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know, but what’s your beginning? he says.
    Then either he winks at her or he’s got something in his eye.
    It’s, like, from the LP Hartley book, she says. Like a new version. You know. The past is a foreign country. From the book The Go-Between.
    Uh huh, he says. Though I think the original line written by LP Hartley is assonantally better than yours.
    You can go and assonate yourself, she says.
    Well, okay, I will, he says, but it won’t have the same effect as when they assonated Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy.
    This time she does laugh out loud.
    Anyway, he says. Actually. What was it about, your story, anyway actually?
    It’s about this girl who wakes up in the year 2000 after being asleep for twenty years, Anna says. And the catch is: in the year 2000 pretty much everything’s exactly like now, except this. When the girl tries to read words it’s like they’re all printed upside down. She wakes up and she goes to the kitchen and gets out a packet of cereal and it looks exactly the same as a cornflakes packet now. Except she notices that the writing on it is upside down. She can still read it and everything, but it’s a bit weird. She turns it on its head, but that doesn’t work, because the words are printed in the same order as they would be if they were printed the right way up. Then she tries to read the newspaper and she realizes it’s the same—the words are all printed upside down. And then she’s in a panic and she thinks she’s losing her brain, and she goes to get her old copy of her favourite book off the shelf, a book she read twenty years ago, like, now, and it’s The Go-Between by LP Hartley, and she opens it, and its words are all the right way up and everything, and she breathes this big sigh of relief. But then she goes out into town. And the writing on the front of the bus is upside down. And all the shop names are upside down. And no one else thinks it’s a big deal or anything. And then she gets suspicious, and she goes specially to the bookshop she always went to, you know, twenty years ago, in 1980, and she takes a new copy of the same book, The Go-Between, down off the shelf. And sure enough, on the cover the title is upside down, and on the back the summary thing they write about the story is upside down. And she opens it, and every page is printed upside down. And then half a day passes, and by lunchtime she’s used to the words being the wrong way up. Her brain just processes it. And by the end of the story she isn’t even noticing they’re upside down any more.
    She stops speaking. She is suddenly embarrassed, at saying so much out loud, and exhausted too. It is more than she’s said all in one go since she left home.
    Oh, that’s good, the boy is saying. That’s really subversive. Subversive sleeping beauty. I mean how would you wake her? Kissing her won’t do it.
    It isn’t a line; he isn’t being flirtatious. He actually looks pre-occupied.
    He is very witty, and definitely clever; he is probably one of the ones on this trip who are going to Oxford or wherever it is they’re all going. But he doesn’t sound rich or like he goes to a posh school. Also, he has already made her really laugh. She wants to ask whether he knows anything about the people who shaved off the boy’s half-moustache. He doesn’t seem like he’d be the kind to do that sort of thing.
    He is dark-haired, big-nosed. He’d be good-looking if it wasn’t for his nose. He looks the quiet type. Maybe he looks more the quiet type than he actually is. He looks a bit tired this close up. His hair is longish, not too long. He is wearing a blue vest-top. He’s quite broad-chested. His arms and shoulders come out of the vest-top gangly and pale, like he doesn’t fit himself. But the way he moves just then, to flick a little greenfly or something off the leg of his jeans, is both gentle and exact.
    She stops looking at him because he starts looking at her.
    What are you doing? he says then.
    She