Day Minus Seven Hundred and Eighty- Three, 08:00
Jen is in September, the previous year. She orients herself, thinking of last night, of her father, of the way he looked at her in the hospital bed. Warm and alive. And now it’s before that again, and he’s alive again now, too, but not because she saved him. She wonders if, somehow, when she goes forward again, she will have still saved him, and he will be there, in the future, alive.
A pile of blue-and-white-striped presents sits in the corner of their bedroom. Oh. It must be Todd’s birthday, his sixteenth. What could be hidden on his birthday that might explain why he commits a crime? She thinks about what Andy said, about how maybe it isn’t about stopping it, but about defending it instead.
She stares at the pile of presents, wrapped last night somewhere in the past; in a yesterday she might never get to. The gifts are PlayStation games and an Apple watch. Too expensive, but she’d wanted to get the watch for him, couldn’t wait to see his face. They will go out for dinner, just to Wagamama’s, nowhere special. It’s cold. The weather turned early that year, becoming autumn almost overnight.
She begins sorting through Todd’s presents, on her hands and knees on
the floor. These two squishy presents are socks. This rectangle is the Apple watch … she sets the others out on the wooden floor, looking at them, mystified. That little round one looks like lip balm. Surely not. She has no idea. She can’t remember.
She hopes he will like them, nevertheless.
She stacks up the presents and walks down the stairs to knock on Todd’s door. ‘Er, come in?’ he says in a baffled voice. Right. Of course. Jen only started knocking last year. Next year. Whatever.
‘Happy birthday!’ she says, nudging the door handle down with the stack of presents.
‘Wait, wait, wait for me,’ Kelly says, rushing up the stairs with two
coffees and a squash on a tray. At the picture window, beyond him, the sky is a perfect, high autumn blue. Like nothing untoward has ever happened, will ever happen.
When she walks into Todd’s bedroom, he’s in pale green pyjamas, sitting up in bed, hair mussed up just like Kelly’s. Jen pauses at the door, gazing at him. Sixteen. A kid, really, nothing more. So perfectly, perfectly innocent, it hurts her heart to look at him.
Despite his birthday, Todd has to go to school and, while he’s getting ready, Jen sees that she has a trial today; a rare event in any divorce lawyer’s calendar is a full-scale trial. It’s Addenbrokes vs Addenbrokes, a case that took over her life for the past year. A couple who’d been married for over forty years, who still laughed at each other’s jokes; but the wife couldn’t get past Jen’s client’s infidelity. Andrew regretted it so much it was painful. If
he was in Jen’s position, it would be the first and only thing he would change about the past.
She heads downstairs, the house empty again, thinking that she can’t attend a trial. It won’t matter. She won’t wake up on tomorrow, anyway. What are the odds?
Just as she’s thinking this, her phone rings. Andrew.
‘You on your way?’ he says to her. Her chest tingles. It isn’t that, in line with Andy’s theory, she is living without consequences, but rather that she isn’t directly witnessing the effects of her actions. Not today, at least.
‘I …’ she starts to say. She can’t bear to do it to him.
‘It’s – I mean, it’s the day?’ he says. And it isn’t that she might get sacked, in the future somewhere, if she misses today. It isn’t that she knows the outcome – Andrew loses. It is that she knows him to be heartbroken, and that he sounds so flat and sad, like all her clients, like her. And so Jen, as she has a thousand times before with a thousand other clients, tells him
she will be there in ten minutes.
Liverpool county court is municipal-looking but nevertheless imposing. Jen hardly ever comes here – like most solicitors, she tries to settle early, and
settle often, before acrimony and court fees set in. But Andrew and his wife wouldn’t. Their primary argument was about a substantial pension fund,
due to reach maturity next year. Jen remembers being surprised Andrew wouldn’t give it up, but most people who have betrayed or have been betrayed are irrational. It’s the single most important lesson she’s learned in her career.
