Day Minus Seven Thousand One Hundred and Fifty-Seven, 11:00
Jen’s eyes open. Please be 2022. But she knows it isn’t.
Hip bones. An old phone. A really, really old bed, God, it’s that low one that had the wooden sides. Air rushes out of her lungs. It isn’t over.
She sits up and rubs her eyes. Yes. Her flat, her first flat. The one she bought when she’d just started work. She’d put down a three-thousand- pound deposit; laughable in 2022.
It has one bedroom. She gets up and follows the worn path in the tattered brown carpet into the hallway and then into the living room. It’s been made boho by her soft furnishings: a chintzy curtain separates the sitting room from the kitchen, purple cushions line a deep windowsill to disguise the damp. She gazes at it now, in wonder. She’d forgotten almost all of this.
Morning light filters in at the grimy windows.
She checks her phone, but it doesn’t have the date on it. She turns the television on, goes to the news, then to Ceefax. Fucking hell, is this what they used to do to work out the date? It’s March the twenty-sixth, 2003, eleven o’clock in the morning.
It’s six months earlier, and it’s the day after she met Kelly for the first time. Today is the day of their first official date.
She looks at her phone, though she can hardly use it. It can send texts,
make calls and she can play Snake on it. She navigates to SMS. Kelly’s last message is right here, in the thread of conversation with a man listed in her contacts as Hot Painter/Decorator? The man who she didn’t know was
going to become her husband. Cafe Taco, 5.30pm? From work? xx he wrote, the text blocky and old-fashioned, the screen illuminated a neon calculator-green.
Her reply must be in a separate box, the messages unthreaded. Ancient. She goes to the sent items. Sure, she’d said, a study in casual language.
She doesn’t remember obsessing over it, but she’s sure she will have.
It’s late. She used to binge drink and binge sleep. She feels hung over. She doesn’t remember what she did the night after she first met Kelly, but she presumes it involved alcohol. She runs a finger over the kitchen
counters – fake marble – and gazes at her possessions: legal textbooks, but lots of paperbacks with high-heeled women on, too. Candles in jars and stuck in the tops of wine bottles. Two pairs of suit trousers balled up on the floor, pants and socks still visible in them.
She takes a long shower, marvelling at the dirt between the tiles. Funny how we get used to things. She’s sure she never gave it more than a passing
thought when she lived here. Just put up with the mould on the windowsills, the constant noise outside, that she had to budget for every penny.
When she’s out, in her towel, she heads to her desktop computer.
Something occurred to her in the hot, scented steam and she wants to look it up now.
She presses the spongy button on the front of the machine and waits for it to power up, shower water dripping from the end of her nose and on to her carpet as she sits.
She watches the monitor spring to life and thinks. She had a best friend when she was a trainee, called Alison. Jen wonders if this is why that alias tripped off her tongue so easily, weeks ago. Alison worked at a nearby
corporate firm. They used to meet every lunchtime, buy a Pret lunch. Alison would slag off the law. Later, she cross-qualified as a company secretary, and Jen had stayed where she was, divorcing couples, and they had lost touch, the way you sometimes do when a friendship is born out of a common interest only.
It’s so strange to be here again. To know she could dial Alison’s number, now, and catch up. How segmented life is. It splits so easily into friendships and addresses and life phases that feel endless but never, never last.
Wearing suits. Dragging a changing bag around. Falling in love.
She blinks as Windows XP loads in front of her. Jesus Christ, it looks like something from an ancient hacker movie. She finds Explorer with difficulty.
Her internet is dial-up, and she has to connect. Finally, she goes to Ask Jeeves and types it in: Missing baby, Liverpool.
And there it is. Eve Green. Taken in the back of a stolen car a couple of months ago. So this is why the personal investigator couldn’t find her: she was missing twenty years in the past. Kelly was involved in catching the ring that stole her, but they never found the baby. Kelly kept the poster. He must have shown Todd when he told him about it. That’s why the burner phone, the poster and the badge ended up in Todd’s room. And Kelly discussed it with Nicola, that she was never found.
Jen’s stomach rolls over. A lost baby, lost for twenty years.
She gazes out of the window at Liverpool, hazy in the low, winter- morning sun, trying to understand it. Her father is alive. Her best friend is Alison. In the future, she marries Kelly, the man she will have her first date with tonight and will have a child with, named Todd.
She thinks about the missing baby, Todd, Kelly, a crime ring made up of bad people and undercover people who are sometimes both. And, more than all that: she thinks about how to stop it.
The puzzle isn’t yet complete. Clearly, it isn’t over yet. She’s still here, in the deep past, still with things to do, to solve, and to understand.
In need of some light relief, Jen heads to the mirror and drops her towel, unable to resist looking at her twenty-four-year-old body. Damn, she thinks, two decades too late. She was a ten! But, like everyone, she didn’t
appreciate it until it was too late.
