Kitabı oxu: «All About Us»

To Carolina

Contents

Cover

Praise

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Author Q&A with Tom Ellen

Extract

About the Publisher

Prologue

University of York, 5 December 2005

Running was a bad idea.

I can see that now. There was no need to run. It’s a game of Sardines, not the Olympic 100m. Plus, they haven’t even started looking for me yet. I can still hear them all outside the maze, shouting to fifty in unison. It sounds like a weirdly raucous episode of Sesame Street.

I could’ve taken my time, strolled about leisurely in search of the perfect hiding place, but no: drunk logic told me that fifty seconds was no time at all and that the best option would be to peg it into the campus maze at top speed until I was safely camouflaged. Now, as I slow down to a stumble in the darkness, I can feel six snakebite blacks, four sambuca shots and that doner calzone I split with Harv all roiling ominously in my stomach.

I stop for a second to catch my breath, which immediately explodes back out of me. I put a hand to the wall to steady myself, remembering too late that the wall is not actually a wall, but a hedge. I fall through it with the slapstick dexterity of a young Buster Keaton, miraculously avoiding being blinded or castrated by a million scratchy branches. I try to get up, fail miserably, and then decide that this is probably as good a hiding spot as any.

The leaves settle around me. The counting has stopped now, and I can feel the maze bristle and creak as a dozen drunken bodies stagger into it, yelling, ‘We’re coming to ge-et you!’

I sit there in silence, trying to work some moisture into my parched mouth and listening to my heart galloping in my chest. I reach up to wipe my forehead, and my hand comes back covered in foundation and fake blood – souvenirs from tonight’s stellar theatrical performance.

The play went about as well as any first-year uni play could be expected to, which is to say we probably won’t be nominated for any Olivier awards, but no one fluffed their lines or vomited nervously on the audience. It was in the bar afterwards, though, where everything really kicked into gear: everyone gabbling at a hundred miles an hour about what we all want to write or direct or act in next. Maybe it was the adrenalin – or more likely the sambuca – but the world suddenly seemed alive with possibility, like I could actually see the future spooling out endlessly ahead of me, beckoning me in. Mad, really, to think that I can do anything I want with it.

It’s funny, though. As weird and brilliant as tonight has been, I always thought it would be me and Alice’s night. The night we finally got it together after a whole term of awkwardly not quite managing to. It’s my fault, really: I’ve never been very good at ‘making the move’ (in fact, just the phrase ‘making the move’ makes me want to cringe so hard that my retinas detach). If I get even the slightest suspicion that a girl might be interested in me, my brain tends to immediately draw up a laundry list of reasons why she actually definitely isn’t.

But with Alice, that list has been getting harder and harder to compile. Over the past ten weeks – ten weeks of private jokes and late-night chats and shared microwave meals – she’s made it pretty clear that she likes me. And I like her too, I guess. She’s funny and pretty and we get on really well, and I suppose I always thought that tonight – the night of the play, the last night before the Christmas holidays – there’d be enough booze and drama and emotion to give us the push we needed.

But then that Daphne girl showed up backstage and sort of knocked everything off track.

It sounds stupid when people say they just ‘clicked’ with somebody, but I can’t think of another word for it. How else do you explain an hour of silly, funny, effortless conversation with a total stranger? Or that weird, tingly electricity in my chest every time I made her laugh?

So, maybe it won’t happen for me and Alice tonight after all. Or maybe it will.

It definitely feels like something will happen tonight.

There’s a flurry of whispers from somewhere nearby – two people bumping into each other in the darkness, forming a momentary alliance in their search for me. And then there’s that whooping seal bark of a laugh that immediately identifies one of them as Harv.

I shuffle further back into the hedge, but somehow I’m sure he won’t clock me. Call it intuition, or a sixth sense, or just being a bit drunk and horny, but I know that either Daphne or Alice will find me before anyone else does.

When we spilled out of the bar after Marek shouted, ‘Let’s play Sardines!’ I looked around to see both of them smirking at me. ‘I think Ben should hide,’ Alice said, and Daphne nodded her agreement: ‘Yep. Ben seems like a natural hider.’ I filed that statement away for further examination when I was less pissed, and then tore straight off into the maze.

Right now, just the idea of sitting here, hidden, with either one of them seems outrageously – ridiculously – exciting.

In fact, as I try to keep perfectly still, my heart going like the absolute clappers, I can’t decide who I’d rather found me first.

Chapter One

London, 24 December 2020

‘So … are you coming, or not?’

‘I mean, obviously I can come. If you want me to?’

Daphne breathes out heavily, but still resolutely refuses to make eye contact. ‘Do you want to come?’ she asks her reflection in the mirror.

I loiter by the bare Christmas tree, picking at stray needles. ‘Well, if you reckon I should, then maybe. I guess.’

She snaps the brush back into her mascara bottle with impressive force. ‘Ben, seriously. I’m starting to feel like Jeremy Paxman here. Can you just give me a yes or no?’

‘Well, I don’t know. Will they be expecting me? I came last year.’

‘Yes, and what a great success that was,’ she says to the ceiling, and there’s a pause where we both remember what a great success that was.

‘Listen …’ she says, pinching the bridge of her nose. ‘It’s Christmas Eve drinks at my boss’s. I don’t even particularly want to go, so there’s no reason why I should drag you along too.’

‘Well, like I say, I’m happy to come if you want me to.’ She ignores this completely, so I add: ‘But you clearly fucking don’t.’

Finally she spins round to look at me. ‘I want you to come if you’re going to actually talk to people and try to have a good time. I don’t want you to come if you’re going to stand in the corner like a grumpy arsehole. OK?’

She snatches up her bag and walks out into the hallway.

Daff is of the opinion that fights are A Good Thing in a relationship. A Healthy Thing. Or at least she used to be of that opinion, back when our fights weren’t really fights, but silly little flare-ups over nothing. I’d get sulky at her for taking too long to get ready, or she’d shout at me for farting or imperfectly folding a bedsheet. And then after a volley of yells, we’d break off, hugging and giggling at the idea that we’d caught ourselves bickering like a sad old couple.

But at some point during the last couple of years, something changed. That fun phoney-war play-fighting turned into this awful tight-lipped trench combat; each of us working doggedly to gain an inch of ground over the other, occasionally lobbing a passive-aggressive grenade into no man’s land.

How did we get here? I wonder. From calmly discussing our evening plans to bitter, seething resentment in – what was it – a minute and a half? That’s got to be some kind of spontaneous marital-spat world record. Because the truth is, everything seems to lead to a fight nowadays. Every nod or murmur or question feels loaded and potentially explosive, like it has to be patted down carefully for hidden meaning. I’m pretty sure this is my fault – in fact, I know it is. It’s all tangled up with everything that’s happened over the past couple of years, and my general sense of self-worth dribbling slowly down the plughole. I can see the problems clear as day, I just can’t figure out how to fix them. Maybe they can’t be fixed.

I follow Daff out into the hallway, where she’s now yanking her long, curly black hair into a bun and fastening it with one of those Venus flytrappy things. ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I just always feel like such a spare part at these things. I can feel them all looking straight through me when I’m speaking.’

‘Ben, that’s not true,’ she snaps. ‘And if it is true’ – which means she knows it is – ‘then maybe it’s because you make literally no effort with anyone.’

‘I do make an effort,’ I protest, but we both know this is bollocks. I stopped making an effort a long time ago. Not just with small talk – with everything.

She grabs her coat off the banister, and sighs. ‘Look, don’t worry, honestly,’ she says. ‘You know what these things are like. It’ll just be boring work chat. If I go now, I can be back by ten.’

‘OK, fine,’ I say, and the look of relief that flashes across her face confirms something I’ve suspected for a while: that I’ve become a weight on her at these events. Or worse than a weight: an embarrassment.

Daff is a literary agent. She works for a big, important company and her clients are all big, important authors and screenwriters. Attending one of her work dos is like lowering yourself into a boiling cauldron of success – you’re never more than six feet from a BAFTA winner or a Booker Prize judge. So I suppose I can’t blame her for cringing slightly when I’m mumbling to these people about how I knock out the odd press release for a living. It doesn’t make me feel great either. The truth is, I’ve spent a lot of time lately wondering what Daphne is still doing with me, and at this thing tonight, I know everyone else will be wondering it too.

‘Is you-know-who going to be there?’ I ask, as she shrugs her coat on. ‘The Big Man?’

I’m hoping this might make her laugh, just to prove I can still do that, at least. Even a sarcastic hollow chuckle would suit me fine. But instead she just rolls her eyes.

‘Yes, Rich will be there. Is that honestly why you don’t want to come?’

‘No, of course not. I was only—’

‘Because you don’t have to talk to him, you know. You could try and talk to some new people.’

‘No, I know. Well, he pretty much ignores me anyway, so …’

‘Maybe if you actually tried to be friendly, instead of sulking like a little kid?’

And yep. Back we go. Like I say: all roads lead to a fight.

Which is crazy, really, because Rich used to be one of our most reliable private jokes. A dependable classic we could always fall back on.

He joined the agency around the same time Daphne did, and since he looks like he’s been laboratory-designed to worry insecure husbands, the idea of her copping off with him quickly became a running gag between us. If I burned the toast or something, she might sigh dramatically and murmur, ‘I bet Rich is a great cook …’ Or if I went out for the night, leaving Daff home alone, I’d bid her goodbye with ‘Tell Rich I said hi,’ and she’d mime oh-shit-I’ve-been-busted as I walked away laughing.

But like all our other private jokes, this one seems to have curdled and hardened. Whether this is down to her actually starting to fancy Rich, or me just suspecting she might, I’ve no idea. He’s definitely a major-league shagger (Daphne once told me, ‘If Tinder was a computer game, Rich would have completed it,’ which I found both hilarious and slightly intimidating), but I don’t think there’s anything between them. The idea that there might be does hit me occasionally, like a punch in the gut. I guess I just can’t figure out why Daphne wouldn’t be interested in him. Or maybe she is interested in him, but she’s just not the kind of person who would do something about it.

I think suddenly about the messages from Alice, squirrelled away secretly on my phone. I’m exactly that kind of person, apparently.

When it comes down to it, I suppose that’s the reason Daphne’s still with me: because of the things she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know about Alice; she doesn’t know about Paris. She knows about Mum, obviously, but she doesn’t know the things I said to her before it happened. Things that still choke me awake in the middle of the night.

After fifteen years together, and four years of marriage, she doesn’t really know me at all. If she did, then surely she wouldn’t still be here.

She clicks open the front door, and makes to step out into the cold early-evening gloom. ‘I’d better go,’ she says, but she doesn’t. She just stands there, frowning at the doormat. ‘We can talk later. It’s just … Work is so draining at the moment, and then I come back here and it’s … even more draining, you know?’ She breaks off and fixes me with her big hazelnut-brown eyes, and she looks tired and really – genuinely – unhappy. And my insides freeze, because I’m suddenly sure she’s about to say something: something big and awful and final.

But then she glances through into the living room at the Christmas tree, and shakes her head, as if remembering that this is not traditionally the season for big, awful, final announcements.

‘Anyway, we can talk later,’ she says again. ‘And don’t worry about the thing tonight – I’ll think of something. Tell everyone you needed to put the decorations up, maybe.’ She looks again at the naked tree. ‘Actually, that wouldn’t technically be lying, would it?’

‘I’ll do it as soon as you’re gone, I promise. And the presents.’

She nods. Then she steps outside, shuts the door and she’s gone. And even though nothing was actually said, I can still feel the storm clouds gathering inside my head. We can talk later. She said that twice. But talk about what?

The word DIVORCE stamps itself onto my brain, making me physically flinch. Is that what she wants? Could it even secretly be what I want? The thought of it makes my stomach lurch, but I don’t know if it’s the idea of losing Daphne, or the shame of being divorced at thirty-four.

Another failure to add to my already ridiculously long list.

