Chapter 6

Terry was exhausted, 16 hours later. Our third child, Jake, short for Jacob Henry Donaldson, the young challenger in the blue corner, who weighed in at 8lbs 12ozs, had completed his very first feed and had just been wheeled off to the baby care unit for a few short hours while his mother and I rested from the ordeal.

We were alone for a few moments. Enough time to settle Terry down before I scooted home for a shower and a couple of hours sleep. Then collect our other two kids and grandparents and get back for visiting time. Terry had been dozing heavy eye lidded while the nurse fussed around, but now we were alone she looked alert and gave me that look, you know the one, where she’s about to quiz you over something you’ve done wrong while hefting a rolling pin in one hand and slapping it on her other hand?

“Honey,” she opened the conversation with an endearment. At least, I thought, that’s a promising opening. “It’s been ten years. Ten years last week.”

“Yes.” No point in beating about the bush of course. I was more than aware it had been ten years and several newspapers had even reported the fact. One had published a three-page article with another mind-boggingly outrageous theory expounded. I had only bothered to read the headline, which was enough to confirm that the article was complete rubbish.

“I didn’t want to say anything with Jake’s arrival so close. I know I have never asked and you’ve never volunteered, but...”

“But?”

“It is, as far as I know, the only secret between us, plus, I suspect, one other secondary secret which I believe is very closely related to the first, am I correct?”

“Absolutely, my dear,” I agreed, “We have no other secrets on my part other than those two. Although I have got you your anniversary present hidden away for two weeks’ time, if you can count that?”

“I think for the moment I can ignore that. There are no secrets at all on my part, but then...” she smiled and gripped my hand harder, “I do not have the same burden on me of feeling the need to be as protective of my spouse as you are.”

“I think it comes with the job, darling.”

“Jobs, more like, honey. Let’s see, loving husband, perfectly considerate and satisfying lover, very best friend, doting father, efficient personal secretary, driven researcher and co-author, family protector and all round shining white knight.”

“Just the one fault, then, in the shape of a couple of ... secrets.”

“I wouldn’t call them faults, as I believe they are being kept for my own wellbeing.”

“They were, but as you say, ten years.” I agreed, nodding. “Even so, I really have no idea what passage of time would ever make us completely safe.”

“I have no idea what the danger is or where it would come from. I do know you have borne the burden totally and protected me and the children from it, but I have no idea what it is that I need protecting from. Would it make a difference what I do or don’t know?”

“I’ll tell you anything and everything,” I said, “But you may not like me very much when I tell you. I’m very afraid that you will even hate me, Terry - and if you did, well, I wouldn’t blame you.”

“I love you, Bobby,” she said holding my hand in an iron grip, “My love for you is unshakeable. Trust me, hon, I know you, everything you have ever done has been for our babies and me, never just for yourself. Tell me everything.”

“You never asked before, but now that you are, you know I can’t deny you, of course, but you will think the explanation fantastic and implausible.”

“Sweetheart, don’t forget, I saw you in the mall that day, wet, frozen, wearing your ruined tux. I remember getting you a change of clothing and we stuffed that tux in a waste bin. Then you left me to do what you had to do in Cambridge. When I got home, your one and only tux you had at the time was still hanging up in our wardrobe. Whatever your story is, I am rather expecting it to be fantastic and implausible.”

Terry managed to smile, she was alert now, very tired but alive and, as ever, quite beautiful. How could I ever refuse her anything?

“Who was this Doctor Curtis,” she asked, “who disappeared immediately after you struck him, and why did you hit him in the first place?”

“To explain that I need to tell you about déjà vu.”

“I am aware of that phenomenon, and have imagined I’d experienced it a couple of times, myself.”

“You know how sometimes you do or say something you regret and, if you could just rewind time a few seconds or minutes and undo it, you would?”

“It depends on the mistake to put right and whether such a thing is possible, we are in the realms of science fiction now, aren’t we?”

