by Jason Ayres
Because of the cost, she had not originally planned to take any additional air travel other than the Helsinki flight and a flight back from Athens in September. Now things had changed. She could afford to get a domestic flight north once she arrived in Helsinki.
There was no way for her to find out what flights were available at the moment; she would have to wait until she got there. If she had been in the modern world, her smartphone would have been able to give her this information in minutes but she wasn’t, so she was just going to have to trust to luck that things worked out for her when she got to Helsinki.
Despite not being able to find out anything about flights she was actually feeling quite glad that she did not have a mobile phone. It gave her quite a liberating feeling. Not only was she not a slave to Facebook or feeling the temptation to take selfies of everything she was doing, but it also meant she could not be contacted.
That meant she did not have to cope with calls, texts and messages from Alan, pleading pathetically at her not to go. Thankfully she was going to be spared all of that. The less technological past was not a bad place to be right now at all. She was to all intents and purposes incommunicado, and she liked it.
She munched on her cheese and pickle sandwich and watched the board, willing the red DELAYED label to disappear from next to her flight. Once she had finished eating, she passed some time by wandering into the duty-free shop to check out the prices of the alcohol and tobacco.
Although her forty-three-year-old self had taken up smoking in a big way, she had never touched cigarettes as a clean-living teenager. Looking at the incredibly cheap duty-free prices on offer now for boxes of 200, she realised she no longer felt any desire to smoke.
Why was that? she pondered. She was reminded of her libido that morning after she had woken. It seemed that the messages her body was sending to her brain were the genuine physical reactions of her nineteen-year-old self. Yet the cognitive parts of her brain and her memories were very definitely those of her older self.
It was a powerful combination – the unspoiled body of youth with the wisdom and experience of age. Most people never got to experience those things working in tandem. By the time they had gained the latter, the former was gone. But today she had it all and felt like she could conquer the world.
Looking at the cigarettes right now, she felt repulsed and made a mental note that as soon as she got back to 2018 she would do her utmost to stop, even if that old, addicted body’s cravings were telling her otherwise. Stopping smoking could be her first step in the right direction. It was unlikely she would have come to this conclusion if she had not come here. The angel had said experiencing the past would help her change the future. Perhaps this was the first example.
Alcohol was another matter. The bottles of half-price spirits were very tempting. She was pleased to see that there were no restrictions on their purchase, recalling that in modern times you couldn’t get the duty-free deals if you were travelling within the EU. It seemed that in 1995 these restrictions had not yet been implemented, so she picked herself up a duty-free bottle of vodka. She had no qualms at all about this. Vodka had been her favourite drink since she had started sneaking into The Railway Arms with all the other underage drinkers when she was seventeen.
Maybe she should cut down on her booze, too, but not today. If all went according to plan, she hoped to be celebrating come midnight with a drink in her hand as if it were New Year’s Eve. With this in mind, she also picked up a half-bottle of champagne. Why not? It would be extra weight to lug about, and she had no way of chilling it, but if there was ever a special occasion that demanded it, tonight would be it.
Emerging from the duty-free shop, she was delighted to see that the delay was over and her gate was being called.
As she wandered through the airport, it struck her that things had not changed very much in the world of air travel in the past quarter of a century. There was very little around her to suggest that she was spending a day in the past.
She had found more signs of change in her handbag than in her surroundings. The lack of a mobile phone was compensated for by other devices that did jobs that her phone did in 2018 – a disposable camera and a cassette Walkman. Looking inside, she had found a TDK D90 cassette tape with “Kay Compilation Volume 4” written on it.
Seeing the tape brought a host of memories flooding back. She had spent hours in her teens recording tracks from CDs onto cassettes, trying to create the perfect compilation tape. It was a much more complex process than the modern equivalent of dragging tracks into a playlist.
When making a tape, there was only one real chance to get it right, as they never sounded as good when they had been recorded on more than once. There were all sorts of factors to take into account, the most difficult being to get the songs to fit correctly into the amount of time on the cassette.
Kay always used to try and plan her recordings so that there was no blank space left at the end of the tape. So if she had only five minutes left at the end of one side, it was a case of finding two short tracks or one long one. The worst possible scenario was losing the last few seconds of a song because the tape had run out.
Running order was just as important. It couldn’t just be a random collection of favourite tracks. It had to flow, just like a decent album did. And most importantly of all, it had to kick off with a killer track to set the scene.
Putting the headphones to her ears, she pressed play and her eardrums were instantly assailed by the opening bars of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana. She listened for a bit, remembering how much this song had inspired her as a teenager, then switched off as the time had come to board.
She could listen to the rest on the flight, indulging herself in this simple, uncomplicated pleasure. She never seemed to spend any time listening to music anymore. There were simply too many other distractions in the modern world.
