by Jason Ayres
He pulled the pack out of his trouser pocket and waved it in Kent’s face. “I would let you have one but seems a shame to let it go to waste. I doubt whether you’ll get a chance to use it before the expiry date.”
He shoved the pack back in his pocket and headed straight for the fridge. To Kent’s joy, he went straight for the milk and downed the whole lot in one go. This was what he had been counting on. Glen was behaving completely true to form.
“Help yourself to a drink,” said Kent, unable to keep a hint of sarcasm out of his voice. Glen showed no indication that he had picked up on his tone.
“Cheers, mate,” he replied, wiping the milk from his mouth. “What biscuits have you got?” He made a beeline for the biscuit barrel next to the kettle, grabbed a chocolate digestive and shoved the whole biscuit into his mouth in one go. Then he took another. They were demolished in about ten seconds flat.
“Lovely. Now then, what’s all this about the booze?”
Kent looked closely at him. He didn’t seem to have noticed any difference in the taste of the milk. That was good. He wondered how long the laxatives would take to work.
“Yes, I’ve got thirty quid here,” said Kent. “We can get plenty with that. All we’ve got to do is get it into the school and we can do that this afternoon. They will only be searching people tonight.”
“How?” asked Glen, opening another cupboard, the one where the crisps were kept. He grabbed a packet of Beef and Onion flavour, ripped them open, and started shovelling them in about six at a time.
Kent ignored the fact that Glen was blatantly helping himself to everything in sight. That was what he did every time he came round. He, did, however make a mental note to have a look and see if there were any more packs of Beef and Onion in the cupboard later. He was pretty sure you couldn’t get them anymore. When had they disappeared off the scene? He hadn’t even noticed and they used to be his favourite.
Continuing to outline his plan, he said, “School’s open for the lower years today. We go straight in through the front door before the end of the day, into the changing rooms and hide the booze in the lockers. No one is going to question why we are there, especially if we take our football kits with us. We can hide the bottles by wrapping them in our kit in our backpacks. Then later in the evening, once the ball has actually started, we go back to the changing rooms to get it. Easy.”
It wasn’t really that easy. There were a number of potential flaws in this plan, but as long as Glen bought it, that wouldn’t matter. After all, the whole purpose of this ruse had been to get Glen round to the house. Hopefully he would be taken short long before they got anywhere near the school, rendering the whole alcohol-smuggling plan redundant.
“I like your thinking, Kenty,” said Glen, in-between mouthfuls of crisps. “I remember now why I let you be my friend.”
“Well, what are friends for?” asked Kent, amused that Glen would be finding out exactly what the price of his false friendship would be very shortly. “Come on, let’s go.”
As they walked into town, Glen was still not showing any signs that the laxatives were having an effect. Instead, he remained his usual irritating self, shouting out, “Schwing!” at every single girl they saw. There was no denying the year they were in. The catchphrases defined the period just as much as the passing cars which had notably changed since he had walked this route in 1984. The old British Leyland models that had dominated the road back then had largely vanished, replaced by VW Golfs, Nissan Micras and Vauxhall Novas. When they reached the start of the town centre, the traffic diverted off to the right as the two of them entered the recently established pedestrian zone.
Kent didn’t want to waste the thirty quid on booze if he could avoid it. He was sure he could put the money to better use later. It was only a couple of hundred yards until they reached Victoria Wine, so he needed to slow Glen down a bit. As they passed The Railway Arms, he remembered his earlier desire to revisit his old, long gone local. This would do very nicely.
“Hey, we’ve got plenty of time, mate. Let’s pop in here for a quick pint and a game of pool,” he suggested.
“Good idea, Kenty. You’ll have to pay, though. I totally forgot to bring any cash with me.”
“That’s OK,” said Kent, being as accommodating as possible, even though he knew Glen was lying. How had he paid for the condoms if he had no money? No matter, half an hour in here and a pint of lager should do the trick. Everyone knew that Big Don, the landlord, never cleaned the pipes. A dodgy pint should get things moving along nicely.
