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14 pages

English

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An old man, happy but wanting more, finds he has the power to travel back to his youthful years, to relive his life and improve on it. He loves his wife and intends to meet her again, but only once he has become rich, and has had affairs with numerous women. Such a move would be irrevocable, cancelling his current life and wiping out his children, but the temptation becomes irresistible.

This is a story about greed and lust, and the betrayal of youth by selfish old age. It is about the dangers of overturning the natural order, and has echoes of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dracula, and Dr Faustus.

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Fiction

Fantasy

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Publié par	eBookIt.com
Date de parution	02 avril 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781456637316
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0100€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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The Old Man’s Tale

by

Ian Curwood
Copyright 2021 Ian Curwood,
All rights reserved.

Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-3731-6

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Chapter 1
All right I’ll tell you, though I hardly know where to begin. He phoned me yesterday, saying he had to unburden himself before he goes, the doc has given him less than a month. Yes of course I was surprised, he’s normally so buttoned up, so distant. Well today I found out why. And in a funny way it all seems to fit. Oh, you’ll find the whole thing absurd, but if it’s true! Well here I go.
I arrived at the hospice yesterday morning at ten. He was propped up in bed against a bank of clean, fluffed up pillows. His room had that bright morning feel, sunlit, a vase of flowers on the table, as if to deny his condition, mask the faint odour of decay. Birdsong came through the open window. He seemed to have gathered strength, or rather his eyes had, glittering with that metallic intensity. He patted the bed and placed a frozen hand on mine, exposing his wasted wrist.
“My boy, my boy,” he said.
Unnerved by this sudden show of affection, I pulled my hand away.
“No, I haven’t been a good father,” he said, “Too preoccupied with my own affairs, too depressed. Not really here. I can’t make amends to you. All I can do is explain, and say goodbye. I can’t even claim real remorse, only guilt and regret. I have this terrible need to confess, I’ve been alone so long, so alone. Even though it’s like talking into the ether, I have to tell.”
He was struggling for air, his cavernous face puce, toothless mouth gaping, his eyes the only constant, like two dead stones, even now appraising you as they always had, objectively. I passed him the oxygen mask.
“Calm down Dad. That’s better. Now come the point.”
He took a few breaths,
“All right. This all started a long time ago, when I was much older than you are now. I had everything, a wife I adored, wonderful children, good career, but when I retired there was too much time on my hands, I wanted something more. I began to look back over my life and think, if I had just done this or that differently things would have been better. Just imagine what I might achieve if I could go back to my youth with the knowledge and discipline I’d developed since. For example, when my son was struggling at university, I found his subject, philosophy, came easily to me, and helped him achieve a good degree, yet at his age I only just scraped through. And women, I did well enough, but I passed over so many opportunities, so crass sometimes, almost incomprehensible, and now I knew so much more how to proceed. I’m sure you don’t want to hear all this, but I would lie in bed night after night, my wife asleep at my side, and mentally make good, as it were, on my failed opportunities.”
I thought his mind must be going.
“Dad, I didn’t do philosophy, nor did Michael, and you didn’t retire, except last year when you got sick. And you’re talking about us as strangers! ‘My son, my wife!’
He raised a hand.
“I know what I’m saying. Just hear me out. Please. Right. This ‘going back’ became an obsession, my nightly romantic imaginings increasingly vivid and detailed, filling my dreams when finally I slept. Then I would wake early and find myself obsessively considering how I could have improved various facets of my young life. I had been quite small and puny, picked on by the bigger boys, and somehow had just accepted it at the time. How good it would have been to build up my strength, willpower and fighting skill and defeat those bullies. I’ll leave you to deduce what psychological and emotional forces were driving all this.
Well, one night, while dreaming of a woman named Alice I felt an arm around my neck and a face against mine. I thought it must be my wife, we had a good relationship, then with a jolt I knew it really was Alice. I can’t describe the shock, like being with a ghost, I almost cried out. I realised I wasn’t at home, I was in my student bed, I was the ghost! You could say it was just one of those waking dreams, but no, it was real. Moonlight bathed the room and there she was, so much younger, oh so much more beautiful than I had remembered. Something told me to hold on to the remnants of sleep, somehow I knew that if I moved, or she spoke, I would be trapped there.
