Life as I Know It (8 page)

Watching a tiny bubble drift up to the ceiling, I was filled with the dreadful certainty that the real Lauren was dead. After listening to Dr. Shakir’s account of her injuries I was sure he felt Lauren should be dead or irreparably brain-damaged, despite his outward claim that her quick recovery was nothing unusual.

The thought that the children’s mother had probably died not only shook me to the core, it brought a lump to my throat. She had been a stranger to me, of course, and possibly a figment of my imagination, but in my dream I had been there in her body and I felt an overwhelming grief for this woman I had never known. My heart went out to her husband and children. They had lost the wife and mother they loved, and didn’t even know they should be mourning her loss.

My lips trembled and I pressed them firmly together. There was nothing I could do for her now, I told myself. The best I could do while I was there was to try to keep her body from further harm, and I found myself wondering what another chapter of the dream might hold for me. Meanwhile, I rather guiltily thanked my lucky stars it had been Lauren who had died and not me.

I lay back in the warm water for a moment or two, pondering why I had survived and Lauren obviously hadn’t, when the whole situation suddenly seemed absurd. I sat up abruptly, slopping water over the edges of the tub onto the green bathroom carpet. What was I doing, allowing this incredible situation to take over my thoughts? I asked myself angrily. Why was I accepting this living nightmare as if it were a normal, everyday occurrence? I knew that what was frightening me most was the possibility that
it wasn’t a dream at all. Not in the normal sense, anyway. And if it wasn’t a dream, then what?

Sitting in the rapidly cooling water, I gazed into space, wondering. What other explanation could there be, other than the shadowy fear that when I was awake I was Jessica, and when Lauren was awake I was her…

I groaned loudly, putting my hands over my ears as if I could shut out the clamoring of my own thoughts, thoughts that sounded as if they had come straight from watching the sci-fi channel. I had to believe that the dream was over now, or I’d be afraid to sleep ever again.

Frankie had heard the groan and was whining at the bathroom door.

“It’s okay, Frankie,” I called through the door. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

Still sitting up, I shampooed my dark brown hair, thanking God for the lack of burns to my scalp as I massaged it to a lather. The lightning hadn’t hit my head at all.

Perhaps, I thought, as I ran Saturday’s events through my mind for the umpteenth time, my lucky escape hadn’t been solely due to the protection afforded by my thick sheepskin coat. It might well have been partly due to the way I’d been hunched forward against the downpour, ready to dive into the passenger seat of Dan’s car, so that the force had missed my head.

Ducking under the water to wash the shampoo away and then wriggling upright, I stepped out of the bath, squeezed the excess water out of my hair, and wrapped myself in my bathrobe. I glanced at the clock. Damn! I’d been so caught up in what was happening to me, I was going to be late for work if I didn’t hurry. I dressed quickly, shoved a piece of toast into my mouth, and ran
up the steps with Frankie at my heels. We walked for ten minutes while Frankie sniffed at lampposts and did her business, which I picked up in my scooper. We headed home at a brisk trot.

“See you at lunchtime,” I called as I closed the door to my flat behind me and, biting a chunk out of a juicy red apple, headed out onto the pavement for the quick walk to work.

The legal firm I worked for, Chisleworth & Partners, was housed in a drab-looking building on a side street. I took the steps two at a time, and arrived at my desk about half a minute before my boss, Stephen Armitage.

Stephen was a good-looking man in his early forties and had been my boss for the last ten years, ever since I’d left secretarial school at the age of eighteen. He’d overseen most of my training to become a legal secretary and had encouraged me to work toward gaining extra qualifications in the legal field, taking me under his wing as his assistant and protégé. Stephen had been kind and attentive and we spent much of our working hours together, sometimes working late into the night when the office was quiet and we were gathering documents and files for court.

As I shrugged out of my coat in the narrow confines of the outer office, I was reminded of how our working proximity had led one night to a gentle coming together, and while I had never been totally sure of my feelings for him, a relationship with him had seemed easy and inevitable. It had seemed sensible after a while to move into a flat he owned, though I retained my independence by paying him rent and splitting our everyday expenses. Although we had both known I wasn’t ready or willing to settle down properly, we had remained lovers for nearly six years.

