Ctrl-Z

by Andrew Norriss

  ‘Oh yes, your car!’ Mr Howard sounded thoroughly aggrieved. ‘I can see that was so much more important…’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ said Mrs Howard. ‘If you’re hungry I can still make you something. Just give me half an hour!’

  ‘I don’t have half an hour,’ said Mr Howard. ‘I have to leave by then.’

  ‘So I’ll make you a sandwich! It’s not the end of the world.’

  ‘If I wanted a sandwich,’ said Mr Howard, ‘I could buy one at a garage. In fact, I think that’s what I’ll do.’

  Alex could hear his father’s steps in the hall. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Steven! There’s no need to –’ Mrs Howard tried calling after her husband, but it was too late. There was the sound of the front door slamming and Mr Howard was gone. Alex could hear his mother in the kitchen muttering and then the noise of her banging something against the wall. It sounded like it might be her head.

  He thought for a moment, then went back into his room and reached for the laptop on his desk.

  ‘How was the party?’ asked his mother, lifting her head from the bonnet of her car as Alex came up the drive.

  ‘It was brilliant,’ said Alex. ‘Lilly had a really good time.’

  ‘That’s nice…’ Alex’s mother held up a spark plug and examined it carefully. ‘And how many accidents did Callum have?’

  ‘None,’ said Alex. ‘Are we having supper soon?’

  ‘Supper?’ Mrs Howard looked up from measuring the gap in the spark plug with a micron gauge. ‘Didn’t you eat at the party?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alex, ‘but I thought Dad said something about you cooking a proper meal this evening.’

  ‘What?’ His mother looked blankly at him for a moment and then her eyes widened. ‘Oh goodness! So I am!’ She began wiping her hands on a rag and then pulling off the boiler suit she wore for working on the car. ‘I meant to tell you. He’s got to drive to Nottingham tonight and tomorrow he’s speaking at a conference. I thought a nice supper might cheer him up.’ She put a hand on Alex’s shoulder. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘No,’ said Alex. ‘No, that’s fine.’

  It was a very pleasant meal. Mrs Howard had made spaghetti and while they ate Mr Howard explained to Alex why he hoped going to Nottingham would provide some useful contacts for his work. Mrs Howard told Mr Howard how she had sorted out the ignition timing problem on her car, and Alex told them both about Lilly’s coming home party and the hundred balloons tied up around the garden.

  Afterwards, when Alex went out to see his father off, his father took him to one side and asked him to take care of his mother until he got back on Tuesday. ‘She’s under a lot of pressure at the moment,’ he said, ‘with all these job interviews and applications.’

  At the moment, Alex’s mother worked as the receptionist at a garage, but for some years she had been taking the exams that would let her get a job as an accountant.

  ‘Look after her, will you?’ said Mr Howard. And Alex promised that he would.

  After his father had left, Alex took his computer to the bench at the bottom of the garden and sat there in the evening sun. He was feeling rather pleased with himself and not even the noise of Mr Kowalski next door shouting at a cat that had got into his garden could disturb his mood.

  He opened the laptop and while he waited for the machine to load up, wondered exactly what he was going to say.

  Godfather John was not an easy man to contact. He had an address – somewhere in Australia – and a phone number, but if you tried to write or call, you might not get a reply for weeks. According to Alex’s father, Godfather John’s lifestyle was as unusual as the presents he sent and he spent a lot of his time travelling. Occasionally these travels had meant calling in at Oakwood Close, but this had not happened recently and Alex hadn’t actually seen his godfather since he was five.

  But it didn’t matter if he couldn’t telephone or write a letter, Alex thought, because now he could use his laptop to send an email. With the computer open on his lap, he clicked on the icon that brought up the email from Godfather John and pressed Reply.

  Dear Godfather John, he wrote,

  Thank you for the birthday present you sent me. It is brilliant. I have had such a good day. If anything bad happens all I have to do is press Ctrl‐Z and I go back and change it. It is so cool!

