The car stalled, and when he turned the ignition again, nothing happened.
‘OK!’ He called back to the open‐mouthed Callum. ‘You can press it now!’
Alex had six more goes with the car and by the last attempt felt he was really getting the hang of it. He could reverse out of the drive without hitting the side of the garage or crashing into the lamp post. He could change into a forward gear without stalling, and got all the way to the end of the road, turned round, came back and into his own drive before stopping in front of a white‐faced Callum and telling him to press Ctrl‐Z.
An instant later, he was no longer in the car, but standing to one side of it in the garage.
‘You’re going to what?’ demanded Callum. ‘I said I’m going to borrow Mum’s car and take it for a drive,’ said Alex, but then decided he had done enough driving for one day. ‘No, on second thoughts, let’s go and have some tea.’
‘Thank goodness for that.’ Callum gave a sigh of relief. ‘Your mum’s spent years doing up the car and if anything happened to it…’
‘Come on.’ Alex took his friend by the arm and led him towards the road. ‘Let’s get to your house and I’ll tell you what just happened.’
*
The next day, when he got home from school, Alex took the 120‐piece dinner service his parents had been given when they got married – the one they only used when they had special visitors – and carried it out to the garden. Standing by the back door, he picked up one of the dinner plates and hurled it like a discus as far as he could. It landed with a deeply satisfying crash on the paving stones down by the shed.
Ten plates later, Callum was finally persuaded to join in, and he threw a soup plate, which unfortunately went over the fence into the garden next door, breaking not only the plate but a pane of glass in Mr Kowalski’s greenhouse. That made an even better noise, Alex decided, and he began throwing more china over the fence directly at the greenhouse.
Five minutes later, when every single piece of china had been shattered – and most of the greenhouse – Alex gazed happily at the wreckage and not even the sudden appearance of Mr Kowalski’s unshaven face above the fence could disturb his feeling of deep content.
‘Alex?’ bellowed Mr Kowalski. ‘What you done? What you done to my greenhouse!’ His finger pointed accusingly. ‘You are wicked boy! I tell your father! You are very wicked boy!’
While Callum backed nervously towards the house, Alex did not bat an eyelid. ‘Don’t worry, Mr K,’ he said calmly. ‘It’s cool.’
And it was cool. Everything was always cool when you had Ctrl‐Z, that was the point. You never had to worry about what might go wrong and, in a way, that feeling was even better than the fun of taking your mother’s car for a drive or smashing a greenhouse with Royal Doulton china.
Throughout his entire life Alex had been told what he could do, what he couldn’t, and how important it was to follow certain rules. Now, suddenly, for a part of the day at least, there were no rules. He could do anything. He could do whatever he wanted. He had to go back afterwards and not do it, of course, but for a while he was completely free. It was one of the best feelings he had ever had.
In the days that followed, Alex did a good many of the things that would, under normal circumstances, have got him into a great deal of trouble. He pulled out the bottom cans from the pyramid displays of baked beans at the supermarket, he dropped a television from the top of a multi‐storey car park, and he even managed, on a brief train journey to Oxford, to pull the lever that told the driver to make an emergency stop.
To be honest, not all the things he did were quite as much fun as he had hoped, and one of them – setting off a fire extinguisher in a shopping mall, turned out to be no fun at all.
It should have been. The idea was simple enough. It was the weekend, and Mrs Bannister had taken the boys into town and left them at the cafe in the middle of the mall with a bun and a Coca‐Cola, while she went off to pick up some medicine for Lilly from the chemist.
The fire extinguisher was sitting invitingly in a corner with the instructions on how to work it written clearly on its side. Alex had his laptop with him in his backpack and setting it off seemed like a fun thing to do.
Callum had the job of standing with his fingers poised, ready to press Ctrl‐Z as soon as anyone in authority appeared, and it was only when Alex had actually picked up the extinguisher that he saw, walking towards them, Sophie Reynolds.
