I freeze.
I am motionless, fixed, suspended in the sky. Then, with a sudden rush, it feels like I’m falling: Icarus plummeting toward the sea with hot, molten wings; Daedalus, watching him. In slow motion, I cross the room and pick up my watch from my bedside table. For a few seconds, I stare at it. Faded blue strap, decade-old leather fraying, tiny gold second hand moving.
Ears numb, I turn it over:
“Time, as it grows old, teaches all things.”
—Mum and Dad x
A sudden memory: unwrapping the curled green ribbon from the box, warmth of restaurant candles, the whole family laughing because I said it looked like my parents were claiming an Aeschylus quote for themselves.
“What’s going on?” Will asks as I carefully slide it on and fasten it in its normal hole. My eyes abruptly fill. I thought my watch was gone. I thought it was stolen when I blacked out in central London. I thought I’d never see my sixteenth-birthday gift from my parents ever again. The pressure around my wrist feels familiar and reassuring; something loose inside me settles.
“I lost this,” I say quietly, wiping my eyes and looking around as the room starts to warp. “Yesterday. But now it’s...back again.”
Almost as if it never left.
Almost as if it wasn’t yesterday.
“Stop lying to me!” The kitchen door slams into the wall. “I saw the shitting text message pop up on your screen!”
“Sal,” Derek whimpers outside my room. “I was just being—”
“If you say friendly again, I will rip your dick off and use it as dental floss,” I whisper as a series of tiny, imaginary cold fingertips run up and down my spine.
“If you say friendly again,” Sal bellows a fraction of a moment later, “I will rip your dick off and use it as dental floss!”
My bedroom smells of death and potatoes.
“Fish and chips.”
“Yeah.” Will nods, now visibly confused. “Your flatmates are delivery-food aficionados.”
World contorting as if I’m locked inside a telescope, I stare down at my watch again.
“It’s Wednesday again,” I say calmly. “Isn’t it.”
What’s strange is that small changes upset me immensely and always have done. A tree trimmed outside my house, the reorganization of a supermarket aisle, a new haircut, an updated app format. I cried for hours when they “new and improved” the recipe for the mashed potato I eat every Monday night.
But the big stuff?
The deaths, the tragedies, the life-changing shifts that rock everyone else to their core? That’s when I’m cool, calm and collected. It’s why I had to give three speeches at my own parents’ funeral, and also—I’m assuming—why I heard my great-uncle Joseph call me an “empty robot” under his breath when I sat back down again.
I don’t understand it, but there’s just something in me that knows how to stand still when the earth shatters.
“Yes,” Will confirms. “It’s Wednesday. What—”
“And we’ve never done any of this before,” I continue, staring at the line of light piercing the curtains: the same bounce of dust particles as yesterday. “We’ve never eaten in that awful themed restaurant before. You’ve never taken a job with pangolins before. You’ve never dumped me before.”
“Of course not.” Will looks untethered for the first time since I’ve known him. “Why would I break up with anyone repeatedly, Cass? This is distressing enough once.”
With an almost hypnotically Zen-like sense of calm, I walk over to the wastepaper basket and tip it up. There should be two black socks in there, and there’s only one. There should also be two identical ripped pink envelopes in there, and there aren’t. There’s just one, with the curly handwritten word Cass, torn in half.
I went to work yesterday in a black jumpsuit; I came home in a navy one.
And now I’m not falling anymore; I know.
My phone rings.
“Hello?” I say in a flat voice. “Cassandra speaking.”
“Don’t you flaming hello Cassandra speaking me,” my boss screams melodiously down the phone. “It’s nine thirty-five in the morning—why the balls aren’t you at work?”
6
It’s completely impossible.
There’s no other way to put it: I am Psyche, arranging her seeds into piles; I am Heracles, slaying the Nemean lion; I am Theseus, navigating a labyrinth designed to be lost in. I am doing what is not supposed to be possible, and yet it appears that I am doing it anyway.
