It’ll be so nice to ditch this bulging suitcase and hit the shops.
Wheeling my luggage up to the desk, I’m about to greet the airline operative when my smile turns to stone. There, at the desk, is a carbon copy of the person who was very grumpy about my heavy suitcase in my sleep. My wide eyes track down to his name tag.
It’s Alan.
I stare, dumbfounded, as the exact same airline operative gives me the exact same withering look.
‘Just inside the weight limits,’ he says.
I can’t reply. I cast around, staggered.
‘That’s going to need a heavy weight sticker,’ adds Alan. It’s another direct echo and I watch in stunned silence as he proceeds to sigh loudly, find a bright ‘bend your knees’ sticker and attach it to my bag.
What’s going on? A crumpled egg sandwichandan angrycheck-in person in quick succession. The parallels are creeping me out. It’s like last night’s dream is being reflected back at me in the water, like I’m somehow living through it again.
I take my passport back in silence, an unsettling feeling seeping into my bones.
Something seems off, I decide, as I hear Alan bark out the word ‘next’.
Something seems too familiar.
In the queue for the security check, I overhear someone saying we’ve got a thirty-minute wait. I pull out my phone and my stomach plummets when I spot an email titled ‘GO GET ’EM, TIGER’ from Kat in my inbox. I open it instantly, urgently scanning through the text for something,anythingdifferent.
But it quickly becomes clear that I am reading the exact same message, Kat’s words echoing what I already know to be true.
With a huge sense of unease, I race through the email. Callum Bang will be joining me for this actual trip to Australia today. Cross and confused (not a great combination) my brain scrambles to make sense of what’s happening.
This can’t just be déjà vu, can it? I’ve experienced that sense of familiarity in the unfamiliar before and it has always been fleeting, temporary. By the time you feel like you’ve lived a moment already, that sensation has gone again. I once read that it is something to do with different parts of your brain being temporarily out of sync. This is definitely not fleeting.
Now that I think about it, I’ve been feeling this way all morning. From the trip on the Underground, and the vague notion that I recognized those passengers, to my irritation that I’d downloaded a podcast I’d already listened to. Had I heard that in my dream last night, too?
I’m also wearing the same clothes, I realize anxiously, although that’s perhaps less surprising as I had already laid them out last night.
Whatisweird is that my body feels compelled to go through the motions of last night’s reverie, too. It’s like I’m on autopilot. I find myself calling Kat as soon as I’m through security, trying to persuade her not to let Callum join me on this trip. I hear my boss’s words on the other end of the line, swirling together in an unsettling reverberation of things I’ve already heard her say before.
‘I know that you and Cal don’t get along.’
‘That weird atmosphere after the Christmas party.’
‘I want you to be best friends. Sympatico.’
‘Capiche.’
My head is both cold and clammy as I hang up. I pace around the shops in duty-free with the distinct impression that I’m looking in a mirror. It goes above and beyond a familiarity in the things I see, like the expensive chocolates in Harrods. It’s the people in this airport, too. I’ve seen these strangers before. The way they move through the space, the clothes they wear, the sounds they make. I gape at everything and everyone in my line of vision and am struck again by the sensation that I’m looking into a pool of water, staring at a Monday I have already lived reflected back at me.
A shimmering, glassy reprint.
That’s when it hits me like a sucker punch.
I have been here before.
That wasn’t a dream, it can’t have been. There’s no way I could have dreamed an exact carbon copy of my journey to Heathrow, could I?
Engulfed by the feeling that I’m bottoming out, I sink to the floor right there outside Harrods.
I didn’t wake up this morning.
I woke upyesterday.