‘Look,’ she says to Andrew, after she’s greeted the barrister – thank God, somebody who can remember the case is conducting the hearing. ‘We’re going to lose this.’
She would never usually say something like this. So bold, so pessimistic.
But they are: of course, she knows they are. ‘If I were the judge, I would find in favour of your wife,’ she tells him.
‘Oh, well, great, nice to know now that you’re on my side,’ Andrew says acidly. He’s approaching sixty-five but still young with it, plays squash
three times a week, tennis on the other nights. He’s most certainly lonely, hasn’t seen the other woman since it happened, after which he issued a full confession to his wife. Jen sometimes wonders, if she were Dorothy, whether she would have forgiven Andrew. Probably, but it’s easy for Jen to say, having been so privy to her client’s heartbreak, his dysfunction, the way he’s left all the photographs of Dorothy up all around his house.
She guides Andrew into one of the meeting rooms that flanks the corridor into the court. It’s dusty and cold, feels like it hasn’t been opened for at least a few weeks. The lights hum as she flicks them on. ‘I think you should offer something up,’ she says to Andrew.
He takes some convincing but, finally, after Jen’s insistent, dispassionate arguments that he is going to spend more on barrister’s fees than he’s trying to save, he offers up seventy-five per cent of the pension fund. Jen takes the offer to the meeting room, where his wife is sitting. She thinks it’ll be enough.
Dorothy is with her lawyers. She’s a diminutive-looking woman, good posture and even better make-up, her physique hinting at a kind of wiry strength, the kind of sixty-five-year-old who walks ten miles on a bank holiday.
‘Seventy-five per cent of the Aviva,’ Jen says to the solicitor, a man called Jacob who Jen went to law school with. Back then, he ate the same
lunch every single day – chicken nuggets and chips – and got forty-nine per cent in the family law exam. Jen wouldn’t want him representing her, and it strikes her that most professions are probably full of these people.
Jacob raises his eyebrows at Dorothy. Evidently, a threshold of acceptability has already been agreed, because Dorothy nods, her hands clasped together. She signs the consent order Jen drafts carefully, feeling pretty pleased with how much easier she has made this day for everybody. When she brings it back into their meeting room, at not even ten in the morning, she sees that, next to her signature, Dorothy has written a small note. Andrew looks at it, the paper conducting the trembling of his hands as he holds it. Jen tries not to look like she’s reading it, too, but she does. It
says only: Thank you x.
Jen wonders as she walks back to her office if this will help, somehow, in the future, both her and them. This small, small change that she’s made. It probably won’t – how could it, when she will wake up next before she’s
made it?
Just as she arrives at her desk, her phone pings with a text from Kelly.
How’s the trial? x. She reads it but doesn’t reply. A photo comes in next.
Coffee for one, it says, a Starbucks takeaway cup held in his hand, his wrist tattoo on show. But blurred into the background – she recognizes it. It’s a tiny corner of the house, the abandoned house he visited at Whitsun. It’s the same shingle on the drive and the brickwork. He’s there again, now. So brazen: he thinks she won’t notice; he thinks she’s never been there.
So here she is. In the office while receiving this text, rather than in court.
It must be for a reason.
Eventually, she wanders down to Rakesh’s room without her shoes on, feet in tights, the way she has a hundred times before. He looks younger, still smells of cigarette smoke.
She recites the address to him. ‘This house, Sandalwood, went bona vacantia,’ she says. Property passing to the Crown. ‘Is there any way we can find who owned it before that?’
‘Ooh, bona vacantia, now you’re testing me,’ he says with a flash of a smile. His teeth are whiter.
‘I think you can look at the epitome of title with bona vacantia – hang on,’ Rakesh says, clicking quickly at his mouse. Jen is glad to be here, with him, in his office in the past. He’s always been so much better than her at legal theory. She should have asked him ages ago.
‘Looks like they’re trying to check who to pass it to because the beneficiary is dead,’ Rakesh says. ‘Hiles. H-I-L-E-S.’
