Ctrl-Z (7 page)

Ctrl‐Z might not be an easy explanation to believe, but it was the only one Callum had and he
did
believe it now, as completely as Alex did.
And he knew that, whenever he did have an accident, the first thing to do was tell Alex, so that he could press the keys on
his computer.

And it was this, strangely enough, that nearly brought the whole glorious adventure to an end.

I
t was a Saturday morning, two weeks after Alex had got Ctrl‐Z from Godfather John, and he had been sent down to the little
row of shops in the Causeway to get some milk. It was a fifteen‐minute walk, but he didn’t mind. The sun was shining and his
mother had told him he could buy himself an ice cream while he was there.

In the shop, he collected the milk and the ice cream and took them over to the counter.

‘Two pounds twenty‐seven, please,’ said Mrs Bellini, and she took the ten‐pound note Alex offered her and passed back his
change.

Outside the shop, Alex sat himself on a bench that looked out over the river and was contentedly eating his ice cream when
the river and the road in
front of him disappeared and he found himself back in the shop, standing in front of Mrs Bellini.

‘Two pounds twenty‐seven, please,’ she said.

‘What?’ Alex stared at her.

‘Two pounds twenty‐seven,’ Mrs Bellini repeated patiently. ‘For the milk and the ice cream.’

By the third time this happened, Alex had worked out what was going on, or thought he had. Looking at his watch, he could
see it was almost exactly ten o’clock when Mrs Bellini asked for the money, and four minutes past the hour when time stopped
and he went back to being in the shop. Someone, somewhere, must have gone into his bedroom at home at four minutes past ten
and pressed Ctrl‐Z.

It could only be Callum, he thought. No one but Callum would have turned on the computer, gone to the page that set the time,
changed it to ten o’clock and then pressed Ctrl‐Z. Goodness only knew why he was doing it, but that wasn’t important at the
moment. What Alex needed to do was get back to the house before Callum pressed the button, otherwise he was going to be stuck
repeating the same few minutes of time over and over again.

Walking from the shop back to the house, Alex knew, took between ten and fifteen minutes depending on how fast you walked.
If he ran as
fast as he could, he ought to be able to get back in time.

He was wrong.

The first time he tried it he was only three quarters of the way home before he found himself back in the shop with Mrs Bellini
asking for her two pounds twenty‐seven. He tried it three times more, each time running flat out as fast as he could, but
it made no difference. Even when he abandoned the milk and ice cream and started running before Mrs Bellini had a chance to
tell him how much he should pay, even when he took the short cut down the back of Exeter Street, he still couldn’t get to
Oakwood Close before four minutes past ten.

‘Two pounds twenty‐seven, please,’ said Mrs Bellini.

As he handed over his ten‐pound note for the ninth time, Alex tried to think. He
had
to get home in time to stop Callum pressing Ctrl‐Z, and if he couldn’t run there fast enough, then… He looked thoughtfully
through the shop doorway to where two girls were talking on the pavement outside. One of them, he noticed, had a bicycle.

It took several tries before Alex could get hold of the bike. He began by asking the girl if he could borrow it, but she said
no. Next, he tried offering her money, but she still said no, so then he tried
snatching it from her, but that didn’t work either. The little girl was only eight years old, but she clung ferociously to
her bicycle, her fingers wrapped tightly round the handlebars. With her friend screaming for help, Alex could never quite
wrench the bike free before the girl’s mother came out of the shop, grabbed him by the collar and shouted for someone to call
the police.

In the end, he found a simpler way. When Mrs Bellini asked for her two pounds twenty‐seven, he left the ten‐pound note on
the counter, walked out of the shop, went straight over to the girls and told them their mother wanted them inside to choose
which sweets they wanted. The girl left her bike leaning up against a pillar box and, as she walked towards the shop, Alex
grabbed it and pedalled off.

It wasn’t an easy bike to ride – it was smaller than he was used to and had no gears – but it was still faster than running.
Pedalling as fast as he could, and with the cries of the girls and their mother fading behind him as he rode, Alex dashed
along the Causeway, turned left into Roseby Crescent, raced up the hill along Derby Road and
… and he very nearly made it.

