Day Minus Two, 08:30

Day Minus Two, 08:30

Jen wakes up, sweat gathered across her chest. Her phone is lying on the bedside table, but she doesn’t check it. A perverse impulse to keep hope alive resides within her.

She pulls on Kelly’s dressing gown, still damp in places from his shower, and heads downstairs. The wooden floors are lit up by the sun, glossy with it. The honey light warms her toes and then her feet as she steps forwards.

Please don’t let it be Friday again. Anything but that.

She peers into the kitchen, hoping to see Kelly. But it’s empty. Tidy, too. The counters clear. She blinks. The pumpkin. It isn’t here. She walks into the kitchen, then spins around uselessly, just looking. But it’s nowhere. Maybe it’s Sunday. Maybe it’s over.

She brings her phone out of the dressing-gown pocket, holds a breath, then checks it.

It is the twenty-seventh of October. It is the day before the day before.

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.’

‘Me neither,’ she says, feeling lighter for having spoken to somebody, nevertheless.

‘Maybe you just got confused,’ he says. ‘Happens to me all the time in small ways. I couldn’t remember driving here the other day. Could not tell you for the life of me which way I went. It isn’t dissociation, is it? It’s life. Get more sleep. Eat some vegetables.’

‘Yeah.’ Jen turns away from his gaze and wrenches up the sash window. It isn’t that. That is forgetfulness. Not this.

And this isn’t stress. Of course it isn’t.

She looks down at Liverpool below her. She’s here. She’s in the here and now. Autumn woodsmoke drifts in. The sun warms the backs of her hands.

‘My friend did something about time travel for his PhD,’ Rakesh says.

‘Did he?’

‘Yes. A study on whether getting stuck in a time loop is possible. I proofread it. He did – what was it?’ Rakesh leans against the wall, arms folded, his suit bunched at the shoulders. ‘Theoretical physics and applied maths. With me – at Liverpool. And then he went on to study … God, something nuts. He’s at John Moore’s now.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Andy Vettese.’ Rakesh reaches into his suit trouser pocket, pulls an open packet of cigarettes out. ‘Anyway. Take these off me, please. I’m slipping back.’

‘Call yourself a doctor,’ Jen says lightly, holding her palm out for the box. She smiles at Rakesh as he turns to leave, but she is thinking about how she really, truly, is here: on Thursday. She feels calmer, having discussed it with somebody she trusts, more able to assess it objectively.

So how has it happened? How did she do it? Is it when she sleeps?

And what does she have to do to get out of it?

She stares down at the battered cigarette box. It must be that she has to change things: to change things in order to stop it. To save Todd, and to get out of it.

‘If I remember, I’ll wear different socks. The next time we meet,’ Rakesh says, with an enigmatic smile, one hand on the doorframe.

He leaves, and she waits a second, then calls out, ‘Quit!’ into the corridor, wanting to change something – anything – for the better. ‘It’s so unhealthy!’

‘I know,’ Rakesh says, his back to her, not turning around.

Jen fires up her computer and begins googling time loops. Why not research them? It’s what any good lawyer would do.

Two scientists, called James Ward and Oliver Johnson, have written a paper on the bootstrap paradox: going back in time to observe an event which, it turns out, you caused. Jen writes this down.

To enter into a time loop, they say you would need to create a closed timelike curve. They provide a physics formula. But, helpfully, they break it down underneath. It seems to happen when a huge force is exerted on the body. Ward and Johnson think the force would have to be stronger than gravity to create a time loop.

She scrolls down. The force would need to be one thousand times her body weight.

She sinks her head into her hands. She doesn’t understand a single word of this. And one thousand times her weight is … a lot. She breaks into a grim smile. An amount not worth contemplating.

She goes back to Google and clicks – desperately – on an article called ‘Five Easy Tips to Escape a Time Loop’. Is this just – is this a thing? There truly is something for everybody on the internet. The five tips are mixed: find out why, tell a friend and get them to loop with you (sure), document everything, experiment … and try not to die.

The last one unsettles Jen. She hadn’t thought of it at all. Something eerie seems to arrive in the room as she thinks of it. Try not to die. What if that’s where this is headed? Some place even darker than that first night, some maternal sacrifice, bargaining with the gods.

She switches off her monitor. There must be a way to make Kelly believe her: her biggest ally, her lover, her friend, the man she is her most silly, unpretentious self with. She will try to prove it to him. And then he can help her.

Her trainee, Natalia, walks by, wheeling a trolley of lever-arch files past Jen’s office that Jen has already seen arrive once before. She is about to steer the trolley accidentally into the closed doors of the lift. Jen closes her eyes as she hears the thump for the second time.

She’s got to get out of here.

Ten minutes later, she’s smoked four of Rakesh’s cigarettes outside the back of the building herself, health be damned.

She knows, deep down, somewhere she can’t name, that it’s her job, isn’t it? To stop the murder. To figure out why it happens, and to prevent it.

