Sitting on the floor beside Amy, we play a game of stacking cups. It’s a simple concept that involves me stacking colourful cups on top of one another and Amy knocking them over. The way Amy purses her lips in concentration as she swipes at the cups reminds me of my mum.
‘Hey, Amy, how about we make this more interesting,’ I say, grabbing a pen lid and hiding it under one of the cups. ‘Find the pen lid!’ I say, muddling up the cups. ‘Best of three.’ But Amy doesn’t like this game, she only wants to knock them over. As I’m looking around for something else we can play, Felix appears in the doorway wearing a colander on his head and a body shield made of kitchen foil.
‘Ooh, are we playing knights and dragons?’ I ask.
‘It’s not a game. It’s to protect me from your alien brainwaves.’
‘Right,’ I say slowly. ‘Look Felix, the doctor thinks it’s likely I have temporary memory loss. I’ll probably be myself again tomorrow.’ Whether I believe this or not, it feels like the responsible thing to say to a freaked-out seven-year-old who’s covered himself in several rolls of aluminium foil.
‘What do doctors know about aliens?’ Felix asks, his face puckered in confusion.
‘I’m not an alien. I’m . . . I don’t know what’s happened to me.’
Felix pauses, adjusting the colander as it’s slipped down over his eyes.
‘But you want to go back to where you came from?’ he asks, pointing a wooden spoon towards my chest.
Do I want to go back? Yes, of course I do. However interesting this glimpse of my future life might be, I can’t stay here. Sure, this house is amazing and my job seems incredible and that bookshelf upstairs is beyond dreamy, but I can’t miss the rest of my twenties, my entire thirties; I can’t just be this grown-up version of myself forever.
‘Yes, I do,’ I hear myself telling Felix.
‘Then we need to find the portal,’ he says, sitting cross-legged opposite me on the playroom floor while Amy bangs a doll against the toy basket in an alarmingly violent manner.
‘Portal?’
‘How you got here. What portal did you come through?’ Felix walks across the playroom and takes a science-fiction book from the shelf. He turns to a page and points to a big white hole. ‘Space is too big to travel anywhere by regular rocket, even the massive ones. If you want to travel a long way, you need a portal, or a wormhole, but they’re hard to find.’
‘I already thought of that,’ I admit. ‘I don’t think I came from outer space, I think I might have time-travelled here from the past.’ Something in Felix’s intense expression makes me want to be honest with him now. ‘There was this machine, a wishing machine, in this newsagent’s in London. I made a wish to skip to the good part of my life, and then I woke up here.’
‘That will be it then, that will be the portal!’ Felix says, taking the colander off his head.
‘But it’s gone,’ I tell him.
‘Gone?’
‘I looked for it yesterday. The shop isn’t there any more, it’s a building site.’
Felix slaps his book shut just as Amy falls over and bangs her head on the toy bucket. She starts to howl, so I jump up and try to comfort her. She flails her arms like an angry octopus, her little face puce with pain and frustration.
‘Oh poor Amy, are you okay?’ I ask, trying to distract her with a cuddly toy, but she bats it away.
‘Maybe you were looking in the wrong place,’ Felix suggests.
Amy is still yelling and it’s such an intense sound, I can’t think about anything except making her stop. I try patting her on the head like you’d comfort a dog, but that only aggravates her further.
‘She likes it when you swing her from side to side and blow on her nose,’ Felix says, rolling his eyes. I do as he suggests, and sure enough, Amy immediately calms down enough to let me cuddle her. ‘Or, just because the shop’s gone, it doesn’t mean the machine has gone. They might have moved it. What did it look like?’ Felix jumps from side to side as though preparing for a race.
‘Felix, I looked. It’s gone, and . . .’ I pause, worried about lending too much credence to this portal theory when I don’t even know the truth myself. ‘Just because the wishing machine is the last thing I remember, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a portal.’
Felix looks deflated, and his wooden spoon drops to the floor. ‘But I need my mummy back. I need her help with my school project.’
‘Maybe I can help with your school project? What do you need me to do?’
But before I can coax him further, there’s a warm feeling beneath my hand and an unpleasant smell fills the room.
‘She’s pooed again!’ I say in disgust.
Amy gurgles in response, then says, ‘Poo poo,’ in that cute baby voice that makes it sound charming when it is anything but.
‘She does that a lot,’ Felix tells me, a note of resignation in his voice.
Of all the things I don’t feel equipped to deal with in this brave new world, wiping another human’s bottom is right up there.
Armed with a clothes peg on my nose, washing-up gloves on my hands, and an apron to protect my clothes, I manage to extract Amy from her leggings, dismantle her vile-smelling nappy, and wipe up the mess with copious amounts of wet wipes. Suffice to say, it’s one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever done, and I once sifted through a bag of week-old rubbish at work looking for a ring Melanie thought she’d lost. （It turned out it was in her ring drawer at home.） How do people bring themselves to do this nappy thing, five or six times a day? Do they not realise how gross it is, or do they just get used to it, in the way prisoners must get used to prison food and sleeping with one eye open?
Having triple-bagged the offending stench bomb, I take Amy back to the kitchen, where she immediately starts crying again. ‘Oh, what now?’ I ask her, exasperated. The emotional journey of a toddler looks like one of those balls in a pinball machine: up, down, bam, ping! Happy, sad, bam, ping, laugh, cry, bam, ping! It’s exhausting, and I could really do with some down time, a chance to regroup without anyone crying or needing me to do things.
The doorbell rings. Amy in my arms, I hurry to answer it, but when I open the door, I get such a fright I almost drop her. Hovering at my eye level is a flying robot. It scans my face with a beam of light, like something out of Minority Report, and my first thought is that it’s been sent here to kill me. Ducking for cover, I scream, then throw a protective arm over Amy’s head. But the robot simply drops a small package on the doorstep, then flies away. I turn to see Felix standing behind me in the hall. ‘Why are you screaming?’
‘There was a flying robot!’
‘A delivery drone,’ says Felix, shaking his head. He walks past me to pick up the package from the doorstep and hands it to me. It’s a small Amazon box with ‘Jam and Baby Wipes’ written on the contents label.
‘Oh,’ I say, feeling foolish. ‘I thought it was a bad robot, not a good robot.’
‘You’re so weird,’ says Felix, walking back through to the kitchen.
While I was changing Amy, Felix has set himself up at the kitchen table with a tray full of loo rolls, tissue paper and other craft items. As I unpack the delivery box, he gets up from his chair and hands Amy a soft giraffe from the sideboard. ‘Neckie. He’s her favourite.’