It takes a second or two for me to notice that it’s day instead of night.

The sun streams through the bobbled glass of the garage doors, illuminating racks of tools, shelves with plant pots, a lawnmower, and flecks of dust. It smells of cooking, and I can hear a radio playing quite nearby. I’m still in a sort of half-crouch as I’m so nervous, and I slowly straighten up and turn around to see that the connecting door to the house is half open and there’s the sound of footsteps on a hard floor. Then there is a voice, a woman’s voice, and she’s in the kitchen only a couple of metres away from me. It’s a wonder I can hear anything, so loud is the beating of my heart in my chest.

“How man, Stokoe,” she says harshly, “put that doon. You shouldn’t be playing with that, you little bleeder!” Her Geordie accent is pretty strong, and I’m just guessing at ‘Stokoe’ which is what it sounded like, but isn’t a name I’ve ever heard before.

I’m still in the middle of the garage, it’s like I’m stuck with glue, and this kid, who must be about two years old, toddles across the kitchen, past the open door, looks straight at me and points.

“Ba! Ga!” he says, and smiles.

“What is it now, man, Stokoe?” I see the back of the woman as she scoops the baby up and then she opens the door to the garage fully. “Ba! Ga!” says Stokoe again, and his mum says, “Shut up, will ya? There’s nowt there,” and of course there isn’t, for I am now crouched behind an old gas cooker thinking that this is twice in ten minutes that I have nearly been caught breaking into this garage.

I hear her footsteps move away from the door and out of the kitchen but I stay still for a few minutes, listening as Madness finish singing ‘Our House’ – I love that song, we did it in a school play once. There’s a jingle on the radio, which goes, “BBC Radio One!” in happy singy voices, and a man’s voice that I think I recognise from a show Mum listens to, except she listens to Radio 2. The man on the radio says, “It’s twenty two Radio One minutes past ten,” and I’m wondering how a Radio One minute is different from any other minute, when I figure I’m safe to get out of the garage.

There’s no Skoda in the driveway, and no hedge either, just a wooden fence. I quickly nip down the driveway and I’m out on Chesterton Road, and I feel sort of safe, out in the open, not having to hide. I cross the road, and notice the first thing that’s different about 1984. The ‘jungle’, the patch of undeveloped land opposite my house, has been cleared of bushes. It’s just bare earth and a few weeds. (I suppose it’s more accurate to say that the bushes haven’t grown yet, rather than they have been cleared.) In the intervening decades between this time and my time, the neglected patch has been overtaken by the weeds and scrubby bushes, but now it’s still just a clearing. There’s still an alleyway running down the side and a low wall. I can sit on it, and see in both directions up Chesterton Road and not really be noticed. I take a few deep breaths and look across at my old house and try to notice everything that’s different.

The woodwork’s painted a different colour. When I lived there, the front door and the garage doors were dark red and the window frames were all white. All the woodwork now is a sort of mustard-yellow, and it’s flaky and needs re-painting.

The rest of the street’s newer-looking, that’s for sure. In front of where I’m sitting there’s usually a big tree, a sycamore that in the autumn sheds seed pods that spin to the ground like little helicopters. Right now, it’s a spindly-looking thing, still supported by a stake and a canvas strap. The monkey-puzzle tree at old Mr Frasier’s isn’t there at all.

Another thing that’s not here is cars. Well, there are a few, but they’re mainly in people’s driveways and there are only five that I can count parked on the street. When I lived here, both sides of the road were pretty much lined with cars. And the ones here look old. That is, new-looking, but old style, sort of smaller and squarer, except for one really old one next to me which I know is a 1950s Austin Cambridge because I have a tiny model one in my bedroom that’s exactly the same that used to belong to Dad.

Three people have walked past on the other side of the road while I’ve been sitting here, and I’ve been checking out their clothes. I was expecting crazy multi-coloured 80s style fashions, like Mum and Dad wore once to a fancy dress party, but these people are dressed pretty normally. (At least, that’s what it looks like to me, but I’m not exactly a fashion expert.) Now there’s someone coming up the alleyway behind me, and there’s something I need to check so I stand up and turn to see a middle-aged man, holding a pipe between his clenched teeth, which strikes me as pretty funny.

