The Time Bubble Box Set 2

by Jason Ayres

  “What’s the Monopoly board challenge?” asked Alice.

  “A legendary drinking event,” replied Josh with relish, as he recalled the memory. “It was something that was originally based on London, but we decided to create our own local version.”

  “How did it work? And how come you’ve never told me about this before?”

  “The initial concept was that you were meant to go around London and have a pint in a pub on every property on the Monopoly board. It was my dad who told me about it. Apparently, he did it for a mate’s stag do sometime back in the 90s.”

  “That’s impossible, surely?” questioned Alice. “There are like how many properties on a Monopoly board – thirty or something?”

  “There are actually twenty-two coloured properties on the board plus the four stations, which makes twenty-six in total.”

  “Don’t forget the Water Works and Electric Company,” said Kaylee. “Not to mention Free Parking.”

  “I don’t think they count,” said Charlie. “OK, you can buy them on the board, but they aren’t actual locations.”

  “Even so, you’re talking about having a pint in twenty-six pubs. No one could manage that in one day, surely? There wouldn’t be enough time and who could possibly drink twenty-six pints?”

  “You’re quite right,” said Josh. “And you can’t do them all anyway. There’s no pub on Vine Street for a start. What we decided to do was stick to one pub for each colour on the board, giving us a more realistic target of eight pints in eight pubs which is a nice, round gallon.”

  “And coincidentally, that was the exact number of pubs in the town centre at that time,” added Charlie. “We wouldn’t be able to do it today. There are only three left now.”

  “I probably couldn’t manage eight pints these days, to be fair, but three wouldn’t be a problem,” said Josh.

  “From what I recall you couldn’t manage eight pints back then either,” replied Charlie. “That’s the main reason we failed to complete the course.”

  “What happened?” asked Alice.

  “He was so drunk that he fell over in The Red Lion, which was the seventh pub on the list, knocking over an entire table of drinks in the process. It wasn’t long after Kent had been kicked out of the police and had taken over as landlord. He didn’t need any excuse to throw us out after the whole botched interrogation thing. So we couldn’t finish our drinks there and then we couldn’t get into Mario’s because Kent used the Pubwatch system to alert them not to let us in.”

  “Yeah, yeah, alright,” said Josh, embarrassed at this youthful misdemeanour being brought up.

  “That explains why you’ve kept this quiet. You screwed up,” said Alice. “When did all this happen, exactly?”

  “Long before I met you,” said Josh. “It was the weekend after we got our A level results, so sometime in August 2020.”

  “Were you there, Kaylee?” asked Alice.

  “Funnily enough, no,” said Kaylee. “If I remember rightly, I was out clubbing in Oxford that night with all the girls from our English class.”

  “That’s right, it’s all coming back now,” said Charlie. “We had planned it all before we finished school. We had a separate lads’ night out and a girls’ night out to celebrate our results. It was also going to be the last time we were all together before most of us went off to uni. If I remember rightly, there were about eight or nine of us, weren’t there, Josh?”

  The embarrassed look on Josh’s face had gone, replaced with one of eager excitement. He had just come up with a brilliant idea.

  “I’ll be able to tell you tomorrow night,” he said. “I now know what I need to do. You could almost say I’m a man on a mission!”

  “You don’t mean…?” began Charlie.

  “Absolutely!” replied Josh. “I needed to pick a time in the past to visit so I’m going to go back to 2020 and make sure that this time we complete the Monopoly board!”

  “This is meant to be a serious scientific experiment,” exclaimed Alice, “not an excuse for a pub crawl!”

  “There’s no reason why I can’t have a little fun along the way, is there?”

  “It depends what sort of fun you’re talking about,” said Alice. “Weren’t you and Lauren an item at that time? I don’t trust her around you now and I certainly wouldn’t have trusted her then!”

  “You’ve nothing to worry about on that front,” said Kaylee. “She was out with me in Oxford that night.”

  “What about at the end of the night?”

  “I never saw her that night,” insisted Josh, hoping that he hadn’t. He couldn’t honestly remember after all this time, particularly considering how drunk he had been, but if they had been on separate nights out, then it was unlikely.

  “You know I’m starting to see a possible sordid side to this time travel game,” said Alice. “What’s to stop people nipping off to the past for a quick fling with their ex whenever they feel like it?”

  “Look, this is nothing to do with Lauren,” insisted Josh. “It’s just a lads’ night out.”

  “What time did it finish?” asked Alice. “You’re not staying the whole night. What if you’re drunk and she comes back from Oxford and fancies a bit? Which she’s bound to because ever since I’ve known her, she’s been permanently on heat.”

  “I’m pretty sure she stayed at mine that night,” said Kaylee. “We didn’t get back from Oxford until the early hours.”

  “And we weren’t out anything like that late,” said Josh. “We started early because the plan was to get around all eight before midnight which was when most of them shut – apart from Mario’s, that’s why we went there last.”

  “That’s your curfew, Cinderella,” said Alice. “We’ll set the tachyometer to bring you back at midnight, and if I suspect you’ve been within a sniff of Lauren you’ll know about it.”

