Nicola Barker - Reversed Forecast

She tried to map out in her mind the basic constituents of her immediate future. I’ll take the dog back, I’ll leave her there. I’ll return to Soho. I won’t see Vincent again.

These were all things she could imagine happening. Also, though — and this was the wonderful part, the amazing part — she could imagine, just as easily, these same things not happening.

Sometimes, she thought, you can get on to a bus and the bus driver forgets to stop, or he loses his way, or he has to change his route because something unexpected happens — roadworks, or a traffic jam, or a flood — and then everything is changed; because of that, everything is different.

She relaxed and smiled to herself. In life, she decided, there’s an outside and an inside. Things happen outside and things happen inside your body, inside your mind … ideas, decisions, feelings. Happiness is just a question of balancing the two.

The bus stopped abruptly and the dog fell forward. She caught hold of the dog, falling forward too.

In that split second — as she moved through the air, hearing the bus’s horn and the squeal of brakes, feeling the dog’s ribs, her fur, her breath — in that tiny dart of time her mind became a microscope. It took in everything, and every detail was significant.

This could be the beginning of something immaculate, she thought.

NICOLA BARKER’S eight novels include Darkmans (shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker and Ondaatje prizes, and winner of the Hawthornden prize), and Wide Open (winner of the 2000 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award). She has also written two prize-winning collections of short stories, and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in east London.