Second Chances Box Set

by Jason Ayres

  “Yes, really,” she added. “But I wasn’t sure if you were interested in me. Then I asked your mate, Glen, and he told me you were gay.”

  “What?” said Kent, shocked at this revelation. “I’m not gay, surely you must know that?”

  “Well, I do now, but I didn’t then. He said I was wasting my time and that I should go out with him instead.”

  Kent thought back. She was right; he had gone out with her for a while. What a bastard. How many more times had Glen screwed him over when they were younger? The two of them had fallen out for good by their early twenties after Glen stole his fiancée from him, but this new revelation was yet another slap in the face.

  Although Kent was repulsed by the drunken, middle-aged Kay, he was still mortified at the thought that he had missed out on being with her when she was younger. Did she feel the same way? Was that why she was always trying it on with him? It was time to ask her the same question he had asked the others.

  “If you could go back in time, would you do things differently?” he asked, for the third time that evening.

  “Too right I would,” she exclaimed. “I wouldn’t have gone out with that arsehole for a start. Do you know what he did to me? Got me pregnant and then told me to get rid of it or he would dump me. So I had an abortion and do you know what happened? He dumped me anyway.”

  This was more news to Kent’s ears. Glen hadn’t told him anything about the pregnancy. It seemed he was an even bigger bastard than Kent had given him credit for.

  “If I knew then what I know now, I’d have ignored him when he said you were gay and have gone straight to you and asked you to take me to the ball,” she added. “And I certainly would not have married that bastard I ended up with. Oh, Richard, why couldn’t it all have been different?”

  She was getting extremely emotional and Kent could see she was on the verge of tears. This wouldn’t do at all. He didn’t want her crying on his shoulder. He made the excuse that he needed to go to the toilet and headed off to the urinals.

  While he was relieving himself of his first couple of pints, he thought about what she had said and particularly about Glen. He really ought to do something about him, but what? There was no point going back in time and confronting him if none of it was going to make any difference to the present. He hadn’t even seen him for years, not since he had gone off to join the Army.

  As for Kay, drunk and annoying as she was, he couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. He felt pretty bad for himself, he could have gone out with the prettiest girl in school, but Glen had wrecked that for him as well. Not for the first time since this whole time-travelling business had started, he felt feelings of anger and frustration rising within him.

  When he got back to the bar, Kay had joined in with the others who were still talking about karaoke. The teenage girl Kent had seen earlier was at the bar ordering drinks. She had quite a diminutive stature, no more than five foot tall with short, black hair cut into a bob. He had seen her somewhere before, but he couldn’t quite remember where.

  “What can I get you, Lauren?” asked Craig.

  “A blue WKD and three Jägerbombs, please,” he heard her saying.

  Lauren. That was it. He did know who she was. She was a close friend of the girl who had gone missing a few weeks back.

  She was leaning provocatively against the bar, giving Craig a good view of her cleavage, as well as a view of her rear to the two appreciative lads who were eyeing her up from the pool table. Kent didn’t think this was really on. He knew for a fact the girl was still at school doing her A Levels. She couldn’t be more than seventeen at the most.

  After she had gone back to the table, he confronted Craig about it.

  “You do know that girl’s underage, don’t you? You could lose your licence if you got caught serving her.”

  “What do you care?” replied Craig. “You’re not in the police anymore so why worry about it?”

  “You do know, then,” said Kent.

  “She showed me some ID, when she first came in here a few weeks ago, a student union card or something. It looked fine to me,” said Craig.

  “You don’t remember what we talked about at the last Pubwatch meeting, then? One of the main items on the agenda, the bit about fake IDs?”

  Kent had been the head of the local Pubwatch committee, a job he had quite enjoyed as the local landlords used to butter him up with the odd free pint here and there to keep him sweet.

  “Look, she’s shown me ID, that’s good enough,” protested Craig. “Fact is, I need customers like her. I’ve told you how much I’m struggling. She generates a lot of revenue.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought teenage schoolgirls would have had that much cash to splash around,” remarked Kent, drily.

  “It’s not her cash she’s splashing,” replied Craig. “There’s never any shortage of men lining up to buy her a drink. Look.”

  Kent looked up to the pool table at the end of the room where Lauren was lining up a shot and deliberately sticking out her arse at the same time. The two lads’ eyes were on stalks, and that probably wasn’t all. Oh to be young again, thought Kent.

  Then he looked over at Kay and remembered that twenty-five years ago she was just as gorgeous and as big a flirt as this girl was now. Time could be very cruel and there was no way to fight against its ravages. This girl, Lauren, probably hadn’t a care in the world, blissfully unaware that one day all of this would end.

  He may as well let her get on with it and enjoy it while she could. In another quarter of a century, she would probably be just like Kay was now. And what would Kay be like in another quarter of a century? What sort of future did she have to look forward to? It was all so desperately sad.

  “You’re right,” he said to Craig, “I’m not in the police anymore, so why worry? Let the girl enjoy herself while she’s young. You only get one shot at it.”

