his father shook his head.
'No more school for you, son. You need to get your priorities right. You're a time shifter now for as long as your powers last. Here's your afternoon tea. It should last you for a few hours.'
Japer's protests fell on deaf ears. Gloomily he climbed onto the bike and took the peanut butter sandwich his father handed him.
'Now you sit there and change time, like a good boy. And not too much at one go. We want them to come back for more.'
'Maybe nobody will want me to do it,' Jasper muttered.
It was a forlorn hope. The local business people were quick to see the advantages of Jasper's talent. Dr Jellicoe the dentist was one of his best customers. He even put up a sign saying 'Dental Treatments that go Past in a Flash.'
Jilly from the hair salon was also pleased. 'It’s much easier on my legs and feet,' she confessed to her friend Mavis. 'It doesn't cost much to have all the hair treatments whiz past and I feel ever so much more rested at the end of the day.'
But others, particularly Mr Arlington, the manager of the local biscuit factory, weren't so happy.
'We skipped so much time last week that I lost five hours of production,' he grumbled to his mates over a mug of ale at the local pub. 'How can I meet my orders when people don't work. They turn up and then pouf, it's knock off time and only one box of biscuits done. And of course they all expect to be paid for a full week's work,' he added bitterly.
Mr Greenaway didn't care. 'My son can slow time down as well as speed it up,' he shrugged. 'It will cost you two gold coins for each extra hour in the day.'
'That's daylight robbery,' grumbled Mr Arlington, but was forced to pay in order to get his biscuits made.
Jasper’s friends were indignant to find that birthday parties finished a few minutes after they started and that bedtime was apt to come around far too soon. They couldn’t afford a gold coin to change things and they whined to their parents to pay.
It wasn’t long before some of the local people set up a petition to stop the time changes.
Old Mrs Sutton stumped along with her stick to then corner shop and sat outside at a card table collecting signatures.
Give Us Our Time Back, the petition demanded.
‘It’s not right,’ Mrs Sutton would tell anyone who passed. ‘They can’t do this to me at my time of life.’
Mr Greenaway was furious.
‘It’s an invasion of privacy,’ he fumed. ‘What we do in the privacy of our own home is our business. A man has a right to earn a living. And if it happens to affect someone other than our customers, well that’s just too bad. But you’d better only shift time an hour at a time, my boy. I’ll put up a new notice. One gold coin per hour. That will make us even richer.’ He rubbed his hands in glee.
Jasper stuck to his instructions to move only an hour at a time so life wasn't disrupted too much and his family was very pleased as the money rolled in.
But poor Jasper became increasingly frustrated at having to work at time shifting.
‘Can’t I take the motorbike for a ride?’ he begged. ‘Just a short one would do. This is so boring.’
‘Absolutely not,’ his father said, shaking his head. ‘Your talent is far too valuable for us to risk. The roads are not a safe place to be for a lad like you.’
‘Couldn’t I at least have the motor running,’ pleaded Jasper.
‘No, no, no,’ Mr Greenaway said emphatically. ‘If you want noise, just make it yourself. Say Brmm Brmm.’
Jasper was disgusted. They were treating him like a baby and he wasn’t getting any advantages of the new found wealth, either. He watched morosely as Drake and Gilbert went to school every day while he was stuck in the shed. His father set up a television set for him to watch but that proved to be very annoying.
‘I keep missing the end of the programme when I shift time,’ Jasper told his mother indignantly. ‘Or else I go back to the beginning again. The shows in the daytime are so boring. I’ve watched How to Wallpaper a Bedroom seventeen times now.’
‘Don’t be silly. Nobody is forcing you to watch it,’ his mother said briskly. ‘You could always read a book instead. Maybe I should ask some of your friends to bring their school textbooks around and you can read those.’
Jasper shuddered and scowled as he shifted time back so that Mrs Mudgeway could have longer to get her garden tidy for her friends from the garden club to visit.
One day the demand for time shifting was very high. There was a major fishing competition on and all of the fisherman wanted as long as possible to catch the biggest fish. Jasper shifted time so much he felt quite dizzy. The last straw came when How to Wallpaper a Bedroom was shown on TV for the eighteenth time.
