“You won’t say anything to your ex-colleagues about herdrinking in here, then?” asked Craig, hopefully.
“No, I won’t,” said Kent. “And I’ll tell you what you shoulddo. As soon as she turns eighteen for real you want to get her working behindthat bar. She would be a real asset to this place.”
Craig went off to serve another couple of young lads who hadjust come in. As soon as they had their pints and clocked Lauren, they were straightover to the pool table like bees around honey.
The final person Kent asked about going back in time wasNobby, but his responses were not particular original. All of his plansinvolved going back in time to put various bets on the horses, and Kent had alreadybeen there and done that and precious little good it had done him.
Kay made one final attempt to get him to come back to herflat just before closing time, but he wasn’t having any of it. He waited untilshe went to the toilet before downing his last pint and disappearing before shecame back. He quite fancied some chips, but couldn’t risk bumping into her atthe chippie, so he decided to go to the kebab shop instead.
Meandering slowly home, chomping on his doner meat andchips, he pondered the evening’s events in his mind. He couldn’t do anything tohelp Kay now, but maybe there was some way he could make it up to her in thepast. There were still a lot of things he didn’t understand about how all ofthis worked but tomorrow he would get to the bottom of it. His friendly neighbourhoodangel had a lot of questions coming his way.
He had finished his food before he reached his house. Notwanting to leave Debs any evidence of his late-night snack, he dumped the boxin next door’s wheelie bin. She was fast asleep when he got upstairs to bed andit wasn’t long before he was drunkenly snoring beside her.
Nothing in my Way
November 2018
With a lot on his mind and the undigested kebab weighingheavily in his stomach, Kent slept fitfully. As the night wore on he wastormented by one disturbed dream after another as his sleeping brain struggled tomake sense of everything that had been going on.
Twice he awoke with a start, desperate to urinate, with thevivid imaginings of his subconscious still imprinted on his mind. The firsttime he had been dreaming of murdering the police commissioner, stabbing him todeath over his desk with a pair of scissors. He then stood there cackling likea pantomime villain as he watched the blood seeping out and soaking the deadman’s stripy red shirt.
His dreams were taking him to the darkest recesses of hismind and the dream that followed was arguably even more alarming. The secondtime he awoke he was lying on his stomach, face down on the pillow humping thebed. He was in the midst of a sordid dream where he was having sex with Kay ontop of a gigantic mound of fish and chips.
That dream had started off quite promisingly. He was youngagain and the Kay he had swept off her feet with his charm and wittyconversation had been the gorgeous teenage version he had once been too shy toask out. Back in the setting of his teenage bedroom, their passionate kissinghad soon led on to much more.
But his mind had been playing a cruel trick on him. Duringthe course of their frantic coupling she had metamorphosed into the hideous, middle-agedversion he now found so repulsive. Unable to control the dream, which wasrapidly turning into a nightmare, he hadn’t been able to break away. It was asif she had cast a fatal spell over him, like a siren luring sailors to theirdoom, leaving him to thrust away inside this toothless crone for all eternity.
Like all of Kent’s erotic dreams, he had woken up before hehad finished the job. This was normally a source of frustration to him, but onthis occasion it was a relief.
He often dreamt about having sex with women other than hiswife but had never admitted it to anyone. He just assumed it was something thathappened to all men, possibly women, too, and was perfectly natural. It washardly cheating, was it? He didn’t stray in real life so could hardly be blamedfor what happened in the mysterious realm of the dream world.
He wondered what a psychiatrist would make of it all. Theywould probably tell him that it was down to some deep-seated unfulfilleddesire, which was pretty obvious. He could have worked that much out for himself.
Why had he had such a strange dream? He didn’t desire Kay inher current form and he had certainly never had a sordid dream about herbefore. It must have been down to her revelation in the pub about her teenagecrush on him. It had obviously had more of an impact on him than he had realisedat the time so this dream was clearly his brain’s way of telling him they had unfinishedbusiness.
After recovering from this second nightmare he managed toget a few reasonable hours’ sleep in. His subconscious seemingly had no furtherissues to resolve for the moment and his kebab had made it down to the lowerregions of his digestive system. By the time he woke up for the third and finaltime he was dream-free.
As he looked blurrily at the clock through his crusty earlymorning eyes, he could just about make out that it was just after 10am. Thatmeant Debs would have already gone off to work at the café. He would have toget his own cup of tea today.
After his usual sluggish start, Kent managed to haul himselfdownstairs to find a note from Debs waiting for him on the kitchen table. He couldn’tread it properly without his reading glasses which he had left in the bedroom.Cursing his bad eyesight, another bane of his life, he hauled himself back upstairsto get them, huffing and puffing as he went. He could barely get up the