But I can’t think about this stuff right now. Daphne’s parents, sister, brother-in-law and their kids are all arriving at midday tomorrow, and there’s still a hell of a lot to be done before then. I should really head straight up to the attic to get the decorations, then sort the tree out and crack on with wrapping the presents.

That’s what I should do.

Instead, though, I decide to go and get drunk.

Chapter Two

Christmas Eve is pretty much the only time you can guarantee that Harv will be available at short notice for a pint. On Christmas Eve, there are no swanky club nights to attend or Tough Mudders to endure, and presumably the dating apps are pretty quiet, too.

We meet in The Raven, a grotty little pub in Crouch Hill whose grottiness is trumped by its exact equidistance between my place in Harlesden and Harv’s in Stoke Newington. It’s already heaving when I arrive: packed to bursting point with rowdy office workers, all draped in tinsel from their Christmas lunches. I squeeze past an old bloke with a scraggly beard who is trying to flog an extremely unconvincing Rolex to a pair of drunken businessmen.

Harv is already at the bar, wearing a parka so large it resembles an unzipped sleeping bag. He waves me over with a tenner.

‘You all right? What d’you want?’

‘Just a beer. Whatever you’re having.’

He wrinkles his forehead. ‘I’m not having a beer, mate. D’you know there’s two hundred calories in a pint of beer? You might as well have a Zinger Burger.’ He taps his stomach, which looks impressively washboardy even through his T-shirt. ‘I’m seeing this girl at the moment who’s a fitness instructor,’ he says. ‘She’s full of these facts and figures. We were talking last night about how drinking Guinness is literally like drinking a pint of lard.’

‘Sounds like a very erotic relationship.’

‘Yeah, the conversation can get quite boring,’ he admits. ‘But the sex is pretty great.’

I look again at Harv’s perfectly flat stomach. I still can’t get my head around how all blokes nowadays are suddenly insanely ripped. It seemed to happen pretty much overnight, about eight years ago, and I was apparently the only male on the planet who wasn’t forewarned. When I met Harv at university, he was fifteen stone and subsisted entirely on Carling Black Label and chicken nuggets. Now he looks like Ryan Gosling’s stunt double.

It’s fine for guys in their twenties, who were raised on Instagram and Love Island; they don’t know any different. But these mid-thirties blokes who suddenly become protein-guzzlers – they’re old enough to remember the halcyon pre-David Beckham days, when young men were all pigeon-chested and Twiglet-armed. They’re selling the rest of us out, I reckon.

I order a Guinness just to piss Harv off.

We sit down at a table by the window, him sipping his vodka and tonic and me slurping my black lard. Another office Christmas party comes barrelling through the doors, all wearing badly torn cracker hats.

‘You going to your parents’ tomorrow, then?’ I ask Harv.

He nods. ‘My sister’s giving me a lift to Suffolk first thing. Are you round at your …’ He flinches and shakes his head. ‘Sorry, man. Wasn’t thinking.’

‘No, no, don’t worry.’

It’s been two years now, and I still forget myself from time to time. I’ll read some book or see something on TV and think, oh, Mum would like this, and then crumple as the realisation gut-punches me.

I wonder if that ever goes away. Probably not.

‘Are Daff’s lot coming to you, then?’ Harv asks.

‘Yep. I’m supposed to be doing the tree and the presents right now, but y’know …’ I hold up my pint and take a big sip.

‘Where is Daff?’

‘She’s at a work thing. I thought she wanted me to come, actually, but maybe not. She’s always on at me to meet new people.’

‘But you hate new people.’

‘Exactly.’

We both laugh. It feels comforting to fall back into our old groove: me as the grumpy, shy one, Harv as the buoyant extrovert. It’s a dynamic that’s been in play since we first met at uni. Occasionally I worry that it’s become a crutch; a performance we put on for each other because we don’t have anything else to talk about. I wonder whether if we met today – stripped of all our shared memories and in-jokes – we’d have anything in common at all. But right now it feels nice to slip back into that tried-and-tested role play – like pulling on an old jumper or something.

Harv starts rambling on about work – he does something in social media, though I’ve never been exactly sure what – and I suddenly want to tell him everything. I want to spill my guts about Daphne and Mum and the messages from Alice, and how I’m starting to feel like my whole life has frozen on screen and I’ve no idea which combination of keys will reboot it. But I don’t know how to even start that conversation. I’ve known Harv fifteen years – he was my best man, for God’s sake – but we never really talk about stuff like that. I don’t think we ever did.

When I overhear Daff speaking to her female friends I’m always amazed at the sheer range of topics they cover. They can get from small talk to deep-and-meaningful within seconds. Whereas when I went on holiday last year with Harv and a couple of other mates, we spent all four days testing each other’s knowledge of football and films and nineties hip hop. I’m not complaining; it was brilliant. I guess women see their friends as profound, complex human beings, while men see theirs as walking quiz machines.

Still, I’m half a pint of Guinness down and Harv has paused to look at his phone, so I decide to give it a go.

‘Yeah, thing is, actually, Harv, I’m sort of feeling a bit … down at the moment, mate.’

He looks up at me. For some reason – possibly to cushion its emotional bluntness – I’ve delivered this statement in a comedy Scouse accent. I have never even been to Liverpool.

‘Ah, don’t be down, mate,’ Harv says, mimicking my Steven Gerrard twang.

‘Well … I am a bit,’ I reply, still inexplicably Liverpudlian.

‘Ah, mate …’ He sips his drink. ‘Don’t be.’

This isn’t really going anywhere. This is just two men having the world’s dullest conversation in an accent neither of them can pull off.

But I suddenly, desperately, want to find a way to actually talk to him. Because it’s too much, keeping all this stuff locked up in my head. It feels like a dam is about to burst somewhere inside me, and fifteen years’ worth of suppressed emotions are about to stream out onto the table between us.

I’m mentally scrambling about for a decent inroad to this outpouring when Harv smirks and shoves his phone in my face.

‘Look at this … Honestly, Mourinho is such a dick.’

I scan the news story, in which Mourinho does, to be fair, come off quite dickishly. Harv slips his phone back into his pocket and grins. ‘OK, random one: d’you reckon, off the top of our heads, we could name every World Cup winner from 1930 on?’

I stamp a smile across my face, and manage to shove down all the sadness and guilt and grief that was about to come spilling out of my mouth. ‘I reckon we could give it a go,’ I say.

He thumps the table. ‘Right. I’ll get another round in first. Although technically, it’s your turn …’

I hand him a tenner and watch as he squeezes through the crowd towards the bar.

And that’s when I hear a gravelly chuckle from over my shoulder: ‘Unlucky there, my friend. You were so close …’

Chapter Three

I turn around to see that the scraggly-bearded Rolex salesman is now sitting in the booth behind us.

He’s wearing an ill-fitting electric-blue suit that has definitely seen better decades, and a tie covered in little cartoon reindeer. His box of moody watches is on the table in front of him, next to a half-drunk pint. He’s spinning a beer mat on its side and grinning broadly at me through his rust-coloured tangle of facial hair.

‘Sorry … what was that, mate?’ I say.

He takes a sip of his beer. ‘It just felt like you were right on the brink of opening up to your friend there. And then he walked off. Rotten luck.’

‘Right, yeah. I mean, it was sort of a private conversation, but …’

The watch-seller shrugs. ‘Oh, I wasn’t listening or anything. Just couldn’t help overhearing, that’s all.’

He smiles at me again, blue eyes twinkling under his unruly coppery-grey hair. There’s something familiar about him that I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s possibly the vaguely Bill Nighy vibe he gives off – all wiry and crumpled and mischievous. His age is impossible to place, though: he could be anywhere from fifty to about seventy-five.

Still, I’ve been cornered by enough pub bores in my life to know exactly how this conversation will pan out if I keep engaging. After a couple more pleasantries, this bloke will undoubtedly whip his chair round to our table and spend the rest of the night regaling us with long-winded anecdotes, while occasionally attempting to flog us a watch.

‘OK. Well, fair enough,’ I say. ‘Have a good night, then.’

I start to turn back round, but the guy speaks again.

‘Christmas is a time for reflection, isn’t it? Getting things off your chest.’

I sigh. I’m not in the mood for a heart-to-heart with a total stranger – particularly not when I’ve just failed to initiate one with my best mate. But I also feel bad about leaving an obviously lonely old man hanging on Christmas Eve. So I turn back to face him.

‘How d’you mean?’

The watch-seller is now wearing a thoughtful smile and drumming his fingers on the box in front of him. ‘You start to wonder about the bad decisions you’ve made in life, don’t you?’ he says. ‘Or the wrong turnings you might have taken.’ He stops drumming and looks me straight in the eye. ‘You start to wonder how things might have worked out differently for you. And whether – if you could go back and change things – you really would.’

I nod, now feeling slightly concerned that this bloke is some sort of mind-reader. I’m certain I’ve never seen him before, but for a split second I’m convinced that he knows me. That somehow he has access to my deepest thoughts and fears and secrets …

But then reality comes crashing back, and I remember that mind-reading watch salesmen don’t exist.

I try to catch Harv’s eye at the bar so that he hurries back quickly and gives me an excuse to end this conversation. ‘Yeah, anyway, listen, mate,’ I say. ‘I’d better—’

‘Is there anything you’d do?’ the old man interrupts. ‘If you could go back. Is there anything you wish you’d done differently?’

He’s staring at me with a weird intensity now, those blue eyes almost fizzing in their sockets. Out of nowhere, all that confusion and guilt and regret I’ve just managed to push down comes rushing straight back up. I think of the things I said to Mum before she died – the things I’d do anything to unsay. I think of what happened in Paris. I think about that night in the maze at uni – the night I met Daphne. My throat is parched suddenly, and my face feels boiling hot. ‘I guess … maybe there are things I’d do differently,’ I find myself saying.

The old man blinks and nods, still watching me with that odd, unreadable expression. And then suddenly his face brightens, and he raps the box with his knuckles. ‘So. Can I interest you in a watch, my friend?’

And there it is.

‘No, honestly, I’m fine, thanks.’

‘I notice you’re not wearing one. I reckon this little number would suit you perfectly …’ He opens the box and takes out a totally unremarkable wristwatch. No chunky silver frame or famous logo or complex features – just a plain white clock face with a black leather strap.

‘Really,’ I say. ‘I’m fine.’

Harv finally catches my eye, and fails to suppress a smile as he watches me trying to fend off this aggressive entrepreneurial advance.

‘Oh, come on,’ the watch-seller says. ‘How else will you know when the clock strikes midnight and it’s finally Christmas Day?’

‘Well, I could just look at my phone.’

He bats this suggestion away with his hand. ‘Phone, schmone. Tell you what, I’ll give it to you. An early Christmas present.’

I laugh. ‘No, seriously, that’s very kind, but you don’t have to—’

He reaches across and slaps the watch onto the table in front of me. ‘I just have,’ he grins. ‘Merry Christmas. Go on, try it on. It’ll change your life, I guarantee it.’

There is clearly no way I’m getting out of this situation watchless, so I just decide to give the bloke whatever I can. ‘OK, look …’ I take out my wallet and peer inside to see what I can offer. But when I look back up, he’s already disappearing out of the door.

The watch is still on the table in front of me. I stare at it for a second and then fix it around my wrist. When I look closely, I spot straight away why he wanted to palm this one off: it’s not even working. The hands are frozen at one minute to twelve. I fiddle with the winding mechanism, but they don’t budge. His line about ‘when the clock strikes midnight’ suddenly makes sense: a little dig before he fobbed me off with a dud.

Harv returns bearing fresh drinks. ‘So. Who was your mate?’

I blink up at him, feeling slightly dazed now, as if I’ve just imagined the whole conversation. I consider telling him about my weird gut feeling that the old man somehow knew me. But I don’t want Harv to think I’ve totally lost the plot, so instead I just hold up my wrist. ‘Not sure who he was, but he gave me the greatest Christmas gift I’ve ever received. A broken watch.’