‘You should aim the nozzle at her,’ said Callum. ‘It’d be much funnier than just splashing the stuff on the floor.’
Spraying someone you didn’t like very much with chemical foam seemed a brilliant idea. Alex pulled the handle on the extinguisher and a wonderful white spray poured out of the nozzle. In seconds Sophie was covered from head to toe, but she didn’t scream this time as she had done with the wallpaper paste. Instead, she simply stood there, and then her face crumpled and she began to cry.
That was when the idea didn’t seem quite so funny.
A moment later, a woman in a wheelchair appeared beside Sophie. Oddly, she was the only one of the people passing by who seemed to take any notice of what had happened and she held Sophie’s hand and looked rather upset.
‘Sophie?’ she said anxiously. ‘Sophie, darling, are you all right? What’s happened?’ She turned in her wheelchair towards Alex and her voice was more puzzled than anything else. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why did you do that?’
That was when the idea didn’t seem funny at all, and the two seconds before Callum remembered to stop staring and press Ctrl‐Z, felt like a lifetime.
‘You should aim the nozzle at her,’ said Callum. ‘It’d be much funnier than just splashing the stuff on the floor.’
‘No,’ said Alex slowly, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’
‘Why not?’ Callum insisted. ‘We don’t like her! She’s always showing off in class and –’ He stopped. Sophie was standing directly in front of them.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Hi,’ said Alex. ‘Look… um…’ Sophie was blushing slightly. ‘I need some help. With my mum.’ She pointed over her shoulder to a woman in a wheelchair approaching them. ‘We’ve got a problem with the wheelchair.’
‘What sort of problem?’ asked Alex. ‘We can’t get it up the ramp,’ said Sophie. ‘With all the shopping, it’s too heavy. I’m not strong enough.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Alex. He was already moving towards Sophie’s mother. ‘We’re experts at moving wheelchairs. Callum’s sister is in one at the moment.’
‘Is she?’ Sophie looked at Callum in surprise. ‘I didn’t know that. Why?’
On their way to the ramps that led up to the car park, Callum explained about his sister and her osteomyelitis, and Sophie’s mother explained about the accident that had left her unable to move below the waist. Apparently it meant that Sophie had to do a lot of the housework and Mrs Reynolds said she wished sometimes that her daughter didn’t have to work so hard and could spend more of her time playing and enjoying herself, like other children.
When they got to the car park, the boys helped unload the shopping into the car and then watched as a rather clever lift arrangement hoisted Sophie’s mother, still in her wheelchair, into the driver’s seat.
‘You were right,’ Callum said as they made their way back to the cafe.
‘About what?’
‘When you said it wouldn’t be a good idea to spray Sophie with the fire extinguisher.’ Callum gave an embarrassed grin.
‘Ah,’ said Alex. ‘Because if you had done it, and then we’d realized she was coming to ask us to help with her mum and… well, we’d have felt terrible, wouldn’t we? That would have been a real mistake!’
‘Yes,’ Alex agreed. ‘Yes, it would.’
It was always much harder for Callum to get his head round the idea of Ctrl‐Z than for Alex. The problem for Callum was that, although Alex had explained to him several times how the laptop could take you back i
n time to before you had done anything bad, Callum had no memory of any occasion when this had actually happened. He had never actually seen Alex drive his mother’s car out of the garage or upset a thousand cans of beans at the supermarket – or at least he had no memory of seeing these things.
Alex had been using Ctrl‐Z every day since the parcel from Godfather John first arrived, and could remember everything – but Callum did not. When Alex carried the china out to the garden and began throwing it at the rockery, Callum couldn’t know – in the way that Alex did – that it was going to be all right. He had to trust each time that Ctrl‐Z really did exist and that his friend had not gone quietly mad.
But although it was difficult, Callum did believe in Ctrl‐Z. He believed in it partly because Alex was not the sort of person who made things up, and partly because his friend had shown an uncanny ability to know what was about to happen – but mostly because he had stopped having accidents.