It was great being back in the old pub. It was the sheer tackiness of the place that Kent loved. From the red and white chequered lino floor, to the cheap mirrors and horse brasses on the walls, it oozed spit and sawdust from every pore. The pub also had a great jukebox full of proper 7” singles. Right now it was playing a song by The Cure, which Kent recalled had been a hit a year or two before.
“Tune!” he remarked.
Best of all it was the one pub that Kent could guarantee getting served in from the age of sixteen onwards.
Kent ordered a pint of lager for Glen and a bottle of Pils for himself. He wasn’t taking any chances with Don’s suspect hygiene practices but he should be quite safe with a bottle. The two drinks came to just £2.70 in total which wasn’t going to put too much of a dent in his funds and compared very favourably with the £4 a pint he was used to paying in 2018.
There was an Only Fools and Horses-themed fruit machine in one corner. Glen was instantly attracted over to it by the flashing lights and tried to persuade Kent to put some money in it. He desisted, reminding Glen that they needed to keep hold of as much cash as possible for their trip to the off-licence.
Instead he suggested a game of pool which could be had for the princely sum of just 40p. Kent put two twenty-pence pieces into the slot and pushed, releasing the balls. As he began to pull them out from the end of the table and arrange them in the triangle, he looked up to see a pained expression on Glen’s face. He was also clutching his stomach with his right hand. It looked like things might be about to start moving.
“What’s up?” he asked innocently.
“Nothing, Kenty, just a bit of gut-rot,” he replied, defensively. “That milk you gave me this morning tasted a bit funny. It wasn’t off, was it?”
So, he had noticed, but he had still drunk it. “No, it was fresh this morning,” replied Kent, before suggesting, “Maybe it’s Don’s dodgy pipes?”
“Probably,” replied Glen. “I’ll be alright in a minute. You can break.”
Kent finished racking up the balls and took the white ball down to the other end of the table. He lined up the shot, hit the cue ball smack into the right-hand side of the pack and watched in dismay as it ricocheted off straight into the bottom right-hand pocket.
“You’re good – not!” commented Glen. “Two shots to me, I think.”
“Go on, then,” said Kent.
Another pained look shot across Glen’s face and his hand went again to his stomach.
“I’ll be back in a minute, mate, think I need the bog,” he said, before walking very quickly out of the pool area and through the bar towards the toilets at the other end of the room. Before he reached the toilet door he had broken into a run.
Excellent, thought Kent. But the job might not be fully done. Glen might well have a traumatic few minutes in the gents but what if he was OK again afterwards? He would have to come up with a Plan B if he recovered too quickly.
He waited in the poolroom, nursing his beer. He wasn’t intending on having more than one, he needed to keep a clear head. He also needed to keep track of time. He looked up at the clock above the bar to see it was already half past two. A few more people were beginning to filter into the pub, mainly factory workers in their uniforms. This would be the early shift clocking off for the weekend.
Should he go to the toilet to check on Glen, or wait? He decided he would give him ten minutes, then go and see what the situation was.
A couple of guys in blue warehouse uniforms came into the poolroom and asked if anyone was playing. Kent was about to let them have the table when Glen re-emerged into the room. He looked as white as a sheet and all of his earlier bravado had disappeared.
“Where have you been, Glen?” asked Kent. “We’d almost given you up.”
“Sorry, mate,” said Glen. “I must have eaten something dodgy, my guts are playing up. I think I’ll be alright now, though.”
But he wasn’t alright. He managed to play just one of his two free shots before he went running off to the toilets again, barging into a man playing on the fruit machine as he went, leading to a shout of “Oi!”
“One of you two can take over if you want,” said Kent. It took one of the warehouse workers less than five minutes to defeat him, after which he decided he would go and see how Glen was getting on.
