Second Chances Box Set

by Jason Ayres

  Whether it had been a good or a bad year wouldn’t matter. If it had been a bad one, then surely it could all be turned around with the foreknowledge of what was to come. And a good year – well, that could always be made even better.

  From my perspective, it hadn’t been either of those things. If I had to sum it up, 2024 had been a pretty nondescript year. I hadn’t really done or achieved anything. It had been mediocre to average, pretty much like every other year.

  Sleep, work, eat, repeat would pretty much sum up the year 2024. I had to be brutally honest with myself and admit that this was no good at all. I was drifting inexorably towards my forties just existing.

  Sure, I’d had a laugh with Phoebe and Lily, lots of fun nights out and occasional brief dalliances with the opposite sex, but nothing that could be called progress. Perhaps with a year to live over again I could rectify that.

  One of my dalliances had been with Ben, a young doctor on the ward who had been pretty keen on me. He was only thirty-one and Phoebe and Lily had teased me, referring to him as my toy boy.

  I think they were jealous and wouldn’t have minded a piece of him themselves, but unusually, it was me he asked for a date. Flattered at being chosen over my younger, more nubile flatmates, I accepted.

  On our first date he told me he had a thing about the Scouse accent. For once, it had done me a favour. Most of the time when I was growing up, the well-spoken Oxfordshire kids had taken the piss out of it.

  I was pretty keen on Ben, too, but had tried to play it cool, treating it as just a bit of fun, wary of getting serious with anyone again after what had happened with Rob. It was to prove my undoing as I played hard to get rather too long and paid the price.

  When he got offered a post in London, he felt there was nothing to keep him in Oxford and he accepted, disappearing from my life before I’d had a chance to really get to know him.

  It had all been my fault, too – turning him down for dates, refuting romantic gestures and pretending I wasn’t interested in anything other than the odd casual night in the sack – something at which Ben had been very proficient, I ought to add – far better than Rob.

  What had I been thinking of? It’s no wonder I had been single for four years. I would never have spurned an opportunity like this in the past but what had happened with Rob had tainted my judgement. The bastard was still messing up my head and my life even now, over three years since I had had any contact with him.

  Ben and I had stayed in touch on Facebook, but judging by the selfies he was posting of him and his new flame down in London, that ship had well and truly sailed.

  Perhaps now I had this second chance I could change all that. If I had this year to live over again, could I not play my cards differently and not let him slip through my fingers this time?

  What else could I change? If only I had known I was coming back here, I could have written down the EuroMillions numbers and then life could have been one big party. I was never going to get rich working shifts at the hospital and my lack of financial security wasn’t painting a very rosy picture for my old age.

  I was already worried I was going to end up as one of those old grannies hunched over an ancient, three-bar fire, having to make the grim choice between keeping warm or eating.

  Technically, I wouldn’t even be a granny due to my lack of kids. Who would be there for me in my old age? I was already an orphan, and my sister had been missing, presumed dead, since 2004. I was in danger of facing a lonely old age and it was a depressing thought.

  Could I make any money any other way out of my little trek back through time? I thought about investing or betting, but since I took little interest in sport and none whatsoever in financial markets, I didn’t know where to start. I struggled, trying to recall anything notable that had happened over the year that might offer me a chance to make some money.

  I knew the Olympics had been on in Paris and the England football team had been in some big tournament or other. They had done badly because Barry on security at work had been ranting and raving about it. Who was it they had lost to? The Faroe Islands, wasn’t it?

  I didn’t even know where the Faroe Islands were and was equally clueless when it came to understanding how betting worked, but I remember people saying it was the biggest shock ever in the history of football. That meant I would get good odds on it, wouldn’t I?

  I’d have plenty of time to figure it out because from what I remembered, the football had been in the summer. For now, all of this deep thinking about my situation had tired me out, so I lay back down and fell asleep.

  I was out for quite some time, it seems, because by the time I woke up again it was dusk and I felt ravenously hungry. I ventured back out into the flat to see what the others were doing.

  There was no sign of Lily, but I could hear a telltale buzzing coming from Phoebe’s room so I knew not to disturb her. I wandered into the kitchen and opened the fridge to find it packed solid with food – meats, cheeses, pork pies and pretty much everything you would need to make a top-notch buffet. Phoebe had been true to her word.

  She had also restocked the bread so I made myself a sandwich and sat down in front of the TV for a while, idly flicking through the channels. After my extended sleep, I was feeling quite relaxed about everything. In fact, I was pretty excited.

  I had been given the gift of a whole year to live again which opened up all sorts of possibilities. I was going to go out tonight and really celebrate my birthday, much more than I had first time round. Then I had only really been going through the motions for Phoebe and Lily’s benefit, even if I had begrudgingly started to enjoy it as the alcohol began to flow. But now I really had something to look forward to.

  That’s what I thought, anyway. But perhaps I shouldn’t have made so many assumptions about my situation. Little did I know, in another couple of days, my fledgling plans for the year would be well and truly blown out of the water.

