The circle of light above his head shimmered as it grew steadily smaller. Muffled sounds fluttered around him as he threw his arms about and kicked his legs in a vain effort to move up toward that receding circle of wavering light. He held his breath. A steel band of pain tightened around his chest with the effort of holding on to the little air left in his lungs. His head hammered with the sounds around him, his pulse pounded behind his eyes as he stared up at that now tiny spot of light. With an explosive noise he released the pent-up breath hoping vainly to replace it with life giving oxygen. Water rushed into him and panic and pain engulfed him.
He shot upright as air rushed into his lungs. In out, in out, he breathed that wonderful air. He must have been holding his breath as he slept through the horrific nightmare of drowning. As the rhythm of his heart and his breathing settled he swore to himself that he would never go near any deep wells. That's what it must have been in the dream, a deep well.
It took him a few moments in the darkness to work out that he was fully dressed. He was sitting in bed, fully dressed. What was more, it wasn't his bed. It wasn't his room. The room was in darkness except for the light of a street lamp that filtered through net curtains. He hated net curtains, they were so old fashioned. His mother had had net curtains, you did in those days, and you had to have your privacy. He could hear his mother's voice as she pulled sodden piles of net out of the bowl where they had been soaking. Like a fisherman drawing bounty from the deep she dragged in the net and the water dripped back down, down into the bowl. He could dimly make out the bulk of a wardrobe. It had a mirror in the door. The mirror threw a stream of light across the bed. The mirror had a crack near the top. Under the window there was a chest of drawers. He climbed from the bed and moved to the window. The surface of the chest of drawers was dappled by the light through the curtains. An empty beer bottle lay against a dirty glass; cigarette stubs filled an ashtray and spilled from it onto the mottled surface where a pool of beer reflected the light from the window.
He listened to the night sounds from beyond the shabby room. There was a dull roar from distant traffic. He was in a city, near a main road, but not very near. No cars passed in the street. He could make out terraced houses across the way, dark windows with their grimy nets keeping out the prying world. There weren't many cars parked in the street either; must be a very poor area. He had two choices, go out into the world and try to find out where he was or go back to bed and wait for the day to come. The bed was not inviting. There was no duvet, only coarse sheets and woollen blankets. A quilt had slid to the floor. He dragged it back onto the bed and tried to make himself comfortable. Surprisingly, he slept.
He woke to the sound of milk bottles rattling on a milk float, a cat yowling and a door slamming. Bright sunlight sliced into the room and revealed the full gory of its disgusting interior. The room smelled of stale beer and cigarettes with the added taint of unwashed clothing and sweat. He groaned and staggered to the window with the thought of throwing it open and gasping in fresh air. Years of paint defeated him. The window would not move. It would not have stayed open anyway as the sash cord sprouted from one side of the frame like a headless daffodil.
Better go out and face the world, he thought, easing open the creaking door and stepping out onto the landing. A faded carpet runner led him down a flight of dusty stairs to a front door with peeling brown paint and a bolt that needed all his meagre strength to force open. He looked down at the doorstep, hoping that the milkman had delivered breakfast for him, but no bottle stood on the step. He tossed a mental coin, left, right. He turned right and slouched up the street. With a furtive glance to make sure the street was empty he filched a bottle from the next doorstep and guzzled greedily at the contents. Ugh, full cream what happened to semi-skimmed? At the street corner he found a sweet shop and newsagent. I'll buy a newspaper, he thought, chocolate too, he added. How familiar the inside of the shop felt. It was straight out of his childhood. He almost expected Mr Bevan to be standing behind the counter. Brown shelves stacked with tins and bottles, large sweet jars with sherbet lemons and kopkops. He grabbed the first paper he came to and a bar of chocolate from a small display. He reached into his pocket and drew out all the coins he found there, dropping them on the counter to sort through them.
“We don't take foreign money, mate," said the bald man behind the counter. He had a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and ash sprinkled his grey jumper.
“This isn't foreign money,” he replied, “Look, it's got the Queen on it. Look, here's a penny." He held up a one pence coin.
“Yeah, right, and I suppose it shrunk in the wash then.” The man pulled open a drawer and scrabbled inside, drawing out a coin more than twice the size. “This is a penny, mate, with Queen on one side and good old Britannia on the other side. Them little things is foreign money and we don't take ‘em. If that's all you got then put the chocolate back and give me the paper.”
He put the chocolate back on the display. As he handed over the newspaper he glanced quickly at it and staggered from the shop, leaning on the wall outside. He breathed heavily again as if he were once more drowning. He was sinking into some nightmare, some surreal world; it was hard to catch his breath. The newspaper was dated July 1966 and a photograph on the front page was of a dog. He knew that dog. He remembered the story of the theft of the Jules Rimet trophy and its finding in some bushes by a dog called Pickles. Poor scrap had strangled on his own lead the following year. But it couldn't be; he'd been sixteen years old when that had happened. He'd been on holiday in London that very week when England won the World Cup. He hadn't been at Wembley, of course, you couldn't get tickets, but he'd been in London, in Russell Square.
