The Old Man's Tale

By Ian Curwood

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781456637316

Book preview

cover-image, The Old Man's Tale

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