I try to sit up, but I can’t. My head is spinning and I’m gasping for air.
And then, suddenly, the shaking stops. Through the window opposite, I can see exactly what caused it: an orange-and-white Overground train, now thundering off into the distance.
I look around me, and with a sickening jolt I realise that the living room is gone – Mum is gone – and I’m somewhere else entirely.
I shoot bolt upright, my heart hammering like crazy.
Was that it? Is it over? Was that the last time I’ll ever see her?
A tight, cold panic seizes me. There was so much more that I could have said. That I should have said.
The watch is still fixed firmly around my wrist. Clearly, there is no loophole. Asleep or awake, I will jump at one minute to midnight, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Regret begins to swell painfully in my chest, but there’s no time for it to properly take root, because as I stare wildly around the room, I suddenly realise: I know where I am.
This is Dalston. 79 Kingsland High Road, Dalston. The flat Harv and I rented together after we left uni.
I stagger out of bed, still trembling like mad, my eyes darting from one side of the room to the other. It’s all exactly as I remember it: the fire extinguisher slumped in the corner by the wardrobe, the laminated safety codes stuck to the back of the door, the horrible strip lighting on the ceiling that – when activated – gave everything in the room a sickly yellowish tint.
Both floors of the flat had previously been the offices of an Albanian law firm, but at some point the Albanian lawyers had given up trying to wage their legal battles over the constant roar of the London Overground, and the landlord had taken the opportunity to rebrand the place as a ‘bijou apartment space’. He’d not even bothered to redecorate – just squeezed in a couple of cheap single beds and a sofa, and left everything else as it was, right down to the jaundiced lighting and the fire safety accessories.
The room starts quivering again as another train bursts out from behind the building, making the window panes chatter like wind-up teeth.
If I remember rightly, Harv and I had allocated who got which bedroom by playing an extremely competitive game of FIFA, which he had won. Both rooms were ridiculously loud, but the one Harv chose, at the front of the flat, picked up only random, sporadic street sounds – the howl of a fox, the scream of a drunken argument, the glassy explosion of a car window. And Harv apparently preferred all that to the meticulously scheduled sleep deprivation of the back room – my room – which had the train tracks running literally right beside it.
We were in this flat for just over three years, and I don’t think I ever slept more than four hours consecutively in that whole time.
Which suddenly makes me wonder: what date have I landed on now? We lived here from, what … 2008 to 2011? So I might just have jumped five years in the blink of an eye.
The thought makes me drop weakly onto the edge of the bed.
My head is ringing with confusion, but I can’t exactly stay sitting in this room forever. I start getting dressed, picking up clothes at random from the floor. Harv’s bedroom door is shut, so I creep downstairs, nostalgia prodding me sharply with every footstep. I pass our boxy living room and spot the grimy fish tank next to the TV that contains two goldfish we named after members of the Wu-Tang Clan, though right now I can’t remember exactly which ones.
I open the kitchen door and walk in. There is an incredibly attractive girl standing at the sink, sniffing an open carton of milk with a look of pure disgust on her face. She’s wearing only a baggy grey T-shirt, which ends just above the knees on her long, tanned bare legs, and her sandy-blonde hair is pulled up into a messy topknot.
The shock of seeing her is enough to make me flinch. ‘Oh my God! Liv!’
She looks up, her nose now wrinkling at me instead of the dodgy milk.
‘Er, yeah? Hi?’ she says, in her ridiculously plummy accent. The bewilderment that floods her face tells me I’ve made a big mistake here. We definitely met for the first time while I was living in this flat. So is this it? Is right now the first time that I’m meeting her?
‘I’m Ben, Harv’s flatmate,’ I explain quickly, but her beautiful face remains puckered and wary.
‘Right, OK. I’m Olivia. Liv. But you already know that, apparently?’
‘Yeah, sorry, that was a bit random, coming in like that and just … shouting your name out.’
‘It was a little bit, yeah.’ Like a caricature of a posh person, Liv actually pronounces ‘yeah’ as ‘yah’.
‘It’s just that I’ve, erm, heard so much about you from Harv, that’s all.’
An indignant voice comes from behind me. ‘What? No you haven’t!’
I turn around to see Harv appearing through the kitchen door in his T-shirt and boxers, glaring at me.
‘I’ve barely mentioned you,’ he says to Liv, who – quite rightly – doesn’t look convinced by this statement. She knows full well that she’s the kind of girl men do mention to their mates. ‘I mean, no, that sounds bad,’ Harv gabbles on, his neck starting to turn bright red. ‘I mean, I probably did say something about you, in passing. But only that we work together or whatever. It’s not like I’m just going on about you all the time, is it, Ben?’
Thankfully, Liv interrupts this torturous monologue by pouring half a pint of thick, gloopy white liquid down the sink.
‘Nice to meet you,’ she says to me, unsmiling, as she slaps the empty carton back down on the counter. ‘You guys need milk.’ She squeezes past us and walks out,
