Second Chances Box Set

by Jason Ayres

  There was a dance floor area at the back and as we ordered our drinks the music began playing, a recent hit from Run-DMC vs Jason Nevins blasting out from the sound system.

  Sarah and Sam had moved over to the edge of the dance floor. They’d ordered a fishbowl, full of Tequila Sunrise, and had placed it on a chest-high table at the edge of the floor. They were tapping their feet to the music as they swiftly drained the bowl through their straws.

  Nick and I both had pints of lager. I wasn’t a huge lager fan, but clubs and bars in Ibiza didn’t tend to cater for real ale enthusiasts. I gestured towards them, and said to Nick, “Hey, what do you reckon to those two?”

  He looked across and said, “Yeah, she’s well, tasty. The blonde one, that is. Don’t fancy yours much, though.”

  I thought he was being a bit harsh. OK, Sam was a little chubby, with freckles and frizzy dark hair, but she wasn’t that bad. She’d ultimately ended up being Sarah’s bridesmaid at our wedding, which had been a little uncomfortable for Nick who was best man.

  I didn’t see Sam much after that because she drifted out of our lives once Sarah settled permanently in Oxford. She was a nice enough girl, but Nick wasn’t very keen on her.

  After the holiday, she’d tried to keep in touch with him, but he didn’t want to know. He’d never mentioned the fact that he’d fancied Sarah before, though. Perhaps he’d stepped aside once I’d beaten him to it.

  Looking at the way he was eyeing her up now, I realised I was going to have to make my move before he tried anything. I couldn’t have the whole of the next 27 years being changed by something as trivial as letting him speak to her first.

  “Don’t you mean yours, mate?” I replied, “I saw them first, I’m calling shotgun,” and I strode quickly across towards them.

  “Hang on a minute,” he tried to protest but it was too late, I was committed. Destiny was calling and there was nothing he could do about it.

  After that, it all went swimmingly. I offered to buy her a drink, got chatting, drank heavily as we moved from bar to bar, and eventually ended up in a drunken snog in Es Paradis.

  It was already gone 3am by this time, which didn’t leave me much longer with her. My curfew on European time at this time of year was 5am, and I was relieved when she jumped at the suggestion we go back to the hotel early.

  When I broke the news to Nick, that I wanted to take her back to the room, he wasn’t particularly happy. “What are you like?” he asked. “You put one on a plane back to Glasgow this morning, and now you’ve picked up one from Wales! What is this, a tour of the British Isles?”

  So, for the second night in a row, Nick found himself shut out of the room, but at least he had a willing partner to have some fun with this time. After a little persuasion from me, I suggested that he go back with Sam, who was clearly keen on him.

  He moaned about it to begin with, but when I reminded him about his earlier complaints about the lack of sex, including my use of the expression “beggars can’t be choosers”, he relented and went back to the girls’ room with Sam.

  This left me with barely an hour. I savoured every last curve of Sarah’s body for the final time, as she enjoyed mine for the first.

  The bedside clock read 4.59am, as I cuddled up in her arms, ready to be whisked away at any moment. I moved in closer and whispered “goodbye” into her ear.

  Seconds later, the room vanished, and I found myself on the middle of the dance floor in a club I didn’t recognise, another huge summer tune from The Tamperer blasting out all around me.

  She was gone. And there was nothing I could do about it. I took solace in some drunken, joyless sex with Cathy that night, but nothing could ease the pain of losing Sarah.

  September 1995

  My twenties progressed backwards, seemingly one long party. I worked hard and played hard. My body was young and fit and it seemed I could effortlessly go out and drink several pints at night and still be as fresh as a daisy for work in the morning.

  By this time I was no longer at head office but working as an assistant manager in one of the superstores. I was on about £15,000 a year which didn’t sound a lot compared to what I had been used to, but it was more than enough for me to get a mortgage on a house in 1995.

