Second Chances Box Set

by Jason Ayres

London

  December 2010

  Almost five years had passed since the night I’d rescued Stacey from Liam’s clutches, sending him to a watery grave. Since then, I’d finally been able to relax and get on with trying to lead as normal a life as possible.

  Landmark events did, of course, come along from time to time, and the next major change I needed to prepare myself for was the arrival of my parents in my life.

  It was a bitterly cold Friday afternoon about a week before Christmas as I stood with assorted mourners saying goodbye to my dead mother.

  After the service, we walked up through the garden of remembrance to look at the flowers. Stacey was crying, just eleven years old now, and she gripped my gloved hand tightly. There was snow in the air.

  The following morning I had woken up to the deepest snowfall I had ever seen, for once giving the Christmas season a festive feel.

  It seemed that death haunted my family around Christmas time. Both my mother and wife had died in the run-up to Christmas, not to mention my own death on New Year’s Day. Mum had been 70 years of age when she’d died suddenly in her sleep the previous week.

  After careful consideration, I had decided I was not going to do anything about it. She had lived a good life and had a peaceful death which is all any of us can hope for. I saw no point in trying to prevent the heart attack that had claimed her, only for her to likely succumb to it soon after, anyway.

  It would either be that or she would face a painful old age, dosed up with medication to try and stave off the inevitable. It just seemed the best thing to do to let her go.

  I was looking forward to getting to know her so I made sure that on the day before she died I went to visit. She didn’t seem unwell in any way, and was pleasantly surprised to see the three of us roll up that Sunday morning at her home in Botley and offer to take her out to lunch.

  My mother was a rich source of information about the past, and had no reluctance at all about imparting it. She was at that age where she was looking back at a life well-led, reminiscing about all the good times and various family members.

  I learnt more about my family history that one lunchtime than I’d accumulated in the whole of the previous fourteen years.

  She was a wartime baby, just like my father, and they had met when she’d been working as a cashier in a betting shop in the 1960s. My dad used to punt there regularly, and when he got three winners up in a patent one Saturday, he’d asked her if she fancied a night out on the winnings.

  The rest was history, married in 1968, and then I came along in 1970. So now, not only did I know how I’d come to be in the world, I also knew where my love of horse racing and gambling had come from.

  My mother’s death in December 2010 coincided with my promotion to Marketing Director at work.

  My upgrade in status meant that I got a brand new top-of-the-range BMW to replace my old car, but getting hold of the keys on the day it arrived proved problematical. Barry had been given the task of handing them over to me, and when I went down to the security desk, he refused.

  “I’ve heard my new car is here,” I said, trying to sound excited, even though I’d been driving it for the past two years. “Can I have the keys please?”

  “No,” replied Barry, bluntly.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because when the fleet manager came in earlier to take away your old car he was disgusted with the state of it. He called me out to look at it and I was horrified. I don’t think you should be allowed to mess another one up.”

  “It wasn’t too bad, surely?” I said. “Just a few bits of rubbish I didn’t have time to chuck out. I took all my CDs and other stuff out.”

  “Not too bad!” thundered Barry. “The passenger seat was covered in some sort of grease they couldn’t get off. There were burger wrappers and other assorted shit everywhere. When I went to have a look, I was able to write my name in the dust on the dashboard, and to top it all, they found a fast-food chicken box under the seat full of rotting leftovers.”

  “So that’s what the smell was,” I said. “I did wonder. Still it’s only a bit of mess, isn’t it? That’s what we have valeting for.”

  “It’s a fucking disgrace, that’s what it is,” said Barry. “Are you going to trash this new car as well? You’re a director now. What are clients going to think if you take them out? It’s a car, not a skip.”

  “I have to travel around in my job a lot,” I protested. “Sometimes I have to eat on the road. That’s the nature of the work.”

  “Allow me to introduce you to something that you may find useful in the future,” remarked Barry sarcastically, reaching under his desk and picking up the waste paper basket. “This is called a bin. You put rubbish into it. Clearly no one’s ever taught you this, so now seems as good a time as any.”

  Eventually he let me have the keys to the new car, after he’d made me swear on my mother’s life which was a bit harsh considering she was going to die in about a week’s time. Perhaps he’d feel guilty about saying it when he found out.

  With the BMW gone, I got acquainted with my “new” car, a Volvo, which, whilst not in the same league as what I had been used to, was still an extremely nice drive. I had to concede, looking around at the mess, he did have a point.

  As for the chicken bones, I eventually traced their origin back to Keele Services on the M6, when I got peckish on the way home from a meeting in Manchester four months earlier.

  July 2006

  A heatwave was spreading across the country, Lily Allen was top of the charts with a catchy little number entitled Smile, and I was out for a drink with Nick.

  The Turf Tavern was my favourite place to spend a summer evening in Oxford. As the night wore on, we worked our way down the list of guest ales on the blackboard behind the bar.

