‌Day Minus Thirteen, 19:00‌
A police car followed Todd home today. Jen is sure of it. She thinks of the car that drove past Clio’s, twice.
It’s the evening now, and Todd and Kelly are sitting opposite each other.
The lamp on the breakfast bar is on, the sky a lit-up pewter beyond the doors.
The trees outside have more leaves on them. What just a few days ago was a thick collection on their patio is now a cluster of bright red flags, back in their spots on the trees.
‘Good evening, squire,’ Todd addresses her. ‘We’re talking about Schrödinger’s cat.’
Jen spent the morning at work, pretending to be normal. She had an initial meeting with a new client, who she knows tells her in a few meetings’ time that she doesn’t want to leave her husband, after all. Jen took far fewer notes this time.
Todd’s eating a Chinese takeaway out of the box, like an American, except it isn’t in a kitsch carton with chopsticks in it but a plastic
Tupperware container. Bless his heart.
Kelly widens his eyes at Jen across the breakfast bar. ‘We are not,’ he says with a laugh. ‘You were. I was eating wings.’
‘I’m not sure Dad is your best audience,’ Jen says, and she hears the perfect little amused exhale that is her husband’s laugh.
‘What happened with the Venus and Mars project?’ Kelly asks.
Todd inches his phone out of his pocket and passes it to Kelly. The first time Jen lived this day, she was at work. Didn’t know anything about this project.
Kelly reads Todd’s phone for a few seconds, then says, ‘Ah – an A! A for astrophysics prodigy.’
‘A for Alexander Kuzemsky,’ Todd says. ‘Can you speak English?’ Jen asks.
‘He is a great physicist,’ Todd says. ‘This assignment.’ He passes her his phone.
‘Well done,’ she says sincerely. She starts to read the assignment with interest, partly wondering if it might contain some science that might help her, but Todd takes the phone off her.
‘Really, don’t worry about it.’ ‘I’m interested!’
‘You never usually are,’ Todd shoots back.
A guilty stone arrives in her stomach. Maternal guilt, that thing she has tried to work against for much of her life, but that always – always – sits there anyway. You never usually are.
‘You all right?’ Kelly says with a laugh. ‘You look like the Grim Reaper.’ Todd snorts into his takeaway while Jen dishes hers out.
Kelly leaves the counter, his mobile ringing. She stares into the hallway, thinking about Todd.
‘What do you mean?’ she asks him.
‘I mean – you don’t usually pay attention to my stuff.’
‘Your stuff?’ Jen says, the world feeling suddenly still. Todd says nothing, reaching for a chicken ball and eating it whole. ‘Do you think I don’t listen to you?’ she asks.
A hazy kind of awareness is descending on her, the way cloud cover does: you can’t quite see it if you’re in it, but you can feel it.
Todd seems to actively consider the answer, looking down at his plate, his brow furrowed. ‘Maybe,’ he says eventually.
He is still staring at her. Kelly’s eyes. But everything else is hers. Dark, unruly hair, pale skin. Unbearably large appetite. She made him. And look: he thinks she doesn’t listen to him. Just says it like it is a plain fact.
‘It isn’t interesting to you,’ he adds. ‘Oh,’ she whispers.
‘I care about physics,’ he says. ‘So it isn’t funny that I care about Alexander Kuzemsky. I actually care about him.’
Jen experiences the eerie feeling of being wrong in an argument. So totally wrong. Her mind performs gymnastics. This isn’t about planets. This is about their relationship.
Todd with his fun science facts and his head in the clouds. Jen with her wry inability to understand what he is talking about. That’s how she has
always thought of them. She and Kelly couldn’t believe they’d made such a cerebral child, clever in a totally different way to them, both so earthy, and Todd so … not. But he isn’t something made. He isn’t an object. Here he is, right in front of her, telling her who he is. She’s let her own insecurities about being stupid turn his intellectualism into something to be laughed off. Laughed at.
‘God.’ She puts her head in her hands. ‘All right. I see. I’m sorry. It’s not – I’m so sorry,’ she finishes lamely.
‘Okay,’ he says.
‘Everything you do is interesting to me,’ she says, tears springing with the kind of reckless fatalism of somebody who won’t be here tomorrow; a deathbed proclamation, a call from a hijacked plane. A woman who can connect and connect and connect with her son, but it doesn’t matter, it
won’t last. ‘I have never loved anybody as much as I love you. Never will,’ she says plainly, her eyes wet. ‘I got it wrong. If I don’t show you that.
