Ctrl-Z by Andrew Norriss Page B

couldn’t do anything like that because Mr Kowalski wouldn’t know what he was talking about. How
could you say thank you to someone for something they didn’t know they’d done?
    It was Sophie Reynolds who gave him the answer when she came into school two days later and presented him with a cake that
     she said she had baked herself.
    Sophie had behaved differently to both Alex and Callum ever since that day at the shopping mall. These days, she smiled and
     said hello when she saw them in the morning, she lent Callum a pen when his own had run out of ink, and she sorted out Alex
     when he had a problem with his maths. The boys didn’t mind this, but baking him a cake was, Alex thought, going too far and
     it was quite a relief when Sophie said it was not for him.
    ‘It’s for your mum,’ she said. ‘For what she did on Friday.’
    The previous Friday, driving into town, Alex had seen Sophie and her mother with their car stopped by the side of the road.
     The bonnet was up and Mrs Reynolds was in her wheelchair, peering anxiously at the engine.
    They had stopped to see if they could help. In the close, most people came to Mrs Howard if anything went wrong with their
     cars; even if she couldn’t fix it herself, she could almost always tell you what the fault was and what you should do about
     it. In this case, Alex’s mother had found a
loose connection to the battery and dealt with it in a matter of seconds.
    ‘They should have spotted that at the service,’ she told Sophie’s mother as she closed the bonnet. ‘You should come to us
     next time. It wouldn’t happen where I work.’
    The cake Sophie had made was a large Victoria sponge, lavishly filled with strawberries and cream.
    ‘Mum likes strawberries,’ said Alex. ‘It looks good. Thanks.’ And it was the cake looking so good that gave him his idea.
    He couldn’t say thank you to Mr Kowalski in words because words were no use when you wanted to thank someone for something
     that had, technically, never happened…
    … But you could bake them a cake.
    Alex made the cake after school the next day. Sophie gave him the recipe and his mother found him the ingredients, though
     he insisted on doing all the work himself. He wanted it to be
his
cake, and the result wasn’t bad. He only had to use Ctrl‐Z twice while he was making it – once when he put in the wrong number
     of eggs and a second time when he forgot to take it out of the oven – but the result was quite tasty. He and Callum tried
     a slice themselves when it was finished, and then
Alex used Ctrl‐Z to go back to before they had eaten it, and took the cake round to number 16.
    It was some time before Mr Kowalski came shuffling along the hall in his slippers to answer the bell, and when he opened the
     door he frowned down at Alex.
    ‘What you want?’ he demanded.
     ‘I came to give you this,’ said Alex, holding out the cake.
    ‘This?’ Mr Kowalski looked at the cake and then at Alex. ‘Is some sort of joke?’
    ‘It’s not a joke,’ said Alex patiently. ‘It’s a cake.’
    ‘Why?’ asked Mr Kowalski suspiciously. ‘Why you give me cake?’
    ‘Well, I thought you’d like it,’ said Alex, ‘and I…’ He took a deep breath. ‘I wanted to say sorry. For all the things coming
     over the fence into your garden. It must have been very annoying, and I wanted to apologize for any inconvenience it may have
     caused.’
    Mr Kowalski stared at him for a moment, then took the cake and without a word closed the door. Alex didn’t mind. His neighbour
     could be as grumpy as he liked, it wasn’t going to make any difference to how Alex felt about him.
    And, grumpy or not, Mr Kowalski had at least taken the cake.
    *
    Two hours later Alex was lying upstairs on his bed, listening to his parents downstairs in the kitchen having an argument.
     They were arguing, as far as he could tell, about whether his mother should apply for a job that was advertised in the paper.
     His mother