An explosion occurs in Jen’s chest. Hiles. Ryan Hiles. It must be. The policeman. The dead policeman. Already dead, even now, even this far back. What does it mean? She thinks wildly of what the connection could be between Todd, a dead policeman, and killing Joseph Jones. Maybe
Joseph killed the policeman, and Todd avenged it. Maybe that’s his defence: seeking justice. It all sounds mad, even to Jen. She’s so far back now.
‘But … I looked recently and couldn’t find it. His death isn’t registered on the general births, marriages and deaths register.’
Rakesh types fast, his eyes scanning. ‘No, it isn’t. But he’s definitely dead. The Land Registry insist on the death certificate.’
‘When did he die?’ she asks, crazy theories running around her mind. ‘Doesn’t say. You can buy the death certificate for three quid – shall I do
it? What file shall I put it on?’
‘Don’t bother,’ Jen says, jaded. ‘It’ll take too long.’ ‘It takes two days, that’s all.’
‘Honestly, don’t.’
As she leaves Rakesh’s office, she walks past her father’s. He’s on the phone, his door ajar. She pokes her head around it, and he raises his hand in a wave. He’s wearing a white shirt and a grey waistcoat, doesn’t look like a man who has only six months to live. The last time she saw him, he was at the hospital. She can’t stop looking at him now, healthy and tanned. She
hears him say into the phone, ‘Sorry, our accounts only start in 2005. We had a flood.’
God, that’s right. The 2005 floods. Jen had been on maternity leave, hadn’t even gone in to help him. Her eyes mist over with it. Her fingers linger on the doorframe for just a second too long, and he waves her away impatiently, which is so him that it makes her give in to a watery, bittersweet laugh.
Todd is eating edamame beans with garlic and chilli salt. He deftly shells them, popping the innards into his mouth, talking through his food. Kelly is reclining in his chair, just listening.
‘The thing is,’ Todd says, swallowing one of the beans, ‘Trump is actually just insane – as opposed to merely Republican.’
Jen’s heart feels both full and light, a pink candyfloss whorl in her chest. She gazes at her son. She knows the man he becomes, at least up until the murder, can see the seeds of him just here. He learns a lot more about American politics in the two years that follow this birthday, totally eclipses her understanding of it. They watch The West Wing together next year. He stops it to explain the electoral process to her; she stops it to explain the
love interests to him. She’d totally forgotten that, too. The past disappears into the horizon like fog, but here she is, able to live it again, to sift through it.
‘Obviously, he will get voted in again,’ Todd says, stuffing another bean into his mouth. ‘It’s the whole fake-news thing, isn’t it? Anything negative about Trump is now fake news. Genius, in a way.’ He reaches down underneath the table to fiddle with his laces – bright green ones. That is what was in the small circular box. Jen was as surprised as he was.
‘He’s not a genius. He’s a pig,’ Kelly says dispassionately. ‘But I agree, he will get a second term.’
Jen hides a smile. ‘Bet you a hundred quid he doesn’t get in,’ she says. ‘And that Biden does.’
‘Biden? Joe Biden?’ Todd blinks. ‘The old guy?’ ‘Yep. Deal?’ Jen says.
Todd laughs. His hair falls in his face. ‘Sure, deal,’ he says.
‘So,’ she says to her son. ‘What’re you going to wish for when the cake comes out?’
He puts his head in his hands, looking at her over his fingers. She
remembers when she used to trim his nails when he was a baby. He was frightened of the nail clippers. She did hers, first, to show him it was fine, even though they didn’t need doing. ‘No, no cake or ceremony,’ he says, blushing, but he’s delighted, she can tell that, too, as though his emotion is hers also. They, mother and son, are a zip, slowly separating as the years rush by. And so here they are, closer than in 2022.
‘Only if you tell us your wish,’ she says.
