The newsagent’s. The wishing machine.
That’s where this started, I’m sure of it. If I can find the machine, maybe I can wish myself back. If that’s really what this is – some supernatural wish fulfilment? But where was it, the newsagent’s? After leaving Dale’s, I remember running in the rain, though I’m not sure how far or in what direction. Getting home from the newsagent’s is a complete blur. Is that because I never made it home, or because it happened sixteen years ago?
Closing my eyes, I try to visualise what I’m looking for – a blue awning, a street name beginning with B; it can’t have been far from the pub, The Falcon? What was it called? I highlight Southwark on my phone then search ‘pubs’. Several dots appear on the screen. The Rising Sun, the Huntsman and Hound, the Falkirk. The Falkirk, that was it. It’s still there.
Following the map, I feel a renewed optimism. Find the pub, find the newsagent’s, wish myself home, and all this will be over – a surreal story to tell my friends in the morning. When I get to the pub, it looks entirely different, it’s now a brutalist black glass and steel box. It must have been demolished and rebuilt but retained the same name. What is it with people demolishing all these perfectly good buildings? Following some instinct, I head down one road, then another. Then in front of me, a familiar street name, Baskin Road, an old red phone box on the corner, a feeling I have been here before. This is the place. Turning onto the street I hold my breath, hoping to see a blue and white awning. But there is nothing – only a building site, bannered ‘Schwarz Construction’, and three or four flattened plots on the side of the street where the newsagent’s would have been. And as quickly as my hopes for a way home were raised, they are dashed to oblivion.
Chapter 8
I’m only a fifteen-minute walk away from Vauxhall, and I don’t know where else to go, except back the way I came. Should I get the return train to Waterloo? Find my way back to this Farnham place? Ask that man I woke up with to help me? As I wander along now familiar streets, I realise I’m already on Kennington Lane. Like a concussed homing pigeon who doesn’t know where else to go, I find myself pausing once more at my front door. In desperation, I press all the buzzers in a last, hopeless bid to be admitted back into my old life. This time a male voice responds. ‘Yes?’
‘Hello?’ I call into the speaker.
‘Who is this?’ asks the voice.
‘It’s Lucy, Lucy Young, I live in flat three – I used to live in flat three.’
‘Hmmmm,’ comes the voice, and it’s a familiar-sounding ‘hmmmmm’. Stinkley?
‘Mr Finkley? Is that you?’
‘It might be,’ he says.
Before this morning, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine a scenario where I was glad to hear Mr Finkley’s voice, but here it is.
‘Oh Mr Finkley, you still live here? I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. Do you remember me? Lucy, I used to live in the flat below, we had the bathroom issue, leaks through the ceiling?’
‘Lots of people have lived below me,’ he says. ‘Lots of them had issues with my bathroom.’
‘Would you let me in? I’m having a strange day and I’d love to see a familiar face.’
There’s a pause, a sigh, then, ‘Are you going to rob me?’
‘No, I’m not going to rob you.’
‘Because I’ve got nothing worth nicking, ’cept my stamps.’
With a buzz and a click, the front door opens before I can offer reassurances about not stealing his stamps. Racing up the stairs two at a time, I pause at the door to flat three – my home for two and a half years. On the floor by the door are a pair of small Wellington boots, a child’s bike, and a mat with ‘Welcome to the Mad House’ written in twirling, cheerful font. I press a hand against the door, as though this proximity to my old life might have some talismanic, calming property. It does not.
Mr Finkley is waiting on the landing above, peering down at me. My first impression is that he hasn’t changed. He has the same angular face, the same gravity-defying hair.
‘I remember you. You gave me the plants.’ Plants?
‘Who lives here?’ I ask, pointing at the door to flat three.
‘A couple with a loud child.’ He narrows his eyes at the door. When I slump back against the wall, sliding down to sit on the floor, he asks, ‘Are you all right?’
‘This is going to sound crazy,’ I say, ‘but yesterday I was twenty-six and living in this flat, then this morning I woke up somewhere else and I’m sixteen years older.’
Mr Finkley nods, as though this is a perfectly normal explanation for why I’m here. He opens his front door and says, ‘You’d better come in then. I don’t have any coffee or tea to offer you, though.’
Mr Finkley’s front room is a riot of greenery. There are plants everywhere. Ceramic pots pepper every surface, hanging baskets overflow with leaves, and there are tendrils of foliage climbing the door frames. Hidden within this jungle are boxes and boxes of junk, piled high around dusty brown furniture. The air smells of wet laundry, moth-eaten carpets, and garden centre.
‘I can offer you water or ham or both,’ he says, moving a plant from the sofa to take a seat opposite me, then picking up a cup, which looks and smells suspiciously like coffee.
‘I’m good, thank you. You have a lot of plants,’ I observe. When I’m nervous, I’m prone to stating the obvious.
‘You started my collection. Don’t you remember?’
‘Me? I’m terrible with plants, and no, I don’t remember anything, that’s kind of why I’m here.’
We sit in silence for a moment. I’m not sure how I expect Mr Finkley of all people to be able to help me, but there is something comforting about sitting with someone who looks and sounds the same as I remember them, someone who is not looking at me like I’m completely deranged.
He frowns. ‘So, you’ve lost a few years.’
I nod. ‘There has to be a logical explanation, but it feels like I jumped ahead somehow,’ I tell him.
‘There’s not always a logical explanation. Some things don’t make sense, like wormholes and nanotechnology.’ He pauses, raising his index finger in the air and peering at me over his coffee cup with unblinking eyes. ‘Did you ask for this? Did you wish your life away?’ His tone is so serious that I find myself bursting into tears.
‘Yes, I think I did,’ I say, and then I’m howling, tears streaming down my face. ‘But I didn’t mean to, I didn’t want to be old, I just wanted to eat croissants and to stop going on terrible dates.’
Mr Finkley stands up and for a moment I’m worried he’s going to try to hug me, but he simply hands me a box of tissues. All the tissues in the proffered box look to have been used and replaced, but I take it to be tactful, then subtly wipe my tear-stained cheeks on my sleeve.