Tomorrow is Another Year

Scott Tierney

Description

When Michael accepts a nondescript job for a nameless London-based company, he finds himself embroiled in a fantastical situation: every time he wakes, time has progressed one single year. At first this seems like a gift; but as the future spirals out of control, and the motives of his titanic employer, Greenwood, prove entangling, he discovers it to be a curse...

Sujets

• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)
• Science fiction
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 15 août 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785387470
• Langue: English

Extrait

TOMORROW IS ANOTHER YEAR
Is a year of years the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end?
Scott Tierney




Tomorrow is Another Year
First edition published in 2017 by
Acorn Books
www.acornbooks.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© Copyright 2017 Scott Tierney
The right of Scott Tierney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.




“And where, may I enquire, do you see yourself in one year’s time?”
It was the question Michael had been dreading, the classic tripwire of a question which either made or broke a job interview - although this made it no easier to deal with. In his presently hazy, nervous and deracinated mood, he could barely remember his own name...
Michael knew from experience what his prospective employer wanted to hear: something enthusiastic yet composed; bold not boastful - act with confidence but refrain from arrogance. Not that this made portraying such an appearance straightforward, of course. Since arriving in this little windowless office he’d been sweating profusely; and the reptilian gaze from the figure who had ushered him here today was doing little to dispel such a condition.
Besides, the question was rhetorical nonsense - how was he to know what the next twelve months would hold? For all he knew he could be dead and buried; just shy of his 32 nd birthday and not a lot to show aside a rented apartment, some scattered bullet-points on a CV, and an ever growing collection of ifs. In his experience, looking beyond tomorrow barely amounted to a hill of beans.
Yet, with all this in mind, Michael delivered his rehearsed and well practised answer, pausing to cough as his throat, as it always did on these occasions, had become dry.
“I would like to imagine, in a year’s time, that I’d be further along my career path, and possess a broader range of experiences.”
“Experiences of what, exactly?” returned the interviewer from behind his vast stately desk, the great trunk of wood bearing down upon Michael’s little chair like a tsunami.
Michael glitched for a moment, this second phase of questioning unforeseen and unplanned. He fidgeted with the buttons of his single-occasion suit.
“Well, regarding myself as an employee, I suppose...”
It was the best he good muster, the two balls of a Newton’s Cradle rhythmically echoing around the small and regal office like the chimes of a detached buoy.
“I see.” the man replied dryly. “And what would you endeavour to learn over the course of this year, should you become a member of our company?”
An easy one. “Some new on the job skills,” Michael boasted, “which I can utilise under your-”
“I meant about yourself.” the interviewer interrupted with all the decisiveness of a guillotine. “As a person, an individual of this world, rather than what you can bring on a purely mechanical level.”
Much to Michael’s apprehension, the thin, languid man leant forward with looming intent, projecting an unquestionable sense that everything relating to Michael’s future rested on the quality, temperament and tone of his next answer.
“Again.” the man said. “Where do you see yourself in one year’s time?”
With that familiar sense of impending rejection he so often experienced at these junctures, Michael exhaled with disregarded honesty.
“I don’t care, as long as everything changed from it is now, you know...”
The interviewer looked Michael’s consigned frame up and down, penetrating and beyond as though examining the marbling of a sirloin. As the twelve spheres of his ornate carriage clock swung back and forth, nonchalantly the man pulled a blank sheet of paper from his desk draw, and produced a pen from his breast pocket.
“You appear to have made a wise decision.” he said with a devilish smile and an offered hand, before stating plainly, “Sign this, and we shall commence at precisely 9am tomorrow .
“Congratulations are seemingly in order.”
Tomorrow is Another Year



1
A second too late. As per usual...
If he hadn’t been lodged behind that woman at the turnstiles - slapping her Oyster card against the scanner as though it were the last smears of butter on foil - he would have caught that now departing tube train and been on his way home. There would be another along in a matter of minutes, of course, and another after that; but by the swelling mass of busy-ness people now converging at the platform, Michael knew he now faced the kind of compression only deep-sea divers should have to endure. Less hassle to walk home , he figured, regardless of the rain. And so he did just that, treading London’s glazed evening pavements with anything but grace - making use of his iPod and the first randomized song as a means to hold him tight - bumping shoulders and ducking umbrellas, trying to unravel the implications of what exactly had just transpired during this evening’s surreal interview.
Deep in retrospect he cursed himself for not asking more questions, about the hours, the salary, benefits, or what his position would actually entail. Michael wasn’t accustomed to landing jobs on the first interview, nor in the first five minutes - or at all, for that matter. So why had today’s encounter been so successful? And immediately so? Yet, like a startled sheep, he’d allowed himself to be herded from his new offices with nothing but a limp and automated handshake as an adjournment, a new, unknown profession apparently his.
Although this sudden and unexpected springboard into employment left him feeling light headed, he was relieved to have at least tied down some form of income, however spurious and short term. The months - if not years, he considered - leading up to today’s interview had been arduous: baron of income and forced to take nibbles from his ever decreasing savings, Michael had found himself directionless, a creature of daytime TV, impotent of all initiative. His career - as others would call it - had stalled; and his private life - as others would claim it - was essentially non existent. Family feuds had escalated beyond repair, and friendships had dwindled away like streams under a water wheel - he’d slammed more doors than opened recently, shutting himself off from the outside world, going his own way through spite rather than fury.
Now it was just him, he told himself.
Him and him alone.
Alone on the precipice of a job he knew nothing about, only that it started at 9am tomorrow, and it paid .
He needed to get home, out of this rain, and prepare...
And so Michael continued to follow the streets of inner city London back to his apartment - uncertain, bemused, blinkered by his conundrums - past the familiar billboards, peeling rave posters and perpetual supermarkets, wandering in through habit to buy milk and a bottle of cheap and deserved celebratory, his future seemingly shackled in motion.
Michael’s apartment was ‘desirably located’ a forecourt away from a blistered, gravel-spitting main road - the kind of strip which rattled to articulated lorries by day, mopeds by night - where every Sunday morning was greeted with someone’s half-slurped can of cider, perched on the doorstep. The forecourt was faring little better, most of its paving slabs either lopsided or smashed like an old lichen mosaic. As Michael neared the entrance a man passed by. He was wheeling a rickety stall of produce which juddered as it traversed each crooked slab, before slamming into a lock-up behind the apartments with a crash of galvanised steel. Michael looked forward to hearing that again at first light...the complex’s proverbial cockerel.
Still, the apartment was home, his box within a box - four flights up, four doors down, all bought yet never quite paid for, a retreat from the reality beyond.
To view it from above, the layout of his apartment took the form of a TV dinner, with a small, single space segmented into smaller living compartments. Michael had never enquired what the building had been previously, but he guessed by the painted brick, hard wood floor and ceiling jousts that it used to be a factory of some sort, with his divvy located to the front of the building. At least the view across the city made up for the rest of the apartment’s shortcomings - such as how the bare partitioning walls were little more than balanced playing cards wedged sturdy with his unpacked belongings - with several tall, single glazed windows lining the room. Most of these windows had sills stacked with unread books and sealed DVDs; but one held a large, round goldfish bowl which housed a single shimmering incumbent. Through routine, Michael scattered a few flakes of food onto the water’s surface. Immediately the little fish gobbled them up - not allowing a single morsel to fall to the bed of glass pebbles - before dashing back under the safety of its plastic model church, not to be seen until next feeding.
“Still scared of the bubbles, huh?” Michael said, inspecting the aerator. He’d been meaning to get it fixed for a while now. For some reason, rather than producing a steady stream of tiny bubbles, the aerator