As though the universe agrees with her, it begins to rain as she’s finishing her fifth cigarette. Huge, fat drops that turn the air frigid.

Jen is slumped, back on the blue kitchen sofa. She left work early. Shouldn’t taking the knife have stopped the murder, and therefore ended the time loop?

Is there an alternative reality where it still happened? Is there another Jen, one who didn’t go backwards, but who is still moving forwards?

Todd is out. With friends, he said, the same as last time; more short texts, more distance between them.

Jen is googling Andy Vettese. He is indeed a professor in the department of physics at Liverpool John Moore’s University. He is easy to find. On LinkedIn, on the university’s own page, and he runs a Twitter account called @AndysWorld, his email address in his bio. She could write to him.

She sits up as she hears the front door.

‘Can’t stop,’ Todd barks, bursting into the kitchen in a blur of cold air and teenage movement, disturbing Jen’s hesitation over a message box.

‘Okay,’ she says. It isn’t what she said last time. Last time, she asked if there was a reason why he never wanted to be at home.

She’s surprised to see the softer approach works.

‘Been to Connor’s, now off to Clio’s,’ Todd explains, meeting her eyes. He bounces from foot to foot as he fiddles with a portable phone charger, full of verve, full of the optimism of somebody for whom life truly is only just beginning. Not the behaviour of a killer, Jen finds herself thinking.

Connor. Pauline’s eldest. There is something about him that Jen isn’t quite sure of. Some edge to him. He smokes and he swears – both things Jen does, from time to time – but, nevertheless, both offensive when seen through the ruthless lens of motherhood.

She props herself up on her elbow, looking at Todd. She missed him coming home, the last time. She’d been at work.

A case had taken over, for the last few weeks, meaning Jen had missed more of her home life than usual. She is often this way when a big ancillary relief case is heading to trial. The neediness and heartbreak of her clients invades Jen’s already poor boundaries, leading her to take constant calls and practically sleep at the office.

Gina Davis was the client who had kept Jen busy during October, but not for the usual reasons. She had walked into Jen’s office for the first time in the summer, with a divorce petition from her husband, who’d left her the week before.

‘I want to stop him ever seeing the kids again,’ Gina said. She had curled her blonde hair carefully, worn an immaculate skirt suit.

‘Why?’ Jen had said. ‘Is there some concern?’

‘No. He’s a great father.’

‘Okay …?’

‘To punish him.’

She was thirty-seven, heartbroken and angry. Jen felt an immediate kinship with her, the kind of woman who doesn’t hide her emotions. The kind of woman who speaks the taboo. ‘I just want to hurt him,’ she said to Jen.

‘I can’t charge you for this,’ Jen had said. It wasn’t the right thing to do, she thought, to profiteer off this. Soon enough, Gina would come to her senses and stop.

‘So do it for free,’ Gina said, and Jen had. Not because her late father’s firm didn’t need the money, but because Jen knew, eventually, that Gina would drop it, accept the decree nisi, accept the residency split, and move on. But it hadn’t happened yet, not after Jen told Gina to go away and think about it over the summer, and advised against it in the many meetings during the autumn. They’d chatted, too, about all sorts – their kids, the news, even Love Island. ‘Gross but compelling,’ Gina had said, while Jen laughed and nodded.

Jen looks at Todd now and wonders, suddenly, if he’s in love, like Gina is. Wonders who this Clio really is to him. What she means. The madness of first love cannot be overlooked, surely, given what he does in two days’ time.

Jen has not met Clio. After Gemma dumped him over the summer, Todd became automatically secretive about his love life, embarrassed, Jen thinks, that it didn’t last. Embarrassed about that evening when he’d showed her all those unanswered texts.

Just as he’s getting ready to go out again, he glances, just once, at the front door. It isn’t a quick, curious glance. It’s something else. Some wariness, like he’s expecting somebody to be there, like he’s nervous. Jen never would have noticed it had she not been scrutinizing him. It’s so quick, his expression clearing almost immediately.

‘What’s that?’ Todd says, looking back at her and gesturing to her screen.

‘Oh, I was just reading this interesting thing. About time loops, you know?’

‘Love that,’ Todd says. He’s gelled his hair upwards in a kind of quiff, has on a retro-looking snooker shirt. He’s recently into it, says he likes the maths of potting the balls. Jen looks at him, her damningly handsome son.

‘What would you do – if you were caught in one?’ she asks him.

‘Oh, it’s almost always about some tiny detail,’ Todd says casually.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know, the butterfly effect. One tiny thing to change the future.’ Todd reaches down to stroke the cat and, just for a second, looks like a child again. Her boy who believes unquestioningly in time loops. Perhaps she will tell him. See what he says.

But, for now, she can’t. If this is really, truly, happening, it is Jen’s job to stop the murder. To figure out the events leading up to it, and to intervene. And then, one day, when she manages that, she will wake up, and it won’t be yesterday.

And so that is why she doesn’t tell Todd.

He leaves, and Jen checks that nobody is waiting for him, or following him. And then Jen follows him herself.