by Jason Ayres
Having kept all of this to myself for so long it was a huge relief to finally be able to unburden myself to Rachel.
“If all of this is true, Amy, then you will have to warn me about all of this again next year. And the year after that – or do I mean the year before that? You will have to tell me every year, otherwise how will I know if you keep going back to a time before you have told me?”
“I’m not sure it works like that,” I said. “I’ve been trying to figure out how my actions in the past affect the future. One theory is that I am creating multiple futures.”
“So in some possible future, I’m still dead?” she asked.
“Yes, but the important thing is, you’re alive in this one and now you know how to stay alive.”
“And that won’t all be undone when you go back another year in time?” she asked.
“I just have no way of really knowing,” I replied, recognising her line of reasoning because they were the same thought-processes I had been through hundreds of times.
“All I can do is try and do my best for the future any way I can,” I added.
“And what about Mum?” asked Rachel. “Are you going to explain all of this to her? What about the money you stole from her? How are you going to justify that?”
“Well, I was planning on jumping back into the past before that became an issue,” I replied. “Escaping into the past has got me out of quite a few scrapes.”
“Such as?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing particularly exciting,” I replied.
I had no intention of telling her about the sordid activities that had led to Gary’s death. She didn’t need to know all of that. She didn’t even know who Gary was and it was years in a future that probably wouldn’t happen that way – not in this world at least.
“But what about you, Amy?” she asked. “You came here to save me, but what about your predicament? What’s going to happen to you?”
“I’m pretty much resigned to my fate, Rach. I’m just going to keep going back in time, getting younger and younger until a time before I was born. Then I will simply cease to exist.”
“But the body you are in now? That will stay?”
“That’s what I think will happen. I will still be here, with you, presumably the same as I was before my mind jumped into this body. You won’t lose me.”
“But the version of you that’s in there, now. The one I’m talking to right now. You’ll vanish, so will the original you remember any of this?”
“I’ve no idea. I’ve never been around to find out. All I know is that this version of me, this soul that inhabits this body right now, is doomed. I know that and I’ve already accepted my fate.”
There had been tears in my eyes when I had found Rachel again. Now it was my sister’s turn to cry.
Chapter Seventeen
1999
The world was preparing to usher in a new millennium, one that I had already seen the first quarter century of. Now here I was, at the age of thirteen being allowed my official first glass of champagne – which sadly would also be my last.
Firsts and lasts were becoming a regular feature of my life these days. On New Year’s Day 2003 I had simultaneously lost my virginity and had sex for the final time in my life, two events which ought to have been separated by several decades.
It had been with Max who had popped my cherry. He was my teenage boyfriend and first love whom I had been with between the ages of sixteen and eighteen. I had missed him the previous year when I had gone down to see Rachel in London, so 2003 had been my only opportunity to see him. I was determined to make the most of it.
First time around we had been a couple for many months before we lost our virginity together in the Easter holidays, but given the circumstances, I was determined to bring that forward.
It wasn’t difficult to accomplish. He had spent most of the autumn crafting the most beautifully articulate love letters to me and we had spent much time passionately kissing, with me firmly removing his wandering hands when they strayed close to my nether regions.
I considered myself to be a good girl, and wanted to wait until I was ready. I certainly wasn’t going to rush into anything like some of the girls in my class, two of whom were already pregnant. I was going to be properly prepared, and my sister had helped in this by kindly supplying me with condoms, advising me that men had a tendency to forget if they could get away with it.
I had a lovely night with Max, though the action was all over rather quickly the first time. In his extreme excitement at finally achieving the Holy Grail of every heterosexual teenage male on the planet, Max’s initial adventure into my nether regions lasted somewhere around thirty seconds.
On the plus side, he had an amazing recovery window, and since I had cunningly convinced my mother I was staying at Kelly’s for the night, I had the whole night with Max as he had successfully managed to smuggle me into his room without his drunk parents noticing. Over the course of the next six or seven hours, we managed to do it four times, and thankfully he had slowed down considerably for the later rounds.
Before I left 2003 behind me, I made sure I briefed Rachel again about avoiding Thailand, something she had suggested. I would need to carry on doing this every year as long as I could.
After 2003, things began to get rather dull. Just as I had anticipated, my freedom continued to decline as I worked my way back through my teenage years.
Schooldays are supposedly the best days of your life, but they weren’t in my case, at least not in my early teenage years. After I had moved down from Merseyside in the late-1990s to a new school in Oxford, I had been the constant target of ribbing about my accent. Brookside was still on TV at the time, along with Harry Enfield and his Scousers sketch.
As soon as the other kids at school realised I was from Liverpool I was subject to a constant barrage of “calm down, calm down”. I also had to put up with constant jibes about not leaving anything lying about because I might nick it. I had never stolen anything in my life – unless you count the money I had taken from my mother’s bag, but that was a) an emergency, and b) in the future.
