Day Minus Five Thousand Four Hundred and Twenty-Six, 07:00
Jen is in a different bed. She knows it the same way she knows it’s roughly seven o’clock in the morning, the same way she knows when somebody has been discussing her just before she enters a room, or that a car is about to pull out in front of her. Micro-emotions, are they called that? The abilities
humans have to detect small changes. You can’t explain it. You just know. Todd would call it the hindsight paradox, she supposes.
The light looks different. That’s the first tell. No blinds at the bay
window. Instead, the room is cast in a grey light, filtered fuzzily through curtains.
It must be the winter. A radiator nearby is on; she can smell the hot metal of it, feel the artificial heat mingling with the chill in the air above the bed.
The mattress feels different. Old and lumpy, from when they had less money. Funny how you get used to having money. It seems easy. You forget what it’s like to live without it, to sleep on shitty mattresses and save up for takeaways.
She’s alone. She lies there in the grey light, just blinking and exhaling a long breath, afraid to look.
She runs a hand down her side, underneath the covers. Yep. Prominent hip bones. She is much younger.
Right. She steels herself, then gets out of bed. The carpet. She knows it instantly. The carpet orients her straight away. She is in her favourite house.
The tiny house that sits alone in the valley. She’s chilled by this. To be alone with a man whose identity is fake.
She reaches down to find a mobile phone and is at least glad there is one there waiting for her. She breathes, then checks the date. It is fifteen years prior. It is 2007. December the twenty-first. Jen feels like she might be sick. This is fucked up. This is completely and utterly fucked up. She has a three- year-old. She’s twenty-eight. A giant leap back, skipping aged thirteen to
three?
Jen is suddenly so angry that this has happened to her. She strides to the window, wanting to wrench it up, to scream out into the country air, to do something, anything, and – oh. There it is. Her favourite, favourite view.
Still in their nomadic, off-grid phase with Kelly, before Todd needed to be settled at a school. In the little house in the valley, a Monopoly hotel of a house, where they never saw anybody.
Maybe it’s that? Maybe this life was damaging for him. Too isolated. She rests her head on the window instead of screaming out of it. How the fuck should she know? There are no fucking clues. Her angry breath mists up the window. Give me a tell, she thinks, staring at the vapour. It clears off, and
she looks out. The beauty of the stark landscape, sepia-brown in the winter wilderness. The hills look old, tatty. Proper, untended, wild countryside, long, blond, beachy grasses. She had loved it here, and now she’s back.
She pulls a dressing gown around her, over a pair of tartan pyjamas she doesn’t remember even owning. She can hear Todd and Kelly in the living room. Loud chatter. She isn’t ready yet to go and see them.
Her body remembers the layout of the bungalow. She heads right, into the bathroom, before going through to see them. She needs to see herself first. To know what to expect.
She looks at the miniature striplight above the mirror. Her hand instinctively reaches to tug hard on it. She knows it will resist, that it is stiff, that, later, it breaks entirely. With a ping, she is illuminated.
It’s Jen from photographs. It’s Jen from her wedding day. Jen has looked back at this Jen often, thought wistfully that she didn’t know how great she looked. She’d focused on her strong nose, her wild hair, but, look: bright, clear skin. Cheekbones. Youth. You can’t fake it. There isn’t a single line on her face while it is at rest. She brings a hand to her skin, which yields like bread dough, springy and full of collagen, not the crêpe paper that awaits her at forty.
Jen turns to the door. She can still hear them. She knows that she will find them in the living room, in the December half-light.
‘Jen?’ Kelly calls.
‘Yeah,’ she says, and her voice is higher and lighter than it is in 2022. ‘He wants you!’ Kelly calls, his voice imbued with a harassed tone she
remembers well. They were so swept up in it, in the demands of parenting a small child. The Jen of now can hardly remember why it was so difficult, can’t recall the exact details. Only that it was. Only the way her calf
muscles ached in bed at night. Only the evidence that remained: toast still in the toaster, uneaten, forgotten in the chaos. Washing hung out at midnight, smelling of damp from too much time in the machine. Weird bodge jobs to make life easier: one time, they put a playpen up around the television to stop Todd turning it off all the time … things they knew to be kind of mad, but did anyway. Things they did just to get by.
