by Jason Ayres
EastEnders was followed by A Question of Sport, something else of little interest to me, though my grandfather loved it and got nearly all the answers right. Then there was some American movie I had never heard of called Back to School. By the time that started I was getting tired and the film was barely ten minutes old before I felt my eyelids drooping.
“Do you want me to take you up, Amy?” asked my grandmother. “Big day, tomorrow, remember? It’s your birthday! I can’t believe you are going to be six. You look so big!”
I didn’t feel big and every other day was my birthday these days but I was happy to agree. I was exhausted. She took me up and bathed me which was another odd experience, after so many years of looking after myself. The younger I got, the more things people did for me. I never appreciated it during my childhood first time around, but now I realised just how much effort went into raising a child.
I was pretty much asleep as soon as I hit the proverbial pillow that night, my youthful body needing increasing amounts of shut-eye with each passing year.
Before I knew it, I was waking to yet another birthday and yet another New Year. But today was going to be different. I didn’t know it yet, but I was about to encounter someone I had never expected to see again.
After all the usual present opening and birthday congratulations, Gran took us into the centre of Oxford on the bus. It was mild for early January, nice enough in fact for us to spend plenty of time outside as long as we were wrapped up warm.
Dressed in brightly coloured woolly hats and scarves, we headed down towards the River Thames, close to a pub called The Head of the River. I remember getting drunk there many years later one summer night with Phoebe and Lily. It all seemed like another world now, almost unreal as if it were a fantasy world that I had invented for myself.
I willed myself to keep strong and hold onto those memories. Phoebe and Lily were real, as was the adult life I had once led. I must not allow the person I once was to become lost in this increasingly undeveloped mind and body.
Gran had made us sandwiches, as she always did. She didn’t believe in buying them pre-packed from shops. “A waste of money,” she used to proclaim. She had lived through times of austerity and by that I mean real post-war austerity, not the relatively tame 21st-century version.
We walked along the river and into Christ Church Meadow, where we sat down on an old felled tree trunk to eat our lunch. Once we had finished, Gran would let us feed our crusts to the many ducks that bobbed serenely along on the River Cherwell.
It was while Rachel and I were throwing morsels of bread to the massing ducks by the bank that I looked up and saw someone I had never expected to see again.
He seemed to have appeared from nowhere, right beside a tree barely ten yards away from me. I may only have met this man once before, but I knew instantly who he was. His image was indelibly imprinted on my mind.
It was Doctor Gardner.
He was looking around sheepishly, as if to check that no one had spotted him. Gran and Rachel hadn’t – they were too distracted by the ducks – but I had and I knew this could be my one and only hope of salvation. I had to seize this moment and make the most of it right now.
I dropped the few morsels of bread in my hands and ran towards him. He looked startled, no doubt wondering why on earth a six-year-old girl was racing towards him, and turned quickly, starting to walk away in the opposite direction.
“Doctor Gardner, wait!” I yelled.
Behind me, I heard my gran shouting, “Amy, what do you think you’re doing?! Come back at once!”
As soon as I said his name, Doctor Gardner stopped and turned back around. I had clearly got his attention. I had to make the most of it. I knew I would not have much time – seconds at the most and would have to pick my words carefully. I couldn’t risk him dismissing whatever I said as the fantastical ramblings of a six-year-old child. It was difficult enough getting anyone to take me seriously at this age, as I had already discovered over the past couple of days.
I would also have Gran to contend with, who was now coming after me. She wasn’t exactly hot on my heels, as would be expected on her seventy-year-old legs, but she would soon drag me away when she caught up. I had to be concise, give him the facts and then hope for the best.
Doctor Gardner looked down at me as I approached, giving me a chance to get a good look at him. He was exactly as I had last seen him, right down to the backpack and the weird-looking wand. He was the same age, too.
“Listen, we don’t have much time,” I began in my squeaky, high-pitched voice. “My name is Amy Reynolds. I was a nurse at the John Radcliffe Hospital in January 2025 when you came in and did something that sent me back in time. Now I’m falling backwards through my own life and I need you to do something about it because in less than two weeks I’m going to reach a time before I was born which means I will be dead.”
This was as far as I got before Gran, who had now reached us, interceded.
“I’m so sorry,” she said to Doctor Gardner, before grabbing hold of me and wheeling me back the other way. As soon as we were a few yards away she began giving me a right scolding, beginning with, “What have you been told about talking to strange men?”
He hadn’t been given the chance to reply and I needed to be sure he had understood. My grandmother had grabbed my hand and was frogmarching me away, but I did my utmost to wriggle free.
Managing to loosen her grip and turn back the other way I yelled, “Please, remember what I said.”
Briefly I caught his gaze and, although he said nothing, there was a flash of recognition in his eyes and a barely perceptible nod of acknowledgement. Meanwhile, my defiance was making Gran even more cross.
“Come away, Amy,” she said. “I don’t know what’s got into you, but we’re going home right now. Just you wait until I tell your parents about this.”
