by Jason Ayres
Kent got up from the double bed he now had. He had managed to persuade his mum and dad to let him have it as a compromise if he promised not to paint his room black. As yet he had not come remotely close to persuading a willing female to join him in it. It would be another two years until that happened, at least in his original timeline. Perhaps that might be different in Universe 2.0. Kay had gone home with Glen on the night of the ball. If it had not been for his subterfuge, she might have been going home with him. Perhaps this time she would.
He got up and instinctively went for the guitar, a traditional, wooden acoustic model. He still owned it in 2018 but it had been sadly neglected, languishing in the loft for years. Perhaps he ought to get it back down and dust it off when he got back to his own time.
He picked it up now and tried to play a chord. It sounded terrible, but then it always had in his hands. Deciding it would probably be best left in the loft, he reluctantly put it down and looked at the clock. It was already half past eleven. It was not unusual for him to get up this late during his teenage years on days when he didn’t need to be in school. On this day, he knew that he didn’t, at least not until the evening.
During that final term there had been no need for them to attend lessons once the A Levels had started. Kent’s last exam had been some days earlier so effectively he had already left, other than this final ball which always took place on the Friday after the final exams.
On the window sill, Kent spotted his ticket for the ball:
Year 13 Leavers
Superhero Masked Ball
Friday 8th July 1994 – 7pm-11pm
Below were listed some of the attractions of the evening, which included a disco and a barbecue. Also highlighted in capitals at the bottom were the words STRICTLY NO ALCOHOL.
Good luck with that, then, thought Kent, triggering a memory about the amount of illicit booze that had been smuggled in. He didn’t remember the teachers being that strict at enforcing the alcohol ban. He was only seventeen but the majority of the kids attending had already turned eighteen. He guessed the school were obliged to put that on there for appearance’s sake. Then if any of the teenagers got drunk, went home and threw up, they could absolve themselves of responsibility.
Next to the ticket was his wallet. Made of black leather, he remembered it well. His parents had given it him for his sixteenth birthday and it had lasted a good few years. He opened it up to find three ten-pound notes inside. That was a reasonable sum, especially in 1994, and he was sure he could put it to good use.
Kent had done all manner of odd jobs as a teenager to earn extra money. He had graduated from paper boy to working on the tills for a few hours on a Sunday morning at the local newsagent’s and also worked a couple of nights as a washer-upper in a local restaurant.
He opened his wardrobe to find his Batman costume hanging inside. It was the classic Adam West design from the 1960s TV series that Kent had watched over and over when he had been growing up. Glen had tried to talk him into getting the Robin costume instead, but for once Kent hadn’t let himself be swayed by this dubious advice. Who would want to be Robin when they could be Batman?
He closed the wardrobe door and pondered how he was going to bring about the change of events he desired. As always he had two very strong aces up his sleeve – the benefit of hindsight and the element of surprise. Glen clearly thought he was a naïve idiot whom he could manipulate to his heart’s delight. Maybe that had been true when he was seventeen but now Kent had decades of life experience under his belt. Glen would be at his mercy, so long as he could come up with an effective plan.
The process of arranging dates for the ball had already taken place several days previously so there was nothing he could do about that. It was a done and dusted deal, one in which Kent had come off very badly.
It had been agreed by everyone in the class that they would pair off for the ball in the style of an American prom. There were four more boys than girls in Kent’s year at school so inevitably some were going to be left on the shelf. Kent had ended up being one of the unwanted four along with Pizza Dave, Fat Simon and Nerdy Spencer.
This wasn’t auspicious company to be in. The latter two certainly were not going to win any popular competitions. They had consistently been the last two selected when picking teams for football at school and now he was officially on a par with them. As for acne-ridden Dave, most people steered clear of him for fear of being splattered by an exploding zit.
Kent’s failure to acquire a date had been primarily down to misfortune and bad planning. It certainly wasn’t down to any physical attributes. Wandering through to the bathroom, he took a good look in the mirror, marvelling at the youthful demeanour facing back at him. The skin was smooth, the face impossibly thin and the eyes were crystal-clear blue, not yet ravaged by the years of heavy drinking that lay ahead.
“Quite a handsome young chap,” he remarked out loud. “Even if I do say so myself.”
If he had been more organised he could have sorted out his ball date with no problems. Throughout the exams he had agonised about whether or not to ask Kay, but he was too fearful of rejection to make the move. Then he made the mistake of confiding in Glen who had used the information to scupper his chances at it and get in there first. By that time, it was too late to find somebody else. Almost everyone had been taken.
There was a girl called Sally left, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask her. She wasn’t bad-looking but had terrible halitosis. Kent could smell her fishy breath at twenty paces. Even she got snapped up eventually, fought over by the last few desperate boys as if she was the last turkey in the shop on Christmas Eve.
Victory had gone to a boy called Gareth, slightly less fat than Simon and normally the third last to be picked at football. His personal hygiene left a lot to be desired. He never had a shower after games and judging by the smell of him, a deodorant had never been anywhere near his armpits. At least he and Sally would be in good company.
