My Tomorrow, Your Yesterday
Page 3
One thing I didn’t have to worry about for a while was work. It seemed I had done well enough in my career to retire with a big pay-off and a very generous pension when I was 50. That was four years in the past.
The home I lived in was testimony to my comfortably well-off status. I lived in a spacious, four-bedroom house on an affluent road in-between the Banbury and Woodstock roads in North Oxford.
It had a lovely, big garden out the back, largely laid to grass but with a nice patio area close to the house, and many mature bushes and fruit trees at the far end. From house to the far end, which could not even be seen from the house, it was nearly 50 yards in length.
It looked immaculate even at this time of year, and I applauded myself on my green fingers, until a gardener showed up one day to do it all for me. He looked to be at least 80, but was very enthusiastic, and further conversation suggested that he had been coming to do the garden every Friday for years, and more often in the summer.
I hoped I might have a cleaner, too, but no one turned up. However, after a while I realised I didn’t need one. The house seemed to get cleaner day by day without any help from me, an unexpected benefit of my backwards passage through time.
Every now and then I would wake up and the place would be a filthy tip. Presumably that must have been the day I had cleaned up. So that was one thing I didn’t have to worry about. Even the unpleasant stains on the toilet bowl miraculously vanished if I left them long enough.
As the weeks passed, I felt progressively better and noticed some quite startling changes in my physical appearance. For a start, I began to gain weight quite rapidly. By early November, I was looking positively tubby. I had taken to weighing myself each morning, and by the day of the doctor’s appointment I was packing a hefty sixteen stone.
This was quite a lot for man of my height, which I had measured at five foot nine inches and on the fringe of the obese category. I thought about going on a diet, but I quickly realised that, like many things in my life, there was no point. I could starve myself every day but it wouldn’t make any difference: I couldn’t change what I’d eaten in the past until I got there.
Looking back at various photos of myself on social media, it was clear I had a fair few pounds to pile on yet. My middle-aged spread was a fact of life I’d have to live with. Hopefully one day I’d be young and fit again.
So, there was nothing I could do to change the past: I was destined to begin every day at the fixed point it had begun in my previous life. I established fairly early on, by sitting up all night a couple of times that the changeover point occurred at precisely 3am.
The only way I knew this was by sitting with my eye on the clock. The next thing I knew I was waking up the previous day. I wasn’t awake, because presumably I hadn’t been awake at 3am on that day. In fact, I hardly ever was.
So the past was fixed, but what about the future? I had free will on the days I was living in, so how would changes in my actions affect the future? It was a future I was seemingly destined not to see, but I realised that anything I did could and would affect the future lives not only of myself, but also of others around me.
I didn’t want to do anything rash that might affect my family, at least not to begin with, but I still needed to find out how much power I had when it came to changing the future. The only way to find out for sure was to do something that would have very clear results on the day itself.
An opportunity came up to test out my abilities in the middle of November. The local news coverage was full of reports of a major fire that had broken out the previous day at an out-of-town furniture store on one of the retail parks on the Oxford Ring Road.
I was sufficiently well enough by this time to go out and about, so I availed myself of as many facts about the incident as I could and made plans for the next day.
It wasn’t entirely clear what had started the fire, but what was quite apparent was that, had it been dealt with sooner, it would not have developed into the huge blaze that had been filling my TV screen on the following morning’s news.
I picked up a copy of the local paper which covered the fire in detail and discovered that the fire brigade had been called at 2.47pm, by which time the fire had already taken hold.
So, on the day of the fire, I set out at lunchtime for the retail park to get there in good time and parked up outside to get a good view of proceedings. Driving posed no problems for me at all. It was another one of those life skills that I had acquired in my past life which had stayed with me, one of many I had rediscovered over the past few weeks.
During my exploration of the house I had been delighted to find a rather smart Mercedes sitting in the garage, and this was the first time I had taken it out for a spin. It felt quite exhilarating and I upped my speed more than I should have done as I whizzed around the bypass.
Then I cursed, as I saw a speed camera flash in my mirror. Seconds later I laughed. One of the advantages of living my life backwards was that I’d never see the speeding ticket arrive.
I thought about this more as I sat in the car park. Were there really no consequences to my actions? As I pondered and looked around, I noticed that there was a burger van parked on the edge of the car park. To my surprise, and also delight, I actually found myself feeling incredibly hungry. I had eaten very little in the latter stages of my illness, but now my appetite was returning.
I opened the car door, bracing myself against the chilly November wind and immediately smelt the gorgeous, sizzling, fatty bacon wafting across from the van. I had to get myself some.
It was a dry, windy day, one of those where the fallen autumn leaves blow around in small circles in the breeze. I braced myself against the wind, and headed for the van.
“What can I get you, guv?” asked the proprietor, a man of similar age and shape to myself. He clearly enjoyed his food as much as I did.