‘I am not going to do this anymore,’ Jasper muttered. ‘In fact, I am going to leave home.’
He lay in bed that night and made a plan while his parents counted the gold coins before stowing them safely in a box under their bed.
The next morning, Jasper crept out to the shed before breakfast and climbed onto the motorbike. Concentrating hard, he used all his energy to focus on making time stand still. He looked at the clock on the wall and saw that the minute hand had stopped. The normal everyday sounds of cars on the street and birds squawking from the trees had stopped. Jasper grinned and ran to get a spanner from his father’s toolbox. He unbolted the motorbike and climbed onto it. He pushed the starter and with a roar the engine came to life. Jasper thought hard again and pushed his mind to shift time an hour backwards.
‘That should give me time to get away,’ he thought.
He wobbled out of the shed and down the driveway to the road. He found it much harder to drive than he had imagined. Cars sped by with little regard for him and he coughed and spluttered in the fumes left by their exhausts.
Jasper drove down side streets and made his way slowly out of town and into the countryside. This was much better. There was very little traffic now, mainly the occasional school bus or tractor, and the air was clean and fresh. Jasper began to feel hungry and wished he had thought to bring some food with him. He kept driving, wondering what he was going to do, when the engine began to spit and stutter. Jasper looked at the fuel gauge and yelped in dismay when he saw that he was nearly out of petrol. The motorbike went slower and slower and began to jerk and judder. Jasper muttered some very rude words and glided to a stop on a grassy stretch beside a gate. The motorbike gave a final shudder and fell over. Jasper picked himself up and said some more rude words before giving the motorbike a kick for good measure.
He sat on the grass feeling very sorry for himself and wondered what he was going to do.
‘Maybe I can hitch a ride with the next car that goes past,’ he thought hopefully. He waited and waited. An hour later he was bored with waiting. The only vehicle that had gone past was a very old tractor with an even older driver who waved cheerfully to Jasper as he chugged past. Jasper tried speeding up time but found to his disgust that no vehicles at all went past in any direction. Jasper pushed time back but this was no better. The elderly gentleman drove past on the tractor again, although his wave wasn’t quite so friendly.
‘That’s interesting,’ thought Jasper.
He sent time back and forwards a few more times. By the ninth time the tractor chugged past, the driver was shaking his first at Jasper, with an expression of acute dislike on his face. Jasper laughed and poked out his tongue, but prudently decided to stop.
‘This is boring, anyway,’ he grumbled.
Another hour went past with no traffic. By this time Jasper was so hungry he couldn’t bear it. He thought about walking down the road but couldn’t decide whether to head back to town, which was going to take ages, or go the other way and hope there was a shop.
‘But I don’t have any money, anyway, so a shop isn’t much use,’ he sighed.
Jasper looked at the gate behind him.
‘Maybe there is a farm somewhere or some apple trees or blackberries growing,’ he thought desperately. He opened the gate
and walked through it.
As Jasper passed through the gate, a sudden gust of wind blew it firmly shut behind him. A crack of thunder sounded then it began to rain. This was not like any rain Jasper had ever experienced. It came tipping down like a hundred bathtubs emptying on top of him. Jasper spluttered and choked as the rain fell on his face. He tried to change time back to before the rain started but nothing happened. He sank to his knees with his hands clasped over his head to deflect the pounding water and tried to speed time up instead. Nothing he did seemed to have any effect and the rain poured down relentlessly. Stumbling to his feet, Jasper decided to go back to the gate.
'I’m sure it was dry on the other side of the fence,' he wailed.
He groped around, blinded by the rain, and tried to find the gate. He found trees with rough trunks and sharp scratchy branches. He found bushes that appeared to be covered in bunches of thorns and he found tangling vines that flapped wetly around his face. He couldn't find the gate anywhere.
By this time Jasper was feeling very sorry for himself. Just as he thought he was going to become the first person ever to drown in a thunderstorm, a large hand grasped his and a fatherly voice said,
'Come with me.'
The man pulled Jasper through another gate and slammed it shut. Instantly the rain stopped and Jasper wiped his face with the back of his hand. His jaw dropped open in shock as he looked around. Instead of the road he was expecting, he was standing in a