“We appear to be. If we assume that redoing a period of time is even possible, what if your loved one was, without his or her knowledge, seduced both by drugs and worn down by the trial and error of time manipulation, used by someone with evil intent, done so subtly that it was months before it became apparent, by which time the abuse of the partner was so advanced that it was impossible to salvage the situation. How far would you go to try and put things to right?”

“I don’t know.” Terry bit her lip, “you are really worrying me, Bobby.”

“OK, that was a complicated and unfair question, honey, of course you don’t know. You would never know how you would react. Imagine a situation where we were married but before the children arrived and we had a set-up stand-up row about something and I was manipulated into walking out on you and we were apart for several months without even a single word between us?”

“That would never happen, Bobby my love, you are my life, I would find you within the hour and knock some sense into you.”

“You wouldn’t if you were being controlled by your new lover.”

“Oh!” She looked shocked. “When is this alternative time frame you are talking about supposed to have happened?”

“About a year after the tux incident at the mall. In that year we didn’t have Mia, our children didn’t exist in that world, in fact they never would.”

“This Curtis chap was my new lover?”

“Yes, I just knew him as Clinton, I was introduced to him on a first name basis for the first time at a dinner party a couple of hours before our tux incident.”

“Hence you were the tux in the morning while we were supposed to be shopping...”

“Yes, I had discovered that I could rewind time a few days earlier, when I was living at Mum’s. I had lost my job six months earlier —”

“— But Professor Josephs promised —”

“I think Clinton and Chantelle engineered my dismissal.”

“Ahh, I wondered when that horrible Chantelle creature would come into the story,” she smiled.

“Secret number two, I’m afraid.”

“So it was you who ... shopped her to the police?”

“Even without Clinton she was still preying on young men.”

“Including you, honey?” she teased as she patted her still-distended belly, “Fond of the fuller-figured woman, are we?”

“Only you, sweetheart, only you.” I kissed her hand as it rested on her stomach. “I was never ever in her clutches, but apparently she had designs on me.”

“I can’t blame her, you are quite a catch, but you’re MY catch,” Terry pulled my hand from her belly to her lips and kissed it. “Go on, honey.”

“I thought at the time I was the only one who could do this time rewind business. I had been feeling at my lowest after we split and descended into being a sad poor drunk.”

“Honey!”

“Well, I was devastated at our separation and my parents were at the end of their tether with me, so I cheered them up with a little help from time reworking. I got a job, using this power and then thought about getting us back together again. Before I could even ring you, though ... well, not you exactly, the other Terry ... I got a call from the other Terry out of the blue inviting me to this dinner party.”

“Did you use this ... power ... on me, sorry the other Terry?”

“I have never used this power on you, never have and never would. It is a power that is so dangerous I have resolved never to use it again, I was prepared to go to prison rather than risk losing you. Yes, I did use it on that other Terry, the controlled one, almost as soon as I saw her at the door of the apartment. She treated me like dirt, chucking my flowers on the hall table.”

“So sorry, my dearest Bobby, I apologise for her ... she ... couldn’t have been in her right mind.”

“She wasn’t, although the extent of her alienation wasn’t apparent at that time, I just assumed she was still pissed off at me and our long post-row separation. With my new powers over time, I didn’t have to stand for that attitude anymore, so I wound back a bit and knocked on the door again and this time I took charge.”

“I bet you bossed her about!” she laughed, “That’s the Bobby I know!”

I laughed with her.

“You know me so well! Yes, I took her in my arms and kissed her. At that time I wasn’t aware of conflicting timelines, so I thought of her as ‘you’. Then I marched past her and put the flowers properly in water in one of our vases, the nice upright crystal one, the wedding present from your Aunt Mary. That Terry was a bit pissed off!”

“Did she pout like this?” She screwed her face up.

“Almost exactly like that, sweetheart, not a good look for either of you. But Clinton’s version of Terry wasn’t you. I had lost her forever, she was his and I later found out she was already carrying his child. That was the reason for inviting me to the dinner party.”

“You hate dinner parties, Hon.”

“I do. Anyway, together they lured me there and wanted me to know they were lovers and she was carrying his child so they could rub it in my face. Then he was going to use her as a sex object for his friends, in front of me, while he in turn subjected the drugged me to Chantelle’s lascivious attentions. He had even arranged for me to be sodomised in front of you, or rather the other Terry.”