Because it is so true – it is the truest thing.’
He blinks. His expression ripples into sadness, like a stone dropped into a pond. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘It’s just – you know.’
‘I know,’ Jen says. ‘I know.’ ‘Thank you,’ he says again.
‘You’re welcome,’ she says softly, just as Kelly strides in.
‘I ate all the balls, because this last one’s mine too,’ Todd says with a smile. The joke’s a deflection, armour against their other family member witnessing this private moment, but Jen laughs anyway, too, though she wants to cry.
‘That was a client,’ Kelly says needlessly. Jen glances back at Todd. He puts the final chicken ball in his mouth and smiles up at her with his eyes. She reaches over to tousle his hair, which he leans into, like a neglected animal.
Todd drops the Tupperware right into the bin, something she would usually complain about but chooses not to, today.
‘Where to tonight?’ she asks him. ‘Snooker.’ He does a chef’s kiss in the air.
Jen nods quickly. ‘Well, have fun.’ Then she adds, ‘I’m going out too.
Drink with Pauline.’
‘Are you?’ Kelly says in surprise.
‘Yeah, I did tell you.’ A lie. ‘Which venue?’ she asks Todd, hoping to sound only curious.
‘Crosby.’
She smiles at him. Because, the reality is, wherever he goes, she will be there too.
The entrance to Crosby sports bar is an anonymous little black door on the high street. A retro neon sign above it. An England flag above that. It is a twenties building with mullioned windows, red bricks and three chimneys along the top.
Jen pulls up in a car park at the back shared by two restaurants, the sports bar and a Travelodge. As she gets out of her car, she smells chargrilled meat, pushed out into the autumn air by a vent somewhere. God, she’s had a Chinese, but she could totally eat a burger.
She tries the door at the back of the bar, even though it looks like a fire door. It’s jammed shut, locked. She goes to the front, peering through the glass, hands either side of her head. It’s dark inside. She can’t see anything at all. She could just stay here, she thinks, the glass cooling her forehead.
She’s so tired. She’s so fucking tired. Let her just stay here and cease to exist. Let her become part of the snooker club, an ornament. Not a tortured, living, breathing human.
A light flicks on inside, red-toned, dim, illuminating what is right in front of her: stairs, painted black. Shabby, stained, old and, more importantly, empty.
She pushes open the door and ascends as quietly as she can. They lead to an empty landing, two closed doors either side of it. The perfect place to sit and listen. The perfect place to take a risk.
She holds her breath. After a few seconds, she hears the click of the balls.
The thump of the end of a cue on to the floor.
A full-length art deco window sits behind her, letting in the glow of the streetlights. The floor is painted black, rickety old wooden floorboards that creak as she moves.
‘Next week, for sure,’ Todd says. A click. He must have taken his shot.
Jen leans over towards the hinge of the door and peers through, hoping nobody will see a single eye over here, in the darkness.
‘Maybe we can go away next summer,’ Clio says. It’s definitely Clio, her dreamy voice.
Todd moves back and forth in her vision. He holds his snooker cue like a staff, exactly the way a wizard in his favourite computer game holds it, his weight on it, his other hand on his hip. Jen’s heart turns over in her chest as she gazes at him, her son. He is acting. She is sure of it.
His hair is coiffed, his trainers bright white, pacing slowly around the snooker table, moving in and out of view. He is in full bravado mode.
‘If you’re still together,’ a male voice says. Jen is pretty certain it’s Joseph, though she can’t see him.
‘Sure we will be,’ Todd says. Nerves thrum in his voice. Jen can hear them, detectable only to her, like the shivering after a piano key is depressed.
‘Good shot,’ another voice says, perhaps Ezra.
‘Hope I’m not interrupting.’ This time, a female voice. Jen shifts so she can see. A woman has entered from a dark door at the other side of the snooker room. She’s about Jen’s own age, maybe slightly older. She has greying hair scraped back into a tidy ponytail. Her outfit looks casual, jogging bottoms and a T-shirt. She walks in an alert sort of way, full of verve, like an athlete.
‘Nicola,’ Joseph says. ‘A nice surprise.’ Nicola. Jen just about manages not to gasp. ‘Long time no see.’
‘Indeed.’ Joseph walks into view, leaning on the cue. Nicola follows him. ‘This is Todd, and Clio. And you know Ezra. Nicola used to work for us.’
‘Nicola Williams, one and the same,’ Ezra says.
