God, I’ve missed her so much.
‘Ben? Are you … Oh, darling, what’s wrong?’
I swipe my hand across my cheek to stop the tears that are suddenly spilling down it.
‘I’m so sorry, Mum,’ I mumble.
‘Ben, don’t be silly! What’s got into you? You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.’
But I do – she just doesn’t realise it yet. I’m sorry for the awful things I’ll say to her before she dies. I’m sorry for the screw-up of a son that I’ll become. But I don’t know how to tell her these things, and it’s only making the tears fall faster.
I speak into her shoulder, my words coming out thick and muffled. ‘I’m going to let you down, Mum. I know I am. I’m going to let everyone down.’
She grips me even tighter and says, ‘Ben, you couldn’t let me down. It’s just not possible.’
I dissolve, then. Everything liquefies.
Some time passes, I’m not sure how much. But when we pull away from each other, Mum is red-eyed and damp-cheeked as well.
‘Look at the state of us,’ she says, wiping her face. ‘You’ve got me going too. This is hardly very Christmassy, is it?’
I laugh and sniff. ‘Sorry.’
‘Anyway, come on. Enough of this. We’ve got a game to finish.’ She points down at my dog counter, which is sitting on Pentonville Road. ‘And don’t think all this crying is getting you out of that.’ She holds her hand out, grinning. ‘You owe me rent, young man.’
The Monopoly game grinds to a halt pretty quickly after that. I find I can’t concentrate on my fictional property portfolio when I know that my time with Mum is slipping away, second by precious second.
So instead, I put on two more of our long-distance car tapes, and spend the next three hours asking her all the things I’ve never thought to ask before. I hear about her childhood, her school days, university. Her early twenties, when she worked on a kibbutz in Israel. All this crazy stuff I never knew. She even tells me about the night she met my dad. It was at the opening of an N. F. Simpson play at the Royal Court. Their interval drinks orders got mixed up, they got talking, and the rest was history.
‘What’s got into you this evening?’ she chuckles at one point. ‘You’ve never showed the slightest bit of interest in my life before, and now you’ve turned into Michael bloody Parkinson.’
It’s meant as a joke – I think – but the truth of it stings me to my core. I never did show any interest. I was completely self-absorbed. I just thought of her as Mum, rather than a real person with hopes and fears, who’d had adventures and made mistakes.
Finally – after a lot more laughing and drinking and story-telling, all soundtracked by our excellent folk/hip hop compilation albums – we pack the Monopoly set away and slump in front of the TV.
The closing moments of some Seventies James Bond film flicker before us, and despite everything, I feel exhaustion bite right into me. The emotional whirlwind of the last few hours – not to mention the copious red wine – is beginning to take effect.
I glance over at Mum as she watches Roger Moore prancing about on the screen, and feel so full of love for her. I don’t want this moment to end.
But it will. The clock above the telly reads ten to midnight. Which means I have exactly nine minutes before all this evaporates and I find myself in another place, at another time.
I know I should be grateful that I got even one more day with Mum, but I can’t help it: I want more.
I sit up straight and take a deep breath. There must be a way to make it happen. There has to be some kind of loophole. The watch-seller told me I’d jump again at one minute to midnight – but when it happened last night, I was asleep. Maybe the jumps can only happen when I’m asleep?
Maybe, as long as I can keep my eyes open, I’ll get more time with Mum …
I have no clue if it’ll work, but it’s worth a try. Unfortunately, at that exact moment, she tosses the remote control over to me and stands up.
‘Right. I’m bushed.’
‘No, wait … Don’t you want to stay till the end of the film?’
‘I think I can guess what happens,’ she yawns. ‘Roger gets his end away after delivering an appallingly sexist one-liner.’
I stand up too. I’m suddenly desperate not to let her go. ‘Well, we don’t have to watch the film, then … We can just talk or play another game or something.’
She laughs. ‘Ben, it’s late. I’m exhausted.’
‘I know, but … Let’s stay up a bit longer. Please. Just a few more minutes.’
I make a decision on the spot: I’m going to tell her. I’m going to tell her what’s happening to me! It’ll sound insane, obviously – ‘The thing is, Mum, I appear to be travelling back through time’ – but I’m sure I can convince her. And then, once I have, I can apologise properly. I can tell her I won’t mean all the awful things I’ll say to her in the future. Maybe there’s even a way to change the future. To stop what will happen to her.
My heart leaps at the thought of it. There’s still time!
‘Let’s just stay up until midnight, OK?’ I say. ‘Just till Christmas Day.’
Mum glances up at the clock. ‘Well, that thing’s slow anyway. It might even be midnight already.’
She pulls out her phone to check. And that’s when everything goes black.
Chapter Eighteen
The feeling is one of being hurled backwards with extreme force.
One second I’m standing upright, the next I’m lying flat on my back on a
