Waves of blackness are starting to slip over my head and somewhere in the distance Grace Kelly finally gets her man to love her for what feels like the trillionth time and the credits begin to roll. Although I can’t help wondering if she should have had to try so hard in the first place: she’s Grace bloody Kelly.
As sleep tugs at my pores, the entire area where Will is touching me suddenly starts to prickle, burn, feel unbearable, trapped, claustrophobic, and that’s it, time’s up, sex is done, no more touching me, please.
As politely as I can, I peel myself off him and shuffle away across the bed, one limb at a time, like a crab.
“Hey.” Will shuffles after me. “Want to go again?”
“Absolutely not,” I say, and pass straight out.
A square, suspended in the air; a line of light; lemons. A dark shadow on the door; blue flickers; something heavy on my legs and material that feels bobbled, confusing, rough, and I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t—
Terrified, I lurch to sitting. Where am I?
Disoriented, I concentrate as hard as I can and try to process the new data while my heart bangs into my fingertips. The square is a window. The line of light is a hallway. The smell is laundry detergent and the shadow is a dressing gown. The blue is a TV screen saver. The lump is white, a sleeping dog, and I’m...in a bedroom. In a bedroom that isn’t mine. In...Will’s house?
“Will?” My voice wobbles. “Is that you?”
“Mmm-hmm.” A hand pats my face. “Sssssshhhh. Gosleep.”
Heart still racing, I lie back stiffly.
This room has the wrong smell, the wrong light, the wrong door, the wrong window. Everything is wrong. Different. My ornaments aren’t here, my books aren’t here, my lamp isn’t here, my plants and owl toy aren’t here; the bathroom’s in the wrong place and if I get up the carpet will feel different under my toes and the sink will be in a different place and the mattress doesn’t feel like my mattress and the duvet is the wrong weight and the pillow is scrunchy and the curtains are the wrong color and I don’t like it I don’t like it I—
I sit bolt upright again. “I want to go home.”
Will stirs. “Hmm?”
My voice is tight. “I want to go home.”
“You want to—” Will wakes up properly now and struggles onto his elbow, blinking at me in the fish screen-saver light. “You want to go home? Cassie, are you okay? Are you sleep-talking? What’s happening?”
“I want to go home,” I say more insistently.
“Cassie.” He turns on the light. “Shit. What’s going on? Talk to me.”
“I want to go home.” Panic is rising, choking, my eyeballs are jittering, my thumbs are held. The room’s all wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong; I wrap my arms around my knees under the duvet and rock, seeking a pattern, a familiarity I can hide in, but I can’t find one, there’s dog hair on the duvet, dog hair on me, the light is wrong, it’s in the wrong place and—“I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home, I—”
I’m looping, trapped: a bumblebee against glass.
“Whoa.” Will gently brushes the hair out of my face and wipes my eyes. “Ssshhhh. Don’t cry, Cassie. Of course you can go home. But can you please tell me why? Did I do something wrong? Can I try to fix it?”
He moves to wrap his arms around me and I jerk away.
“I want to go home,” I cry desperately.
Will pulls away, and as I sob into my knees, I can feel the colors spinning out of me: shame, confusion, fear, guilt, distress, pain, humiliation, all the many, many bloody reasons that I do not stay at other people’s houses.
Like a tide receding, I gradually feel my sobs start to quieten, my body still.
And as my own colors fade, I can suddenly see Will’s.
He’s looking at me as if he went to bed with Lamia, the beautiful Libyan queen, and woke up with Lamia, the disfigured demon who ate little children. And it doesn’t matter that it wasn’t her fault. Lamia transformed into something unrecognizable, so that’s how everyone saw her. It always happens. Always. Little by little, something inside me comes to the surface and drives everyone away.
I have to undo this.
I cannot let Will look at me as if I’m someone else.
When I open my eyes, Will is fast asleep.
I watch him for a few minutes: studying the lovely lines of his resting, slightly dribbling face. He looks so peaceful. So happy. So completely unaware that in another timeline, in another universe, he’s about to be woken up by a woman he’s just had sex with for the first time, bawling and begging for home like a tiny child at their very first sleepover.
(“Cassandra can be worryingly immature and childish.”)
