Cassandra in Reverse

“I rarely understand what another human is thinking, but I frequently feel it: a wave of emotion that pours out of them into me, like a teapot into a cup. While it fills me up, I have to work out what the hell it is, where it came from and what I’m supposed to do to stop it spilling everywhere. Rage that doesn’t feel like mine pulses through me: dark purple and red. His colors are an invasion and I do not like it.”

Smale employs a simile of emotion pouring from another individual into Cassie, “like a teapot into a cup,” which provides a visual and a connotation of urgency due to the potential overflow of hot liquid. It also introduces Cassie’s experience of emotions as colors, including her narrative style, which includes frankly assessing her reactions and her frequent use of expletives.

“At some point last night I must have rearranged myself, because I’m now lying on Will’s chest and he’s staring down at me. Again. Is he going to study me first thing every morning now? I’m not sure I like it very much. It makes me feel like I’m both hanging up in the Tate and being peered at under a rock, like a wood louse.”

Smale describes Cassie’s feelings about being studied by Will as paradoxical. The use of specific imagery—a specific museum, and a specific type of insect—serves both to characterize Cassie’s detailed way of thinking, and to highlight how different those types of gazes are.

“There’s a lot to be said for repetition, and I think I might actually understand what’s going on around me for the first time in my entire life. It’s not an entirely unpleasant sensation. Maybe this is how other people feel all the time; some of us just need a dress rehearsal first.”

In this passage, Smale uses first-person narration to provide a detailed and experiential representation of the feeling of being able to predict others’ emotions and actions being unique to her, as a neurodiverse person. The theatrical term “dress rehearsal” suggests Cassie’s initial view on time travel: a useful tool to prepare for situations and circumvent unwanted social interactions, namely her breakup with Will and being fired.

“According to Sophocles, ‘time calls only once, and that determines all.’ But what if it doesn’t? What if time calls again and again? What if it doesn’t get the message, doesn’t give up, doesn’t let go? What if it’s calling me from the point where it all went wrong, pulling me back there to do it again?”

Smale uses humor to contrast between the serious Sophocles quote and Cassie’s detailed extension of it. Cassie imagines time as a persistent caller, who doesn’t “get the message” and doesn’t “let go,” which serves to anthropomorphize the concept of time as an overeager love interest.

“I now have a few hours to make sure I’m where I’m supposed to be, at exactly the time I’m supposed to be there. This seems important. After all, much like Andromeda—tied to her rock—who knows the difference a minute could make? What if Perseus had taken a different route, or Pegasus had flown too slowly? What if the sea monster Cetus had risen just a moment earlier, or Medusa’s head had gotten stuck in the bag? Time is the invisible thread that weaves our stories together. And sixty seconds can change everything.”

Cassie’s comparison of her preparation for her date with Will to figures from Greek mythology serves to indicate its importance to her, as well as her metaphorical understanding of time as a thread that weaves stories together. The passage features the combination of the dramatic and the ridiculous, with vivid and darkly comedic imagery like Medusa’s head getting “stuck in the bag.”

“For possibly the first time in three decades, I’m not weighted down by trying to read someone’s colors and their facial expression and their body language and their tone and their words and also look out for jokes and sarcasm and flirting and secret insults and what is implied and what is left unspoken and somehow simultaneously filter out the chatter around me and the milk frother and the sensation of the chair under my bum and the movement of my fingers and position of my own feet and the breeze on my face and the sound of the doorbell ringing and the sound of my own heart and breath and the muscles in my own face. For just a few seconds of my life I get to just be present, and it is joyful.”

The syntax of Cassie’s stream of consciousness reflects exhausting experience of social interaction. Smale uses polysyndeton to emphasize the overwhelming number of things that Cassie finds herself needing to read, manually, in other people. As she has already been in this same situation in the same coffee shop and thus knows what to expect, she is finally able to experience being in the moment.