But I tell Will we can talk about it later.
Even though—as I climb into yet another Uber—I’m no longer sure there’s going to be one.
“There she is! How are you, sweetheart?”
My boss is standing in reception, so it might be time to describe him now: a portly man in his late forties called Barry Fawcett, with the belligerent, farty air of a bulldog (even though everyone knows that bulldogs are friendly, so this is an unfair comparison). He has also never—not in the entire ten months and three days I’ve been working here—called me sweetheart, so I can infer from this abrupt shift in vocabulary that he’s very angry indeed.
“How am I?” I say blankly. “Stuck in a time loop, Barry. Cheating the laws of time and space, but unable to elaborate further at this point.”
With a surreal sensation, I turn toward my clients.
Jack Burbank is the CEO of a “men’s boutique skin-care company”—tall, chiseled, blond hair like a Ken doll with highlights. Gareth Wilson (head of marketing) is similar but slightly less tall, less chiseled and less blond, like they ran out of Jacks but kept drawing them anyway.
“How’s your mum, Cassandra?” Jack leans forward and gently rubs the top of my arm as if he’s spicing up a chicken breast. “Barry was just explaining that she’s ill, which is why you’re an hour and a half late for our important meeting today. Something about an immovable hospital visit?”
Why does sympathy always involve so much touching?
“My mother is dead, Jack.” I step out of his reach. “Has been for a decade, so whatever you’ve been told was a tasteless lie, I’m afraid.”
Gareth and Jack glance at each other.
“Well.” Barry clears his throat: the vivid purple is starting to prickle again. “I must have got it mixed up, Cassandra. Your grandmother, perhaps?”
“Also deceased,” I inform him. “I have no close family or friends, and you should probably know that already, Barry, given that my emergency contact is my hairdresser.”
On one level, I’m freaking out. I’ve already had this exact meeting. Gareth and Jack were wearing precisely the same clothes they are wearing now; I updated them on the terrible campaign results; they said wow and then went into Barry’s office—and I should not know this, because that’s just not how time or knowledge or days of the week or meetings work. Admittedly, I’m not a scientist, but I feel like that’s basic entry-level physics.
But, on another level, there’s a lot to be said for repetition, and I think I might actually understand what’s going on around me for the first time in my entire life. It’s not an entirely unpleasant sensation. Maybe this is how other people feel all the time; some of us just need a dress rehearsal first.
While my clients process this information, I look curiously around the office. The watercooler is still dripping, bagels are paused—hanging in midair while my colleagues watch the drama play out—and the radiator continues to gurgle. Sophie’s fluffy ginger head pops up briefly over her computer screen like a gopher and disappears again.
“Well.” Barry scratches one of his jowls so it sways dramatically. “That’s... Perhaps we should just start the meeting?”
“Tell him,” I say, turning abruptly to Gareth and Jack.
“Sorry?”
“Tell him that you’ve replaced this agency already. Tell him that you’re firing us today and you were going to whether I was late or not.”
Another glance. “We don’t know what you’re—”
“They don’t like me.” I turn to Barry. “They’re unhappy with the way I’ve handled their product launch, but mostly they don’t like me as a human, so they’re firing us. I am relentlessly grating. Unlikable. Have I remembered the phrasing correctly?”
Jack’s face becomes enjoyably blotchy. “I haven’t said that.”
“You will,” I inform him, looking at my watch. “In about ten minutes. Then I say I don’t really like you that much either and then you leave and I get fired because Barry has absolutely had it with my shitty attitude.”
There’s joy in irony and I was named after Cassandra, the mythological Trojan priestess who was cursed by a sexually thwarted Apollo to see the future but never be believed. A strange legacy for any parent to give a tiny baby, but thirty-one years later, it seems I finally know more than anyone else in the room.
“Is this true?” Barry stops fawning. “Are you firing us?”