Second Chances Box Set

by Jason Ayres

  What was I to do? There was no way of getting out of this one. I was going to wake up on the 6th of August on the other side of Europe, needing to be back in Oxford by 5pm. How was I going to do it? Would I have the money and means to make such a journey?

  Was it even worth bothering? It was somewhat of a long shot that Josh would even be there in the first place. He hadn’t been at all confident that he would be able to discover the secret of time travel and to my knowledge, no one else ever had.

  The only concrete evidence I had that there was any possibility of it at all was my own backwards existence, and even that wasn’t anything I had any control over.

  In the end I decided that I had to try. It was the only possible way I would ever get answers to the questions that I sought. Without those answers, my mind would never be at ease. Had the things I had done made a difference? Did I live on beyond 2025, and if so, was I happy?

  I had one chance, a slim possibility, maybe, but it was the only chance I had so my mind was made up. I would make it back to Oxford by 5pm that day no matter what it took. I was a man on a mission.

  Being in Paxos immediately put me at a disadvantage over most Greek islands. It had no airport, so it was a two-hour ferry journey to Corfu before I’d even be able to think about getting a flight.

  I also had the familiar problem of not knowing what time I was going to wake up in the morning. What if I’d been drinking heavily the night before and didn’t wake up until lunchtime? This had been the case on more than one occasion already during the week I had spent there.

  I checked the ferry timetables. There was one at 7.30am, and the next one at 9.45am. I really needed to be on that first one, but I knew the odds were against me, and so it was proved when I awoke, just after 9am.

  Fortunately my parents were still asleep, which spared me any lengthy explanations.

  I didn’t want to worry them, so I hastily scribbled down a note and left it on the tiny kitchen table:

  Met a girl in a taverna last night, and gone on a trip to Corfu. Back tomorrow, love Tom.

  They would be annoyed, but hopefully that would be all. I left all of my clothes and my suitcase: I wouldn’t need them. The only thing I needed was my passport and hopefully they wouldn’t think to look for it.

  My father’s wallet was on the table next to where I left the note. It was bloated with drachmas. One of the things I liked about the Greek currency was that the notes went down to really small denominations, as low as 50 drachmas which equated to about 20p. It was easy to feel rich in Paxos, flashing the huge wads around even on my relatively meagre holiday funds.

  I was tempted to take some because what I had was nowhere near enough to get me home, but consequences or not, I could not bring myself to steal from my own parents. I’d have to look for some other opportunity en route.

  I walked quickly down the stony path between the olive trees that led towards the harbour, the sun already hot on my skin even at this early hour.

  There were plenty of people getting onto the ferry, including several English tourists laden with suitcases, none of whom I recognised. That was a good sign. That meant they must be going home today, and that meant that there would be at least one flight back to the UK that I could try and get myself on.

  Quite how, I wasn’t sure. What if they were all fully booked?

  Once I was on the boat, I spent some time wandering around the deck, sussing out the other passengers. Paxos wasn’t an obvious package holiday destination so there were not many family groups. It was mainly couples and quite a few singles. I got chatting to a few, and it turned out they were all on the same flight, the 1.15pm to Manchester.

  That wasn’t much use to me. I was pretty sure that it would be full, being a package holiday flight and even if I could get on it, Manchester was a long way from Oxford. I also still had very little money.

  Fortunately, that was about to change. I really didn’t like stealing, despite the endless opportunities available to me. Nicking the odd bar of chocolate from the newsagent’s was one thing. Stealing some poor guy’s wallet was quite another.

  Fortunately, my reservations about doing so were quite laid to rest when I encountered the most unpleasant pair of holidaymakers I had ever come across.

  Jim and Sandra were from Salford, and as I walked around the deck of the boat, I could hear him moaning from a mile off in his broad Mancunian accent.

  “Worst bloody holiday ever,” he was going on. “Disgusting food, no proper beach and you can’t even flush the toilet paper down the bog.”

