The Time Bubble Box Set 2

by Jason Ayres

  Kent blamed TV talent shows which had become very big around that time. It was suddenly all about a procession of wannabe stars being paraded on TV singing songs that the audience already knew. Performance was everything, creative talent and songwriting skills were irrelevant. Songs that the public didn’t know weren’t good for viewing figures. Rehashing tried and tested former hits was.

  He absolutely hated this kind of approach and the more popular it became, the more he railed against it. But what could he do? Everyone else seemed to love it, it took up a huge amount of space in the tabloids, and it was all his younger colleagues at work ever seemed to talk about.

  He couldn’t even escape it at home; his wife was glued to it every Saturday and Sunday night. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she also felt the need to waste money phoning in votes for the talentless morons who performed on the shows. In Kent’s opinion, it was blatantly all fixed, so what was the point in voting anyway? His opinion was vindicated on this a few years later when a voting scandal erupted.

  At least there had still been some decent music around at the time to keep him sane. He loved The Killers, Kaiser Chiefs, Keane and Maroon 5. But over time even these bands seemed to fade from the scene, squeezed out by an increasing number of artists filling up the charts that Kent had never heard of. By the time the decade drew to a close the charts were full of unfamiliar names to him.

  Nearly every song in the chart seemed to be by some overegotistical DJ or rapper with a silly name featuring someone else with an even stupider name. Quite apart from the ridiculous monikers these new acts went by, couldn’t they even stick to their own stuff anymore? What was with all the collaborations? He couldn’t make sense of it all.

  Top of the Pops went off the air around this time, another piece of his childhood stripped away, though in truth he had long since stopped watching it. As for Radio 1, that had become about as relevant to him as a weather forecast for Jupiter. He was grimly aware that he was no longer part of their target demographic and that the station he had grown up with no longer wanted him. It wasn’t just the music they played that he couldn’t relate to, but the DJs, too. They spoke a language he no longer understood.

  On the few occasions he got a chance to listen to the wireless now he found himself increasingly drawn to Radio 2, despite the fact that he had mocked the station not that many years earlier. He remembered one night when he was out on a colleague’s stag night and some of the lads had tried to leave early because they were on duty in the morning. At the time he had ripped the piss out of them, quipping, “You lightweights! You’ll be listening to Radio 2 next!”

  It didn’t seem so funny now. Those chickens had well and truly come home to roost. Most of the DJs he had grown up listening to on Radio 1 had been moved across to the sister station, and grudgingly he was being forced to join them.

  He had also been gutted when John Peel had died – in his opinion, the best DJ of all time. Unlike many who claimed to have spent their formative years listening to Peel in an attempt to look cool, Kent genuinely had. As the years flew by, more and more of those who had had such an influence on his early life through music and TV passed on. With each death, Kent felt a tiny piece of himself dying inside, too. This process seemed to be accelerating by early 2016, when hardly a week went by without some childhood hero or other dying, leading him to question his own mortality.

  There was no danger of his friends finding out about his shameful defection to Radio 2, as he no longer had any proper mates. His social life had disappeared into the abyss around the same time he fell out of love with music. He still spent a lot of time in the pub, but they weren’t the type of nights out that he had enjoyed when he was younger. Then, him and a bunch of other lads had started at the top of the town and worked their way around the town’s pubs every Friday night. Now those lads had gone their separate ways and he was reduced to standing at the bar with the other middle-aged losers going on about how much better life had been in the good old days.

  As the 2010s wore on, things just got worse and worse musically. He thought he was moving with the times, now listening to his old music on an iPod classic rather than playing CDs. But before long it seemed even that was considered old hat. When he had gone into an electrical superstore in search of a new hi-fi system, he had asked one of the young lads who worked there if they had one with an iPod dock.

  The assistant, who couldn’t have been older than about nineteen, had looked at him as if he had been asking for something to play wax cylinders on. He then proceeded to completely flummox Kent with talk of Bluetooth, wi-fi speakers and various other bits of technobabble that went completely over his head. As he left the shop he heard the assistant say to a colleague behind him, “iPod dock!” and they both burst out laughing.

  As he stood on the car park roof thinking about all these things, he reflected that even without all of the other problems in his life, the state of the music industry alone was enough to make him want to commit suicide.

  Maybe he should. Why not just end it all, leap off the roof and get out of this horrible modern world in which he no longer belonged? The 20th century was never coming back. He was never going to feel that exuberant burst of youth and excitement about anything ever again, so what was the point in carrying on?

  “If only you could go back, eh?” said a voice behind him.

  Kent turned to see a slim, young man in a plain black T-shirt, blue jeans and white trainers standing behind him. The man looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t quite place him.

  “Excuse me?” asked Kent.

  “If only you could go back,” repeated the man eagerly. “And live it all over again. It wouldn’t be so bad then, would it?”

  “Do what all over again?” asked Kent, perplexed. Who was this guy and what did he want?

  “What you were just thinking about,” said the mysterious stranger. “The good old days, when music was great and you didn’t have a care in the world.”

