The Good Part(17)

Four minutes later, I’m sitting in a window seat on my way to London. Safe, familiar, glorious London. The train carriage feels reassuring – same ugly seat covers, same faint smell of bleach and overflowing bins. I imagined trains in the future would look like those slick bullet trains they have in Japan. So either the rail network is still chronically underfunded, or I’m not in the future after all. Then I remember the events of this morning and my body gives an involuntary shiver.

Pulling out my phone, I try Zoya’s number again. It still won’t connect. As I’m contemplating who else to try, ‘Office’ flashes on my screen. Then an alert from Fit Fun Fabulous informs me my heart rate and stress levels are higher than normal. Would I like to engage in a guided deep breathing exercise? No, I would not. I push the phone to the bottom of my bag and turn to look out of the window, focusing on the trees and houses zipping by. I just need to get home, back to my bed, go to sleep and wake up from whatever this is. Train, home, sanity. Train, home, sanity. I repeat the words in my head like a mantra. If I start to think about anything else, like how I got here, or where and when here is, my brain is liable to implode.





Chapter 7


London doesn’t look like I remember it. There are no ticket barriers at Waterloo, just gateways that let out a low ping when you walk through. There is a new brightness to the concourse, and when I look up, I see the vaulted ceiling has gone and there is only blue sky above us. This feels architecturally impossible, and then I notice advertising banners flying across the sky, which makes me think it must be a giant screen or projection. At my feet, there’s a purring noise, and I look down to find a sleek Roomba-style machine polishing the concourse floor. This all feels too detailed to be a dream. I can’t stop to think about what it all means, I just need to get home.

But home doesn’t look like I remember it either. When I emerge into daylight at Vauxhall station and walk beneath the bridge onto Kennington Lane, everything feels subtly different. The yellow and white road markings are gone, replaced by shimmering electronic markers that change with the traffic lights. Our beloved Vauxhall Tavern has been torn down, and there is a column of shiny glass-fronted flats where the pub should stand. How can they have torn down the Vauxhall Tavern? It’s an institution, a London landmark. If I didn’t have more pressing priorities, I would write a sternly worded email to my MP. I start to run, desperate to see if my flat is still there, to find out if my former life has been completely erased. All I want to do is crawl back into my damp, uncomfortable bed and for this whole hallucination to be over.

Thankfully, number eighty-three is still standing. The building looks unchanged, if a little worse for wear. A small sign on the placard next to the third-floor buzzer reads ‘Graham’, rather than ‘ZoLu JuEm’, but I buzz anyway. There’s no reply and I clench my hands around the door frame. It’s as though everything I have seen so far, I can rationalise as a delusion, but my flat, my home, the place I went to sleep – if that’s not there, then . . . then what? I should call Emily. Emily is always home. On my phone, there are now three missed calls from ‘Office’. Emily picks up after two rings.

‘Hello?’

‘Emily, oh Emily, thank God. Something completely insane has happened, I really need your help. Are you at home?’

‘At home?’ she repeats. ‘Who is this?’

‘It’s Lucy. Lucy Young.’

‘Oh, Lucy. Hi.’ Why doesn’t she have my number in her phone?

‘Look, Em, this is going to sound insane, but I think I’ve travelled through time. Either that or I’m having a full-on psychotic delusion. I need to get into the flat.’

‘Right,’ she says slowly, in that way people talk to children or men wielding knives.

‘Yesterday we were flatmates in Vauxhall, berating old Stinkley upstairs. You’d just slept with someone called Ezekiel or Zebadiah, something like that. Do you remember?’

Emily makes a strained ‘hmmm’ sound.

‘Then today, I woke up in some random house in Surrey with a husband and two children.’ I say it with a little laugh, to illustrate how crazy I know I must sound.

‘Right,’ she says again, then after another long pause. ‘Have you taken drugs, Lucy? Where are you?’

‘No, not that I know of, and I’m outside the flat, our flat. I just told you.’

There’s a beep on the screen; she’s requested to switch our call to video. I click accept and Emily’s face fills the screen, only she looks nothing like the Emily I know. Her red dreadlocks are gone, replaced by a sleek bob. Instead of her usual dungarees, she appears to be wearing a collared shirt and a grey suit jacket. She looks like Shiv from Succession.

‘Emily?’ is all I can say.

‘I needed to look you in the eye, to see if you were joking or high,’ she says, and as she holds my gaze, her face softens. ‘If it’s neither of those things, then it sounds like you need to see a doctor, Lucy. Have you had a knock to the head?’

‘I don’t think so, but maybe.’ I pause. ‘I know it sounds nuts, but it feels more like an intensely realistic hallucination . . . or . . . or time travel.’

‘Right,’ she says again, her voice loaded with scepticism.

‘You look so different from how I remember,’ I say. ‘What happened to your dreadlocks?’