  For the moment I was blissfully unaware of all that and consequently entered into my New Year’s night out in a spirit I hadn’t felt for years. I decided not to use my future knowledge to try and change anything about the evening but to just let things happen exactly as they did before – it was a sort of experiment, I suppose, to see if everything was identical or whether my foreknowledge would lead to inevitable changes.

  As far as I can recall, we went to the same places as before – a restaurant and a bar down Little Clarendon Street. I couldn’t remember the minutiae of what had happened a year ago, so it was going to be difficult to judge whether or not the evening would be a carbon copy of before.

  The excessive alcohol consumption on both occasions didn’t help matters. This time, I probably drank more than the first time around, as in my unusually euphoric state I kicked things off by ordering a bottle of champagne as soon as we got in the restaurant.

  I realised at that early stage that things would definitely not be exactly the same as before, because I hadn’t ordered the champagne first time around. I simply wasn’t in as big a party mood as I was this time. But would that invariably mean that the whole evening would deviate from that point onwards or not? Perhaps minor details like this wouldn’t affect the ultimate course of the evening.

  Our conversation was probably different, too, but I can’t honestly remember what we talked about the first time around. Who does recall details of conversations a year later? It was highly unlikely I would have said word for word what I had the year before owing to my changed mindset.

  Still, what did it matter? All I was really concerned with was having a good time, so after a while I stopped overanalysing and just concentrated on enjoying myself.

  I was pleased and flattered when on the stroke of midnight, Phoebe and Lily screamed out “Happy Birthday!” at me, and simultaneously planted big, sloppy kisses on opposite cheeks. I remembered than that they had done exactly the same thing the year before.

  So I might have said my lines differently all evening to those in my previous perf
ormance, but the end result was the same. So it seems the small ripples in time I had created had not had any long-term effect on the timeline.

  The next day was just as fun. We chilled out in our PJs in the flat and Phoebe laid out all the food she had bought on the breakfast bar before bringing in her pièce de résistance – a cake she had baked herself in the shape of a rippling, naked Adonis with bumps in all the right places. It was so good that even Lily asked for a second slice and she hardly ever ate anything.

  Later, some other nurse friends who lived in the same building called around and we proceeded to get sloshed all over again.

  I went to bed happier that birthday night than I had been in years. I was completely accepting of my new and strange situation and bursting with ideas and plans for the year ahead. I had been itching to tell the others what had happened to me so that they could share in my adventure, but I managed to resist the temptation. At best they would have just thought it was another prank, at worst that I’d completely lost my marbles.

  Yes, they’d probably seen and enjoyed all the same time-travel movies I had but they were just stories. No one was going to take seriously anyone who claimed something like that was actually happening to them in real life. I wouldn’t have done either, before all of this.

  No, I would keep it all to myself for the moment. If I felt the need to confide in one or both of my flatmates later, I’d have to try and come up with some sort of irrefutable proof, but I was tired and drunk right now and there would be plenty of time for all that later.

  Or so I thought. What I didn’t know when I fell asleep that night was that my world was about to be turned upside down all over again.

  I knew something was wrong as soon as I woke up the following morning, because I didn’t actually wake up at all – not in the traditional sense. After falling asleep, extremely drunk, at around 2am, the very next thing I remember was finding myself right back on the ward in the nurses’ office.

  There was no moment where I was aware of waking up – it all happened instantaneously. I wasn’t lying down or snoozing in a chair. I simply materialised in midstride, walking across the room holding a cup of coffee. I was also stone-cold sober, without even a hint of a hangover. That was impossible considering the amount I had imbibed over the previous two evenings.

  Was my adventure over before it had even begun? Or had I imagined it all, after all? It seemed like I was back where I had started. If that was the case, why was I here and not in Thomas’s room?

  I looked across at the clock on the wall – a simple, white, plastic analogue clock which showed the time to be exactly 3am. That was the more or less the time, by my reckoning, that I had originally left after the incident in Thomas’s room.

  The office, shared by all the nurses on shift, was cluttered with bags, food and other personal belongings that had been left lying around. My eye was drawn to a copy of The Sun on the desk which had been left there by one of the other nurses.

  It wasn’t my favourite rag, but now I seized it eagerly. Ignoring the headline about a Cabinet minister being caught watching lesbian porn on her smartphone during Prime Minister’s Question Time, I scanned the top of the paper, searching for the date.

  Friday 30th December 2022

  Unless this paper had been left lying around in the office for months or years, it seemed that I hadn’t returned to where I started at all. Instead I was another whole year back in the past.

  I examined the paper closely. It didn’t look old or yellowed as papers did after a year or two. It looked as freshly minted as you would expect the current day’s paper to look.

  I remembered that story from the front page, too. The Minister had been forced to resign. That had indeed been a couple of years ago. If I was in any lingering doubts that I had gone back another year, they were soon squashed when the door opened, the sister on duty that night walked in.