  Josh had no intention of going anywhere near Lauren. She had proved to be enough of a thorn in his side already on other past trips through time. The last thing he wanted was her turning up unexpectedly and trying it on with him.

  “Why don’t we set the timer for eight hours in total?” he suggested. “I’ll get there for 4pm which gives me plenty of time to get ready, and then you can whisk me away at midnight.”

  “OK, good. And don’t come back drunk.”

  “That’s an interesting point as I don’t think I will, but it will be interesting to find out. After all, it’s not my physical mind we’re transferring, just pure data. In theory no matter how much I drink I should arrive back in my current body stone-cold sober.”

  “That’s another plus to all this!” said Charlie. “You’ve just invented the ultimate hangover cure. When can I have a go?”

  “Let’s just get tomorrow out of the way first, shall we?” said Josh.

  “Fine by me,” said Charlie. “But I bet you still can’t drink those eight pints.”

  “We’ll see about that,” said Josh, a little nervously. He could knock the wine and spirits back with ease, but he struggled with the volume when it came to beer, and had never managed eight pints in his life. Why would tomorrow be any different? Perhaps he would need to employ a little subterfuge along the way.

  “Bet you fifty notes you don’t make it to the end,” said Charlie.

  “You’re on,” said Josh.

  Josh had been on countless time travel journeys before, to the past, the future, and to all manner of other universes, but this was something entirely new – the chance to revisit and re-experience the person he used to be. He was feeling more excited about this than possibly anything he had done before.

  He was also curiously obsessed with taking on this Monopoly challenge again. He knew it was his fault they had failed before. Now he was being given a chance to exorcise that demon and have a lot of fun along the way.

  Best of all, he was going to find out what it would feel like to be young again.

  Chapter Seven

  August 2020

  Josh
wasn’t sure exactly where his younger body was going to be when he transferred his mind back to 4pm on Saturday 15th August 2020.

  It was a quite different experience to travelling with the tachyometer. With that mode of time travel he always materialised in the same location he had departed from. This time his consciousness would arrive in his old body at the exact moment specified, wherever he happened to be at the time.

  As it turned out, he found himself in his bedroom, sitting on his bed playing a racing game on the PS4.

  Despite his long experience of time travel, being thrust suddenly into this position momentarily distracted him. His right index finger was pressed hard down on the R2 button and the car was heading straight for the chicane after the tunnel at Monaco.

  It had been so long since he had played this game that it had slipped his mind which button to press to brake, leaving the car to continue straight on. It slammed head on into the barrier with an impact that would most likely have killed him had it occurred in real life.

  This was a sobering thought. It was only a game, but what if he had arrived while driving a real car in the middle of an overtaking manoeuvre? Would he have had time to react?

  It wouldn’t have been a problem for Josh as he hadn’t bothered learning to drive until he was in his late-thirties, by which time most cars had become driverless. In fact, he had gained his pilot’s licence before he got his driver’s licence. But it could certainly be an issue for others.

  He made a mental note to mention this to Henry and the rest of the team when he returned. Past incidents had taught him the need to take all sorts of precautions when it came to time travel. He would have to ensure that anyone travelling back using this method did so at a safe time. Perhaps the best way would be to make the jumps in the middle of the night. You couldn’t come to much harm if you were asleep in your bed.

  He put the controller down and looked around his bedroom, reacquainting himself with the surroundings of his teenage life. There were clothes strewn on the floor, electronic gadgetry everywhere, including his electric guitar. This must have been around the time he and Charlie had been talking about starting a band. That had never happened.

  There was a lot of dirty crockery scattered around the room, including his beloved old Aston Villa mug which he had bought as a memento from a stall outside Wembley after they had won the Championship play-offs in 2019. He still had it in the 2050s and drank his coffee from it every morning.

  He went over and picked it up but recoiled when he saw what was growing inside, a furry, green mould in what presumably had once been a cup of tea. He was so disgusted that he involuntarily let go of it, dropping it onto the laminated bedroom floor. It smashed into several pieces, spreading vile green liquid across the floor.

  “Great start,” he muttered. He had lovingly looked after his Villa mug for over three decades and had now broken it less than three minutes after arriving back in the past. Thank goodness this was another universe and the original would still be waiting for him when he returned to the 2050s.

  As for the rest of the room, had he really been this much of a slob as a teenager? He supposed he must have been.

  “Bloody hell!” came a shout from downstairs, in the familiar and much-missed voice of his father. Josh knew exactly what he would be doing down there – the same thing he did every Saturday afternoon.

  Geoff Gardner loved his sport and would be watching the racing on ITV followed later by the live football scores on Sky Sports. He bet heavily on both these sports and it was almost certain that the utterance Josh had just heard was related to some sort of gambling mishap.

  His father was dead by 2057 but Josh had encountered him several times in the past, most notably when attending his wedding in 1992. He hadn’t been able to reveal his identity then because no one would have believed him, but there were no such worries today. There was no way any external observer could know that he was occupying his younger self. It was an odd feeling – in a way he almost felt like an imposter in his own body.

