by Jason Ayres
“So where are we going, then?” I asked. “Should we go back to my house in Botley? There won’t be anyone there: my parents are in Greece.”
“Probably not a good idea,” said Josh. “There might not be anyone there now, but what about when we come out of the other end of the Time Bubble? Anyway, I’ve already got everything planned out. I’ve already been to your future and I think you’ll be pleased with what you’ll see. Come on, drink up, we’ve got a bus to catch.”
“Well there’s no shortage of them around here,” I joked, and Josh laughed. We’d both lived through different eras of time in Oxford, but there was one constant that never changed: the place was always crammed with buses.
We went to Cornmarket Street, which was now in the days before it was pedestrianised, and jumped on a 2A bus heading north.
“Where are we headed?” I asked.
“I thought you’d have guessed that. We’re going to your future home in North Oxford.”
I hadn’t seen the old place for years, but I’d often thought about it, remembering the happy times I’d had there with Sarah and Stacey. I still missed them terribly even after all this time. Was I going to see them again today?
We got off the bus a couple of stops after we’d passed through Summertown, and walked down the leafy avenue towards the old house.
The road still looked exactly the same as I remembered it. Even the trees didn’t look any different. They must have been here for decades. There was a certain timeless quality about some parts of Oxford, and this was definitely one of them.
Josh walked straight up to my old house, reached up above the six foot-high gate that led to the secluded and large garden, and undid the bolt on the other side. He’d obviously done this before.
I thought it was a bit odd, marching straight into what was someone else’s garden and anticipating my concern, he said, “Don’t worry, they’re on holiday.”
The garden was set to patio at the top, lawn in the middle, and at the far end was a large selection of bushes and fruit trees that Stacey used to call “The Jungle”. It hadn’t changed much since my time. Josh led me down to this area, right to the bottom where we were out of sight of the main part of the garden.
“This is the best place,” he said, “we don’t want to be seen.” He explained what we were going to do.
He opened his bag and pulled out the two wands, handing one of them to me. “Take hold of this and I’ll explain how we are going to travel to the future.”
He pressed a red button in the base, illuminating the device. Pressing some further buttons on a small keypad he entered a date and time on a tiny screen built into the top of the device.
30th July 2035. 4.40pm.
“Now it’s primed,” he said. “Hold onto that and don’t touch anything.” He then did the same with the second device. “Now we are ready to go. All you need to do is copy everything I do.”
He held the device out in front of him, and said, “All you need to do now is press the green button and you are ready to go. Like this,” and he pressed the button. If I was expecting some spectacular-looking vortex to appear, I was disappointed.
“Nothing happened,” I said.
“Oh it did,” replied Josh. “You just can’t see it.” Now, remember what I did, and copy me. He stepped forward two paces and vanished.
I did the same: pressed the green button on my wand, took a deep breath and stepped into the Bubble.
Instantly, I could see the change. The jungle was more overgrown than I’d ever seen it and the light was brighter, with the sun much higher in the sky. Josh was waiting for me.
“Pretty cool, huh?” he said. “It only took me about 30 years to work out how to do it.”
I could hear the sound of children laughing and playing from the garden. “Come and take a look,” said Josh. “But stay out of sight.”
I peered through a gap in the bushes to see an idyllic family scene. I recognised Sarah instantly, older, but still beautiful, with a middle-aged man standing beside her, flipping burgers on a large gas barbecue.
After a few seconds, the realisation dawned that it was me. It was 2035, ten years after I’d died, first time round, but I looked fit, tanned and healthy, better than I can ever recall looking in those final years of my life.
Stacey and David were sipping white wine from glasses, chatting away with Sarah and my older self. And two little boys were running around on the lawn, full of energy.
“Are they…?” I began to ask.
“Yes,” Josh interrupted. “They are your grandchildren.”
“Can we stay a while,” I said.
“Of course,” said Josh. “Stay as long as you want. Just make sure they don’t see you.”
I couldn’t tear my eyes away. Just being here had answered so many questions. I truly had made a difference. Both Sarah and I were still alive, Stacey was happy with David, and we had two beautiful grandchildren.
I’d probably never know why I’d been given the second chance I had, but I had used the time well. My future was secure, my family were happy, and I could go on with my life now without having to worry anymore.
Josh had an extremely futuristic-looking digital camera with him, and took a couple of snaps through the hedge.
“I thought you’d like a memento,” he said. “As I figured you wouldn’t have been able to bring any pictures back through time with you.”
“And I still won’t be able to,” I said.
“Trust me,” he said. “You will.”
Reluctant as I was to leave, there was no more I could do here. If I’d walked out onto the lawn and introduced myself, there was no knowing if my future self would have any clue at all about the life I had led. In all likelihood I would be taken for a trespasser, leading to an unpleasant scene. I didn’t want to disrupt their day that way.
Josh primed the wands again, and took us back to 1990. Then it was time for him to go back to his own time. But he had one last thing to tell me before he left.