In the week since the morning of Lilly’s party, when Alex had come round with his laptop, Callum had not had a single accident. Not one. Alex told him that he had – that in the last two days alone, he had had accidents with a stapler, an electric carving knife and a nasty incident when his hair got caught in a light socket – but Callum didn’t remember any of them. As far as he was concerned, he had had no accidents at all and, for someone who’d been coping with them for most of his life, this was truly remarkable.
Ctrl‐Z might not be an easy explanation to believe, but it was the only one Callum had and he did believe it now, as completely as Alex did. And he knew that, whenever he did have an accident, the first thing to do was tell Alex, so that he could press the keys on his computer.
And it was this, strangely enough, that nearly brought the whole glorious adventure to an end.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was a Saturday morning, two weeks after Alex had got Ctrl‐Z from Godfather John, and he had been sent down to the little row of shops in the Causeway to get some milk. It was a fifteen‐minute walk, but he didn’t mind. The sun was shining and his mother had told him he could buy himself an ice cream while he was there.
In the shop, he collected the milk and the ice cream and took them over to the counter.
‘Two pounds twenty‐seven, please,’ said Mrs Bellini, and she took the ten‐pound note Alex offered her and passed back his change.
Outside the shop, Alex sat himself on a bench that looked out over the river and was contentedly eating his ice cream when the river and the road in front of him disappeared and he found himself back in the shop, standing in front of Mrs Bellini.
‘Two pounds twenty‐seven, please,’ she said.
‘What?’ Alex stared at her.
‘Two pounds twenty‐seven,’ Mrs Bellini repeated patiently. ‘For the milk and the ice cream.’
By the third time this happened, Alex had worked out what was going on, or thought he had. Looking at his watch, he could see it was almost exactly ten o’clock when Mrs Bellini asked for the money, and four minutes past the hour when time stopped and he went back to being in the shop. Someone, somewhere, must have gone into his bedroom at home at four minutes past ten and pressed Ctrl‐Z.
It could only be Callum, he thought. No one but Callum would have turned on the computer, gone to the page that set the time, changed it to ten o’clock and then pressed Ctrl‐Z. Goodness only knew why he was doing it, but that wasn’t important at the moment. What Alex needed to do was get back to the house before Callum pressed the button, otherwise he was going to be stuck repeating the same few minutes of time over and over again.
Walking from the shop back to the house, Alex knew, took between ten and fifteen minutes depending on how fast you walked. If he ran as fast as he could, he ought to be able to get back in time.
He was wrong.
The first time he tried it he was only three quarters of the way home before he found himself back in the shop with Mrs Bellini asking for her two pounds twenty‐seven. He tried it three times more, each time running flat out as fast as he could, but it made no difference. Even when he abandoned the milk and ice cream and started running before Mrs Bellini had a chance to tell him how much he should pay, even when he took the short cut down the back of Exeter Street, he still couldn’t get to Oakwood Close before four minutes past ten.
‘Two pounds twenty‐seven, please,’ said Mrs Bellini.
As he handed over his ten‐pound note for the ninth time, Alex tried to think. He had to get home in time to stop Callum pressing Ctrl‐Z, and if he couldn’t run there fast enough, then… He looked thoughtfully through the shop doorway to where two girls were talking on the pavement outside. One of them, he noticed, had a bicycle.
It took several tries before Alex could get hold of the bike. He began by asking the girl if he could borrow it, but she said no. Next, he tried offering her money, but she still said no, so then he tried snatching it from her, but that didn’t work either. The little girl was only eight years old, but she clung ferociously to her bicycle, her fingers wrapped tightly round the handlebars. With her friend screaming for help, Alex could never quite wrench the bike free before the girl’s mother came out of the shop, grabbed him by the collar and shouted for someone to call the police.