With a bolt of overwhelming sadness, I lean over and stroke Will’s cheek.
“Mmm-hmm.” He pats my face. “Sssssshhhh. Gosleep.”
Because it’s only now starting to hit me that what I’m doing might not be...right. Good. Ethical. Am I manipulating Will? Am I simply using time travel to control him? Am I using my prophetic skills for evil, like Ouranos, the sky grandfather who learned that his children would one day overthrow him and so immediately ate them?
Now the sadness is shifting, changing, but I can’t tell into what.
(“Cassandra can be incredibly selfish.”)
Am I just bad?
(“Cassandra is prone to self-absorption.”)
Is this why I’m alone?
(“Cassandra is a difficult person to warm to.”)
Because all I know is that I want to be with Will, I want to love him, I want him to love me—I think maybe he could—but he chose not to. In another version of this universe, he made a conscious decision not to be with me.
Twice.
And I’m trying to make him be with me anyway.
“Will?” I say as my throat abruptly closes. “I’m so sorry.”
He stirs. “Mmm?”
“Nothing.”
Stiff as a board, I lie back in the bed with my arms by my sides, which is how I really sleep when I’m not pretending to look bendy and casual: like a vampire, but without a pillow. And as I lie there, touching nothing and nobody—a jigsaw piece with the edges sanded down—I suddenly realize: I’m not traveling through time to undo the things I’ve done wrong or the decisions I’ve made.
I am trying to undo myself.
23
I am also not using time travel properly.
Stiff as a celery stick, I lie wide awake until 7:00 a.m.—just in case the humiliation happens again—then make Will a cup of coffee, kiss his cheek gently, leave the mug on his bedside table and make my way back to my house to get ready for work. Even in my tiredness, I cannot help but feel that somewhere out there is a brilliant scientist who would be saving the world with these abilities, or at the very least carrying a spare change of clothes.
“Well, well, well.”
Exhausted, I shut the door of the Brixton flat behind me, hang my bag on its little hook and wonder who says well, well, well other than cartoon villains with their fingertips pressed together. The trains were packed, people kept touching me, so I instinctively kept rewinding thirty seconds just to get away from them without making a fuss, and it effectively doubled my journey time. Now I can move through space too, I probably need to work out how to navigate London without using the Underground at all. Technically, I could just go back to the last time I was in a specific place, but I can’t figure out how to do that without erasing everything that’s happened in the interim.
“Good mor—” I turn round. “Oh, fuck me.”
Derek is leaning against the kitchen door frame, eating a bowl of cereal. The only thing separating him from a naked statue of Apollo is a tiny pair of blue Y-fronts and the absence of a laurel wreath or a lyre.
“Looks like somebody already has.” He grins, shoveling more Coco Pops into his mouth. “Where have you been, you dirty little stop-out? Don’t stare at my penis, Cassie. It’s generally considered poor form.”
Flushing, I drag my eyes away and stare at the ceiling pendant.
“Must have been a good night,” Derek continues, and his eyes feel like fingertips. Crunch. Crunch. “I didn’t know you had it in you, Cassandra. Although it looks like you did. More than once, judging by the state of your hair.”
I open my mouth in shock and shut it again.
“Hey.” He chuckles lightly as I quickly do up the button of my denim jacket. Crunch. “I’m just joking, Dankworth. Banter, you know? You don’t need to look quite so appalled. I’m not a predator or anything. I’m just playing around.”
Breathing out, I try my hardest to make eye contact.
My pupils briefly connect with Derek’s and—with an almost audible crack—unbearable pain shoots through them to the back of my head, then bounces down into the rest of my body like a pinball: ricocheting off every single organ on its way down.
Nope. Can’t do it. I’d rather shoot myself in the head.
Defeated, I look away again.
“Umm.” I take a small step forward. “I need to get changed for work.”
Derek laughs but remains blocking the doorway, so I calculate my next move. My bedroom is on the other side of him, so I’m going to have to get past him somehow, like Oedipus and the goddamn Sphinx. Holding my breath, I carefully manage to inch past him by doing a three-point turn, as if I’m trying to maneuver a sofa.
“Do I make you nervous, Cassie?” Derek follows me into the kitchen.