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 again. He said he was with friends, just like last time—short texts, more distance growing between them.
Jen is googling Andy Vettese. Sure enough, he’s a professor in the physics department at Liverpool John Moores University. He’s easy to find—on LinkedIn, on the university’s website, and even on Twitter with the handle @AndysWorld. His email is in his bio. She could reach out to him.
She sits up as she hears the front door open.
“Can’t stay,” Todd calls out, rushing into the kitchen in a blur of cold air and teenage energy, interrupting Jen as she hesitates over her message.
“Okay,” she replies. It’s not what she said last time. Last time, she’d asked why he never seemed to want to be home.
She’s surprised to see the softer approach works.
“Was at Connor’s, now heading to Clio’s,” Todd explains, meeting her eyes. He bounces from foot to foot, fiddling with a portable phone charger, full of energy and the optimism of someone whose life is just beginning. Not the behavior of a killer, Jen thinks to herself.
Connor. Pauline’s eldest. There’s something about him that unsettles Jen. He has an edge—he smokes, he swears—things Jen does herself occasionally, but still, they seem more offensive when seen through a mother’s eyes.
She props herself up on her elbow, watching Todd. She’d missed him coming home last time; she was at work.
A case had taken over the past few weeks, pulling Jen away from her home life more than usual. This often happens when a big ancillary relief case is heading to trial. The neediness and heartbreak of her clients invade her already weak boundaries, leading her to take constant calls and practically live at the office.
Gina Davis was the client who kept Jen busy during October, but not for the usual reasons. Gina had walked into Jen’s office for the first time in the summer, holding a divorce petition from her husband, who had left her the week before.
“I want to stop him from ever seeing the kids again,” Gina had said, her blonde hair carefully curled, dressed in an immaculate skirt suit.
“Why?” Jen had asked. “Is there a 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—a woman who didn’t hide her emotions, who spoke the unspoken. “I just want to hurt him,” Gina had admitted.
“I can’t charge you for this,” Jen had said. It didn’t feel right to profit from someone’s pain. She assumed Gina would eventually come to her senses.
“So do it for free,” Gina had replied, and Jen had agreed. Not because her late father’s firm didn’t need the money, but because Jen believed Gina would eventually drop it, accept the decree nisi, agree to the residency split, and move on. But that hadn’t happened yet, even after Jen had advised Gina to reconsider over the summer and discouraged her in countless meetings during the autumn. They’d chatted about everything—their kids, the news, even *Love Island*. “Gross but compelling,” Gina had said, and Jen had laughed in agreement.
Now, Jen looks at Todd and wonders if he’s in love, like Gina. She wonders who Clio really is to him, and what she means. The madness of first love can’t be overlooked, especially given what he’s about to do in two days.
Jen hasn’t met Clio. After Gemma dumped him over the summer, Todd became secretive about his love life, embarrassed, Jen thinks, that it didn’t last. Embarrassed by the evening he showed her all those unanswered texts.
As he gets ready to leave again, he glances briefly at the front door. It’s not just a quick, curious look—it’s something else. A wariness, as if he’s expecting someone or nervous about what’s outside. Jen wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t been watching him so closely. The expression disappears almost as quickly as it came.
“What’s that?” Todd asks, nodding towards her screen.
“Oh, just reading something interesting. About time loops, you know?”
“Love that,” Todd says, his hair gelled into a quiff, wearing a retro-looking snooker shirt. He’s recently gotten into snooker, says he likes the math behind potting the balls. Jen looks at him, her devastatingly handsome son.
“What would you do if you were caught in one?” she asks.
“It’s almost always about some tiny detail,” Todd replies casually.
“What do you mean?”
“You know, the butterfly effect. One tiny thing can change the future.” Todd reaches down to stroke the cat, and for a moment, he looks like a child again. Her boy who believes in time loops without question. Maybe she should tell him. See what he thinks.
But for now, she can’t. If this is really happening, it’s her job to stop the murder. To figure out the events leading up to it and intervene. And then, one day, when she succeeds, she’ll wake up, and it won’t be yesterday anymore.
And that’s why she doesn’t tell Todd.
He leaves, and Jen checks to make sure no one is waiting for him or following him. Then, Jen follows him herself.
