Day Minus One Thousand Six Hundred and Seventy-Two, 21:25‌
Todd is thirteen.
He’s four and a half feet of thirteen-year-old boy. He smells of biscuits and the great outdoors. He’s currently in the back of their old car that they trade in for a better model in a few years’ time, kicking Jen’s chair in the way he did that she hated and is now nostalgic for. Sort of.
It is the first of April. As soon as Jen woke up this morning, the sun a yellow melted pool on their hallway floor, she remembered this day, this weekend. It is Easter Sunday.
They are on their way back now from a village fair, followed by dinner. Simple things, family things. Jen has forgotten herself for some of the day, laughing at her son’s banter, her husband’s quick remarks.
It was a perfect weekend, the first time around. The weather had made it. They’d spent almost all of it outside, with friends, barbecuing, a small party with their inner circle. And, on the Sunday, in this exact car ride, Jen
remembers so vividly Kelly looking at her and saying, And we’ve still got a whole bank holiday tomorrow, too.
She wonders curiously why she remembers that exact phrase so well.
Some days, she supposes, are brighter than others, more memorable. Some days, even the great ones, like their wedding, fade away into history.
And now here they are again. Jen remembers spending a portion of this car journey worrying she had upset her father at the office on the Thursday night about a directions hearing on a case. She wishes she could stretch an
arm back into the past and shake that Jen. Life is so short. It rushes by. He’ll be dead one day, she would tell her, but she can’t. Jen is that Jen, today.
The car is dark and quiet, the radio on low, the heater on high, just the way she likes it. Her skin feels stretched. She had forgotten that they both got burnt, today, the first time, and they made exactly the same mistake today. That deceptive British springtime sun, the air refrigerated, the sun molten.
The sun set about five minutes ago. The sky beyond the motorway is rosewater pink.
They’ve been discussing Brexit. ‘They just need to get on with it, now,’
Todd adds, a view he will later retract. They should have been more considered, he will say, when the queues stack up at the ports.
It’s been the nicest day in the sun, and Jen can’t work out why she’s here.
On every other day, she’s been able to find at least something, a small, confusing clue, something to change. A piece of the mystery. But this day has played out exactly as it did then.
Fuck it. She leans her temple against the passenger window and closes her eyes. Kelly is driving. In the present day, he drives much less. She had forgotten that he almost always used to drive. His left hand rests casually on her knee.
She will just enjoy the rest of the day. Maybe if she stops trying to learn from it, something will happen.
‘Can I stay up when we get in?’ Todd asks from the back.
Jen opens her eyes and checks her watch. It’s just gone half past seven.
She has no idea what time Todd went to bed when he was thirteen. It
became a blur, that creep towards adulthood. She looks across at Kelly, raising her eyebrows.
He shrugs. ‘Yeah, why not?’ he says. ‘Can we play Tomb Raider?’
‘For sure.’
Todd laughs, a happy sigh. Kelly looks at Jen. ‘You just like Lara Croft,’ she says in a low voice to him.
‘Oh yeah, you know how I love computerized tits.’ ‘What?’ Todd calls from the back.
Kelly flashes her a grin. ‘I said, we’ve still got a whole bank holiday tomorrow, too.’
Jen smiles back at him, in the darkness of the car, just as he takes the slip road. ‘Too right,’ she says softly, hoping he can’t hear the nostalgia and grief in her voice. And something else, too. This banter of theirs … perhaps it does more than it purports to. Perhaps it evades the deeper issues,
somehow. Jen thinks sometimes that Kelly is so busy laughing that he never does anything else. Like show how he feels. What’s the bedrock, underneath the banter? Their family has always been so full of charm, exactly what she wanted after her repressed upbringing. But isn’t humour a different kind of repression?
Lights appear in the rear-view mirror, a halo of blue. Kelly’s eyes dart to them, and become illuminated, his navy gaze turning aquamarine just for
one second. That’s right … something is coming back to Jen. What is it? Is there an accident or … no, no … they get pulled over. That’s right. Nothing comes of it, she knows that; that’s why it had faded into the past so easily. She remembers being so panicked at the time. And now, look: it’s just like Andy said. She can observe it.
Her gaze moves to the speedometer, but Kelly’s doing thirty up the slip road. He never speeds. Never pays tax. Never travels. Never goes to parties. Never gets to know anyone. Sits quietly at dinner parties.
‘It’s the po po!’ Todd says, laughing in the back seat, still so innocent.