  Speaking of which, he looked down at himself, marvelling at the smoothness of his skin and how much slimmer he was. It was hard to believe he had ever been like this, but here he was.

  His backache from the previous day was gone, and he felt amazingly awake and full of energy. This fountain of youth that he and the others had created had an awful lot going for it. No wonder Vanessa saw it as a huge money-spinning opportunity. Who wouldn’t spend a fortune to experience this?

  He was keen to go downstairs and see his dad, but before that he needed to establish exactly what the agenda was for the evening, as the details had long gone from his memory.

  Reaching into the pocket of the incredibly skinny jeans he was wearing, he pulled out an iPhone. This particular version was an antique in his time but the latest state-of-the-art gadget in 2020.

  Unlocking it wasn’t a problem as it asked him for a thumbprint, but then it took him a minute or so to track down the text icon and reacquaint himself with the delights of SMS text messaging, long defunct by his time when few people still typed messages. Slowly, he managed to tap out a short message to a teenage version of Charlie which read:

  What time are we meeting up, mate? I forgot.

  The response was swift.

  I told you this morning! 6pm at The White Swan – don’t be late!

  That gave him a couple of hours to kill which suited him just fine. He would start by going down to see what his dad was up to, even though he knew already what to expect.

  Sure enough, on arriving in the living room, he was greeted by the same scene he had witnessed almost every Saturday afternoon while he was growing up. His father, a burly, middle-aged builder with a growing pot belly, was sitting on the black leather sofa, leaning forward excitedly as he watched the TV.

  Unusually for Geoff, he was also sporting a rather bushy and untidy beard, something Josh recalled he had experimented with for a short period during an ill-considered attempt to look like a hipster.

  It was during a period when, for some inexplicable reason, facial hair had become fashionable again. Thankfully the trend didn’t last much beyond the early 2020s. By Josh’s time, beardy images of men of the era were now held up to ridicule along with other fashion disasters of the past such as flares and shell suits.

  His father was clutching a can of Stella in one hand and a selection of betting slips in the other. Most people had bet on the internet by this time but Geoff was strictly old school. He still enjoyed going down to the betting shop every Saturday morning where he placed the classic mug punter bets of Yankees and football accumulators.

  Josh looked at the TV where the familiar face of Jeff Stelling, who as far as Josh knew had been presiding over the football scores forever, was eagerly relating the afternoon’s happenings. Things didn’t seem to be going well on the betting front judging by the several discarded slips which had already been screwed up and thrown onto the coffee table in disgust.

  “Alright, son! What you up to?” asked Geoff, looking up briefly. He didn’t wait for an answer, instantly focusing back on the screen. “Oh for Christ’s sake look at that!” he exclaimed. “What’s wrong with this damned team?”

  Josh looked across to see that Burton Albion had just taken the lead against Oxford United, their local team, who had spent recent seasons mired in mid-table mediocrity in one of the lower divisions.

  “Third game of the season and this is going to be three defeats on the trot,” lamented his dad. “The sooner they get rid of that bloody manager, the better.”

  Josh couldn’t even remember who Oxford’s manager was at the time: there had been so many. He decided to change the subject.

  “How did your horses get on today, Dad?”

  “Terribly,” replied Geoff.

  Nothing new there, thought Josh. He remembered that his dad always made himself out to be an expert on their occasional forays to the races but his results told a different story.

  “Well, I had bette
r go and get ready,” he said. “I’m out with the lads tonight.”

  “Have a good time, son,” replied his dad. “Here, have a beer on me. I may have had a bad day on the horses, but I can still buy my lad a pint.” He reached into his pocket and handed Josh a tenner.

  “Thanks, Dad,” said Josh gratefully. Ten quid would almost certainly come in handy, as he hardly ever had any money when he was a teenager. He turned and headed upstairs as Geoff turned back to the screen where Chris Kamara was giving an overexcited report from a goalless Championship game.

  Two hours later, dressed in his standard teenage attire of Vans T-shirt and Wrangler jeans, Josh approached the front door of the first destination on the itinerary. This was The White Swan, a dilapidated, old estate pub on the edge of town which had seen better days. It was amazing in 2020, when so many pubs had closed down, that this one was still going.

  Two or three decades earlier this pub was packed every evening with workers from the old textile factory across the road, not to mention the lunchtime drinkers in the days before that practice was frowned upon. Now the factory was long gone, and the new breed of upmarket London commuters who were moving into the new, overpriced flats on the site had no interest in the old-fashioned boozer in their midst.

  The white paint on the windowsills was peeling and would never be renewed again. Within a year the windows would be boarded up for good as the pub inevitably succumbed to the changing times.

  It may have been a dump but that was what made it the ideal place to start. This pub was meant to be representing the cheap and cheerful brown properties on the Monopoly board and it fitted the bill perfectly.

  As Josh entered it wasn’t hard to see why the pub was struggling so much. There was hardly anyone in there, even though it was Saturday night and the big screen was showing a live Championship football match.

  The lads from school were already there and they accounted for well over half of the total clientele. Josh counted seven in total, including many whom Josh hadn’t seen for years. There was one in particular he had hoped he would never see again.