I examined the paper closely. It didn’t look old or yellowedas papers did after a year or two. It looked as freshly minted as you wouldexpect the current day’s paper to look.
I remembered that story from the front page, too. The Ministerhad been forced to resign. That had indeed been a couple of years ago. If I wasin any lingering doubts that I had gone back another year, they were soonsquashed when the door opened, the sister on duty that night walked in.
“Amy, we’re just had someone brought up from A&E who wasbrought in after a cardiac arrest. Can you go and attend to his medication?”
Her actual words didn’t really register, due to my surpriseat seeing and hearing her again. The middle-aged, grey-haired lady in front ofme was my mentor of many years, Sister Mary Williams. She had retired from thehospital and gone to live in Australia eighteen months ago. By that, I meaneighteen months ago from where I had started from, which from two years in thepast meant about six months from now.
Her presence fitted in perfectly with what the date on thepaper was telling me; even so, it had still come as a surprise and I wasmomentarily distracted thinking about the implications.
“Amy – did you hear what I said?” asked Sister Mary impatiently.
“Sorry, Sister,” I replied, aware that I hadn’t responded toher request. “I was miles away then. I’ll get right onto it.”
I tried to focus and recall exactly what she had said.Something about a heart attack victim and medication.
Before thinking, I inadvertently blurted out, “And it’sgreat to see you again.”
“You only saw me ten minutes ago,” she replied, lookingbemused.
Mary was a strict but kind woman, and had taught me moreabout nursing than just about everyone else in the hospital put together. Itreally was good to see her again. I almost wanted to hug her, but that wouldhave been seriously weird from her perspective, where presumably everythingseemed completely normal.
Instead, I took the details of the patient from her, made myway out of the room and got on with attending to my duties.
It wasn’t easy to concentrate on what I was doing, consumedas I was with thoughts about this latest shift through time, and I had to forcemyself to be professional. I couldn’t afford to screw up the medication for aheart attack patient with sky-high blood pressure.
He pretty much fitted the mould of our average cardiacpatient – mid-fifties overweight boozers who never went to the doctors. We gotthem under control and sent them home with a load of pills and instructions tochange their lifestyles.
Whether they did or not was up to them. As I attended tohim, I tried to banish thoughts of time travel from my mind, but I simply couldnot help mulling over the enormity and uncertainty of the situation I was in.
The more I thought about it, the more tired I felt. Was myfatigue down to my recent experiences, or was it just because of my body’snatural resistance to working nights? Perhaps it was both – an unwelcome mix ofmental and physical exhaustion.
When my shift finished, I went straight home and slept,knowing that I was due in again in the evening for another stint. I wasn’t sureif I was even going to go. With everything that was going on, I really needed abreak from work.
When I woke, it was mid-afternoon and all was quiet in theflat. I had passed Phoebe and Lily in the morning while they were getting readyfor their day shifts. We were often like this, ships passing in the night.Their absence from the flat gave me a chance to properly think about things,now that I had had a few hours of rejuvenating shut-eye.
To try and clarify everything, I jotted down on a notepadall the details I could remember from my journey so far. I knew that on myfirst jump through time I had gone back from the early hours of 2nd January2025 to the sometime in the early morning of 31st December 2023. That was ayear and two days.
I had then stayed in that time zone for two further daysbefore jumping back in time again. As far as I could ascertain, this hadhappened at roughly the same date and time as before. The crucial time seemedto be 3am on the 2nd January. I couldn’t be absolutely sure it was the exacttime second time around, as I had been asleep, but it had certainly been 3amwhen I had arrived in 2022.
It seemed that on my second trip back through time I hadjumped back exactly the same amount as the first time, one year and two days.
There was an obvious pattern emerging here. It seemed that3am on 2nd January was the trigger point for my involuntary trips back in time.The burning question for me now was whether or not that was the end of it.Would I stay put now, or was the pattern set to repeat? And if so, what werethe implications?
If I kept jumping back in time like this every two days, Iwas going to travel further and further back into time, presumably gettingyounger as I did. I still wasn’t entirely certain if it was just my mind thatwas being transported or my body as well, but I would find out soon enough ifthe jumps continued. After a few trips, if my body was getting younger, I wouldsurely start to notice.
Being younger again was something that millions wished for,but I could already see that my fountain of youth was potentially a poisonedchalice. If I really was going to get a year younger every two days, my lifewould fly by in no time.
I had been thirty-nine when all of this had started. At twodays per leap, it would be less than eighty days until I would reach a timebefore I was born. So what would happen then? Would I just cease to exist?
What about my own birth? It was an event no human couldremember under normal circumstances, but was I to
