“Yes it does.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“Craig and Lucy,” she purrs. ”A couple. Boyfriend and girlfriend. I like that.”
“Me too.”
SEVEN MONTHS LATER...
33
“Next please,” the young sales assistant calls out.
Miles away, my head snaps up, and I’m beckoned forward with a smile. I place a pair of jeans on the counter.
“Have you got these in a thirty-two-inch waist?”
“I’ll ask one of my colleagues to take a look. Give me a moment.”
She disappears and I return to my daydreaming. Two slender arms appear from nowhere and encircle my waist from behind.
“How’s it going?” a voice whispers in my ear.
“Nearly there. Just need another pair of jeans.”
“Good. If you don’t mind, I’m going to go and look at some shoes. Shall I meet you downstairs in the coffee shop?”
I twist around and plant a kiss on Lucy’s forehead.
“Sure. See you in three days.”
She looks up at me with those opal-green eyes and strokes my cheek.
“Maybe just the two days,” she giggles. “Love you.”
She spins around and I watch her as she skips off to the shoe department. Bless her for not putting me through that nightmare.
“One pair of jeans. Thirty-two-inch waist,” the shop assistant says.
I turn back to her and hand over my debit card. I don’t know the price, nor do I really care. She drops the jeans into a carrier bag and I add it to my burgeoning collection. Clothes shopping, done and dusted.
I vowed I wouldn’t replace my wardrobe until I reached the same weight I was the day I walked out of Broadhall. It’s been a slog, trying to juggle my hectic life with visits to the gym and eating the right things at the right time, but I’ve done it. Just as well, as my previous clothes now hang off my slender frame. Still, it’s a great motivator to put on a pair of baggy jeans and reach the last hole at the right end of my belt.
I gather up my bags and head out of the department store.
I avoid the escalator and make my way down the stairs to the ground floor of the shopping centre. It’s mid-afternoon on a Thursday so the coffee shop is quiet. I order an Americano and slump down on a couch next to the window. I sit and listen to the piped music, thinking of nothing and gazing mindlessly at the drones beyond the glass, buzzing between the shops.
“Craig,” a voice shouts from behind the counter.
I make my way over, grab my cup and return to the couch. I don’t know how long Lucy will be, but I’m happy just to sit here and sip coffee in relative peace. I still don’t enjoy shopping — it still tests my patience.
I stretch my legs out and enjoy this rare moment of doing nothing. For the last seven months my life has been frenetic. Actually, my life has been pretty crazy for the last eighteen months if you include my eleven month sabbatical in the future, some of which is still yet to happen. Oh, and that weekend in 1986. How could I forget?
What I really yearn for now is normality. Not mundane, just something close to normal.
On the domestic front, Lucy and I are getting there. I moved into the cottage three weeks after our heart-to-heart, and having lived with Megan for so long, it took a while to adjust to Lucy’s way of doing things. Maybe it was tougher for her as she wasn’t used to sharing her home with another adult. She is pretty independent and for a while I felt like a spare part. I don’t mean that in a negative way, it’s actually quite nice not having to think about meals or constantly repair wardrobe doors. And while Megan hated cooking, Lucy has a real passion for it and the kitchen is very much her domain. However, when I first moved in I did surreptitiously conduct a thorough search of her kitchen cupboards. I didn’t find any extract of anchovy but better to be safe than sorry.
The toughest challenge in living with Lucy was not adapting to Lucy herself, it was adapting to life with her teenage daughter. Grace is fourteen, going on twenty-one. She’s smart, quick-witted, and like her mother, fiercely independent. My initial attempts to connect with her through the medium of music were quickly thwarted when she made it clear my taste in music is beyond lame. Seeing as I know nothing about fashion, makeup, or teenage boys, her three favourite things, I had to seek other common ground. Thankfully, I discovered that we do share a similar sense of humour. I’m still lame, but at least I’m funny with it, and Grace now seems happy to accept me as part of the furniture.