Walking back to my desk, I flicked on my computer, unable
to keep my mind from dwelling on past actions and decisions I had made. I knew my experience as Lauren was making me question my life here as Jessica, and it suddenly became clear that my doubts about Stephen had probably been obvious to him all along. That doubt was possibly the reason that he’d kept his own flat close to the office, and had influenced our joint decision to see each other socially several times a week rather than living permanently together. I realized now that I had thought of him as more of a friend with whom I was having a relationship than as a partner, and cringed when I remembered I had even introduced him to my parents as such.

I stared blankly at the computer screen as it flickered into life before me, recalling how we’d muddled along in that unsatisfactory fashion until rumors reached me that he was seeing a female barrister on a regular basis. I knew it wasn’t so much the lies or the fact that he was cheating on me that prompted me to move out and put a down payment on a flat of my own, but rather the fact that the news hadn’t bothered me anywhere near as much as I knew it ought to have if I’d really cared for him.

It seemed that Stephen had felt much the same way, and somehow we’d made the difficult transition from lovers to friends, because I loved my job, even if I had to admit I had never really loved him.

Glancing at the clock on the wall, I knew how fortunate I was that the working day began late at Chisleworth & Partners. Stephen never put in an appearance until after ten o’clock, and as long as I was in the office slightly before him he didn’t seem to mind what time I arrived.

This morning he squeezed my shoulder affectionately as he passed my desk, which was unfortunate since the high-voltage
burn was still pretty tender. I winced with pain, and he was instantly contrite, asking what on earth was the matter. I told him about the lightning strike and he was suitably horrified.

Not as horrified as he would have been if he’d known I’d spent my sleeping hours since Saturday in the body of another woman, I thought to myself, as he asked me solicitously if I was well enough to be working. The nightmare seemed unreal, even laughable now, in the familiar surroundings of the shabby office, with the coffee machine gurgling away in the corner and the computer blinking up at me.

I assured him I was fine, and he vanished into his office with the undisguised relief of a man who had thought I might have wanted him to do something about it.

There were two other girls working with me: Clara, who was secretary to Rory Chisleworth himself, and Delores, who answered the telephone, made coffee for clients, and spent the rest of the day bitching about her boyfriend to anyone who would listen. As soon as the office door closed behind Stephen’s smart but rather dated blue pinstripe suit, I got up and grabbed the newspaper from Clara’s desk, my eyes flicking straight to the date. Monday, October 20. And there was the article about the royal family. How could I possibly have dreamed that?

“Help yourself,” Clara smiled, with a touch of friendly sarcasm, handing me a cup of coffee before I’d even had time to assimilate all that the date meant.

I sat down at my desk and sipped the hot drink thoughtfully. Monday again, and with the same news. I’d already lived through Monday as Lauren. So what kind of a dream had this sort of continuity? The thoughts that had plagued me earlier returned, reducing my legs to jelly. I’d certainly never heard of anyone
picking up a dream from where they’d left off the previous night and living it as if it were an alternate life.

There was that other possibility, I told myself uneasily. It was even more frightening than the dream theory. It might explain why when I was here I was Jessica, and when I was asleep I became Lauren. I knew I couldn’t keep blocking out the awful dawning suspicion forever. Sooner or later I would have to face the inconceivable… Could it be that somehow my life force—my soul—had been split by the simultaneous lightning strike, so that it now inhabited both bodies alternately?

The outlandish idea caused me to suck in a quick breath, which in turn caused a coughing fit as the coffee slid down the wrong way. Clara, who I believe had been talking to me, came and held out a tissue, which I took gratefully. I wiped my eyes and then gave my nose a good blow, which seemed to calm everything down.

“Are you sure you’re okay to be working?” she asked, perching on the corner of my desk. “You look very pale.”

“I’m fine, honestly,” I assured her.

She’d heard me telling Stephen about the lightning strike and wanted to know the details. I told her about meeting Dan and how he’d given me a lift back to my car the next day. She grinned at me and looked as if she was about to interrogate me further when Delores appeared from reception.