I looked at the menu, crudely chalked on a blackboard on the rear wall of the van. As far as I could see, it consisted predominantly of burgers, bacon and sausages in various combinations.
“What’s the monster?” I asked, looking at a £4.95 option near the bottom of the menu.
“It’s four rashers of bacon and four sausages in a giant bap,” replied the man. “That’s my favourite, as it happens.”
It shows, I thought, but I could hardly talk. I hadn’t got to be the shape I was dining on lettuce. The phrase “no consequences” came into my head once more. And why shouldn’t I treat myself? I’d been through a pretty horrible few weeks with the cancer. Now I was hungry and I wanted to indulge.
“Make mine a monster,” I said.
I took my monster back to the car, where I sat and munched away, savouring the gorgeous flavours of bacon fat and sausage in my mouth. It felt good, and I wolfed it down in no time.
Little drips of fat dropped onto the front of my jumper, but I wasn’t bothered. They wouldn’t be there after today. I almost fancied going to get another, but I really needed to concentrate on the task in hand.
Clearly I was no stranger to eating in the car, as I had noticed earlier when I got in. The floor beneath the passenger seat was littered with burger wrappers, fried chicken boxes and more.
Every day that went by now provided me with more of these little clues about my life. The car was two years old and only had around 7,000 miles on the clock. So I didn’t drive very much, but when I did, I liked to go to fast-food places.
It wouldn’t have taken the genius of Sherlock Holmes to work all this out, but I had trained myself to become extremely observant over the past few weeks. Every little detail that most people probably took for granted, from what brand of cereal I found in the cupboard to what deodorant I wore, provided me with more and more details about my life.
With the monster well and truly devoured, I sat back to await developments. It was now well past 2pm and everything on the park seemed to be proceeding normally. People were coming and going in and out of the furniture store and the other shops on the park,
which included a DIY superstore, a large electronics store and a discount clothing store.
I had my smartphone with me, now thankfully unlocked after I had finally managed to work out that the PIN code was the numbers of Stacey’s date of birth.
What time should I phone the fire brigade? If I phoned too early they might turn up, think it was a hoax, and go away again. Too late, and the blaze would take hold just as it had done before. I knew the fire brigade had been called at 2.47pm, so I held off as long as I could before entering the store at 2.30pm.
I could not see any sign of a fire, but the time had come to dial 999 anyway. The lady who answered the phone insisted on taking some details from me before she’d despatch the fire engines. I gave her my name and where I was, but I had to bullshit her about the fire. I said it was in the shop and that the flames were everywhere.
For good measure, I smashed the glass on the wall to set the fire alarm off so that she could hear it on the other end of the line. A supervisor saw me do it, and immediately headed over to me to admonish me, along with two burly security guards who appeared out of nowhere.
I hung up, panicked and ran, not particularly quickly as it happened. The effects of the monster, my age and all the weight I was lugging around with me meant I was no spring chicken. Maybe one day I would be, but the security guards caught up with me before I got to the door.
“Hold it right there, sir,” said one of them, a big, beefy bloke who looked like he might play rugby at the weekends as he took a firm grip on my arm. “I think my manager would like to have a word with you in his office.”
With the fire alarm still sounding, all around people were filing out of the doors, but these two big blokes were escorting me further into the store, not where I wanted to be with a blaze about to break out. Great, I thought. I’m going to die in the fire. So much for my clever plan.
“Get off me!” I protested, “You don’t understand.”
And then I noticed the smoke, pouring out from underneath the double swing-doors at the back of the store, leading out to the warehouse, I assumed. “Look!” I shouted.
Taken aback, the security guards let go and I sprinted towards the exit. Amazing what danger could do: I actually managed to put on a fair bit of speed now that my life was threatened, overweight or not.
I looked back to see one of the security guards right behind me, but he wasn’t the slightest bit interested in nabbing me anymore, he just wanted to get out. Meanwhile, the other one had grabbed a fire extinguisher and was playing the hero.
As I reached the doors I heard the sirens. Three fire engines had pulled up outside, and the firemen were already being deployed, rushing in with hoses at the ready.
In the confusion, I slipped away to the safety of my car and watched from afar. Whilst I saw a fair amount of smoke coming out of the building, the blaze that I had seen on the television news never happened. Within an hour or so, the whole thing was contained.
I drove home, reflecting on the day’s events. I knew without doubt now that I did have the power to change things. I watched the local television news that evening which did have a small piece on the fire, confirming that the fire service had been called out to the store, but had swiftly contained the blaze with no reported injuries.
So the future was not written in stone. The consequences of what I had done in preventing the fire would have long-reaching effects that I could only guess at.
Before my intervention, four people had died in the fire, including an eighteen-year-old girl who had just started work there in the warehouse. Now they were alive, and ripples of change would spread outwards from their lives, affecting the whole world, not just them.
The girl may well have children in the future that would never be born otherwise. They would have children of their own and so on. Potentially there might be millions of people alive in the future that would never have existed before. Each of the other victims would have had their place in the world, too. The timeline as it was originally meant to play out had been irrevocably altered.