The toilets were a cold, inhospitable place, even in the height of summer. The urinal was one long, metal trough, rusty and stained after years of neglect. There was some sort of unidentifiable green mould growing on the pipes above it and no sign that any cleaning of ever took place. The only concession to hygiene was a few yellow blocks melting in the tray. It was also clogged up with cigarette butts causing it to overflow and flood the floor every time it flushed. The earthenware tiles underfoot were cracked and the walls were damp.
There was a small sink with a single cold tap and a bar of grimy soap. There was a dispenser for paper towels but it was empty. Kent remembered that it always was and that if you wanted to dry your hands, you used toilet paper.
There was a single cubicle which Kent had only ever used in cases of dire emergency. It was devoid of a lock and had a door that didn’t shut properly. Kent didn’t need to ask for any confirmation that Glen was in there: the groaning noises coming from the cubicle were proof enough.
“Are you alright, mate?” he asked.
“No, I’m not bloody alright,” snapped Glen. “And I’ve run out of toilet paper. Can you go and ask Don for some?”
“Will do, mate,” said Kent. He had to get out of the room, the smell was horrendous. What a pity, he thought. This couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke.
By the time Glen emerged from the toilets the second time he was almost shaking from the after-effects of his experience.
“I need to go home, now,” he said in a pathetic voice, adding, “Will you help me?” and he went straight out of the front door of the pub. Kent followed, fascinated to see what would happen next.
Less than a hundred yards from his house Glen was desperate once again. “Oh, God, oh God, please no,” he whined, powerless to fight against the downward pressure from his bowels. Just before he got to the front door, the inevitable accident occurred.
Kent opened the front door for Glen who was now almost crying at his ordeal. Not so big and clever, now, are you? he thought. He didn’t feel the slightest twinge of guilt about what he had done. As long as he kept thinking about all the things that Glen had done to him, Kay, and goodness knows who else, then his conscience would remain clear. He had well and truly had this coming to him.
As Glen headed straight into the downstairs cloakroom, Kent decided it was time he took his leave. He could easily have made a gloating speech at this point, letting his enemy know who had been the orchestrator of his downfall. But what would that achieve? It could even backfire if he recovered enough to take retaliatory action. Instead, he derived some satisfaction by delivering an overly cheerful farewell, making no acknowledgement whatsoever of Glen’s plight.
“Well, I’ll be off then, see you later!” Without waiting to hear the response, he closed the front door leaving his hapless friend to it and headed back into town. He still had £27 to play with, and he wanted to make it count. It wasn’t alcohol he was planning to spend it on this time: he had thought of a much better use for the money.
Less than four hours later, dressed as Batman, he rang the doorbell of Kay’s house and stepped back. He was holding his purchase in his right hand – a large bunch of red roses. Glen would never have bought a woman flowers, he would have considered it corny and soppy, but Kent was different. He was going to show Kay that he was romantic and a gentleman. Glen had bought twelve condoms, Kent had bought twelve roses. That summed up the difference between the two of them. He hoped Kay would see it that way, too.
She opened the door, looking stunning, dressed as Catwoman. She was impossibly young and pretty compared to her modern-day self. Promptly, he presented the bunch of roses to her.
“For you,” he said. “Will you do me the great honour of accompanying me to the ball?”
“Richard!” she said in surprise, but certainly not in a disappointed way. “They’re lovely! What are you doing here? Where’s Glen?”
“Indisposed, I’m afraid,” replied Kent. “I’m taking his place.” He had decided to keep the switch a surprise, gambling that Glen had been either too ill or too thoughtless to bother to tell her he wasn’t coming. Clearly he hadn’t.
She was initially delighted, he could see it in her eyes, but then he saw a look of worry cross her face. He had anticipated this and had come prepared for it. Before she could speak, he pre-empted her.
“Oh, by the way, that thing Glen told you about me being gay? Not true, I’m pleased to say. That’s just his warped sense of humour.”
“To be honest, I never thought that you were,” replied Kay. “I should never have let him talk me into being his date. All along it was you I wanted to go with.”
“And now you can,” replied Kent.