  “Amy, we’re just had someone brought up from A&E who was brought in after a cardiac arrest. Can you go and attend to his medication?”

  Her actual words didn’t really register, due to my surprise at seeing and hearing her again. The middle-aged, grey-haired lady in front of me was my mentor of many years, Sister Mary Williams. She had retired from the hospital and gone to live in Australia eighteen months ago. By that, I mean eighteen months ago from where I had started from, which from two years in the past meant about six months from now.

  Her presence fitted in perfectly with what the date on the paper was telling me; even so, it had still come as a surprise and I was momentarily distracted thinking about the implications.

  “Amy – did you hear what I said?” asked Sister Mary impatiently.

  “Sorry, Sister,” I replied, aware that I hadn’t responded to her request. “I was miles away then. I’ll get right onto it.”

  I tried to focus and recall exactly what she had said. Something about a heart attack victim and medication.

  Before thinking, I inadvertently blurted out, “And it’s great to see you again.”

  “You only saw me ten minutes ago,” she replied, looking bemused.

  Mary was a strict but kind woman, and had taught me more about nursing than just about everyone else in the hospital put together. It really was good to see her again. I almost wanted to hug her, but that would have been seriously weird from her perspective, where presumably everything seemed completely normal.

  Instead, I took the details of the patient from her, made my way out of the room and got on with attending to my duties.

  It wasn’t easy to concentrate on what I was doing, consumed as I was with thoughts about this latest shift through time, and I had to force myself to be professional. I couldn’t afford to screw up the medication for a heart attack patient with sky-high blood pressure.

  He pretty much fitted the mould of our average cardiac patient – mid-fifties overweight boozers who never went to the doctors. We got them under control and sent them home with a load of pills and instructions to change their lifestyles.

  Whether they did or not was up to them. As I attended to him, I tried to banish thoughts of time travel from my mind, but I simply could not help mulling over the enormity and uncertainty of the situation I was in.

  The more I thought about it, the more tired I felt. Was my fatigue down to my recent experiences, or was it just because of my body’s natural resistance to working nights? Perhaps it was both – an unwelcome mix of mental and physical exhaustion.

  When my shift finished, I went straight home and slept, knowing that I was due in again in the evening for another stint. I wasn’t sure if I was even going to go. With everything that was going on, I really needed a break from work.

  When I woke, it was mid-afternoon and all was quiet in the flat. I had passed Phoebe and Lily in the morning while they were getting ready for their day shifts. We were often like this, ships passing in the night. Their absence from the flat gave me a chance to properly think about things, now that I had had a few hours of rejuvenating shut-eye.

  To try and clarify everything, I jotted down on a notepad all the details I could remember from my journey so far. I knew that on my first jump through time I had gone back from the early hours of 2nd January 2025 to the sometime in the early morning of 31st December 2023. That was a year and two days.

  I had then stayed in that time zone for two further days before jumping back in time again. As far as I could ascertain, this had happened at roughly the same date and time as before. The crucial time seemed to be 3am on the 2nd January. I couldn’t be absolutely sure it was the exact time second time around, as I had been asleep, but it had certainly been 3am when I had arrived in 2022.

  It seemed that on my second trip back through time I had jumped back exactly the same amount as the first time, one year and two days.

  There was an obvious pattern emerging here. It seemed that 3am on 2nd January was the trigger point for my involuntary trips back in time. The burning question for me now was whether or not that was the en
d of it. Would I stay put now, or was the pattern set to repeat? And if so, what were the implications?

  If I kept jumping back in time like this every two days, I was going to travel further and further back into time, presumably getting younger as I did. I still wasn’t entirely certain if it was just my mind that was being transported or my body as well, but I would find out soon enough if the jumps continued. After a few trips, if my body was getting younger, I would surely start to notice.

  Being younger again was something that millions wished for, but I could already see that my fountain of youth was potentially a poisoned chalice. If I really was going to get a year younger every two days, my life would fly by in no time.

  I had been thirty-nine when all of this had started. At two days per leap, it would be less than eighty days until I would reach a time before I was born. So what would happen then? Would I just cease to exist?

  What about my own birth? It was an event no human could remember under normal circumstances, but was I to experience it all, fully conscious with my adult mind, knowing I was living my last two days on earth?

  Or would my immature and undeveloped brain no longer be able to make sense of all of this? Was I destined to end up a helpless infant, with no control over my bowels or bladder, like an incontinent, senile old person in reverse? The thought horrified me.

  Was there any way out of this? Was there anyone who could help me? If I could track down the mysterious Doctor Gardner, perhaps he could, but I had no idea where to start. I didn’t know his first name and I didn’t even know if Gardner was his real name. He had been pretending to be a doctor, so had he used a false name as well?

  Whoever he was, was he even aware of what he had done to me? I cursed the man and his time-travelling wand. Why had he let me get dragged into whatever he was up to? Didn’t time travellers have rules about this sort of thing? They always did in the movies.