Wrong Place, Wrong Time (12)

Rakesh takes his suit jacket off and drapes it over the back of the dark green armchair Jen has in the corner. A proprietary gesture, but a fitting one, too. Jen and Rakesh have spent almost every weekday lunchtime together for a decade. They buy baked potatoes from a van which calls itself Mr Potato Head. Rakesh collects the loyalty stamps – in the shape of potatoes – all year and, at Christmas, he gets them tons of free ones. He blocks it out in their calendars as CHRISTMAS SPUDDING.

‘What disease would you have if you were in a time loop? As in, what does Bill Murray have in Groundhog Day?’ she asks, thinking it’s been so long since she watched it. ‘I mean – mental illness-wise.’

Rakesh says nothing initially. Just stares at her. Jen feels herself blush with both shame and fear. ‘I would go for … stress,’ he says eventually, steepling his hands together carefully. ‘Or a brain tumour. Er – temporal lobe epilepsy. Retrograde amnesia, traumatic head injury …’

‘Nothing good.’

Rakesh doesn’t answer again, just communicates an expectant, doctorly pause to her across her office.

She hesitates. If tomorrow will be yesterday, does anything matter, anyway? ‘I am pretty sure,’ she says carefully, not looking directly at him, ‘that I woke up on the twenty-ninth of October, then the twenty-eighth again, and now the twenty-seventh.’

‘I’d say you need a new diary,’ he says lightly.

‘But something happened on the twenty-ninth. Todd – he – he commits a crime. The day after tomorrow.’

‘You think you’ve been to the future?’ Rakesh says.

Jen’s fear has simmered down to a kind of burning, low-level panic. She feels exhausted. ‘Do you think I’m mad?’

‘Nope,’ Rakesh says calmly. ‘You wouldn’t ask that if you were.’

‘Well, then,’ Jen says with a sigh. ‘I’m glad I did.’

‘Tell me exactly what happened.’ Rakesh crosses her office and stands closer to her, by her window, which overlooks the high street below. Jen loves that old-fashioned window. She insisted it be openable when she chose this room. In the summer, she feels the hot breeze and hears the buskers. In the winter, the draughts make her cold. It’s nice to be aware of the weather, rather than a sterile eighteen-degree office.

He folds his arms, his wedding ring catching the sunlight. He is looking closely at her, his eyes scanning her face. She is suddenly self-conscious under his gaze, as though he is about to uncover something awful, something deadly. ‘Start at the beginning.’

‘Which is this Saturday.’

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?’