‘And the date?’
‘Did you bring an old ticket?’ she says, scowling. ‘Because you’ll need to buy a new one if you can’t prove you’ve paid your fare.’
I shake my head. ‘Just … ’ I clear my throat ‘ … need to check something.’
She looks at me as if I’m an idiot, but says, ‘May the fourteenth.’
My stomach drops to the soles of my feet. ‘And the year?’
She gives her colleague standing a short distance away a ‘we’ve got a right one here’ kind of look and then adds, ‘2014.’
It’s as if a warm and violent wind rushes not just past me but right through me as I register her words. I’m shaking as the barrier eats my ticket and then spits it out again. I’m carriedthrough the ticket hall by the steady stream of people, all heading off somewhere with determination and purpose. Eventually I stop walking and they just tut and flow around me.
The only thing I can do is stare at my phone. My phone but not my phone.
And the stories in the newspapers are all from years gone by.
And Priya is texting me from a job I left close to a decade ago.
I pull up the camera on my phone, flip it to selfie mode and take a really hard look at what I see. The face staring back is me but, like my phone, it is also not me. At least, not who I am now. I look very much like I did twelve years ago, which means I was wrong about my skin looking as if I was still twenty-five.
If this really is 2014, I’m actually twenty-three.
CHAPTER NINE
JESS
This can’t be real. It can’t be! I’m just … I don’t know … feeling delusional, or dissociated, or … something! At a loss for anything else to do, I let my feet follow the well-worn route from the station to our house. Once I get inside, I’ll feel better. I can go to bed, maybe, have some decent sleep and, hopefully, wake up later today feeling ready to deal with the fallout of last night.
I do a good job of convincing myself that I’m just having a really bad ‘morning after’ experience as I walk down streets filled with row upon row of red-brick Victorian houses of various sizes and shapes, but when I reach our front gate, my stomach drops.
This is not how my house looked when I left it yesterday. The usually glossy black front door is red, the paint faded in places from years of afternoon sun. The tiled path Luke and I had put in last year is gone, replaced by crazy paving punctuated by weeds that have pushed through the cracks.
Not too different from how it was six years ago when we took down the ‘For Sale’ sign and entered our new home for the first time. However, it doesn’t stop me walking up to the front door and rapping loudly on the knocker, hoping Luke will open it.Even if he scowls at me, gives me the silent treatment, I won’t care, because at least it will contradict what my five senses are telling me and I can remain safe in my bubble of denial.
No one answers. I take a couple of steps off the path so I can peer in the bay window. A pair of dingy curtains hang where there should be gleaming white shutters and I can see a sagging corduroy sofa. The sight of an ugly carpet full of orange and brown swirls is all it takes for my panic to reach the surface. I spin around, unable to look at what should be my front room, as my ribcage squeezes my lungs and my pulse gallops. I stumble out of the garden and back onto the street, but have to sit down the low garden wall because my vision begins to spin. How can this be happening? How?
I spend the next five minutes concentrating on my breathing, trying to coax my body out of a full-blown panic attack. A man with a dog walks past and stares at me, but he doesn’t stop to ask if I need help.
Eventually, the adrenaline in my system diminishes. As soon as I am able, I get up and walk. I don’t decide on a direction; I just move. Anywhere, as long as I don’t have to stand in front of 24 Nightingale Road and know that it isn’t mine. Not yet, anyway.
Am I dreaming?
No. It seems unlikely. The world is behaving itself, following the laws of physics and logic. I haven’t teleported to anywhere different or walked down the street naked. Apart from the fact that I’m here,now, everything else seems to make sense.
A hallucination, then?
Possibly. Maybe, after losing my grip on the one relationship in my life where I felt safe, I’ve lost my grip on reality.
I suppose I could just sit down on a bench somewhere andhope that I’ll come to my senses, but there’s a kind of nervous energy building inside me, a feeling that something important is about to happen, that I need to pay attention, and I’m too hard-wired to do the responsible thing to ignore it.
In lieu of any other sensible ideas, I go with the flow and follow the path already laid out for me. If Priya says I need to be at work, maybe I need to be at work. Perhaps being in the right place at the right time, rather than a puzzle piece jammed into the wrong part of the jigsaw, will help me make sense of what is happening around me.
I make my way back to the station, get on a train into London, and walk the old familiar route I did for four years when I worked at Dobson’s as an administrator, then sneak into the office just after ten and pretend I’ve been there all along.
Priya sends me a thumbs up from her cubicle and I smile weakly back. I want to rush over to her and hug her tight, so glad to see a friendly face in the midst of all this madness, but Janine, the manager from hell, is prowling and I can’t afford getting us both in trouble. I try to get stuck in to what I should be doing, but it’s really hard to concentrate and act as if everything is normal.
It can’treallybe 2014, can it? But when I stop what I’m doing, and look around the office, I see all my old colleagues, looking exactly as they did twelve years ago. I have phone calls and meetings about things I vaguely remember but wouldn’t have been able to recall the details if you’d asked me in 2026.