She didn’t have her tapes anymore either. Alan had taken them all up to the local tip when he was having a clear-out without asking her. When she had protested, he had said they were obsolete. They no longer had a cassette player in the house, so what was the point in keeping them?
He didn’t understand that there were memories locked up in those tapes, and all the hours of fun compiling them. Now they were gone forever, buried under a mountain of decomposing chicken bones and babies’ nappies.
Boarding went smoothly and in a matter of minutes she was seated on the plane. The plane was something else that didn’t seem to have changed much in the last quarter of a century. It was exactly the same design as pretty much every other plane she had ever been on.
She now had time to relax and listen to her tape. It wasn’t a long flight, no more than an hour and a half, which gave her time to ponder what she should do with the remaining five days she had. She had barely had time to take stock of her situation until now, but sitting in her seat, the truth of what she was doing suddenly hit her.
“I am really here! This is really happening,” she said out loud, attracting on odd glance from the middle-aged woman in the seat next to her. Kay had a habit of speaking out loud to no one in particular and right now she felt so liberated she wanted to shout out, “I’m free!” at the top of her voice but resisted the temptation to do so. Instead, she sat back quietly and thought carefully about how to make the best of this amazing opportunity she had been given.
She could use her days for pleasure, reliving the highlights of her life in a sort of greatest hits compilation, rather like one of her tapes.
She could go back to pivotal moments like the one she had just experienced in the airport with Alan, and see how things might have turned out differently, for that day at least.
Or she could make a bucket list of things to do, like seeing the midnight sun. The only restriction was she only had one day to make these things happen, but you could do a lot in one day, provided it didn’t involve anything on the other side of the world.
There may have been limitations on
travel due to time, but there were no such restrictions where money was concerned. Anything expensive could go on a credit card that would never need to be paid off.
Those were all positive ideas, but she had darker thoughts, too, invariably involving Alan. What would it feel like to kill him? She found herself picturing the shocked expression on his face as she plunged a carving knife into his chest. Could she really bring herself to do something like that?
No, she couldn’t, but she could sure as hell humiliate him in some way. Her mind mused over the possibilities. Jilt him at the altar? Expose his infidelities? All these ideas were satisfying in one way or another, but would they really be worth it? Was petty revenge really what she wanted to do with her days? She was better than that, wasn’t she? Surely there must be better ways of utilising her time.
There were so many possibilities that she was finding it difficult to narrow them down into anything concrete. The angel had said six days were enough, but were they? Kay could easily have thought of sixty things to do if she had put her mind to it. Perhaps she needed to try and combine some of her ideas in some sort of time-travelling multitasking.
Maybe she could right a wrong, live out a missed experience and make some positive contribution to her own future all in the same day if she picked the right day. She had done a pretty good job with it already in the current day. If she could build on that, then she had a very interesting few days ahead of her.
She found it frustrating that she couldn’t do anything to change history, but she could see the angel’s point on that. She knew all about paradoxes from the time travel films she had seen. If she changed the past so she didn’t end up in the flat in the chip shop, then she would never have ended up in the depressing mess that had brought the angel to her door in the first place.
Not being able to take anything back into the past or forward into the future was also very restrictive, but that rule only applied to physical things. It didn’t apply to her knowledge. She already had the benefit of hindsight when travelling to the past, which allowed her to make the most of her trips back, but could it work the other way?
Was there anything she could find out in the past that she could utilise to make a difference to her present or the future? The angel hadn’t said anything about that. As far as Kay was concerned, the future was still a blank page yet to be written and she alone had the ability to change it. She couldn’t see that the angel could have any objection, having already stated that she had come to help her get out of the rut she was in.
So what could Kay do in the past to help herself? What secrets could she uncover that might enable her to alter her circumstances going forward?
She thought back to some of the great unsolved mysteries of the past. What if she could go back to Whitechapel in the 1880s and unmask Jack the Ripper? Even if she could, would anyone in the present believe her? Or would it just be dismissed as another crackpot theory to add to the dozens that had gone before it.
What about financial gain? Could she go back to 1945 and find out where Hitler’s legendary gold train really ended up at the end of the war? Or indeed if it even existed. It would be a pretty tall order to find all this out in one day in the middle of a war zone.
These were mere flights of fancy and she quickly realised that she could not do either of these things. She could only revisit days within her own lifetime, so anything before the mid-1970s was completely off-limits to her. In fact, anything before about 1990 would be pretty useless when she thought about it. She would not be able to achieve much as a child with little money or freedom.
There were other cases, more recent, that she could potentially investigate, but where would they get her? She thought back over some high-profile cases of the past few decades. There were children who had vanished in mysterious circumstances, never to be seen again. Then there were the high-profile deaths of people in the public eye, many of them murdered with the perpetrators never found. Who really had killed them?
All the details of where and when these incidents had taken place were well documented. It would certainly be possible for her to be at the scene of the crime, particularly those that had taken place in the UK.