  His wife was just as bad, bemoaning the lack of a McDonald’s. I listened as they recanted one complaint after another.

  What the hell had they come here for, I wondered. Presumably they must normally go to Benidorm or somewhere like that. Whatever possessed them to choose Paxos?

  My experience had been completely at odds with theirs. All of the food I’d had on the island had been amazing. Most of it was home-cooked by family-run restaurants, some of which seemed to amount to little more than a couple of tables in someone’s back garden.

  It was all traditional Greek food, such as taramasalata and plenty of freshly caught fish. The swordfish steaks I’d eaten had been awesome. A fishing boat came into the harbour each morning and the fisherman would throw a couple of swordfish out onto the harbour front.

  He’d jump off the boat, chop it into steaks with a hefty cleaver in front of a circle of onlookers, and then the various restaurant owners would buy what they wanted from him there and then, ready to cook that night. You don’t get much fresher than that.

  But presumably Jim and Sandra would rather have had cod and chips.

  The two had to be seen to be believed. I’d seen stereotypical characters moaning about foreigners in reruns of old 70s sitcoms. I hadn’t believed such people really existed until now.

  “I’m going up to get a beer,” said Jim. “Probably that Amstel rubbish as usual. I can’t wait to get back to the Queens for a proper pint.”

  I watched him go up to the bar, wallet sticking out of the back pocket of his ridiculously tight Bermuda shorts that were at least two sizes too small for his fat arse. It looked like it was bulging with cash which surprised me, considering that it was the last day of his holiday.

  This was too good an opportunity to miss. He had money, and he was also an arsehole. I could steal from him, conscience clear. I sauntered up casually behind him, watched him take out his wallet to order his beer, and then slip it back in the same place. With a slight deft of hand, I swiped his wallet without him or anyone else noticing and quickly walked to the other end of the boat.

  I didn’t have long; surely he would notice the wallet was missing when he sat down. They were sitting near the bow of the boat, and I was now safely at the stern. Quickly I opened the wallet and was delighted to discover that the majority of the notes in it were not Greek at all, but good old sterling.

  The bloke had more money than sense. Why was he walking around with so much British currency on him? Presumably he was just one of those types who always felt the need to have a load of cash on them to wave around to show everyone how wealthy they were. Whatever the reason, it was his loss and my gain.

  I took out all the cash, at least £500, and a decent amount of drachmas as well. Making sure no one was looking, I tossed the wallet over the back of the boat straight into the Aegean Sea, just as a right hullabaloo erupted behind me.

  “Hey, someone’s stolen my wallet!” I heard Jim exclaim, and watched from a safe distance as he kicked off in no uncertain terms. He didn’t do himself any favours at all, especially when he started accusing the “thieving Greek bastard” behind the bar.

  He got no support whatsoever from the other holidaymakers who clearly found him as irritating as I did; thus his demands to have everyone searched fell on deaf ears. Not that it would have done any good anyway; there was nothing on the cash in my pocket to link it back to him.

  Watching him rant and rave, ge
tting redder in the face by the minute, was quite amusing. He really was a horrible, fat little man and I felt almost as if I’d done the world a favour by dealing him a misfortune. He well and truly deserved it.

  Docking at Corfu, I had no time to lose. I certainly wasn’t going to waste time waiting for a bus to the airport, and grabbed the first taxi I saw. At 11.45am, I practically ran into the departure lounge, scanning the boards for a flight back to England.

  Other than the Manchester flight, now delayed until 2.20pm, there was nothing until the evening: far too late for me. A quick enquiry at the check-in desk confirmed what I’d already suspected – the Manchester flight was full anyway.

  I wasn’t beaten yet. I had a plan B. Corfu was predominantly a holiday airport when it came to international flights, invariably fully booked. However, I could get an internal flight to Athens and there was one scheduled for 12.40pm.