Harv laughs. ‘You get some proper weirdos in this pub.’ He takes a sip of his vodka and claps his hands together. ‘Anyway, let’s do this. Every World Cup winner since 1930 … and no checking our phones.’

‘All right, let’s go.’

With that, I push every thought of Daphne or Alice or Mum to the back of my mind, and focus all my mental energy on meaningless football trivia.

And when we say goodbye two drinks later, having successfully managed to name every World Cup-winning team in history (with the exception of Uruguay in 1950), I definitely don’t feel better. But I don’t feel worse either.

And that’s something, surely.

Chapter Four

I get home about half ten, and Daphne’s still not back.

She hasn’t texted, and my Guinness-addled brain immediately conjures an image of her and Rich stroking each other tenderly beside a roaring log fire, which has to be the least imaginative hypothetical adultery fantasy ever. Still, it does the trick: the thought of them at that party right now, drunk and flirting, makes me feel hot with anxiety.

I walk straight past the undecorated Christmas tree and into the kitchen, where I sit down and crack open the very expensive bottle of red Daphne bought specifically for tomorrow’s lunch.

I pour myself a large glass and check Facebook. There’s a new message. It’s from Alice.

Hey! Found out that my conference thingy is DEFINITELY on for next week so I will be down in London! They’re putting me up in the Hilton in Canary Wharf (fancyyyyy) so maybe we could meet for a drink there? Say, Tuesday 29th? Would be SO good to see you and catch up … ;-) xxx

I take a big gulp of wine and think: is this how it starts, then?

Is this how easy it is?

When I was a kid, the idea of Having An Affair seemed like an incredibly elaborate, complex, almost Machiavellian thing to do. In my head, I built Dad up to be some sort of evil genius who’d spent months planning this dark, terrible scheme that would rip all our lives in two. But maybe I was giving him too much credit. Maybe he stumbled into it without thinking. Maybe he was just frightened and lonely and confused. If so, then I guess I’ve inherited those traits from him. None of his talent, none of his charm; just the cowardly, rotten, arsehole bits.

I pour myself another glass and stare down at the message, wondering how to reply.

The whole thing is just so … odd. I hadn’t seen Alice for years – not since Paris – until I bumped into her at Marek from uni’s wedding a few months back. Daff wasn’t able to make it, and Alice was on her own, too; she’d just split up with her fiancé in Manchester and was there, in her own words, ‘to get as drunk and cynical as humanly possible’.

I’d been really nervous about seeing her again, but right from the off, she acted like nothing had happened. As if there was no reason for any awkwardness. She beckoned me across the lawn with a glass of champagne, and after three more, we were engaged in a lively debate about the ethics of switching dinner-table name cards. Before a conclusion had been satisfactorily reached, Alice had done it – ‘Uncle Steve’ was settling down oblivious on the other side of the marquee, and she was sitting in his seat beside me grinning like a mischievous kid.

Over salmon and chicken and endless white wine, we steadfastly ignored our tablemates and huddled together revisiting the past, expounding on the present and then cringing at all the same bits in the speeches.

It wasn’t just that she looked hot – though she very much did – it was how she made me feel as I talked to her: like I was nineteen again, like the past fifteen years hadn’t happened and the future was still blank and inviting. It was just like in Paris: I loved the fact I could present an edited version of myself to her. I could prune away at the rudderless screw-up that Daphne has watched me become until a better man emerged.

And then later, right at the end of the night, something happened.

All I remember is that the music was winding down, and Alice must have been as wrecked as I was, because she dragged me off the dance floor and into the ‘quirky’ photo booth we’d spent most of the evening taking the piss out of.

We grabbed our ridiculous props – fairy wands and top hats – and at her insistence, we pulled a variety of stupid faces as the flash bounced off us: rictus grins and zombie grimaces and – for the last picture – air-kissing selfie pouts. I closed my eyes for that one, I remember that, and as I felt the flash echo through my eyelids, I realised I wasn’t air-kissing any more. Alice’s lips were pressed up against mine. I pulled away, obviously. But not as quickly as I could have done.

When I opened my eyes, she was shrugging and laughing like it was no big deal. Just a joke.

So that’s what I’ve been telling myself it was. But jokes don’t keep you awake at night, prickling with guilt.

When I got home the next day, I didn’t even tell Daphne I’d seen her. Daff’s always had a weird thing about Alice. I guess because Alice and I were so close during that first term at uni. Even now, she’ll still make the occasional semi-joke about how Alice used to fancy me. Those jokes always leave me prickling with guilt too. So I didn’t tell her when Alice messaged a few days later, and I didn’t tell her when I messaged back. Daff and I were going through a particularly grim patch where we were barely even speaking; she was constantly busy with work, whereas I was fretting about how badly paid, boring and sporadic my employment situation was.

I’m a writer, I suppose, technically speaking. But that makes what I do sound much grander than it actually is. I always imagined I would follow in my dad’s footsteps and write some great play or TV series or novel, but I could never quite sharpen those dreams down to anything specific. I used to think I lacked drive or self-confidence, but the truth is, I just don’t have it in me. I never did. Paris proved that, among other things.

So at some point I downgraded my ambitions and worked as a staff writer for a pretty tawdry lads’ mag. Then, when the dwindling print industry blocked off that career path, I started doing what I’m still doing today – penning press releases and travel brochures for any company that will pay me.

It’s nothing to complain about, I know – I’m lucky to be working, full stop – but it’s nothing to shout about either.

I remember Daff went through a period a while back of trying to light a fire under me. She’d introduce me to editors or other writers; encourage me to try and keep writing stuff I enjoyed, even if I never showed it to anyone. But I’d already given up on myself by then, so I couldn’t really blame her for eventually doing so too.

I drain my glass, and as I pour another, the broken wristwatch catches my eye. It was so strange, those memories popping into my head back in the pub. Particularly that game of Sardines in the maze at uni: I haven’t thought about that in years. Daphne was the first one to find me, and we ended up snogging drunkenly in the thorny hedge, before Alice pulled the branches back, frowning, a few minutes later.

Deep down, I’ve always wondered what would have happened if Alice had found me first. Maybe she should have.

I read her message one more time, and then hit reply.

Hey! 29th sounds good – will be great to see you. Let me know what time works. Xx

As soon as I press send, I experience several contradictory things at once. Fear and excitement and guilt and self-pity, plus a weirdly thrilling sensation that I’ve set something huge in motion; crossed a line that can’t be uncrossed.

Pathetically, though, the overriding emotion is that it’s nice to feel wanted.

Chapter Five

After another large glass of wine, and a lot more staring blankly at my message to Alice, I discover – to my genuine surprise – that the bottle is now four fingers off empty.

Bollocks. That’ll be another row tomorrow. Or later tonight, whenever Daphne gets back. It’s coming up to half eleven now, and she still hasn’t texted.

I feel knackered suddenly, but I decide to do the decorations before heading to bed, so as to provide myself with some passive-aggressive armour ahead of our next argument. I wobble to my feet, realising that my warm three-Guinness glow has now been replaced by a harsh, metallic red-wine drunkenness.

I trudge upstairs to the back attic, feeling the draught cut right into my bones as I open the rickety little door. The decorations are all the way at the back, of course, and to get to them, I have to navigate a treacherous obstacle course of cardboard boxes, suitcases and even an old skateboard (mine, not Daphne’s).

I’m millimetres from the tinsel when I accidentally nudge a massive see-through crate full of Daff’s stuff, which promptly smashes to the ground, spilling its contents everywhere.

‘Fuck’s sake …’ I mumble.

I’ve dropped to my knees to start clearing up when I spot something among the debris. An old metal biscuit tin, its lid hanging half open to reveal a selection of random objects: a crumpled script, a torn-up ticket, a faded programme for a play and a bloodstained fake revolver.

And then it hits me. These objects aren’t random at all.

Out of nowhere, a shiver runs through me; a ghost of that same feeling I felt in the pub, talking to that weird old watch-seller. The sense that this is more than just coincidence.

It’s the gun I reach for first. Crazy how Daphne kept this. I never knew she had. I turn it over and over in my hands, feeling its cold plastic grooves, tracing the smudgy red fingerprints on the handle. I can picture her now, handing it to me. I remember it so clearly. The night we met.

The script, the ticket, the programme: they’re all from that same night. The one that popped into my head earlier: the Sardines-in-the-maze night. I pick up the programme. The front cover reads: UNIVERSITY OF YORK DRAMA SOC PRESENTS: THE CAROL REVISITED.

The play was Marek’s extremely cringeworthy – and surprisingly violent – modern-day reworking of A Christmas Carol. I only had a small part, but still, as I turn the programme over, there I am: allocated my own blurry black-and-white cast photo. I’m gurning toothily at the camera in what appears to be an impression of Wallace from Wallace & Gromit.

I stare down at the picture, and suddenly I cannot believe that this grinning nineteen-year-old kid and I are actually the same person. It’s like looking at a photo of a stranger; I feel no connection at all. What is left of him now?

Obviously it could have been the snakebites and the sambucas, but that night in the maze – a week after this photo was taken – I remember feeling some strange, almost spiritual certainty that everything would turn out all right for me. That I was headed in a decent direction, that my dreams were achievable and the future was a blank canvas I was about to decorate beautifully.

And then – yeah. Look what happened. I took that canvas and filled it with mistakes and failures and wrong turnings. Bad decisions and lies and terrible things I can never, ever take back.

If there’s ever a Ben Hazeley Wikipedia page – and unless someone who shares my name does something worthwhile with his life, there won’t be, but just suppose there is – I can picture now exactly how it will look. Where other Wikipedia pages have headings like ‘Career’ or ‘Legacy’ or ‘Filmography’, mine will just say: ‘Fuck-Ups’. It will be a long, detailed, heavily bullet-pointed list that will begin with the subheading, ‘1996: Dad Buggers Off’ and end – next week – with ‘2020: Cheats On Wife’.

My head is getting heavier by the second, and I know I should crack on with the decorations, but for some reason I can’t tear myself away from the items in this tin. It suddenly makes me angry that Daphne’s kept all this stuff. I picture her sneaking up here from time to time, opening the lid and poring over these objects: physical reminders that she would have been better off without me.

Because that’s it, isn’t it? If your life is just a series of mistakes and screw-ups, then surely it would be best if you weren’t around?

There’s no photo of Daphne in the programme – she was drafted in at the last minute, after someone dropped out – but I can still see her exactly as she was at eighteen: this happy, funny, exuberant girl who gave everyone, friends and strangers alike, the full wattage of her amazing smile, as if she genuinely didn’t realise its power.

And then I stepped in. Chipped away at her over the years, to turn her into the tired, angry, miserable woman in the hallway earlier. Surely her teenage self would be just as disappointed as mine at how things turned out? She must have imagined that by thirty-three she’d have a successful, supportive, normal husband. And kids. I know she wants kids, even though we haven’t broached the subject once this year, despite lots of our mates starting to have them.

A weird memory hits me – not even mine, but something Mum told me when I was a teenager. I’d been eagerly pestering her for happy stories about me and Dad – positive that he’d soon be back in my life – and she’d finally caved and told me about how, when I was eight, I’d wandered in on him watching that Monty Python film, The Meaning of Life. Hearing the phrase, I’d repeated it, parrot-fashion: ‘Dad, what is the meaning of life?’ And he’d laughed and then replied: ‘I suppose it’s to increase the sum of human happiness.’

I loved that answer when I was fourteen, but now it strikes me as the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard. Because all I’ve done since then is subtract, subtract, subtract.

I squeeze the bridge of my nose, and my vision blurs at the edges. I look at my watch to see that it’s one minute to midnight. One minute to Christmas Day.

And then I remember that the watch is bust. Still, that’s probably not far off the real time. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day …

I pick up the programme again, and the fake gun, and hold them both steadily in the palm of my hand.

I’ve no idea how long I sit there staring at them before I fall asleep.

Chapter Six

Traditionally, I find that my hangovers wake up a few seconds after I do.

