up after a night of improbably romantic sex.
I’m talking at least an hour after I’ve woken up, when I’ve washed, moisturised and had two cups of coffee to make me feel human again. Oh, and I’ve done my hair. Unlike those Hollywood starlets, I don’t have my own personal stylist to make my hair look perfect while I’m asleep.
Despite its bedraggled early morning look, my best feature probably is my hair. It’s long, blonde and without a hint of grey in sight. Before she died, I remember my mother telling me the grey hairs will start showing up when I hit forty. With all that’s been happening to me lately, I’m not sure I will ever reach that milestone.
You see, I don’t have to pass for being thirty-five anymore because, as of today, I’m only thirty. In two days’ time I’ll turn twenty-nine. Confused yet? I sure as hell was when all this started happening. That was about three weeks ago, since when it’s been permanently New Year – which, you’ll recall, is not my favourite time of year.
1st January must be a strong contender for the worst possible date on which to have a birthday. Only 25th December could possibly trump it. There was a girl I went to school with in Liverpool who was born on Christmas Day. Siobhan had really mean grandparents who always bought her a joint birthday and Christmas present which was a pretty flimsy excuse for getting away with buying just one. It wasn’t as if they even spent twice the money – she would get a cheap Tamagotchi off the Heritage Market at Stanley Dock if she was lucky.
I didn’t mind being born on 1st January when I was still a child. Apparently everyone made a real fuss of me when I was born because I was the first baby born at the Liverpool Women’s Hospital in 1986. I was supposed to have been born the previous day but clung onto my mother’s womb until twelve minutes after midnight. Being the first meant I even got my picture in The Echo. It was my first and last moment of fame – I’ve not appeared in a newspaper since.
As I grew up, being born on 1st January still seemed like a good thing. I never had to go to school on my birthday and because it was a bank holiday there were always plenty of family members around to celebrate.
Some years we would go and visit my maternal grandparents in Oxford. On others, they would come and stay with us. These were my happiest years, before my mum and dad split. After that I started being dragged from one end of the country to the other, losing some of my sense of identity in the process.
From that point my birthday celebrations took a nosedive. By the time I hit my late-teens and early twenties and wanted to go out drinking and partying to celebrate my birthday, nobody was interested. They were always too hung-over from the night before.
“I can’t see what the problem is,” said Kelly, who was my best friend at the time. “I think you’re lucky. The whole country goes out to celebrate your birthday.” That was on my 21st.
Blatantly they didn’t but I couldn’t be bothered to point out the flaws in that argument so just went along with it. I knew that my friends weren’t really celebrating my birthday, even if they could be bothered to pretend they were. They, like everyone else, were out to enjoy New Year’s Eve.
It was only when Big Ben chimed that my birthday celebrations could truly begin and, invariably, they didn’t. Everyone around always wished me “Happy New Year” but hardly anyone ever said, “Happy Birthday”. In their drunken euphoria they had forgotten all about me. Going out to celebrate my birthday? I think not.
“Let’s go out for lunch on my actual birthday, tomorrow,” I suggested one year, not long before Big Ben chimed. Of course, everyone was up for it in their drunken state. The following lunchtime I sat like a total numpty in Nando’s like some Billy-no-mates, realisation slowly dawning that no one was going to turn up. Not one of them even bothered to text. Most were probably still in bed. Even an extra-large dollop of peri-peri sauce couldn’t sate my disappointment.
After I turned thirty, birthdays became less of a big deal. I felt less inclined to go out and get drunk every year like I had before. I was working full-time as a nurse by then and the enhanced pay for working over the bank holiday period was well worth missing yet another tedious New Year’s Eve party for. It was enough to pay for a nice week away in the Canaries in January just as everyone else was struggling back to work.
I loved going on holiday at that time of year. It was cheap as chips outside the school holidays. I felt sorry for people with kids when I looked at the astronomical prices travel agents charged during the school holidays. How did they ever afford to get away?
I was determined to make the most of the years before I had children to travel as much as possible, but to be honest, a week
each year in Lanzarote wasn’t exactly travelling the world as I had in my younger years.
I would go with Rob, my ex, and we always got on better when we were away. In the latter years it was about the only time we communicated at all, but as I later discovered, he had other distractions back home.
I didn’t work every New Year. Of those I did not, I could honestly say I had only had one decent birthday in the past decade. That was last year, when my two eager young flatmates actually pushed the boat out and made the effort for me. Prior to that, virtually every other birthday in my thirties had been a non-event.
Rob, whom I lived with for several years, never seemed bothered about me working during the holiday period. Since he was shagging the girl next door behind my back for at least half the time we were living together, I guess he saw it as an opportunity for a little extra-curricular activity. It was actually on my birthday four years ago when he dropped the bombshell he was leaving me for her.
You might be thinking that was rather heartless. Could he not at least have waited until the day after? Actually he couldn’t, as it was on that particular day I caught the pair of them in bed together. Would he ever have told me if I hadn’t stumbled on them as I had? Would I have lived with him another four years in blissful ignorance?
I only found out then after coming home early from work because I was poorly. Yes, I had a terrible cold as well, just one more thing to make the misery of that day complete. It was definitely one of my all-time worst New Years, and I’ve had some shockers, believe me.
Aside from my own personal issues, there’s one other thing I really detest about New Year and that is all the false hope and bravado that people come out with.