‌Day Minus Six Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety-Eight, 08:00‌
Jen is in a two-up-two-down terrace. She and Kelly rented it for a year. They had no emotional connection to it at all. Jen hardly remembers it. It is only now, looking up at the ceiling marbled with damp, that she recalls living here at all.
Jen is not yet pregnant, and so Todd is not yet born. Which leaves only one person this mystery can be about.
‘Lopez?’ Kelly calls up the stairs. Emotion moves up through her. She’d forgotten he went through a phase of calling her that. Jen became Jenny
became Jenny from the Block, after that song, then became Lopez. ‘Kelly?’ she says.
‘You’re up!’
‘I am.’
‘Look,’ he says, in that way that he does, that authoritative, guarded way. ‘I have a thing today.’
‘What’s that?’
‘An all-day conference.’
Something vague is stirring in Jen’s mind. What kind of painter/decorator goes to a last-minute conference? One she trusted, she supposes.
‘Sure,’ she says, but the ground underfoot as she rises from bed feels unstable, like it’s made of quicksand.
‘You’ll be gone all day?’
‘Yeah,’ Kelly says distractedly.
‘Okay.’
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’ Kelly’s eyes are the same, but not much else. He’s so slim. Elegant, almost.
‘I’m fine,’ Jen says weakly, looking up at him. ‘Don’t worry – you go.’ ‘You sure?’
‘Sure as sure can be.’
Jen doesn’t hesitate at all in following Kelly. They’re rushing towards the moment she cracks it open, she can tell.
She’s here, in the back of a cab. It was much harder to call a taxi this far back in the past. She has a mobile, but it’s an old brick whose numbers
illuminate green neon and sing as she touches them. A children’s toy of a phone.
‘Can we stop here?’ Jen says.
Kelly has parked illegally right in the centre of Liverpool, on double yellows. His car is a Y reg: Jen hadn’t realized quite how much cars had changed. It’s boxy, looks too big. She can’t stop looking at it, or him. She feels like an alien.
Kelly looks left and right as he unfolds his long legs out of the driver’s seat. The checking seems habitual, a tic. Blue eyes flick up and down the street.
She remains in her black cab. She will be almost invisible to Kelly here, sheltered in the back, behind a grimy window.
‘Got to get a move on soon,’ the cabbie says.
‘Just five – just five minutes, please, I just need to watch something,’ she says.
The taxi driver doesn’t answer her, instead pointedly gets a novel out.
John Grisham, the pages folded down. He leaves the engine idling. Oh, the days when people read novels to pass the time.
‘Sorry, won’t be long,’ she adds, thinking of all the things she could tell
this man about the future. Brexit. The pandemic. Nobody would believe her. It’s mind-blowing. A whole two decades squashed here into a taxi with them.
Kelly moves around to the back of his car. He scans the horizon in that way he sometimes still does in the present day. She’d never thought about it much until forced to observe her husband in this way. His hair is gelled carefully, coiffed at the front.
Another driver honks at them, gesturing at the taxi as he drives past. He winds his window down. ‘Move!’ he yells.
Jen’s driver puts the car into gear. ‘One sec, please, please,’ she says. If she gets out now, Kelly will see her, and it will all be for nothing.
Kelly opens the boot with one hand and pulls something out. It’s large and burgundy, some folded material – curtains, maybe? Jen rests her forehead against the mucky window of the taxi, squinting. It’s a suit bag. Jen recognizes it from years ago. He wore suits very occasionally. To funerals, to weddings. It hung on a hook in the back of their wardrobe.
‘Any time, love,’ the taxi driver says, but Jen just nods.
Kelly disappears up a side road, his stride a study in casual walking that Jen knows to be false. She’s going to lose him. ‘I need to go,’ she says.
She starts to gather her bag and purse, trying not to lose sight of him. As she’s counting out the money she got out of the drawer in the kitchen – different drawer, different kitchen, different notes – another car honks their horn.
‘Hang on,’ the taxi driver says.
‘I’ll go, I need to go,’ Jen says, almost shouting. ‘We’re blocking a bus route.’