‘I’m here,’ she says, turning the light out in the bathroom and stepping into the hallway.
There they are. Jen’s eyes track to Todd, the Todd from her memories. Her son, three years old, barely a foot and a half high, Jen’s face, Kelly’s eyes, fat little hands outstretched towards her. ‘Todd the toddler,’ she says, his nickname rolling easily off her tongue, ‘you’re up!’
‘He’s been up since five,’ Kelly says, pulling his hair back from his hairline. He raises his eyebrows to her. She’s shocked by how much it’s receded in the present day. Shocked by other things, too. His face is boyish. She finds him less attractive in his twenties than in his forties, she is surprised to find. He’s fatter here, too. They had a lot of takeaways, didn’t exercise. Any time to themselves was hard won, so precious that they spent it in blissful, sitting silence.
‘Go back to bed, if you want,’ she offers. She walks down the hallway to the door. Cold is seeping in from underneath it, an icy backwash. She wants to see the view properly. Her hands – so young, so unlined – remember the knack for opening the Yale lock and pressing the handle at the same time, and she pulls it open and – ah! – finds her valley.
‘It’s your day for a lie-in,’ Kelly says automatically from behind her. Yes, that’s right. They alternated the lie-ins religiously.
‘It’s fine,’ she says with a wave of her hand, with all the concern of somebody only here for the day; a babysitter, a nanny, somebody who can give the baby back.
It’s frosty out. They have a wreath on their door which she fingers absent-mindedly. Wellies outside, a stone porch. Milk bottles – they had an old-fashioned milkman. And then: the valley. Two hills meeting in an X. Dusted with the cold, like icing sugar. It smells delicious out here. Smoke and pine and frost, menthol, like the air itself has been cleaned.
Satisfied, she closes the door and turns back to Todd, who is walking
towards her. When he reaches her, she bends to him, and he moves his face into her shoulder, and it is as seamless a motion as a long-forgotten dance. Her body remembers him, her baby, in all of his guises. Three, fifteen, seventeen and a criminal. She loves them all. ‘Go back to bed,’ she says, looking at Kelly.
He gives her a warm half-smile. ‘I feel like I’ve been shot out of a cannon, not just woken up,’ he says, yawning and stretching.
He doesn’t go, though. Like with most things in parenthood, he wanted support, to be understood, rather than for her to take over. He sinks on to the sofa.
She turns back to her son. With this person who, today, on the shortest day of the year, 2007, she has got to fix so that, as the clocks go back, in 2022, he doesn’t kill somebody.
The room is littered with toys she had forgotten about. The little yellow ice-cream truck. The Fisher Price garage, inherited from her parents. A
Christmas tree sparkles in the corner. An old, artificial one that might still sit in their loft in Crosby to this day. The living room is dim, lit only by the fairy lights.
‘Now,’ Jen says, drawing back from Todd and looking at him in his tiny dungarees. He stares back at her wordlessly in that soulful way that he used to. Inky eyes, snub nose, pink cheeks, a studious expression on his face. She holds up a wooden block and he takes it very seriously from her, then drops it on to the floor. ‘Shall we pile them up?’ Jen says.
Todd stretches his hand out very, very slowly.
‘As tense as a hostage negotiation,’ Kelly says.
‘What is it they say – toddlers don’t play, they go to work?’ ‘Ha, yeah.’
‘I was obsessed with blocks when I was a kid.’
‘Oh?’ Kelly leans back on the sofa, putting his legs up over one arm. He closes his eyes. ‘Would’ve thought you’d be – I don’t know. On the flashcards. You know. Always learning.’
‘Really not,’ Jen says. ‘It took ages for me to read.’
‘I don’t believe that. You wordy lawyers … you’re all the same,’ he drawls, and Jen smiles in surprise. He was more acerbic like this. In 2022, he’s still dry but, here, Kelly comes complete with a chip on his shoulder.