“When you get back home tonight, go into the garage, and find the loose brick underneath your dad’s workbench. I’ve left something there for you.” And with that he vanished.
Intrigued, I made my way back to my parents’ home in Botley. It was dark by now, but I flicked on the light in the garage, and made my way to the bench at the back as he’d instructed. I reached right underneath, and, true to his word, there was a loose brick there.
Underneath, I found a faded white envelope, crinkled and yellowed at the edges with time, with my name written on it.
Inside there was a note attached to the back of a photograph, which read “Thought you might appreciate this. Best wishes, Josh. 12th September 1973.”
I turned over the photograph to see the picture of my family, enjoying that sunny afternoon in the garden, 45 years in the future. At last I had something to remember them by.
Youth
August 1987
I was stretched out on a sunbed next to the swimming pool in a caravan park in the south of France.
It was a gloriously hot day, and the sun beat down upon me through an unbroken blue sky. I had my eyes closed and was listening to music on my Walkman.
It played only cassettes. Although CDs were around at this time, they were the preserve only of the rich. My music collection had shrunk over the years and I was making do now with only a handful of pre-bought tapes and numerous blanks upon which I’d recorded music from the radio.
It was one of those tapes that I was listening to now. It seemed that first time round as a teenager I had been in the habit of recording the weekly Top 40 show from the radio on Sunday afternoons.
This particular tape, a TDK D120, had been around a while, and the content changed on a weekly basis as I taped over it again and again.
I enjoyed listening to the Top 40. It was a hugely popular show and many of my friends recorded it, too. It was a very common tradition among teenagers at the time, and the only way many could afford to h
ave their own copies of the latest hits.
Whether it was legal or not was a bit of a grey area, but as far as I could see it was harmless enough. It certainly wasn’t in the same league as all the illegal peer-to-peer file sharing that went on later.
Some of my friends tried to stop the tape at the right moment to cut out the DJ’s voice, but I quite enjoyed listening to Bruno Brookes giving the chart rundown. It was quite a thrill to hear songs that I had known for years now being played at the time they were actually hits. The whole thing had a real retro quality to it.
This was the last one I’d taped before I came away, and it was packed with classic hits, including the Pet Shop Boys who were at number one that week during the height of their fame.
I found some of the elements of the show irritating, though. Because it was only two hours long, there wasn’t time to play all 40 songs, so they tended to miss out those between positions 21 to 40 that were going down the charts. This included a couple of my favourites that week, one of which had only gone down one measly place to number 31, but wasn’t deemed worthy of a play.
What I did find rather quaint was the failure to play George Michael’s latest single, I Want Your Sex, which was in the top ten at the time. In fact, during the countdown, Bruno didn’t even refer to it by its full title, referring to it simply as I Want.
How times had changed: it seemed that in 1987 you were not even allowed to say the word ‘sex’ on the radio. As for George Michael’s song, it was incredibly tame by the standards of the stuff that had been around a decade or two later.
By then it was perfectly acceptable to thrust the likes of a scantily clad Christina Aguilera into every living room in front of impressionable kids of all ages. And as for the lyrics, Eminem and others had pushed the boundaries way beyond what had been acceptable in the 80s.
Yet, in other ways, society had moved in the opposite direction. It seemed that it was deemed quite acceptable for football crowds to make monkey noises and throw bananas at black footballers, to which nobody batted an eyelid.
It was a strange world, regardless of whether you moved forwards or backwards in time, where values were constantly changing: some for better, others for worse.
The tape ended, and I turned it over and started again, kicking off with Jackie Wilson who had entered the charts at No. 39 with a golden oldie, even by 1986 standards. It seemed there had been a bit of a 50s and 60s revival going on, hence Jackie’s return to the charts long after his death.
As I listened, I reflected on the past three years.
I had been remarkably relaxed since my trip with Josh to 2035. Now that I knew the future was secure, I could really get on with enjoying the present, and enjoyable years they had certainly been.
Between September 1987 and June 1989, I had been doing my A Levels at the Oxford College of Further Education, referred to locally by all as ‘Oxpens’. It was opposite the ice rink, close to the centre of Oxford, and the location of two of the most fun years of my life.
On arriving at the time of completing my A Levels, I swiftly acquired a huge group of friends, hardly any of whom I had seen after I’d left.
In this pre-social media age, all I had to keep in touch with people was a small red address book that I’d kept for years, full of names and numbers of people who were unknown to me. Now, at last, I was putting names to those faces.
Life at the college seemed to be one long party and I wondered how I’d ever managed to pass my exams. The college day was split mainly into 90-minute lectures that began at set times.
Nearly all of mine seemed to be either from 9.30am until 11.00am or from 3.00pm to 4.30pm. This meant that I had a four-hour gap in the middle which coincided precisely with the opening hours of The Duke of York, a public house conveniently situated just across from the entrance to the college.
