The '86 Fix: A 1980s Time Travel Novel

by Keith A Pearson

  The queue moved and Tessa took a few steps forward. I shuffled nearer, trying to maintain the socially acceptable distance between us. Just as I inhaled another deep breath of her perfume, she suddenly turned around and glanced in my direction. Our eyes met for a split second, but just as I expected Tessa to turn back to the front of the queue, she did the unthinkable. She held her position and smiled.

  “Hello you,” she said cheerfully.

  I turned around to see if she was speaking to somebody behind me. With nobody there, I turned back to face her.

  “Hi Tessa,” I replied meekly, wondering if my cheeks were as obviously red as they felt.

  For an awkward moment, no further words were exchanged. I dropped my gaze from her face to her folded arms, cradling her purchases: a can of Lilt, a bag of Monster Munch, a Marathon and, surprisingly, a copy of ‘Your Computer’ magazine. With the sudden realisation it looked like I was staring at her tits, I shifted my eyes back to her face.

  “Good magazine. I didn’t know you were into computers,” I spluttered.

  “Oh, I’m not, I don’t know the first thing about them. My mum asked me to pick it up as my little brother got a computer for his birthday, but none of us have the faintest idea how to get the damn thing working.”

  Then I made the first mistake of many.

  “I might be able to help,” the words leaving my mouth with no authority from my brain.

  “Ah right, you go to that computer club thing after school, don’t you?”

  I nodded sheepishly. Tessa thought for a moment, chewing her bottom lip in a way that took her cuteness to new heights.

  “Do you think you could get it working?” she asked hopefully.

  “Probably. Do you know what model it is?”

  “I think it might be an Amstrad. I try to avoid my brother’s bedroom if I can help it,” she replied with a giggle.

  “Okay, I’m sure I could get him up-and-running in no time,” I said confidently.

  “Oh Craig, that’s sweet of you. Can you come round tomorrow some time?”

  I paused for a second, trying to offer the impression my diary was full of meaningful commitments, rather than the reality of playing computer games and masturbating.

  “Yeah sure. I’ve got some free time early afternoon if that works for you?”

  “Perfect. Thank you so much for this, Craig. I want to go to a party tomorrow night and need to keep in my parents’ good books. Let’s say about one o’clock. Have you got a pen? I’ll give you my address.”

  I rummaged in my school bag, found a scrap of paper and a pen, and jotted down Tessa’s address. With the queue gone, she turned and dropped her purchases on the counter.

  “Sorry, I don’t need the magazine now,” she said to Mr Patel.

  Tessa paid and turned to leave, but not before flashing me another smile. I watched her intently as she sashayed towards the door, capturing and storing every exquisite movement. Then she was gone.

  Mr Patel coughed to attract my attention. I paid for my Coke and floated home in a state of hormone-induced euphoria.

  Those hormones would prove to be my downfall.

  4

  I could hardly sleep that night. My mind crashed from wild optimism to cold realism, back and forth, up and down. By the time I got up on Saturday morning, I had settled on accepting the situation for what it was; an opportunity to spend an hour or two in the company of a girl I adored. If nothing else, I could at least show Tessa that I was more than just the quiet geek from computer club she happened to see every morning at registration.

  With little else to do, I switched on my computer to drag my thoughts elsewhere for a few hours. The computer, a Commodore 64, had been a gift for my 13th birthday. In the three years I’d owned it, I’d become fairly adept at coding. After initially learning the basics of the computer language, conveniently called BASIC, I started creating my own games. Early attempts were fairly simplistic and comprised just a few hundred lines of code, but as my confidence and skills developed, so did the complexity of the games I created. The project I was working on at the time was a complicated role-playing game I’d titled, ‘Afterpath’.

  The game centred on a character called Professor Lance Gilgrip. While on holiday in Mexico, the unfortunate professor’s wife was kidnapped, and subsequently killed in a bungled rescue operation by the local police. The heart-broken professor channeled his grief into developing a machine that would allow him to travel back in time and undo the decisions that led to his wife’s ultimate demise.

