by Jason Ayres
Thankfully, when I got up late the following morning, there was no sign of him. Mercifully, she had sent him on his way and was now sitting in the kitchen nursing a coffee. She was looking seriously the worse for wear, but as least she hadn’t started on the booze – yet.
“Morning, Amy,” she began. “Want some coffee?”
She hadn’t given any indication she was going to mention last night, so it looked like it was up to me to bring it up.
“Who the hell was that last night, Mum?”
“Don’t judge me, Amy,” she snapped, clearly spoiling for a row. This was a bad start. I had got her on the offensive with my first remark. Why was I so crap at handling these things?
“I’m not,” I replied. “But seriously, how old was he?”
“He’s thirty, for your information,” she said. “That’s what he said anyway, not that it matters.”
“That’s sick,” I said, and before I could stop myself, I blurted out another unwise choice of phrase. “Don’t you think that makes him seem a bit desperate?”
“Why, because he wants an old slapper like me?!” she shouted? “Who the hell do you think you are, Amy? It’s my business what I do, nobody else’s.”
“Look, Mum,” I said, trying to be reconciliatory. “I’m worried about you. You’re drinking an awful lot these days and bringing all sorts back to the house.”
“Who’s the parent here, me or you?” she demanded. “Let’s get one thing clear right away. You don’t tell me what to do, OK? I tell you. And besides, Andy isn’t all sorts – he’s a nice guy.”
I wanted to retort with the observation that he was a total loser but managed to restrain myself. I had messed this up enough already.
“OK, I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe I misjudged him. But I’m really worried about how much you’ve been drinking since Rachel…”
She cut me off before I could finish, yelling, “Don’t you dare bring her into this!”
This was not going well at all. It was in danger of turning into a carbon copy of the conversation we had already had three years in the future. I was getting nowhere and it was time to change tack. There was nothing else for it, I was going to have to try and tell her the truth.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’ve got something important to tell you.”
“Like what?” she said scornfully, as if I couldn’t possibly have anything to say that she would be interested in.
There was no point messing around with any convoluted explanations about how I had come to be where I was, I just needed to get it out, concisely, before she interrupted me again.
“Mum, if you don’t stop drinking, you are going to die. I’ve travelled here from the future to warn you. In three years’ time you’ll be diagnosed with liver cancer and die in agonising pain.”
She laughed brazenly, right in my face.
“Is that really the best you can do?”
She turned towards the kitchen cupboard, opened up the door, grabbed a wine glass, and then reached for an unopened bottle of red wine in the criss-cross-shaped wine rack that sat on the kitchen surface next to the kettle.
“Well, if I’ve only got three years left, I’d better get started then, hadn’t I?” she remarked, reaching for the screw top of the bottle.
“Mum, please, listen…” I began, attempting to reason with her.
“Listen to your imaginary stories?” She laughed. “Grow, up Amy. You’re twenty-two, not two.”
She wrenched the cap from the bottle and filled the glass almost to the brim. Then she defiantly took a huge swig, right in front of my face.
I turned away, unable to stomach seeing any more. This hadn’t worked. I was doing no good here whatsoever. I still had a plan B, which was to give her Wednesday’s lottery numbers as proof I knew the future, but would that make any difference? My sister’s death had set her on a course of self-destruction, and she was already past the point of no return.
Abandoning my lottery plan, it was clear that there was only one course of action left open to me now.
I had to save Rachel.
Chapter Fifteen
2004
It was New Year’s Eve, 2004, and I was in the living hell-hole that was Phuket, Thailand. It was five days after the catastrophic tsunami that had claimed so many thousands of lives, including my sister’s.
I had been steeling myself for this moment for the past few days, knowing where I would find myself. Even so, coming back here after so long still brought it all back home to me. From the moment I arrived, I was filled with emotions as raw as I had felt first time around, twenty years ago.
I had tried to enjoy my previous two trips but the knowledge of what was to come had weighed heavily upon my mind.
On the day before I turned twenty-one, Kelly and I travelled down to London to see Kylie Minogue in her Showgirl concert. I had been looking forward to this ever since I had found the faded ticket in my biscuit tin, and it didn’t disappoint on any level.
I had been a fan of Kylie’s ever since I was tiny. I couldn’t remember her being in Neighbours, though I knew she had been because Rachel had told me all about it.
When Kylie rose out of the stage dressed in her pink Showgirl outfit and began belting out Better the Devil You Know, the whole crowd, me included, went crazy. This had been one of my very early favourite songs, coming out as it did when I was about four years old. She couldn’t have picked a better song to open with, and the night just got better and better from there.
In 2005, nothing notable had happened around New Year, which was hardly surprising considering I had lost my sister and my father in the space of just over a year. So this time I decided to take the opportunity to go travelling again to see in 2006, realising that it would be just about my last chance. My adulthood was coming to an end.