After a big night of drinking, I tend to get this lovely calm-before-the-storm moment as soon as I regain consciousness, where there’s no pain yet, no regret, no violent urge to vomit. And then as soon as I open my eyes or move my head, all hell breaks loose.

I’m lying perfectly still with my eyes shut, enjoying this period of prelapsarian bliss as I try to fill in the gaps from last night. There are plenty of them. I remember the biscuit tin and the fog of self-pity, but I can’t remember Daff coming home. I can’t remember doing the tree. I can’t even remember coming down from the attic.

Oh please God, don’t let me have slept in the attic.

I experiment with turning my head very gently to the side. There’s no blinding migraine or sudden desire to be sick, which is encouraging. I also seem to be lying on a comfortable pillow and mattress, which bodes well for the please-God-don’t-let-me-have-slept-in-the-attic situation.

I decide to risk it and open my eyes. But it’s not a headache that hits me – it’s cold, hard terror.

I scramble upright, suddenly wide wide WIDE awake, my heart head-butting my ribcage.

Where the HELL am I?

It’s like my brain is still a few seconds behind my eyes, struggling to process the information it’s receiving. The bogey-green curtains; the scratchy Brillo-pad carpet; the poky brown cupboard that hides a grubby little sink and mirror within it.

I hear a low, slightly manic moan from somewhere, and then realise it’s coming from my mouth.

This is … this is uni. This is my bedroom in the first year at uni.

Have I gone mad? Is this what going mad feels like?

Or maybe … maybe this is some kind of elaborate – really elaborate – prank. I suddenly remember an awful interactive theatre experience that Harv dragged me along to once, where the audience ended up as part of the show. We were led into the middle of this extravagant stage and forced to start shaping the plot by ad-libbing with the actors. Maybe this is something similar. If so, then whoever designed the set deserves every award going. It’s literally exactly as I remember it.

I feel my head start to pound, the hangover kicking in now, but then I notice the door handle is rattling frantically and the thumping is actually coming from outside the room.

‘Ben? You in there? Ben!’

The handle jiggles again, but it seems the door is locked.

‘Benjaminnnnnnnn?’ It’s Harv’s voice. Thank God for that.

I stumble to my feet, my heart still thundering, and notice that I’m dressed in a pair of jeans I don’t recognise and my old Wu-Tang Clan hoodie. I thought I’d lost this thing years ago.

I open the door and immediately have to fight the urge to start laughing.

It’s Harv, but it also … isn’t.

It’s like Harv has been gently inflated, or suffered some traumatic allergic reaction. His sharpened cheekbones and laughter lines are all gone, and his face is younger, rounder, doughier. I notice a solid pouch of belly hanging stoutly over his belt buckle. He has a can of lager in one hand and what appears to be a peanut butter and cheese toastie in the other.

‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ he says.

‘I … have no idea,’ I stammer, quite truthfully.

‘Do you know what time it is?’

Instinctively, I glance down at my wrist. My watch says one minute to twelve. The watch I’m still wearing. I’ve woken up in completely different clothes, in a completely different place, and yet this watch is somehow still fixed around my wrist. My brain is poking fruitlessly at this fact when I realise Harv is snapping his fingers in front of my face.

‘Hello? Hellooooo?’

He looks at me strangely, and then takes a large bite of his toastie. ‘It’s after six, man, you’d better get a shift on,’ he says, stickily. ‘Marek just called me. He’s going mental. You weren’t answering your mobile. They’re all already at the Drama Barn.’

I shut my eyes for a second, hoping that when I reopen them I’ll be back in the attic, nursing the mother of all hangovers, with Daphne glowering down at me.

But no. Inflatable Harv is still right there, swigging his lager and staring at me through narrowed eyes. ‘Are you stoned or something?’ he says. ‘Or are you just being a twat?’

‘No, I’m …’ I have no clue what I am. I feel like I’m in some sort of highly advanced virtual-reality video game.

A door opens behind Harv and a small blonde girl emerges, smiling at us. Fuck. It’s Geordie Claire. She lived opposite me in halls. I haven’t seen her since … well, since uni. She waves two little red tickets at me. ‘Good luck, Ben! Me and Stu will be front row.’

I squint at the tickets. They say: DRAMA SOC PRESENTS: THE CAROL REVISITED.

Suddenly I know where I am. And, more importantly, when I am. I have to grab the door frame to steady myself.

‘Shit, Ben, are you OK?’ Claire asks, rushing towards me.

Harv laughs and slips an arm round my shoulder. ‘Must be first-night nerves. Come on, man, we’ll have a quick drink and then I’ll walk you down there.’

Claire looks slightly concerned, but just nods goodbye and heads out.

Harv leads me through to our corridor’s shared kitchen, and the milky-cheesy-rotten-fruit stench that hits me is almost as strong as the déjà vu. I am now one hundred per cent certain that this is not a dream. Only reality could smell this bad.

I slump down into a plastic chair and take a few deep breaths (through my mouth, obviously). Harv shakes his head as he watches me gulping desperately for air.

‘Mate, will you chill out,’ he laughs. ‘You’ll be fine. It’s not like you’re the main part. What’ve you got, like, three lines?’

I’m barely listening to him. There’s a Nuts magazine calendar hanging over the pasta-sauce-spattered microwave. Just above Michelle Marsh’s partially exposed breasts is the confirmation I’m looking for, the confirmation I’ve been dreading:

DECEMBER 2005.

I’ve come back fifteen years.

Harv plonks a can of lager on the table in front of me. He’s now talking into a little electric-blue flip phone. God, I remember that phone. He thought it made him look like someone out of The Wire. ‘Yo, Marek,’ he says. ‘It’s all right, relax, I’ve found him … Yeah, he’s fine. Just a bit nervous … I know, three lines, that’s what I told him. Anyway, we’re on our way now, so don’t panic … Cool. In a bit.’

He snaps the phone shut with a satisfying click. He used to love doing that. ‘Well, Marek’s officially losing his mind,’ he announces. ‘He thought you’d bottled it. Apparently the girl doing the props has also dropped out last minute. He’s calling everyone he knows to find a replacement.’

I can’t get my head around this. I know I should probably be crying or screaming or checking myself into an asylum, but all my brain seems capable of doing is compiling a list of every time-travel film I’ve ever seen. 12 Monkeys, The Terminator, Timecop: they all involve people being sent back to kill somebody significant. Is that what this is? Does Geordie Claire turn out to be the next Hitler or something? She is vegetarian.

But then there’s also Bill & Ted, Back to the Future, Groundhog Day …

‘Harv …’ I stare up at him blankly. ‘What happens in Groundhog Day? I mean, like, why does he go back in time?’

If Harv finds this question at all random, he doesn’t show it. He simply taps his can of lager against his teeth, thoughtfully. ‘Er … isn’t he, like, a weatherman, who’s sort of pissed off with everything? And so he keeps reliving the same day over and over until eventually he … shags Andie MacDowell? Isn’t that basically it?’

I nod dumbly.

He grins at me. ‘Hey, d’you reckon we can name every Bill Murray film from Groundhog Day on?’ He glances up at the clock. ‘Nah, best not, actually. Marek would murder me.’

He downs his beer and pulls me up by the shoulder. ‘Come on, man, let’s go.’

Chapter Seven

As we tear across campus, I am hit by wave after wave of déjà vu.

Our poky little college bar, the run-down Kwiksave, the cocky squads of ducks that waddle up from the lake to shit on the walkways; all of them appear as we sprint past, as if daring me to doubt how real this is.

Because it clearly is. Real.

But still, as I chase Harv across the rickety red bridge by the English block, I feel almost like I’m watching this whole thing from above. Like it’s happening to someone else. Maybe that’s the best way to deal with it: forget the whys and the hows and the what-the-actual-fucks and just go with it until it’s over.

We finally stop running when we reach the Drama Barn – or the Drama Closet, as we rechristened it: a tiny fifty-seater venue right in the middle of campus. There’s already a line of people outside queuing to get in.

‘Fucking hell,’ Harv pants, mopping his forehead with his sleeve. ‘I need to start doing more exercise.’ He nods at the entrance. ‘Well, go on then, dickhead. Break a leg and all that. I’ll see you afterwards.’

Still on autopilot, I walk past the queue and approach the bloke sitting by the main door, taking tickets. I vaguely remember him; a second-year, I think, fully kitted out in the unofficial Drama Soc uniform of black turtleneck, black jeans, black trainers.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ I tell him. ‘Can I, erm … come in? I’m in the play.’

He grunts but doesn’t look up from his phone. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Ben Hazeley.’

He starts scanning a list on the table in front of him. ‘Any relation to Patrick Hazeley?’

And even in my stupefied state, I still feel it. The sense that I’ve been instantly reduced to a little kid; that I exist only as a footnote in the life of a man I barely know.

‘Yeah, he’s my dad.’

The second-year looks up at me; I’m suddenly interesting enough to warrant his full attention. Interesting by birth. Interesting by proxy. ‘Shit, is he really your old man?’ he says. ‘I love his stuff. Seriously, Earth Weight was the first play I ever saw. Fucking … brutal. Incredible writing.’

‘Yeah,’ I say.

He moves aside to let me through. ‘Good luck anyway, mate. See you after, probably.’

I slink into the venue, which is still dark and empty at this point. I remember that the dressing room is right at the back, but I feel like I need a few minutes alone before I have to do any more actual interacting, so I duck into the little toilet behind the lighting rig.

I should really have been expecting it, but seeing my reflection in the mirror makes me genuinely jump. If Harv’s been inflated, then I’ve been whittled down. It’s the face I saw in the programme last night. I push my bony nineteen-year-old cheeks right up to the glass to find soft patches of nearly-stubble in place of wrinkles, and no sign yet of a widow’s peak retreat in my thick dark brown hairline.

I splash my face with cold water and as soon as I come out of the toilet, I hear a voice behind me.

‘Marek is going to KILL you!’

Alice is right there, smirking up at me. She looks … To be honest, she looks almost exactly the same as when I saw her at the wedding. Which is to say that she looks a bit like a blonde Phoebe Cates in Gremlins, except she’s now sporting more of an Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction haircut. She looks good.

‘Come on, the audience will be in any minute.’ She beckons me through to the dressing room, which is stuffed with bodies: people wriggling into shiny suit jackets, having their faces frantically powdered, yelling out lines at random across the uproar. I spot Marek – who hasn’t changed much either; same beard, glasses, wild hair – in the corner, muttering into his phone. He sees me, mimes throttling someone (presumably me) but doesn’t break off the call.

‘He’s found somebody to do the props, I think,’ Alice tells me. ‘Some mate of Jamila’s. He’s just speaking to her now.’

I nod as I feel the beginnings of a thin film of sweat on my brow. Because I suddenly know where all this is heading. I know that I’ll see her in – what will it be – ten minutes? And then it’ll be much, much harder to pretend this is all happening to someone else.

‘Audience is coming in!’ somebody hisses, and suddenly the noise level in the room sinks to a nervy murmur.

The next few minutes are a total blur. I’m helped into my costume – a cheap black Reservoir Dogs-type suit – and then slapped about gently by a girl with a powder brush.

The play has started by now – I can hear Marek on stage, hamming it up – and its finer details begin to tumble back into place in my mind.

The Carol Revisited. ‘Dickens meets Tarantino’ is how Marek pitched it to us at the first rehearsal. Six months from now, he will be openly dismissing it as ‘crude and underdeveloped’, but at the moment, I can hear him giving it his absolute all as he bellows, ‘Humbug, motherfucker!’ at the presumably bewildered audience.

Marek was – is – Drama Soc chairman, and therefore also was – is – a massive show-off. Not content with writing and directing, he’s also playing the main part: Vinny Scrooge (seriously), a meth dealer who is near-fatally shot by a hitman and then guided through his past experiences by a mysterious ghost.

I’m playing the hitman, I remember that much. And the ghost—

‘Ben, dude, they want us backstage.’

