“I know,” she replied. “But the time will fly by, you’llsee. And when I come back, we can be together all the time.”
In Kay’s current mindset, that was a total lie, but she was stickingto the script for the moment. Although it would have been easier to just get upand walk off with the minimum of fuss, she wanted to see him beg pathetically,just like he had before. But this time she would not cave in.
Suddenly he began blubbing uncontrollably, like a baby.
“Please don’t go, Kay,” he pleaded. “I love you. I can’tlive without you.”
This was so typical, she thought. It was all about him andhis feelings. It was alright for him, he had his career and his fancy jobtravelling around vineyards, but what about her plans and her dreams? He hadnever cared about any of that. All he cared about was how it would affect him.
“You know I’ve got my heart set on this trip, Alan. I’vedreamt of doing it since I was fifteen.”
“Please, Kay, I’ll do anything. You can still travel. Look,I went down to the travel agents earlier in the week and booked us this.”
He pulled some tickets out of his bag and showed them toher. She didn’t even need to look at them to know what they were. She had beenthrough all of this before. It was a package holiday for two to the Algarve.
“Two weeks in the sun, just me and you together. I’ll payfor everything, don’t worry, and you can go travelling later. In fact, I’ll geta sabbatical from work and we’ll go travelling together.”
This was the point at which she had capitulated before butshe wasn’t going to be fooled a second time. He never did let her gotravelling, despite several attempts on her part to rearrange it. Thesabbatical of course never happened – apparently he was too indispensable atwork to be spared. Not long after that, he had talked her out of going touniversity as well by fixing her up with a full-time job in his department.
As for the holiday in the Algarve, on the first day he met aboorish group of city types and spent half of the holiday going off to playgolf with them, leaving Kay on her own by the pool with only her Walkman and abunch of cassettes for company.
“Please, Kay,” he whined, tears pouring down his face.“Don’t leave me. I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you.”
She could quite easily have cut him to shreds right then. Itwould have been so easy to humiliate him right in front of everyone at theneighbouring tables, whose attention they were beginning to attract. But shedidn’t want a scene right now. There would be better opportunities to get herrevenge on later trips back to the past. Today, her focus was elsewhere. Shejust wanted to get away and get on that plane.
“I’m sorry, Alan,” she replied. “I’m going and that’s that.”Without saying any more, she got up, turned around and walked away.
“Don’t leave me, Kay!” he shouted behind her. “I’ll killmyself if you do.”
“Be my guest,” she said under her breath. This was gettingridiculous. She had never seen anything so pathetic from a grown man. It hadbeen bad enough the first time round, but at least he had stopped after she hadsaid she would stay. This was downright embarrassing.
“Just keep walking,” she kept saying to herself, over andover again, and she did not look back until she had reached passport control.
Chapter Five
June 1995
Only when she was safely in the passport control queue didKay dare to take a look behind her. It was a relief when she saw no sign thatAlan was following her.
She fumbled in her bag for her passport and had a momentarypanic when she thought she couldn’t find it. She wouldn’t have put it past himto have taken it out of her bag as a backup plan to ensure she couldn’t go, butthen she realised he couldn’t have. She had shown it when she checked in. Thenshe remembered she had put it in a small, zip-up side pocket of her bag.
Once she was through passport control and security apalpable sense of relief washed over her. She was safe now, wasn’t she? Shecertainly hoped so. She wouldn’t put it past him to buy a ticket for theflight, follow her onto the plane, and either beg her to get off or insist onher coming with him.
She had seen similar scenes in films, but she dismissed itas unlikely. Things like that just didn’t happen in real life. Besides, heprobably didn’t even have his passport so it really wasn’t worth worryingabout.
She browsed around the duty-free shops and bought anoverpriced sandwich and a drink. Even by 2018 standards the prices wereoutrageous. Then she went out into the main departure lounge to see if the gatenumber for her flight had come up yet.
The airport was still quiet given the early hour, so it waseasy for her to get a seat in front of one of the boards giving out flightdetails. She was not best pleased to discover that her flight was one of anumber that had been delayed.
It had been pushing it, aiming to reach Rovaniemi bymidnight, even if the flight had been on time. When she had initially plannedthis trip, back in 1995, she had not intended to do the whole journey in oneday at all. She had planned to stay in Helsinki for a day or two and then getan overnight train north, saving the cost of a night in a youth hostel bysleeping on the train. It was a long journey, something she had discovered whenshe realised that the Scandinavian countries were much larger than she hadoriginally thought.
The capitals of Oslo, Stockholm and Helsinki were more orless on the same latitude, but far further from the Arctic Circle than she hadbelieved. Initially she had considered travelling to Norway, but had been putoff when she found out that it was over