‘You can’t tell anyone a birthday wish,’ he says automatically. God, his skin. He has no facial hair at all. His emotions still bubble near the surface, that blush, that embarrassed, delighted grin, the superstition about wishes. It is before he has learned to bury it all, to be so male.
‘What?’ he says curiously, looking at her.
‘Just – you look so old,’ she says, the sentiment the exact opposite of what she is really thinking.
Todd waves a hand, but he looks chuffed. Jen’s eyes moisten. ‘Oh, not the waterworks,’ he says casually.
‘It’s so weird in here,’ Kelly says, ever the evasive diplomat. Jen looks at his eyes. That navy blue. They are so distinctive. But maybe the person in
the photograph … maybe they didn’t have them, not quite like this. Maybe Jen is mistaken. Kelly leans back and spreads his hands wide. ‘It feels like a
… I don’t know. Like a school hall. Why are we so close to everybody?’
Their mains come. Katsu chicken curry for Jen, the only thing she likes on the menu. ‘I wish you could tell me your wish,’ she says to Todd.
‘If you promise it’ll still come true,’ Todd says, spearing a dumpling with a chopstick. He insisted on using the chopsticks, she remembers now. In the past iteration of this day, Jen had laughed at him. But she doesn’t today, thinking of what he said to her about science the other night at the dining table. The things that matter to him.
‘I promise,’ she says.
‘Just – for things to go well,’ Todd says simply. ‘To get the GCSEs. Keep working hard. To become something.’
‘What’s that?’ she says softly, holding his eye contact under the harsh lamplight. He looks pale. The air smells of the kiss of garlic hitting the pan and Jen immediately thinks of her father and the garlic bread in the oven.
He shrugs, a child bathed in the glow of parental interest, content to be witnessed thinking, dreaming, wishing. ‘Sciencey,’ he says. ‘Something sciencey. I’d like to come to the Earth’s rescue in the future, you know? I’d like to change the world.’
‘I know,’ Jen says quietly. How could she ever have laughed at this? ‘I think that is laudable,’ Kelly says. ‘Really cool.’
‘I’m not trying to be cool,’ Todd says.
‘I just meant it in the old sense of the word.’
‘Of course,’ Todd snorts, and Kelly laughs easily. As he looks up, distracted by something behind them, his expression changes completely.
‘Oh sorry, got to take this,’ Kelly says, jumping to his feet. He raises his phone to his ear, and his T-shirt rides up, exposing his slim waist. He walks to the other side of the restaurant, where they can’t hear. She stares at the
phone in his hand, at his face as he talks into it. She’s sure it didn’t ring, didn’t light up.
She looks behind her.
Nicola Williams is sitting two rows behind them. Jen is sure it is her, even though she looks completely different, her hair down, a glamorous top on. She’s sharing a bowl of noodles with a man, and laughing.
Something hot flashes up and down Jen’s back. That’s right. That’s right. Kelly left. He left the birthday meal. Something urgent for work, he’d said. Her gaze lands on him again, as he approaches the table after a phone call that lasted only ten seconds. ‘Work,’ he says. He’s hunched over, not quite looking at them. And certainly not looking at Nicola. ‘I’m so sorry – a client is back early, wants to discuss a job … do you mind if I …?’
‘No, no,’ Todd says, always reasonable, always affable, until he kills. He waves a hand, suddenly looking like a man again, in the hinterland between childhood and adulthood. ‘’Course not. Go. I’ll eat yours.’
‘It’s his birthday!’ Jen cries, stalling for time. ‘I don’t mind.’
‘Remember me when you win the Nobel,’ Kelly says to Todd, raising a hand in a parting gesture to both of them.
Jen jumps to her feet. She’s got to do something.
‘Nicola,’ she says loudly. Nicola doesn’t look at her, doesn’t do anything at all, keeps feeding the man noodles. ‘Nicola?’ Jen says again, directing it to her table. Kelly has stopped walking and is turning around slowly on the spot, watching Jen.