I turn around to see a stark-naked man standing in front of me, a stoner’s grin smeared across his face.

Bloody hell. Clem Matthews. Third-year, I think. Not what you’d call a natural actor, but apparently the only student on campus willing to get his knob out in public. I suddenly wonder what he’s doing nowadays. Porn, presumably.

Quite why Marek insisted on the ghost being fully nude, I can’t remember now. Something to do with spiritual realism and shocking the ‘boring old farts’ in the drama department, I think.

‘Come on, let’s go,’ Clem says.

The costume girl stops me. ‘Hang on, are you keeping that watch on? You weren’t wearing it in rehearsals.’

I stare down at my watch, still stuck firmly at a minute to twelve. I forgot I had it on. Why do I have it on? How the hell is it still here when everything else has disappeared?

‘It’s fine,’ Clem breezes. ‘Hitmen obviously wear watches. They don’t want to be late for their murders, do they?’

He grabs my arm, and I follow his bare arse cheeks out behind the wobbly set. We both stand in silence, waiting to go on.

‘How you feeling?’ he whispers. ‘Nervous?’

I suddenly recall how awkward this always was in rehearsals, having to make small talk as I tried very hard to ignore Clem’s dangling penis.

‘Bit nervous, yeah,’ I whisper.

He shrugs. ‘You’ve only got, like, three lines. You’ll nail it.’

Three lines. Why is everyone so obsessed with this three-lines thing? Then it hits me: I have no idea what these three lines are. It’s been fifteen years since I looked at this script. I’m about to walk out on stage with no clue what to say when I get there.

I’ve just decided to make a run for it when I feel a light tap on my shoulder.

‘Hey, are you Ben? This is yours, right?’

Daphne smiles brightly as she holds out a plastic fake revolver.

Chapter Eight

I was expecting to see her, but still.

For a second, I am caught so completely off guard that I can’t even move. Daphne has to lift my hand up and press the gun into it.

‘They told me: “Ben’s the one who’s not naked”,’ she whispers. ‘So I’m guessing that’s you?’

I nod, dumbly. I can’t believe it’s really her. My heart feels like it’s trying to punch its way out of my chest.

Even in the almost pitch darkness I can tell her smile is on full beam. Her curly hair is pulled back into a ponytail that drapes halfway down her shoulder and she’s dressed in the regulation backstage outfit of tight black top and black leggings; a combination that makes her look a bit like a ballerina or a strangely sexy cat burglar.

I’m vaguely aware that I am just staring openly at her, which is probably coming across as more than a little creepy. But I can’t help it.

When this moment first happened, fifteen years ago, I’d be lying if I said it was a fireworks-in-the-sky, love-at-first-sight revelation. As she handed me the gun, I’m pretty sure all I thought was: ‘Huh, the new props girl is quite hot.’

But now – somehow – I’m standing here looking at the girl who’ll become the woman who’ll become my wife. I’ve spent the past fifteen years with her. I know her inside and out. Or at least I think I do. Either way, I have no idea how to treat her like a total stranger.

This weird, silent trance is shattered by the sensation of Clem’s penis bopping me gently on the thigh as he leans across to introduce himself.

‘I’m Clem,’ he whispers, offering his hand. ‘I’m the one who is naked.’

Daphne nods and shakes it. ‘OK: naked, not naked,’ she says, pointing at him, then me. ‘I think I’ve got it. And I’m Daphne, by the way.’

Clearly, both of them are now finding my slack-jawed gawping slightly awkward, because Daphne dials her smile down and looks away, and Clem starts massaging my shoulders.

‘Ben’s a bit nervous,’ he mouths at her. ‘Even though he’s only got three lines.’

That brings me back down to earth with a jolt.

‘I don’t know what they are,’ I splutter. ‘I don’t know my lines.’

Clem laughs without smiling. ‘Good one.’

‘No, seriously … I can’t remember them.’

Clem is now looking at me like I’m the one with his tackle out in a public space. But Daphne just raises her index finger and says: ‘Give me one sec,’ then disappears into the darkness.

Clem starts muttering something at me, but I’m not paying attention; I’m just listening to Marek out on stage telling Tiny Tim to go fuck himself, and before I know it, Daphne’s back again, bearing a script and a key-ring torch.

‘Right, what’s your character’s name?’ she whispers, flipping through the pages.

I look at Clem blankly.

‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ he hisses. ‘Have you been hit on the head or something?’ His laid-back stoner persona seems to have completely evaporated over the past thirty seconds. ‘He’s called Jimmy the Hat,’ he tells Daphne.

‘Jimmy the Hat …’ she repeats slowly. She shines the torch at me. ‘Shouldn’t you be wearing a hat, then?’

‘Marek says it’s an ironic nickname,’ Clem explains, through gritted teeth. ‘Like Little John in Robin Hood.’

‘Ah, right, gotcha.’ Daphne nods. ‘Such a fine line between ironic and just … confusing.’ Her expression is thin-lipped, earnest, perfectly deadpan, and despite everything, I have to put a hand to my mouth to muffle my laughter.

She finds the page in question and stabs it with her finger. ‘OK, got it … Jimmy the Hat … Right, so you walk in when the lights go out. Then the lights come up, and you say: “Scrooge, you son of a bitch, I thought I might find you here.”’ She looks up at us. ‘Isn’t this set in Scrooge’s house? Obviously he’s going to find him here.’

This makes me start laughing again, and for a second I’m worried I won’t be able to stop, and that I’ll be shoved out on stage still giggling like a lunatic, until the men in white coats arrive to take me away.

‘This is not the time to start dissecting the fucking script,’ Clem whispers, but he’s smiling now too.

‘OK, OK …’ Daphne looks back at the page. ‘Scrooge says: “Jimmy the Hat, what the fuck do you want?” And you say, “Where’s the dope, Scrooge?” And he says, “Fuck you, Jimmy!” and you say, “Eat lead, cocksucker!” and then you shoot him.’ She gives me a conspiratorial glance. ‘This is great stuff. Dickens would be so chuffed.’

I lean over and stare at the page under the torchlight, trying to burn the words into my brain. And then suddenly the stage lights go out, and I feel Clem grab my shoulders and bundle me roughly through the gap in the set.

When the lights come back up, they are bright white and searing intensely into my face, and I’m staring out at forty or fifty bored-looking audience members. I turn to look at Marek, who is lying in bed with a rictus grin on his face, his eyes begging me to say something.

‘Er … Scrooge, you … son of a bitch,’ I stutter. ‘I thought I might find you here.’

I see Marek wince at my robotic delivery, but he’s instantly back in character.

‘Jimmy the Hat!’ he bellows. ‘What the fuck do you want?’

‘Where’s the dope, Scrooge?’ I enquire, with slightly more emotion this time.

He jabs a finger at me. ‘Fuck you, Jimmy!’

‘Eat lead, cocksucker!’ I shout back. And the relief that I’ve actually done it – I’ve managed to deliver my three lines without ruining the whole play – is so overwhelming that I almost start laughing again.

But then, nothing happens.

The audience are all still staring at me blankly, like they’re expecting something more. I think I can see Harv in the back row, although I can’t be sure, as he’s got both hands over his face. I turn to look at Marek, who is now beetroot red and visibly shaking. He’s glaring down at my hand, for some reason. Or, no, not my hand; the gun in my hand.

‘Ah, right, yeah,’ I murmur. And then I point the revolver at him and squeeze the trigger.

There’s a loud bang from up in the sound booth, and Marek is suddenly screeching in over-the-top agony, his white nightshirt covered in what is quite clearly tomato ketchup.

I stumble backwards, past Clem, who is emerging nakedly onto the stage and muttering, ‘Mate, seriously, what the fuck?’ as he passes me. I grope my way back into the darkness, where Daphne’s smile is still waiting for me. She raises her hand for a high-five and leans in so close I can feel her breath on my cheek.

‘And the Oscar goes to …’ she whispers, and we both dissolve into silent laughter.

Chapter Nine

I spend the next hour in the dressing room, alone for the most part, trying and failing to make sense of what the hell is going on.

The thing I keep coming back to is that nothing – nothing – is playing out the way it did first time around. Obviously, fifteen years ago, I didn’t forget my lines or gawp at Daphne like a creepy oddball, and she didn’t have to go and find me a script or high-five me as I came offstage.

I have no idea whether any of this matters. But I do remember reading some sci-fi story when I was a kid about a time traveller who crushes a butterfly and ends up killing off the dinosaurs as a result. And if there’s any truth in that logic, then I’m starting to seriously wonder what sort of knock-on effects all these new developments will have.

But then maybe, I consider, as I stare at my insanely youthful face in the dressing-room mirror, maybe that’s the point of all this. I think back to the attic, which already seems like days ago: didn’t I drunkenly imagine what might have happened if tonight had gone differently? And that old man in the pub. The watch-seller. When he asked me if I would change anything, tonight was one of the memories that flashed into my mind. That strange feeling rushes through me again – the unsettling sense that the old man knew me somehow. I stare down at the watch he gave me, its hands still frozen at one minute to twelve, and make a concerted effort to wrap my brain around what is going on.

Before I can manage it, though, the rest of the cast are stomping back into the dressing room, dragging me back out on stage for the curtain call.

I blink into the white light again as the audience claps half-heartedly at us, and then we’re all back in the dressing room together, shouting and laughing and hugging.

If Marek bears me any ill will for turning his gravely serious near-death scene into a ridiculous farce, he doesn’t show it. He squeezes me just as tightly as he does everyone else, gushing about how amazingly the whole thing went, and seeming particularly pleased that several audience members walked out during a flashback in which Scrooge slits a rival drug dealer’s throat with a guitar string.

‘Did you see the looks on their faces?’ he yells. ‘They just couldn’t fucking handle it!’

We all spill out of the Drama Barn into Langwith College bar next door, and as my feet cross the ominously sticky threshold, the déjà vu is humming away stronger than ever. God, I remember this place so well. I can’t count the number of nights I spent in here, feeding my student loan into the pool table, fifty pee at a time.

The bar’s lime-green walls are reverberating to the sound of ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’, and my butterflies-and-dinosaurs theory begins to flounder slightly, because everything starts slotting neatly back into place, exactly as I remember it.

Daphne has disappeared, just like she did all those years ago, and I recall the sharp pang of regret nineteen-year-old me felt as I scanned the bar and couldn’t spot her. Harv turns up and starts forcing sambuca shots on everyone, and then Alice sits down next to me, just as she did first time round.

She’s pink-cheeked, fresh from scrubbing off her stage make-up, and she looks lovely. I watch her down her shot, and wonder if maybe this is where things will really start to change. If maybe this time Daphne won’t show up at the bar at all, and tonight will become what I always imagined it would: me and Alice’s night.

She drops the tiny glass back onto the table and grimaces. ‘Well, thank God that’s over.’

‘What, the shot?’

She laughs. ‘No. The play.’

‘Oh, right. Didn’t you enjoy it?’

‘Yeah, no, I did. It’s just I’ve been so nervous about it for weeks. It’s nice to be able to finally stop worrying about it.’

Alice had a much bigger part in The Carol Revisited than I did – although to be fair, the same could be said for literally every other member of the cast. She was playing the second lead – Marie, Scrooge’s fiery moll – and as I recall, it required a ton of line-learning and late-night rehearsing.

‘You were great,’ I tell her.

She shrugs. ‘Thanks. It was pretty fun. But tonight’s what I’ve really been looking forward to.’ She smiles at me for a second before adding: ‘The cast party, I mean.’

I smile back and find myself wondering if she always imagined this would be our night too.

She picks up two shots from the tray in front of us and says: ‘Here, come on. Let’s get very, very pissed.’

I smile and nod, feeling exactly as torn as I did all those years ago; part of me enjoying the feeling of being flirted with by Alice, the other part desperate to see Daphne again.

We do another grimace-inducing sambuca shot each, and then Alice squeezes my arm and gets up to say hi to somebody else. And as I scan the room again, Daff is suddenly there, right on cue.

