The Song Was Number One Again

It crept up on me the way these things do, through repetition. In the car on the way to town, the radio played a song I hadn't heard in twenty years, and I smiled, nostalgia, a good station. Then the next song was also from that year. And the next. By the time I parked I'd heard four songs, back to back, all from the same long-ago summer, with a DJ chattering between them about them as if they were new — 'straight in at number three this week,' he said, of a song that had been old when I was young.

In town it wasn't just my radio. The clothes shop I went into was playing the same era, the assistant humming along. A car went past with its windows down, thumping out a track that had been inescapable two decades ago and inaudible ever since. The café had it on. A busker was playing it. The whole town, that afternoon, was tuned to a summer that had already happened, and playing it like it was now.

And nobody else noticed. That's the part that turned a charming coincidence into something that hollowed me out. I said to the café assistant, lightly, 'Bit of a throwback playlist today,' and she looked at me blankly and said it was just the chart, wasn't it, just the radio, and named the current week's 'number one' — a song that had topped the charts when I was at school. She wasn't playing along. To her, that was this week. To the DJ, to the shops, to the passing cars, it was that summer, and it was current, and I was the only person carrying the knowledge that twenty years had gone by.

I drove home with the radio off, unable to bear it, and by evening — I kept checking, obsessively — the stations had slid back to now, to this year's songs, this year's DJs, no seam, no announcement, as if the afternoon had never dropped through a hole into a summer none of them remembered leaving.

I've never found anyone who shared that afternoon with me. I've described it carefully to friends, and they remember an ordinary day. Only I spent a few hours in a town that had quietly, cheerfully, unanimously agreed it was twenty years ago, and only I came back knowing we'd all been there, and that I was the one who wasn't supposed to notice.