Kent had forgotten about all of these details until he had clapped eyes on the ball ticket. This visual clue, along with the Batman costume, had triggered his brain to release a host of long-forgotten memories from deep within his mind. It seemed that these long-term memories had not been permanently deleted. They just needed some sort of stimulation to pull them back out of the archives. Now that he was actually here in 1994, he was finding it a lot easier to piece together these fragments than when trying to remember from a distance.
Kent’s mission was clear. All he had to do was think of a way to prevent Glen from taking Kay to the ball. As long as Glen failed to turn up at her house to escort her, there was nothing to stop Kent taking his place. He was sure she would not mind the switch, not if the feelings she had revealed in the pub were true. He hoped they were true and not just the desperate ramblings of a middle-aged divorcee who had lowered her expectations.
He had mulled over a number of possibilities in his mind but still not settled on a definitive answer. One thing he had vowed not to do was inflict any sort of violence. He had got a real sense of satisfaction out of what he’d done to Gideon Summerfield but he had no desire to pull a similar stunt, even if he was in the consequence-free cocoon that was Universe 2.0. Whatever Glen had done to Kent in the past, he hadn’t inflicted any sort of physical harm on him.
A less drastic option was to find some way of physically restraining him so he couldn’t make it to the ball. The best way would be to get him locked up somehow, but Kent couldn’t think of any realistic way of achieving this. He could hardly go around to his house and barricade him in his room. He would only have to shout and his mum and dad would let him out.
If it had been 2018 when he still had his job, it would have been easy. He would have just brought him into the station on a trumped-up charge and chucked him in the cells for a few hours. He had made enough wrongful arrests over the years that one more wouldn’t make any difference.
But this was 1994, which predated Kent’s policing career by a
good few years. The only way to get Glen arrested by the current police would be to frame him in some way but he dismissed that idea as well. It would be far too elaborate to set up something that would be guaranteed to succeed in the short time he had available to him.
An idea that had a more realistic chance of succeeding was to get Glen out of town, far enough away that he couldn’t come back. All he needed was to get him into a car and drive. If he could get him out into the middle of nowhere and abandon him, it would be highly unlikely he would be able to make his way back in time.
This was the idea Kent was leaning towards when he opened the bathroom cabinet and found another possibility staring him in the face. Right in front of him were his dad’s laxative powders, a whole packet full.
Now why hadn’t he thought of that before? If he could find a way of getting Glen to take an overdose then that would well and truly put him out of the game. He could incapacitate him without doing any long-term damage, as well as giving him a thoroughly unpleasant experience – which he well and truly deserved. He was pretty sure the laxatives wouldn’t kill him, but even if they did, it was only Universe 2.0 after all.
His dad had suffered from constipation for years and he had seen him stirring the laxatives into his coffee as if they were whitener. That meant they were easily soluble and he was pretty sure his dad had told him that they barely tasted of anything. This was ideal for his needs. All he had to do was get them into something Glen was drinking.
Kent thought back to when they were young. What did Glen usually drink? Then a long-forgotten memory flooded into his mind, about a particularly annoying and arrogant thing Glen used to do. The seeds of a plan began to form in his mind. All he had to do was get Glen round to the house.
He worked through the details as he got dressed. The first thing he needed to do was to get hold of Glen on the phone. This seemingly simple task was to prove remarkably tricky. Forgetting where he was for a moment, he looked around for his mobile phone, non-existent in 1994. Fair enough, he would use the landline, but what was Glen’s number? He would have known it when he was young but he hadn’t had to commit a phone number to memory for years. Once a number was tapped into his mobile there was no need.
Try as he might, he couldn’t remember Glen’s number. This was one piece of information that he couldn’t retrieve from his archives. He would have to find it out some other way. Surely he must have it written down somewhere? He searched in vain around the room for an address book or anything to help, but he came up empty. He remembered having kept all his numbers in a small, red, leather-bound book but he had no idea where it was at this moment in time.
Perhaps his mother would know. It was worth a try. His parents were bound to have Glen’s number; they had been friends since primary school. He went downstairs but there was no sign of her. Of course, there wouldn’t be. She always went to Tesco’s on Friday lunchtimes, regular as clockwork. Perhaps that was just as well. If he was going to carry out his diabolical scheme with the laxatives it might be better if there was nobody around.
He may not have found his mother, but when he went into the living room in search of the phone, he did find Glen’s number. Their phone was the classic GPO handset design in a rather putrid shade of green, with a rotary dial in the centre. Almost everyone had these phones when Kent was growing up but he hadn’t seen one for years. Theirs lived on the window sill next to the telephone directory, Yellow Pages and an old-fashioned address and phone book, the sort he hadn’t seen for years. That would be sure to have Glen’s number in it.
It had a small, plastic slider which moved up and down a row of letters. Kent lined it up with the letter G and pressed down on the slider. The top of the address book pinged up, promptly opening at H. The damned thing had never worked properly. He peeled back the H, and there was Glen’s number, right underneath Uncle George.
Kent paused before dialling the number to consider what he was going to say. If he was going to get him round to the house it needed to be for some convincing reason. Glen generally didn’t go out of his way unless there was something in it for him.