She’s standing at the bar with her best friend, Jamila, and a few of her other mates. She gives me a grin and a wave and then turns back to them.

Under the bar’s garish strip lighting, I can finally see her face properly, and my heart starts pulsing in my chest. It’s stating the blindingly obvious to say that she looks younger – a little bit redder and rounder in the cheeks – but the really big difference is in the way she carries herself. There’s this lightness to her that I remember being immediately struck by when I first met her – a goofy, playful silliness that I honestly haven’t seen in years.

Probably because I’ve managed to gradually grind it out of her.

She’s listening to Jamila tell some story, and as she nods along, she nibbles absent-mindedly at the rim of her plastic pint glass. That’s a trait I remember thinking was a cute little nervous tic, until I later learned it was a tactical ploy to hide her top lip.

Daff’s always had a weird thing about her top lip. She hates the little scattering of light brown freckles that run across it – which, to be honest, I’ve always thought were really cute. But some boy at her school once teased her about them in Year 8, and it’s stuck with her ever since.

And now here she comes, walking towards me, smiling awkwardly, and I have to pretend I don’t know any of that. I have to pretend I don’t know anything about her. That she’s some random girl I’ve just met.

How the hell am I supposed to do this?

‘Hey!’ she says. ‘Not-Naked Ben.’

‘Not-Naked Daphne. Hi.’

She pulls out Alice’s chair, and before I can tell her that it’s Alice’s chair, she’s plonked herself down in it. She raises her pint glass to me. ‘Congratulations again on your stellar performance.’

I hold my hands up and force a laugh. I’m still finding normal conversation with her too much to handle, to be honest. Plus, I’ve become so keenly aware of my tendency to stare that I’m now doing the exact opposite – making barely any eye contact at all. Which is probably just as weird.

‘I thought you’d headed off,’ I tell her left shoulder.

She shakes her head. ‘No, I was supposed to be meeting some friends off campus, but I brought them back here instead.’

‘Ah, right. Cool.’

Alice is now back at the table, holding a tray loaded with pints of snakebite and black. I see her glance pointedly at Daphne as she slides one towards me and then goes off to find a free chair next to Marek down the other end. I feel a twinge of guilt, as well as something else I can’t quite put my finger on. Regret, maybe? But there’s no time to dwell on it, because Daff is leaning back in.

‘So is this your thing, then?’ she asks. ‘Do you want to be an actor? Because I have to say, I’m not a hundred per cent sure you’re cut out for the hitman business.’

‘You’re right,’ I say, nodding. ‘The best hitmen do traditionally remember to kill their victims.’

‘Well, maybe you could be a sort of pacifist hitman,’ she suggests, her smile widening, ‘who’s trying to bring down the industry from within.’

‘A non-violent hitman. Yeah. I’m into it.’

‘The Gandhi of assassination.’

I snort a laugh at this, and it draws another glance from Alice.

Harv materialises behind us, clutching another fresh crop of sambuca shots. He sinks one himself and then thumps another down in front of me. ‘I didn’t get you one,’ he tells Daphne, ‘because I don’t know who you are.’ He sticks his hand out. ‘Let’s remedy that right now. I’m Harvey.’

‘Daphne,’ she laughs, shaking his hand.

‘OK. Daphne. Now that we’re old mates, I’ll go and get you a shot.’

She’s still shaking his hand and laughing. ‘No, no, honestly, I’m fine. Thanks.’

‘You sure? Final answer? All right. Nice to meet you, anyway. This is the longest handshake ever.’ He breaks off and slumps down into a free seat at the other end of the table.

I really can’t face this latest shot. I’m feeling extremely light-headed as it is, and I suspect that inexplicably travelling into the past is a bit like operating heavy machinery: you probably shouldn’t be pissed when you do it.

‘Do you want this?’ I whisper, nudging the sticky glass towards Daff. ‘Because I definitely don’t.’

She grimaces and slides it back. ‘Ugh. No way. Can’t stand sambuca. It was the first drink I ever got sick on. Bad memories.’

‘That’s so true,’ I say. ‘The first drink you get sick on will always be undrinkable. Mine was peach schnapps. Still can’t go anywhere near it.’

She laughs, wrinkling her nose. ‘Peach schnapps. You must have been a classy kid.’

‘Oh yeah, big time. We were about fourteen, I think, down the park one Friday night, and Ross Kennett turned up with a bottle of it that he’d nicked out of his mum’s cabinet.’

‘Classic Kennett,’ she says.

‘Exactly. Textbook Kennett. I think I only had three shots, but even now, just the smell of it makes me feel sick. I must’ve thrown up underneath that slide for about fifteen minutes straight.’

‘Well, that’s a lovely image, Not-Naked Ben. I’ll keep it with me always.’ She takes a sip of her pint. ‘So, hey, you never answered my question before – is acting actually what you want to do?’

‘No, no, not at all,’ I say. ‘I just did this for a bit of a laugh, really.’

When she asked me this question first time round, I vaguely recall launching into a long, boring spiel about how what I really wanted to be was a writer. I think I trotted out the standard monologue I’d memorised for when trying to impress attractive girls, which was full of painfully crowbarred references to Franz Kafka.

This time, though, I decide against trying to conjure up some non-existent self-belief, and ask her a question instead.

‘What about you?’ I say. ‘Do you want to get into theatre stuff?’

She shrugs. ‘Well, I was only helping out tonight as a favour, really. But yeah, I do enjoy it. I don’t know, though … I’m definitely not an actor, and I don’t think I’d be much of a writer or director, either.’

‘Gun-handler?’ I suggest. ‘Last-minute script-finder?’

She laughs. ‘Yeah, exactly. Or maybe … I don’t know. Maybe producer? I like the idea of being someone who helps to make good stuff happen, you know?’

I nod, and the difference between us at this age suddenly seems staggeringly clear. I was a pretentious knobhead, full of unrealistic dreams and unfounded confidence; Daff was modest, humble and obviously bound for success.

She shoots me another one of her wide, bright, amazing smiles – the kind I see so rarely in 2020. I don’t know if this is the exact same discussion we had first time round – probably not – but the general feeling I’m getting is the same. That fluttering excitement at the knowledge that I’d definitely met someone special – someone I’d still be thinking about long after this conversation finished. But also, a strange sense of ease and comfort – like I’d known this person for years, and conversation just flowed effortlessly between us.

She says something else, which I don’t quite catch, because as I glance over at the bar, I see a face I recognise.

A scraggly rust-coloured beard above a tie covered with cartoon reindeer. Two twinkling blue eyes that meet mine as he shoots me a wink …

I launch up from my chair, nearly spilling every drink on the table.

‘Are you OK?’ Daphne laughs.

I’m craning my neck to see through the mass of people surrounding the bar. But he’s not there. I must have imagined it. After all, I’ve just come back fifteen years: why would he look exactly the same and be wearing the exact same tie?

I must be losing it.

‘Sorry. Just thought I saw someone I knew.’ I slump back down, but Daphne’s attention is focused on the other end of the table. Marek is now aggressively drunk and sounding off so loudly that everyone is forced to turn and listen.

‘I’m honestly glad that people walked out,’ he shouts. ‘The truth is, you can’t produce a truly great work of art that is also commercially successful. It cannot be done. The two things are fundamentally incompatible.’

Everyone around him nods in solemn agreement, and I suddenly remember exactly how this bit goes.

Daphne puts down her glass, clears her throat and then asks him, quite earnestly: ‘Do you think that’s definitely true?’ Fifteen heads turn to look at her.

Marek is used to holding court without any interruptions whatsoever, so he’s now staring at Daphne like she’s just poured her pint over him.

‘Er, yeah,’ he snaps. ‘I do.’

‘Oh, OK then. Fair enough.’ She nods and says nothing more. Marek clearly feels the need to reassert himself, though. ‘You don’t think it’s true, then, I’m guessing?’ he says.

‘Well, no.’ She shrugs, apologetically. ‘I think there are lots of good writers who are also commercially successful.’

‘Go on, then,’ Marek smirks. ‘Would you care to enlighten us with some examples?’ Daff opens her mouth to speak, but he shouts over her before she can get a word out: ‘Because, to be honest, I’m not sure I’d even want to be commercially successful anyway.’ She tries again, but Marek is way too loud for her. ‘Anything of any real artistic merit has always been scorned or ignored by the masses,’ he proclaims. ‘Like, look at the Dada movement, right …’ – and at this point, I stop listening and focus on watching Daphne.

She doesn’t seem particularly cross at being interrupted; she just sits there looking at Marek with one eyebrow raised, and it hits me again that I haven’t seen this playful, feisty spark in her in years. If we hadn’t got together – got married – maybe she’d still have it.

‘But isn’t that the ultimate dream?’ she says, when Marek finally breaks off for a swig of snakebite. ‘To make something really good that also resonates with lots of people?’

Marek slaps his glass down. ‘Not achievable, I’m afraid, because most people are idiots. I mean, seriously: can you name one decent writer – in any genre – who’s also commercially successful?’

Daff takes a deep breath and starts counting them off on her fingers. ‘Nora Ephron, Stephen King, Sue Townsend, Armando Iannucci …’ She puffs her cheeks out. ‘That’s four, for a start.’

There’s a beat of embarrassed silence while we all watch Marek consider arguing that these good and successful writers are not good and successful. In the end, he gives up and reaches for a Big Lebowski quote: ‘Well, that’s just like … your opinion, man,’ he drawls.

Daphne holds up a fifth finger. ‘Ah, yeah, and the Coen brothers. Thanks. That’s five. Or six, if we’re counting both of them.’

There are a few laughs at this, and Marek takes out his phone and starts jabbing at it to indicate that the conversation is over.

‘Sorry about that,’ Daphne murmurs to me, not looking in the least bit sorry. ‘I hope I didn’t upset your friend.’

‘He’s not really our friend,’ Harv whispers, leaning across. ‘He’s more a bell-end that happens to live on our corridor.’ Daphne laughs hard at this, and Harv stands up to address the whole table. ‘Right, I’m getting more shots. Who’s in?’

‘Fuck shots,’ says Marek, snapping his phone shut and assuming leadership once again. ‘Let’s play Sardines!’

Chapter Ten

A dozen chairs scrape backwards noisily, and the cries of ‘Yes!’ and ‘Let’s do it!’ instantly drown out the Kaiser Chiefs’ riot predictions on the stereo.

I can feel beads of sweat starting to prickle on my brow, so I excuse myself and barge through the last-orders throng at the bar, towards the bathroom.

I slip into a cubicle and slump down on top of the toilet lid, my heart pounding in my chest. Playing Sardines in the campus maze was an end-of-term Drama Soc tradition, one that Marek had always insisted we should keep up tonight. But this evening’s game represents something way more significant than a bit of random boozy fun: it was the first time Daphne and I ever kissed.

I take a deep breath and try again to make some sense of the situation. I’ve spent the past half-hour being reminded of how brilliantly Daff and I once got on; how right we once seemed for each other. But while I may not have a clue why this is all happening, one thing I do have is hindsight. And that means I now know exactly how we’ll end up. How far we’ll eventually drift from our hopeful, happy, seemingly perfect-for-one-another teenage selves.

Fifteen years ago, it was just a random quirk of fate that Daphne found me first in the maze. And that quirk has gone on to define the rest of our lives. So maybe this time … will it be Alice who finds me first instead? The idea makes my heartbeat instantly double its speed. Will I get to see what my life would look like if she and I had got together tonight?

There was always something between us, and over the years, it’s like fate has constantly found ways to bring us back together. There was Paris, then Marek’s wedding, and now this drink we’ve arranged back in 2020. Maybe this – tonight – is where it was all supposed to start? But instead, Daphne found me first during the game of Sardines, and all three of our lives were sent spiralling off in the wrong direction …

I must be breathing pretty heavily as these thoughts ricochet around my head because the bloke in the next cubicle thumps the wall and shouts, ‘You all right in there, mate? Tactical chunder?’

