He stares. “‘Delicious.’ I was going to say ‘delicious.’”
“Thank you,” I say gratefully. “I’m sure they are.”
Turning round, I charge back out of the café before realizing I must have missed a step. Scanning my memories, I check the street. The girl with the hat is nowhere to be seen—I must be a little early—so I wait until I see her in the distance, head down, looking at her phone. That’s probably close enough. Checking the street—yellow door, orange can, a blue sliver of sky, dropped navy glove, red ring around a street sign—I wait a few seconds for another pigeon to flap aggressively, which it does.
I flinch again: fucking pigeons.
“Fur’s not fair! Fur’s not fair! Fur’s not fair!”
Increasingly emotional, I take a deep breath and run as fast as I can around the corner into Regent Street: straight into the heart of the protest. And even though I know it’s coming, even though I’m here on purpose, it still hurts as if every cell in my body has been filled with gasoline and promptly set on fire.
“Fashion has no compassion!” The woman with the purple bowl cut thrusts the same leaflet at me. “A hundred million animals every year—”
I shut my eyes at her closeness: every part of me is now folding inward like a paper airplane.
“Minks are semiaquatic! They—”
Breathe, Cassie. Breathe.
But I can’t: the noise, the crowds, the flares, the colors, the alarms, the whistles, all at once it feels like I’m a million mouths and none of them can speak but all of them are screaming and I’m being swept away again, down the road, carried in the madness and the chaos like a stick in a flooding human river.
“FUR IS DEATH!”
“Fur is death!”
“FUR IS DEATH!”
The invisible scarf is tightening again.
“Head-to-toe electrocution! Foxes get an electrode up their butts. Does that sound fun to you?”
The lights behind my eyelids are flashing.
Just in time, I remember to put my hands in front of my face a second before the red liquid hits me, but it’s still sticky, it’s still smelly, it’s still revolting, I still don’t want it on my skin, and I start crying again even though I knew this was coming, even though I chose to let it happen, even though I wanted it to happen.
Desperately, I search the names of the buildings.
I’m nearly there: I can feel it.
With a shudder of reprieve, I claw and elbow my way out of the crowd toward Bar Humbug, then huddle in the doorway with my arms tightly wrapped over my head. The world starts to flicker in and out, like the waves of darkness that hit just before you disappear every night. It’s coming again and I don’t know what’s going to happen, I don’t know if this is going to work, I don’t understand what it is or how it is, and frankly, I’m no longer sure it matters.
All I know is I’m not doing this day again.
Because, as horrible as it is, it’s also kind of tempting to stick here, in this nothing of a Wednesday: settling into the sameness the way I’ve settled into my grubby little Brixton bedroom. There’s an appeal to the repetition of it, no matter how terrible. I could make this day comfortable and stay, nestled into the monotony and familiarity, content in the knowledge that nothing will ever surprise or shock me again. Zoning out, the way I can listen to the same song on a loop a hundred times until I can’t hear it anymore, until I don’t realize it’s still playing.
Until I don’t even notice that it hasn’t moved on.
But I’m not going to.
I had a plan for my life—laminated and stuck to my bedroom wall—and this wasn’t it. I never intended to end up thirty-one years old, unloved, unemployed and alone, covered in fake blood and curled up in a tight ball on the pavement. At some point in my past something went wrong, so if there’s even a chance I can do it all over again—throw out this life like a first pancake and make another, better one—I have to at least try, don’t I?
According to Sophocles, “time calls only once, and that determines all.” But what if it doesn’t? What if time calls again and again? What if it doesn’t get the message, doesn’t give up, doesn’t let go? What if it’s calling me from the point where it all went wrong, pulling me back there to do it again?
Because if the first page of a book is a lie and all we have are lines drawn in the sand, then that makes time the wave that erases them all.
I’m going to start my story from the beginning.
8
First, though, I’ll need to control time.
It can’t just be rocking up without warning and then pulling me through the cosmos whenever it bloody feels like it. After all, I’ve spent my entire life carefully regulating my environment and everything in it. Temperature. Light. Noise. Food. Textures. Routines. Rules. Emotions. People, especially when they’re running in school corridors. I shape the world into one I can fit into more comfortably, and then ensure nobody touches it or messes it up.
So I’m going to be completely honest here.
Making sure that time behaves properly feels like a skill that is very much in my wheelhouse.
Cautiously, I open one eye.
When am I?
The where is immediately apparent: I’m still curled in a ball inside a doorway on Regent Street, my arms wrapped tightly around my head. Cautiously, I unravel and look down, searching for clues. My watch is still around my wrist, which suggests I have neither looped again nor been stolen from; it also suggests it’s just after 1:00 p.m., which is handy.
Groggily, I assess my hair—still a bob, although I haven’t changed my hair since I was eight, so this proves nothing—and then my hands: adult, which is a relief. Being a teenager is not an experience I particularly want to repeat. With a dazed pat, I look down: work jumpsuit. This is a little disappointing, although I’m not exactly sure why I thought I’d be given a makeover midair, like a kind of space Kylie.
I peer down the road: the protest has gone again.
Evaluating the evidence, it appears that I have moved through time but not through space; I cannot alter my geographical location, or get dressed using my new powers (unfortunate). Is this specific location some kind of magic portal or are my new powers portable? It’s unclear, so that will obviously have to be investigated further.
Full of burgeoning hope, I rise from the (cigarette) ashes.
And that’s when I see it: the Bar Humbug sign, swinging smugly over my head. It opened about six months ago. I remember because they handed me a shot of vodka at lunchtime, which felt both generous and also highly inappropriate.
Then I peer more closely at my jumpsuit: it’s still black.
Fuck.
All the evidence also points to the fact that I’ve just been curled up in a ball on the pavement for just over fifty minutes, going nowhere. Yet I find myself inexplicably shocked. Indignant, actually. In mere hours, I haven’t just adjusted to my ability to defy the laws of physics, I now feel entitled to it. As if not being able to move through time whenever I feel like it is some kind of human rights violation.
Devastated, I wipe my hands on my thighs.
So—that obviously didn’t work.
The problem is that I know exactly where I want to go (or, more specifically, when). There are a million possible moments I would probably return to and change if I could: tiny decisions that have quietly carved my life in the wrong direction, like water running over a rock. Things I shouldn’t have said. Things I shouldn’t have done. Passive-aggressive messages I shouldn’t have left stuck to the front of communal fridges.
But all potential paths lead back to one place, one time, one event.
The moment where my life broke.
Where maybe I broke with it.
So now I know where I’m ideally headed, all I’ve really got to do is work out the mechanism of how to get there. Do I have to fully melt down before time travel is triggered? Is the hedgehog position a requisite? Sobbing uncontrollably? Being covered in blood? If I have to black out every time I want to go anywhere, this is going to get unnecessarily dramatic and also a bit grubby.
Thinking hard, I pull myself to my feet and begin wandering toward Oxford Street: automatically slotting back into my daily ritual like a plastic horse on a merry-go-round. Cheese sandwich on a bench at twelve thirty. Banana muffin and latte at one. Then twenty minutes of wandering around clothes shops in a daze, mindlessly pawing at fabrics and either wincing or kneading them with my eyes shut like a blissed-out cat. Memorizing every item until I can cite them to strangers years later (“Skirt, Mango, spring 2016”). Which would be quite an impressive party trick, I suppose, if I ever went to parties.
Obviously, I need to make a proper plan.
No more of this impulsive nonsense: I need to get the right books, spend a few days on Google, maybe email a few relevant scientists. I’ve already traveled through time once, so I’m positive I can do it again. I just need to figure out how, potentially via some kind of intricate spreadsheet.