She glanced over to where my sister was standing, still surrounded by hungry ducks, observing my bizarre behaviour from afar. “Come on, Rachel!” she called.
Grabbing my hand firmly, Gran pulled me back down the path.
“You idiot, Amy. Why do you have to ruin everything?” complained my sister.
I managed to fire one glance back to where Doctor Gardner had been standing to see that he was now walking swiftly away in the opposite direction. He had understood, hadn’t he?
I was in the doghouse for the rest of the day, but I didn’t care. My unexpected encounter in the park had given me fresh hope that there might still be some way out of this, and if there was, then it had been so worth it.
When I got to bed, I tried to think things over as best as my immature mind would allow. I could no longer analyse things as logically as I had when I was an adult. Clearly there were areas of my brain now simply no longer physically developed for the task. I became slightly frustrated as I tried to arrange my jumbled thoughts into some sort of order. No wonder kids had so many tantrums.
I knew without doubt that it had definitely been him and that he must have time-travelled to get here. But his journey must have been by other means, as he didn’t look any younger than he had that day in the hospital, despite it now being thirty-three years in the past.
He still had that strange device with him, which I was pretty sure was what he must use to travel through time. That would suggest he had at least some element of control over what he was doing, unlike me.
If so, why hadn’t he come back to help me before? How could he have let me go through all I had over the past two months when he could have come to rescue me straight away?
Admittedly, much of my adventure had been fun. It had given me opportunities to relive some great and some not so great moments of my life. It had also allowed me to see old family and friends I thought had gone forever. Then there was saving Rachel, of course.
Despite all of that, it had still been a pretty frightening experience, largely because of the impending death sentence that had been hanging over my head the whole time.
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Now that I had made contact with him, would he do anything about it? Could he, even? Many hours had passed since our encounter in the park and there was no sign of him. If he was going to whisk me back to my own time, would he not have come to do it by now? If he could time-travel, then he could have returned at any time during the day to rescue me.
I had made the assumption that he would be able to find me, but I was beginning to have doubts about that. I hadn’t given him my address or anything else other than my name. I was a Reynolds, but these were my maternal grandparents I was staying with and their surname was Spencer. That didn’t help. But I couldn’t give him any more details because of Gran snatching me away.
I couldn’t blame her for that. Ever since the Moors murders, there had been a growing fear of child killers and paedophiles, and any strange man talking to a child in a park would be viewed with suspicion. It was the way the world was going now and would get far worse in the next century as all manner of past abuse cases came to light.
Thinking about all this was exhausting and I felt sleep coming to claim me. Just before I fell asleep I offered up one final prayer that something good might come out of what had taken place today.
Chapter Twenty
2025
I knew almost instantly that I was back. As soon as I opened my eyes, I noticed three things simultaneously.
Firstly, the curtains were open and it was broad daylight outside. I could see right away that I was back in my room in the flat I shared with Lily and Phoebe.
Secondly, my body felt different and I quickly looked down to check. The first thing I saw were my breasts, back in place, full, rounded and not quite as firm as they had been at my peak. They were exactly as they had been on the day I had left in my thirty-nine-year-old body.
Finally, there was a familiar-looking man sitting on the end of the bed looking at me.
I sat up, pulling the quilt up around me, the way actresses do in films. I was acutely aware that I was naked.
“Better now?” he asked.
Although I had recognised him straight away I couldn’t help noticing that he looked much older than when I had last seen him.
“Doctor Gardner?” I enquired.
“Call me, Josh,” he replied. “And as I think we may have established before, I’m not actually a doctor.”
“Well, Josh,” I began. “I hope you’ve got a bloody good explanation for all of this. One that’s good enough to justify sneaking into a naked woman’s bedroom uninvited!”
He grinned and said, “Well, it might take a while, and you’ve got to be at work in two hours, but yeah, I’ll give it a shot. I imagine you’ve got a lot of questions.”
“Haven’t I just,” I replied, peering closely at him. He really was a great deal older, almost of pensionable age.
“You can start by telling me why you’re so much older than when I last saw you,” I said.
“That’s one of the easy ones,” he replied. “It’s taken me an enormous long time to sort out the mess I created that day in the hospital. A large part of that was figuring out how to get your mind back into your proper body at the proper time. It’s taken me nearly twenty years, to be precise.”
“Well, I suppose I should be grateful,” I replied. “Though, to be fair, this was your fault in the first place. It’s only right you should sort it out.”
“That’s alright, I enjoy the challenge of trying to solve these problems,” he replied. “Alice, that’s my wife, was trying to get me to give up all this time-travelling stuff. Knowing that you needed rescuing gave me a legitimate reason to continue my experiments.”
“I guess I should say thank you for coming to rescue me,” I said. “How did you find me anyway?”
“Well, this helped,” he said, producing a faded and crumpled letter from his pocket and handing it to me.
“It’s the letter I wrote to Professor Hamilton!” I exclaimed. “So you know him? Why didn’t he reply?”
