Beyond his Time, page 15
If this was 1994, then closed timeline curves could be the only reason Beth of 2016 hadn’t experienced this night twenty-two years prior. What had happened to Chris and Beth after my altercation with a dustcart – hell knows. However, this version of 1994 had to be completely different from their version.
Whilst waiting for a stream of cars to pass before a gap appeared to allow me to pull out of the lane, I mused over what reason my namesake had travelled back from 2019.
This was seriously screwing with my head. Presumably, if Beth and Chris from 2016 hadn’t made up their elaborate story, Jason Apsley – that bloke who caused me to disappear in 1976 – time travelled for a reason that this unknown power deemed necessary. Whatever task he was faced with, I could only assume he wasn’t regarded as suitable to save Jess. Therefore, back in whenever, 2019, 1976, or a thousand years in the future, for all I knew, a greater force had identified that we two Jasons needed to swap places.
As I turned onto the main road, the required direction indicated by a waving of her hand, I considered the possibility that her father was no longer in existence. Just by landing in 1994, could I have sideswiped him into oblivion? That said, if Beth and Chris of 2016 were to be believed, he was alive and kicking in 2015. I shook my head at the ridiculous conversation rolling around in my head. Maybe a padded cell is where I belonged.
Of course, if this situation I found myself in was actual reality, then history, or future history, was about to change. For starters, that letter I discovered in the glove compartment in 2016 suggested that in 2015 I hadn’t re-materialised after disappearing in 1976. That Jason chap had written that ‘other’ Jason, as he referred to me, still hadn’t shown up. However, here I was in 1994 – apparently.
“You gonna tell me then?” Beth broke the silence, hauling me from my musing about time travel.
“What?”
“Well, there’s a few things that need explaining. For starters, I hadn’t noticed because of what’s just happened, but you’re driving a car that looks similar to the old heap Dad keeps in a lock-up on the other side of town. Also, you seem to know my name, and you look a hell of a lot like Dad.”
“Do I?”
“Yeah! A good twenty years younger, but the resemblance is spooky. You’ve got those bloody great flappy ears like he has.”
I side-eyed her as I negotiated a roundabout that wasn’t there last night before passing a whopping great supermarket that most certainly didn’t exist twenty-four hours ago.
“No offence.”
“None taken,” I chuckled. “How much is a packet of fags these days?”
“You’re avoiding the question. Take the next left, just after that pizza place.”
“Come on, a packet of fags. How much?” I pushed her for an answer, deciding not to question when the Star & Garter Pub became a takeaway pizza place. I guess it didn’t matter at what point over the last eighteen years that transition had occurred. Anyway, it was a shit pub, so no loss there. More importantly, the thought which had popped into my head was a far more critical question. However, rather than ask, I thought my next port of call would be the top of the High Street.
“About two quid. Benson and Hedges are about that. You can get the cheap shit for about a quid-fifty, though.”
“That’s a bit better than thirteen quid, I suppose,” I muttered.
“What’s thirteen quid?”
“Oh, nothing. Look, Beth, I can’t really explain or go into any kind of detail, but I have a bit of a problem.”
“Next right.”
“Okay.”
“What kind of problem?”
“You couldn’t sub me a few bob, could you?”
“Do what?”
“I’m a bit strapped for cash. I’m hoping tomorrow to sort that out.” Of course, that depended on whether I could convince the bank who I was, assuming it hadn’t already morphed into Star-something-or-other, or my namesake hadn’t already raided the contents of my safety deposit box. There were too many ifs for my liking, but I had to stay positive.
“Oh, err … I can give you a tenner. You have given me a lift home, I suppose.”
Beth rummaged around in her bag before offering me the note, which appeared smaller than I remembered.
“Drop me at the end of this road, near the traffic lights about half a mile up here.” Beth pointed ahead. “I live just around the corner. I’m gonna need to sneak in the back way and try to somehow avoid Mum and Dad. Hopefully, they’re still around Jess’s. Explaining this,” she waved her hand, indicating her sodden clothes. “Could be a bit tricky.”
“Jess, that’s your half-sister?” I quizzed, musing that this road was a ploughed field twelve hours ago.
“Err … yeah. Hey, come on. I guess you’re not going to murder me now you’ve driven me home, but how d’you know who I am? And Jess, for that matter. Who the frig are you?”