  “How do you know what I was just thinking about?” asked Kent. The November wind was bitingly cold and he drew his coat up around his neck to keep in the warmth. He looked at the young man in just a T-shirt and added, “Aren’t you cold?”

  “No I’m not. But then I wouldn’t be. I’m not really here at all, you see. It’s quite warm where I am.”

  “Great,” said Kent. “On top of everything else, now I’m talking to a nutter. That’s it, I’m out of here.” He placed his hands on the metal fencing that surrounded the car park and thought about the best way of climbing up. That was if he even could. He was so fat and unfit, even getting up a six-foot fence was going to prove problematical. He’d have clambered over something like that for fun chasing villains back in his Met days.

  “Oh, I’m not a nutter,” said the man. “And you’re not hallucinating either,” pre-empting what would have been Kent’s next thought. “I’m here but I’m not here, if that makes any sense. I just saw you there, thinking about killing yourself and popped along to see if I could do anything to help.”

  “What are you, some sort of guardian angel?” asked Kent in the gruff style he had often used in the force when interviewing suspects. He was rather intrigued by this strange encounter. If nothing else, it was the first time anyone had made the effort to speak to him in public for months.

  “If you like to think of me in that way, then go ahead,” he replied. “I’ve had many names in my time, but I’m happy to be your angel.” And then, again reading Kent’s thoughts: “And I don’t mean in a gay way. You’re such a homophobe, thinking that. Still, I wouldn’t blame you for fancying me. Haven’t you recognised me yet? Look closely.”

  Kent peered into the fresh-faced young man and a strange realisation dawned. He was looking at a much younger version of himself.

  “What the…how is this possible? Are you me? How did you get here?” A multitude of questions raced through his mind. If this was indeed him in a younger form, wouldn’t he have remembered meeting his older self
when he was him?

  “Relax, I’m not you, I just made myself look like this to see if you remembered the person you used to be. I could just have easily looked like this.”

  As the angel spoke, he morphed into the shape of a beautiful young woman with long, blonde hair who Kent recognised immediately. It was his wife, Debbie, but not as she looked now. This was how she looked when he first met her, twenty years ago, before age, two kids and too many cakes took their toll.

  “No don’t,” said Kent, thinking about what used to be. “It’s too depressing.”

  The angel morphed back into the form of the young Kent. “You can’t fight the passage of time, Richard. Beauty is ephemeral, and the world is constantly evolving. You need to adapt and embrace life in all shapes and forms as you make your way through it.”

  “I know all that,” said Kent. “But it’s so damned hard. I miss the old days. I wish I’d appreciated them more when I was there. At the time I never even considered that one day they might end. You’re right, it would be better if I could go back and live it over again, it was so much better then than it is now.”

  “As a great man once said, youth is wasted on the young,” said the angel. “But do you really think it was as great in the past as you remember, or do you think you are just looking back now through rose-tinted spectacles?”

  “Well, there’s no way of finding that out, is there,” remarked Kent, ruefully.

  “What if I said there was?” replied the angel. “What if I told you I had the power to let you go back and live any day of your life over again? Where would you go, or indeed, when would you go? Which day would you choose?”

  “Can you really do that?” asked Kent excitedly. Having already seen this angel shapeshift, he obviously had some sort of supernatural abilities. “Can you take me back and let me do it all again?”

  “Not all of it, no,” replied the angel. “That would be a bit greedy of you. You do only get one life, after all. But I can give you the chance to relive a few snapshots. A sort of edited highlights, if you like.”

  “So how’s that going to work?” asked Kent.

  “Well, think of me like one of those pantomime genies, giving you three wishes. In fact, since I’m more generous than that I am going to give you double. What would you say if I offered to let you live six days of your life over again? It can be any six of your choice. When and where would you like to go?”

  Kent thought back quickly through his life. Where indeed? It wasn’t an easy decision to make just like that on the spur of the moment. He needed time to think about it. And how would this mysterious angel know exactly where to send him? He couldn’t remember precise dates and times when things had taken place.

  “Don’t worry about any of that,” said the angel. Clearly it had the ability to reach into his mind because Kent hadn’t spoken. “Just think yourself to a place and time and I will take you there.”

  All sorts of possibilities floated through Kent’s mind, glorious red-letter days from the past, as well as the darker days when things had gone horribly wrong. Maybe he could revisit those and settle some old scores. But where should he start?

  “I tell you what,” suggested the angel. “To start off with, why don’t you go back to that day you were thinking about earlier, the day when you bought your first record? You seemed pretty happy when you were thinking about that.”

  “Perfect,” replied Kent. It would be fun to be a kid again. He could figure out the rest later. “When do we start?”

  “There’s no time like the present,” replied the angel. He clicked his fingers and the rooftop, the sunset and everything else dissolved into nothingness.

  What Difference Does It Make?

  February 1984

  The first thought that went through Kent’s head when he woke up was: “What a bloody weird dream that was!”

  The second was, “Wow, I feel great!”

  For as long as he could remember, Kent had felt like death warmed up in the mornings. His mouth was usually bone dry and crusted with a mixture of gooey and crusty white mucus, caused by lying on his back all night snoring with his mouth wide open.