She’d forgotten. How much he used to moan about work, come up with various business ideas and abandon them. He seemed to want to succeed, then chicken out.
‘What’s on these flashcards, then?’ she says.
‘Definition of jurisprudence, for starters … one should know this by aged two at the latest.’
‘Of course. And what is that, Kelly – age …’ Jen hesitates. ‘Twenty- eight?’
‘Good at English, less so at maths,’ Kelly says, quick as a flash. ‘Twenty- nine. Forgotten my age already?’
‘You know me.’
Todd laughs suddenly, out of nowhere, and claps at Kelly. ‘Yes, yes,’ he says to him.
‘What was yours?’ Jen asks him, thinking of how she felt in the back of
the car with him as they got pulled over, trying to reach that part of him that perhaps she never has.
‘My what?’
‘Favourite toy.’
‘Can’t remember.’ Kelly shifts on the sofa, eyes still closed. ‘What did you want to be when you grew up?’
Kelly sits up on an elbow, looking at her sardonically, emotional unavailability coloured across his features. How can Jen have missed this? ‘Why?’
‘Just wondering. I’ve never known. And we’re so far from where you
grew up … you know, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who used to know you.’
‘They’re all so far away. My mum always wanted me to be a manager,’ he says, changing the topic. ‘Isn’t that funny?’
‘A manager of what?’ Jen is stacking the blocks up in front of Todd, who has his hands clasped in anticipation, but, really, she is thinking how
evasive Kelly can be.
‘Literally anything. That’s what she wanted. After our dad piss— disappeared,’ he corrects himself, glancing at Todd, ‘all she wanted for us
was stability. To her – a boring office job. One holiday a year. A mortgage on a little place.’
‘And you did the opposite,’ Jen says, but internally she is thinking: Our dad. Our dad. The man in the photograph with Kelly’s eyes. She knew she hadn’t imagined the resemblance. She blinks, shocked.
He avoids her gaze. ‘Yeah.’ ‘You said our dad?’
‘No – my?’
‘You said our.’ ‘I didn’t.’
Jen sighs. He will stonewall her if she asks further. She’ll have to try something else. ‘I wish he could’ve met your mum,’ she says softly to him. ‘And mine.’
‘Oh, same.’
‘How old were you when she died, again?’ Jen asks, wondering why this feels dangerous, tentative. This man is her fucking husband, for God’s sake.
‘Twenty.’
‘And you last saw your dad when you were …’ ‘God knows. Three? Five?’
‘It must have been so … to be an only child, and then no parents.’ ‘Yeah.’
‘Do you think she’d have liked me – and Todd?’
‘Of course. Look. Going to take you up on that offer,’ he says. ‘Bed calls.’ He leans down and kisses her, full on the lips, the only thing that hasn’t changed between 2007 and now, and then saunters off to bed, leaving Jen alone with Todd.
Something makes Jen leave Todd in the living room with the blocks and follow Kelly down the drab, brown-carpeted hallway.
She reaches their bedroom, one ear still listening out for Todd, and stops by the door.
Kelly isn’t in the bedroom. Not that she can see, anyway. She edges the door open in the half-light and creeps in. Nothing.
Well, where is he, then?
She moves forwards across the room. The striplight is on in the bathroom. Did she leave it on? Just as she’s standing there, wondering what to do, she hears a sound. A quiet, anguished sort of sound, like somebody trying to keep something in.
He’s in there. She moves towards the bathroom door and peers inside.
And there is her husband of twenty years sitting on the toilet lid, his head in his hands, sobbing. The only time Jen has ever seen him cry.
‘Kelly?’ she says.
He jumps, wiping hurriedly at his eyes with his fists. The backs of his hands come away wet. He looks so like Todd when he cries. Bottom lip
going and all. Jen’s whole body feels heavy and sad as she watches him try to cover it up.
‘I’ve got this cold, it’s making my eyes stream,’ Kelly says. It’s a ridiculous lie. Jen wonders how many of them he’s told. And why.