“I turn my music to a looped piano track and feel every note: running along my shoulder blades, down my vertebrae, across my thighs and into my feet, a moving wave of bliss. The wrong noises hurt me—pinching, punching, scraping—but the opposite is true, too: a shifting kind of sweetness in every organ. I don’t think I could give up one if it meant losing the other; not—in fairness—that anyone is giving me the option.”

Smale’s use of visceral, sensory representations of Cassie’s experience build empathy for her as a character and emphasize the importance of sensory stimulus to her. Cassie’s thoughtful assessment that she wouldn’t necessarily give one up characterizes her perspective on her experience of the world, and the statement that it’s not as if anyone is giving her the option to do so adds humor to the otherwise stark statement.

“In Greek mythology, Iris is the goddess of rainbows: the human personification of the spectrum, who uses the symbol of the rainbow to link the gods to humanity, sky to earth. And as I sit in that grotty little pub and look up at Will’s lovely face, that’s suddenly exactly how I feel. As if I have every single color possible inside me too.”

Smale’s choice of diction foreshadows Cassie’s realization that she likely has autism, because of the association of the word “spectrum” with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The passage also blends the concepts of emotions as color and Greek mythology, both of which are central to her way of understanding the world. That they are combined in this passage reflects Cassie’s enjoyment of a rare moment of being present and joyful in a social interaction.

“Somehow, I wander through a now that is also a then: peering through the college window into Mum’s old office and watching a thousand smaller versions of myself grow steadily larger. Hiding under her desk. Sniffing her fountain pens. Running my hands along the spines of her alphabetized books while she forgot I was there for hours at a time. Except I didn’t mind, even if it meant no lunch that day. Because I could lose myself the same way, just like her, and as I watched her eyes glaze and her face slacken and her cheeks glow, I felt happy for her: knowing she was somewhere beautiful and safe and joyful, where nobody could reach her.”

Smale associates the abstract temporal concepts of “now” and “then” with a tangible physical location, as Cassie imagines herself wandering through them, which emphasizes the idea of time as concrete and fluid at the same time. Smale also characterizes Cassie’s similarity to her mother in a rare passage of reminiscence and includes vivid sensory details to emphasize the strength of the memory.

“I can feel the colors spinning out of me: shame, confusion, fear, guilt, distress, pain, humiliation, all the many, many bloody reasons that I do not stay at other people’s houses. […] And as my own colors fade, I can suddenly see Will’s. He’s looking at me as if he went to bed with Lamia, the beautiful Libyan queen, and woke up with Lamia, the disfigured demon who ate little children. And it doesn’t matter that it wasn’t her fault. Lamia transformed into something unrecognizable, so that’s how everyone saw her. It always happens. Always. Little by little, something inside me comes to the surface and drives everyone away.”

Smale characterizes Cassie’s understanding of herself as broken and that her driving people away is inevitable. Cassie again processes Will’s perception of her, as she understands it, through the lens of Greek mythology, which creates a sense of detachment through simile.

“‘I’m not lying,’ she objects desperately. ‘I could have been called Diana, couldn’t I? It’s not that different. It would have taken just the tiniest tweak. Just a nudge, somewhere in the past, and boom—a different story. So I’m not a liar. Sometimes I just enjoy living in all the narratives that never got a chance to happen.’ ‘That’s the definition of pathological lying,’ I hiss.”

This passage characterizes Artemis as open to change and difference, in opposition to Cassie, who is ironically able to time travel and actually live the “narratives that never got a chance to happen,” but views her sister’s actions as pathological lying. Smale emphasizes the fragility of time through diction that connotes the effect of minute changes: “tweak” and “nudge.”

“The waitress leaves and I pick up the menu and stare blankly at all the egg puns. Hard to Beat. What the hell is going on? Breggsit. We’re here three months early. Practical Yolk. It’s just a coincidence, right? Will picked the same restaurant, that’s all. Eggstraterrestrial. It’s no big deal. He saw a flyer and remembered I’m vegetarian. Eggspresso. I’m overthinking it all again, right?”

Smale creates a sense of heightening panic through Cassie’s stream of consciousness, as she realizes Will is about to break up with her, much earlier on this timeline. The blend of her real assessments of the situation with reading the egg puns on the menu enhances the novel’s darkly comedic tone.