‘I need to get out!’ Jen yells. She fiddles with the car door handle as the honking continues, wondering what will happen if she just cuts and runs without paying. It’s only a taxi. It’s barely a crime.
She thrusts too many notes into the silver tray that has actual cigarette ash in – God, yes, people used to smoke everywhere! – and leaps out.
She dashes to the side-street. Kelly has almost reached the end of it. He stands out to her in a crowd the same way Todd does, the same way her own name does on a list.
He turns abruptly left and goes into a pub called The Sundance. He’s holding his suit bag still, over his arm, so Jen hedges her bets and waits nearby, on the pavement.
She stands outside Woolworths, the red-and-white sign so familiar to her.
It goes bust in just five years’ time. The recent past, really, but it doesn’t feel it. Inside: the sealed plasticky floors, the stationery. She could stay here for ever, just looking in through the window, marvelling at times gone by, Christmases buying games and pic ’n’ mix, just staring at the changes that have overtaken the world over the last twenty years, the things lost and
gained. She raises a palm to the glass, just as she did right at the very beginning of this, and waits.
Reflected behind her, she sees Kelly emerge from the pub. He’s now wearing the suit, the bag slung back over his arm. Hair freshly gelled. Black, shiny shoes on.
A woman seems to come out of nowhere, perhaps another pub, perhaps an alleyway. Jen watches her approach Kelly. She squints. It’s Nicola.
‘How was it?’ Kelly says to her.
‘Yeah, all right. Tough – they want to know all the methods.’ Kelly guffaws. ‘We can’t say those.’
‘I know. I said that. Judge didn’t much like it. Listen – good luck. And call me, you know? If … in the future. You ever want to come back.’
Nicola leaves Kelly there, in the street, without another word.
Jen gazes at him, unseen now in the crowds, thinking of the texts he
sends Nicola in twenty years’ time, asking for help. Of the fact that she asks for something in return from him.
Jen follows Kelly at a distance, grateful that it’s Liverpool and not Crosby. She marvels at the fashions – flared jeans, boho tops exposing skin to the last of the summer sun, in September – and the old cars and shops,
the world filtered vintage. Kelly walks with purpose but also with anxiety, Jen thinks. His head upright, a deer being pursued, or a lion in pursuit, she isn’t sure which.
Down a cobbled street, past brands that have and haven’t survived the last twenty years, Debenhams, Blockbusters. Into a striplit-bright mall full of jewellers, out the other side. Left, right. Up a side-street lined with industrial-sized bins. Jen drops even further back.
His pace slows on a wide, pedestrianized swathe of grey paving slabs. He’s surrounded by tall buildings. His body turns completely towards one of them, and then he walks forward, pulls the door open, and disappears.
Jen doesn’t need to look at a map or read the signs. She, a lawyer, knows this building well. How could she not? It’s Liverpool crown court.
Outside, there are old-fashioned streetlamps, the bulbs spherical and white, like pearls. The building is no different back here in 2003. A large seventies cuboid sprawl, dark brown cladding, tinted windows. An embossed crest on the front. For once, she’s glad of the justice system that never changes, creaking and ancient and fusty.
She waits in the sun for a few minutes, then follows Kelly inside, pulling open the glass double door to the courthouse.
She heads straight to the listings, glad of the legal knowledge that she has. They’re pinned on a corkboard in the foyer, four scraps of paper fluttering together, held by a single drawing pin that’s probably still in use today.
She knows what she’s looking for. She knows what she will find.
The dates align. She didn’t realize it, as she travelled back. The archived news story. The list of charges against him.
And there it is. She barely has to scan down at all.
R v Joseph Jones. Courtroom One.
So this is a life lived in reverse. Things happened that Jen had no idea about, that passed her by as innocuously as cars.
She heads into courtroom one and sits in the public gallery. It smells of stale teapots, ancient books, dust and polish. It is busy; a high-profile trial that she had no idea about at the time. And why would she?
She’s lost Kelly. She has no idea in which capacity he is attending. As a friend of Joseph Jones, she assumes with a wince; an accomplice.