Turning into the close he could actually see Callum running past the side of the house towards the back door and his mother
standing by her car
in the driveway. He opened his mouth to shout to Callum not to go indoors when –

‘Two pounds twenty‐seven, please,’ said Mrs Bellini.

He tried the bicycle trick twice more, but it made no difference and, handing over the money for the seventeenth time, it
dawned on Alex that he was in serious trouble. Unless he could get home before Callum pressed Ctrl‐Z, he was going to be stuck
in the same four minutes of time… forever.

In desperation, he considered stealing a car and was actually working out how he could snatch the keys from the woman behind
him in the queue at the shop when he realized he didn’t have to steal a car at all. There was a much simpler solution to his
problem and he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t thought of it before.

‘Two pounds twenty‐seven, please,’ said Mrs Bellini.

Alex gave her the ten‐pound note. ‘Could I use your phone to call my mum?’ he said. ‘I can pay you for it. Only it’s quite
urgent.’

‘Yes, of course, dear.’ Mrs Bellini pushed the phone across the counter towards him. ‘And don’t worry about paying.’

‘Thanks.’ Alex was already tapping in the number.

The phone rang for some time and he remembered his mother had been outside doing something to her car.

‘Hello?’ His mother’s voice finally answered the call.

‘Mum? It’s me.’

‘Alex? What are you –’

‘Just listen, will you, Mum? You mustn’t let Callum into the house, all right? When he calls round, don’t let him in and don’t
let him up to my bedroom. It’s really important, OK?’

‘OK,’ said his mother. ‘Look, are you all right? Why are you –’

‘I’m fine. I’ll explain when I get home,’ said Alex, and hung up.

When Alex turned into the drive of number 17 Oakwood Close, his mother swung herself out from under the back axle of the TR4.

‘You were right,’ she said. ‘Callum came round just after you phoned. He told me to tell you he’d had an accident. Just after
ten o’clock. He said it was very important you knew the time.’

‘What sort of accident?’ asked Alex.
‘As far as I could tell, he was playing darts and one of them landed in his father’s foot,’ said Mrs Howard. ‘But I couldn’t
get the details because his father was shouting for him to come home.

He was hopping mad. Literally.’ Mrs Howard looked up at Alex. ‘So how did you know?’

‘What?’

‘The phone call,’ said Mrs Howard. ‘The “Don’t let Callum into the house” thing. How did you know he was coming and why did
I have to keep him out of your room?’

‘Oh, that,’ said Alex. ‘I… I’ll just put this milk in the fridge, shall I? Then I’ll explain it to you.’

Indoors, he left the milk on the table and went upstairs to his computer.

It was five minutes to ten and Callum was playing darts. The hook that normally held his dartboard to the wall had come out,
so he propped it up on the window sill instead and he was about to start throwing when Alex appeared.

‘Hi,’ said Callum. ‘Want a game?’

‘No, thank you,’ said Alex. ‘One of the things I came to tell you is that playing darts by an open window, especially when
your dad is standing underneath, is definitely a mistake. But sit down, will you? And listen.’

‘OK.’ Callum sat down on the bed. ‘Has something happened?’

‘I want you to imagine,’ said Alex, ignoring the question, ‘that you’re up here throwing darts at that board and one of the
darts misses the board,
goes out of the window, and lands in your dad’s foot, down in the garden. What would you do if that happened?’

‘Well, I’d…’ Callum hesitated. ‘We’re not talking about something I already did, are we?’

‘Yes,’ said Alex, ‘but stay with the question for a minute; what would you do?’

‘Well, I’d phone you and –’

‘There isn’t time to phone,’ said Alex. ‘Your dad’s screaming that he’s going to bury you in concrete…’

‘Oh… well… I’d go round to your house…’

‘Right,’ said Alex. ‘You come round to my house, but I’m not in. I’ve gone down to the shops. So what do you do then?’