Nicola turns her mouth down in bafflement and shakes her head. ‘You know my husband?’ Jen prompts, pointing to Kelly.
Nicola and Kelly’s eyes meet, but there’s nothing. No recognition whatsoever. They are either masterclass liars, they haven’t met yet, or this woman isn’t Nicola. Jen steps closer to her. God, it isn’t. She only saw her through the door of the snooker club. And now, looking at this woman, she’s sure it isn’t her. She is much more groomed, her hair different, her make-up and clothes much tidier.
‘Sorry – sorry. Thought you were someone I knew,’ Jen says in embarrassment.
Kelly comes back to their table. ‘What’s going on?’ he says in a low voice, his palms flat on the table. There is something just the wrong side of assertive about this. He crosses over into menacingly angry.
‘Sorry – I thought you used to know her,’ she says, though she has never met any of Kelly’s friends.
‘No?’ he says, waiting for her to say more. When she doesn’t, he leaves.
Jen must be mistaken. Nicola must not be the reason he was leaving after all.
‘You sad he left?’ Jen asks Todd.
Todd shrugs, but it isn’t dismissive. She thinks he is genuinely unbothered. ‘Nah,’ he says.
‘Good.’
‘It’s usually you leaving,’ he adds lightly. Jen’s head snaps up in surprise.
Perhaps she isn’t here to observe Kelly’s behaviour at all.
She looks closely at Todd. He’s staring at the table. She starts to consider what Andy says about the subconscious. About how clues aren’t always the most obvious thing.
Their conversation about Todd’s science project pops into her mind.
What was it he said to her? You don’t usually pay attention to my stuff. She thinks of the pizza boxes, one empty, one full, the other night. How she left him. How maybe this is all deeper, deeper, deeper than organized crime, than lying husbands, than murders. Maybe Kelly is a red herring. She’s here, on Todd’s birthday, when she’s been absent so often. What makes somebody commit a crime? Well, maybe it’s about her mothering of him.
After all, does every action a child performs not begin with their mother?
Jen and Todd have been at the table for two further hours, clearly annoying the waiting staff, who keep asking if they want anything. Outside, the sun has set, the sky a deep plum. Todd’s eaten two puddings, ordered one after the other. ‘When can you, except on your birthday?’ he’d said hopefully, and Jen had let him.
‘You’re growing,’ she says, slipping seamlessly back into the role of the mother of a younger child. It’s innate, she was always told. It lived within her. Only she had never thought it had. It had taken her so long to adjust.
The birth had been such a mess, the baby years so fraught, so busy Jen felt
like she was in a vortex, always something to be doing. The clichés were all true: cups of undrunk tea left dotted around the house, friends neglected, career bodged.
Jen buried it. The shame of it, of not falling head over heels for her baby, who arrived in her life like a detonated grenade. She lived alongside it, that inadequacy, got used to it. But then, years later, she still felt the shame; but she also felt the love, too.
She remembers waiting for Todd to come out of his tiny classroom one day when he was five or six, feeling like she had just downed a glass of champagne. Fizzy with the excitement of just … seeing him, little him.
The love, true love, it should have eclipsed the shame, but there is so much judgement involved in parenthood that it never did. The shame is so easy to access, at the school gates, at the doctor’s, on fucking Mumsnet. She can’t let it go. And nor should she. You don’t usually pay attention to my stuff.
‘Let’s head?’ he says now. He jerks a thumb towards the door, motioning to leave.
‘I’m sorry about Dad,’ she says to him.
A frown crosses his face like a cloud in front of the sun. ‘No – I said it’s fine,’ he says, genuinely baffled, but not getting up.
‘And I’m sorry if I haven’t been … you know. The mum of your dreams.’ ‘Oh, please, Mother.’ Todd flicks his hand on the table, a throwaway
gesture. Already, at sixteen, he’s learned to deflect.
‘Let’s just say –’ she stops, not knowing how to word it. ‘What?’ Todd says, his expression softening, lowering.
