Cassandra in reverse, p.5
Cassandra in Reverse, page 5
Even though—as I climb into yet another Uber—I’m no longer sure there’s going to be one.
* * *
“There she is! How are you, sweetheart?”
My boss is standing in reception, so it might be time to describe him now: a portly man in his late forties called Barry Fawcett, with the belligerent, farty air of a bulldog (even though everyone knows that bulldogs are friendly, so this is an unfair comparison). He has also never—not in the entire ten months and three days I’ve been working here—called me sweetheart, so I can infer from this abrupt shift in vocabulary that he’s very angry indeed.
“How am I?” I say blankly. “Stuck in a time loop, Barry. Cheating the laws of time and space, but unable to elaborate further at this point.”
With a surreal sensation, I turn toward my clients.
Jack Burbank is the CEO of a “men’s boutique skin-care company”—tall, chiseled, blond hair like a Ken doll with highlights. Gareth Wilson (head of marketing) is similar but slightly less tall, less chiseled and less blond, like they ran out of Jacks but kept drawing them anyway.
“How’s your mum, Cassandra?” Jack leans forward and gently rubs the top of my arm as if he’s spicing up a chicken breast. “Barry was just explaining that she’s ill, which is why you’re an hour and a half late for our important meeting today. Something about an immovable hospital visit?”
Why does sympathy always involve so much touching?
“My mother is dead, Jack.” I step out of his reach. “Has been for a decade, so whatever you’ve been told was a tasteless lie, I’m afraid.”
Gareth and Jack glance at each other.
“Well.” Barry clears his throat: the vivid purple is starting to prickle again. “I must have got it mixed up, Cassandra. Your grandmother, perhaps?”
“Also deceased,” I inform him. “I have no close family or friends, and you should probably know that already, Barry, given that my emergency contact is my hairdresser.”
On one level, I’m freaking out. I’ve already had this exact meeting. Gareth and Jack were wearing precisely the same clothes they are wearing now; I updated them on the terrible campaign results; they said wow and then went into Barry’s office—and I should not know this, because that’s just not how time or knowledge or days of the week or meetings work. Admittedly, I’m not a scientist, but I feel like that’s basic entry-level physics.
But, on another level, there’s a lot to be said for repetition, and I think I might actually understand what’s going on around me for the first time in my entire life. It’s not an entirely unpleasant sensation. Maybe this is how other people feel all the time; some of us just need a dress rehearsal first.
While my clients process this information, I look curiously around the office. The watercooler is still dripping, bagels are paused—hanging in midair while my colleagues watch the drama play out—and the radiator continues to gurgle. Sophie’s fluffy ginger head pops up briefly over her computer screen like a gopher and disappears again.
“Well.” Barry scratches one of his jowls so it sways dramatically. “That’s... Perhaps we should just start the meeting?”
“Tell him,” I say, turning abruptly to Gareth and Jack.
“Sorry?”
“Tell him that you’ve replaced this agency already. Tell him that you’re firing us today and you were going to whether I was late or not.”
Another glance. “We don’t know what you’re—”
“They don’t like me.” I turn to Barry. “They’re unhappy with the way I’ve handled their product launch, but mostly they don’t like me as a human, so they’re firing us. I am relentlessly grating. Unlikable. Have I remembered the phrasing correctly?”
Jack’s face becomes enjoyably blotchy. “I haven’t said that.”
“You will,” I inform him, looking at my watch. “In about ten minutes. Then I say I don’t really like you that much either and then you leave and I get fired because Barry has absolutely had it with my shitty attitude.”
There’s joy in irony and I was named after Cassandra, the mythological Trojan priestess who was cursed by a sexually thwarted Apollo to see the future but never be believed. A strange legacy for any parent to give a tiny baby, but thirty-one years later, it seems I finally know more than anyone else in the room.
“Is this true?” Barry stops fawning. “Are you firing us?”
“Umm.” Jack scratches a well-moisturized throat and glances around the office. My colleagues are now watching us intently, having completely abandoned pretending not to. “We’ve ultimately decided to take SharkSkin in...another creative direction.”
“A direction further away from this agency,” I clarify helpfully. “Toward another, different agency.”
“Implied,” sighs Jack. “But yes.”
Without further ado, I pick up the empty cardboard box from behind the gold reception. Last time Jack and Gareth had gone before Barry called me into his office: I’m not sure I want to voluntarily wait for him to insult me again.
Unless...
“Before I leave,” I say, because this is potentially a huge wasted opportunity, “do you think you could tell me why you don’t like me?”
Jack and Gareth stare. “Sorry?”
“It would be helpful if you could just outline the basics.” I grab a pen from the top of the reception desk and prepare to make notes on the box. “Details would be particularly well received.”
“Cassandra,” Barry hisses.
“I’m not being sarcastic,” I say earnestly.
Obviously I’ve felt Jack’s discomfort around me for months now. It’s a sticky, burnt-orange wriggliness, and not unlike the internal squirm you feel when you see a flattened squirrel on the road. Frankly, it’s hard to focus on creative ways to sell moisturizer when you’re being forced to feel like roadkill for hours a day. But I also don’t know what’s going to happen next: whether I’m going to be repeating today again or whether this is just a small blip in my chronology, a scratch in the record of my life, a track played twice in a row.