  The half a dozen beers he knocked back before bed most nights might have given the illusion of lubrication while he was drinking them, but in reality they only contributed to the dehydrated state he found himself in by the morning. He couldn’t have felt more parched if he’d been wandering lost in the Sahara desert for two days.

  Most mornings he couldn’t even speak until he’d had the life-saving cup of tea that Debs brought him – if she brought it. Whether he got one or not depended on what sort of mood she was in. Over time her disposition towards him was becoming increasingly unfavourable and the frequency of the tea was declining accordingly.

  He could normally tell whether he was going to get one or not by the state of his ribs. If he could feel any pain there it meant he probably would not. She had been poking and kicking him in the side all night in a forlorn attempt to try and stop his snoring.

  At her insistence he had tried all manner of remedies to try and cure the problem, from various revolting herbal concoctions that Debs had insisted he drink before bed, to some stupid plasters that she had made him stick across his nose. None of them had made the slightest bit of difference. To make matters worse, the plasters had made him a laughing stock one day when he had forgotten to remove one before he went to work.

  She had even bought some ridiculous contraption that enabled her to strap tennis balls to his back one night. It was bloody ridiculous and uncomfortable. He refused to wear it again, at which point she insisted that he went to see the doctor about it.

  Grudgingly he had made an appointment to see Doctor Dickinson at the local surgery. He had diagnosed sleep apnoea and recommended that Kent lose some weight. This seemed to be the standard advice dished out for pretty much every ailment Kent had suffered in the past ten years, and he was sick of hearing it. High blood pressure, gout and even a bloody ear infection had all been put down to his weight. He couldn’t see how the latter worked. Ears didn’t get fat, did they?

  He made the foolish mistake of telling Debs what the doctor had said. She responded immediately by trying to put him on a diet, serving up salads and trying to get him to eat less meat and more fish. He hated eating fish: it didn’t agree with him and it made his urine smell like Scampi Flavour Fries. None of it made any difference to his weight as she couldn’t control what he ate at work, so he regularly made up the shortfall in calories at lunchtime.

  Waking up now, in 1984, he felt as light as a feather and better than he had in years. It was an unconventional way of going about it, but he had indeed lost weight, about fourteen stone of it in fact.

  And that wasn’t the only thing. His mouth was mucus-free and his head was clear. As he sat up and opened his eyes, free of the crusty sleepy dust that normally welded them shut, he also discovered that he had razor-sharp 20/20 vision. Within a second of opening those eyes, his first thoughts about how great he was feeling were superseded as he took in the scene around him.

  He knew instantly where he was, even though he had not set foot in the room for over a quarter of a century. The first thing he saw was the wallpaper, which immediately revealed his location.

  Every wall in his room was clad in scenes from Return of the Jedi. It was the first film Kent had ever seen at the cinema in the summer of 1983, and he had pestered his dad for weeks afterwards for the wallpaper. Sent to stay at his grandparents for a couple of nights in August, he returned on his birthday to the delight of discovering his newly decorated room.

  He glanced to his left to see the Charlie Brown clock he had learnt to tell the time from. It was half past eight. Then he looked down at his body.

  The Star Wars theme extended to his pyjamas but it was what was inside them that shocked him. The hairy, fat belly, peeling dry legs and gnarled old toenails were gone. The smooth skin that met his gaze confirmed he was well and truly back in his seven-year-old
body. The angel had been true to his word. He was young again! This was really happening!

  He felt incredibly alive and full of energy. Spontaneously he leapt up and started bouncing up and down on the bed with joy. Had the forty-two-year-old, eighteen-stone version of Kent done that, not only would he have broken the slats on the bed, he may possibly have gone through the floor as well. Even so, his youthful exuberance was enough to attract attention from downstairs.

  “Hey! How many times have I told you to stop bouncing up and down on that bed? It’s not a trampoline, you know!”

  It was a comforting voice, one that Kent had not heard for many years. His mother had died, a victim of early onset Alzheimer’s, not long after the heart attack that had claimed his father. Overwhelmed with joy at the thought of seeing her again he raced to the bedroom door, turned right and down the stairs, noting the hideous orange and yellow patterned carpet that had been fashionable when they had bought it in the 1970s. He hurtled around the 180-degree turn where there were four triangle-shaped stairs he used to call the cheese wedges, and on down into the kitchen, straight into his mother’s arms. “Mum!” he exclaimed. “I can’t believe you’re here.”

  “Well, where else would I be?” she replied. This was a reasonable comment. His mother hadn’t worked; she had stayed home and looked after her children full-time, as many more women did in those days. His father had worked full-time in the management team of a local factory, earning enough money to pay their mortgage, food and bills. Such a scenario would have been unthinkable in 2018 when house prices had spiralled out of all control in their local area, but the world was a very different place in 1984.

  And now here she was, forty-three years of age and still beautiful, her long, straight, dark hair cascading down over her shoulders onto the red woollen jumper she so often wore. All Kent wanted to do was grab hold of her, squeeze her tight and never let go. She was standing at the sink, washing up, and seemed huge in comparison to his diminutive stature.