I unlock the door and splash some cold water on my face. As I walk out, still dripping and borderline hyperventilating, I bump straight into Alice on her way to the ladies’.

‘Bloody hell,’ she laughs. ‘You look like you’ve just done fifty lengths. You all right?’

I nod.

‘Oh-kay.’ She tilts her head at me. ‘Hardly chatted to you all night, Benjamin. Impossible to tear you away from the sexy props girl … who clearly fancies you, by the way.’

Telling me that random girls clearly fancied me was something Alice did quite a lot over this first term. I would estimate that ninety-eight per cent of the time it was utter bollocks, but still, it always made me feel pretty good. Probably because, even at nineteen, I realised that ‘so-and-so clearly fancies you’ can usually be translated as ‘I clearly fancy you’.

‘I’m not sure about that,’ I tell her.

‘Soooo modest.’ She rolls her eyes, mock dramatically, and gives me a coy smile. For a second, it’s like I’m right back at that wedding with her, feeling the words WHAT IF? burn themselves onto my brain.

‘What’s her name again, the props girl?’ Alice asks, fiddling with her fringe. ‘Daisy?’

‘Daphne.’

‘Daphne, right.’ Getting Daphne’s name wrong was something Alice did quite a lot from this night onwards. ‘Well, anyway, if you can tear yourself away from Daphne, maybe me and you can hang out a bit later?’ She grins and nudges my trainer with hers. ‘I feel like I’ve hardly seen you recently, what with having to rehearse all the time. And tomorrow it’s the holidays, so I won’t see you for, like, three weeks, you know?’

I nod, dumbly. It’s odd to think now, but throughout this whole first term, Alice was probably the person I hung out with most. More than Harv, even. We were next-door neighbours in halls, and since we were both doing artsy degrees, with precious few contact hours, our daytimes would mostly be spent cooking sausage sandwiches in the shared kitchen and then retreating to the bar to play pool and talk bollocks. We were pretty much inseparable for those first ten weeks. And now – just like in Paris, just like at the wedding – I’m starting to remember why. She was funny and clever and I liked who I was when I was with her. And as the term wore on, I have to admit I enjoyed the heady sensation of knowing something might happen between us, but not knowing exactly when.

‘Hanging out later sounds great,’ I tell her. It briefly crosses my mind to suggest that we sack off Sardines altogether, and head straight back to the corridor, just the two of us. But before I can weigh this idea up properly, Alice says, ‘Cool, see you out there,’ and slips past me into the loos.

When I step out of the bar, everyone is huddled up in coats and scarves, their breath billowing out in smoky speech bubbles. Harv slides an arm around my shoulder and starts gabbling about something or other, but I can’t concentrate on what he’s saying. Everything is zoning in and out of focus, feeling real and unreal at the same time.

Alice comes out and loops her arm straight through mine. I’m not sure if Daphne sees this, because she’s at the front of the pack, chatting to someone else. Marek shouts, ‘Let’s go!’ and starts to lead our chattering, giggling group down the walkway and over the bridge behind the English blocks, where the campus maze looms out at us through the darkness.

A couple of the group have no idea what Sardines is, so Marek’s explaining it to them: ‘Someone goes to hide, right, and then we all look for them. When you find the hider, you hide with them, and it goes on like that until everyone’s hiding and there’s only one person left looking.’

‘So who’s hiding first?’ someone else asks, as we arrive at the entrance to the maze. I look round to see Daphne and Alice both grinning at me.

‘I think Ben should,’ Alice says.

‘Yep.’ Daphne nods. ‘Ben seems like a natural hider.’

I feel the sudden urge to just drop onto the damp grass and adopt the foetal position until this dream or nightmare or vision or whatever the fuck it is is over. But something propels me forwards, and before I know it, I’m bolting into the maze while they all start counting to fifty behind me.

I’m nowhere near as drunk as I was first time round, but still, I have absolutely no clue where I’m running to, or where I originally hid. I’m just sprinting mindlessly, turning corners whenever I feel like it, my footsteps keeping time with my heartbeat, the sweat cold and clammy on my temples.

The counting has stopped now, and I can hear them all bundling raucously into the maze after me. I slow down to a standstill, clutching the throbbing stitch in my stomach, and claw my way into the nearest hedge. I flop down painfully among the prickly branches, and try to picture Alice climbing in beside me.

But what happens if she does? We kiss? And then what?

Do I stay here, in this new reality? For how long? For the rest of my life?

I try to decide whether I would actually – genuinely – want that. Whether it would be better for everyone, Daphne included. But I can’t. The concept is just too massive to properly process. My head throbs with confusion and doubt, and I realise the only thing to do is let fate take control, exactly as I did last time.

I hear Harv’s whooping laugh float around the corner as he bumps into somebody in the darkness. I remember this happening first time round too, and wonder idly if I’ve somehow ended up in the exact same hiding spot as before. Just as they did originally, the two pairs of trainers bounce right past without stopping.

And then, almost immediately, I hear another crackle of feet on twigs. I crane my neck to see someone else rounding the opposite corner and beginning to emerge through the leaves. I squint to try and make them out …

And as I do so, something even stronger than déjà vu slaps me hard across the face. A sense memory so vivid it makes my head spin.

All these years I’ve been telling myself the story of what happened in this maze. And I realise now I’ve been telling it wrong.

It was Alice who got to me first.

I see her now through the gaps in the hedge, creeping past just as she did back then, scouring the branches for any movement. The precise thought I had at the time flashes suddenly into my brain: I could make a sound now. I could let her know where I am.

But I found that I didn’t want to make a sound. I didn’t want her to find me.

Alice squints right through the branches, and for a second I’m certain she’s looking straight at me. But then she draws back, turns and keeps walking.

I breathe out shakily, because it’s all coming back now and I know exactly what will happen next. I’m not sure how I could have forgotten it – the booze, I guess, or just the gradual erosion of the intervening years – but the memory is now crystal clear in my mind.

Right on cue, Daphne appears, peering gingerly into the hedge opposite. And without thinking, I do exactly what I did fifteen years ago: I reach up to bend one of the branches above me until it snaps cleanly in two.

She jumps at the sharp sound and turns in my direction, a smile playing on her lips.

It wasn’t random chance at all.

I wanted her to find me. I made her find me.

She gets nearer and nearer until she’s standing right over me, grinning down through the leaves.

‘So,’ she whispers. ‘Not a great hitman, not a great hider.’

I just about manage to croak a laugh.

‘Is there any room in there?’

I lift the biggest branch and she climbs under it and sits down opposite me, cross-legged. Our knees are already overlapping, but then she has to lean forward to readjust her position, which brings our faces so close they are practically touching.

‘Oops,’ she whispers. ‘This is a bit, erm …’

She lets the sentence hang there, unfinished, as we look into each other’s eyes. My heart is thumping so hard that I’m sure she must be able to hear it. But I can’t help it. My head is suddenly filled with the memory of this moment, fifteen years ago: our first kiss. How right it felt, as I leaned forward and touched her lips to mine. The way she smelled, the way she felt, the way she tasted.

She tucks a stray curl back behind her ear and smiles at me. And God, I want to kiss her again.

She tilts her head slightly, and without thinking, I reach up and touch her face, very gently. She smiles again, and the tip of her nose brushes my cheek as her lips find mine. And as we kiss, everything around me seems to fizzle and dissolve, until there’s only the two of us left.

Chapter Eleven

I’m not sure how long we stay like that, lost in that kiss.

I must have kissed Daphne a million times over the past fifteen years, but I can’t remember any of them feeling this perfect. It’s like my whole body is being lit up from inside. I don’t want it to ever end.

But then, suddenly, it does.

There’s a sharp crackle of leaves, the branches are pulled back, and there’s Alice, staring straight down at us.

Daff pulls away, and the look on Alice’s face brings me right back to earth with a jolt. It’s exactly as I remember it: the initial flinch of confusion that melts instantly into a kind of embarrassed disappointment. She sucks in her bottom lip, glances down at the grass and mutters: ‘Sorry.’

Daff shoots me an ugh-this-is-awkward grimace, but I have no idea what to say or do. The moment is so insane and unreal it feels like it’s happening to someone else.

Thankfully, I don’t have to do anything. Marek and a couple of others materialise out of nowhere, right behind Alice, giggling like idiots. They barge into our hiding place, and suddenly there are enough bodies in the hedge to muffle the awkwardness.

I’m doing everything in my power to avoid eye contact with Alice – which is not difficult, really, since the space is now so crowded that my face is pressed directly into Marek’s armpit. And even though I feel sick with guilt about Alice finding me and Daff together, I’m still thrumming with the exhilaration of that kiss. I can’t help it. It’s all coming back to me now: the way I felt at this moment, fifteen years ago. The ballooning sense of excitement in my stomach. The tingly feeling that this might be the start of something really good. The absolute certainty that there was no way in hell I could wait the whole Christmas holidays before I saw Daphne again.

Finally, after what seems like centuries, the last person finds us and the game comes to an end. We all scramble out of the hedge, and start traipsing back out of the maze. I lag behind, right at the back of the pack, trying to figure out what I’ll say to Alice when I get out.

But it turns out I don’t need to worry. By the time I step out of the maze, Marek is already leading the charge back towards the bar for last orders. Everyone is staggering drunkenly after him, and I can’t see Alice anywhere. I linger by the maze’s entrance and watch the bodies disappear into the night, terrified that Daphne might have disappeared with them …

Then, suddenly, she’s right beside me in the darkness.

‘Not sure I’m up for another drink,’ she says.

‘No, me neither.’

‘So …’ I feel her hand brush gently against mine. ‘I guess this is goodnight, then …’

The first time around, it was. We were still surrounded by people, so we just exchanged a brief, awkward ‘See you later’, and then I headed off for one last beer, before stumbling back to my room to lie wide awake in bed, reliving the memory of that kiss.

But this time, I don’t want the night to end. I still can’t make head or tail of what is happening, but I know for absolute certain that I don’t want Daphne to leave.

‘Do you want to …’ I begin. But I can’t think of a way to add ‘come back to mine’ without sounding like a massive sleazebag.

Daff must pick up on this dilemma, because she tilts her head at me playfully. ‘Not-Naked Ben, are you asking me back to your room?’

I laugh. ‘Well, yeah. But for entirely innocent reasons, I promise.’

She still looks dubious – which is fair enough, really. I don’t know how to communicate that I am actually telling the truth. As amazing and electrifying as that kiss was, the idea of us going any further honestly hasn’t crossed my mind. I just want more time with her – with this Daphne. This happy, funny, carefree girl who is so different from the woman I live with in 2020. I want to get to know her all over again.

‘A cup of tea,’ I say. ‘That’s all, I swear. If you fancy it?’

She sizes me up with her big brown eyes. And then that amazing smile spreads across her face. ‘OK, yeah. I could murder a cup of tea, actually.’

We wind our way slowly back to my hall of residence. And with every step, I can feel the excitement rising in my chest. Daff loops her arm through mine and shoots me a grin that makes me think she’s feeling the exact same thing.

But then we get to the entrance, and I come face to face with a bulky locked door, and a numbered entry panel beside it.

‘Oh. Shit.’

My heart sinks right into the pit of my stomach.

‘What?’ Daphne asks.

For the hell of it, I punch in 1-2-3-4. No joy. We could be here a while.

‘How drunk are you?’ Daff laughs. ‘Can you really not remember your own door code?’

‘No, hang on, don’t worry … It’ll come to me …’

But obviously it won’t. I’m about to pull my phone out and see if Harv is still awake when I hear someone shout ‘WAHEY!’ at a deafening volume behind me.

I turn around to see Geordie Claire standing there, grinning drunkenly, with her massive rugby player boyfriend next to her. Both of them smell strongly of tequila and chilli sauce.

‘Hey, Ben!’ Claire slurs, dragging me into a wobbly hug. ‘So, we both really enjoyed your play. Really, really, really. It was very, erm … original.’

