by Jason Ayres
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 looked 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.
&
nbsp; 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.
If you have enjoyed this story, I’d be hugely grateful if you could help other readers to discover it by leaving a review at amazon.co.uk or amazon.com.
Many thanks
Jason
Also by Jason Ayres:
The Time Bubble
Charlie and Josh’s interests were the same as most other teenagers: drinking, parties and girls. That was until the day they discovered the Time Bubble.
It starts at a bit of fun, jumping a few seconds into the future. Soon things take a more serious turn as the leaps in time increase in duration. When a teenage girl goes missing, and the police become involved, suspicion falls on Charlie. How can he explain where she is? Will anyone believe him?
As the long term dangers of the Bubble become clear, one man comes up with a solution – one that could hold the key to his own salvation.
Set in a small market town in Southern England in the early 21st century, this light-hearted time travel novel has plenty to delight readers of all ages.
Also by Jason Ayres:
Global Cooling
Ten years have passed since Charlie and Josh discovered The Time Bubble. As they wait for Peter to emerge after several years inside, Earth is facing a global climate catastrophe.
The astronomers had predicted that the asteroid would miss our planet. They were wrong. It slams into the Sahara Desert, annihilating everything within a hundred miles. But this is only the beginning. A huge amount of dust is thrown up into the atmosphere, blocking out the sun across the planet. Soon temperatures begin to fall.
As weather conditions worsen, the members of The Time Bubble team need to make a decision – flee south to escape the weather, or wait for the worst to pass. Choosing to stay, D.I. Hannah Benson soon has more to worry about than keeping law and order. With power supplies failing and food scarce, it soon becomes a battle just to stay alive. And there are some that see it not as a crisis, but as an opportunity.
Set a decade after the main events of The Time Bubble, this sequel takes place in parallel with events in the latter stages of that story.
About the author
Jason Ayres began his writing career at Primary School in 1979 with a 94 chapter epic space adventure. It featured the exploits of Captain Jason who bore more than a passing resemblance to a famous starship captain of the era. Sadly, the plot was just getting going when his teacher firmly suggested that he try writing about something else.
Never one to let the creative sap rest for long, by the mid 1980's he was furiously scribbling down plays in "spare" exercise books liberated from the stationery cupboard. These plays starred his classmates and girls he fancied in a number of outrageous and libellous scenarios. The plays have now been placed securely under lock and key with strict instructions never to release them to the general public.
Unfortunately his budding aspirations as a writer were somewhat stifled in his twenties by an ill-advised fifteen year career in the Market Research industry. At this time, writing opportunities were somewhat limited by having to go to work every day. However he still found time to write numerous letters to various manufacturers advising them on their product ranges. He also produced many spoof newsletters for the countless activities that a social life based around the pub entailed.
Eventually he left the world of sales figures behind to become a stay-at-home dad, giving him a whole new source of material to write about. His first two humorous parenting diaries, "Fortysomething Father" and "Austerity Dad", were published in 2013. This was followed in 2014 by a third diary recording his experiences in the world of sausages. He also continued writing about his parenting experiences via a weekly column in the Oxford Mail.
In the summer of 2014 Jason released his first novel, "The Time Bubble", which was a huge hit both in the UK and the US, achieving the coveted #1 spot in the YA Time Travel category. The sequel, "Global Cooling" followed in November.
In March 2015, he released his latest time travel epic, "My Tomorrow, Your Yesterday". This story of a man living his life backwards, one day at a time, is set in Oxford between the years 2025 and 1970, and is ideal material for a film, according to the author!
Want to know more about Jason? - find him on Twitter @AusterityDad