Chapter 15
ALICE
It takes me a moment to realise the light is already starting to peek from behind the shutters, pale and liquid lemon softening the harsh blue glare from my laptop.
I crick my neck and stretch my back. I don’t know how long I’ve been bent over the screen.
As with the last few nights, sleep has been something I haven’t been able to grasp.
I doze in short bursts of snatched dreams where I’m always in my old house, Ryan laughing or smiling across the room at me.
Every time I wake, I can feel my nervous system trying to recalibrate, the knot in my stomach becoming more and more tangled, harder to unravel each time I realise I’m not living that life any more.
But then I think of Spence and Georgia and Michael, and I find the energy to breathe, to… be.
I’d gone to the post office a few days ago, the empty week stretching ahead of me.
Spence at work, Josie at an influencer’s party in some faraway castle in Wales.
I haven’t had a reply from Royal Mail and thought maybe a face-to-face enquiry would be better.
The woman behind the glass screen looked at me like I’d lost my mind as I tried to explain, and I didn’t miss the curious glances from the people in the queue clutching Shein return parcels.
Then, yesterday, I went to the library. The man at the desk had been as helpful as always and now, stacked by the sofa are textbooks on time travel, wormholes, and causality circuits… whatever they are.
I rub my eyes. I’ve been up since four, maybe earlier. I’d found myself in the kitchen wearing my denim shorts and a white T-shirt that I had no recollection of putting on, eating a cold piece of shepherd’s pie. Insomnia is a bitch. Thankfully though, I was still inside my house.
A long breath stretches out as I reach for my cup of tea, almost spitting it back out; it’s stone cold.
I could have sworn that I’d only just made it, but then I look at the open tabs that are crowding my search bar…
causality of time friction, something called temporal dioramas, and then there are the countless Reddit pages that I have open…
Time flies when you’re starting to lose your mind, I guess.
My cup lands back on the upturned crate with a scrape.
I really need to buy some furniture that fits in this place.
I push the thought away and instead click on Keith’s Story – The Night I Time Walked.
“One minute I was walking into my kitchen smoking a joint, then bam, I was sharing the same joint with Janis at Woodstock.” Yeah, right, Keith.
I shake my head and close the tab. While I’m pretty sure that Keith was stoned and imagined the whole thing, there are more cases of people who claim to have stepped into the past than I was expecting.
My index finger presses on the mouse pad, bringing up a different article on the same thread about Carol, a dentist, who lives in London. Sounds promising.
I know how it sounds, believe me. I didn’t tell anyone until after a year seeing a therapist. I was going through a divorce, while simultaneously starting my own practice, and trying to raise two children whose whole lives had just been upended.
I had a migraine, hadn’t slept properly for days.
I can’t really remember what I was thinking as I walked along the street to pick up my girls from school.
All I remember was that there was a shift around me, not flashing lights or anything, it was more that the air felt cold, heavier, if that makes sense.
When I stopped to get my bearings, I didn’t recognise the road – it was cobbled, not concrete and everyone around me was dressed in clothes more suited to the fifties, even the cars were like something you’d usually see a bride going to the church in.
I wondered if I’d walked onto a film set; it’s not unusual for streets to be closed for filming around here.
But anyway, what made it real was the smell…
it was just different. More soot in the air, I guess?
Anyway, I bumped into a man, he had the whole hat and suit thing, just like Cary Grant.
I apologised, he smiled, dipped his hat and then I turned and I was back.
On my street. In my time. I thought I was going mad.
It never happened again, but I have always wondered who he was, if he was real.
My heart is knocking loudly as my fingers grab my pen, turn to a fresh page, and start writing down all the similarities between me and Carol the dentist. Recent break-up.
New job(ish), insomnia, stress, meeting a man?
I underline that twice. The notebook is already filled with spidergrams, facts and theories that I’ve been researching over the last week.
Outside the street is waking up. The flashing lights of the bin lorry flickering into the room, the clatter and hiss of bins being lifted and emptied, remind me that the day is beginning and that I really need to move, take a shower, make a fresh drink, but still my fingers tap across the keyboard.
The bin lorry moves further down the street, catcalls and banter from the workers as they make their way to the next house fading away, and the room is filled once more with just the hum of my laptop and the drip from the tap in the kitchen.
I get up, stretch and go back into the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea and a piece of toast, the half-eaten shepherd’s pie still congealing on the plate.
Josie’s voice: Maybe you sleepwalked to 1985?
I pause with the toast in my hand, then return to the sofa. I take a bite, thick with the peanut butter that Ryan hated the smell of, tuck my feet beneath me on the sofa and pull the laptop back towards me.
I open up another tab: Can you sleepwalk into the past?
I drop the toast back onto the plate and lean forwards:
Metaphorical time travel is a dissociative state that refers to the mind’s ability to visit past events through dreams. During sleep, the brain has the ability to create vivid experiences that feel real, by placing a person in different periods of time and environments.
These experiences can leave the dreamer with a sense of familiarity with people and places they’ve never encountered while awake.
The toast feels thick in my throat. Heat crawls across my skin. Because isn’t that exactly how I felt when we went to Yorkshire? How I feel when I read Michael’s letters?
Somnambulism, or sleepwalking, is where the body moves while the brain remains in a dreamlike state. Some psychologists suggest this is a form of metaphorical time travel, where the mind explores experiences in other times and places beyond conscious control.
The peanut butter churns in my stomach. I look up at the source: Timetravel 4 U.
I let out a long breath and close my eyes, slowing down my heart rate. One of the first rules of journalism, make sure your source is reliable. This is so not a reliable source.
Get a grip, Alice.
And let’s be honest, if I’d bloody time travelled, wouldn’t I at least remember it? Then again, I can’t remember getting on a bus or walking out of my hotel room.
I close the tab and instead search for a complaints department at Royal Mail.
The search stops, the buffering logo spinning, just as the low battery light comes on.
I scan the room for the power cable as the clatter of the letterbox flips open, the envelope landing on the floor with a soft thud.
My laptop shuts down, the light disappearing, leaving just the emerging daylight cutting across the floor and landing on the post like it’s spotlit.
I move slowly. I’m not scared. I’m not even hopeful.
Because I already know with every part of me.
It’s from Michael.