Although I eventually integrated myself into life at the cottage, I did still feel a bit like a lodger. So, when my bet finally paid out in November, one of the first cheques I wrote was to Lucy, as payment for a half-share in our home. It is now our cottage, and she’s already invested some of her windfall by putting a deposit down with a builder to remodel the kitchen and dining room. I’ve already sat in it, despite the fact work doesn’t actually start until next month. She’ll be delighted with the finished product, I’m sure.
And true to her word, Lucy’s sister returned my loan within three weeks of completing the work on her hotel. So now I own half a cottage and I’ve still got over four hundred grand in the bank. Whatever worries I might have in the future, I doubt they’ll be of the financial kind.
Speaking of finances, this month marks the official launch of Pelling IT Solutions. As soon as Claire repaid my loan, I belatedly signed up for the franchise I’d been struggling to finance before. And having undergone a three-month induction which involved being trained and tested until my brain ached, I am now qualified to offer tech support to local businesses. I’ve already got a couple of clients on board, and while it’s early days, I’m genuinely excited at the prospect of running my own business.
The offices of Pelling IT Solutions are situated in a building on Victoria Road. Conveniently, my new business is located in an office right next door to Senior Connections — Lucy’s new venture. She’s worked tirelessly to get it up-and-running and despite a few early setbacks, it’s now starting to turn a reasonable profit. I’m pretty confident she’ll replicate the success of the venture she was running in that fractured timeline I deleted.
While my personal and professional lives have been demanding, I have made a conscious effort to spend more time with my parents. They eventually moved into their retirement flat and their quality of life has significantly improved. Mum has joined several of the community groups they run, and she seems to have found a new lease of life. The old man is still the old man, although he has definitely mellowed. Every now and again I see a flash of the father I left behind when I re-set my timeline. The original version is still a work in progress but we’re in a much better place than we were seven months ago.
The only setback with my parents came when I told them about my decision to divorce Megan. Mum in particular was disappointed, but perhaps not surprised. Considering the loyalty she’s shown my father over the years, I guess I should have expected her less-than-enthusiastic reaction. The old man was slightly more philosophical, especially when he tasted Lucy’s Beef Wellington the first time they visited the cottage for lunch. I hope in time they both grow to love Lucy just as much as I do.
The divorce my parents objected to was, in itself, relatively straightforward. I would say it was painless, but in reality it was never going to be. While there was no acrimony, and no lawyers, there were certainly a few tears shed by both of us. The irony is that once you remove all the negativity that festers when you live with someone for so long, what you’re left with is two people who simply know each other inside-out. And with all those marital hang ups removed, it’s a natural progression into friendship, and that’s what I have with Megan now.
In the interests of transparency, it wasn’t long after we had our chat in the lounge that Megan admitted she had indeed been seeing a guy from work. For about five months as it turned out. I’d be lying if I said her revelation didn’t hurt a little, but I appreciated the honesty
. On the plus side, her confession cleared the way for me and Lucy to go public. I decided to tell Megan first and if she was surprised, she certainly didn’t show it. It wasn’t what I was expecting, but our chat ended with hugs and good wishes, and a fair dollop of relief on both our parts I suspect. Megan eventually rented out our former marital home and moved in with her lover, who is actually now her fiance. It’s good to know I didn’t totally put her off marriage.
On the whole my life is now where I always hoped it would be. I enjoy a fulfilling relationship with a woman I truly love. I’m fit and healthy. I work for myself and control my own destiny. I live in a lovely house, and I no longer have any financial woes.
All perfect, you’d think.
But while I managed to shed several stones of flab, I continue to carry around a sackful of regrets. I couldn’t do anything to help my grandparents, nor could I rescue Aunt Judy from the horrors of her past. Then there’s Malcolm and his premature death at the hands of his Thai wife, Mali Surat. By re-setting my timeline, I took away their futures — I fixed the code and then deleted it.