As I regressed back into my teens, my financial muscle was becoming seriously diminished. I had got my first credit card as a student at the age of nineteen, so this would be the last year I would be able to make use of it. The limit on it wasn’t great, just £1000, but it was enough to get me down to the Canary Islands for one last mini-holiday as I prepared for my arrival in Thailand.
As I lay by the pool on my twentieth birthday there was no escaping the truth that my time was running out. I was now halfway through this journey, and I was going to have a lot less control over what happened to me in the second half.
Soon I would have no money. I would officially be a minor, under the care of parents and teachers. Sure, in my teens it wouldn’t be too bad, but what happened when I got even younger? I would have less and less freedom with each passing year.
I also worried about what was going to happen to my body and my mind. The physical changes were inevitable, but how would my mind react? Would my thoughts still be those of an adult, or would I revert to a childlike state, almost like becoming senile in reverse?
All of that was still to come, but for now I had to put it to the back of my mind and focus on the task in hand, which was the very pressing need to do something about Rachel.
Unlike many of my recent trips from so far back in the past, I was pretty confident about exactly where I was going to find myself when I materialised in Phuket on the morning of 31st December 2004. As my mind took possession of my body from twenty years ago, I realised I was right. I was exactly where I had expected to be. It was where I had spent every day in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.
I was down on the beach, in front of the café where I had been taking breakfast on the morning the tsunami had struck. I had been in Thailand visiting my sister and it was the first time I had travelled abroad alone, aged just eighteen.
Rachel had spent six months travelling the world since graduating the previous summer, and had invited me to come out and spend some time with her. I had been very fortunate to be able to get a cheap flight over to spend two weeks with her over Christmas and New Year. My parents weren’t particularly keen on me travelling all that way alone a
t such a tender age, but both Rachel and I had reassured them that it would all be fine. How wrong we had been.
When I said I was in front of the café, I should have said I was in front of where the café used to be. It simply wasn’t there anymore. The outer shell of the building that had housed it was still there, but anything that wasn’t bolted down had been swept away by the giant waves that had crashed in that day, sucking everything back down to the beach with them as they retreated.
The umbrellas, tables, chairs and various other bits of debris from that café were now scattered all around me, along with numerous other items from the buildings and streets, even whole cars and trucks. Nothing that had been in the firing line of one of nature’s most devastating forces was safe. The beach and everything for some considerable distance inland now resembled an overflowing landfill site.
The clean-up operation had barely begun yet. The disaster had only happened five days ago and the search was still continuing for survivors. That was exactly why I was still here. Most of the Brits that had been here had been evacuated but I had refused to leave, desperate to find Rachel.
By this stage I had known that there was probably little hope. Very few survivors had been found after the first twenty-four hours, so arriving here again on New Year’s Eve was of little use to me now. If only I had some element of control over my time travel. If I could have timed my arrival here a week earlier I could have saved her.
What could I have done differently? I thought back over the events of that morning. There were plenty of things I could have done. The tsunami had not come in until late morning. I could have found her and got her to higher ground. I could also have saved more than just her – hundreds, if not thousands, of people. That’s assuming I could convince people to heed my warnings.
How was it that I had survived and Rachel hadn’t? It was largely down to my excessive drinking whilst celebrating Christmas the previous evening.
Both of us had been at a party on the beach with many others that had gone on very late, but Rachel had gone to bed considerably earlier than me. Had I not stayed out, I would very likely have been on the beach at the time the tsunami struck leading to me joining Rachel in her watery grave.
She had left much earlier than me, having met a charming Frenchman and accepting his invite to go back to his hotel with him. My sister was only three years older than me, but that made a huge difference at that time when it came to our sex lives. At twenty-one, with three years at university behind her, she was confident sexually. In contrast, I was still finding my feet, having had just one boyfriend.
She winked at me as she left that night, handing me her room key and telling me not to wait up. It was the last time I ever saw her.
The following morning, I had come down late. Not only was I sexually inexperienced at eighteen, I was also still finding my way with alcohol. I hadn’t yet learnt when to stop and had stayed out far later than I should have.
I had eventually gone back to the hotel so much the worse for wear with drink that I was unable to surface until late morning. When I did, I had just about managed to make my way down to the café and order some breakfast, hiding behind dark glasses, when I became aware that something wasn’t right.
The veranda of the café overlooked the already busy beach. It made for a pretty scene, fringed with palm trees beyond which were scattered rocks on the white sands. But this morning there was something different about the view.
I couldn’t see the shoreline, the water having retreated far further than I had ever seen it. What I could see were people on the beach wandering far out onto the exposed seabed, presumably curious as to the cause of this strange phenomenon. They didn’t seem to have any inkling that there might be any danger, but I felt a sudden premonition about what was about to happen.
A memory stirred in me about a children’s book I had read many years earlier about a young woman trapped on a desert island. In the story, I remember something similar occurring, and what followed it was something terrifying. It was something that I had heard referred to wrongly in the past as a tidal wave, but I knew it by the correct name – a tsunami.