  My father had died two weeks previously, and Nick had taken me out for the evening to try and cheer me up. It quickly transpired that he was the one that needed cheering up. He had just gone through a rather messy divorce and was feeling rather depressed about the fact that at 35 years old he already had two failed marriages behind him.

  “At least we didn’t have any kids,” mused Nick.

  “You were hardly with her long enough, really, were you?” I replied.

  “No. I shouldn’t have married her in the first place. I don’t know what I was thinking of. Talk about love being blind. You must have suspected something.”

  Making a mental note that I would try and mention it when the time came, all I could offer, lamely, was “Sorry, mate”. If I had said something, would it have made any difference, though?

  The world was full of people who thought their latest partner was the best thing since sliced bread, whilst all around them could see that they were in fact an arsehole. There was never any point saying anything, Nick was right: love was blind.

  Fishing for details, I discovered that he’d picked her up in a nightclub in Oxford three years ago. Like myself, Nick had done very well within the company and after he took this girl home to his upmarket flat in Jericho, she took a real shine to him, or, as it later transpired, his money.

  Blinded to her selfish ways by her stunning figure, long legs, fake tan and plastic boobs, he had proposed within six months, desperate to keep hold of her.

  They’d married in 2004 but had split up after about a year. She’d taken him for a mug and now possessed half of everything he’d had. That had included the flat, which had to be sold, and now he was renting a rather more modest pad somewhere off the Botley Road.

  The conversation continued, with Nick’s ranting increasing in line with the amount of beer he’d consumed.

  “A hundred grand at least this has cost me. And she hardly ever wanted to have sex after we got married. Well, not with me, anyway.”

  That was a sore point. It seemed that they had split up after he’d found her in bed with a plumber who’d come to fix a burst pipe three months earlier. It turned out he’d been giving her pipes a good plum
bing on a regular basis ever since.

  I had to feel a bit sorry for Nick. He seemed to be perennially unlucky in love.

  He was still going on. “I was lucky if I got it once a month, mate. That’s grand total of twelve shags from my second marriage. What’s that, eight grand a shag or thereabouts? I’m a fucking idiot, I really am.”

  I thought it best not to mention to Nick that I’d once spent more than that on an all-nighter with two high-class escorts in a hotel in Mayfair. Instead I said, “She was hot, though. She must have been good in bed.”

  “Just because someone looks hot, doesn’t mean they can cut it in the sack,” he said. “She couldn’t give head properly for a start. You use your lips and tongue, not your teeth. What’s that all about? Didn’t anyone ever tell her?”

  “Perhaps they didn’t like to complain, you know, looking a gift horse in the mouth and all that.” I decided to change the subject before Nick started coming out with any more revelations about his unhappy sex life. “So, now that you’ve got the money from the flat, what are you going to do with it? Are you going to get another place?”

  “No, I’m going to rent for a bit and see what happens to house prices. They’ve shot up the past few years. I reckon there’s another crash on the way,” said Nick, confidently.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Nick,” I replied. Apart for a brief blip at the end of the decade, I knew that house prices would continue to rise at ridiculous rates for another fifteen years at least. “What are you going to do, then, put it into savings?”

  “Well, I was going to,” he said, “but then I went to see this bloke at the bank to talk about ISAs. He said that was a waste of time and that I’d be much better investing it all in the stock market. He showed me all sorts of graphs showing how much money the markets have made in the last few years, and I think it’s worth a punt.”

  I had noticed when Nick had arrived that evening that he’d brought a copy of The Times along with him, and now I was about to find out why. Opening it out to the share pages, he excitedly showed me what he’d been doing.

  “I’ve picked out a few stocks I like the look of,” he said. “What do you think?”

  I looked to see that he’d circled a number of companies with a yellow highlighter pen. I was horrified to discover that among the stocks he had picked out were Woolworths, Northern Rock and JJB Sports.

  “Mate, this is a really, really bad idea,” I said. “Trust me. You really don’t know what might be around the corner,” remembering the scenes in my head of Northern Rock’s panicked customers queuing around the block to take their money out. “If you absolutely must put money into the stock market, put it into something bomb-proof like tobacco or pharmaceutical stocks.”

  “What could be safer than a bank?” asked Nick. “If your money’s not safe with a bank, where is it safe: under the mattress?”

  If only he knew, I thought, thinking of the financial crisis about to engulf the world. “You’d be surprised,” I replied.

  “And what about good old Woolies?” he added. “They’ve been around forever. They are as much a part of Britain as fish and chips.”

  Not for much longer, I thought. Seeing that he was determined to embark on this foolhardy venture, I thought I’d better at least try to minimise the damage. Sighing, I said, “OK, well at let’s go through the share prices and see if we can come up with a decent portfolio.”

  By the time we’d finished I’d managed to steer him away from most of the companies that had gone bust, and point him in the direction of businesses that I knew would still be around in twenty years’ time.

  Satisfied that I’d done my good deed for the day, and with him seemingly cheered up considerably, we got on with the serious business of drinking our way to the bottom of the blackboard.