  He went on to describe what had happened when the parcel arrived and then how he had used the computer at Callum’s house. He didn’t mention the row his parents had been having, though, and instead, at the end, he wrote –

  Can I ask where you got it from? And how it was made and how it works? And I was wondering what happens to all the times that don’t happen because I have gone back and changed them? If nobody else remembers them, did they ever happen at all?

  It really is the best present ever!

  Love

  Alex

  When he had finished, he pressed the Send button, then sat back as the laptop connected itself to the wireless router in the house and the message disappeared.

  He leant back on the bench and stared up at the sky. The sun had set and the first stars were faintly visible, but Alex didn’t see them.

  His mind was too busy wondering what he might do with Ctrl‐Z tomorrow.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The next morning, when Alex woke up, the first thing he did was go over to his desk and turn on his laptop. He set the time for two minutes earlier, pressed Ctrl‐Z, and found himself back in bed looking up at the ceiling.

  He lay there for a moment contentedly. It hadn’t been a dream! With Ctrl‐Z, he really could send himself back to any point in the day, and the night before he had worked out two things that he particularly wanted to do with this new ability.

  The first of them was very simple. He was going to go next door and get back his cricket ball. He had lost it over the fence two evenings before – in the last month he had also lost three tennis balls and a frisbee – but had never dared to try to get it back.

  The old man at number 16 was not an easy neighbour. Mr Kowalski lived alone and hated any dogs, cats or children coming into his garden. He had actually run lengths of barbed wire along the top of the fence to keep them out and Alex had decided some time ago that the only thing to do when you lost a ball over the fence to number 16 was forget about it and buy a new one.

  However, with Ctrl‐Z, the situation was different. It was one thing to creep into Mr Kowalski’s garden to look for a cricket ball when Mr Kowalski might burst out of his house at any moment and catch you, but quite another to go there knowing that if he did appear, you could get yourself out of trouble at the touch of a button. If Alex was carrying the computer, it wouldn’t matter if Mr Kowalski came out. All he would have to do was press Ctrl‐Z and he would be safely back in his bedroom deciding whether or not he wanted to go.

  An hour later, with his laptop balanced on one arm and the time on it set for ten minutes earlier, Alex strode confidently down the path at the side of Mr Kowalski’s house and into his back garden. The old man was indoors and, as all the windows of his house were tightly closed and the curtains drawn – they always were, no one knew why – there was no reason why he should know Alex was there.

  He searched the garden thoroughly – twice – but without finding his cricket ball. He checked over the vegetable patch, walked up and down the flower beds and scanned every inch of the lawn, but there was no sign of it. Or of his frisbee, or any of the tennis balls. Disappointed, he was just double‐checking one of the flower beds before leaving when –

  ‘Get away! You are very bad! Get away!’

  The sound of Mr Kowalski’s voice was so sudden and so startling that Alex dropped his computer. It landed on the grass at his feet and, as he bent down to retrieve it, he realized two things. One was that Mr Kowalski was not shouting at him in his heavy Polish accent, but at a small white dog, which had been sniffing around the vegetable patch and was now running for its life. The second was that Mr Kowa
lski had a gun.

  ‘You don’t stay away, I shoot you!’ Mr Kowalski shouted and, pointing the gun at the dog as it raced across the garden, fired twice. The ping of pellets bouncing off the fence at least told Alex it was only an air pistol, but any reassurance he might have felt disappeared as Mr Kowalski turned and saw him.

  ‘Alex?’ he demanded sharply. ‘What you doing? What you doing in my garden?’

  ‘I‐I –’ Praying that the computer had survived the fall, Alex lifted his hand, pushed down on Ctrl‐Z and found himself back in his bedroom, quite unharmed, but with his heart thumping heavily in his chest.

  His first idea may not have been as successful as he’d hoped, but it didn’t really matter, Alex thought. It was his second idea that was the exciting one and, after telling his mother where he was going, he walked down the road to talk it over with Callum.

  Callum, however, was not at home. Alex rang the doorbell several times without getting an answer before Mrs Penrose came out of the house next door to tell him that the Bannisters had all gone off in a car about half an hour earlier. Alex asked if she knew when they would be back – Mrs Penrose usually knew everything like that about her neighbours – but on this occasion she didn’t.