I may have had my answer about whether or not it was possible to change things, but inevitably this led to further questions. My memories of reading the reports of the fire as it had originally occurred were untouched. Did this mean I had created two possible futures?
I was aware of the butterfly effect theory, that every tiny change created new and infinite universes where all possibilities could occur. As things stood now, I was aware of one universe where four people had died, and a new universe of my own creation where they had not.
Would I create a new universe every day of my life? I sat down with a calculator and tried to work out how many days I had lived. I was 54 when I died, plus a couple of months, so I multiplied 54 by 365 and added 60 on which gave me a total of 19,770. So that was 19,770 potential different timelines I could create.
Alternatively, it could be just the one. If the theory of infinite universes turned out to be nonsense, then only my most recent actions would lead to the one true path. If that was the case, then pretty much everything I did from day to day now was irrelevant, as I’d only change it all again at an earlier date.
Frustratingly, it seemed there was no way I could ever find out, destined as I was only ever to travel backwards. After much philosophising, I decided to attach my colours to the multiverse theory, as that would at least give my life some purpose. I had been gifted a power and now I needed to decide what to do with it.
I could lead a hedonistic lifestyle, living only for the day, knowing I need never face the consequence of my actions.
I could become a force for good, Oxford City’s very own superhero, righting wrongs and trying to make the world a better place.
Or I could just try and live as ordinary a life as possible, but with the benefit of hindsight.
In the end, I decided to go predominantly with the third option, but with the opportunity to dip into the others as and when it suited me. If it had not been for Stacey, I probably would not have bothered, but I had a responsibility to her as a father who would invariably grow over time as she grew younger.
I had already worked out that there was nothing I could do about my weight, but a more pressing problem soon came to light which I had to work out a way to deal with.
As the days of November passed and my health improved, I began to feel a strange craving in my body. I felt nauseous and desperate for something, but I didn’t know what.
Then one day when I ventured out to Summertown to do some shopping, I saw a young woman standing outside a newsagent’s shop lighting up a cigarette. Instantly I knew what my craving was: it was for nicotine.
The craving was all-consuming, but I managed to stop myself from smoking that day. Over the next few days the craving grew worse. I decided I’d have to speak to Stacey about it in an attempt to get to the bottom of my smoking habit.
Was it something I’d had a lifelong addiction, too? I hoped not, because if it was, I’d never get away from it. It wasn’t a question of simply giving up, because even if I never smoked again, I’d still wake up every morning in a body that had smoked the previous day.
There was no way of getting around this. I had a choice between giving in to my cravings, and therefore sealing my future death sentence from lung cancer, or suffering cold turkey on a daily basis for years or even decades.
It was Stacey who shed more light on the situation. On the weekend of November the 10th she came up to visit and, about an hour after she arrived, she commented on the fact that I wasn’t smoking. She seemed to have no idea about the lung cancer: clearly I hadn’t told her yet.
That was odd because I am sure she had told me it was her who had forced me to go to the doctor about it. Perhaps I had lied to her about the outcome to try and protect her. Whatever the reason, I didn’t see any point in upsetting her now, so I just told her I’d decided to give up.
“I’m glad,” she said. “I know it was stressful for you after Mum died, but I really wish you hadn�
��t started smoking. I don’t want to lose you, too.”
That was encouraging. It seemed I hadn’t smoked for the whole of my life. I knew by now that my wife had died seven years previously. Could I get through seven years without smoking? I wanted to try for Stacey’s sake, but it wasn’t going to be easy.
At least it was only seven years. If I’d been smoking since my teens, I’d be looking at nearly 40 years.
The temptation to smoke was to get worse before it got better. On the morning of November the 3rd, the day I was due to get my test results, I discovered a half-consumed pack of cigarettes on my bedside table, complete with a classic Zippo lighter.
Presumably this must have been the day that I stopped, because I’d never seen cigarettes in the house before, or the lighter. Maybe I had disposed of it in revulsion after I’d got my diagnosis. But it was there now, and so were the cigarettes, seductively looking back at me. And they were going to be there every morning from now on, tempting me.
I tried to put them out of my mind as I got dressed and prepared myself for the trip to the doctor. I already knew what was coming, but I decided to go along anyway. Perhaps he could give me some information that might be able to help in some way in the future, even if it was only advice on combatting nicotine addiction.
I left the house and drove the short distance to the surgery, wanting to get this over with so I could get on with my life pre-cancer.
Sex
December 2023
Today was to be an odd day. It was the anniversary of my wife’s death. Stacey was coming up for the day and we were going to visit the grave.
It felt odd to be going to pay respects to someone I had never met. I had searched the deepest recesses of my mind over the past year to see if I could remember even the slightest thing about her, but had drawn a complete blank. But I knew that Stacey would be upset, and I vowed to do my best to play my part as the grieving husband and father.