This was crazy. He was fifty-seven years old and had grandkids. It was two thousand and seven, not nineteen sixty-six. He took the coins out of his pocket and examined them. There was nothing earlier than nineteen seventy-nine, yet that man had held up an old penny. He walked further along the street and tried his luck at two more shops. They both turned away his ‘funny’ money and told him to change his Deutschmarks at a bank and get some real money.
It was not believable, but he appeared to be in the year nineteen sixty-six, forty years in the past, there was no other explanation. He had only the clothes he stood up in and a pocket full of coins that would not be legal tender for another five years and some of them not even then. Where was he? He walked to the street corner and looked up at the wall; Wellhead Street, Bethnal Green, E2. He was in London. So, he was in London with no visible means of support. What could he do? Where could he get some money? The milk he had stolen was churning sourly in his stomach and it was telling him that it was high time he ate something. How could he get some money? A glance down the street gave him the answer. He spotted one of the oldest shop signs in England. Just up the street were three brass balls sticking out from above a pawnshop. He would pawn his watch, it had cost him ninety quid last year, or should that be in forty years? He gazed at the numbers, the second's digit clicking over, recording his future. Digits! He couldn't pawn the watch. They wouldn't accept it, just like they wouldn't accept his money. He remembered buying his first calculator with the money he'd earned as a poll clerk in the election. It had been expensive because LED calculators were new in nineteen seventy-four. LCD watches weren't even invented then. He would have to pawn his wedding ring. It was all he had left. He had married in nineteen seventy and that could have been awkward. He could just imagine the old Jewish pawnbroker staring at him through his loupe and wondering what the hallmark was that he had just seen. It wouldn't be the right date for another four years. Fortunately, he had used his father's ring. It had been made in nineteen forty—three and was quite valuable.
In half an hour he had a comfortable amount of money in his pocket and was on the hunt for a Lyons Corner Café. It was while he was drinking his second cup of tea that the idea had come to him and now he was searching for another shop. He would have had no difficulty finding in his own time, they were ten a penny, but in nineteen sixty-six they had been in existence for only a few years. The newspaper he had bought for just a few of the clunky old pennies that weighed down his pockets, had revealed that the date was indeed July 1966. It was, in fact, the last Saturday in July and he was the only man in London who knew for an absolute certainty that in just a few hours Bobby Moore would lift that very same trophy that a little dog named Pickles had found in a bush. Today England would win the World Cup. If he could find a betting shop he could turn his comfortable amount of money into an even more comfortable amount. Then if he sat and thought about it for a while he could come up with some more absolute certainties and become a very rich man.
The odds that the bookie had given him weren't great, but then, England were favourites. Now where would he watch the match? The obvious place was to sneak into the TV lounge of a small hotel in Russell Square where his doppelganger, a sixteen-year-old lad would be watching the match with his parents. He knew there would be a number of Italian waiters and maids crowding around the door of the lounge cheering England on. He could watch with them.
The game had been going for fifteen minutes and Helmut Haller had put Germany ahead. He could feel the tension in the room. He hadn't spotted his young self yet but the room was packed and the Italians kept jumping up and down and getting in the way. It was a very smug feeling knowing that all these people didn't know what he knew.
After ninety minutes the game went into extra time and then the room exploded as Geoff Hurst's shot bounced on the line. Everyone in the room held their breath as he had when he thought he was drowning, everyone except him. He knew that when the ref walked to the Russian linesman, England would go a goal up. You could have heard a pin drop. Then the linesmen lifted his flag and pointed. He indicated a corner to England. No, that was wrong. He was supposed to give the goal. People talked about it for years afterwards. The linesman should give the goal.
The corner doesn’t clear the first defender and it’s in open play. What was going on? This wasn't the way it was supposed to be. Never mind, England won four goals to two, Hurst scored again in the final minute.
There was a roar and he looked at the screen again, Weber had been brought down in the area, the referee had given a penalty. The final seconds tick away, what was going on? The room became one great groan as the ball hit the back of the net. As the groan died away, a whistle was heard. It was all over, the Germans had won.
He wandered the streets of London which were deserted. No-one had come out celebrating, history had changed. He could not understand it; England won the 1966 World Cup, that was history. Either he was still dreaming, and the nightmare went on or he had woken up in a different history. In this one he was a poor man living alone in a disgusting room. England had lost the world cup and he had lost everything he had. He had a watch he dared not sell and a few coins in each pocket. Those in his right-hand pocket would buy him one more meal, well a bag of chips, perhaps. The coins in his left pocket he would be able to spend when he was old enough to draw a pension he did not have.
He could walk no further. He had reached the bank of the Thames. The street lights shone on the brown sluggish water. This day of torment began in deep waters, he thought; let it end so. As he fell toward the churning water his last thought was, should I hold my nose?
