by Jason Ayres
These were not ordinary police, as I soon discovered as I wasn’t being taken to the police station but to a high-security unit somewhere in London. Where, I had no idea as I had been handcuffed and led into the back of a van with blacked out windows.
On arrival, I was then taken into an interrogation room and questioned. I was seriously shitting myself at this point. I had just recently finished watching the latest series of 24 on DVD (backwards like most series I watched) and I was uncomfortably aware of what they did to terrorist suspects to extract information, at least according to that show.
Thankfully, things did not go that far, but they did ask me some pretty hard-hitting questions. I stuck to my story that I’d overheard two men talking in a pub and eventually they seemed to accept it. I didn’t fit the mould of the average terrorist who they probably had in their minds.
I had no doubt that my white skin and lack of any links to terrorist organisations had saved me from some more intensive methods. Would they have been as gentle on me if I’d been a Muslim of Middle Eastern origin?
I didn’t really want to think about it, the amount of prejudice in the world seemed to be getting worse as I travelled back through time, and I’d heard suggestions that in the past it had been rife within the authorities.
At 9pm, exhausted, I was released and I vowed never again to try and get involved in global events. I had saved no one and earned myself an extremely unpleasant day for my troubles.
When 9/11 rolled around four years later, all I could do was watch helplessly as the Twin Towers fell, knowing there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
Ibiza
April 1999
I was at the hospital again, this time for what most would consider a happy event. For me, it was anything but. I was sitting by Sarah’s bedside, awaiting the birth of my daughter. It seemed that it was to be the last time I would ever see her.
“They grow up so quickly” was a cliché I had heard many times over the years. If that was true, then so was the reverse. It seemed like no time at all since Stacey had left home to live with David and now here she was, back in her mother’s womb, preparing to emerge.
I had enjoyed growing younger with her at first: helping her with her homework, building sandcastles on the beach, and all the other things that had filled my life with joy on a daily basis.
The best times had been when she was around four or five years old. She was so cute and clever, amusing me no end with her observations on the world in the way that only a wide-eyed, open-minded child could. But as she’d grown younger still, I’d begun to find the whole process quite heartbreaking.
I’d watched as she’d lost the ability to write, and then to read. Her speech became progressively less coherent, and as she approached two years of age, I found myself changing my first nappy.
It was not dissimilar to the process Sarah had been through with her mother a few years previously. She had suffered from Alzheimer’s and had required more and more care as time had moved forward. That at least was a natural process, and, awful as it had been for Sarah, at least it had happened in the right order.
Watching it happen to Stacey from my perspective was something no one else could possibly understand.
As she regressed towards her first birthday, she lost the ability to walk and talk. She could still smile and giggle as I played with her during the first year of her life, but even that stopped eventually in the last few weeks before her birth.
It was very hard seeing her as a newborn, oblivious to pretty much everything, reduced to crying for her basic needs, nappy changes and suckling on Sarah’s nipples.
She was around six months of age when Sarah and I married. We didn’t have a lavish wedding, just a registry office and a quiet reception at a village hall a few miles outside of Oxford.
The fact that we’d had a baby together hadn’t been the main reason behind our decision to wed. I am pretty sure we would have married regardless; we must have both known we had found the right one. Apparently I’d proposed the day after Stacey had been born, so I made sure that I played things out exactly as they were meant to.
At least I didn’t have to worry about where to get the ring from on the day of the proposal: it was already conveniently waiting for me in my coat pocket.
I knew that once Stacey was gone, she would exist only in my mind. There would be no photographs, and no one to reminisce with about her. She would simply cease to exist. My beautiful daughter, who had nursed me through my cancer and been ever-present by my side for so many years, would be gone forever.
It was a very depressing thought, and I had to make the utmost effort to seem excited for Sarah’s sake as she went into labour.
I had grown used to things disappearing forever, but they had been mostly material objects up until now. They were things that I’d learnt to live without.
My mobile phone got downgraded ever year, getting bigger and clunkier each time. 4G and 3G were long since gone; the last phone I’d had that could access the internet had something called WAP on it, which was laughably poor.
The latest one even had an aerial that I had to pull out to make a call. From home I found that I could only get a signal on it by leaning out of the bedroom window.
Music was a big part of my life which was gradually being taken away from me piece by piece. I used to plug my iPod into my car via the USB port on long business trips, or listen to it through the headphones when I was flying abroad.
I loved the indie rock bands of the mid-2000s like The Kaiser Chiefs, The Kooks and Keane, but by 2003 they were all gone from the device. I could still hear the songs in my head, but that was the only place they existed now. The bands had not even written them yet.
On the plus side, the day was rapidly approaching when I’d never have to hear Westlife on the radio ever again, so there were some consolations.
As for the iPod itself, I saw it for the last time on Christmas Day 2002, my present from Sarah. After that I had to make do with CDs.
These were minor annoyances, though, all of which I could live with, insignificant in comparison with the loss of my daughter who was irreplaceable. Coming into the world at 1am, I had just three hours to say goodbye, before I was whisked away by my 4am curfew, my days as a parent now over.
