The Time Bubble Box Set 2, стр. 283
The accompanying light show was dazzling, with the toweritself lit up like a Christmas tree. The atmosphere was indescribable, likenothing I had experienced before. All those years of hating New Year’s Eve werewashed away that night. London and Big Ben were great, but nothing couldcompare to New York.
I wasn’t even with anyone but that didn’t matter as Ienjoyed the company of the revellers all around me, bound together by our sharedexperience. The party continued long into the night and I found myself chattingto anyone and everyone. I even got a snog off a handsome stranger next to me inthe crowd just before we did “Auld Lang Syne”.
All in all, it was a pretty cool way to celebrate my 30thbirthday.
I smiled as I lie now on my sunbed in my latest destination,an all-inclusive resort in Playa del Inglés, thinking back over the memories ofthat night, just two days ago. I had turned thirty that day, but now it seemedI would never be that age again.
I looked down at my body, stretched out on the sunbed, cladin just a skimpy bikini. It was a noticeably younger body now. My skin hadgrown smoother and suppler, my tummy was flatter and my boobs were firmer.
My own personal fountain of youth was making me look betterand better but this double-edged sword was going to come back and bite me soon.Now aged twenty-nine, and losing a year every two days, I knew I had less thantwo months left.
If only this could stop now. I would be happy to stay atthis age. I’d have another decade of life, my whole thirties, in front of me,and could do so much more with those ten years than I had.
It was no good thinking like that. There was nothing I coulddo to stop what was happening. I had tried with the letter to ProfessorHamilton but unsurprisingly, that had gone unanswered. Had I ever reallyexpected a reply? Not really. I just had to make the best of what I had.
In reality, I didn’t even have two full months left. Interms of my adult life it was less than a month. Once I became a child, Iwouldn’t be able to go off jet-setting like I had. I would be a minor, with nomoney, no passport, and under the jurisdiction of my parents.
My parents – how much was I looking forward to seeing themagain? It wouldn’t be long now.
Chapter Twelve
2011
A day that I had been in two minds about had arrived.
I had mulled long and hard over how I should handle NewYear’s Eve 2011. That had been the date of that fateful first meeting with Roband Gary, the outcome of which was to shape my entire future.
At the time I was living alone in a rented council house offthe Iffley Road. It had been my family home for over fifteen years, ever sincemy mother had become a single parent and sought help from the local authority.
For the last seven years I had lived there on and off, buthad been in permanent residence for the past year. I would not be there muchlonger. My mother had died during 2011 and I had no desire to stay in the housealone. The austerity-obsessed government of the time was talking about allsorts of penalties for underoccupancy of council properties, including aso-called bedroom tax.
Quite how that would affect me, I wasn’t sure, but it seemedmorally wrong to stay in a large house if a family could use it. But where wasI going to go? Buying a place on my nurse’s salary was out of the question inOxford and private rent was equally unaffordable.
Thankfully, meeting Rob solved that problem when he asked meto move in with him. I hadn’t considered the possibility at the time that Imight end up in exactly the same boat nine years down the line, but who does?No matter how badly a relationship breaks down, most of us idealisticallybelieve it will last forever at the start when we are in the first flush oflove. Otherwise why would we bother?
So here I was, waking up at twenty-five years old in theroom where I had spent my teenage years. Any casual observer might be under theimpression a teenager still lived in the room, as I hadn’t done anything to updateit for years. There was a reason for this. I hadn’t seen it as a permanenthome, more of a bolt-hole which I came back to from time to time due tocircumstances. In an ideal world, I would have been settled elsewhere by now.
The paint was faded and peeling in the places where it couldbe seen. Most of the walls were covered up with rock posters, from Nirvana toOasis. My room was almost like a shrine to the 1990s music scene.
As for my bed, that was only a single. I had thought aboutbuying a double, but somehow that didn’t seem quite right in my mother’s houseand didn’t fit in with my “temporary residence” status. There was a double bedin my mother’s room, which she had died in and I couldn’t face moving in there.
The single bed meant my sexual encounters in this room hadbeen very few and far between, most confined to my teenage years. That didn’tmean I’d had a non-existent sex life, merely that most of it had taken placeelsewhere.
Although I was living here now, I had come and gone a lotbetween the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. As well as time at universitydoing my nursing degree, I had also spent a great deal of time abroad, bothtravelling and working.
I had moved back in with my mother full-time just under ayear ago to nurse her through the illness that eventually killed her.Fifty-nine had been no age to die, though my father had been even younger.
Now I was alone and contemplating what to do with the dayahead of me. Was I going to relive that first meeting with Rob and Gary oravoid it? I knew that I couldn’t resist it – out of fascination more thananything.
As if on cue, my phone beeped, and I picked it up