He had nothing to worry about. She didn’t seem bothered about Glen’s non-appearance, not even enquiring about the reason for his absence. She was too happy being with him, on an evening that could not have gone better.
The feeling was more than mutual. Being with Kay was amazing. It wasn’t just her looks and her body that were a quarter of a century younger; it was everything else about her, from what she said to how she said it. She told him all about her hopes for the future, how she wanted to travel the world, surf on Bondi Beach, climb Everest, and ultimately make and present travel programmes.
Kent knew that none of those things had happened. Instead she had ended up just another middle-aged loser in a small town drowning her sorrows at the bar. Obviously he didn’t let on that he knew her future hadn’t turned out the way she had planned. At seventeen she was starry-eyed and full of dreams and there was no way he was going to spoil them.
Maybe she could have fulfilled those dreams if first Glen and then her husband hadn’t wrecked things for her. The night of this ball was clearly one of those pivotal points on which whole lifetimes can be turned. If she and Kent had become a couple, he certainly wouldn’t have stood in the way of anything she wanted to do.
If only things had worked out this way first time round in Universe 1.0, her whole life could have been completely different. And not just her life, doubtless it would have set his life on a different path, too. He might never have joined the police, never married Debs, and could have ended up anywhere.
There was no point speculating on such things now. He had to accept that he and Kay had no future together and no past. All they had was this one night, and it was flying by far too quickly. All too soon they had talked and danced the night away. Suddenly it was 11pm and the DJ was playing the last song. It was a smoochy ballad, “Love Is All Around” by Wet Wet Wet, which had been number one for pretty much the whole of that summer. It wasn’t the sort of song that Kent would have had anywhere near his record collection but it was absolutely perfect for the moment.
Holding each other on the dance floor, they rotated slowly around in the flashing disco lights, resting each other’s heads on opposite shoulders. Most of the discos Kent had been to in his youth had finished with these slow dances. He remembered it being quite nerve-racking, trying to pluck up the courage to ask a girl to dance.
Tonight he had no such fears. Pulling away from the hug, he
lifted his head from his shoulder and looked into her eyes, which shone full of expectation. As he leaned in to kiss her for the first time, he had no doubt that she would reciprocate. It was the most romantic feeling he had had for years, and possibly one of the finest of his life. He had almost forgotten what it felt like to kiss with such passion. He and Debs might still have sex occasionally, but they never kissed.
What she said next was the icing on the cake. She broke off the kiss and whispered into his ear.
“I want to go home with you tonight.”
Secretly, Kent had been almost hoping this would happen. The offer was a million times more tempting than her previous one, that of a trip back to her flat above the chip shop a quarter of a century later. It did, however, raise a bit of a moral dilemma.
Despite him and Debs not exactly having a marriage made in Heaven, he had never slept with anyone else since they had been together. Now he was being given the opportunity on a plate he had to ask the question. Did this count as being unfaithful?
He convinced himself that it was not. Firstly, all this wasn’t even taking place in the same universe as the one he normally inhabited. Secondly, it was 1994 here, he was seventeen, and he had not even met Debs yet. So, could sleeping with Kay now be technically classed as cheating? He knew that in some people’s eyes it would be, regardless of the unusual circumstances, but then those people were always getting on their moral high horses over something or other.
He had to think about the here and now. He was with this gorgeous girl who was clearly besotted with him, they had had a fantastic evening and this moment was never going to come again. If he didn’t go home with her now he would regret it for evermore. There was no way he could let this moment pass.
As the song came to an end he cast aside his doubts, took her hand and said, “I want you to come home with me, too.”
Hand-in-hand they walked home through the warm summer night.
He didn’t have to worry about sneaking her into the house when they got home. It was close to midnight and downstairs was in darkness. Putting his fingers to his lips, he slowly turned the key in the lock and they crept up the stairs. As they reached his bedroom door they heard the sound of the toilet flushing from the bathroom and his father cursing. Before the bathroom door opened, the two of them were safely ensconced in his room.