“He was my mentor at the university,” replied Josh. “He did receive your letter but didn’t do anything with it. He couldn’t do anything with it because he never discovered how to time-travel. It ended up filed away with all his other correspondence. He didn’t make the connection to me, despite you referring to me as Doctor Gardner, because I hadn’t started working with him then. I was also in my early twenties, not fifty, as you stated in the letter.”
“That’s time travel for you,” I replied. “People aren’t always the age you expect them to be.”
“Indeed,” replied Josh. “After you called me Doctor Gardner in the park, it struck a bell because I remembered him mentioning your name years and years ago in one of our many conversations about time travel. Yours was one of many letters he had received, all of which he had concluded were from fakers. I realised after you approached me in the park that your letter must have been genuine. As soon as I got the chance I went back through his files and retrieved it.”
“And I thought writing that letter had been a waste of time,” I replied.
“It’s a good job you did,” said Josh. “It made tracking you down a lot easier. I was able to track your family history and eventually trace you to your grandparents’ home in 1992. It was very fortunate you running into me when you did, really. As luck would have it, I spent several months in Oxford in 1992. But that’s another story.”
“Well I’m pleased my letter wasn’t written in vain,” I replied. “Now, perhaps you ought to explain how all this happened in the first place.”
“I’ll do my best,” he said. “But it’s quite complicated.”
“Just give me the edited highlights,” I replied. “You don’t need to go into the technicalities.”
“OK, well, in a nutshell, I was doing research into the existence of parallel universes and traced the origin of many of them to a specific point in the past. That was 2025 in the hospital room where we met.”
“So you’re from my future?” I asked.
“Yes, many decades in the future,” he replied. “When that all happened, I had come from 2055. But even that was fifteen years ago for me now. I came here today from 2070.”
“Wow!” I replied. “Is it all flying cars and teleporting by then?” I asked.
“Not really,” he replied. “But we do have a lot of robots. Anyway that night in the hospital, both myself and another version of myself from a different universe attempted to open the time vortex at the same time. It caused a massive feedback loop which transported you, me, and the dead man on the bed back through time in three different ways.”
“So Thomas Scott went back through time, too? Have you brought him back to the present day, too?”
“Unfortunately not,” replied Josh. “There would be no point, as he had already died.”
“So what happened to him?” I asked.
“He travelled back in time just as you did, but on a much slower trajectory. He lived his entire life day by day in reverse, all the way back to the day he was born.”
“Then what happened?” I asked.
“The only thing I could was to reverse the effect, transplanting his mind into a newborn body in a separate universe moving forward. Effectively he gets to start his life again from scratch.”
“So you can do that?” I asked. “Transfer consciousness between bodies?”
“That’s what I’ve been working on these past fifteen years. And not just me, come to that. The whole scientific community has been working towards uploading brains to robot bodies so that we can all now live forever.”
“Is that how you got me back to the present day?” I asked.
“Yes. I’ve managed to adapt my time travel technology to allow people to visit their own past by transferring their consciousness into their former bodies. This is effectively what was happening to you, but spontaneously in your case. I just whisked your mind out of your 1992 body and into this one.”
“And what happened to you?” I asked. “You said the accident sent you b
ack in time, too.”
“It wasn’t just back in time in my case,” replied Josh. “I was shifting between different universes as well. It wasn’t just my mind, but my body, too. That’s why I didn’t look younger when you saw me in the park.”
“But you got back eventually?” I asked. “You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
“Eventually, but it was a long and tortuous process. I’ve seen things in other worlds you could scarcely imagine. And as for my six months in 1992, they weren’t straightforward by any means!”
Remembering Gary and all the other things that happened, I knew what my next question would have to be.
“So what about all the stuff I did back in the past? Someone ended up dead because of me. Did you know that? Is he still dead?”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” he replied. “Everything here is exactly as it was when you left. That’s the thing about time travel. Every time you travel back in time you create a new universe with a new timeline. So as far as your life here is concerned, nothing’s changed.”
“Gary’s still alive?” I asked.
“He is,” replied Josh.
“And Rachel?” I said, already fearing the answer.
“Like I said, everything here is as it was.”
“So all that effort I went to in order to save her was for nothing?” I said despairingly.
“Not at all,” he replied. “There are several other universes in existence now where she is alive and well, thanks to your warning about the tsunami.”
“But I can’t see her?”
“No,” he confirmed. “But isn’t it enough to know that she’s out there somewhere in another universe, alive and kicking – thanks to you?”
He was right. I was no worse off than I had been before all this started and this was some consolation.
“Have you seen everything I’ve done?” I asked, feeling naked not just in my body but also in my mind. How much did he know? If he could transfer my mind from one body to another, could he peer at my innermost thoughts, too?
“Relax, I’ve only seen the edited highlights,” he said, grinning. “Your secrets are safe with me. I must say those stunts you pulled on your ex were pretty entertaining. The incident with the vegetable knife was unfortunate, admittedly, but who could have foreseen that?”