If having to deal with the fact that I would never see Stacey again wasn’t bad enough, I also had to face up to the fact that, in less than a year, Sarah would be gone, too.
July 1998
Sarah and I had met on holiday in Ibiza in July 1998, proving the exception to the rule that holiday romances never last. Nick, reeling from the break-up of his first marriage, had persuaded me that we needed to go on a Club 18-30 holiday while we were still young enough.
I doubt whether I would have needed much persuasion at that point in my life. I knew that I had been single for over a year before I’d met Sarah.
As I travelled back through the nine months prior to Stacey’s birth, I managed to piece together the details of how we’d gone from holiday romance to doting parents in so short a time.
When Stacey had been about a year old, we had moved house from the modest starter home I’d bought on the Greater Leys development to the east of the city. The starter home was a tiny, one-bedroomed place, referred to by Sarah as “the Shoebox”.
It was fine when Stacey was a baby, but as she grew we needed to find somewhere bigger. I was a rising star at Head Office by this time, acquiring the role of Senior Market Research Executive before I turned 30, enabling me to easily afford the new house in North Oxford which had been my home for over a quarter of a century afterwards.
As winter 1998 turned to autumn, at four months pregnant, Sarah had moved into the shoebox with me in time for Christmas.
Her Welsh accent was much stronger in those days than in later years. All those years of living in England had softened it considerably. One of the first things I’d fallen in love with was her voice, and that had never diminished: her lilting Welsh tone
s never failed to thrill me.
After we’d met in Ibiza, we’d sworn to keep in touch. Our holidays had overlapped by a week on either side, so she didn’t fly back until a week after I got home. During that week, she had sent me postcards every day, none of which had arrived back in the UK before she did.
We were in the early stages of the mobile era now, and quite a lot of people didn’t have them yet, Sarah included. As for landlines, calls to and from abroad were far more expensive and unreliable than they had been in the 21st century.
We hadn’t been able to bear being apart and out of touch, so true to the story she’d related to me, I made sure I was at Cardiff Airport, complete with a bunch of flowers, to meet her off the plane on her return.
We had spent every weekend together throughout the late summer, having more sex than I’d ever had in my life. We barely got out of bed some weekends, getting takeaway pizzas and watching the Brookside omnibus on Channel 4 after the racing on Saturday afternoons.
I’d participated very enthusiastically, knowing that it was going to result in her getting pregnant. It was on the last weekend of September when she’d excitedly shown me the pregnancy kit with two blue lines showing in the box.
Potentially any weekend before that could have been the moment that we hit the jackpot. I got very excited every time at the thought of a microscopic mini-Stacey (or half of her anyway) swimming up Sarah’s cervix, ready to hit the target.
When we worked out the dates, we came to the conclusion that she must have got pregnant either on, or very shortly after, the holiday. Presumably I hadn’t used condoms when we’d slept together in Ibiza, despite all the general advice to do so.
I had never been very keen on the things, and although I knew I’d had them with me on the holiday (I found an unused pack in my suitcase when I unpacked), clearly I hadn’t been asked to use them, so hadn’t bothered.
Irresponsible it may have been, but since it had led to the creation of my beloved Stacey, I wasn’t going to worry about it.
The final week before I got to Ibiza dragged by, especially with Sarah already over there and out of contact. Finally the day arrived, and I awoke to find myself with her, on two twin beds we had pushed together in an extremely basic hotel room.
Nick and I had been sharing a room, but he’d generously agreed to take one for the team and paired up with Sarah’s rather less attractive friend, Sam.
He didn’t seem too fussy. He hadn’t had a lot of action since his divorce, or on the first week of the holiday, so he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I knew he was going to drop her like a ton of bricks when we got back to the UK.
I savoured every single moment of that final glorious week together, knowing it was to be our last. When we had sex, I was more enthusiastic than I’d ever been, willing my little swimmers on towards their target.
I even turned down her offers of blow jobs, wanting to make sure I kept her topped up as much as possible. As I’d suspected, the subject of condoms was never mentioned.
We dined out, went clubbing, and in the daytimes either chilled at the beach or took part in some of the outrageous activities the club reps had organised.
Beach parties with highly dubious games that involved licking cream off people, huge amounts of alcohol, and organised trips out to various nightspots in and around San Antonio made the week go by extremely quickly.
It was full-on in every sense, or “having it large”, as the reps liked to call it.
Inevitably the final day arrived, the one when I would meet Sarah for the first time. It was the middle Saturday of a two-week holiday for me, but she was only due to fly in that afternoon.
Expecting to wake up alone, I was extremely surprised to be woken up that morning by a red-headed Scottish girl, of whose existence I had been previously unaware. She was extremely pretty and very lively, having woken me up by reaching down beneath the sheets and grabbing hold of me, her intentions abundantly clear.
This didn’t feel right at all. Here I was, preparing to meet the love of my life for the last time, and I was being very vigorously and very enthusiastically stirred into action by someone else. It felt rather like cheating, a term I wasn’t particularly keen on, but it fitted the scenario.