  A couple of weeks later I found myself waiting for my father to die in the very same hospital where I had breathed my last. There was a horrible air of déjà vu about the whole situation, and I didn’t mean my usual day-to-day déjà vu.

  Like father, like son, he, too, was dying from lung cancer, having been a twenty a day man for over 40 years. He’d lasted longer than I had, though. Perhaps the love of my mother had kept him going, but even so, 66 was still too young to die.

  He was in an awful state, a grey, pallid complexion, breathing through tubes and struggling to speak. This was exactly how I must have looked and I thought how awful it must have been for Stacey, especially with her mother already dead.

  Fortunately she was spared it all this time round. She was only seven years old now, and Sarah and I had both agreed she would be better off at school rather than seeing her beloved Grampy in this state. As he breathed his last, on a baking hot Monday afternoon, I had cause to reflect that for once, a death in the family had fallen outside the Christmas period.

  In the weeks that preceded his death, his illness progressed incredibly quickly, just as mine had. He was also diagnosed only when it was way too late. To support my mother, I spent as much time with him as I could, which gave me yet more opportunities to find out about my earlier life.

  As summer turned to spring and he got better, we began to enjoy more and more family occasions. Sundays alternated between them coming to us for lunch and vice versa. Dad was also very much a pub man, and we started going out for a drink regularly, when he would sit in the pub and puff away to his heart’s content.

  This was before the smoking ban, and sometimes we were joined by my uncle Bill, who liked nothing better than to sit on a bar stool, filling the air with the smoke from his pipe.

  Perhaps it was just as well that Dad had passed away when he had, as one of his major gripes was the government’s plans to introduce a smoking ban in pubs. He considered this to be an infringement of his civil liberties.

  When I’d died in 2025 there had only been Stacey left and I’d only seen her at weekends. It had been a lonely time but my journey back through time had now delivered me a wife, a mother and a father.

  With my family around me, I felt quite content, and if I could have stayed in that moment and gone back no further, I’d have been perfectly happy.

  But time continued to march backwards, with me no more able to do anything about it than a normal person moving in the other direction. As it did so, I was watching Stacey growing younger before my eyes.

  She may have been the one who had been with me the longest, but I was more than aware that she would also be the first one whom I would lose.

  July 2005

  I had made a decision long ago not to get involved in events outside of my immediate friends and family.

  I knew that I could change things after the fire at the furniture store all those years in the future, but I was reluctant to intervene in other events. The news was regularly filled with stories of death and disaster, some of which could be prevented, some which couldn’t.

  If I’d tried to prevent every car crash, murder or terrorist outrage, I would never have found time to do anything else.

  Occasionally the idea of being a time-travelling detective, preventing crimes before they were committed, appealed, but was there really any point? And what right did I have to play God anyway? How would I choose who lived or died?

  If a teenager got killed because he got into a car driven by a joyriding mate, would it be alright to let him die because I was busy with some other more worthy cause at the other end of town?

  I didn’t want to shoulder the responsibility of such decisions, so the vast majority of the time I allowed the world to play out as it was destined to.

  However, in July 2005, I decided that I would make an exception to this rule. The first quarter of the 21st century had been peppered with one terrorist atrocity after another. In the days following each one, they dominated the news coverage.

  It was when the terrorists came uncomfortably close to home, in the summer of 2005, that I began to wonder if there was anything I could do to prevent what occurred on that fateful morning
of 7/7.

  On that day, suicide bombers had exploded four bombs in the centre of London, three on Tube trains and one on a bus, killing 52 people. After careful consideration, I decided that I would try and warn the authorities in advance in the hope of preventing the attacks.

  The Metropolitan Police had an anti-terrorist hotline, which I phoned at 7am on the morning of the attacks, nearly two hours before the first bomb went off.

  I had planned very carefully what I was going to say. I needed to sound credible and convince them that this was a tangible threat. For all I knew, they might get dozens of calls a day from paranoid members of the public or hoaxers. I needed to ensure that they didn’t think I was one of them.

  I made the call from a phone box, one of many that seemed to have sprung up on the streets recently. I’d never seen anyone using them, everyone had mobile phones. Maybe that was why so many of them had disappeared in the future.

  They suited me very well for my purpose that day, though. I wanted anonymity to avoid any awkward questions later on.

  So, when I rang, I also gave them a false name because I didn’t want to be tracked down after the event. I calmly and concisely gave them the exact details of where and when each bomb would be set off, and the names of each of the bombers.

  When pressed on how I’d obtained this information, I told them I’d overheard two men discussing it in a pub in London the previous evening. When the questions began to become more probing, I put the phone down. Had I done the right thing? It wouldn’t be long until I’d find out.

  I went home, called the office to say I would not be coming in, and took Stacey to school. I hurried back home and switched on the 24-hour news channel.

  As the news of the attacks broke, I was dismayed to discover that my call had achieved nothing. Everything had happened exactly as it had done before my intervention. Why hadn’t they listened to me?

  There was worse to come. Just before lunchtime, there was a hammering on the front door, accompanied by a shout of “Open up, this is the police.”