  So, at the tender age of 24, I became a homeowner. Of course, for me, this meant the end of independence and moving back in with my parents in Botley.

  I’d paid just £39,000 for the house, which turned out to be one of the best investments I had ever made. There had been a prolonged slump in the housing market since a price crash at the start of the decade. With a recession following, houses were remarkably cheap.

  It was a completely different scenario from the early decades of the next century. By 2020, it would not be possible to buy even a one-bedroomed house in Oxford for less than £200,000, putting homeownership completely out of the reach of most local young people.

  I’d had no way of knowing this when I’d bought the house the first time round: it seemed that I’d made a remarkably shrewd decision, but the reality was, I’d just got lucky with the timing.

  I had lived in my starter home for five years, so it seemed odd when the day of my arrival approached. On the day after I’d moved in, I found the place full of boxes containing the sum total of my life’s possessions.

  There were records, cassette tapes and CDs galore. There were at least four big boxes full of video cassettes which took up a ridiculous amount of room compared to the DVDs I’d later owned.

  One series of Star Trek comprised thirteen videotapes alone and took up the whole top shelf of the video cabinet I’d kept them in. According to the price stickers on them, I’d paid £9.99 per tape from somewhere called Our Price.

  This seemed outrageous compared to the DVD box sets containing an entire season which had barely cost me a tenner on the internet a decade or so later and took up a fraction of the space.

  I had got used to prices getting cheaper over the years. Petrol and food were half the price now that they had been in 2010. Clearly when it came to home entertainment, the reverse was true.

  Perhaps that was one of the reasons why the pubs were so busy now; there was less to do at home and it was more expensive.

  I also noticed that the price of drink seemed to have declined rapidly in pubs to a point where it was now quite competitive compared to supermarket prices.

  Nick and I were paying less than 2 quid a pint to drink in Oxford now, and it seemed to be dropping by at least 10p a year. The price of beer in the supermarkets meanwhile didn’t seem to be getting any cheaper.

  Whilst I was sorting through some of the boxes, I came across an old Victorian biscuit tin which I hadn’t seen before. I certainly didn’t remember seeing it when Sarah and I had moved into the big house in North Oxford, so where it had gone by then I had no idea.

  Curious, I opened it, and inside I found a veritable treasure trove of letters and keepsakes.

  There was a whole bunch of letters bound tightly by an elastic band. It was obvious from the back of the envelopes, smothered in hearts and kisses, and the faint scent of perfume, that they were love letters.

  Fascinated, I opened them to discover that they were written in French. Fortunately my French was good, I’d taken it at A Level, according to my CV, and I had no difficulty at all in reading them.

  “Mon cher Thomas,” began the first one, and I eagerly read on.

  The letters spanned a period of about a year, from August 1987 to July 1988. They were passionate, romantic and beautifully written in old-fashioned ink upon scented coloured paper.

  I had lived my life through an era of social media, texting and email so it was a joy to handle these real, handwritten letters. There were pictures, too, of a very pretty and dark-haired girl who could not have been more than sixteen.

  The girl’s name was Simone, and it seemed that, just as with Sarah, I had met her on holiday, this time in France in the summer of 1987. She lived in a small village near Rennes, and t
he passionate nature of her writing left me in no doubt as to the intensity of our relationship.

  Clearly the letters had been the only way we had been able to keep in touch. The internet was primitive enough now in 1995, and mobile phones were the preserve only of the very wealthy or ostentatious. By 1987, both would have disappeared. Disappointingly, it seemed I’d never seen Simone again after that first summer, the letters fizzling out over time.

  Clearly I must have felt something for her, if only I could see the letters I had written to her I might have been able to see just how much.

  Bearing in mind that I, too, would be sixteen in 1987, there was a very real chance that this was not only my first love, but also the girl to whom I had lost my virginity.

  My life always seemed to have more purpose when I had something to look forward to, and my fascination with Simone would grow and grow over the eight years that would pass before I would finally meet her.

