by Jason Ayres
Alan was generous to a T back then, never asking her to contribute a penny towards the food or bills. He made life as easy as he possibly could for her, which made it all the more difficult to face the decision that was looming on the horizon.
Living scot-free had enabled her to save money rapidly for the travelling she hoped to do in the summer, but she was now facing a dilemma about whether or not she should go. She had told Alan of her plans to go travelling when they had been away in France, but had avoided discussing it since she had moved in with him. He had not mentioned it again either, which didn’t help. Perhaps he had just assumed that now she was living with him, she had dropped her plans. The trouble was, the longer she left it, the harder she was finding it to bring the subject up.
Further ahead, there was also the issue of university that would have to be tackled at some point. She had told him all about her career plans on one of their first meals out. He had seemed enthusiastic and encouraging, but again it had not been mentioned since. Now she was at the point where she needed to accept a place if she was going that September. She knew she couldn’t stay in Oxford with him unless she changed her course to something they offered, which she was not willing to do. She still had her heart set on media studies and was strongly considering Leeds or Durham as her best options.
Alan had made her feel so wanted and happy that she was getting strong feelings of guilt over her plans. Would leaving him to travel or study be an act of betrayal after all he had done for her? If there had been any cracks in their relationship at that time then she would at least have had some reason to justify leaving, but he was just so damned perfect. That was going to make it all the harder to leave.
With the benefit of decades of hindsight, Kay now wondered if he had been manipulating her even back then. She had assumed then that he hadn’t asked about her plans because he had forgotten about them, but was he in fact playing a clever game with her? Had he been so nice to her purely so that she would feel unable to leave?
His impeccable conduct back then was a far cry from what she was to experience in later years, once he had got her where he wanted her. But she was only nineteen then. She simply didn’t have the life experience to see what he was doing. Maybe there had been warning signs that her forty-three-year-old self would have spotted a mile off, but she was young and in love, and as she had heard people say many times, love is blind.
Spring gave way to summer, and as June dawned she knew she could not put off her decisions any longer. Breaking away from Alan would be very hard but she had saved for and planned her trip round Europe for so long that she couldn’t turn her back on it now. It didn’t have to spell the end of the relationship – if he loved her, he would wait for her to come back – wouldn’t he?
She had over £3,000 in the bank and a clear plan in her mind as to what she wanted to do. Her plan was to start at the top of Europe and work her way downwards.
She had decided that one of the Scandinavian countries would be her first destination, with mid-June as her planned departure date. This wasn’t a date she had chosen at random. A year or two before, she had watched the latest David Attenborough series, Life in the Freezer, on BBC1. She found it fascinating to learn how the sun never set in the summer in the Arctic regions.
She had vowed there and then that she would one day go and see the midnight sun. Hence her rather unusual choice of country to begin her travels through Europe. By choosing a date as close as possible to the summer solstice, she wouldn’t have to travel all the way to the North Pole. All she had to do was get inside the Arctic Circle. Her best options for this seemed to be Norway or Finland.
She had opted for Finland. This gave her the option to visit Lapland, somewhere she had seen depicted in many Christmas movies. She doubted it would seem very Christmassy in June, but no matter. She would get a budget flight to Helsinki, and from there travel north to the city of Rovaniemi. She would give herself the best possible chance of seeing the midnight sun by ensuring she was there on the date of the summer solstice. Then she just had to keep her fingers crossed for a sunny day.
From there she would travel south by train using a student railcard. She would visit as many countries as she could, finishing with a tour of the Greek islands in September. She had built up a good selection of guidebooks to help her find the youth hostels where she would stay and the places of interest she could visit.
It would mean lugging a lot of books around with her, but that was how people did things in those days. It was 1995 and the internet revolution was only just beginning. Online guides, the few that existed, were in their infancy and the only way to access them would be in one of the internet cafés which were springing up all over the place at that time.
It would be an exciting time to be travelling in Europe. The Iron Curtain had recently come down and there were a host of newly independent states springing up, formerly part of the Soviet Union. These had once been very difficult to visit but were now throwing open their borders, keenly embracing and welcoming visitors from the Western world.
Kay hoped to include some of these on her journey. Everyone else went to France, Spain and Italy, but she wanted to do something different, something unusual. It was going to be the adventure of a lifetime.
The thought that she was just nineteen, inexperienced and potentially vulnerable, didn’t dissuade her. She was young and fearless, her heart and mind full of adventure. To her, this would only be the start – one day she planned to be the one writing the guidebooks rather than reading them.
But none of it ever happened.
She kept putting off telling Alan, even booking her flight before broaching the subject with him. On the same day she booked the flight she also accepted a place at Leeds University. She didn’t tell him about that either.
It was just four days before she was due to fly from Heathrow to Helsinki on the third Saturday in June when she finally plucked up the courage to tell him. She hadn’t expected him to take it well, but he was surprisingly supportive. He even offered to drive her to the airport the night before and pay for them to spend a last night together in a hotel, prior to seeing her off in the morning. He was so nice and reasonable about everything, she hadn’t for a moment thought of turning his offer down.