Either way, this seems like useful information to have.
“Well,” Jack snaps through paper-white teeth, “I’d say it’s mostly doing weird shit like this.”
I look down. “Oh.”
“Cassandra,” Barry says in a low, aggressive voice. “Can I speak to you in my office, please? Now?”
“No, thank you,” I say firmly. “Your constructive feedback has already been extremely thorough.”
With the office still watching, I carry the box to my desk.
“You know,” I hear Jack say not very quietly to Barry, “I’m all for equal opportunities and box-ticking and disability acts and shit, but I feel like you should have told us Cassandra was on the spectrum before we signed with you.”
I briefly picture myself sliding down an iridescent rainbow.
It seems unlikely that’s what they mean.
“Oh shit.” Sophie leans across her desk toward me with wide blue eyes, like a small, sarcastic doll. “They haven’t fired you? That’s awful. I’m sure we will all miss you so much.”
“You don’t have to keep saying that,” I tell her tiredly.
Assessing my desk, I automatically pick up my mug and put it in my cardboard box, turn off my computer and reach for the keyboard wipes, and inexplicably this is what does it, this is what finally tips me over the edge: the moist antibacterial cloth is what sends me spiraling into an existential crisis, because am I actually time traveling right now? Breathing faster, I stagger toward the exit. You know what? This shouldn’t be happening to me. I’m not trained. I’m not a horologist or a physicist, I’m a mediocre PR account manager, and I’ve already been told I have a loose grip on reality without this shit.
Panicking, I start pushing at the pull door.
Because it’s finally starting to hit me: if today keeps looping, this is going to be my life now. I’m going to be eating Beet Root Pan Cakes (four words) forever. I’m going to be informed about the considerable environmental significance of pangolins forever. I’m going to be woken up by my boyfriend, dumped, ripped apart by my boss and fired, forever.
I’m going to be told I’m unlikable and unlovable, over and over again, and there’ll be nothing I can do about it, because even with infinite chances you can’t make someone like you or love you in less than twenty-four hours. There’s a solid chance I could be stuck in the third-worst day of my life for the rest of eternity, much like Prometheus: chained to a rock, doomed to have my liver pecked out by eagles every single day, then waiting for it to grow back every night so it can happen again. Except, instead of eagles, it’s other humans, and instead of beaks, it’s hurtful words, and instead of liver, it’s my entire fucking identity.
So while I’m not averse to repetition—I take enormous pleasure and comfort in it—of all the days to repeat, I would not have picked this one.
“Cassandra!” Barry appears in his office doorway. “What the hell are you doing? I didn’t mean leave right now. Jesus on a yellow bicycle, what is wrong with you? I’d prefer you to work out your notice period, please.”
Unless—
With a sharp turn, I charge back toward my desk. Because if I’ve learned anything from Greek mythology—and I’ve learned everything—it’s that our fates may be spun, measured and cut, but they can also be altered. In all the stories, time after time, humans and demigods defy the Moirai and take their destinies back from the gods on their terms.
I am stealing this bloody rubber plant.
Ensuring that Ronald is focused on his spreadsheet—headphones on, the only person in the office not now watching me with their mouth open—I grab the clay pot firmly with both hands and run back through the agency door.
Go go go go—
My phone beeps:
Dankworth please clean your shit up
Hitting the lift button, I hold my breath and count: five, four, three, two—
The office door swings open.
“Cassandra?” Ronald has the same incalculable expression on his face, and no no no, this doesn’t bode well for me and my pecked-out liver at all.
He clears his throat. “That’s mine.”
I can’t do this.
I cannot.
I refuse to.
I’m point-blank stating right now that I will not be participating in a repeat of this bloody awful day again.
“The plant.” Ronald points at the shrubbery. “It’s mine and I’d like to keep it.”
“Of course,” I say flatly. “Sorry.”
Ronald reaches out a hand and I move quickly away so his fingers won’t touch mine, except this time I don’t move quite fast enough: his fingertips graze mine, pain shoots through my entire body, and I instinctively flinch and pull away. We watch as the rubber plant somersaults through the air and hits the ground. Pot broken. Leaves snapped. Dirt everywhere.
“Oh, thank the gods,” I say, putting a hand over my face.
“Did you...mean to do that?” Ronald says, crouching on the floor and staring sadly at the carnage.
“No,” I say, suddenly dizzy with relief.
Because if things can be broken, then things can be changed; and if things can be changed, then it stands to good and logical reason that they can also be fixed.
That’s all I need to know.
7
The lift pings open.
“Cassandra? Miss Dankworth? Hang on a second—I’ve got Mr. Fawcett on line nine, and—”
“Can’t stop,” I say, racing past her. “No time.”
Or way too much of it: at this point, it’s difficult to tell. All I know for sure is I need to rerun exactly what happened last time. That’s how you replicate an experiment, right? You repeat the conditions as closely as possible. Although, if I’d known I’d end up with this kind of undocumented ability, I’d have paid a lot more attention in GCSE physics, purchased my own Bunsen burner.
