This seemed the best way to ask without letting on that Iremembered nothing about it whatsoever. By asking questions in the rightplaces, nodding and agreeing when she asked “Do you remember when…?” I managedto piece together a very flimsy framework of my life.
Stacey was my only child, and she was 25 years old. Hermother, and my wife, had died seven years ago in a car crash, so that explainedher absence from the bedside. I didn’t learn her name, but I did deduce thatthe photograph I had found earlier in my wallet must have been of her.
I had worked my whole life in the retail trade, starting inshops when I was younger and progressing to the head office of a major nationalchain of supermarkets. It seemed we had been pretty well off, judging byStacey’s recollections of some of our holidays abroad, which included Floridaand Dubai.
Stacey herself was living with a man in London who worked inthe media, having left home sometime after she had finished university. She hadreturned home recently to care for me.
All the questions and the conversation had exhausted me,leaving my cancer-stricken body crying out for rest. I wanted to find out morebut, later that afternoon, I found myself once again suffering agonising pain.In front of my daughter’s sorrowful gaze, I was once again placed undersedation.
Four more similar days passed, and then I awoke inunfamiliar surroundings. So this was it, then, I was back at home, as I hadsuspected I might be.
Over the past few days, I had watched the clock slip back aday each time, from the 29th to the 28th to the 27th. Each morning as I hadawoken in the hospital I had spoken to the nurses and also to my daughter whenshe visited. Each time they had no recollection of what had occurred on theprevious day, or at least not as I recalled it.
Unless this was some enormous and elaborate practical jokethat someone was playing on me, there was no denying that time was runningbackwards.
Being laid up in the hospital had left me with plenty oftime to think. It helped to take my mind off the never-ending pain inside me,which no amount of morphine could completely take away.
On the 27th I tried to get it all clear in mymind exactly what the situation was, and wrote it down on a notepad that I’dfound in one of the drawers next to my hospital bed. The key points seemed tobe as follows:
1) Timewas running backwards for me on a day-by-day basis. If it was Friday today,then tomorrow it would be Saturday for everybody else, but Thursday for me.
2) Timeran as normal during the day itself. The exact point when I jumped back wassome time during the night, but I wasn’t exactly sure when.
3) Eachjump back must be exactly 48 hours, otherwise I’d be living the same day overand over again.
4) Ihad no memory of my past life but fully understood the world around me. Staceyhad a clear memory of my past, which did not seem in any way unusual to her.Everything seemed to be running normally for everybody else.
5) Basedon Stacey’s anecdotes about the past, I concluded that I must have alreadylived my life in full right up until the day I died. Now, for whatever reason,I was starting to live it over again, but backwards.
Those were the facts as far as I had managed to ascertainthem, but they still left a huge number of unanswered questions.
Firstly, was the past fixed? If Stacey told me I had donecertain things on a certain day, was I destined to do those things again, orcould I change them? I had not had a chance to test this theory out yet, butnow that I was back at home, surely I could. And if I made changes, what effectwould they have?
The biggest question of all was “why?” To that I had noanswer, but it seemed that I was being given a second shot at life, and onethat intrigued me.
I needed to find out as much as I could about not only myown past life, but also everything that was happening in the wider world. AsI’d already worked out, I had a basic working knowledge of how the worldworked, but without the detail.
For example, I could point to a country on a map and say,“Yes, that’s the USA, and they have a President, whilst we have a PrimeMinister,” but I wouldn’t be able to tell you the name of that President or anyof his predecessors. These were all things that I was going to have to findout.
I vowed to read as much as I could in the newspapers andonline, as well as devouring as many history books and television programmes asI could get my hands on. I had a lot to learn if I was going to make the mostof this unique opportunity.
But now I had Boxing Day to get through. It was a relief tobe out of the hospital, but I was grimly aware that later in the day I wasgoing to be suffering so badly that my daughter would be taking me in. Itwasn’t a pleasant thought and I couldn’t see any way around it. Having spentmost of the past few days in various degrees of excruciating agony, I steeledmyself for the worst.
The only comforting thought I had was that if time continuedto run backwards, then I should get progressively better as I moved backthrough December.
It was time to explore my home. I reflected for a moment onthe peculiarity that, although this was my first day in my new home, in anotherway it was also my last. I sat up and looked around the room.
Although the details were unfamiliar to me – the pale creamdécor, the dark blue curtains and the chest of drawers, I was struck by anoverwhelming
