It had been a highly satisfactory outcome for Kent, but haddone nothing to undo that early stain on his career. His punishment had beenexile to the sticks and an unspoken ceiling placed on his career once hereached the level of D.I.
Sorely tempted to go back and sort Leanne and Charlton out,just as he had Summerfield, Kent had toyed with various options in his head. Butthe more he thought about it, the more he came to the conclusion that it just wasn’tfeasible.
What could he realistically do differently back then thatwould make him feel any better? He certainly had no desire to live the evening ofthe rape accusation over again. He was sure she would act no differently, whateverhe did. She and Charlton had clearly planned the whole thing in advance and theywere both popular in the station. Doubtless the flatmate had been in on it, too.The whole thing was best left in the past.
Having made the decision to leave well alone, instead heturned his attention to his so-called friend, Glen. What a bad choice of bestfriend he had turned out to be. His long history of betrayal truly deservedsome punishment. He had pinpointed the perfect day on which to do it, one whichwould enable him to combine two things he wanted to do in the past into onetrip.
It was going to be a little more challenging than hisprevious two trips. He was going a lot further back in time on this occasion. Theevents of the Summerfield day, just a few months ago, had still been relativelyfresh in his mind. As for the day of the robbery on the betting shop, he hadbeen able to check up on the details he needed for that day. It was alldocumented in his crime reports or on the internet.
Going back to the 1990s to deal with events in his personallife was different. There was no documentation he could call on, no socialmedia, not even as much as a faded photograph. He was going to have to rely completelyon his memories and he had no idea how reliable they would be after such a longtime. He had heard people say that memories became unreliable over time, thatthey degraded in the same way as old film.
He knew from watching reruns of old sitcoms on Gold that themind could play tricks. Sometimes he saw episodes of much-loved shows he hadseen many times when he was younger, but when he watched them again, the dialogueand plot differed from what he remembered.
False memories could be implanted, too. There was a storywhich his parents and various other family members had delighted inembarrassing him with ad nauseam over the years. It involved an incident in akitchen and bathroom showroom when he was about two years old. He had been toilet-trainingat the time and he had supposedly pulled his trousers down and urinated in oneof the showroom toilets.
This story had been told to him so many times that he could rememberthe event in great detail, right down to the colour of the porcelain. But inreality he knew he couldn’t have remembered it. He couldn’t remember anythingthat had happened before he was about five years old, so this memory couldn’tbe real. It had been implanted by the constant retelling from older relativeswho related the tale with glee at every opportunity while he was growing up, especiallyif he had any friends or a new girlfriend around.
So memories could not be 100% trusted. There was very littleconcrete that he could rely on about the day. All he knew for certain was thathe needed to go back to the Friday in July after his class had finished their ALevels. It had become a tradition for the school to hold a ball in a marquee onthe school field to celebrate the end of the exams.
One thing he was pretty certain of was that the theme was superheroesand villains and that he had gone as Batman. He could not recall any detailsabout the evening but that was hardly surprising. He was pretty sure he hadgone to the ball alone and left alone. Evenings like those didn’t exactly lend themselvesto laying down long-term memories. He remembered Glen and Kay being theretogether, but nothing else. He didn’t remember anything about them leavingtogether, but they must have done as Kay had told him they had in the pub.
In Universe 2.0 he planned to rectify the situation. He hadno intention of going to the ball unaccompanied this time. Quite how he wasgoing to engineer things to his advantage he hadn’t been able to work out yet.He was just going to have to play it by ear when he got there.
His day in 1994 began back in his childhood bedroom, a roomthat was almost unrecognisable from the last time he had seen it in 1984.
The Return of the Jedi wallpaper was gone, removed byKent himself when he was sixteen, having taken it upon himself to decorate hisroom. He had been going through a bit of teenage depression at the time and hadcome up with the idea of painting it all black. When he mentioned this to hismother, she had absolutely refused to allow it. In the end he settled for plainwhite, adorning almost every spare inch with posters of iconic album covers.
From The Smiths to Nirvana, the walls were a tribute to histeenage life. The rest of the room fitted in with the musical theme. Recordsand CDs were everywhere, along with his stereo system and his pride and joy ofthe time, his guitar.
Kent got up from the double bed he now had. He had managedto persuade his mum and dad to let him have it as a compromise if he promisednot