Instinctively, I knew these foolhardy people wandering far out onto a seabed that had never been exposed before. My first thought had been to jump up and shout a warning, but they were a good half a mile away, some of them. Besides, looking further out to the horizon, I quickly realised I was too late.
Some of the people furthest out had turned back and were running back up the beach but they were already doomed. There was no way they would be able to outrun the huge surge of water racing up behind them and I watched horrified as it began to swallow them up.
It wasn’t a huge, towering wave as I had seen tsunamis portrayed in Hollywood movies. It was more a huge surge of water, relentlessly sweeping all before it in its path and it was coming towards me fast.
I couldn’t save the people on the beach but I jumped up and yelled at everyone in the café, all of whom still seemed oblivious to what was going on.
“Tsunami! Run for your lives!”
I was expecting everyone to start screaming, but they didn’t, just looking at me as if I was crazy. I wasn’t waiting around to try and convince them, I needed to follow my own advice. Sidestepping the waiter, who unbelievably tried to block my way, thinking I was trying to get out of paying the bill, I ran out of the café and as fast as I could up the street away from the beach.
Even with the head start I had on all the other people who were only now starting to twig what was happening, I could hear the water rushing up behind me. I can still remember now, twenty years later, the sheer panic I felt when I realised I wasn’t going to be able to outrun it.
Thankfully for me, as I passed the low balcony of a hotel on my right, I was spotted by two British middle-aged men, in Union Jack shorts with pot bellies.
“Up here, love!” one of them called over the sound of the onrushing water.
There was a car parked just below their window so I scrambled aboard, and they pulled me up, just as the water reached the car.
Then it began to subside. Perhaps this wasn’t going to be as bad as I feared after all. Grateful to my two hosts for the rescue, I eagerly took the beer that they offered. Despite my raging hangover, I was seriously in need of a drink.
We watched in horrified fascination as the water retreated, sucking back bottles, plastic furniture and all manner of other stuff with it, before the shocking realisation hit us that it wasn’t all over. It was actually going to be much worse than I had initially feared.
A second, much bigger wave crashed in, this time passing our position and sweeping the car I had climbed upon up the road as if it was a boat. All around people were screaming and I saw more than one disappear beneath the water, having been knocked over by cars, bins and other heavy objects.
The water was everywhere and sweeping up everything in its path as it pushed on up the street. If I had still been down there, I have no doubt that I would have been killed.
I still feared for my safety, even from the relative safety of the hotel. The water had almost come up the floor of the balcony and would clearly have flooded the ground floor. Would the building be strong enough to hold?
Fortunately it was a modern hotel block made of concrete that held firm. The same certainly couldn’t be said for some of the more lightweight dwellings closer to the shore. For anyone still down there, the outlook would be bleak indeed.
Temporarily safe, my thoughts turned to Rachel. Was she safe? I didn’t even know where she had spent the night. All I knew was she had left with the Frenchman and I couldn’t even recall his name. It might possibly have been Pierre, but that was barely more than a guess. Addled with alcohol as I had been, small details such as the names of people I had met at the party had simply not stuck.
I recalled the happy, smiley faces the previous evening, dancing around the fire in what was then paradise on earth. How many of them were still alive now in what had becom
e the complete opposite?
As the water retreated a second time, the true cost of the disaster was becoming apparent. One of my companions was recording everything on a handheld camcorder and it made for grim viewing. Everything was being dragged back down the street by the retreating flood water, not just all the jetsam and flotsam that had been generated by the wave, but people, too.
Some were still screaming for help, but others were motionless apart from the contortions the water was wreaking on their bodies as it twisted them to and fro like rag dolls.
When the lifeless body of a girl, no more than five or six years, old floated past, I had to turn away from the balcony and dash into the bathroom where I was physically and horribly sick.
This wasn’t just the throwing up of someone who’d had too much to drink the night before. I was sick with shock, panic and fear. I was only eighteen – I was too young to be coping with this alone, but there was no big sister beside me to lean on. The fear I felt for my own safety began to be replaced by fear for her. I prayed that she was still shacked up in bed with the Frenchman, safely out of harm’s way. I didn’t dare even contemplate the possibility that she might have been down on the beach.
I had my mobile phone with me and tried calling her number but I couldn’t get any sort of signal. It seemed all communications were out. As soon as the waters subsided again, I thanked the two men who had helped me, and dashed back out into the street, despite them warning me it might be too dangerous.
It was a scene of sheer carnage. Desperately I ran, calling her name, as I skirted around everything from upturned cars to fridge-freezers which were scattered everywhere. I wasn’t alone by any means. There were dozens out there in a similarly distressed state going through exactly what I was – locals and tourists alike.
Invariably I came across more bodies and forced myself to look at the faces of at least three girls who could have been Rachel. When I saw that they weren’t I felt a strange mix of emotions. There was relief at the discovery that they weren’t Rachel, tempered with an increasing desperation at not finding her.