“That particular pale green feels similar to the way I felt when I was about three years old and I got up in the morning before anyone else was awake, and I managed to open the back door for the first time on my own and it was cold and bright, but everything was whitened with frost and a wood pigeon was making that very particular sound and I walked onto the grass and my feet got wet, I saw a frog and then my mum said Good morning, baby—how did you get outside on your own, you clever little monkey? From her bedroom window, and I realized she wasn’t asleep, she was there, she had been watching me the whole time. That’s what that green sort of feels like.”

Like the memory of her mother’s office in Cambridge, this scene is significant in that it’s a rare representation of memory from childhood. Smale includes vivid sensory details, including auditory and tactile, to emphasize the strength of Cassie’s memory and color associations. This passage also adds to the characterization of Cassie’s mother, depicting her as nurturing Cassie’s curiosity and respectful of her freedom.

“Once Will had kissed my cheek and gone—taking both socks with him—I spent the entire weekend sobbing in a ball on my bed and realized I’m now very much done. It’s too hard. Too painful. The experiment is over. Time travel is not for me. Thank you for the kind gift but please give it to someone else: I will not be navigating time and space any further.”

Smale represents Cassie’s upset, but decisive, mentality using syntax. The short sentences—“it’s too hard,” “time travel is not for me,” etc.—emphasize that Cassie’s hurt at losing Will has caused her to make an important but firm decision to stop her use of time travel.

“Then I look down at the point where we touch. It doesn’t hurt, I can’t feel her like an electric shock, it doesn’t make me flinch and pull away. It feels like my sister is simply part of my own body, an extra limb, my largest organ. And even now, I can’t quite believe that she doesn’t get it. After all this time, Artemis still doesn’t seem to understand that I do not set my life on fire and run away from somebody I hate. Where would be the logic in that? Hate is never what the matches are made of.”

This passage includes vivid sensory descriptions of the effect that Artemis does not have on Cassie, but which most others do. In contrast to this painful sensation, Cassie describes feeling as if her sister is part of her own body, which provides a corporeal image of the closeness of their relationship. Smale also uses metaphor to suggest that the matches used to burn her previous life were made from love, emphasizing The Complexity and Importance of Human Connection: Walking away from someone she didn’t care about would have been much easier.

“Even now, I can feel the containers in me starting to rupture: everything threatening to spill everywhere. Too many emotions and memories. Too much mess. I can feel my brain responding by preparing to close down. Getting scared; ready to cut the pain away at the base. Because all this time, I allowed myself to believe that I was the victim and my sister was the villain—black and white, good and bad—but what if that was never true?”

Smale extends the imagery of Cassie’s mental compartmentalization as involving actual containers, which is present several times throughout the novel, by describing them as literal containers inside her, which are on the verge of rupturing. In this, Smale emphasizes the visceral experience of Cassie’s neurodiversity.

“Memories are time travel, and so are regrets, hopes and daydreams. When we die, the people we love carry us forward into it. So if we’re all just moving forward and backward, living all the times at once—if time is an arbitrary concept that we can bend to our will—then what does 11:00pm last orders mean, anyway? If time belongs to all of us, how can you possibly close it? And it’s saying this kind of drunk shit that gets both me and Artemis thrown out of the pub.”

The diction and syntax of this passage reflect Cassie and Artemis’s drunkenness, through long, complex sentences. Smale also creates a turn in the passage, by starting the section with philosophical, abstract thoughts, before the shift to “and it’s saying this kind of drunk shit,” which serves to subvert the reader’s expectation regarding the context of their conversation.

“I got it made for you in Thailand in my gap year, Sandy-pants. I know my own bloody joke when I see it. Look, see, it’s a deer, because the deer is my spirit animal, and the joke is Did You Myth Me? You know, because you’re Cassandra, the tragic mortal, and I’m Artemis, the Greek goddess, and it’s a play on the word miss because the arrow didn’t hit the deer and also because it’s short for Artemis and also because I hadn’t seen you in so long. It’s multifaceted comedy and goddamn hilarious.”