Perhaps their futures were fated? Maybe what happened to them was pure bad luck?
When I wake up in the mornings, I sometimes stare out of the bedroom window at the trees and open fields beyond our garden. I have to pinch myself because I feel like the luckiest guy in the world. I then look across at the woman I now share my bed and my life with, and I know for sure I’m the luckiest guy in the world. But no matter how lucky I might feel, I know luck played no part.
Nor did luck play any part in what happened to my grandparents, Aunt Judy, or Malcolm.
I’ve thought about everything that happened to me and the people in my life, and I know for sure our lives weren’t changed because of luck or fate. Nor were our lives ultimately changed because of the decisions I made. Life is too complex, too unfathomable.
When I was a kid, my grandparents gave me a game for Christmas. It was called Domino Rally and the basic premise of the game was to line up scores of plastic dominoes on their edges. You’d then nudge the first domino and it would tumble into the next one, setting off a chain reaction. Life is like Domino Rally. Once you nudge that first domino, all you can do is sit back and see if it pans out as you hoped.
If I’ve learnt anything from the last eighteen months, it’s that sometimes the dominos fall perfectly, and sometimes they don’t. Either way, there isn’t anything you can do about it once you nudge that first domino. The only thing you can do is set them up as best you can, and have the courage to nudge that domino in the first place. If it doesn’t work, you just have to try again, or concede you’re shit at Domino Rally and go play something else.
The same could be said about the decisions we make in life. Sometimes they work out, sometimes they don’t. You can dwell on those decisions or you can move on. After my inexplicable journey, I now know that nothing good ever comes from avoiding a tough decision or dwelling on the outcome.
No matter what Professor Lance Gilgrip might have once thought, none of us have corrupted paths, just corrupted attitudes.
A tap on the window drags me back from my reflection. Lucy is stood the other side, clutching a carrier bag in each hand and grinning ear-to-ear. I suspect shares in Jimmy Choo have just spiked. I neck the remnants of my Americano, gather my own collection of carrier bags and join her outside.
“Sorry,” Lucy says. “I got a bit carried away.”
“Don’t worry. I was just reminding myself how nice it is to sit on my arse and do nothing.”
She looks up at me and scrunches her face. “You know the trouble with sitting on your arse?”
“No. Do tell.”
“I can’t see it.”
“I’ll let you have a look when we get home.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
We make our way up to the tenth floor of the car park and I pull a key fob from my pocket. A press of a button and the lights on the Audi blink on. We deposit our bags into the poor excuse for a boot, open the doors and collapse onto the leather upholstery. I do love our new car but I sort of miss my pug-ugly Mazda. It was like a perennial friend; always there, always reliable. Not the sort of friend you’d go on the pull with, but a friend nonetheless.
I turn the engine on and the stereo illuminates in soft blue light. Lucy reaches across and stabs at the buttons to find a station playing music. We scan past newsreaders, traffic announcers, and a hyperactive DJ. Then, just as she’s about to stab another button, I recognise the start of a song I haven’t heard in a while.
“Leave it on that station, honey.”
The opening verse to Rockwell’s ‘Somebody’s Watching Me’ rings out from the car speakers. I can’t help at chuckle at the serendipity — it’s the same track that was playing on the radio when I drove to RolpheTech for my first meeting with Marcus. That moment feels an absolute lifetime ago.
“What’s so funny?” Lucy asks.
“This song. It reminds me of somebody.”
“Who?”
“Oh, just somebody I used to know. He’s not around anymore — he went travelling, never came back.”
“Does this somebody have a name?”
I can’t tell her I’m referring to myself. I pluck a name from nowhere.
“My uncle. Uncle Bungle.”
Before You Go...
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Table of Contents
Beyond Broadhall
Important Author’s Note
JUNE 2017
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
SEVEN MONTHS LATER...
33
Before You Go...
Beyond Broadhall (The '86 Fix Book 2) Page 25