But was it really worth it? She could go back to the exact date and time of a major crime and solve it, but what then? Go to the police fifteen years later claiming she knew who had done it, with no physical evidence to back up what she was doing? At best she would not be believed or labelled as a crank. At worst, the real killers could get wind of what she was doing and decide to make her the next target.
And other than the slim prospect of some reward money if anyone did take any notice of her, what was in it for her? No, she was going to have to abandon this line of thinking for the moment. It wasn’t going anywhere.
It seemed that she wasn’t making much progress with her plans, so she decided to put them on hold for the time being and concentrate on the day in hand. Already the plane was beginning its descent into Helsinki, so she needed to get her act together and sort out the next leg of the journey.
It was gone midday local time when the plane touched down. Clearing passport control was no problem, but when she got to the baggage carousel, there was no sign of any activity. This was going to hold her up further – or was it?
No, it wasn’t. As she stood waiting by the stationary carousel, she suddenly realised that she didn’t need the rucksack. She reminded herself that she was here for a day, not for the whole three months. So what need did she have to cart around three months of clothes and several heavy guidebooks all day?
All she needed was what was in her handbag and her duty-free bag containing the two bottles she had bought at Heathrow. By the time her rucksack made it onto the carousel, she would be long gone. It could travel round and round to its heart’s content. Every time she flew, there always seemed to be one sad little piece of luggage nobody wanted left behind. Today, it might as well be hers.
Leaving the rucksack proved to be a wise choice. She sailed through Customs and back out into the main part of the airport. She headed straight for the check-in desks to investigate the availability of domestic flights.
She was in luck. There was a flight to Rovaniemi at 3.55pm and there were seats available. She had been pretty confident that there would be. After all, the angel had said the trip was achievable, suggesting she must have known about this flight. Kay had plenty of time. So she could have retrieved her rucksack after all, but it didn’t matter. She would travel much lighter without it.
Everything went smoothly with the second flight. Just after 6pm she emerged from Rovaniemi Airport into the bright evening sunshine. She had made it with nearly six hours to spare!
She had expected it to be cold this far north but it was surprisingly warm, like a pleasant early summer’s day in England. The sun was low in the sky, as if sunset was not far away, but she knew that not to be the case. She remembered from watching speeded-up film on the television that close to the Poles in summer the sun stayed close to the horizon, doing a complete circle of the skyline over the course of a day.
She took a taxi into the town, wondering how to make the most of the hours ahead. She was very hungry and made finding some food her first priority. She soon found a lovely, old-fashioned-looking café overlooking the river and decided to stop for a bite to eat.
The proprietors did not speak any English and her Finnish dictionary was back in Helsinki in her rucksack. So she took pot luck ordering from the menu and chose something called lihapullat which turned out to be a delicious dish of traditional Finnish meatballs in gravy.
Later she walked around the town, finding a lively bar packed with young people. Remembering that she was now one of them again, not the middle-aged drunk that the young people of her own town avoided, she ordered a drink and got chatting to a group of young Finnish people.
Unlike the old couple who ran the café, most of these people had a reasonable grasp of English. Perhaps that was a generational thing. She told them all
about her trip and asked where the best place was to see the midnight sun. They directed her to a place called Ounasvaara Fell, just outside the town.
Bidding her new friends farewell, she followed their instructions and headed for the fell. It took her nearly an hour to climb to the peak, by which time it was after 11pm. The sun was very close to the horizon now, but it was still broad daylight outside and still warm. She sat herself down at the peak and took in the glorious view of the town below her basking in the late-night sun.
Cracking open her vodka, she took a swig and sat contentedly, just watching the sun as it travelled along the skyline. This had been an amazing day and it had left her feeling fulfilled for the first time in years. It didn’t matter that it was only a copy of her own universe and that soon she would have to go back to her older self. The point was she was here now and living in a moment that had been taken away from her once before. This time, she was really here, and this was really happening at last.
As her watch reached midnight, a feeling of euphoria and triumph flooded through her. She uncorked the champagne, and swigged from the bottle like a Grand Prix driver on the top of a podium, even if the bottle didn’t quite have the same dimensions as one of Lewis Hamilton’s.
She feared that she might be whisked away at that precise moment, back to the flat in 2018, but nothing happened. She continued to watch the sun, swig her champagne and muse about her life. There was no one else up on top of the fell. She was completely alone, enjoying her own special moment in this special place. Right then she felt as if the whole world belonged completely to her. In a way, it did, for this world would soon cease to exist, and only she would go on.
Later she felt tired, and lay down on the grass to rest. She could quite happily have drifted off to sleep right there and then and never woken up again. It wouldn’t have been a bad time to go. The day had given her a sense of completion and at least she would have died happy.
But it wasn’t time to go yet. Her trip to the midnight sun had given her plenty to think about. Most importantly, during that last hour while she was enjoying her champagne, she had worked out exactly where and when she wanted to go next.