Over the following nights I would return to the past. At first I didn’t realise what was going on. How could one be transported over space and time? It must be a dream, a hallucination, perhaps I was already certified and raving in a mental hospital. Then one night, several weeks later, I found myself sitting on the side of my childhood bed. I expected to see a child, myself, in the bed but I was alone. Where was the child? I glanced across at the mirror and my heart missed a beat, there staring back at me was a six or seven year old boy. Like a chimpanzee presented with a mirror I moved my head, hands, this way and that, and the image responded. I rubbed my cheek, no stubble, soft childish arms. My adult mind was inhabiting my childhood body! Carefully I lay down and quietened my racing heart, seeking sleep, escape.
I cast around for reassurance. I’d heard that some trained mystics of an eastern sect can travel in their dreams, really visit a different place or time, and something similar might occur with near death experience, so perhaps my situation was just an extreme case of that.
With practice I found I could go to any chosen period of my life. At first I just enjoyed being there, to hear my dear parents talking in the kitchen, those forgotten but so familiar cadencies, how I longed to go out to meet them, to hug and kiss them! Once I heard the voice of my long dead sister and it made me cry. I wanted to step outside into 1960s Britain, to feel the atmosphere, hear the music, see the social revolution, the old cars! Invariably I arrived in my bedroom, at night, and wondered whether perhaps the rest was unreal, like a stage set, or a computer game. But no, gradually I became better at holding my sleep-like state and could even move around the room a little, look out of the window, and there seemed to be a world outside.
Finally, after agonising for several months I decided to return permanently. What an opportunity to live twice, to take on the world with infinitely more experience! What could I lose? My aim would be to meet my dear wife Eleanor, the love of my life, again when I was about thirty five, and she an adorable thirty, but first to have a damn good fling. Of course things could go wrong, this wouldn’t simply be rewinding the Newtonian clock. I would be in the real world, with a different mind, doing things differently, with unpredictable consequences, but hoping to keep to a broad plan. I might be run over, fall ill, but it was worth the chance. I had no difficulty deciding the age to which I would return. Whilst it might be amusing for a couple of days to be a six or ten year old with an adult mind, and shock parents and teachers with my precocious abilities, the whole thing would be grotesque, and I’d be subjecting myself to years of childhood games and prattle. A similar consideration applied to teenage years, could I really be bothered with the inane chat and pimply girls, however wonderful they had seemed at the time? No I’d return to first year university, in 1969.
Now I began to prepare for my new life, as for a journey, and of course the only thing I could take back would be information. I researched key events of the ensuing years, sporting fixtures, general elections, wars, assassinations, and the behaviour of the stock and precious metal markets. I intended to make a fortune, by betting on upcoming events, and then investing my winnings. I would cash some early gains to feed a racy life style, to entertain and impress women. I spent months learning this information by heart, testing and retesting myself. I even tried to find my degree examination papers in the archives but failed, so academic work would be inescapable.
The time came to leave. I put it off day after day. What if something unforeseen should happen? But really it was moral qualms that consumed me. I was planning to be unfaithful to my wife, but was I? She would be my one constant through time. Everyone has flings before settling down, I would simply be resetting the clock. But yes of course I was. What would happen to those I left behind? Presumably this present would no longer exist, all the ripples and ramifications of my contact with the world erased. A parallel universe seemed implausible. Then with a shock I realised I would never again see my wonderful sons and granddaughter. Without really thinking about it I had assumed that after I met my wife again my family would just be recreated, but of course the vagaries of reproduction would ensure that any new child would be different. I adored my children. I had been a devoted dad, crawled on the floor with them when small, become the evil Sheriff of Nottingham, been defeated at plastic sword play and football, helped with homework, and latterly provided financial support and advice. How I loved them! I would never see them again. I would be destroying them, but was I doing real harm, since they would not have existed? Yes I was, once created they were always there, at least in my mind, a thing of beauty is a joy or curse forever. But somehow I could not stop myself, I was obsessed. Perhaps the obsession, the requirement to return, was inherent in the gift if you can call it that, a double package from which there was no escape. How can we judge a person whose passions are