“Excuse me,” I say. He stops and takes the pipe out of his mouth, exhaling a plume of smoke. He looks down at me.

“Aye?”

“I wonder if you would mind telling me today’s date?” I ask, in my politest talking-to-the-head-teacher manner. The man gives a little smile on one side of his mouth.

“Today’s date? Why, laddie, it’s the thirtieth of July. Monday, July the thirtieth. And aren’t you a wee bit warm in your coat?” He points with the stem of his pipe to my thick coat, which I had put on last night. His voice, a rich Scots accent, is oddly familiar.

“Ah! Aha – no, I’m fine, er … thanks. No, I meant the year. What year is it?”

At this he takes a draw on his pipe and actually smiles with his whole mouth. “The year? Aw, now ye’re havin’ me on. Have some of your friends dared ye to ask me a daft question?” and he looks up and down the street for the guilty parties.

“No – honestly! I … I’ve forgotten,” I say, lamely.

He shakes his head and makes to walk off, putting the pipe back between his teeth. He has taken a few steps on his way, when he turns his head and calls back over his shoulder, “It’s 1984, lad, 1984.”

I watch him walk up the street, and turn into old Mr Frasier’s house where one day he will plant a monkey-puzzle tree.

That’s it then. It works.

My dad’s time machine works!

That’s when I look at my watch, and …

I’m not really one to panic, but – with no regard for being discovered – I sprint back over the road and into the garage. It’s already ten minutes past the taxi driver’s deadline. If I’m stuck in Culvercot in the middle of the night with no means of getting home, then I’m well and truly stuffed. That’s if I even get back to my own time, which I keep telling myself I will I will I will because Dad’s time machine works.

Little Stokoe and his mum are nowhere to be seen, and I slip under the wooden boards and through the steel door in no time.

And now I’m standing in the zinc tub about to press ‘enter’ again when I have an idea. Fishing my keys from my pocket, I find my key ring memory stick and plug it into the side of the laptop, then click and drag the folder marked ‘Al’ on to the stick’s icon. The ‘Copying Files’ dialogue box pops up, and in a few moments, all 8 gigabytes of the program will be copied on to my stick.

The progress bar creeps along. Four minutes to go. I’m clenching my fists so hard with tension that it hurts, so I shove them in my pockets where I find a plastic sandwich bag. I’m supposed to fill it with earth for Carly’s spell. Now obviously any old earth is going to do, she won’t know, but I feel compelled to do this properly. It’s the ‘precision counts’ thing again, and it’s better than watching the progress bar, so once again I creep out of the cellar, into the garage and out into the front driveway where I can scoop up a handful of soil.

A minute later, I’m back in the bunker, sitting in the zinc tub, and I press ‘enter’.

Thank God – the taxi driver’s still there, head back, snoring loudly. A few minutes later and I’m on the back seat I put the sandwich bag in my coat pocket alongside … I feel around in my pocket for Alan Shearer. With a lurch in my stomach, I don’t find him.

Think, think. I definitely had him when I was talking to Mr Frasier because I remember him wriggling. And I put my hand in my pocket to protect him as I climbed in through the steel door after collecting soil.

So he must be in the underground bunker.

I sit for a few minutes more in a panicked silence. Finally, I say to the driver: “We have to go back.”

He looks at me in the rear-view mirror.

“You’re jokin’ aren’t you, son?”

“I, er … I’ve forgotten something.”

He pulls the car into the side of the road and stops, with the engine idling. Turning round in his seat, he says, “It’s gonna cost you. It’s another tenner.”

“But I haven’t got any more.”

“What about yer mam? She’ll have it, won’t she?”

“No. She, er …” I’m thinking hard, but nothing comes out. “She hasn’t.”

I know: lame, lame, lame.

He starts driving again. “Sorry, son. I don’t drive for nowt. Whatever it is you’ve forgotten, you’ll have to get another time.”

Alan Shearer’s going to have to wait to be rescued.

Back home, before I fall into my bed, I look it up on the web: two days. That seems to be the majority opinion on how long a hamster can survive without food or water. (Again, not an action endorsed by Dr A. Borgström.)