In the end, he found a simpler way. When Mrs Bellini asked for her two pounds twenty‐seven, he left the ten‐pound note on the counter, walked out of the shop, went straight over to the girls and told them their mother wanted them inside to choose which sweets they wanted. The girl left her bike leaning up against a pillar box and, as she walked towards the shop, Alex grabbed it and pedalled off.
It wasn’t an easy bike to ride – it was smaller than he was used to and had no gears – but it was still faster than running. Pedalling as fast as he could, and with the cries of the girls and their mother fading behind him as he rode, Alex dashed along the Causeway, turned left into Roseby Crescent, raced up the hill along Derby Road and … and he very nearly made it.
Turning into the close he could actually see Callum running past the side of the house towards the back door and his mother standing by her car in the driveway. He opened his mouth to shout to Callum not to go indoors when –
‘Two pounds twenty‐seven, please,’ said Mrs Bellini.
He tried the bicycle trick twice more, but it made no difference and, handing over the money for the seventeenth time, it dawned on Alex that he was in serious trouble. Unless he could get home before Callum pressed Ctrl‐Z, he was going to be stuck in the same four minutes of time… forever.
In desperation, he considered stealing a car and was actually working out how he could snatch the keys from the woman behind him in the queue at the shop when he realized he didn’t have to steal a car at all. There was a much simpler solution to his problem and he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t thought of it before.
‘Two pounds twenty‐seven, please,’ said Mrs Bellini.
Alex gave her the ten‐pound note. ‘Could I use your phone to call my mum?’ he said. ‘I can pay you for it. Only it’s quite urgent.’
‘Yes, of course, dear.’ Mrs Bellini pushed the phone across the counter towards him. ‘And don’t worry about paying.’
‘Thanks.’ Alex was already tapping in the number.
The phone rang for some time and he remembered his mother had been outside doing something to her car.
‘Hello?’ His mother’s voice finally answered the call.
‘Mum? It’s me.’
‘Alex? What are you –’
‘Just listen, will you, Mum? You mustn’t let Callum into the house, all right? When he calls round, don’t let him in and don’t let him up to my bedroom. It’s really important, OK?’
‘OK,’ said his mother. ‘Look, are you all right? Why are you –’
‘I’m fine. I’ll explain when I get home,’ said Alex, and hung up.
When Alex turned into the drive of number 17 Oakwood Close, his mother swung herself out from under the back axle of the TR4
.
‘You were right,’ she said. ‘Callum came round just after you phoned. He told me to tell you he’d had an accident. Just after ten o’clock. He said it was very important you knew the time.’
‘What sort of accident?’ asked Alex. ‘As far as I could tell, he was playing darts and one of them landed in his father’s foot,’ said Mrs Howard. ‘But I couldn’t get the details because his father was shouting for him to come home.
He was hopping mad. Literally.’ Mrs Howard looked up at Alex. ‘So how did you know?’
‘What?’
‘The phone call,’ said Mrs Howard. ‘The “Don’t let Callum into the house” thing. How did you know he was coming and why did I have to keep him out of your room?’
‘Oh, that,’ said Alex. ‘I… I’ll just put this milk in the fridge, shall I? Then I’ll explain it to you.’
Indoors, he left the milk on the table and went upstairs to his computer.
It was five minutes to ten and Callum was playing darts. The hook that normally held his dartboard to the wall had come out, so he propped it up on the window sill instead and he was about to start throwing when Alex appeared.
‘Hi,’ said Callum. ‘Want a game?’
‘No, thank you,’ said Alex. ‘One of the things I came to tell you is that playing darts by an open window, especially when your dad is standing underneath, is definitely a mistake. But sit down, will you? And listen.’
‘OK.’ Callum sat down on the bed. ‘Has something happened?’
‘I want you to imagine,’ said Alex, ignoring the question, ‘that you’re up here throwing darts at that board and one of the darts misses the board, goes out of the window, and lands in your dad’s foot, down in the garden. What would you do if that happened?’
‘Well, I’d…’ Callum hesitated. ‘We’re not talking about something I already did, are we?’
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