“Mr. Chisleworth’s ten-thirty is here,” she announced. Clara returned to her desk with a knowing glance at me, and there was no more opportunity for small talk as the working day began.

Today, unfortunately, Stephen was preparing a case for court. That meant I would be working closely with him, getting the files together, and would probably not leave the office until after
six o’clock, except for my hour-long lunch break when I walked the ten minutes home again to see Frankie.

As it happened, Stephen wanted to work right through lunch, but he knew I walked Frankie in my break and begrudgingly allowed me half an hour to hurry home. I let Frankie out and sat on the wall that surrounded my little courtyard, eating the egg and cress sandwich I’d bought from the sandwich girl at the office before I left.

Everything was so familiar, so normal. I began to think that my experiences as Lauren must simply have been a very real-seeming dream after all.

Back in the office, Stephen was panicking over some mislaid notes, and I hardly had time to grab a cup of afternoon tea, let alone dwell on the workings of the sleeping brain, or the outlandish theory of shared souls. By the time I returned to my flat after Frankie’s evening walk, it was after seven o’clock. I kicked my shoes off in the hallway and walked in stockinged feet into the kitchen to throw a TV dinner into the oven, then flopped down in my armchair with a glass of orange juice.

I glanced anxiously at the clock, allowing my thoughts to return to the forbidden territory of “what if?” So far, if I assumed the worst—that Lauren and I both really coexisted in some way—then it had worked quite well logistically until now because Lauren and I had been keeping strange hours, due to the fact that we’d both been in the hospital. What would happen, I wondered—providing she was real—if she were ready to wake up before I was ready to go to bed? Could both of us be awake at the same time? I couldn’t see that it was possible, given that there was only one me, one consciousness—even if I had started flitting between two bodies like something out of a horror movie.

After eating the cardboard-flavored shepherd’s pie and giving Frankie her supper, I curled up in my chair to see what was on the television, flicking through the channels without much success. I was about to give up and see if there was any ice cream in the freezer when the phone rang.

It was Dan.

“How are you today?” he asked solicitously. “Feeling better?”

Adrenaline flooded my body at the sound of his voice. There was a discernible tightening in my chest and my palms became so clammy I thought the phone was going to slip right out of my grasp. My voice sounded strained when I tried to use it, so I cleared my throat and tried again.

“I’m much better, thank you. I went in to work today. I’ve only been home just over an hour.”

“Do you feel well enough to come out for a drink this evening?”

I was about to say I’d love to, when I glanced again at the clock. Eight-thirty might not be late in evening terms, but it was getting late to be sleeping in the morning.

Then I remembered Nurse Sally’s voice speaking to me as I’d woken as Lauren the previous morning. She’d complained that I was an incredibly heavy sleeper, and that she hadn’t been able to rouse me. Did that mean that Lauren couldn’t wake until I went to sleep?

“That would be great,” I heard myself saying. “Where should we go?”

He suggested a friendly little pub not more than ten minutes’ drive away. I agreed to meet him there in half an hour. However, once the phone was hung up and the feeling of euphoria I had felt at the sound of his voice had started to wear off, I was assailed by feelings of guilt. Poor Lauren—or, rather, poor
Lauren’s family, I thought. Suppose my theory was right and this wasn’t a dream? Her children would be waiting to visit her and wondering why their mummy wouldn’t wake up. On the other hand, I had no wish to jump back into her shoes any sooner than I had to. Apart from the children, there was Grant of course. He seemed like a nice caring husband, but I was not his wife and I could see that things could get very complicated there.

If I could postpone the moment when I was back in her body by an hour or two, then that suited me just fine, especially if she was going to be allowed to go home today. I wasn’t looking forward to stepping into that minefield one little bit.

Anyway, I reasoned, as I brushed mascara onto my eyelashes and finished smoothing on lip gloss, this was all simply a wild theory. I would probably tumble into bed tonight and dream about something completely different. And even if I was somehow right, then I didn’t owe them anything. If their mother was dead, then that was very sad, but why was it my responsibility? I’d never asked for any of this, had I?