  ‘I would have asked them,’ she said, ‘but I was a bit upset at the time. About Jennings.’

  ‘Jennings?’

  ‘My dog,’ Mrs Penrose explained. ‘He’s small, white… You haven’t seen him, have you?’

  Alex wondered if he should say he had seen it in Mr Kowalski’s garden being shot at, but decided against it. Mrs Penrose had already lost one dog that year, and if she’d lost another he didn’t want to be the one to break the news.

  He called back twice in the next couple of hours, but Callum had not returned and he still wasn’t back at half past one when Alex and his mother left for the fête. Which was a shame because that was where Alex was planning to put his second idea into practice.

  The school fête was held on the playing field every year in the middle of May, and Alex and Callum normally went to it together. This year, however, the fête was almost over and Mr Eccles the head teacher had finished giving out the prizes for the Grand Draw before Callum finally turned up. When he did arrive, he was wearing a neck‐brace and could speak only in a hoarse whisper.

  Alex asked what had happened. ‘He’s lucky to be alive,’ said Mrs Bannister. ‘He nearly strangled himself this morning.’

  ‘Strangled himself?’ said Alex. ‘How?’

  ‘I had an accident,’ whispered Callum hoarsely. ‘With Dad’s paper shredder.’

  Alex wasn’t quite sure how even Callum could strangle himself with a paper shredder, but it turned out he had got his pyjama top caught in the machine while he was using it; the cloth had been pulled through with such force that the material had tightened round his neck and almost throttled him. Mr Bannister had found him and cut him free just in time.

  ‘You should see the bruises on his neck,’ said Mrs Bannister. ‘And the doctor says he’s torn four separate muscles and needs to wear the neck‐brace for a month.’ She sighed. ‘We were six hours in Casualty while they fitted it. That’s why we’re late.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call me?’ demanded Alex as Mrs Bannister went off to the tea tent. ‘So I could sort things out.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ croaked Callum. ‘I told you yesterday,’ said Alex. ‘Anything happens, any time you have an accident, all you have to do is let me know and I can go back in time so that it doesn’t happen. I told you!’

  ‘Did you?’ Callum frowned. ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday! I told you just after –’ Alex was about to say that he had told Callum just after he had sat on Lilly’s present, when he remembered that he had used Ctrl‐Z to go back before that time, so Callum wouldn’t remember.

  ‘But you do remember I told you about Ctrl‐Z?’

  ‘Oh yes…’ Callum looked slightly embarrassed. ‘I remember that, but…’

  ‘OK!’ Alex held up his hand. ‘We’ll go over it later. First things first. When did the accident happen?’

  ‘This morning.’

  ‘No, no, I need to know exactly,’ said Alex. ‘What time was it?’

  After some thought, Callum decided it must have been about quarter past nine.

  ‘Quarter past nine? You’re sure?’

  ‘I think so. What… Where are you going?’ Alex was already on his feet. ‘Home,’ he said. ‘And then back to this morning, to make sure you don’t do anything stupid with a shredder.’

  To be on the safe side, Alex went back to nine o’clock, and found himself in his bedroom that morning. A few minutes later he was ringing the bell at the Bannisters’ house and Callum answered the door, dressed in his pyjamas.

  ‘I’ve come to warn you about using the shredder,’ said Alex.

  Callum looked at him blankly. ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve got to be careful using the shredder,’ said Alex, ‘because if you get your pyjama top caught in it, you’ll strangle yourself.’

  ‘I’ve never used a shredder in my life,’ said Callum. ‘Why would I use a shredder? I haven’t got anything to shred.’

  At that moment, Mr Bannister came out of the dining room with a sheaf of papers in one hand, which he passed to Callum.

  ‘Put these through the shredder for me, will you, Callum?’ he said. ‘I’ve got to make some phone calls and I have to be out of the house in five minutes.’ He gave Alex a cheery wave and disappeared into the kitchen.

  Callum stared at the sheaf of papers in his hand and then at Alex. ‘How… How did you know that… ?’

  Alex sighed and wondered how many more times he would have to explain it to Callum before he understood.