That was her first mistake. Had he got angry or upset at that point, it would have been easier to break away. Kay would still have had a few days to get her act together for her trip. But he had been one step ahead of her all the way. She was sure now that he had known exactly what he had been doing in order to turn the situation to his advantage. She had seen many similar examples of his cunning in the intervening years. Unfortunately, back then she had still been blissfully unaware of how he operated.
It was just one of so many “what if?” moments she had played over and over in her mind in the long, lonely hours she had spent in her flat lately. The morning she had been due to fly from the airport was one of the pivotal moments. That one wrong decision she had made that day had followed her down the years, like a lead weight dragging behind her.
She had let him talk her out of going at the eleventh hour and after that the opportunity never arose again. He had got his own way and it would set a precedent for the rest of their relationship. Without realising it, she had already become subservient to him.
Twenty-five years on, she had still not seen the midnight sun. It seemed there was precious little chance now that she ever would.
Chapter Three
December 2018
Wearily Kay dragged herself out of bed, trying feebly to gather the strength to face another day.
It wasn’t far to the bathroom, if it could even be called that. It was a tiny room with a toilet in one corner and a shower cubicle she could barely squeeze into in another. There was also a sink, even smaller than the one in the kitchen. There was no towel rail – the only place she could hang a towel was over the back of the door.
That was her luxury en suite bathroom, as McVie had outrageous
ly called it when he first showed her around. It wasn’t even a proper room. The wall separating it from her bedroom was just a cheap partition, of the type used in offices to separate conference rooms, and it wobbled when she walked across the floor.
The faded yellow ceramic tiles, ingrained with decades of other people’s dirt, were icy to the touch. The cold was a shock to her feet after the threadbare grey carpet of the bedroom which at least provided a smidgeon of warmth.
Avoiding the tile with the large crack running diagonally across it, she fumbled for the shower controls. As fast as she could she reached for the left-hand control, turning it clockwise and quickly pulling her hand back. She wasn’t quick enough, and got a splash of cold water across her arm, just as she did every other day. The shower head was ancient and clogged up with black mould. Rather than one continuous flow, it sprayed what little water it gave out in all sorts of unpredictable directions.
While she was waiting for the hot water to come through, she kicked off her skanky T-shirt and knickers, eager to feel the relief of the hot shower as she shivered in the cold.
It was definitely colder in the room than usual, even accounting for the freezing weather outside. She was soon to find out why. As she stepped into the shower she got a much bigger shock than the one the tiles had given to her feet. The water was icy cold. She gasped for breath and quickly stepped back, catching the big toe of her right foot in the cracked tile, giving it a nasty pinch.
“For fuck’s sake!” she shouted out in frustration. It was just one thing after another. She really had had enough of this miserable existence. As so often in recent days, dark thoughts filled her mind as her eyes welled up with tears once again.
And then she caught sight of herself in the mirror above the sink. The cold tiles and cold water may have given her body a shock, but that was nothing in comparison to the surprise that now greeted her eyes.
Looking back at her from the mirror was not the tired, tear-stained face of despair that she could barely bring herself to look at these days. Instead she saw a vision of youth and beauty that she instantly recognised as her own. Only a few moments ago she had been lying in bed thinking all about that pretty girl she used to be, and now here she was, looking right back at her.
Before she had a chance to ponder as to why she might be seeing the image of her younger self in the mirror, she had something else to think about. A split second after she had first set eyes on the reflection, it spoke.
“So you recognise me, then?” said her younger self in clear, unbroken tones.
“What? How?” croaked Kay, incredulously, her voice dry and rough from last night’s smoking and drinking. She couldn’t even begin to contemplate how this could possibly be happening or why. Before she could even begin to try and make sense of the situation, the image from long ago spoke again.
“Let me put your mind at rest and save us the routine of going through the usual questions,” replied her youthful reflection. “You’re not dreaming, hallucinating or mad. I’m not your younger self, just a projection of her, to remind you who you used to be. There is nothing to be afraid of. I’ve come here to help you.”
“How?” asked Kay again, so gobsmacked by this strange turn of events that she was unable to muster any more than this monosyllabic response.
“Well, I suggest you think of me as your guardian angel,” replied her reflection. “That was the moniker another lost soul I helped recently gave me and I rather like it. I have been given a lot of different names in my time. Another I visited long ago dubbed me ‘The Ghost of Christmas Past’. I think that’s quite appropriate, given the time of year, don’t you think?”
Kay couldn’t even fashion a single-word response this time, as her hung-over mind wrestled with making sense of this bizarre situation.
“I can see you’re confused,” said the angel. “So let’s make this easy. I’ve come to help you, like I said before. I can see life’s gone very wrong for you and I want to give you the chance to confront your inner demons. I know all about what happened in your past – about your failed marriage and how your life didn’t turn out as you had hoped.”