‘I had this dream …’ Jen says. A dream is the easiest way into this mess. ‘About the future.’
‘Okay,’ Todd says, but it isn’t imbued with his usual sarcasm. He looks curious, concerned, maybe. He fiddles with the fork from his chocolate pudding.
‘You want a tea?’ He shrugs. ‘Sure.’
They order from an irritated waitress who brings them over quickly, bags still bobbing in the liquid. Todd pokes at his with a wooden stick.
‘The dream,’ she says carefully, ‘was that you were older, and we’d grown apart.’
‘Right,’ Todd says, his hand creeping across the table towards hers, the way it used to, yes, yes, yes, like this, when he was still half-child.
‘You’d committed a crime,’ she says. ‘And it left me wondering …’
‘I would never do that!’ he says, his body making such a violent move as he laughs chaotically in that teenage way of his.
‘I know. But – things can change. So it kind of made me want to ask … if you wanted anything to change – between us?’
‘No?’ Todd screws his face up again in that way that he does. He first
made that face when he ate a strawberry when he was eight months old. Jen had known, somewhere deep inside her, that it came from her. She hadn’t known she made it until she saw him do it. That’s my face! she’d thought in wonder. She had seen it in candid photographs sometimes, but she only recognized it truly when he did it; her reflection.
The overhead lights, on some sort of sensor, begin to go off, leaving their bench spotlit in the middle, alone, like they’re in a play. Just the two of them, in the basement of a shopping mall, out for his birthday. His later
actions must start here: with her, his mother. ‘No?’
‘You’re human.’ He says it so simply something deep within Jen’s body seems to turn over, exactly the same way she used to feel when he was yet to be born, her baby, tucked up away in her, rolling like a little barrel, warm and safe and happy.
‘I wouldn’t have you any other way, Mother,’ he says. He puts his hands on the table, motioning to leave. The conversation closed. Not, Jen thinks, looking closely at him, because he wants to end the discussion, but because he doesn’t think that a meaningful discussion has even taken place.
They get to the car and Jen almost tells him, then. That it wasn’t a dream.
That it’s real, that it’s the future, and that she’s doing her best to save him, her baby boy, from that grizzly fate, that crime, that knife, that blood, that murder charge. But he wouldn’t believe her. Nobody would. Just look at him. Pink-cheeked in the cold, the hint of a chocolate smear rimmed around his lips just like when he was tiny and she weaned him on all sorts, but mostly on his and her favourite: Bourbon biscuits. They ate so many of them.
She almost hopes she can go back to then, even further. Perhaps it is not directly about Kelly, but about how Todd reacts to whatever his father has done.
‘Mad that I used to be able to carry you, and now look,’ she says, looking up at him.
‘I bet I could carry you now.’
‘I bet you could.’ His arm is still across her shoulders, hers around his waist. It occurs to her, as they walk to her car, that this might be the last time they embrace. She’s pretty sure Todd gives it up after this age.
Becomes too cool for it. The first time she walked with him on his birthday, here, tonight, she didn’t know. She didn’t know it might be the last time.
A voice downstairs. Jen was almost asleep but – clearly – not quite. She walks soundlessly past the picture window, down, down, down, into the house. Kelly is in the study, off the hallway, and Jen pauses, listening.
He’s on the phone.
‘Yeah, all right,’ he says. ‘Tell Joe I called as soon as you can get hold of him in the morning, yeah?’
Joe.
But it can’t be the prison. It doesn’t sound like he’s talking to an organization. And it’s so late. It must be a mutual acquaintance of some sort.
‘Yeah, exactly,’ he says. ‘Wouldn’t want him to think I don’t care.’ He says it very carefully, slowly stumbling over the words like an amateur picking a guitar. ‘Wouldn’t want to ruin a twenty-year business partnership.’
Jen sits down on their bottom step. Twenty years.
Those two words are doubly significant. A betrayal, but also a prophecy of how far back she may have to go.