  ‘Just do the shredding,’ he said, ‘and I’ll tell you.’

  While Callum did the shredding, Alex explained how he had already spent the day – what had happened with Mr Kowalski, how he had gone to the fête, and how Callum had appeared with a neck‐brace – then finally how he had gone back to the start of it to make sure the accident didn’t happen.

  At the end, Callum sat there, nodding slowly. ‘So in future,’ Alex finished up, ‘any time anything bad happens to you, you have to tell me about it, straight away. OK?’

  ‘Because you can go back and stop it happening?’ said Callum.

  ‘Right,’ said Alex. He sat down on the floor beside his friend. ‘Now, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen this afternoon… ’

  At the fête that afternoon, Alex was finally able to put the second of his ideas into practice. He began at a small table near the entrance where his form teacher, Miss Simpson, stood behind a large jar of Smarties. If you guessed how many Smarties there were, said the sign along the front, then you could win the whole jar.

  Alex consulted a piece of paper he had taken from his pocket. ‘It’s six thousand, three hundred and ninety‐four,’ he said.

  ‘You’re sure?’ asked Callum. ‘Positive,’ said Alex confidently. ‘I’ve done all this before, remember?’

  Alex had already seen the prize jar of Smarties being awarded and been careful to make a note of the winning number. He had written it down – then written down the location of the square in which the £20 note was buried in the Treasure Hunt, the combination on the padlock to the bottle of champagne, and all the numbers on the winning tickets in the Grand Draw.

  He didn’t have that piece of paper with him now, of course, because as soon as he had gone home and pressed Ctrl‐Z, he had gone back to before he had written it. However, the last thing he had done before pressing the keys on his computer, had been to go over the numbers several times in his head, and the first thing he had done when he found himself back at nine o’clock in the morning was write them all down again before he forgot. They were listed on the piece of paper he now held in his hand.

  ‘Come on.’ Alex led Callum across the grass to the Treasure Hunt. ‘We’ll do the twenty‐pound note next.’

  After the Sma
rties, the Treasure Hunt and the champagne, Alex moved on to buying raffle tickets. He bought the winning numbers for a flat‐screen television, a hamper of groceries, the use of a cottage in Cornwall for a week in August, an oil painting of a sunset and seven other smaller items.

  ‘You’re going to win them all!’ said Callum excitedly. ‘You’re going to win everything!’

  ‘And that’s only the beginning,’ Alex agreed happily. ‘Next Saturday, I’m going to do the lottery.’

  ‘The lottery?’

  ‘Think about it,’ said Alex. ‘All I have to do is wait till they’ve announced the winning numbers, use Ctrl‐Z to go back to earlier in the day, then buy the ticket. I can’t lose!’

  For a moment, neither of them said anything as they considered what this meant.

  ‘The week after,’ said Alex, ‘I could give you the winning numbers, if you like.’

  Callum said he’d like that very much, but pointed out that you have to be over sixteen before you are allowed to buy a lottery ticket.

  They were still discussing the best way to get round this when the tannoy system announced that the prize‐giving was about to start.

  When Mr Eccles the head teacher said that Alex had won the jar of Smarties by guessing the exact number inside, there was a big cheer from the assembled parents and children as he went up to collect it.

  When it was revealed that he had also guessed the magic square in the Treasure Hunt, there was another round of applause and some laughter as he went up to collect the twenty‐pound note as well. There was rather less applause when he won the bottle of champagne and, as he went up to collect the hairdryer, the first of the prizes in the Grand Draw, most people were not clapping at all.

  That was when Alex realized he might have made a mistake.

  ‘They don’t like it, do they?’ said Callum, as Alex came back with the hairdryer. ‘When you win everything, I mean.’

  And he was right. By now there were hostile murmurings from several parts of the crowd. A girl from Alex’s class called Sophie Reynolds said in a loud voice that she thought he was cheating, but he didn’t know what he could do. He wondered about going to the tea tent to find his mother or Mrs Bannister. He wondered about quietly throwing away his tickets and pretending he hadn’t bought them, and he wondered about simply running away…