On top of the other things his so-called friend had done over the years, Kent recalled that he had also freeloaded off him at every opportunity. He had borrowed loads of his stuff with no intention of returning it, not to mention all the drinks he had scrounged off in the pub when they were older. He always conveniently didn’t have enough money when it was time to get a round in.
All Kent had to do was make Glen think he was getting something for nothing and he would be round to the house like a shot. Knowing exactly what to do, he picked up the handset. Placing his fingers into the holes on the dial of the old-fashioned phone, he began to dial. It seemed to take forever and he could hear a series of short clicks on the line for each number as he released the dial. Eventually he heard it ringing at the other end and shortly after, Glen’s mother answered.
“Hi, it’s Richard,” he said. “Is Glen there, please?”
When his friend came on the line, he was full of swagger and bravado.
“Alright, Kenty, you tosser. What do you want? Don’t you know I’m busy getting ready? Big night for me tonight – I’m gonna pop Kay’s cherry.”
Any misgivings Kent may have had about springing his laxative trap evaporated after hearing these words spilling out of Glen’s mouth. He need not feel guilty at all about teaching this arrogant arsehole a lesson. Why the hell hadn’t he done something about it when he was younger? To his shame, Kent knew he had just let Glen get away with talking to him like this for years. He had passed Glen’s contempt off as friendly banter at the time, but he could see him now for the person he really was.
He should have been stronger and stood up to him then. He could quite easily do it now. He was sorely tempted to just tell Glen to fuck off there and then, but that would mess things up. He needed to bite his tongue, just as he had with Summerfield. Staying true to his character of the time and playing along would make it all the easier to lure his victim into the trap.
“Ha ha, Glen, you are a card. Listen, I’ve got a plan that will make tonight go with even more of a bang than you’re expecting. Want to hear more?”
“Whatever, dude. Let’s hear it.”
Kent found Glen’s use of the word “dude” hilarious. It sounded so dated. Around that time, Glen had said it all the time, thinking it made him look cool. It didn’t. Kent suppressed his desire to laugh and began to set the trap.
“Well, you know there’s no booze allowed at this thing?”
“Yeah, they’re going to be searching everyone at the gate, bloody killjoys,” said Glen. “It’s not like we’re under eighteen or anything. Well, I’m not anyway, shame about you.”
“Don’t remind me,” replied Kent, another flood of injustices running back. Since Glen had turned eighteen in September, he had delighted in rubbing Kent’s nose in it whenever they went out. There had been a number of times when he had got served in pubs and Kent hadn’t.
“Anyway,” continued Kent. “I’ve got thirty quid here that says we are going to get pissed tonight. As you are so fond of reminding me that you are eighteen and I’m not, I need you to go down the off-licence and get the booze. Come over and I’ll explain how we are going to smuggle it into the school.”
Then, resorting to language that would appeal to Glen’s base instincts, he added, “Think how much quicker Kay will spread her legs with a few vodkas inside her.”
“Sounds like a plan, Kenty,” replied Glen. “Maybe you’re not such a loser after all.”
“Right, well get yourself over here pronto and we’ll go shopping,” said Kent.
“I’ll be there in half an hour,” replied Glen, before adding. “See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya.” He then promptly put the phone down.
What a twat, thought Kent. Did he really think all these stupid catchphrases made him cool? Why did girls fall for idiots like him? There was no justice in the world so it was just as well he had come b
ack here to administer his own. Glen wouldn’t be getting anywhere near Kay tonight, not if he had anything to do with it.
With the first part of the plan accomplished, all Kent had to do now was get the laxatives into something Glen was drinking. Casting his mind back to how Glen normally behaved when coming round to his house, he triggered a memory that could be put to good use. He was pretty sure what Glen would do when he arrived and it would make his task a lot easier than first imagined. He wandered through to the kitchen, packet of laxatives in hand and opened the fridge.
In the door he found a traditional glass milk bottle and a litre carton of orange juice. Both were approximately half-full. Kent enjoyed the constant little moments of nostalgia that leapt out at him when he went back in time and here was another. Like many people back then, the Kent household still had their milk delivered on a daily basis in pint bottles.
He was going to have to hedge his bets here. He couldn’t risk Glen missing the target. He took both bottles out of the fridge and removed the lids. He then opened the box of laxatives. There were ten sachets in all. He opened them in turn, pouring five into the milk and five into the orange juice. That ought to be enough. Then he gave them a good shake around for good measure.
He couldn’t see into the orange juice carton. It was a Tetra Pak adorned with pictures of oranges growing in the Spanish sunshine. He could, however, see the milk through the clear bottle and was reassured to see no evidence it had been tampered with. He put both back into the fridge and disposed of the laxative box in the kitchen bin. All he had to do now was keep his fingers crossed that Glen would behave true to form.
It was nearly an hour before Glen turned up, letting himself in through the kitchen door. He never bothered to knock.
“Sorry I’m late, Kenty. Stopped off at Boots on the way to pick up a few johnnies. Got a 12 pack, that should be enough even for a man of my sexual prowess.”