Finding her voice, Kay replied, “How do you know?”
“I can see inside your mind,” replied the angel. “I was reading your thoughts as you lay in bed this morning. And I saw what happened downstairs last night. I can pretty much see everything. I have the ability to travel to any and every point in time and space simultaneously and see the potential result of every decision ever made. Though in practice, that gets a bit tiring even for me. It’s a case of serious information overload if I try and do too much at once.”
“How?” asked Kay once again.
“That seems to be your favourite word this morning,” replied the angel. “Don’t worry about the how because it’s beyond your comprehension. Just accept what I’m telling you and then we can move on.”
Kay quickly decided that she may as well accept it, even though the whole thing was preposterous. Maybe she was going crazy, but things could not get any worse than they already were, so why not go along with it?
Perhaps going crazy would be a relief. If she was so fucked up now that she was losing her grip on the car crash that was her life, perhaps it would be a blessed relief. At least if she got carted off by the men in white coats there would be someone to look after her then.
But in the seemingly unlikely event that this really was some sort of miraculous visitation, she may as well grab firm hold of whatever it had to offer. This angel had said she had come to help her, after all, and what did she have to lose? There wasn’t a lot left to lose in her life: she had lost it all already.
“OK, I accept it,” she said. “So what happens next?”
“It’s pretty simple, really. I’m going to let you live six days of your life over again. Any six days you like but I must clarify, they need to be in the past.”
The angel specified that because another lost soul she had recently visited had unexpectedly asked to see his own future, which had annoyed her no end. Even despite her all-knowing, all-powerful presence, she took her eye off the ball occasionally and hadn’t seen that one coming. Being caught out by a mere mortal was humiliating.
“That’s it?” replied Kay, feeling somewhat underwhelmed. “How’s that going to help me?”
“Think about,” replied the angel. “It will give you the chance to revisit some of those pivotal moments in your life and perhaps do them differently.”
“OK, I get it,” said Kay, her mind opening up to the possibilities. “So I could go back in time to the day my ex-husband first asked me out and tell him to get lost?”
“You could do that,” replied the angel. “But it would be a bit of a waste of a day, wouldn’t it?”
“No, I don’t think so. Because then my whole life would change,” said Kay excitedly. “Without that sod I could live the life I always wanted to.”
“Actually, no, you can’t,” replied the angel. “I’m glad you brought this up as it saves any misunderstandings later on. I’m afraid I can’t allow you to change anything in the past. When you travel back to the past, the day you will visit will be a temporary copy, nothing more. When you return to the present, that copy will cease to exist.”
“What’s the bloody point of that?” protested Kay. “That’s no use to me whatsoever. When I get back here, I’ll just be back to square one.”
“That’s what most people think to begin with,” replied the angel. “But it’s all in the application. You can do a lot in a day if you put your mind to it. There are all sorts of possibilities. Maybe you cannot change history but you can resolve some of the burning issues that have been eating away at your soul. Generally people find when it’s all over they are in a much better place to take their lives forward.”
“Everyone?” asked Kay.
“Pretty much,” said the angel. “Most are sceptical to begin with and unsure of what to do, but no one’s ever turned down the offer. There are no
strings attached, no consequences, just a once-in-a-million-lifetimes, six-day trip back through your own past. It’s an experience very few will ever have and something money can’t buy. It’s not something you can book down at Thomas Cook.”
“Why six days?” asked Kay. “Why not five or seven?”
“I’ve found six to be the optimum number for people. It’s enough for them to do the things they need to do, but not so many that they waste days. So six days it is – use them wisely.”
“But where to begin?” asked Kay, beginning to warm to the idea. “The possibilities are endless.”
“Most people struggle with their first choice so I normally give them a little helping hand to get started,” replied the angel.
“I could certainly use one,” replied Kay, feeling like a kid in a sweet shop not knowing where to start.
“How about this?” suggested the angel. “Do you remember what you were thinking about just before I arrived? Not the part about freezing your tits off in the shower and hurting your foot, but what you were thinking about before you got out of bed?”
“Yes,” replied Kay. “I was thinking about the day Alan talked me out of flying to Finland.”
“Well, there you go, then,” said the angel. “That’s your first port of call. Go and see the midnight sun. You’ve always regretted not going, so now’s your chance.”
“That’s an awesome idea,” replied Kay. “You’re right: I always regretted not taking that trip. The only thing is, I can’t remember the exact date. All I know is it was June 1995, just before the solstice.”
“Don’t worry about the details,” said the angel. “You don’t have to programme the date into a computer or anything. I already checked back to the date of your flight. It was Saturday 17th June 1995. I also took the liberty of checking the weather forecast and I’m pleased to report that it was clear and sunny that night in Rovaniemi. All you’ve got to do is make it there in one day. It’s going to be quite a challenge but it’s definitely achievable and will be all the more fun for it. As for your other five trips, well, you’ll have plenty of time when you are travelling to think about what you want to do with them.”