Smale creates “multifaceted comedy” in this passage, layering the joke of the mug itself with Artemis’s humorous, drunken description of it. The use of polysyndeton emphasizes the number of layers to the original joke, and the passage serves to characterize Artemis and Cassie’s relationship and the wit and humor they share in spite of their differences.

“I could have approached all of this on a much bigger, more cinematic scale. It just didn’t really occur to me. All I can say in my defense is that if you give the power of time travel to a woman who eats banana muffins every day for three decades, you can’t go expecting her to be someone else with it.”

Smale uses second person address in several instances when Cassie addresses an anonymous “you” who gifted her the time-travel powers, which is significant because it adds a level of familiarity to the abstract concept of a deity or universe capable of assigning time-travel powers. The contrast between the idea of time travel on a cinematic scale and eating banana muffins every day for three decades is comedic and serves to emphasize the novel’s way of subverting the time-travel trope through Cassie’s character.

“And I suddenly realize that my life no longer feels paper-plate disposable; I can’t just throw it away or undo it. I don’t want to discard it because it’s not perfect, or because there are flaws in my tapestry. It’s not quite there yet—there’s still a long way to go—but I want my life to eventually become ceramic: one I can wash and keep, even when it chips. A life I can use every day; one I smile at because it makes me happy, like a picture of a cute hedgehog.”

Smale employs a unique metaphor of life as being either disposable or worth persevering, extending the metaphor of the former as a paper plate, and the latter as a piece of ceramic that can be renewed and repaired. That the passage includes both the metaphor of plates and the idea of a person as a tapestry demonstrates Cassie’s mental work to relate differently to her life. The tapestry is also another reference to Penelope in Greek mythology.

“I am not a monster or a goddess; I am not a prophet or a princess, a gorgon or a priestess. I am not Aphrodite or Athena, Arachne or Medusa. I did not emerge from a seashell, or the inside of a head; I do not have to weave my story, over and over again, and it is not—and never should be—told by other people. My fate is not written in time, or sand, or stars, or in a tapestry, or a spider’s web, and it never actually was. I am Cassandra: the future was always in me.”

In this passage, Cassie makes declarative statements about who she is not, and presents numerous alternatives for mythological figures to whom she has decided she does not relate. The fact that her statement that she is Cassandra is preceded by these negative statements gives it more declarative power by contrast. Cassie is beginning to recognize that she is not the mythological figures she loves, but a mortal human who can make choices and changes.

“‘It’s our parents’ funeral and you haven’t even cried. Look at you, standing there, dry-eyed and sleepy, like you’re bored already. Like it doesn’t matter. Like you’re somewhere else. You’re a monster.’ Hiccups. ‘Why can’t you just be normal.’ Hiccups. ‘Why can’t you just be normal.’ Hiccups. ‘Be human for, like, one minute.’ Hiccups. ‘This bottle is empty,’ she concludes, holding it upside-down. ‘Vicar, do your water-into-wine thing for me, pronto. Or is that Jesus. Or Moses.’”

Smale represents the moment of Artemis denigrating Cassie at their parents’ funeral using black comedy. The statements that hurt Cassie deeply, like “you’re a monster,” are punctuated by Artemis’s drunken “hiccups,” which contributes to the scene’s bleakly farcical tone.

“‘People think autism is some kind of error, and it’s not. You’re not broken or “disordered,” or whatever they say on their little bits of paper. That just means “not exactly like me.” Which—’ Artemis points at the folder—‘I think you’ll see is one of the many things Mum wrote in the margins, along with the words go to hell, highlighted in pink. Autism is just a different wiring. You’re built in alternative neurological software, from the ground up.’”

A return to the symbol of technology to represent the “different wiring” of autism, this passage characterizes Artemis’s positive perception of her mother’s and sister’s neurodiversity. Like the passage in which Cassie declares, “I am Cassandra,” Artemis precedes her statement about what Cassie is with corrections about what she is not: most importantly, that she is not broken.