Panicked, I body-slam the exit repeatedly because I still do not know how to open doors. The receptionist lets me out with a sigh and a click.
Breathing slowly, I stand on the street.
What was my next move? I remember pretty much everything that has ever happened to me as if it’s still happening: my memories are so accurate and so vivid I can watch them like films whenever I want to, searching for details like a detective. Unfortunately, I was so overwhelmed yesterday, the image is blurry, as if somebody has rubbed olive oil all over the screen.
“Excuse me.” The woman in the orange bomber jacket taps me lightly on the shoulder and I jump yet again. “You’re kind of blocking the entrance to the—Are you okay?”
I blink at her. “Banana muffin.”
“I’m sorry?”
A giddy wave of relief. “I need a banana muffin.”
With my cardboard box gripped tightly, I charge with growing excitement toward the café. Banana muffins are comforting. Banana muffins are reassuring and familiar. Banana muffins might be part of a fundamental glitch in the universe that allows me to travel through time and space, according to my now spurious calculations.
The café doorbell tinkles behind me, and this time I think of Peter Pan and how fairies die unless you believe in them. Maybe this is just how magic works: like a melodramatic and attention-seeking Tinker Bell, you have to clap for it as hard as you can or it simply can’t be bothered to keep going.
“Hello, young lady! Goodness, is it one o’clock already? Or are you early?”
I stare at the place where banana muffins should be.
“Oh!” The café owner smiles. “I’m afraid we had a—”
“—delivery issue,” I fill in for him. “No banana today, but you do have some delicious chocolate muffins and a lovely salted caramel, which you can personally attest is an adjective I’ll never know because I interrupted.”
He stares. “‘Delicious.’ I was going to say ‘delicious.’”
“Thank you,” I say gratefully. “I’m sure they are.”
Turning round, I charge back out of the café before realizing I must have missed a step. Scanning my memories, I check the street. The girl with the hat is nowhere to be seen—I must be a little early—so I wait until I see her in the distance, head down, looking at her phone. That’s probably close enough. Checking the street—yellow door, orange can, a blue sliver of sky, dropped navy glove, red ring around a street sign—I wait a few seconds for another pigeon to flap aggressively, which it does.
I flinch again: fucking pigeons.
“Fur’s not fair! Fur’s not fair! Fur’s not fair!”
Increasingly emotional, I take a deep breath and run as fast as I can around the corner into Regent Street: straight into the heart of the protest. And even though I know it’s coming, even though I’m here on purpose, it still hurts as if every cell in my body has been filled with gasoline and promptly set on fire.
“Fashion has no compassion!” The woman with the purple bowl cut thrusts the same leaflet at me. “A hundred million animals every year—”
I shut my eyes at her closeness: every part of me is now folding inward like a paper airplane.
“Minks are semiaquatic! They—”
Breathe, Cassie. Breathe.
But I can’t: the noise, the crowds, the flares, the colors, the alarms, the whistles, all at once it feels like I’m a million mouths and none of them can speak but all of them are screaming and I’m being swept away again, down the road, carried in the madness and the chaos like a stick in a flooding human river.
“FUR IS DEATH!”
“Fur is death!”
“FUR IS DEATH!”
The invisible scarf is tightening again.
“Head-to-toe electrocution! Foxes get an electrode up their butts. Does that sound fun to you?”
The lights behind my eyelids are flashing.
Just in time, I remember to put my hands in front of my face a second before the red liquid hits me, but it’s still sticky, it’s still smelly, it’s still revolting, I still don’t want it on my skin, and I start crying again even though I knew this was coming, even though I chose to let it happen, even though I wanted it to happen.
Desperately, I search the names of the buildings.
I’m nearly there: I can feel it.
With a shudder of reprieve, I claw and elbow my way out of the crowd toward Bar Humbug, then huddle in the doorway with my arms tightly wrapped over my head. The world starts to flicker in and out, like the waves of darkness that hit just before you disappear every night. It’s coming again and I don’t know what’s going to happen, I don’t know if this is going to work, I don’t understand what it is or how it is, and frankly, I’m no longer sure it matters.
All I know is I’m not doing this day again.
Because, as horrible as it is, it’s also kind of tempting to stick here, in this nothing of a Wednesday: settling into the sameness the way I’ve settled into my grubby little Brixton bedroom. There’s an appeal to the repetition of it, no matter how terrible. I could make this day comfortable and stay, nestled into the monotony and familiarity, content in the knowledge that nothing will ever surprise or shock me again. Zoning out, the way I can listen to the same song on a loop a hundred times until I can’t hear it anymore, until I don’t realize it’s still playing.
Until I don’t even notice that it hasn’t moved on.
But I’m not going to.
I had a plan for my life—laminated and stuck to my bedroom wall—and this wasn’t it. I never intended to end up thirty-one years old, unloved, unemployed and alone, covered in fake blood and curled up in a tight ball on the pavement. At some point in my past something went wrong, so if there’s even a chance I can do it all over again—throw out this life like a first pancake and make another, better one—I have to at least try, don’t I?
