A Happy Old Year

She hadn’t had anywhere to go when New Year´s arrived. It felt as if she had spent the previous months to either decline the parties she didn’t want to attend or alienating the hosts of parties she could have considered. And now she had become her very own version of a wallflower; she had nowhere to go. Julia was staring at her reflection in the mirror while clasping the neck of the bottle of cheap champagne she had bought, just in case something turned up when the phone rang. Her heart was racing with excitement she tried hard to quench; if this was an invitation, she wouldn’t give her relief at not spending the night alone away.

‘Hi! I’m sorry, but you don’t know who I am. My name is Mike, and I’m a friend of Sam. I’m throwing a party tonight, and I have bought tons of food and booze, but it turns out I’m being snubbed by a lot of people I thought would come. I invited Sam, and he couldn’t. But he thought you would like to come. Would you?’

Julia didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Sam, her since long ex-boyfriend, had made her the last choice of a party she knew nothing about, held by people she’d never met. This was not her choice of how to spend New Year´s Eve. But what the hell….

‘I have no idea how Sam knows this, but did he tell you I’ve painted myself into somewhat of a corner when it comes to parties this evening?’ Her questions were met by a massive silence, but she chooses to ignore it.

‘Ok, Mike. As you pointed out, I have no idea who you are, but consider your party one guest richer. I’ll be there. Just give me the time and address!”

“Ok…”

His reply sounded slightly disenchanted, but Julia chose to ignore it. She did not, repeat did not, want to spend the eve of the old decade alone. Who knew what ghosts from the past 10 years would come to visit. She wrote down the address and time and started to get ready.

When she called the minicab, there was a hesitation, both on her side and that of the recipient at the cab company. She wasn´t ashamed to admit that she had never heard the address before, but it bothered her that neither had the woman on the telephone. But after assurances that such a simple thing would be sorted by the time the driver arrived, they agreed on a time, and she hung up.

Just as she had done so, the phone rang again.

‘Hi, this is Mike. Sorry to bother you so soon again, you´re probably either getting ready to leave or wondering why you said yes to my impromptu invitation, but I need to ask you to do something. Please dress to fit into the previous decade of your choice. Hippie, punk, 40s swing dancer, 50s housewife, whatever. Your choice. This comes as a bit of a surprise to everyone, but I decided to up the party a bit, and who doesn’t like a masquerade?’

She wasn’t given time to answer before he hung up, so she told the silence around her;

‘I. I don’t like masquerade.’ But as usual, the universe didn’t seem to give a crap, so she went to her bedroom and dragged out a costume she had intended to wear years earlier, funnily enough together with Sam at a party taking place after they broke up, and so, it had been left hanging in her wardrobe.

She glared at the sequin creation with its weird matching hairpiece and hoped it still would fit over her bosom and butt; that much she remembered from trying it on the first time; curves weren’t a thing in the 20s.

Jazzing and jiggling into the dress, watching herself in the mirror as she places the weird headpiece on her suitably bob-cut hair, she hears the cab come to a somewhat screeching halt outside her door. One last glance at her transformation and she tiptoe downstairs. Another item with no proper purpose; these shoes definitely aren’t made for walking.

As she was getting into the backseat of the minicab, the driver turned to her;

‘I’m going to be honest; we checked our maps for the address you gave us, and I’ve put it into my GPS, but it seems a bit hard to find, the GPS-location keeps on changing. But don’t worry, I’ll get you there.’ He turned around and put the car into gear, and as they slowly crept through streets that seemed surprisingly empty for a New Year’s Eve, the rain started to drizzle down.

When they finally, after several wrong turns and mistaken streets, arrived at her destination, Julia was for a short moment overwhelmed. The house was magnificent, and she felt that she should have known this address, simply for its grandeur. It was the kind of house that normally showed up in magazines due to its beauty, accompanied by an interview with its owner, usually, some impoverished man of impressive lineage whose family fortune was, due to unforeseen events, now gone. But this as like running into a unicorn during your daily jog in the park you’d been to a thousand times. She could see from the expression on the cab drivers face that he too was taken aback.

When she turned to him to ask how much the fare was, he just waved his hand dismissively and drove off. Julia stared after him for a short while, not quite knowing what to think. Maybe she should call the company the next day and insist to pay, the driver had put in some effort to get her where she was going. She turned back to the house and took it all in. It was a classical townhouse in its design, but not white as she thought was more common, but built with rough slabs of stone, and the staircase leading up to the front door felt like it would have been more appropriate leading up to a Gothic mansion. The drizzle had started to dampen her clothes and hesitantly she walked up the stairs.

‘What have I got myself into? Beautiful as it is, this could be the perfect lair of some psycho sect, she thought, raising her hand to knock on the door, only to be inches away from knocking a young man straight in the face as the door opened.

‘We were wondering how long you were going to stand out in the rain! You must be Julia, and I’m Mike, the weirdo who called you out of the blue a few hours ago. Come in!’

He was almost a head taller than she, which wasn’t something she often encountered, being quite tall herself, and from how h was dressed she gathered he too had aimed for the 1920s. Inside there was a party going on that one could not have imagined standing outside on the pavement.

It was warm inside, the heat coming from both candles and oil lamps that made the balloons bouncing against the ceiling dancing gently in the warm air, towers of champagne glasses on silver trays glittering in the soft light. Although she could see the other guests having chosen outfits from various decades, something in the atmosphere made Julia feel her choice of clothes had been the right one.

