AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He pauses. ‘Okay, then.’ He spreads his hands, like, So be it, his face in the shade of the low sun.
He stands in silence for over a minute when she has finally finished speaking, telling him every detail, even the strange things: the pumpkin, her naked husband. In the anxiety of it, she has lost all dignity, not caring what he thinks of her.
‘So you’re saying today has happened before, and now it is happening again, in mostly the same ways?’ he says incisively, capturing the logic – or otherwise – of Jen’s situation completely.
‘Yes.’
‘So, what did we do? The first time you experienced today? On the first twenty-seventh?’
Jen sits back in her chair. What a smart question. She looks at his face properly for a few seconds. She needs to relax to be able to work this out. She puffs the air from her lungs, eyes closed, for just a second. Something comes to her, drifting from the back of her brain to the front. ‘Do you have weird socks?’ she says. ‘I think – maybe … we might have laughed at your socks when we went for potatoes. Pink.’
Rakesh blinks, then slips the leg of his trousers up. ‘I do indeed,’ he says with a laugh, showing her a pair of cerise socks that say Usher on them. That’s right. He attended a wedding last weekend, got them as a gift.
‘Hardly foolproof, is it?’ she says.
‘Look. It’s stress, probably,’ Rakesh says quickly. ‘You’re coherent. You do know the date. I’d go with something – I don’t know. Anxiety. You’re a bit prone that way anyway, aren’t you? … Or depression can make days feel the same, like you’re getting nowhere … This isn’t psychosis.’
‘Thanks. I hope not.’
‘I mean – I have to say,’ Rakesh says, humour laced through his voice, ‘I have absolutely no fucking idea.’
‘Me neither,’ she says, feeling lighter for having spoken to somebody, nevertheless.
‘Maybe you just got confused,’ he says. ‘Happens to me all the time in small ways. I couldn’t remember driving here the other day. Could not tell you for the life of me which way I went. It isn’t dissociation, is it? It’s life. Get more sleep. Eat some vegetables.’
‘Yeah.’ Jen turns away from his gaze and wrenches up the sash window. It isn’t that. That is forgetfulness. Not this.
And this isn’t stress. Of course it isn’t.
She looks down at Liverpool below her. She’s here. She’s in the here and now. Autumn woodsmoke drifts in. The sun warms the backs of her hands.
‘My friend did something about time travel for his PhD,’ Rakesh says.
‘Did he?’
‘Yes. A study on whether getting stuck in a time loop is possible. I proofread it. He did – what was it?’ Rakesh leans against the wall, arms folded, his suit bunched at the shoulders. ‘Theoretical physics and applied maths. With me – at Liverpool. And then he went on to study … God, something nuts. He’s at John Moore’s now.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Andy Vettese.’ Rakesh reaches into his suit trouser pocket, pulls an open packet of cigarettes out. ‘Anyway. Take these off me, please. I’m slipping back.’
‘Call yourself a doctor,’ Jen says lightly, holding her palm out for the box. She smiles at Rakesh as he turns to leave, but she is thinking about how she really, truly, is here: on Thursday. She feels calmer, having discussed it with somebody she trusts, more able to assess it objectively.
So how has it happened? How did she do it? Is it when she sleeps?
And what does she have to do to get out of it?
She stares down at the battered cigarette box. It must be that she has to change things: to change things in order to stop it. To save Todd, and to get out of it.
‘If I remember, I’ll wear different socks. The next time we meet,’ Rakesh says, with an enigmatic smile, one hand on the doorframe.
He leaves, and she waits a second, then calls out, ‘Quit!’ into the corridor, wanting to change something – anything – for the better. ‘It’s so unhealthy!’
‘I know,’ Rakesh says, his back to her, not turning around.
Jen fires up her computer and begins googling time loops. Why not research them? It’s what any good lawyer would do.
Two scientists, called James Ward and Oliver Johnson, have written a paper on the bootstrap paradox: going back in time to observe an event which, it turns out, you caused. Jen writes this down.