“God! How evil was he?”

“Totally consumed by the power of time manipulation. He had been doing it for 30 years ... actually, he squeezed that thirty years into less than three years of our conception of time passage.”

“That’s why his parents said he was only twelve years old!”

“You’ve got it.” I said it quietly, full of admiration for the intelligence of my wife, my one true love.

“My god! It is so fantastic, but it all fits, it is actually possible!”

“It is and it isn’t. You cannot mess with time. It messed with Clinton big time, he was corrupted by the power he wielded.”

“He must’ve thought he could do anything, didn’t he? Thought he was all-powerful and didn’t realise that you could do it as well!” she exclaimed, everything falling into place. “Only he wasn’t as strong as you, darling. He needed the power to enforce his evil intent. You were strong enough to resist using it, you limited it just to try and put things right for others and were prepared to pay the price for it.”

“You get it. I love you, sweetheart, I would do anything for you, you know that.”

“I love you too, you were always my hero, even before your arrest and everything. I knew you had done something noble to go to such lengths, I just didn’t have the details.”

“It was hardly noble, I thought I was powerless. He was lording it in front of me. I hadn’t even grasped the concept that you could pause and fast forward as well as rewind.”

“Wow!”

“I had to think fast. The other Terry was virtually out of it on a cocktail of Chantelle’s sex drugs and was about to be gang raped, Clinton was naked so I hit him and we fast forwarded into the future, where I dumped him, left him for dead ... twice.”

I looked Terry in the eye. “You’ve been living with a murderer for ten years, my love.”

“You can never call yourself that, sweetheart,” she held out both arms and I was drawn to her breast as she lay propped up in the bed where she had just presented us with our third beautiful child. She had created life in her image while I had destroyed a life, twice. She kissed the top of my head. “You were protecting your family by doing so, and I am so proud of you. So, you left the other Terry where she was and came to find me?”

“I did. I kissed my fingers and put them on her lips, but she wasn’t aware of what was going on. I could only hope that the shock of Clinton and I suddenly disappearing without trace would bring them all to their senses. It meant that my other parents had lost their son and the other Terry that I had to leave behind would at least be left with the choice of being a single mum or terminating Clinton’s child. I was already out of the picture as far as she was concerned. I didn’t even know if I would be able to return on that same timeline anyway.”

“So you came back for me?”

“I went back to exactly one year before and reappeared in that shopping centre. I was in the middle of a blizzard one minute, running through trees to put distance between Clinton and myself before coming back.”

“How do you do it?” she asked, “This ability to rewind time?”

“It was as simple as thinking about it and wanting it so badly that ... it happens. Once I had checked that I hadn’t brought Clinton back with me to our Oxford, I couldn’t be sure if he hadn’t come back to my time within his existing body, which was then residing in Cambridge. As soon as I saw you back in the mall I was aware that I must have gone with you there earlier and you had left me at the cafe, so the way the timeline rewind works means I occupy the same body in that timeline. It prevents there being two of you in the same timeline. However you return not as you were in the past but how you are at the time of rewinding. Because for you time has already elapsed.”

“Hence the tux you were wearing and the snow and ice, where did you come from, honey?”

“I think it must’ve been an ice age, thirty thousand years into the future, it was damned cold. There were wolves, or at least wild dogs, the second time I went to that future.”

“From Cambridge?”

“Yes. If he was the same Clinton that had come back, like me turning up in my tux, I think he would have recognised me as I walked towards him in the lecture hall in Cambridge, holding out my hand in greeting. He looked twenty years younger —”

“— So, when you continually wind and rewind you use up your own time and still age normally while all those around you remain unchanged or get younger?”

“Yes, it appears so. From what he told me at the dinner party, he had discovered the power when he was ten and used it pretty sparingly until he went to Yale age eleven. Then he used it so much that, in a matter of calendar months, he aged several years and had to move to England. Then he must have met your counterpart Terry, perhaps when she guest-lectured there and fell under his spell.”