  “You won’t say anything to your ex-colleagues about her drinking in here, then?” asked Craig, hopefully.

  “No, I won’t,” said Kent. “And I’ll tell you what you should do. As soon as she turns eighteen for real you want to get her working behind that bar. She would be a real asset to this place.”

  Craig went off to serve another couple of young lads who had just come in. As soon as they had their pints and clocked Lauren, they were straight over to the pool table like bees around honey.

  The final person Kent asked about going back in time was Nobby, but his responses were not particular original. All of his plans involved going back in time to put various bets on the horses, and Kent had already been there and done that and precious little good it had done him.

  Kay made one final attempt to get him to come back to her flat just before closing time, but he wasn’t having any of it. He waited until she went to the toilet before downing his last pint and disappearing before she came back. He quite fancied some chips, but couldn’t risk bumping into her at the chippie, so he decided to go to the kebab shop instead.

  Meandering slowly home, chomping on his doner meat and chips, he pondered the evening’s events in his mind. He couldn’t do anything to help Kay now, but maybe there was some way he could make it up to her in the past. There were still a lot of things he didn’t understand about how all of this worked but tomorrow he would get to the bottom of it. His friendly neighbourhood angel had a lot of questions coming his way.

  He had finished his food before he reached his house. Not wanting to leave Debs any evidence of his late-night snack, he dumped the box in next door’s wheelie bin. She was fast asleep when he got upstairs to bed and it wasn’t long before he was drunkenly snoring beside her.

  Nothing in my Way

  November 2018

  With a lot on his mind and the undigested kebab weighing heavily in his stomach, Kent slept fitfully. As the night wore on he was tormented by one disturbed dream after another as his sleeping brain struggled to make sense of everything that had been going on.

  Twice he awoke with a
start, desperate to urinate, with the vivid imaginings of his subconscious still imprinted on his mind. The first time he had been dreaming of murdering the police commissioner, stabbing him to death over his desk with a pair of scissors. He then stood there cackling like a pantomime villain as he watched the blood seeping out and soaking the dead man’s stripy red shirt.

  His dreams were taking him to the darkest recesses of his mind and the dream that followed was arguably even more alarming. The second time he awoke he was lying on his stomach, face down on the pillow humping the bed. He was in the midst of a sordid dream where he was having sex with Kay on top of a gigantic mound of fish and chips.

  That dream had started off quite promisingly. He was young again and the Kay he had swept off her feet with his charm and witty conversation had been the gorgeous teenage version he had once been too shy to ask out. Back in the setting of his teenage bedroom, their passionate kissing had soon led on to much more.

  But his mind had been playing a cruel trick on him. During the course of their frantic coupling she had metamorphosed into the hideous, middle-aged version he now found so repulsive. Unable to control the dream, which was rapidly turning into a nightmare, he hadn’t been able to break away. It was as if she had cast a fatal spell over him, like a siren luring sailors to their doom, leaving him to thrust away inside this toothless crone for all eternity.

  Like all of Kent’s erotic dreams, he had woken up before he had finished the job. This was normally a source of frustration to him, but on this occasion it was a relief.

  He often dreamt about having sex with women other than his wife but had never admitted it to anyone. He just assumed it was something that happened to all men, possibly women, too, and was perfectly natural. It was hardly cheating, was it? He didn’t stray in real life so could hardly be blamed for what happened in the mysterious realm of the dream world.

  He wondered what a psychiatrist would make of it all. They would probably tell him that it was down to some deep-seated unfulfilled desire, which was pretty obvious. He could have worked that much out for himself.

  Why had he had such a strange dream? He didn’t desire Kay in her current form and he had certainly never had a sordid dream about her before. It must have been down to her revelation in the pub about her teenage crush on him. It had obviously had more of an impact on him than he had realised at the time so this dream was clearly his brain’s way of telling him they had unfinished business.

  After recovering from this second nightmare he managed to get a few reasonable hours’ sleep in. His subconscious seemingly had no further issues to resolve for the moment and his kebab had made it down to the lower regions of his digestive system. By the time he woke up for the third and final time he was dream-free.

  As he looked blurrily at the clock through his crusty early morning eyes, he could just about make out that it was just after 10am. That meant Debs would have already gone off to work at the café. He would have to get his own cup of tea today.

  After his usual sluggish start, Kent managed to haul himself downstairs to find a note from Debs waiting for him on the kitchen table. He couldn’t read it properly without his reading glasses which he had left in the bedroom. Cursing his bad eyesight, another bane of his life, he hauled himself back upstairs to get them, huffing and puffing as he went. He could barely get up the stairs these days without getting out of breath.

  Back in the kitchen, he put the kettle on and started to read the note. Before he’d even finished the first sentence he was wishing he hadn’t bothered:

  Since you clearly haven’t got anything worthwhile to do today, here’s a list of jobs you can be getting on with to keep you out of the pub.

  He read through the list, which had at least fifteen items on it, from emptying out the dishwasher to cleaning the windows. Many of these had sarcastic remarks added to them, some of which Kent considered rather harsh. The last one was particularly brutal.