I rubbed my chin as I pondered that difficult question. The truth wasn’t going to cut it. And more to the point, I didn’t know what the truth was. “Look, it’s difficult to say. I know Jess, although I haven’t seen her for a few years.” If this was 1994, then nearly thirty-eight years, to be precise.
“Oh … you an old boyfriend of hers, then? Gotta say, that’s a bit weird considering how much you look like Dad.”
I snorted a laugh at the thought.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing,” I chuckled.
“What were you doing in Lovers’ Lane?”
“I took a wrong turn.”
“Bollocks—”
“To quote your father?” I interrupted, shooting a smirk at her.
Beth screwed up her mud-splattered face. “Yeah. You know Dad, then?”
I scratched my neck, trying to conjure up a sensible answer. The truth being I’d never met the man, but presumably, we had a fair bit in common with each other – oversized, big flappy ears, for starters. “Sort of,” I mumbled.
“What does that mean? Oh, just here. Pull up near that bus stop.”
I swung the car towards the kerb and glided to a halt. “You sure this is close enough?”
“Yeah, it’ll be fine. As I said, I’ll need to sneak in.”
“Your parents are at Jess’s, you say?”
Beth shot me a nervous look. “My brother will be home,” she stammered, presumably those worries that I was planning to harm her resurfacing and hoping this added information about Chris might somehow protect her.
Although I didn’t want to frighten the girl, somehow, I needed to glean information from her. “Your parents will be home soon?”
“Yes, definitely. Jess lives only a few minutes away in Lowther Close on the Bowthorpe Estate, so they will be back soon.”
“Okay.” I’d got the information I needed. The Bowthorpe Estate, as far as I was concerned, was a new development just being built. Presumably, it had morphed into a vast housing estate eighteen years later. However, that was irrelevant because I now knew the road where Jess lived. “Look, thanks for the ten quid. You’d better get going.”
Beth nodded and reached for the door handle, relief oozing from her mud-spattered face.
“Oh, before you go, just a few pieces of advice.”
With her hand on the door handle, primed and ready to make a dash for it, she’d probably decided that although I hadn’t inflicted any harm upon her, there was still time. So, as I read her mind, I bashed on.
“Firstly, I think, at your age, boys asking you to perform lewd acts down Lovers’ Lane is unacceptable. If you haven’t already decided to, I suggest you ditch the idiot. Wait until you fall in love with the right man. Maybe a lawyer called Phil.”
“Who’s Phil?”
“You’ll find out.”
“Secondly, ten-year-old boys can be very sensitive. I know because I was one once upon a time. So, when your son, let’s call him Oliver, for the sake of argument, pleads with you not to go to summer camp, don’t be too hard on the lad.”
“Who the frig are you?”
“Good question,” I muttered,
“You’re not right in the head.”
“You’re probably right,” I chuckled, before what she’d said during the short drive pinged into my head.
In 2016, a few hours ago, when standing on Chris’s drive, he’d mentioned that his father used to keep the Cortina in a lock-up. Although I hadn’t listened closely to his ramblings, I’m pretty sure he’d said something about his father moving the car to his garage after finding it splattered with mud, assuming kids had taken it for a joy ride.
“Wow,” I muttered, gazing through the windscreen, realising that my jaunt in the quagmire down Lovers’ Lane had been the event Chris was referring to. I turned to Beth, who, for some reason, hadn’t done a runner. “You said your dad owns a car like this one.”
She nodded.
“Keeps it in a lock-up—”
“Bowthorpe Estate, behind the row of shops,” she interrupted.
Although I needed a car, one to take a trip to the High Street, and two, to follow Jess on the 6th of April to ensure no harm came to her, I knew I would have to park my car in that garage as my final act before – well, who knew when or where I’d end up.
Earlier this morning, when vaulting down the stairs after leaving my flat, I was a rational man. Despite my love of science fiction novels, I knew fantasy from fiction. Now, one day and three time zones later, all that I previously believed I’d left at the bottom of that stairwell, the point at which my eyes closed after watching two rats rummage around in that chip paper.
Beth hopped out, holding the car door and leaning down to peer at me. “Who the frigging hell are you?”
“Me? I’m beginning to wonder. Let’s just say I’m a guy who’s somehow ended up beyond his time.”
Beth flung the door closed, stomped off, and disappeared from sight around the corner into the next street. I wondered if this Beth would end up differently from the thirty-nine-year-old Beth I’d met a few hours ago. Would my intervention somehow change her life path? Perhaps she would never meet Phil, never give birth to chundering Oliver, and maybe, just maybe, turn out less annoying.