‘Yeah, top work, mate,’ says her boyfriend, whose name escapes me. ‘You were … great.’

‘He was, wasn’t he?’ Daff nods, somehow managing to keep a straight face. ‘He’s a natural hitman.’

Claire punches in the entrance code, and we all troop up the stairs together. We say goodnight to the two of them at the end of the corridor, and as we do, I find my voice dropping automatically to a whisper. It’s not even half eleven – still early for a freshers’ dorm on the last night of term – but I’m suddenly keenly aware of the fact that Alice’s room is right next door to mine. I have no idea whether she went on to the bar with the others, or whether she’s in there right now, just one paper-thin wall away from us.

By some miracle, my room key is in the pocket of the jeans I was wearing when I woke up, so I let Daff in before heading into the kitchen to make the tea. I flick the kettle on and stare at it hard, willing it to boil faster. I don’t know how long we’ll have together tonight – I have no idea if I’ll find myself back in 2020 at any moment – so I want to make the most of every second here.

Once the kettle’s boiled, I dart straight back to my room with the two steaming mugs to find Daff kneeling on my bed, peering closely at the bookshelf next to it. I spent hours arranging that bookshelf in preparation for precisely this moment: a hot girl peering closely at it. It was chock full of wilfully obscure, borderline unreadable paperbacks, all designed to make me look much deeper and more intellectual than I actually was.

I feel a little shiver of exasperation at my try-hard teenage self as I hand Daff her cup of tea.

‘Here you go,’ I say. ‘Milk, one sugar.’

She wrinkles her brow. ‘How did you know?’

‘I, er … Lucky guess.’

‘Very lucky. So, you’re doing English, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Me too.’ She takes a sip from her mug. ‘Mmm, good tea.’ And then, with a little smile, she adds: ‘You know, I’ve actually seen you in lectures.’

‘Oh, really?’ I’d definitely never seen her before this evening.

‘Yeah. You and Marek,’ she says. ‘You always seem to be the last ones to arrive. The lecturer starts talking, then the door slams and everyone looks round, and you two come swanning in in your long flappy coats, looking like you’ve just got out of bed.’

I can’t help laughing at the memory of it. ‘Oh God. We don’t mean to always be late,’ I start. ‘We just—’

She interrupts me with a grin. ‘I reckon you both like the attention.’

She’s right, of course. We loved it. God, we were a pair of knobs.

It’s so weird, thinking back to what I was like at this point. So full of ill-founded confidence, so desperate to appear cool and interesting at all times. For this whole first term, I saw Marek as a bit of an aspirational figure, I guess. Like Alice, he was clever and funny and sarcastic, and he seemed to have stepped straight out of Withnail & I, chain-smoking roll-ups in his moth-eaten pea coat. I’d bought one in the exact same style – I can actually see it now, through the gap in my wardrobe.

By second term, though – once I’d met Daphne – the Marek effect started to wear off. I began to realise that Daff and Harv were much more fun to hang out with. Mainly because when I was with them, I didn’t have to try so hard to be someone I wasn’t.

Daff shifts round to face me and sits cross-legged on the bed. She’s slipped her shoes off already, and she tucks her stripy-socked feet underneath her. Her curly hair is starting to wriggle free from her ponytail, and as she reaches up to retie it, she pushes her shoulders back and tilts her head, and for a moment, she looks so beautiful I can barely think straight.

This is just … mad. I mean: this is Daphne. I’ve known her fifteen years. Why the hell am I so nervous?

I plonk down opposite her, nearly spilling half my tea.

‘So, you’ve already got me figured out, then, have you?’ I say.

‘Yup.’ She grins. ‘Always late. Reads highly pretentious books. Bad at hiding in mazes. Good at making tea. That about sums you up, I reckon.’

‘Oh, great. Thanks a lot.’

‘No worries.’ She stretches her leg out and pokes me gently in the thigh with her big toe. It’s a gesture that’s so familiar – so relaxed and comfortable – that I’m suddenly seized by the idea that she knows. That this isn’t 2005 Daphne: it’s 2020 Daphne, and she’s inexplicably jumped back through time, too.

But as soon as that idea forms, it dissolves. Because the truth is: she was always like this. Right from the start. I remember it even on our first date. I made her laugh at one point, and she reached across and squeezed my hand. She was so intimate; like we’d known each other our whole lives.

She cranes her neck round to look out of the window, but she doesn’t move her leg away. She just leaves it there, with her foot still resting lightly on my thigh. She can’t possibly know the effect this is having on me – or at least I hope she doesn’t. It’s like a cement mixer has just been switched on in my stomach. All I can think about is leaning forward and taking her in my arms again.

‘You got so lucky with your view,’ she murmurs, staring out of my grubby second-floor window. ‘You can see the lake and the ducks and everything. My room looks out onto the bloody staff car park.’

‘Trust me, it’s not lucky,’ I say, remembering the racket the ducks used to make. ‘Listen to this lot.’ I lean past her, catching a scent of her perfume as I do, and crack the window open. The sound of hooting and quacking comes floating in, along with a blast of bitingly cold wind. ‘They’re like this all night,’ I say. ‘Honestly, I barely sleep in here.’

She laughs, her brown eyes twinkling. ‘So that’s why you’re always late for lectures. The ducks.’

‘Exactly. Blame the ducks.’

She glances out of the window again. ‘They’re probably hungry …’

She jumps up and bolts out of the door. When she comes back in a few seconds later, she’s swinging a half-empty bag of sliced bread. There’s a Post-it note stuck to it that reads: MAREK’S – DO NOT TOUCH. For a self-styled anarcho-communist, Marek always had surprisingly conservative views on food-sharing.

‘On a scale of one to ten,’ Daff says, ‘how pissed off will Marek be if we nick two slices of his bread?’

‘I’m going to say eleven,’ I tell her. ‘But let’s do it anyway.’

She drops back down on the bed and hands me a slice. We both poke our heads out of the window into the freezing night air. And as we lean out, shivering, we’re pressed right up against each other, arm to arm, so close that her loose curls are spilling onto my shoulder. We start dropping the bread.

‘This is not doing anything for the noise levels,’ I say over the excited honking.

Daff laughs, and nudges her shoulder into mine. ‘Yeah. Plus it’s absolutely freezing.’ She dusts her hands off and watches as the crumbs rain down. ‘Come on, let’s go back in.’

We retreat inside and shut the window again. She recrosses her legs, and wraps both hands tightly around her tea mug to warm them up.

‘It’s crazy how quickly this first term has gone,’ she says. ‘Before we know it, uni will be over.’ She shakes her head at the idea. ‘We’ll be twenty-one. We’ll be actual adults.’

‘We are technically actual adults now, you know,’ I say.

She gives me a perfectly deadpan look. ‘Ben, we’ve just spent the last hour playing hide-and-seek in a hedge.’

I laugh. ‘Good point.’

She takes another sip of tea, and shuffles backwards on the bed until she’s leaning up against the headboard. She stretches her legs out again, and without thinking, I lift her foot back into its previous position on my thigh. If she finds this at all weird or forward, she doesn’t show it. She just smiles at me and says: ‘It’s crazy to think about, though, isn’t it? Once uni’s over, we’ll have no one telling us what to do any more. We’ll actually have to decide what to do with every day of our lives.’

‘So what do you want to do with them?’ I ask her.

She laughs, and wriggles back against the headboard, trying to get comfy. ‘I just want to … be happy, I suppose. Enjoy life. Have good friends. Be a good friend. Do something for a living that I love.’ She pauses for another sip of tea. ‘First up, though, I want to go travelling. Bit clichéd, I know, but when you grow up in a tiny village where you know everyone, the idea of visiting the other side of the world seems quite appealing.’ She shrugs. ‘That’s the plan, anyway. But I bet I never get round to it.’

‘I bet you will,’ I say. Because I know she will. She and Jamila will spend five months backpacking around South East Asia and Australia straight after uni, while I work night shifts in a pub in Ealing, missing her like mad.

It’s crazy to think about that period now. We’d been going out for two and a half years at that point, but it still felt fresh and new and exciting. I was still so caught up in her; so hopelessly head-over-heels. I couldn’t believe that this funny, sexy, incredible girl was actually with me. It’s a feeling that’s starting to sink back in again right now – it has been ever since that kiss in the maze.

What’s happened to that feeling in 2020? When did it get lost along the way? How did we turn into this bitter, sniping couple, constantly at each other’s throats?

We sit in silence for a few seconds, at opposite ends of my single bed, just smiling and looking into each other’s eyes. And suddenly it’s like I really am nineteen again, my brain fizzing with the excitement of having met someone this brilliant. Someone I feel an instant, inexplicable connection with.

Daff yawns and stretches her arms behind her head. The urge to lean forward and kiss her grips me tightly again, but I content myself with another large slurp of tea.

‘What are you doing for Christmas, then?’ I ask.

‘I’ll just be at home,’ she says. ‘The usual stuff: stockings, presents, turkey. My mum’s not actually that big on Christmas, though. We tend to do all the proper, extended-family stuff on January the first.’

I nod. ‘Greeks are all about the new year, right?’

She freezes with the mug halfway to her lips. ‘How did you know my mum’s Greek?’

Oh God. This is a minefield.

‘Erm … just another guess,’ I stammer. ‘You kind of … look Greek?’

Which is true, to be fair. She narrows her eyes at me. ‘Are you sure you haven’t been stalking me on Myspace, Not-Naked Ben?’

The mention of Myspace makes me laugh out loud. If I ever doubted that I am genuinely in 2005, here is the conclusive proof.

‘So, what about you?’ she asks. ‘What are you up to for Christmas? At home with your mum and dad?’

‘Well, I …’ I have to stop suddenly, because the thought of Mum almost makes me choke up. But I take a deep breath and manage to keep it together. ‘My mum goes mad for Christmas, so it’ll be the full whack – turkey, all the trimmings, tinsel everywhere …’

‘What about your dad? Is he into it too?’

I shrug. ‘He’s not really in the picture, actually.’

She looks down at the duvet. ‘Oh. Right. Sorry.’

I shake my head. ‘No, don’t be. I mean … hopefully, some day, that might change.’

She looks at me fondly, and then yawns again. As she stretches, a few more curls escape and tumble gently around her shoulders.

God, she looks amazing.

‘I feel knackered suddenly,’ she says quietly.

And this time I can’t stop myself. I move in to kiss her again. She leans forward to meet me, and we’re locked into each other once more, kissing hungrily, her hands on the back of my neck, my hands tangled in her long black curls.

And then she breaks away.

‘Ben, I don’t know if I want to … you know?’ she says. ‘We’ve only just met …’

‘Yeah, no, of course! Of course not. I mean, if you want to head back …’

She shakes her head. ‘I don’t want to go.’

She pulls me gently towards her, and we both lean back slowly until our heads are resting on my squashy foam pillow. For a while, we just lie there, fully clothed, on top of the duvet in my tiny single bed, looking into each other’s eyes and smiling. And then I shift round and wrap my arm around her, so that her head is resting on my chest. Her hand finds mine and our fingers interlock. She lets out a tired, contented sigh. And despite all the madness and chaos that this day has brought, I feel totally at peace. Calm and happy and in control. Like I’m exactly where I’m meant to be.

‘Almost midnight,’ Daff mumbles.

I glance up at the clock above the door. It’s not far off the time that’s frozen on my watch. I think suddenly of that piss-take sales line the old man gave me: How else will you know when the clock strikes midnight? A flicker of that strange feeling I felt in the pub passes through me, but I’m too tired to properly examine it.

Daff nuzzles further into my neck. ‘This should feel weird,’ she says, sleepily. ‘I mean, I hardly know you. But it doesn’t.’

I feel my eyelids starting to droop. ‘Yeah,’ I murmur. ‘The fact that it isn’t weird is, in itself, weird.’

We both laugh softly. I pull her even closer and gently kiss her forehead.

And before I know it, I’m asleep.