Jen’s back feels uncomfortable, like there’s a hostile gaze on it. She turns to look at Todd, who gets arrested in four and a half years’ time for murder and doesn’t seem to care, has jaded, old, unfocused eyes as they handcuff him. She reaches to squeeze his knee, which fits in her palm perfectly.
The police turn their lights off, then flick them on again. Jen looks in the mirror. An officer in the driver’s seat in a black vest is pointing very obviously to the left.
‘Pull over, I guess?’ she says to Kelly.
The police start indicating. Blue lights meet orange.
‘Yep, they want us,’ Kelly says, but his voice … Jen’s gaze goes to his. Jaw set. Eyes on the mirror. His hand withdrawn from her knee. His tone: furious. Not about a speeding ticket or whatever, but about something else. Something bigger. She never would have noticed it the first time: she was feeling anxious too. But, now that she is calm, she notices. That anger that sometimes seems to simmer beneath the surface of her husband’s caustic wit.
Kelly wrenches the wheel at the top of the slip road. He takes a left, to
the services, and pulls over at the verge, two wheels on, two wheels off, at an angle which seems somehow hostile, like a teenager who won’t cooperate.
A male officer appears at the driver’s side. He’s got a completely round head, bald, shining under the bright lights of the service-station slip road.
There’s something satisfying about the symmetry of it, like a football. He
has a chain around his neck, a big, thick one like a fighting dog would wear. ‘All right,’ he says, when Kelly winds the window down. Spring air drifts in.
‘Just doing some random breathalysing on the bank holiday. Happy to participate?’ He has an expectant smile on his face, but it isn’t a question.
Kelly’s eyes go to the dashboard, the front windscreen, and then to the policeman. Jen watches every single movement he makes. ‘Sure,’ he says, unfolding himself from the car. As he does so, Jen watches him remove his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans and drop it. A completely fluid movement. It falls and skitters on to the seat like a beetle, unnoticed in the darkness of the car. Except to her.
‘You going to bag me, then?’ Kelly says, Jen thinks impatiently.
The policeman obliges, and Kelly blows into the breathalyser, standing there by the side of the road as the cars whip by, his hands on his hips. He
doesn’t ever drink when he’s driving, not even a pint. This is why Jen didn’t worry. This is why Jen didn’t remember. But look: she’s here. There must
be a reason why. Once again, everything points to her husband. ‘Why would they breathalyse people randomly?’ Todd asks.
‘Oh, because some idiots like to drink on bank holidays and then drive.’
Kelly gets back in the car and winds the window up. He must be sitting on the wallet. It can’t be comfortable, but his face gives nothing away.
Absolutely nothing.
He flashes Jen a quick, easy look. ‘Jesus, does he know this isn’t LAPD?’ he says.
‘Wasn’t it a bit scary, to be pulled over?’ she asks. ‘I’d always be terrified I’d done something wrong.’
‘Not at all,’ Kelly says mildly.
Jen bites her lip, there in the front seat, a spectator on her own marriage. When was the last time Kelly did tell her something had bothered him? Has he ever? She goes hot, suddenly, in the car. What keeps this man awake at
night? What makes him mad? What will he regret on his deathbed? She suddenly finds, in the passenger seat next to the man she has pledged to love for ever, that she can’t answer a single one of these questions.
Jen is sitting in pyjamas, cross-legged, on the velvet sofa. An old lamp is lit, one they get rid of in a few years. Tonight, Jen is glad to be back here, in
the past, in the comfortable surroundings she didn’t quite know she had missed.
Kelly’s wallet is in her hands. It’s brown leather, worn at the edges like a dog-eared novel. He has their joint-account card. That’s it – no credit cards, no debit cards of his own. He has three pound coins, his locker token for the gym and his driving licence.
Jen stares at them, spread across her lap. They’re totally normal. What
she would expect to find. What illegal item could anybody possibly keep in their wallet, anyway?
She squints down at the ID. The hologram … she isn’t sure. She vaults off the sofa to get her own driving licence, setting them down side by side. Are the holograms the same? She holds them up to the light. No. They’re not exactly the same, no. His is … flatter, somehow.
She googles counterfeited driving licences on her phone.
‘The best way to tell,’ an article says, ‘is to look at the hologram. It cannot be successfully replicated.’ Accompanying it are two photographs: one of a real driving licence, and one of a fake.
The fake hologram looks exactly like the one on Kelly’s.
She can’t deal with this. Finding and finding and finding things which
she wishes she could forget. She turns the lamp out, just sitting there in the darkness of the living room, on the comfort of their old sofa, her husband’s forged identity held in her hands.