Anyway, if I could intervene in what will happen to Jess, then perhaps young Beth would enter womanhood with her older half-sister still here.
Whether it was twenty years or thirty-eight years ago, when I stepped away from my responsibilities, the day I walked out on Jess and her mother, I now knew I had to step up to the plate and be the father I never was.
As I pondered my next move, I thought of Jason Apsley, that man who’d pinged me off to the future when he landed back in 1976. Could we co-exist in the new future? Had time in 1994 superseded that time of 2016? Had that world now evaporated? That letter he wrote mentioned that I hadn’t surfaced. However, clearly, time had altered because here I was in 1994.
As I rammed the gear stick into first gear, ready to head off and check that Midland Bank still existed, I considered it safer if we never met – paradox and all that. After all the baffling events of the day, I thought I’d better reread that letter. When flipping the gear lever back to neutral to reach for that letter from my jacket pocket, I realised Beth had wandered off with my jacket slung around her shoulders.
“Christ,” I muttered, not at the loss of my favoured leather jacket but concerned when realising what had just happened – more to the point – what was about to happen. Jason Apsley, in 2015, had penned himself a letter and popped it into the glove compartment of his Cortina, hoping it would somehow travel back through time to 1994.
Well, it had. I’d unwittingly transported that letter back. A mud-splattered Beth would arrive home wearing a man’s jacket around her shoulders with a letter written in 2015 secured in the inside pocket. Any mother worth her salt would want to know where her daughter had got the jacket and who it belonged to as she rifled through the pockets.
If that Jason Apsley bloke was a time traveller, he would know that letter to be genuine. Whether I’d thought it a good idea or not, I suspected that this other Jason Apsley and I were destined to meet.
“Bollocks,” I muttered.
~
If you’d like to know whether the two Jasons meet, what happened to Jess, and follow the story of that other Jason after he time travelled from 2019 to 1976, then dive into the four-book series where all will be revealed—
Book 1 – Jason Apsley’s Second Chance
Book 2 – Ahead of his Time
Book 3 – Force of Time
Book 4 – Calling Time
Novella – Beyond his Time (you’ve just read it!)
Amazon Author Page
Can you help?
Thank you for reading this novella. I hope you enjoyed this introduction to the story of the two Jason Apsleys. Could I ask for a small favour? If you enjoyed this novella, can I invite you to leave a review on Amazon? Just a few lines will help other readers discover my work. I’ll hugely appreciate it.
For more information and to sign-up for updates about new releases, please drop onto my website. You can also find my Facebook page and follow me on Amazon – or, hey, why not all three.
Adriancousins.co.uk
Facebook.com/Adrian Cousins Author
Author’s note
I do hope you weren’t offended by some of the vocabulary and outdated language used by Jason because that wasn’t my intention. Unfortunately, Jason came from an era that was very different from today. In 1976, Jason didn’t know any better, so perhaps we can forgive the man for that. Anyway, as he zips through time, I’m sure he will come to realise the error of his ways.
Thankfully, for the vast majority, education has led us to a more inclusive society. That said, even fifty years after Jason’s time, we have many more miles on that journey to tread.
Books by Adrian Cousins
The Jason Apsley Series
Jason Apsley’s Second Chance
Ahead of his Time
Force of Time
Calling Time (due for release November 2023)
Beyond his Time (Novella)
Deana – Demon or Diva Series
It’s Payback Time
Death Becomes Them
Dead Goode
Standalone Novels
Eye of Time
Acknowledgements:
Thank you to my Beta readers – your input and feedback is invaluable.
Adele Walpole
Brenda Bennett
Tracy Fisher
Patrick Walpole
Andy Wise
And, of course, Sian Phillips, who makes everything come together – I’m so grateful.
Table of Contents
Also by Adrian Cousins
The Shining
Blinded By The Light
Downtown
Wish You Were Here
Thrilla in Manila
Sputnik
Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em
The Music of the Night
Bad Manners
Groundhog Day
Who’s on First?
A Sound of Thunder
The Siegfried Line
Public Eye
Vanishing Point
Bloody Friday
The Calcutta Cup
Beyond his Time
Can you help?
Author’s note
Books by Adrian Cousins
Adrian Cousins, Beyond his Time
