Ctrl-Z by Andrew Norriss Page A

in Ctrl‐Z. He believed in it partly because Alex was not the sort of person who made things up, and partly because
     his friend had shown an uncanny ability to know what was about to happen – but mostly because he had stopped having accidents.
    In the week since the morning of Lilly’s party, when Alex had come round with his laptop, Callum had not had a single accident.
     Not one. Alex told him that he had – that in the last two days alone, he had had accidents with a stapler, an electric carving
     knife and a nasty incident when his hair got caught in a light socket – but Callum didn’t remember any of them. As far as
     he was concerned, he had had no accidents at all and, for someone who’d been coping with them for most of his life, this was
     truly remarkable.
    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.

C HAPTER S EVEN

    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