The benches in the public gallery are laid out like pews. ‘All rise,’ a clerk says. He has reading glasses perched on the end of his nose, robes that sweep the cheap-carpeted floors. Jen is embarrassed by the pomp and
circumstance of the justice system that she’s dedicated her life to. She gets to her feet as the judge arrives. She bows her head reflexively.
The defendant, in handcuffs, is led in by a security guard with one delicate hoop earring in his ear, and put in the dock.
Joseph Jones. Young, thirty-year-old Joseph. How strange it is to look at him and know the date on which – as things stand – he will die, Jen thinks, looking at those distinctive elfin ears, his goatee, his narrower shoulders, almost boy-like. He could be anyone’s son. He could be Todd.
The judge addresses the court. ‘Earlier, we finished hearing from the second witness for the prosecution, Witness A, and now, we call the third,’ he says simply.
The court is already in session. Jen works it through in her mind. So Kelly’s last-minute ‘conference’ must have been a witness summons. Trials never know which day they will need their witnesses on, until the previous one finishes.
‘Thank you, Your Honour,’ a barrister says. A woman with retro thick glasses. Her wig just covers their pale stems. Jen had forgotten it was the past until she saw those NHS glasses. They look almost like the ones kids wear today: funny how fashion works. ‘We heard yesterday from Grace Elincourt, HSBC employee, who confirmed that Joseph Jones regularly deposited and withdrew large sums of money into a company bank account.’ She looks pointedly at the jury. ‘We heard earlier from Witness A that he also regularly instructed his foot soldiers to steal cars. And to
corroborate this, the state now calls the next witness to the stand and, for this, we must ask again that the jury and the public gallery temporarily depart.’
Jen’s mind is whirring. The public gallery and jury out only indicates a few things: evidential issues, matters of law and procedure, admissibility arguments.
And anonymous witnesses.
Everybody except the lawyers leaves. Jen loiters, watching people who presumably have as much vested in this as she does, drinking vending-
machine coffee, talking. The same way they always have in courthouses. The only difference is fewer mobile phones.
She pops outside, stands on the courthouse steps, wanting to witness the world here in its 2003 snapshot. She watches the cars, brand-new-looking but old, too, N reg, P reg. A lawyer stands nearby, smoking, just thinking. The buildings are the same. Same sky, same sun. She met Kelly only the preceding March; their relationship is hardly six months old.
She spins in a slow circle. You wouldn’t know. You wouldn’t know. The world doesn’t know how much it’s changing.
‘Jury back to courtroom one,’ an usher says from the foyer, and Jen heads inside, her eyes lingering on the city horizon for just a second. She’s about to find something out. Something she can never un-know.
In the courtroom, her eyes take a second to adjust after the glare of the September sun, but after a moment she sees what she expects: the witness box has changed. It is secured by a black curtain.
‘Witness B,’ the female barrister says, her voice as crisp and clear as a natural spring, ‘is a serving undercover police officer. His anonymity,’ she addresses the jury, ‘is to preserve his and the police’s methods and working arrangements and his safety. So, now, to Witness B. You do not need to
state your name for the record. How would you like to swear your oath?’
Whoever is behind the curtains says nothing. The barrister waits, then approaches the curtains after the silence throbs in the courtroom for too long. Jen holds her breath. Surely, surely, surely this is not her husband.
The barrister re-emerges after a second and approaches the bench. Jen hears it, then, a murmured discussion. ‘He wants his voice anonymized. He’s got an accent. We did make a formal application,’ the barrister is saying.
Jen can’t catch it all. She can only hear snatched phrases. She can only understand because she’s a lawyer.
‘But Your Honour, in the interests of open justice …’ the other barrister says. Their debates continue in mumbled prose that Jen strains to hear.
‘It’s important in open court to be heard as you are,’ the judge announces after a few minutes more.
‘Witness B, the oath?’ the barrister prompts. Wait … this witness is a witness for the prosecution, not the defence. So …
Jen hears a sigh. A very, very distinctive, pissed-off sigh. And then a single word: ‘Secular.’
Three syllables. And there it is. What Jen perhaps already knew: Kelly is Witness B.
She had it all wrong. Kelly isn’t involved in crime. He had been trying to stop it.
