Chapter 2

It was a damaging time for both of us and Terry and I bickered and rowed. We had never had any arguments before. Lovemaking dropped off to once a month, then stopped altogether. We had a final row, both saying upsetting things to each other that should have remained unsaid. My beautiful butterfly declared I had become a pathetic parasite hanging onto her cosmic coat tails, that I meant less than nothing to her any more and so I stormed out, vowing never to return. I said a few things I shouldn’t have said. I was upset but what I said in anger and hurt was unacceptable.

You know the instant you’ve said or done something stupid that has ruined the moment, affected your life, upset someone, whatever? And you wish there was a rewind button so you could do that sticky bit over again and make it right the second time around? I do. All the time. I am one of those guys who had cocked my life up all the time until I met Terry. Then things were all right for a while before everything went completely wrong.

I often wished I could just click a button, like on a TV remote control, rewind a few moments or an hour, or a day, a year, and do that part of my life all over again, but do it right this time, knowing the pitfalls of previous actions.

One of my favourite films is Groundhog Day, where the hero has to replay a single day in his life over and over again until he gets it right. He appears to control events but he is really not in control of anything. He just relives that same seemingly pointless day, able to change events as the day unfolds but the outcome is always the same — he finds himself back to square one, alone. Until, one day, everything works out perfectly for both him and the heroine and his life finally proceeds on a new path as it should have in the perfect world. The film producers had a great idea but the science, I now know, is imperfect.

Time is immutable, the movie hero lived each day regardless of how many times he went back and started again. If he relived ten thousand of those days he should have aged twenty-seven years or more, even though everyone else remained the same.

Time is actually made up of an infinite number of timelines. In theory, you cannot change time itself, you can only change the timeline you are currently on. You may be able to switch to a different timeline to achieve a more favourable outcome but the time you personally spend is time used up. Irrefutable, you can mess with the order in which you use time but time eventually catches up with you and messes you up. So, have you got ninety minutes of your precious time spare to use up? Then I’ll begin to tell you my story.

Well, I can tell you here and now that I really managed to find that Rewind button. Yes! It exists.

I found out quite by accident that I could rewind my life backwards to a point just before a painful incident and alter my actions and change the course of my history for the better. Hard to believe, huh? Just think about the possibilities though? Wouldn’t it be great if you could rewind your life, just a little bit? I bet if you try hard enough, you might even find that you can do it too.

However, there is one caveat. I did it and then I found I still couldn’t quite change things enough. I found out the hard way that while I thought I could change events I really couldn’t easily affect the outcome in the long run. A sorry tale, huh? Still got those ninety minutes? I’ll tell you everything then, but before we start just remember that I warned you that you’ll never get those ninety minutes back.

I told you I could rewind time, and I did it many times but I won’t ever do it again, it just didn’t work out for me. You might even be able to do so yourself, I know that there are others out there like me who can, but if you find that you can do it, heed my warning, you really, really shouldn’t mess about with it.

I first realised I could do it about two months after I left my wife Terry, when I was drunk and violently sick on a new cream-coloured carpet at my parents’ chalet bungalow. And I did it in the presence of my said parents, so there could be no denial.

I mean, this was projectile vomiting of the worst kind, from a man so drunk that he wasn’t even able to put a hand to his mouth or attempt to run to the toilet. Of course both my parents were entirely disgusted with me. I had been hitting the bottle for a couple of months, in fact ever since I had moved back in with them and had cleaned them out of every bottle of liquor they had in house.

I think that last bottle was “off”. That’s my excuse and I stuck with it for about an hour or so.

Not only did my parents refuse to accept any conversation with me or an apology, they actually gave me 24 hours’ notice to leave their lovely home for good. My own parents had actually allied themselves to my estranged wife and were prepared to wash their hands of me!

And quite honestly I couldn’t blame them. Even I was disgusted with myself.

I had a shower and changed into fresh clothes, sobered up quite a bit and was back sitting on the sofa in the lounge, feeling extremely sorry for myself. Dad wasn’t speaking to me at all and Mum, god bless her cotton socks, had cleaned up the mess as best she could and opened all the windows, but it still smelled of horrible vomit in that room. And that stain in the brand new carpet stood out like a Belisha beacon in the wee small hours.

My parents were in the kitchen talking in hushed voices, no doubt discussing me, while I sat in my own stink fiddling with the remote to find something on daytime television to occupy the time and drown out the verdict of a jury of two.

Out on the streets without a job, I knew that I’d have to live in a cardboard box and one without cable. There was nothing on live TV so I clicked on a familiar stored movie and played it for a while after fast forwarding through the preamble to the action scenes.

And the thought just hit me, what if I could press a rewind button on my own life and go back to just before I was sick and make sure this time that I ran out and made it to the loo in time?

What about if I went back further and didn’t drink that last bottle of whatever rubbish liquor it was that was left in Dad’s now empty drinks cabinet?

It was just a thought. We all have them. I was at the lowest point in my thirty-two years of existence and I just thought, bugger, why can’t something good like that happen and rescue me from the mess I was in, even if it was of my own making?

I noticed the movie on the TV running backwards first of all, and assumed I must’ve pressed the rewind button on the remote in error before dropping it somewhere. I couldn’t actually see the remote, it was no longer in my hand. Then Mum walked into the room backwards carrying her mop and bucket. Dad walked in backwards too. Their speech sounded foreign.

That was really bloody weird. I wondered what hell was that bottle I was drinking from?

The mop and bucket were then carried away backwards full of clean water and the pair of them walked in backwards again and sat down with a sudden plonk, which they never do on their decent furniture. Then they quietly watched the telly, showing the start of the grand prix race we watched earlier in the afternoon, this time the cars doing 200mph in reverse gear. Meanwhile I just sat there watching them. I found the remote control device on the arm of my chair and pressed the button for play, and everything, telly and life, started moving forward again.

I had that déjà vu feeling as my parents spoke the same comments on the grand prix race as they had two hours or so before, the outcome in the race for the line a complete surprise to them. It was all so strange that I was speechless for a while just listening to them rabbit on as if nothing had happened.

For a start they were still speaking to me, no mention of packing my bags and there was no stink of vomit or disinfectant in the room. Even more amazing, I was not as drunk as I was back then an hour or two earlier, in fact I felt great as though a load was lifted off my shoulders and I didn’t need the drink any more.

I was in the fresh clothes that I had changed into after showering. Somehow (and I had more than a suspicion that I had some control over what had happened), I had rewound a part of my actual existence, life if you like, and corrected a momentary mistake I had made, without anyone being any the wiser. It was as if my embarrassing drunken sickness episode had never happened. I needed to sleep on this, get my head around it and try again in the morning.