  Josh

  February 1991

  It was proving to be a bitterly cold month across Oxfordshire. I was noticing it more than most, because now I was working as an assistant manager for a newsagent’s in Botley.

  This meant starting work at 5.30am in the morning when it was bloody cold.

  More often than not my car, a horrible, mustard-coloured 1978 Austin Maxi, wouldn’t start, leaving me having to trudge to work through the freezing ice and snow to open the shop.

  It was a pain having to open the shop that early in the morning as there was hardly ever anyone about. The main reason it had to be done was for the papers.

  I had noticed as the years had passed that people were less and less inclined to get milk and papers from supermarkets and preferred to have them delivered.

  Suddenly there was an army of milk floats on the road, not to mention eager teenagers willing to risk life and limb lugging The Sunday Times around.

  I had to mark all of the papers up by hand for the rounds, ready for the paper boys to take out. They started to arrive around 6.30am, so I needed to have it finished by then.

  The paper boys did not get paid very much for the thankless task of delivering these papers in all weathers. For taking out the morning papers seven days a week and the Oxford Mail on six afternoons, they received the princely sum of £15.

  I soon noticed that several of them liked to top up their earnings by filling their bags with bars of chocolate and sweets when they thought I wasn’t looking. I was pretty eagle-eyed, though, and confiscated anything I caught them trying to shoplift, usually eating it myself after they’d gone.

  Once I’d caught one of them, I could catch him every day after that, as I’d know his methods. The company policy was instant dismissal for anyone caught shoplifting, but I wasn’t that daft. I knew if I sacked one of them that there would be no one to do their round that day which would lead to a string of angry calls from customers demanding to know where their papers were.

  On top of that, I’d have to take the round out myself once one of the shop assistants arrived at 9am, as opposed to sitting in my cosy office drinking coffee and reading Viz. My standard procedure was therefore to let them off with a warning and pocket the contraband.

  It wasn’t just the paper boys doing the pilfering. Several of the staff had their own little scams going as well. We used to get a regular tobacco delivery on Monday afternoons, and I’d noticed that my fellow assistant manager, Colin, was always most keen to take that shift.

  He was most perturbed when the delivery driver was changed, so I decided to do a little detective work to find out what had been going on when the previous Monday rolled around.

  It seemed that a 200 pack of B&H was conveniently “falling off the back of the lorry” each week into Colin’s lap, with a £10 note going the other way. Perhaps that was why they had changed the delivery driver: he must have been caught.

  Meanwhile, my assistant, Jenny, a middle-aged, married woman who manned the tills in the mornings, liked nothing better than to “accidentally” open a bag of crisps while stocking up the shelves and then announce that, as it was now damaged stock and we couldn’t sell it, she might as well eat it.

  Overall, I enjoyed working at the shop. The office out the back was my own little kingdom where I could do whatever I wanted and it was good fun out on the shop floor most of the time.

  Apart from the occasional miserable git moaning because Mars bars had gone up to 24p and that sort of thing, I enjoyed lots of banter with the regular customers and the staff.

  Some of the pensioners treated the shop a bit like a social club and would hang around rambling on for hours about nothing in particular. The favourite topics of conversation seemed to be hip replacements, the war, the youth of today, and the fact that the new 5p piece was too fiddly.

  I found it all quite entertaining and played along accordingly.

  Another thing I found amusing was serving the teenage boys who came in looking extremely nervous, hanging around by the magazines, casting furtive glances at the top shelf.

  I used to have a bit of fun at their expense, coming out with comments like “Jazz mag, is it? What do you fancy, Escort or Razzle?”, leading to lots of stammered responses and red faces.

  Still, perhaps I shouldn’t have taken the piss so much. I might well be doing the same in a few years’ time when my supply of the real thing would have well and truly dried up.