Over time, the locals became more accepting of me. I made friends and even began to enjoy school. I wasn’t going to be able to revisit any of those carefree and responsibility-free times on this journey, though. My timing, being stuck in New Year for all eternity, was lousy. It was smack bang in the middle of the school holidays.
On a positive note, my birthday began to assume a greater level of importance. It seemed the younger I became, the more fuss was made. Some years, this involved family gatherings, which each time brought back long-gone family members into my life, as grandparents, uncles and aunts came back to life and made their reappearances.
Some years brought days out with friends, including a very memorable fifteenth birthday outing in 2001, when Mum, Rachel, Kelly and I got to go and see the recently opened musical, The Lion King, in London. This had been one of my favourite movies as a kid and I remember begging my mother to take us to the stage show.
The tickets hadn’t been cheap and she had to book them nearly a year in advance, but it had been well worth it. Getting to see this amazing show a second time around was a real highlight of my trip back through time.
And now it was the end of the Millennium – a significant milepost in the life of pretty much everyone alive at that time. The human race was saying goodbye to a century that had brought amazing technological developments from the aeroplane to the internet that had completely changed the world. Now, they were putting all of that behind them and wondering what this brave new dawn would bring.
I was in the unique and position of having already seen it. Most were looking to the new century with optimism, but was it misplaced? I knew that, despite further advances, the first quarter of a century would bring difficult times: more wars, more pollution and great political upheaval.
Above all else, the world would change forever on September 11th 2001 with the terror att
acks in America. But the world was blissfully unaware of this now, and as I looked at the faces all around me, I saw something I saw every New Year – hope.
Hope was something of which I was in short supply. But tonight, I had resolved that I must put all that behind me and make the most to enjoy the evening.
I was at my grandparents’ house in Botley, where they had invited family and friends from far and wide to celebrate this special year. There were about forty people there all told, spread out around the kitchen, living room and conservatory.
The evening had been a source of delight for me. It had given me the chance to catch up with many long-lost family members. My Uncle Derek and his family had come down from Banbury to join us. He had two daughters, Kirsty and Karen, who were a little older than me and Rachel. They had got into drinking and boys before we did, and we both looked up to them. They were also very handy for smuggling drink in our direction at these sorts of gatherings.
Uncle Derek had proved to be tremendous entertainment value throughout the evening, with his ongoing attempts to convince everyone that the Millennium bug was about to strike, bringing the world to an end.
Despite being only in his mid-forties, Derek was quite an old-fashioned man, as amply demonstrated by both his attire, an old-fashioned beige suit, and his attitudes. These included not only a deep suspicion of anything foreign, but also a mistrust of any new technology.
“I’m telling you,” I heard him saying to my mother, “people might take the piss, but they won’t be laughing when planes start dropping out of the sky at midnight. I’ve been preparing for this for weeks.”
“Don’t I know it?” chipped in his wife, my Aunty Carol. “I’m sick of tripping over the boxes of candles all over the house.”
I liked my Aunty Carol. She was in her late-forties around this time and wore way too much perfume and make-up to cover up her years. I remembered the constant banter she and her husband used to have whenever I encountered them in my youth.
“You may scoff, my dear,” replied Derek, taking a puff on his old-fashioned pipe and holding it out in front of him as if that somehow gave him an air of wisdom and authority. “But you’ll be glad of those candles tomorrow night – and the Calor Gas stove.”
“Yes, and I’m sick of that bloody thing cluttering up the hallway too,” replied Carol.
“Covered every base, I have,” continued Derek, ignoring his wife’s remark. “That Brian next door, he thinks I’m a nutter, but I’m going to be the one laughing tomorrow night when he’s freezing cold and begging to come in and get warm in front of my wood-burner.”
“Ooh, you’ve got a wood-burner, now?” asked my mother.
“Yes, and that’s set us back a fair few bob, as well,” complained Carol. “It’s dirty, smelly and messy. Then there are all the logs we have to lug into the house. I swear they’ve got things living in them. When I came down this morning, there were silverfish running around on the kitchen floor and we’ve never had them before.”
“You can’t beat a real fire, though,” replied my mother.
“Don’t encourage him,” said Carol. “Tomorrow morning, when all this is over, all that stuff he’s piled up everywhere is going straight back in the garage. And if he insists on using that wood-burner, he can clean it out himself.”
“If you say, so dear,” replied Derek condescendingly.
“If it’s going to bad as you say, how come you are here now?” asked my mother. “Shouldn’t you be at home, preparing for the worst?”
“Well, I was invited and I couldn’t let the family down, could I?” he replied.
“More like you didn’t want to miss out on all the free food and booze on offer,” retorted his wife.
“What’s that awful racket?” complained Derek, deciding wisely to change the subject. The music, which had already been distinctly modern for the generally conservative gathering in the room, had suddenly been ratcheted up a notch.
I grinned as the dulcet tones of Eminem rudely drowned out the conversation. Kirsty’s boyfriend, Mark, who claimed to be a part-time DJ, had unwisely been allowed to bring his decks along for the evening. That is if you could call them that.
