Free extract from The Time Travelling Estate Agent
By Dale Bradford
Time takes everything – but what if it could also give back?
It’s December 2019 in a small Welsh town, and 60-year-old estate agent Eric Meek discovers a property which boasts a truly unique garage conversion. Instead of the more customary home office or gym, it contains a hole in space-time that has been developed into a traversable portal.
The portal allows movement between 2019 and the day it was first powered up, 3rd July 1976, which just happened to be the best – and worst – day of 16-year-old Eric’s life.
Presented with a chance to right the wrongs of the past, Eric revisits the moment he believes defined his future. His adventures in time also find him caught up in a decades-old missing persons case while he attempts to improve the lives of those close to him, including his long-dead father.
The Time-Travelling Estate Agent is the story of a first love, a second chance, and a third age redemption.
Will Eric change history? Or will history change Eric?
SATURDAY 3rd JULY 1976
There was no internal gents’ toilet in the Old Oak in 1976, and Eric walked around the outside of the building to the small extension. It was just as rustic as he remembered it. He stood at the aluminium trough and pondered on the events of the past few hours. It was certainly a day to remember, even though he’d be the only one doing the remembering once he returned to 2019.
Eric’s thoughts were suddenly interrupted by his iPhone alarm going off. It was the default tone, which resembled the emergency siren on a World War II submarine, and the sound really carried in the tranquil country air. Shit. He’d left it in his jacket pocket. He finished his business as quickly as he could and rushed out to the table where Carol was sitting. She was holding his iPhone.
“What’s this?” she cried.
“It’s an alarm clock,” he said. That was true. He had set it to remind himself to call his financial advisor to discuss the property chain. He pressed the home button and turned the alarm off.
One of the drinkers from inside came outside. “Everything alright?”
“Yes, it’s just my alarm clock,” Eric said, snatching the iPhone from Carol and shoving it in his trouser pocket.
“Alarm clock? It sounded like a bloody bomb was going off,” the drinker said. “What do you need an alarm clock for on a Saturday afternoon?”
Eric laughed. “It’s Monday where I come from.”
The man stared at Eric. “What are you on about?”
“I’m so sorry to have disturbed you,” Eric said, taking a five-pound note from his trouser pocket and offering it to the drinker. “Please buy a few drinks for you and your friends.”
Flabbergasted, the drinker agreed to do just that.
“Are you bonkers?” Carol said to Eric. “That’s enough for about 20 pints.”
“It’s only money, right?” Eric shrugged. And it wasn’t even his, it was Big Ben’s.
“Let me see that alarm clock of yours,” Carol said.
“Why?”
“Because it doesn’t look like any alarm clock I’ve ever seen before,” she said.
“I can’t.”
“If you don’t, I’ll go in there and tell them it’s a bomb,” she warned.
“Please don’t do that.”
“Let me see it then.”
“Okay but if I do, you’ve got to promise not to freak out,” Eric said.
She assured him she wouldn’t.
Eric removed the phone from his pocket and pressed the home button. The jet-black screen displayed the time in crisp, white numerals.
“That’s amazing,” Carol said. “How come the numbers are so smooth, and how come they’re white?”
While Eric was holding the phone, Carol pressed the home button and the screen now had 20 little graphics, one of which was an analogue clock with a digitised second hand slowly moving around its face.
“What’s happened now?” Carol squealed.
“It’s basically a computer,” Eric said, deciding it was less hassle to tell her the truth than to make something up. “And all these little pictures are programs that run on it.”
“What programs?”
Eric took the phone back and gave her a quick guided tour of his most-used apps: “This one’s a calculator, this one’s for appointments, this one’s an address book, this one’s a dictionary and thesaurus, this one’s a notebook, this one’s a map with satellite navigation, this one’s my bank account, this one’s a news channel…”
Carol reached across and prodded the phone icon and the screen changed to a numeric keypad.
“Don’t tell me it’s a phone as well.”
“It is.”
“How gullible do you think I am?” she cried. “Where does it plug in?”
“Please, lower your voice,” Eric urged. “It doesn’t need to be plugged in.
“Let me see you make a phone call then,” she challenged him.
“It won’t work,” Eric said. “There’s no service in this… area.”
“How convenient!”
Eric inputted the number for the Barrington Meek showroom and the message ‘You must disable Airplane Mode to make a call’ appeared. “See?” he said.
She looked sceptical.
Eric prodded the camera icon and the screen immediately changed to a view of the table they were sat at. “This works though,” he said, framing Carol’s face in the screen and pressing the white button.
The iPhone clicked like a real camera and a small thumbnail of Carol’s face appeared in the lower left corner of the screen. Eric enlarged it and showed it to Carol.
“Fuck off!” she shrieked.
Eric smirked. He had never heard her use that word before. He returned to the camera screen and slid the menu to video, and the white button changed colour and became red. “What’s your favourite song, Carol?”
She couldn’t think.
“Okay, what’s number one in the charts?”
She thought for a few seconds. “It’s the Real Thing, with ‘You To Me Are Everything’.”
“How does it go? Can you sing it for me?”
“I can’t sing!” she protested.
“Just hum it then,” Eric encouraged, framing her in the screen again.
Although clearly embarrassed, she hummed the first line of the chorus.
“That’s fine,” Eric said, and played it back to her.
Carol was speechless.
Eric played it again. He then switched the camera into selfie mode, holding the phone at arm’s length and leaned his head into hers so they could both see themselves on the screen. “Where are we, Carol?” he asked.
“The Old Oak,” she replied, pointing towards the building behind them.
“And are you having fun?”
“I’m having a day I’ll never forget,” she laughed.
Eric cleared the screen and pressed the music icon. “It’s also got stored on it every song ever recorded by The Beatles, The Kinks, Kate Bush…”
“Who?”
Eric went into his song library and played ‘Wuthering Heights’.
Intrigued at first, a look of horror came over her face as the piano intro gave way to the vocal. “What the hell is that?” she recoiled from the device.
Eric laughed. Carol probably wasn’t ready for Kate Bush yet, not on top of everything else she’d just seen. Quite a few people weren’t ready for her in 1978, after all. He put the phone back in his jacket pocket. “Sorry, I got carried away there,” he said. “It must be the salesman in me.”
“How does it work?” Carol asked.
“I honestly don’t know,” Eric said. “I don’t even know how electricity works. I’m pretty sure microprocessors are involved but don’t ask me to explain what they do.”
“How have you got it?” she asked in awe.
Eric stared at her. In for a penny, in for a pound. “Everyone has them where I come from,” he said.
“And where’s that, Futureland?”
“Yes, in a way,” he said slowly. “I’m from 2019, Carol.”
“Fuck off!” she said again. “You’re pulling my leg.”
“I’m honestly not.”
A look of genuine fear flashed across Carol’s face. She stood up.
“Please, Carol, sit down,” Eric said. “You promised me you wouldn’t freak out.”
“I said I wouldn’t freak out if you showed me your alarm clock,” Carol replied. “This is a bit bloody different.”