But look at him, now, she thinks sadly. It’s the same look. It’s the same look he gives her in fifteen years’ time when their son kills somebody.
Heartbreak.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘No, nothing, honestly, it’s this bloody cold. I hope it’s gone for Christmas.’
‘Is this about your mum?’ Jen says, her voice low. ‘Is Todd all right – is he …’
‘He’s in the living room, he’s fine.’ Jen moves across the tiny bathroom to Kelly. He stays where he is, on the toilet lid, but Jen moves in alongside him, putting her hand across his back and guiding him towards her. To her surprise, he lets her, his arm coming around the back of her legs, his head resting against her chest.
‘It’s okay,’ she says gently to him, the way she would to Todd. ‘It’s okay to be upset.’
‘It’s just this –’
‘Your Christmas cold, I know,’ Jen says, letting him live the lie, whatever it is. Letting him believe it. Something he said to her in 2022 comes to her, about a divorcing couple. Avoiding pain is priceless to some.
After a few minutes, Kelly releases her. He looks across at Jen as she
leaves to go and check on Todd and says one single sentence to her: ‘I just miss her – my mum.’ It seems to cost him a lot; his body convulses as he says it.
Jen nods quickly. And there it is. Something her husband – for some reason – has not ever been able to show her.
‘I know,’ she says. And she does know, motherless herself. ‘Thank you for telling me,’ she says.
Kelly gives her a watery smile, his black hair everywhere. His eyes look especially blue. And, here, back in the past, something passes between them. Something more substantial than what has gone before. Something Jen can’t even name, but something which goes some way towards igniting some hope within her that Kelly isn’t what he appears to be. Please let that be so.
Jen walks back to Todd in the living room. It is old-fashioned. Green, worn carpet, dark-wood furniture. It has a specific smell to it. A comforting, homely sort of smell: cinnamon sugar, cookies, a blown-out candle somewhere. Jen guesses that, somewhere or other, an alternative version of her was baking last night. Funny how those things felt so important then.
Go and see the Christmas lights, bake and assemble the gingerbread house. And – poof. They disappear into history, causing only stress and leaving no imprint, like a footstep on sand that gets washed away too swiftly. Her
entire life, she’s been so concerned with how things seem to be. Keeping up appearances. Having it all, the house with the carved pumpkin so everybody knew they’d done it. And yet. What was it all for?
Todd plays with his cars for a few minutes, then toddles over to the other side of the room.
‘No, Toddy, not that,’ she says as he dives suddenly into the bin. He ignores her, pulling out two balls of tin foil from what was perhaps a
KitKat. Jen is disappointed that irritation flares up so easily on just a single day with him.
‘Mine,’ Todd says. His hurt little eyes gaze at her across the room. ‘More,’ he adds. He turns to the bin again.
He’s practically upside down, his head at the bottom of the bin, his feet almost rising off the floor.
‘Sorry, Todd, come here,’ she says. ‘Come to Mummy.’
Todd turns to her the second he hears the very first syllable fall from her lips, like a flower to his sun, and looks at her. And suddenly, just like that, like a light going on, she knows. She knows deep in her stomach, deep
inside her.
She knows because of the way his eyes catch the early-morning blue winter light.
It isn’t her fault.
It isn’t his fault.
She knows that she mothered him well enough. She knows because of his eyes. They are lit with love. They are lit with love for her. She deflates right there on the sofa.
She tried her best. And, even when she didn’t, the guilt is as much
evidence as anything else: she wanted to do her best for him, her baby boy.
The hindsight paradox that this very person here teaches her about in a decade’s time: she thought she knew it would happen, self-blamed. Thought he’d killed because of a poor relationship with her. But he doesn’t. It was an illusion. And so this is the moment, the moment Jen realizes that it isn’t about this. It’s not about Todd’s childhood, at all.
‘Come here, Toddy,’ she says. Immediately, he drops the balls of foil from the bin, and he comes to her, his mother.