There was something in the intensity of Alex’s gaze that made Callum feel distinctly uncomfortable.

‘Well…’ he said, ‘I suppose I’d go upstairs and try using Ctrl‐Z on your computer to –’

‘That is exactly what you did!’ said Alex. ‘And you must
never
do it again!’

‘OK.’ Callum looked puzzled. ‘Why?’

‘Because you hadn’t told me, had you? So you went back in time, but you didn’t know you had! You were just back here in your
room playing darts and one of them went out of the window and hurt
your dad, so you ran up to my house, set the computer, pressed Ctrl‐Z so you were back here in your room playing darts and
one of them went out of the window and hurt your dad, so you ran up to my house and set the computer… !’

‘Oh…’ You could almost see the cogs turning in Callum’s brain as he worked out what this meant. ‘What… what happened?’

Alex told him the whole story. About finding himself at the shop with Mrs Bellini every four minutes, about trying to get
home to reset Ctrl‐Z, about taking the bicycle and nearly stealing a car and, finally, about the phone call.

‘You must never,’ said Alex, ‘
never
press Ctrl‐Z without telling me first, so that I can tell you what you need not to do. OK?’

‘Right,’ said Callum. ‘OK.’

That night, Alex wrote an email to his godfather, telling him what had happened. It had been a bit of a shock to realize that
his laptop could be quite so dangerous and he wondered if there were any other risks in using it. If there were, he wrote,
it would be good to be warned about them so that in future he could try to avoid them.

The reply, when it arrived, was not as helpful as he’d hoped.

‘
Plenty more dangers…
’ Alex read the phrase again.

It wasn’t exactly encouraging.

H
aving Ctrl‐Z might cause Alex the occasional scare, but nothing would have persuaded him to give it up. It was by far the most exciting present he had ever received and being able to walk out of school in the middle of the morning or suddenly
decide to borrow his mother’s car meant Ctrl‐Z was worth any of the risks involved.

And in the days that followed, Alex discovered his laptop was useful in more ways than he had expected. For a start, it meant
that life became almost totally pain‐free. If he accidentally cut himself on a bit of broken glass, or grazed his elbow when
he fell off his bike, or did something as simple as stubbing his toe on a chair leg, with Ctrl‐Z all Alex had to do was go
back to before
it had happened and the pain was gone as completely as if it had never been there – which of course it hadn’t.

With Ctrl‐Z, if you were watching a DVD and you were only halfway through it when Dad said it was time for bed, you could
go back an hour and watch the second half. If there was a meal you particularly enjoyed you could go back and eat it all over
again – and eat it as many times as you liked without getting full because each time you went back, you went back to being
as hungry as you were the first time. And if you bought something in a shop, like a computer game, you could have all the
fun of playing with it for a few hours and then, if you didn’t want to keep it, go back to before you’d bought it and buy
something else.

But there was one other thing Ctrl‐Z could do that was, in its own way, better than any of those. It was better than never
getting hurt, better than undoing Callum’s accidents, and even better than the excitement of breaking all the windows in a
greenhouse. With Ctrl‐Z, Alex found, it was possible to make sure that everything went
right.

Everything.

When Callum rang up to point out that they had missed their favourite TV programme, Alex could go back to when it had started
and set the
recorder. When Mum left her handbag in a shop, with all her money and her credit cards in it and was convinced it had been
stolen, Alex simply rewound time to when it happened and reminded her to pick it up from the counter. And when Dad got back
late to the car park after a trip to the swimming pool and found he had a parking fine, Alex went back to make sure he bought
a ticket for the time he would need. And had another swim.

Everything went so much more smoothly with Ctrl‐Z. With his laptop, Alex could iron out all the little irritations and annoyances
that might disturb the even flow of life before they ever happened. In school or at home, when the day hit a wrinkle, it was
no problem. You just went back and made the wrinkle disappear. Dad taking a wrong turning in the car, someone spilling tea
on the carpet, Mum hitting her thumb with a hammer – whatever it was, you simply went back and made sure it didn’t happen.
All at the click of a key on the computer.