  The game involved the professor navigating his way through a series of interactions with various characters, hoping to stop either the kidnap, or the bungled police operation. However, if the professor made any incorrect decisions during those interactions, his timeline spun off in a different direction, to an alternative future; usually one where his wife, or the professor himself, ended up dead. It was like cracking a code to a safe — only one sequence of correct interactions would lead the professor to his ultimate aim.

  I spent two hours trying to work my way through a major bug with the game, but the complex layers of code made it near-impossible to make any real progress. Growing frustrated that I was no closer to fixing the bug, I turned my attention back to my visit to Tessa’s house. I switched the computer off and headed for the bathroom.

  I took a long shower and doused myself with an excessive amount of Jazz aftershave I’d received at Christmas. I’d hoped to wear it on occasions where I might come into close contact with girls. The bottle was still full. I put on my best pair of jeans and the only vaguely fashionable shirt I possessed. It was a soft, burgundy material with a button-down collar. Finally, I put on my brand new Nike trainers.

  I then went back into the bathroom and styled my hair using liberal amounts of toxic-green hair gel. I brushed my teeth and took one final look at myself in the bathroom mirror. Passable. Definitely passable.

  I spent the next fifteen minutes anxiously pacing up and down my bedroom, trying to imagine the things I might say or do to impress Tessa. With no inspiration and my nerves frayed, I gave up and left the house.

  It was unusually chilly for late spring and the watery sun struggled to warm the air. I cursed my decision not to wear a jacket. Within five minutes of brisk walking I warmed up a little, only then to panic about sweat stains appearing on my dark shirt. I slowed my pace and walked on.

  Bang on time, I arrived at Tessa’s house. It was a huge, red-brick building, Victorian or Edwardian I guessed. I crunched across the gravel driveway and approached the front door. I tried to steady my nerves and rapped the brass knocker. Until the moment Tessa opened the door, I had never seen her wearing anything other than school uniform. I think my jaw may have dropped when she stood before me, dressed in white jeans and a cropped yellow t-shirt that displayed her naked midriff. She looked incredible.

  “You’re the punctual one, aren’t you? Come on in,” she said with that killer smile.

  My bone-dry mouth would only allow me to offer a feeble greeting. I took a few steps across the tiled floor into the large hallway, a broad staircase directly ahead of me. Compared to our bland, boxy house, it felt like a stately home.

  “Let’s get you upstairs and I’ll introduce you to Kevin, my little brother.”

  I followed Tessa up the stairs, not once taking my eyes from her perfect backside. At the top of the stairs, we turned along a bright, airy landing. Tessa rapped on the second door along before opening it. The familiar smell of a teenage boy’s bedroom drifted across the landing and hit me like a stinking brick. A combination of cheap deodorant, sweaty socks and that indescribable odour that can’t quite be placed, or you’d want to analyse too deeply. We entered the room to find the stick-thin figure of Kevin, sat at a desk across the room. He was wearing a baggy blue tracksuit and looked more like a child than a fourteen-year-old adolescent. There was dirty laundry strewn across the floor and an unmade bed, positioned against the wall opposite the desk.

/>   “Kevin, this is Craig, he’ll help you with your computer,” Tessa said gently.

  Kevin remained transfixed to the blue screen which displayed very little.

  Tessa turned back to me.

  “He’s quite shy,” she said apologetically.

  “Hi Kevin,” I said.

  He didn’t answer, but prodded a few random keys on the computer keyboard.

  “Can I leave you boys to it?” Tessa asked, aiming the question at me rather than Kevin.

  “Um, sure,” I replied.

  Tessa smiled and left the room, closing the door behind her.

  So there I was, abandoned in a stinking bedroom with just Kevin the mute for company. It wasn’t quite the afternoon I had hoped for.

  I approached Kevin’s desk and looked over his shoulder. The computer was an Amstrad CPC 464, a hugely popular machine with a combined keyboard and tape recorder, plus a colour monitor. Kevin continued to stare blankly at the screen, fingers poised over the keyboard but remaining motionless.

  “Okay Kevin, Tessa says the computer doesn’t work. Can you tell me what the problem is?”

  After what seemed like an eternity, Kevin eventually spoke.