  And finally, you can also give the bathroom toilet a good scrub as doubtless you’ve left it in a mess again after last night. I’m sick of doing it. PS: Stop weeing on the bloody floor!

  Charming, thought Kent. It was no wonder he dreamt about other women at night. He was sure other husbands didn’t have to put up with this level of aggravation.

  To be fair, she was right about one thing, he did have a few hours to kill and the list of chores would keep him busy until his daily appointment with the angel. Grudgingly he got on with it, vowing that he would have to find gainful employment soon. He had no intention of being a house-husband for the rest of his life.

  All told, the day was a rather depressing comedown from what he had been expecting after his last trip. He had thought this would be the first day of his new life, rolling in cash and able to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Instead here he was on his hands and knees scrubbing toilets, muttering and grumbling to himself.

  By the time late-afternoon rolled around, Kent was feeling extremely disgruntled. He had started the day feeling fed up enough about the situation, but after a day of mind-numbingly boring housework he was all ready for a major showdown. On top of all that, his knees and back hurt from all the bending down.

  Arriving at the car park at 4.30pm, he saw that the angel was already there waiting for him. He was leaning nonchalantly against one of the pillars at the edge of the roof, smoking a cigarette. Kent was just about to open his mouth and begin his well-planned tirade when the angel pre-empted him.

  “Go on, say it,” he said, grinning. “I know what’s coming.”

  “You conned me!” exploded Kent. “You said I could go back and do things differently, so I did. Then I get back here and find nothing’s changed!”

  “You conned yourself,” replied the angel. “Yes, I said you could go back and live things over again, but I never said anything about changing things.”

  “But I did change things!” protested Kent. “You must be aware of what I did back there. You seem to know everything else I’m thinking! I went back with the intention of fixing things in my past to make things better now. At least that’s what I thought I was doing. That was the whole point of this, wasn’t it? So why is everything still exactly the same as it was before?”

  “Look, slow down a bit and look at it from my perspective,” replied the angel, attempting to explain. “I can’t let you go blundering around in the past like a bull in a china shop, can I? Imagine if I let everyone do that. The world would be chaos. We wouldn’t know whether we were coming or going.”

  This made sense, but Kent continued to protest.

  “I understand all that, but what I did wasn’t going to make much difference, surely? A few extra grand in the bank, a few villains in jail where they should be, it’s hardly endangering the fabric of the time-space continuum, is it?”

  “Small beer, admittedly,” said the angel. “But trust me: others have had far loftier ambitions. You should see some of the things they have got up to in the past.

  “Like what?” asked Kent.

  “Oh you know – all the usual clichés you get in time travel books and films,” replied the angel, breezily. “Stuff like killing Hitler, trying to prevent JFK being assassinated, or going back to find out who Jack the Ripper was. I’ve seen it all done thousands of times. If you ask me, it shows a distinct lack of originality. It actually gets quite boring watching it after a while. I found your little adventure a lot more entertaining, at least it was something different.”

  Although Kent understood the broad gist of what the angel was telling him, there were still a lot of parts to it that didn’t make sense.

  “I’m still struggling to get my head around this a bit. Does this mean that I wasn’t really back in the past at all, because it certainly felt like I was? Did I really do all the things I thought I did or was it just some sort of hallucination?”

  “Well, you did, and you didn’t,” replied the angel, cryptically.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Kent. “Ca
n’t you just give me a straight answer?”

  “OK, put it this way,” said the angel. “I’ll try and explain it in terms even you can understand. Now, you know when you save a file on your computer?”

  “Of course,” replied Kent.

  “Well, you know if you hit ‘save as’ rather than ‘save’, you can create a second copy of the file under another name? So that you have a backup copy, in case you lose the original?”

  “Yes,” said Kent. “I do know how to use a computer, you know.” He was annoyed enough with the current situation as it was and the angel was not helping matters by talking to him as if he was technologically illiterate.

  “Well, it’s a bit like that,” continued the angel. “When I send you back in time, I create a copy of the universe. Let’s call it Universe 2.0. Then I let you play in it to your heart’s content for the whole day you are there. Afterwards, when you come back to Universe 1.0, I just delete the copy – job done.”

  “Wow,” replied Kent, feeling genuinely impressed. “You can really do stuff like that?”

  “It’s my universe,” replied the angel, with a hint of arrogance. “I can do whatever I want with it.”

  Kent felt quite overawed and more than a little scared. What was he getting himself into here? Who exactly was this angel? Was that even an appropriate moniker for him? He was clearly all-knowing and all-powerful. If he really did own the Universe, then what was to stop him destroying it completely if he got bored with it?

  He tried to put these fears aside as more questions cascaded through his mind.

  “So time travel isn’t possible, then?” he asked. “All that stuff you mentioned about Hitler and JFK, it’s all fixed?”

  “Oh, it’s certainly possible,” replied the angel. “In fact, this town is a hotbed for time travel. You would be surprised at some of the things that have been going on around here recently. But it’s not for everyone. Travelling into the past is permissible for only a few special individuals and they have to spend the best part of a lifetime learning the rules.”