His equipment consisted of a cheap twin-CD bedroom starter kit from Argos, which he had plugged into my grandfather’s old-fashioned Pioneer stereo system. Apparently Mark had planned to bring his speakers, but had discovered at the last minute that there wasn’t enough room for them in the boot of Uncle Derek’s fifteen-year-old Mini Metro.
Despite the basic nature of the set-up, it was surprisingly loud in the relatively small living room. This hadn’t been a problem to begin with, but as the evening wore on, I had watched with amusement as the music deviated more and more away from the brief. Mark had been under strict instructions to play 20th-century music from across the eras suitable for all age groups.
He had interpreted this as by playing a few tunes from the 60s and 70s at the start of the night to keep the old folk happy, followed more or less exclusively by music he liked. As a young man in his early twenties, this pretty much meant tunes from the 1990s. While Rachel, Kirsty, Karen and I loved this, needless to say the older generation did not.
I remembered all this with glee from the first time around and now chuckled as my uncle’s face went red as a beetroot in outrage at the lyrics to Eminem’s “My Name Is”, and this wasn’t the radio-edit version.
I followed as he marched over to Mark, keen not to miss out on the inevitable confrontation. Unsurprisingly, Derek didn’t like his daughter’s boyfriend. He was twenty-one and his precious Kirsty was eighteen, which meant that there was a high probability that he was screwing her.
My uncle, who was of the old school ‘no sex before marriage’ type definitely would not be happy about that.
“What the bloody hell is this?!” spluttered Derek into his beer, a bottle of something called mild, whatever that was. “This is supposed to be a family party. It’s half past eleven on New Year’s Eve and you’re playing this disgusting, filthy stuff. We want some proper good, old-fashioned party tunes.”
“Well, I was sort of saving those until after midnight,” replied Mark.
“That’s no bloody good, is it?” shouted Derek, struggling to compete with Eminem’s swearing. “You know all the power’s going to go off at midnight when this Millennium bug hits, don’t you? Now get this vile rubbish off and play some proper tunes.”
I was standing right behind, and saw an opportunity to intervene.
“Maybe I can help out,” I said. “I know my music.”
“You,” said Mark, scornfully. “How old are you, about ten?”
I bristled at this put-down and replied. “Nearly fourteen, as it happens, and believe me, I can guarantee I’ve been to a lot more New Year parties than you.”
“Yes, let her help,” said Rachel who had come up behind me. “If anyone knows about New Year’s Eve here, she does.”
Earlier that day, I had given Rachel my now standard tsunami warning chat so she knew all about my time travels.
“Come on, lad,” said Derek. “You’ve had your change and made a pig’s ear of it. Move over and let these girls sort it out.”
Quickly I flicked through the big box of CDs Mark had brought with him, pulling out a compilation album of party hits.
“Here, try this,” I said. “Track Five.”
Muttering, Mark took the CD and put it in the spare deck. A few seconds later Eminem’s lyrics were cut short as the opening chords to Dexys Midnight Runners’ “Come On Eileen” rang out.
“Hmm, that’s a bit better,” said Derek, begrudgingly, “but still a little modern for my tastes.”
“Well, they all seem to like it,” said Rachel, gesturing towards the room where a large proportion of the guests, even the grandparents, had spontaneously begun to dance for the first time that evening.
I wasn’t a massive fan of this song personally, having heard it done to death over so many New Year parties, but I knew
how effective it always was on this particular night.
Over the next half-hour, I produced a set that included, amongst others, “Rock Around The Clock”, “Dancing Queen”, “Don’t You Want Me?” and “The Final Countdown”. At five minutes to midnight I topped the whole thing off with Prince’s 1999. It was cheesy and obvious but nobody cared. I was giving them exactly what they wanted.
The TV was switched on to hear Big Ben’s bongs just before midnight arrived. Much to Uncle Derek’s disappointment, the lights didn’t go off and no planes crashed on the house. That was when I had that official first glass of champagne. Of course, being a teenager it wasn’t my first drink of the evening. No one knew about the cider that Kirsty had smuggled upstairs for us kids to share earlier in the evening.
It was a time when alcohol, like so many things was new, forbidden and therefore exciting. Even though I had loved through another twenty-five years since this evening, I didn’t feel jaded in any way. There were even moments during the night when I forgot about my situation for a moment and really did revert to that teenage mindset when the endless possibilities of life were still stretching out before me.
But they weren’t in front of me anymore. I was heading in the opposite direction and I now had less than four weeks left.
Chapter Eighteen
1992
I am now almost six years old and time is running out.
Strangely, I no longer fear the death that now seems inevitable. What I fear most of all now is my birth.
Although I’ve never had children myself, I know from countless conversations that childbirth is the worst pain a woman can experience. But what about the process of actually being born? How does that feel? Is it as painful for the baby as the mother?
The answer is that nobody knows. Not everyone has given birth, but everyone has been born – whether that be the normal way or by Caesarean section. In my case I know it was the former.