Technically it wasn’t cheating, after all, I hadn’t actually met Sarah yet, but even so, I felt pretty uncomfortable with the whole situation.
My body had no such qualms, though, responding proudly to her attentions, and when she leapt on top of me, I just let nature take its course.
Her name was Cathy, and I didn’t have much time to get to know her. It had been a one-night thing, and she was due to get on a plane back to Glasgow that very afternoon.
We may have exchanged bodily fluids, but we didn’t exchange numbers. She wasn’t that sort of girl. By 11am she was safely on her way to the airport, and I was safe in the knowledge that I’d never see or hear from her again because I hadn’t, other than on the previous evening, obviously, when we’d somehow ended up in bed together.
Every Saturday night, the reps arranged a welcome tour of San Antonio’s bars for the latest batch of holidaymakers. Although Nick and I had already been there a week, he suggested we went along to check out the new recruits.
He was not in the best of moods at the midway point of the holiday. Not only had he failed miserably to pull after a week, he’d also had to sleep on one of the sunbeds by the pool the previous night, after I’d taken Cathy back to the room.
“Some holiday this is turning out to be,” he grumbled, as we got ready to go out for the evening. “I’ve been here a week and I haven’t even had a sniff of a shag yet. Remember what Pizza Dave said to us in The Duke last week? If you can’t get a shag in Ibiza, you won’t get one anywhere. Well, it doesn’t bode well for my future sex life, does it?”
“Don’t panic,” I said, adding confidently, “I’m pretty sure your luck is about to change. There’s a whole new batch of girls down there that have flown in today looking for sun, sea and sex. We’ve been here a week now, we’re old hands. Tonight’s the night, I reckon.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” he replied, making no attempt to hide his jealousy. “You got it last night. I had to sleep by the pool because of you, and all I’ve got to show for it is a load of mosquito bites.”
As he spoke, he was spraying himself very generously with Joop! to cover up the smell of the antihistamine cream he’d smeared all over his bites.
“I’d go easy on that if I were you,” I said. “You’re meant to use it sparingly, not go around smelling like you’ve had a bath in it.”
“Better safe than sorry,” he said, adding some deodorant to the mix. “It gets pretty hot and sweaty in those bars.”
He had a point. It was mid-July in Ibiza, and absolutely sweltering. I decided to spray a bit of extra deodorant on myself. I didn’t want Sarah’s first impression of me to be of some bloke with B.O.
Soon we were ready: two smartly dressed young men ready to paint San Antonio red. We were to meet in the bar downstairs at 8.30pm.
Although the event had been put on for the new arrivals, no one had said we couldn’t go. Nick had done it all before, but I hadn’t, so technically, in my eyes, I was a new arrival, too.
I knew for a fact that Sarah and Sam would be down there in the bar, but I also knew that we wouldn’t actually start talking until we got to the first bar in town.
She had recounted the tale of how we’d first met many times, which was just as well, since I couldn’t remember it. All I needed to do now was stick to the script.
We headed downstairs. I was eager to get my first glimpse of my future bride, and sure enough, there she was, long, golden hair cascading down over a light blue dress that came down to just above her knees, chatting to Sam.
I steered us over towards them, curious to see if I could catch her eye. She glanced in our direction, but looked straight through us as if we weren’t even there. It seemed I hadn’t left much of an i
nitial impression, even though Sarah had sworn blind to me in years ahead that it had been love at first sight.
So, I bided my time until we got to the first bar, where our oft-recalled first meeting had happened. We left the hotel in a large group and the reps led us out of the hotel, through the streets, and towards the music square in the centre of town.
It was a vibrant, buzzing place with touts on every corner desperately trying to tempt the punters into one of the dozens of bars that lined the narrow streets with their various offers. It seemed that the BOGOF concept wasn’t something that was just confined to supermarkets.
I made sure we held back a little and walked just behind Sarah and Sam so I could listen to their conversation. They were babbling away excitedly in their Welsh accents, talking about Es Paradis, one of the main clubs in San Antonio.
The four of us had been there already, on Wednesday afternoon when they’d held a water party on the dance floor, so I made a mental note to enthuse about it when we got talking.
I couldn’t hear a great deal of what they were saying as I had Nick babbling on in my ear about some other bar he’d heard about where you could drink as much as you wanted in an hour for 1,000 pesetas.
“We’ll go there tomorrow,” I answered, annoyed at his attempts to derail my plans for the evening. “I want to stick with the rest of the group tonight, give us a chance to meet some of the new people.”
When we got to the bar, there were not many people there, but it soon filled up. All of the Club 18-30 holidaymakers from all of the hotels had convened in the same place, and before long it was “banging”, another favourite word of the reps.
There was a dance floor area at the back and as we ordered our drinks the music began playing, a recent hit from Run-DMC vs Jason Nevins blasting out from the sound system.
Sarah and Sam had moved over to the edge of the dance floor. They’d ordered a fishbowl, full of Tequila Sunrise, and had placed it on a chest-high table at the edge of the floor. They were tapping their feet to the music as they swiftly drained the bowl through their straws.