Blood pounds in her forehead, hot and stretched, like somebody’s turned a heater on. She must be mad – she must be. The pumpkin isn’t here because it hasn’t yet been purchased by her.
Apparently, it is Thursday, eight thirty in the morning. Todd will be on his way to school. Kelly will be at Merrilocks. And Jen – Jen should be at work. She looks out at their garden, the grass gilded by the early-morning sun. She makes and gulps a coffee that only jangles her nerves further.
If she’s right, tomorrow will be Wednesday. Then Tuesday. And then what? Backwards for ever? She’s sick again, this time into the kitchen sink, spewing up sweet black coffee, panic and incomprehension. Afterwards, she rests her head briefly on the ceramic edge and makes a decision. She needs to talk to someone who understands her: her oldest friend and colleague, Rakesh.
The street outside Jen’s work is often blustery, caught in a wind tunnel in Liverpool city centre. The October air gusts her coat up and around her thighs like a bawdy dancer’s. Later, it will begin to rain, huge, fat drops that turn the air frigid.
Jen had wanted to live closer to town, but Crosby was as close as Kelly said he’d get. He hates the noise of cities, doesn’t like the mess, the bustle. Also Scousers, except you, he had said once, she thinks in jest. Kelly left his hometown behind when he met Jen. Both parents dead, his schoolfriends all wasters, he says, he hardly goes back. The only connection he has to it is an annual camping trip with old friends, on the Whitsun weekend. He’d wanted to live out in the wilderness, he said, but she made him move back to Crosby, with her. ‘But the suburbs are full of people,’ he’d said. He is often this way. Dark humour crossed with cynicism.
She pushes open the warm glass door, the foyer ablaze with sunlight, and heads down the corridor to Rakesh’s. Rakesh Kapoor – her biggest ally, and long-time friend – was a doctor before he became a lawyer. Ludicrously overqualified, logical to a fault. Jen thinks he’s the kind of man Todd might become. The thought hits her with a wave of sadness.
She finds him in the kitchen, stirring sugar into a tea. The kitchen is a small, soulless dark purple space with a stock image on the wall of a sunset. Jen remembers her father choosing this burgundy colour when they took the lease here three years ago, eighteen months before he died. The paint had been called Sour Grapes. ‘Perfect for a law-firm foyer,’ Jen had said, and her father – usually serious – had exploded into sudden, beautiful laughter.
Rakesh greets her with only a raise of his dark eyebrows and a lift of his full mug. He, like Jen, is not a morning person. ‘Do you have a minute?’ she says. Her voice trembles in fear. He’ll never believe her. He’ll cart her off somewhere, section her. But what else can she do?
‘Sure.’ She leads him down the corridor and back to her office, where she perches on the edge of her messy desk. Rakesh hovers in the doorway but closes the door when he sees her hesitate. His bedside manner is excellent. Kind but jaded, he favours sweater vests and poorly fitting suits. He left medicine because he didn’t like the pressure. He says law is worse, only he doesn’t want to leave a second career. They became friends the day she hired him, when, in his interview, he said his biggest professional weakness was office doughnuts.
Jen’s office faces east and is lit with morning sun. One wall is lined with haphazard files in pink, blue and green, their ends sun-bleached – a sure sign they ought to be archived, something Jen finds far less interesting than seeing clients.
‘How do you feel about giving a medical consult?’ she asks Rakesh with a small laugh, followed by a deep breath.
‘Unqualified?’ he says lightly, as quick as ever.
‘Your disclaimer is safe with me.’
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.’