She danced and drank champagne like never before and found it both odd and comforting that she connected so easily with people she had never before met in her life. And they were all new to her. Somehow, she had expected to see someone she at least recognised from her time with Sam. But no. All the faces around her were new, and she, who by nature was quite shy, thrived in their company.

Together, they said Goodbye to 2019 and greeted 2020, and amid the celebrations, Julia felt that she had been affected by the freely flowing champagne. She felt disoriented and slightly nauseous and decided to retreat from it all for just a few minutes. Just sit down for a while. She slipped away further into the house, feeling slightly embarrassed for being where she probably shouldn’t, and found it was probably older than she had thought. Narrow passages with dark panels on the walls connected more, and larger, rooms, and in one of them, she finally found a sofa. As soon as she sat down, she started to drift away.

It felt like seconds but could just as well have been hours before she felt something soft touching her legs. Julia let out a little scream and pull up her legs under her, but calm down when she sees a white, long-haired cat, with two black spots between its ears.

‘Oh, hi! I’m sorry if I frightened you!’ she says when the cat shrugs away as she sits up, forgetting that the one who for a brief second had been frightened was she.

Julia starts making her way back to the ballroom, hoping she isn’t the only one still there. Her watch has stopped, and her mobile is stuffed into the pocket of her coat, hanging in the hallway. But as she’s finally back at the party, she’s relieved to see there are still people there.

The music that earlier had been a mix from at least three different decades, but mainly from the last 20 years had changed, she noticed.

Instead of Lady Gaga and Ed Sheeran the music was what Julia, without knowing if she was correct, would associate with the decade she was dressed to match. The lights dimmed, and the music sounded as if came out of a funnel gramophone. Julia looked around the room and found that almost everyone had left without her noticing. Small groups pf people were standing talking to each other, all dressed up almost like her, the women in sequined dresses and headbands decorated with feathers of varying size and the men in tuxedos. She started looking for Mike, who was by her side faster than she was prepared for, and she took a step away from him.

‘It’s almost dawn, and people are leaving. It’s time we went to bed.’

‘What do you mean? Do you think I will sleep with you just because you invited me to your party? That is hardly something Sam suggested!’

Mike gave her a strange look and then removed the headband.

‘You are clearly unwell again. You should have come and talked to me as soon as you felt out of place. This is surely your delusions coming back again. Luckily, Dr Thompson hasn’t had a chance to leave yet. He always has his bag with him. He will administer something.’

Julia tried to pull away, but Mike’s grip around her wrist was to tight, and he pulled her with him across the room.

‘Dr Thompson, I’m sorry to bother you almost the first thing I do on this new year, but my wife is feeling confused and out of sorts. Do you have something she can take?’

Dr Thompson was a man Julia hadn’t seen all evening, a chubby man with a balding head, a reddish face and a pair of glasses balancing on a nose that hinted that he probably drank too much and too often, and Julia stared at him a little too intensely to at first catch what Mike had said.

‘Wait, what? I’m not your wife! I don’t even know you!’

The two men exchanged concerned glances, and Dr Thompson shook his head in a manner that made Julia want to smack him, and when he pulled up a syringe out of his brown, tattered leather bag, she did. It didn’t help, and all she could do was watch its sharp tip slide through the skin on her upper arm. Somewhere a cat meowed.

Roses. The pillow smelled of rose-scented talc, or as she usually would have said, someone’s od grandmother, and her head hurt. The light that seeped through the opening between two heavy curtains felt cold and merciless, and it took Julia a few minutes to realise she had no idea where she was.

She stared at the white stucco ceiling, flat on her back, trying to gather her thoughts when she heard steps in a staircase somewhere just outside the door. A man walked into the room and sat down on the side of the bed. He looked concerned, and she felt as if she had seen him before.

“Mike!” She almost screamed his name as the memories from last night started coming back to her, and she realised where she was. Stepping away from the bed, he took a glass from the bedside table, pour water and quickly stirred a powder into it.

‘You need to drink this, my love, and you will soon feel better.’ He pressed the glass against her lips, and she couldn’t stop it running down her throat.

‘Maybe it’s just as well’, she thought as she drifted back into the fog, someone will miss me, and go to the police. Sam will know about the party and I will soon be safe back home again.’

It felt like the procedure was repeated over and over again, but she wasn’t sure. She remembered eating soup at one point, assisted by a young woman in a maid’s outfit, and she wondered briefly if she had ended up in some perverse cult, or if it was still a masquerade going on in the house.

Finally, it came, that morning when she was alone in the bedroom when she woke up. Her head felt like it was filled with cotton, and when she tried to stand up, her legs were weak and wobbly. But she made it out of the room, walking silently on thick carpets to the staircase that would take her to the lower floor. She heard the sound of cutlery against porcelain, and given the rising sun, she suspected someone was having breakfast. Mike?

As she walked through the rooms, trying to make her mind up whether to confront or avoid the source of the sound, she caught a glimpse of the street outside the windows. A bus passed by. At least Julia supposed it was a bus, as it had a slight resemblance with one. But still, it was like nothing she had ever seen before; clearly, it was from a different century. People walked by, the women dressed in dresses similar to the one she had worn at the party, sans the sequins. Surely there must be a film shoot just outside the door?

As she was trying to understand what she was seeing, Julia felt herself being watched, and she turned around to see Mike standing in the door to what must be the dining room.

‘I’m happy to see you up and looking better. Come and have some breakfast; let us toast in tea for better years to come than the ones we’ve had recently. He handed her a cup and raised his.

‘Here’s to a new year and a new decade, here’s to 1920!’