For the moment I was blissfully unaware of all that andconsequently entered into my New Year’s night out in a spirit I hadn’t felt foryears. I decided not to use my future knowledge to try and change anythingabout the evening but to just let things happen exactly as they did before – itwas a sort of experiment, I suppose, to see if everything was identical orwhether my foreknowledge would lead to inevitable changes.
As far as I can recall, we went to the same places as before– a restaurant and a bar down Little Clarendon Street. I couldn’t remember theminutiae of what had happened a year ago, so it was going to be difficult tojudge whether or not the evening would be a carbon copy of before.
The excessive alcohol consumption on both occasions didn’thelp matters. This time, I probably drank more than the first time around, asin my unusually euphoric state I kicked things off by ordering a bottle ofchampagne as soon as we got in the restaurant.
I realised at that early stage that things would definitelynot be exactly the same as before, because I hadn’t ordered the champagne firsttime around. I simply wasn’t in as big a party mood as I was this time. Butwould that invariably mean that the whole evening would deviate from that pointonwards or not? Perhaps minor details like this wouldn’t affect the ultimatecourse of the evening.
Our conversation was probably different, too, but I can’thonestly remember what we talked about the first time around. Who does recalldetails of conversations a year later? It was highly unlikely I would have saidword for word what I had the year before owing to my changed mindset.
Still, what did it matter? All I was really concerned withwas having a good time, so after a while I stopped overanalysing and justconcentrated on enjoying myself.
I was pleased and flattered when on the stroke of midnight,Phoebe and Lily screamed out “Happy Birthday!” at me, and simultaneouslyplanted big, sloppy kisses on opposite cheeks. I remembered than that they haddone exactly the same thing the year before.
So I might have said my lines differently all evening tothose in my previous performance, but the end result was the same. So it seemsthe small ripples in time I had created had not had any long-term effect on thetimeline.
The next day was just as fun. We chilled out in our PJs inthe flat and Phoebe laid out all the food she had bought on the breakfast barbefore bringing in her pièce de résistance – a cake she had baked herself inthe shape of a rippling, naked Adonis with bumps in all the right places. Itwas so good that even Lily asked for a second slice and she hardly ever ateanything.
Later, some other nurse friends who lived in the samebuilding called around and we proceeded to get sloshed all over again.
I went to bed happier that birthday night than I had been inyears. I was completely accepting of my new and strange situation and burstingwith ideas and plans for the year ahead. I had been itching to tell the otherswhat had happened to me so that they could share in my adventure, but I managedto resist the temptation. At best they would have just thought it was anotherprank, at worst that I’d completely lost my marbles.
Yes, they’d probably seen and enjoyed all the sametime-travel movies I had but they were just stories. No one was going to takeseriously anyone who claimed something like that was actually happening to themin real life. I wouldn’t have done either, before all of this.
No, I would keep it all to myself for the moment. If I feltthe need to confide in one or both of my flatmates later, I’d have to try andcome up with some sort of irrefutable proof, but I was tired and drunk rightnow and there would be plenty of time for all that later.
Or so I thought. What I didn’t know when I fell asleep thatnight was that my world was about to be turned upside down all over again.
I knew something was wrong as soon as I woke up thefollowing morning, because I didn’t actually wake up at all – not in thetraditional sense. After falling asleep, extremely drunk, at around 2am, thevery next thing I remember was finding myself right back on the ward in thenurses’ office.
There was no moment where I was aware of waking up – it allhappened instantaneously. I wasn’t lying down or snoozing in a chair. I simplymaterialised in midstride, walking across the room holding a cup of coffee. Iwas also stone-cold sober, without even a hint of a hangover. That wasimpossible considering the amount I had imbibed over the previous two evenings.
Was my adventure over before it had even begun? Or had Iimagined it all, after all? It seemed like I was back where I had started. Ifthat was the case, why was I here and not in Thomas’s room?
I looked across at the clock on the wall – a simple, white,plastic analogue clock which showed the time to be exactly 3am. That was themore or less the time, by my reckoning, that I had originally left after theincident in Thomas’s room.
The office, shared by all the nurses on shift, was clutteredwith bags, food and other personal belongings that had been left lying around.My eye was drawn to a copy of The Sun on the desk which had been leftthere by one of the other nurses.
It wasn’t my favourite rag, but now I seized it eagerly.Ignoring the headline about a Cabinet minister being caught watching lesbianporn on her smartphone during Prime Minister’s Question Time, I scanned the topof the paper, searching for the date.
Friday 30th December 2022
Unless this paper had been left lying around in the officefor months or years, it seemed that I hadn’t