  I quickly changed some of Jim’s sterling into drachmas at the bureau de change and headed for the booking desk. I was in luck. The Athens flight was used mainly by Greeks who worked in the islands, going to and fro on business, and there were plenty of spare seats.

  I knew once I got to Athens Airport I’d have a much better chance of getting a flight home, as they would have many more flights that were not purely dedicated to holidaymakers.

  The plane was in the air on time, and the flight to Athens took just one hour. I had no luggage and there were no customs, so getting through the airport was easy. Well before 2pm, I was in Athens Airport, scanning the boards for the flight that I hoped would take me home.

  My luck held. I had been hoping for a flight to Gatwick, but I was delighted to see that there was a British Airways flight to Heathrow, much closer to Oxford. It didn’t take off until 3pm, though, and I had to meet Josh at 5pm.

  Luckily, Greece was two hours ahead of the UK, so I could still make it. The flight time was only two hours, and I had just enough drachmas left to cover it. I hadn’t changed all the sterling I’d lifted from Jim because I knew that I’d still need some at the other end.

  With the flight taking off only ten minutes behind schedule, I was able to relax for the first time that day. It was less than six hours since I’d got on the boat from Paxos and now I was on a flight bound for home. I was really beginning to believe that I was going to make it. But would Josh be there? I’d hate it if I’d gone to all this effort for nothing.

  It seemed to take an age to land at Heathrow where we were stuck in a stacking system above the airport. I put my watch back two hours before we landed and checked it as I cleared customs with no problems. It was 3.27pm. I rushed out of the airport and enquired at the taxi rank how much it would be for a black cab.

  Needless to say, it was beyond my means, I had only around £40 left after paying for the flights. I toyed with the idea of stealing a car, but it was too risky and would be stacking up potential problems later on. In the end, I jumped on a National Express coach bound for Oxford and hoped for the best.

  The journey went well, to begin with. We were ahead of the rush hour, and the M40 was running smoothly. As we headed past the Park and Ride on the outskirts of Oxford, it was 4.39pm. With only around three miles to go, I really did think I was going to make it.

  And then we hit the Oxford traffic. It was queued up to the Headington roundabout, and then at a crawl through Headington itself. By the time we got to St Clement’s, there was less than five minutes left. I was getting frantic, checking my watch every few seconds.

  As we crawled over Magdalen Bridge at barely walking pace, I realised that I had to get off the coach. Now I just had to convince the driver to open the doors. The coach service was meant to be non-stop all the way to Gloucester Green bus station, but there was no way I could wait that long: it could be another half-hour at least.

  We were only a couple of hundred yards from where I needed to be, so I rushed to the front of the coach, hand over my mouth, and yelled at the driver, “Open the doors, I’ve got to get off, I’m going to be sick.”

  “I can’t let you off here,” he replied. “It’s against regulations. There’s a toilet at the back of the coach: use that.”

  “There’s someone in there,” I protested, and leaning closely in towards him and doing my best to look as if I was about to vomit, I added, “Seriously this is an emergency and I’m going to throw up all over you if you don’t open these doors.”

  He relented, pulled a lever, and the doors opened just opposite Rose Lane at the entrance to the botanical gardens.

  “Cheers, mate!” I shouted, and leapt off the bus and ran up the High Street as fast as I possibly could. It was 5.03pm. If he was there, I hoped he’d wait. My nineteen-year-old legs covered the ground in no time, and as I reached Magpie Lane on the left, I sprinted across the road and up the short alley that led to the Radcliffe Camera.

  Exhausted and out of breath, I looked around me, desperately trying to see if I could recognise the face that I’d last seen over 30 years ago.

  There had been railings around the large, circular building in the future, but they were gone now, and there were tourists sitting on the steps. A young blonde girl and a boy in a denim jacket were sharing a bottle of wine and laughing in the sunshine. But I could see no one who looked like Josh.

  What an idiot I was. This was a complete waste of time.