  Financially, things were looking a bit woeful for me around this time. The job at the newsagent paid a pittance compared to what I had been used to and I frequently found myself skint, despite living at home with my parents.

  It seemed that I spent most of my nights frittering away my cash in the pub. There wasn’t much in the way of home entertainment to keep me in. My parents liked to watch TV most evenings in the living room, detective dramas and sitcoms for the most, but I found that pretty boring. I’d seen most of these shows decades later on Freeview.

  I had a TV in my room, but it was only a 16” portable and we didn’t have Sky which was in its infancy at the time. Faced with the four measly channels available or a night at the pub, I usually chose the latter. I did have a Sega Megadrive, but that was primitive compared to the consoles I’d been used to, and as for the internet, no one had even heard of it.

  About the most advanced technological feature I had available to me now was CEEFAX on my telly, and that was laughably slow. Sitting watching the little numbers tick around to flick on to the next page was painful.

  So, the pub it was. I was a local at a good, old-fashioned boozer close to home and spent most nights in there with a gang of like-minded young men. The main activities seemed to be pool, darts and playing on the one-armed bandits.

  I really couldn’t see the point of those machines. They swallowed money like no tomorrow that could be better spent on beer, and the jackpot was pitiful. It was just £4.80 and that came out in tokens that you had to put back in anyway.

  Despite that, my friends seemed to love playing them and presumably I had, too, judging by the state of my bank account. My future knowledge was of absolutely no practical use whatsoever when it came to predicting the outcome of a three-reel slot machine, so I avoided playing them, regardless of what I’d done in my past life.

  With my bank account constantly overdrawn, I was struggling to obtain cash. There were numerous occasions when I faced the dreaded “Insufficient Funds Available” message when attempting to withdraw money from the cashpoint.

  Under the circumstances, I had no choice but to begin patronising the bookies again. Conveniently, there was one located a couple of doors along from the newsagent’s, so I’d often leave Jenny in charge of the shop for ten minutes and nip out to put a bet on.

  Learning from past mistakes, I tried not to get too greedy. A simple 10p Yankee on four moderately priced winners each day was enough for my needs. Picking up £50 or so after work provided more than enough cash for the evening’s entertainment, perhaps a bit more if I was taking a girl out.

  If I
was totally skint I used to borrow the stake money out of the till. I could always put it back later.

  So that was my worklife in my early twenties. As for my love life, it seemed that, prior to meeting Sarah, I hadn’t really settled with any of the girlfriends that I’d had. Life was a succession of short relationships, never more than a year, interspersed with shorter periods of being single.

  Each new girlfriend who came along provided a welcome distraction from the tedium of everyday life, as well as taking care of my sexual needs, but I didn’t feel particularly enamoured of any of them. They just weren’t Sarah, that was all there was to it. I missed her terribly, thinking about her all the time and wondering what she was doing.

  Every so often I felt tempted to drive down to Wales and find her, but decided against it. What would be the point? I could only see her briefly, she’d have no idea who I was and it would only cause fresh heartbreak for me. I just had to try and get on with life and forget both her and Stacey.

  My one consoling thought was that the day of my appointment with Josh was fast approaching. If, and it was a big if, he had unlocked the secret of time travel, would he remember me? Would he be there on August the 6th 1990? The date had been etched in my brain for over 30 years.

  Unfortunately, I was about to discover that my plans to meet him on that day were in serious danger of being thwarted.

  August 1990

  It was in early September that I realised I had made a schoolboy error in picking an August date for meeting up with Josh.

  My parents had been reminiscing for some time about the fantastic holiday we’d had. When the holiday snaps came back from the chemist’s and my tan started to develop, the sudden realisation dawned that I could have a clash of dates to deal with.

  I rushed to the calendar on the wall in the kitchen where my mother recorded anything and everything, flicked it back over to the August page and was confronted with the news I had feared. From the 30th of July to the 13th of August, we’d been on holiday on the Greek island of Paxos.