Waking up is hard to do

The next day Suzi woke up.

 

She felt awful. Worse than awful, she felt as if every single cell in her body had been hit by a brick.

 

It felt like a hangover, the worst hangover she ever had, and yet she knew it wasn’t a hangover. This felt different, there was no wooziness, no blurred vision, no headache, just all over exhaustion.

 

Her brain felt scrambled, literally, bits didn’t fit together properly. Her memory was hazy, as if yesterday never happened, with a strange dream lingering in her mind, with elephants and a forest.

 

She staggered upright, still trying to get a focus. She checked her phone to find out the day, the date, the time. It was after 9.00, on Saturday. She had new messages, nearly thirty in total and a number of missed calls. Why hadn’t she been answering her phone? Where had she been?

 

She passed through her lounge on the way to the kitchen (coffee she must have coffee) and saw the Good Luck cards displayed around the room. The job interview – she has no recollection of her job interview. How did it go? How can she have forgotten the job interview?

 

Over coffee she pieced the jigsaw of her memory together, adding in details from her ‘dream’. She didn’t go to her interview, whilst she’d been in the pub preparing a total stranger, The Conduit, had asked her if she wanted to marry the perfect man, another stranger had appeared and the two of them had tried to track the Conduit down, to visit the other world, the world they came from.

 

She took a break. The memory game was hard work, like extracting minerals from the bottom of a deep, deep mine. Instead she went through her messages. Lots of people asking how she’d got on in her interview, several asking where she was last night – she’d been supposed to go out with friends, but had failed to show without explanation. She texted a few people back, apologising. She was meeting a friend for lunch, she remembered. She’d have to say something about the interview, make up a story.

 

After taking a shower, she googled ‘The Conduit’, but found nothing, just a video game that seemed to be so-named for no good reason, as if it was the last name available.

 

Then she thought about the other man. The surgeon, Jeremy, Jeremy Truscott. She googled the name and found him without difficulty, there was the hospital he worked for and even a number to call for his department.

 

But what would she say? Would he be working on a Saturday? Would his memory be any clearer than hers? Did she really want to speak to him anyway?

 

She stared at the number on the computer screen, trying to work up courage to call it.

 

Her phone rang. She looked at the screen, it was the number of the hospital.

 

“Jeremy?” she said.

 

“You recognise my number,” said his voice, assured, reassuring to hear.

 

“I’d just looked it up. I was about to call you.”

 

“Good. We’ve got things to talk about. Can you remember anything about what happened after we went in the wardrobe? My memory’s a complete blank.”

 

“The wardrobe? Oh, the elephant. No. Nothing.”

 

“You too, eh? Must be something about the process of passing back. It reminds me of childhood memory.”

 

“Childhood memory?”

 

“You know, the fact that nobody has memories from before the age of three, something happens in early development, changes in the brain, that mean those early memories can’t be accessed.”

 

“So the memory’s there, we just can’t process them.”

 

“Exactly. Which brings us to the dilemma. We’re trying to find out the truth about what happened in the other world, but we can’t take our memories with us. So when we get back our memory of what happened on the other world is nil. Even our memory of leaving here is hazy. Assumedly we faced the same problem on that world, we’d have had no idea why we went back. This is like the worst detective fiction plot ever.

 

“So what can we do? Go back?”

 

“I thought about that. I thought if we went back with a note of what happened, if we could carry the message with us we’d be able to see it ‘on the other side’. Maybe we could then bring a message back this way.”

 

“Good idea. My head’s too scrambled this morning to think of anything that clever. Let’s go back to the house and try again.””

“Too late. The wardrobe’s gone.”

 

“Gone?”

“I went back this morning – I got up early, thought it would be rude to wake you too early on a Saturday. I popped inside the house again – no wardrobe, no sign of life at all. He must be using a new place.”

 

An overwhelming sense of futility swept over her.

“So we can never get back?”

 

“Well, not without help.”

 

“Help?”

 

“We know he’s coming back. He’s still waiting for the answer to his question?”

 

“Whether I’ll marry his perfect man? You think I should say ‘no’?”

 

“No, I think you should say ‘yes’. We need to keep the connection with him, it’s the only way we’ll get back again..”

 

“But if I say ‘yes’, well, he can trap me. You know what powers he has, I could find myself pregnant the second the words leave my lips.”

 

“Then don’t say yes, give a conditional yes, say you agree in principal, but get sniffy on the detail, say you need to agree absolutely everything about what this perfect man should be like.”

 

“And then what happens?”

 

“I don’t know. We need lots of plans, not just a Plan A, but Plans B, C, D and E. We should probably meet. Are you doing anything?”

 

I’m meeting a friend for lunch, I already missed a drink with her last night so I can’t really cancel, she thought. “No, I’m free all day,” she said.

 

“Excellent, let me have your address and I’ll pop round. What’s the parking like?”

 

“Oh, parking’s fine at weekends.” She gave him her address and waited.