  Then a man caught my eye, middle-aged with greying hair and glasses and the beginnings of a pot belly. What was noticeable about him was that he was holding some sort of wand-like device that looked like something out of a science-fiction film.

  It certainly looked out of place in 1990. He looked like he was looking for someone. Could this be him? He looked so old. I had nothing to lose by approaching him.

  “Josh?” I asked tentatively, afraid of looking like an idiot if it turned out to be a case of mistaken identity.

  He turned to look at me, and I could see that it was the same man. The face was older, lined with age, but it was unmistakeably him. “Oh my God,” he said, “Thomas. You know, I really didn’t expect for one minute that you’d actually be here.”

  “Same here,” I said. “I’m so glad you are, though. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve gone through to get here today.” And I told him the story about my race against time to get back to Oxford against the odds.

  “We need to go somewhere to talk,” he said, and we headed back to the High Street and walked down to the Queen’s Lane Coffee House.

  “I can’t get over how young you look,” he said. “Last time I saw you, you looked like…well I guess you probably looked a bit like me. How old are you now?”

  “I’m nineteen,” I said. “I was 51 the last time we met.”

  “How weird is that?” remarked Josh. “I’m 51 now, and I was nineteen when you met me at Cheltenham Races. I’ve travelled over 60 years backwards in time to get here today. In 1990, I haven’t even been born yet.”

  “So how long did it take you to work out how to travel back in time?” I asked.

  “A very long time,” replied Josh, and over coffee he related to me the story of how he’d discovered the existence of Time Bubbles and ultimately how to create his own.

  “That’s what this little device does,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out the wand-like object I had seen earlier. “I can programme this to open a bubble to wherever I want to go to in time. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen. But I guess that can wait until another day. You want to see your future and that’s where I am going to take you.”

  He pulled a second, identical wand out of his pocket. “Only one person can travel within a Bubble at any one time,” he explained, “but fortunately I’ve brought along a spare. I’ve already preprogrammed both of them. All we need to do is find the right place to create the bubbles, and away we go. I try to avoid doing it in public. It doesn’t do to draw attention to people disappearing and appearing in mid-air.”

  “So where are we going, then?” I asked. “Should we g
o back to my house in Botley? There won’t be anyone there: my parents are in Greece.”

  “Probably not a good idea,” said Josh. “There might not be anyone there now, but what about when we come out of the other end of the Time Bubble? Anyway, I’ve already got everything planned out. I’ve already been to your future and I think you’ll be pleased with what you’ll see. Come on, drink up, we’ve got a bus to catch.”

  “Well there’s no shortage of them around here,” I joked, and Josh laughed. We’d both lived through different eras of time in Oxford, but there was one constant that never changed: the place was always crammed with buses.

  We went to Cornmarket Street, which was now in the days before it was pedestrianised, and jumped on a 2A bus heading north.

  “Where are we headed?” I asked.

  “I thought you’d have guessed that. We’re going to your future home in North Oxford.”

  I hadn’t seen the old place for years, but I’d often thought about it, remembering the happy times I’d had there with Sarah and Stacey. I still missed them terribly even after all this time. Was I going to see them again today?

  We got off the bus a couple of stops after we’d passed through Summertown, and walked down the leafy avenue towards the old house.

  The road still looked exactly the same as I remembered it. Even the trees didn’t look any different. They must have been here for decades. There was a certain timeless quality about some parts of Oxford, and this was definitely one of them.

  Josh walked straight up to my old house, reached up above the six foot-high gate that led to the secluded and large garden, and undid the bolt on the other side. He’d obviously done this before.

  I thought it was a bit odd, marching straight into what was someone else’s garden and anticipating my concern, he said, “Don’t worry, they’re on holiday.”

  The garden was set to patio at the top, lawn in the middle, and at the far end was a large selection of bushes and fruit trees that Stacey used to call “The Jungle”. It hadn’t changed much since my time. Josh led me down to this area, right to the bottom where we were out of sight of the main part of the garden.