  “Can’t get games to load,” he quietly replied.

  “Can you show me what you do to load games?”

  Without replying, Kevin typed a command and hit the enter key. An error message appeared.

  “Have you got the operating manual, Kevin?”

  He reached down below the desk and retrieved the manual, dropping it onto the desk next to the keyboard. I scanned the manual until I came to the section about loading software. I studied what Kevin had typed on the screen and compared it to the instructions on the page. According to the manual, you had to simply type the word ‘CLOAD’, followed by a single speech mark. I bent down to get a closer look at what Kevin had typed and immediately saw the problem — he’d added two apostrophes rather than a single speech mark.

  I moved the cursor to the end of the line, deleting the apostrophes and adding the single speech mark. I pressed ‘Enter’ and a further instruction appeared — ‘Press PLAY then any key’.

  Kevin suddenly sat bolt upright, moving closer to study the new words that had appeared on the screen before him. I hit the play button on the tape recorder and then the ‘Enter’ key again. The silence was pierced by the familiar, high-pitched screeching from the tape. The screen changed from blue to a vibrant shade of red and then, line by line, a loading graphic slowly appeared. A huge grin spread across Kevin’s face, and just to make me feel a shade more uncomfortable, he began clapping and whooping. I was about to explain his mistake, but by that stage he was in such a state of excitement I doubted he would take it in.

  The one and only benefit of Kevin’s noisy outburst was that it brought Tessa back into the room. She looked at the screen which was displaying a full loading graphic for a game I didn’t recognise. Kevin continued to clap and whoop, and then suddenly turned to face Tessa.

  “He fixed it! He fixed it!” he shrieked.

  Before I could explain just how simple the problem was to fix, Tessa moved in to grab me in an unexpected embrace. She was a good eight or nine inches shorter than me, and with her head pressed tightly against my chest, I inhaled the clean, floral smell of her hair. It was a welcome relief from the stench of Kevin’s bedroom. Until that point, the only females to have ever hugged me were my mum and gran. But unlike those maternal hugs, Tessa’s hug caused an immediate stirring in my groin. As much as I didn’t want her embrace to end, I was becoming increasingly conscious of my erection. It needed little encouragement to make an appearance at the best of times.

  I reluctantly broke away from Tessa’s embrace, unsure if she’d noticed the bulge in my jeans. She kept a hand locked to my upper-arm and stared up at me.

  “Thank you so much for this, Craig. You have no idea what this means to Kevin.”

  Judging by Kevin’s enthusiastic reaction, I guessed it meant a lot. Tessa released her hold on my arm, turned and placed her hands on Kevin’s shoulders.

  “Mum wants to take you into town now, Kevin. Maybe you can buy more games?” she said in a tone a mother might use with a toddler.

  Kevin looked up at me with eyes which were as disturbingly big and brown as Tessa’s.

  “Will more games work?” he said in a worried voice.

  “Yes they will. I’ll write some instructions just in case you get stuck again.”

  Without warning, Kevin leapt from his chair and threw his arms around me.

  “Thank you, friend,” he said.

  I gulped back the sudden surge of an unrecognised emotion that Kevin’s gratitude had awoken.

  “It’s no problem,” I replied with a slight croak in my voice.

  As Kevin bounced off downstairs, it crossed my mind what a difference that single speech mark had made to him.

  With the computer problem solved, I reluctantly accepted my time with Tessa was over. I turned to say goodbye but Tessa got in first.

  “Got any plans for the rest of the afternoon?” she asked.

  “Nothing important. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, seeing as you’re now my brother’s hero, you could hang around here for the afternoon. Maybe listen to some music or something?”

  “Yeah, I’d like that.”

  “Brilliant. You’ll enjoy it, I promise,” she added with a playful grin.

  5

  Once Kevin and his mother had left the house, we moved to the more fragrant surroundings of Tessa's bedroom. It was a huge room with tall windows hidden behind baby pink roller blinds. In fact, the whole bedroom was a picture of pinkness from the poster-clad walls to the thick carpet. The pinkness was only broken by the bulky, black hi-fi system and two speakers sat on top of a chest of drawers.

