It was quiet in the long, open-plan office. There was just the soft clicking of keyboards, the constant hum of the harsh, flickering, strip lights, and the occasional murmur of voices and the sound of papers being shuffled. Derek stood up suddenly, knocking his chair over with a startlingly loud crash. Eight heads turned to stare at him. The woman at the next desk gasped, slapping her hand over her heart, but said nothing. He ignored their looks, stepped out from behind his desk leaving the chair where it had fallen, and walked mechanically across the thread-bare carpet to the door. As he left the room, a babble of voices could be heard from behind him. He wasn't listening. Under normal circumstances, one of his colleagues - his mates - might have said something to him: made a joke, asked him what was the matter. Normality was a distant memory to him now though. His wife had died in a car accident the previous month and he was a long way from coming to terms with it. Friends didn't dare speak to him. Words of sympathy were rejected; help and understanding were fended off with rudeness and unreasonable anger. People had started to avoid him. He told himself that was the way he liked it. But it wasn't true.

He wanted her back. The intensity of his longing was burning him up like a fever. They'd only been married a year. She was all he cared about. He couldn't remember caring about anything else, ever. All his friends, family and interests had dissolved out of his memory. The loss of Jill was a huge catastrophe. It was enormous. So enormous and catastrophic that it filled his whole mind, to the exclusion of all else. It was like a bubble of misery that just seemed to expand inside his head and push everything else out of the way. There was no sense of form or order to it. A few desperate and morose thoughts jiggled about inside the bubble - the same hopeless thoughts endlessly repeated, about how he couldn't believe she was gone, how she might so easily just be in the next room, how she couldn't really be lying in the cold earth in a suffocating little box..... On and on and on.

Occasionally, stranger thoughts seemed to erupt into this dismal void. Most of these weird ideas drifted away - like the one about going to dig up her grave and check that she was really dead, in case she woke up and found herself in that awful, claustrophobic box, panicking in complete darkness and cold silence. But one idea stayed and grew stronger. He wanted to turn back time. It was an idiotic notion, he knew, but it seemed to get a grip of his mind while it was in its weakened condition. It burrowed in like a worm and grew itself into an obsession.

This Monday he had arrived at work, sat at his desk and processed his pile of documents like a robot all morning, while his mind pressed like a gimlet on the mad idea of reversing time and changing the past. Just before lunch time, he succeeded in convincing himself that he could achieve it by the strength of his will alone. He had to gather all his forces. What forces, he wondered. The question just confused and maddened him. He had forces! He was sure of it but couldn't name them. These forces were growing - getting stronger, the more angry and miserable and bereft he felt. Dwelling on his loss and embracing his rage seemed to heighten his sense of the forces that he was generating.

There was a tingling, itching, pulling sensation in the region of his solar plexus. He tried not to notice it to start with, but it became very insistent. He looked down, frowning. There was nothing to see but it felt as though a thousand tiny tentacles had battened on to his viscera and were pulling him, urgently, from his seat. The sense of urgency grew, battering its way through the misery and confusion that had taken up residence in his mind for what seemed an eternity. Something started wailing like a klaxon inside his head. He had to go home immediately. That was the point at which he stood up abruptly, toppling his chair, and left the office.

The journey home was a blur. All his actions between leaving the office and getting home, undressing and getting into bed, were carried out on auto-pilot. Not until he stepped into his bed, did the sense of urgency loosen its hold on him. He felt a wave of euphoria wash over him as his head touched the pillow. It was the sort of high you feel when a bad pain suddenly disappears. This was the exact location. He'd been lying here, precisely in this position, when the crash had occurred. And this was where he needed to be to undo it. The mysterious forces - his forces - were all aligning themselves, ready for the manoeuvre backwards in time. He felt it. There was a sensation of energy and matter sliding into place, like the cogs and wheels of some sort of complicated mechanism engaging, ready to be set a-going. It was a relief, like dislocated bones being manipulated back to their proper places.

After a while, the dreamy smile melted from Derek's face. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling - a man in a trance, until the process started. His face started to twitch, his eyes widened in shocked surprise and his mouth gaped in a silent scream. Then his whole body began to tremble and his eyes bulged in pure terror, his lips stretched tight across his teeth in a rictus of pain. He was being torn backwards in time at great speed, while the laws of nature tried to nail him in the present. It was an agony that seemed to last for the full month, to his tormented mind and body. It could only really have lasted a few 'normal' minutes. He could not have survived such destructive forces for longer.

Finally the sensation of falling, stretching and twisting ceased, and he lay there for a long time, panting, gathering his strength, reassembling his thoughts. She was alive, he felt sure. He didn't know how he had achieved it or how he knew - he just knew. He didn't need to do more. She would be home soon. Some component of his brain was behaving like a proximity detector. He could feel her getting closer. She would arrive within the next few minutes. Jill was coming home.

Derek moved, experimentally. To his surprise, there was no pain. He sat up and swung his legs out of the bed. He felt fine - better than fine. Quickly, he got dressed and went over to stand by the window. Jill's car was just turning into the drive as he pulled back the curtain. Jill was home! He felt giddy and elated. All the misery of the last month washed out of him as he watched her stop the car and climb out. It was too much. Tears streamed down his cheeks and he rushed to the door to meet her. She was fumbling in her bag for the key when he flung the door open. She looked up with a hard, unfriendly expression which changed to one of surprise at seeing his happy and tearful demeanour, while his own expression changed to hurt and confusion. She pushed past him as he stood in the doorway, hesitating.

Then he remembered that they'd had a row on the morning of the day Jill was killed. Remembering their last, harsh words was one of the things that tormented him to begin with. But then he'd forgotten. Now he remembered with a horrible clarity. Jill didn't know she'd been dead only a few minutes ago and that Derek had been through hell. She was angry. And she could be quite vindictive. There was a loud bang and he snapped his head round as she smacked her bag down on the kitchen table.

'I'm leaving you. I've just come home to pack some things.'

'What?' He walked across the kitchen. 'What do you mean? You can't! I've only just....' The sentence trailed off. There was no way to tell her what he'd only just.... 'Please don't go. I love you. I love you so much. I'm sorry if I upset you. I'll never ..... '

Jill broke in, 'Oh stow it. Don't you know what a turn-off "weak and pathetic" is? It's nothing to do with the row. We've been planning this for months. Gary's got a job offer in Canada. We were just waiting until I could get one in the same city. The call came through this afternoon. Don't waste your breath. I'm going!'

'Gary? My brother? Do you mean my brother Gary?'

She cocked an eyebrow - looked slightly surprised. 'You didn't know? You're joking! I was sure you knew. Well, you must be even more stupid than I thought you were... And I thought you were pretty stupid.'

Derek didn't think about what he was doing. He just picked up an iron saucepan and brought it down on her head. It was over. And it was some time before he could think clearly enough to feel anything. Then he telephoned the police and confessed. Before the police arrived, he left in Jill's car and drove it into a derelict factory wall at high speed.

Poor Derek couldn't win. But he didn't know that. He didn't know that, under certain, extraordinary circumstances, it is possible - but never profitable - to mess with the arrow of time.

Fiction by Tibley Bobley

Tibley Bobley

14.02.08 Front Page

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