Jen frowns, sitting there on the steps, listening to this play out. Todd is being introduced to Nicola. But Todd has already texted Nicola. Hasn’t he? She runs over the dates in the phone messages. Yes, he has. He has. He texted her on the fifteenth, saying Nice to chat. Today is the sixteenth. But he meets her on the seventeenth. Doesn’t he?
Jen shifts as quietly as possible, straining her eyes, looking past the lit- green of the snooker table, and beyond. On the red plush sofa attached to the far wall is Clio. Golden legs, short fringe, the lot. Jen blinks, just watching, waiting for the small talk to end.
‘Room for a little one?’ Nicola says. She grabs the cue off Todd, who sits down. It seems like a perfectly normal outing. Todd’s girlfriend, her family. But Nicola’s appearance has set something off, perhaps because Jen knows Todd’s lying, perhaps not. There is some sinister undercurrent now, like a shark in the water.
Jen shifts again to look at Todd sitting on the bench with Clio. He isn’t as close to her as he was the other night. But, nevertheless, he’s with her. So, what – does he end it tonight?
Music kicks in from nowhere. Big, bass-led rap that drowns out their voices. Jen peers and sees that it’s coming from a jukebox she hadn’t noticed, a red retro-looking one with white lights surrounding the display.
She sits for the duration of the song, hoping it’ll stop, but another kicks in. Todd is talking to Joseph, and Clio stands and joins them too, with Nicola, but Jen can’t hear a thing. She can only watch it play out.
Something that looks like casual conversation, but Todd is uncomfortable, she can tell. She can tell by the way he walks toe to heel around the table, a pacing lion.
Suddenly, Jen realizes the music isn’t accidental. It’s to drown anyone
else out. Any eavesdroppers like her – and others, she thinks, remembering the circling police.
After an hour, Joseph puts on a coat. Todd cleans up, potting the balls effortlessly himself. As Joseph leaves with Nicola, Jen dives through the door on her left, which she discovers leads to the toilets. She stands there in a retro-decorated bathroom alone, listening for footsteps.
The bathroom has vintage wallpaper up, pink clamshells, the texture
gone fuzzy with age. Two wooden boxes of toiletries sit between the two sinks, also pink, and a gilded full-length mirror hangs on the wall.
She leans against the sinks and thinks about what she knows: Todd meets Clio in August.
They’re currently still together but, by tomorrow, he’s gone off her. But then five days before the crime, they’re back together.
Yesterday, he asked Nicola for some sort of help.
Today, Nicola shows up at the snooker club. He pretends not to know her.
She clearly knows Clio’s uncle, used to work for him.
In a few days, a blond kid steals a car for Ezra. Clio’s family are clearly criminals. The Chanel bag. And, in a few more days, Nicola is injured. And then Todd becomes a killer.
She stares outside, considering this timeline of events. The window is open, letting in a steady stream of cool night air. She waits at least ten minutes before considering leaving, then hears a low voice, laughter,
outside. Without thinking, she climbs on to the unit holding the two sinks, her knees painful on the hard surface, and peers out through the crack. It’s Todd. He’s on the phone. He has reached his car, parked out the back. He leans his elbows on the roof – he’s so tall – as he talks animatedly.
She strains to hear. It’s quiet out. She should be able to listen. She
reaches to her side to switch the light out, so she can sit here, once again unseen at yet another window.
‘I almost called your secret phone. I’m trying to phase Clio out,’ he is saying. ‘Don’t worry. Your dirty work is safe with me.’ His tone is acidic, like a lemon.
A pause. Jen stops breathing. ‘Yeah – I mean, who knows,’ he adds. She has no idea who he is talking to, can’t gauge it. It isn’t a mate. Isn’t an equal.
Todd laughs again, a sort of hard laugh, bitter and sardonic. ‘No. That’s just what I was trying to say. We’re at the end of the line, aren’t we?’ He
tilts his head back, looking up at the heavens. The moon is out, a pale hologram in the sky. The temperature is dropping. Jen is cold, kneeling
there on the sinks, listening to her son, who seems to think they’re at the end of the line. What does that curiously adult expression mean? Is this why, in just under two weeks, he kills?
He moves his gaze down, like he’s watching a ball slowly drop, and
looks straight at Jen’s window. She can’t look away, as their eyes meet, but he moves his gaze quickly away. He can’t have seen her. The glass is frosted, the light is out.
‘Yeah, okay,’ Todd says. Another pause.
‘Ask Nicola. See you at home,’ Todd says into the phone.
The world seems to stop, just for a second. See you at home. See you at home. See you at home.
That can only be one person: her husband.
