Back in the kitchen, he put the kettle on and started toread the note. Before he’d even finished the first sentence he was wishing he hadn’tbothered:
Since you clearly haven’t got anything worthwhile to dotoday, here’s a list of jobs you can be getting on with to keep you out of thepub.
He read through the list, which had at least fifteen itemson it, from emptying out the dishwasher to cleaning the windows. Many of thesehad sarcastic remarks added to them, some of which Kent considered ratherharsh. The last one was particularly brutal.
And finally, you can also give the bathroom toilet a goodscrub as doubtless you’ve left it in a mess again after last night. I’m sick ofdoing it. PS: Stop weeing on the bloody floor!
Charming, thought Kent. It was no wonder he dreamt aboutother women at night. He was sure other husbands didn’t have to put up withthis level of aggravation.
To be fair, she was right about one thing, he did have a fewhours to kill and the list of chores would keep him busy until his dailyappointment with the angel. Grudgingly he got on with it, vowing that he wouldhave to find gainful employment soon. He had no intention of being a house-husbandfor the rest of his life.
All told, the day was a rather depressing comedown from whathe had been expecting after his last trip. He had thought this would be thefirst day of his new life, rolling in cash and able to do whatever he wanted, wheneverhe wanted. Instead here he was on his hands and knees scrubbing toilets,muttering and grumbling to himself.
By the time late-afternoon rolled around, Kent was feelingextremely disgruntled. He had started the day feeling fed up enough about the situation,but after a day of mind-numbingly boring housework he was all ready for a majorshowdown. On top of all that, his knees and back hurt from all the bendingdown.
Arriving at the car park at 4.30pm, he saw that the angelwas already there waiting for him. He was leaning nonchalantly against one ofthe pillars at the edge of the roof, smoking a cigarette. Kent was just about toopen his mouth and begin his well-planned tirade when the angel pre-empted him.
“Go on, say it,” he said, grinning. “I know what’s coming.”
“You conned me!” exploded Kent. “You said I could go backand do things differently, so I did. Then I get back here and find nothing’schanged!”
“You conned yourself,” replied the angel. “Yes, I said youcould go back and live things over again, but I never said anything aboutchanging things.”
“But I did change things!” protested Kent. “You must be awareof what I did back there. You seem to know everything else I’m thinking! I wentback with the intention of fixing things in my past to make things better now.At least that’s what I thought I was doing. That was the whole point of this, wasn’tit? So why is everything still exactly the same as it was before?”
“Look, slow down a bit and look at it from my perspective,” repliedthe angel, attempting to explain. “I can’t let you go blundering around in thepast like a bull in a china shop, can I? Imagine if I let everyone do that. Theworld would be chaos. We wouldn’t know whether we were coming or going.”
This made sense, but Kent continued to protest.
“I understand all that, but what I did wasn’t going to makemuch difference, surely? A few extra grand in the bank, a few villains in jailwhere they should be, it’s hardly endangering the fabric of the time-space continuum,is it?”
“Small beer, admittedly,” said the angel. “But trust me: othershave had far loftier ambitions. You should see some of the things they have gotup to in the past.
“Like what?” asked Kent.
“Oh you know – all the usual clichés you get in time travel booksand films,” replied the angel, breezily. “Stuff like killing Hitler, trying toprevent JFK being assassinated, or going back to find out who Jack the Ripperwas. I’ve seen it all done thousands of times. If you ask me, it shows a distinctlack of originality. It actually gets quite boring watching it after a while. Ifound your little adventure a lot more entertaining, at least it was something different.”
Although Kent understood the broad gist of what the angelwas telling him, there were still a lot of parts to it that didn’t make sense.
“I’m still struggling to get my head around this a bit. Doesthis mean that I wasn’t really back in the past at all, because it certainlyfelt like I was? Did I really do all the things I thought I did or was it justsome sort of hallucination?”
“Well, you did, and you didn’t,” replied the angel,cryptically.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Kent. “Can’t you justgive me a straight answer?”
“OK, put it this way,” said the angel. “I’ll try and explainit in terms even you can understand. Now, you know when you save a file on yourcomputer?”
“Of course,” replied Kent.
“Well, you know if you hit ‘save as’ rather than ‘save’, youcan create a second copy of the file under another name? So that you have a backupcopy, in case you lose the original?”
“Yes,” said Kent. “I do know how to use a computer, you know.”He was annoyed enough with the current situation as it was and the angel wasnot helping matters by talking to him as if he was technologically illiterate.
“Well, it’s a bit like that,” continued the angel. “When Isend you back in time, I create a copy of the universe. Let’s call it Universe 2.0.Then I let you play in it to your heart’s content for the whole day you arethere. Afterwards, when you come back to Universe 1.0, I just delete the copy –job done.”
“Wow,” replied Kent, feeling genuinely impressed. “You can reallydo stuff like that?”
“It’s my universe,” replied the angel, with a hint of arrogance.“I can do whatever I want with it.”
Kent felt quite overawed and more than a little scared. Whatwas he getting himself into here? Who exactly was this angel? Was that