  We sat on her bed, and after maybe twenty minutes of uncomfortable small talk, Tessa got up and sauntered over to the chest of drawers. She rummaged through a box of cassettes, selected one, and dropped it into the slot on the front of the hi-fi. She pressed the play button and a cacophony of electronic chords filled the air, followed by an electric guitar. Then the unmistakable voice of Freddy Mercury boomed out. Even with my limited knowledge of pop music, I knew the track was ‘One Vision’ by Queen.

  “My favourite album, ’That’s what I Call Music 6’. It’s a bit old now but I still love it,” Tessa shouted over Mr Mercury.

  The next few moments were as wonderful as they were surreal. Tessa stood in the centre of the room and strutted around, holding an invisible microphone and lip-syncing to the lyrics. She posed and pouted in a Freddy Mercury style, thrusting her hips back and forth. I was mesmerised by her performance.

  As the track ended, Tessa stood breathlessly before me.

  “Dance with me Craig,” she pleaded.

  The next track started. I thought the voice sounded like Nik Kershaw, but I wasn’t familiar with the tune. Tessa beckoned me to stand, so I hesitantly got up from the bed and moved towards her, feeling more than a little self-conscious. Her arms encircled my waist, pulling my body tight to hers. I placed my hands on her shoulders and let Tessa take the lead. Not for any chivalrous reason, I just couldn’t dance to save my life. She slowly circled her hips, grinding against me as she stared into my eyes, with a mildly psychotic look on her face.

  Two things then became apparent.

  Firstly, the song, which I later learnt to be ‘When a Heart Beats’, was virtually impossible to dance to, even if you knew how to dance. Secondly, Tessa seemed unconcerned that my penis was fully erect and pressed hard against her stomach.

  We continued to sway around in clumsy circles, Tessa’s eyes never leaving mine and her hands grasping my buttocks. My hands had fallen from her shoulders to her waist in an effort to control her relentless grinding. As Nik Kershaw wound down, Tessa’s hands left my buttocks and climbed to my shoulders. She pulled me closer so our faces were only an inch or two apart. I knew what was about to happen.

&n
bsp; I had only kissed one girl before, and that was in the last year of primary school. It was a sloppy, awkward and ultimately brief moment with a girl called Karen O’Donnell. I had grave doubts my single snog experience with Karen would help in that moment.

  Tessa moved in, closing her eyes and tilting her head slightly to the left. I mirrored her actions and our mouths met. Within a split second, she had thrust her tongue into my open mouth and began exploring wildly. I attempted to reciprocate, but with no obvious pattern to Tessa’s probing tongue, it was impossible to make progress. Instead, I took the opportunity to grope her body.

  I began at her waist, where her naked torso was exposed below her cropped t-shirt, and slowly moved north until I reached her shoulder blades. Her tongue became more frantic, and she pressed herself tighter to my body. My hands continued to wander over the smooth skin of her back until suddenly, she pulled her face from mine.

  “Get undressed. I’ll be back in a minute,” she whispered before she turned and left the room.

  I distinctly remember thinking that all my Christmases had come at once, but in my excitement I had overlooked one minor issue; I didn’t have a clue what to do, or how to do it. This was not a scenario I could have envisaged in even my wildest or wettest dreams. Forget first base, or second, or even third, I was about to try for a home run off the first ball. In reality I was ill-prepared for sex with anyone, let alone with a girl who was obviously more experienced than I. My penis didn’t care and led the way.

  Keen to get under the duvet before Tessa returned, I undressed like a man possessed. I had grave doubts that the full glory of my skinny, naked body would have been much of a turn on. After fumbling with my shirt buttons for what seemed like an eternity, I stripped off my jeans, considered leaving my socks on, but relented, and slid under the duvet.

  The hi-fi was now playing a Eurythmics track called ‘There Must be an Angel’. I laid on my back staring at the ceiling, my penis protruding like a stumpy tent pole beneath the pink duvet. I tried to control my heart rate as the anxious seconds turned into minutes. The bedroom door eventually opened and Tessa appeared wearing a silky dressing gown; pink obviously.