More than anything else in the world he wanted to go back.
He found her in Italy. It was just one of those super cheap package holidays. He had the hotel for a week. A week of sun, sand and sea, with the usual night-time visits to bars and clubs. It was back in the day when these budget holidays were all the rage. He’d been in his early twenties, single, and certainly not looking for romance. It was just a break. Time out from his work in his own city. Work that had him in the office all hours. It was a responsible position for a man of his age. He had studied hard for it and he was set to climb just about any ladder he chose. Now, he was letting it all go for a few short, relaxing days. It was on the third day that he’d seen her at the roadside café.
It was all very brief; just moments in time. He was sipping coffee watching people go by, mainly tourists, when his attention was drawn to a sudden burst of laughter coming from a group of three twenty-something women approaching the café. He watched as they stopped and said their goodbyes. They split up, each going their own way. One of them, the girl in the red dress, passed his table. He was so taken with her as she came closer, that he didn’t notice that something fluttered to the ground. She had dropped something; a scrap of paper. It looked like a receipt. She paused, closed her purse and looked back. She returned, almost to his table, picked it up and went on her way.
For the remainder of the week he thought of little else, other than the incident at the café. He asked around whenever he could. Nobody seemed to know who she was, accept two shopkeepers where all three had been, said they were certainly Italian, but probably not from there; just on holiday together. This was as far as he got by the time he was due to fly home. On the plane, and over the weekend before returning to work, his preoccupation with the woman, the incident, and his failure to find out who she was, became more of an obsession.
This became apparent to him when, after his first day back of work, he didn’t go straight home. Instead, once away from the pressures of work, he made his way to the nearest park, where he sat turning it all over in his head. Time passed and he failed to notice how late it was getting. It was quite dark before he decided to make a move. As he stood up, he mumbled something about how he wished he had…
At that moment he became aware of someone suddenly sitting beside him. Someone who shouldn’t be there; couldn’t be there! The shock of it ran through his whole body, leaving him trembling.
A voice said, “Where and when did you want to go?”
“Sorry?”
“You must want to go somewhere. Put it like this, you wished very hard that you could go somewhere. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here. If you hadn’t wished that hard you would never have gone into the pool.”
“Pool?”
“Yes, well, I call it the pool; it’s more of a lottery really. We only do it once a year. Anyway, you won. Now, where and when did you want to go?”
The young man sat thinking for a while. Gradually, an understanding of what was going on became apparent. In some strange way what was being discussed was quite normal and he accepted the truth of it. “Well, OK… back I suppose.”
“Ah! That’s good, we only do back. You need to know that you’ll have no memory of the time between; we have to wipe that.”
Without hesitation, he said, “Yes. OK. Do you need time and coordinates, that sort of thing?”
“No, from this point you only have to think it…”
He did. It went from dark to sunny in an instant. The girl in the red dress was passing his table, when something fluttered to the ground.
With a smile, he strolled over and picked it up…