It seemed that the entire daytime social life of the college revolved around this pub, where a half of lager at 53p a pop could be made to last a good hour or so for your average poor student.
I was still pretty well off thanks to the bookies, but it was getting increasingly difficult to get bets on as I continued to get younger. The pub itself tended to turn a blind eye to the underage drinking going on, which was hardly surprising. It was doing a roaring trade at lunchtimes thanks to the college, and takings would have been severely dented if they’d started asking for ID.
Unfortunately the bookies were a lot stricter, and even at the age of 21 I was finding myself being frequently asked for ID, usually when I was collecting rather than putting bets on, which was typical. They were happy to take stake money from underage gamblers. But if they then had the audacity to win, the bookie would ask for ID and, if the punter could not provide it, would confiscate the cash.
Once my eighteenth birthday came and went in October 1988, I was in real difficulty. Any sizeable win, and my age was immediately brought into question. I didn’t possess any sort of fake ID, and had neither the means nor the time to create one on a daily basis with the limited resources at my disposal.
Reluctantly, other than getting in my dad’s good books by tipping him a few winners for his Saturday Lucky 15 bet, I had to concede that my gambling days were over.
There was still a lot of fun to be had in the pub and I don’t think I ever enjoyed myself quite as much as during those two years. Darts, bar billiards and an ancient old console game called Pac-Man were all part of the fun.
There was also a long-standing tradition where we all dutifully trooped into the poolroom to watch the lunchtime showing of Neighbours on an old-fashioned cathode ray TV attached to the wall. It seemed the whole college stopped one memorable November day in 1988, when the pub was packed to the rafters with students ready to witness Scott and Charlene’s wedding.
The two years at college flew by. Disappointingly, it had been a pretty lean spell for girlfriends, though I had managed to have a few brief liaisons with girls from college. Suddenly, it was the beginning of September, and other than one lad who had come to the college with me from school, my newfound friends vanished as swiftly as they’d arrived.
I still had Simone to look forward to and I got a thrill each time a new letter from her popped through the door, even though I’d read them all dozens of times before. They were coming in thick and fast throughout August.
I never replied to any of them, my predecessor had already done that for me, so there seemed little point. Now, lying beside the pool, I knew that I was one day away from seeing her.
Like when I’d met Sarah in Ibiza, our holidays had not exactly aligned, and I knew that Simone had left the park before I had. My holiday had ended on the 11th of August, but she had left on the 6th.
I knew she was going to be in the next caravan to us, so on that morning I was out of bed the second I awoke, pulling aside the curtains on the static caravan, to try and get a glimpse of her next door. Sure enough, there she was, wearing the orange blouse and black skirt that she had in one of the pictures I’d kept of her.
Her parents were in an advanced state of loading up their car to go home, so I dressed quickly and hurried outside to see her.
They were nearly ready to leave, so she excused herself from her parents to take a quick walk with me around the site. Her father seemed none too happy about it and was pretty grumpy when she said she’d be back soon, telling her to “dépêche-toi”.
We walked hand-in-hand up towards the entertainment block by the pool, where she pulled me to her and kissed me deeply. There were tears in her eyes as she repeated “Je t’aime” over and over again.
We had time only for the briefest of goodbyes before we reluctantly parted, she promising in her broken English to write as soon as she got home.
It wasn’t difficult to see why I’d been attracted to her. She was fiery and passionate, and I found her French accent incredibly sexy. I must have had a thing about accents, because it had been just the same with Sarah and many others.
As for the sex with Simone, it w
as some of the best I’d ever had. It went on for several days, all over the site, in the showers reserved for the campers, on the beach at night, wherever and whenever the opportunity arose.
The first time it happened was in my caravan, when my parents had gone out on a wine-tasting trip to a local vineyard. I knew they would get drunk and not be back for hours.
It was only the third day of my holiday, but we were already an item by this time. She was all over me as soon as she joined me at the pool that morning, as I soaked up yet another day of sunshine.
When she began kissing me passionately on the sunbed, getting extremely heated, I knew what she wanted. And no one could have wanted it more than me. This was a pivotal moment in a young man’s life. I was about to lose my virginity.
It wasn’t going to be quite the cause for celebration for me that it was for every other male on the planet, though: quite the opposite in fact. I was going to have to savour this because it was going to be the last shag I’d ever have.
I wondered to myself how many people living a normal life knew when they were having their last shag? Not many, I reckoned, and even if they did and were very old at the time, the likelihood was that their sex drive would have waned and they wouldn’t be that bothered anyway.
In my case, I had to face years of rampant teenage hormones with nothing to look forward to at the end of it. It was a depressing thought, but I wasn’t going to let it spoil the moment. That last afternoon in my tiny single bed in the caravan was one of the most memorable of my entire life.
I couldn’t really complain. From Marie to Simone, and all the others in-between, I’d had more than my fair share of sexual adventures, as well as an extremely fulfilling marriage. I’d truly had the best of both worlds.