At five forty, fashionably late, Kelly arrives in the café. Jen can tell, now that she has known him for twenty years, that he is nervous. He is wearing double denim, light and dark, effortlessly cool, the way he’s always been, that hair turned up at the front. But his gaze is skittish, like a deer’s, and he wipes his hand on his jeans before he comes over.
She stands to greet him. Her body is so slim, it’s so lightweight, like she’s been underwater and just got out. She bumps into fewer things. There is just
… less of her. And she’s so supple, so boundlessly energetic, the hangover burned off in minutes, cured with coffee and sunshine.
Kelly leans to kiss her cheek. He smells of tree sap. That smell, that smell, that smell. She’d forgotten. An old aftershave, deodorant, laundry detergent – something. She’d forgotten his smell, and suddenly, she is here, in 2003, in a café, with him, the man she falls in love with.
She looks at him, her young eyes meeting his, and she finds she has to cover up a wave of tears. We do it, she wants to say. Once. In one universe, we make it all the way to 2022, still having sex, still having dates. We have a wonderful, funny, nerdy kid called Todd.
But, first, you lie to me.
Kelly says nothing in greeting to her. Typically him. She understands,
now, the need to be guarded. Because he is a liar. But his eyes flick up and down her body and, nevertheless, her stomach rolls over.
‘Coffee?’
‘Sure.’
She messes with the sugar packets on the table. Pink Sweet ’n Lows. The menu contains coffee, tea, peppermint tea and orange squash. Nothing like 2022’s macchiatos. The front window is illuminated with fairy lights, even though it’s late March. The rest is pretty mundane. Formica tables, linoleum floors. The smell of fried food and cigarettes, the sound of a till ringing up.
People signing receipts for card payments. Two thousand and three lacks the flair of 2022. There’s nothing, except the fairy lights, that is there just because it’s nice. No picture walls or hanging plants. Just these tables and those blank walls, and him.
He’s in the queue, weight on one hip, slim frame, his face inscrutable, an enigma.
‘Sorry,’ he says, bringing over two old-fashioned cups and saucers. He
sits down opposite her and, bold as that, her future husband knocks his knee against hers, as if by accident, but then lets it settle there. It has exactly the same effect on her the second time as the first, even though she knows in
precise detail what it’s like to kiss him, to love him, to fuck him, to make a child with him. Kelly has never failed to turn her on.
‘So,’ he says to her, a sentence as loaded as a gun. ‘Who is Jen?’ His knee is warm against hers, his elegant hands plucking at the same sugar
packets she was just messing with. He’s always done this to her. She can’t think clearly around him.
She stares down at the table. He is undercover. His name isn’t Kelly.
Why does he never, ever tell her, not in twenty years? That’s what she can’t figure out. The answer must be out there, somewhere, beyond those fairy lights, but she can’t yet find it. She wonders if, when she does, the time loop will end. And, if not, what it’ll take to stop it.
‘Not much to tell,’ she says, still looking at the street outside, at the 2003 world. Thinking, too, about the glaring truth that she’s been trying to ignore: unless Jen and Kelly fall in love, Todd won’t exist at all.
‘Who is Kelly?’ she says back. She thinks, out of nowhere, of the way he bought that pumpkin for her, because she wanted it. The Belfast sink he got her. The lack of fucks he gives to the whole world, in the future. Both inspirational and slightly dangerous. He excites her. They were good together. They are good together. But the foundation of it is this: lies. A crumbling cliff edge.
He lets his smile spread across his features as he looks at her, biting his bottom lip. ‘Kelly is a pretty boring guy on a date with a pretty hot woman.’
‘Only pretty hot.’ ‘Trying to keep my cool.’ ‘Failing.’
He holds his hands up and laughs. ‘True. I left my cool at the law-firm door.’
‘The painting then – it was a ruse.’
Something dark passes across his expression. ‘No … but I don’t give a fuck about decorating your dad’s law firm any more.’
‘How did you get into that then?’
‘You know, I just never wanted to be of the establishment,’ he says, and Jen remembers this exact sentence, the effect it had on her, on of-the- establishment her. She’d found it thrilling. Now, she’s jaded by it, confused.
She doesn’t understand where Ryan ends and Kelly begins. Whether the things she fell in love with are the real him.
‘Which area of law do you practise?’
‘I’m a trainee – so everything. Dogsbody stuff.’ Kelly nods, just once. ‘Photocopying?’ ‘Photocopying. Tea-making. Form-filling.’
Another sip of his coffee, yet more eye contact. ‘You like it?’ ‘I like the people. I want to help people.’
His eyes catch the light at that. ‘Me too,’ he says softly. Something seems to shift between them. ‘I like that,’ he adds. ‘You have much to do with the running of it or …?’
‘Hardly anything.’ Jen remembers being flattered by these questions, at his ability to sit and listen, unusual among young men, but she feels differently about it, today.
Kelly crosses his legs at the ankles, his knee leaving hers. She’s cold with the absence of it, despite everything. ‘That’s good,’ he says quietly.
She looks across at him. Sparks fly between them, like embers spitting out from a fire that only they can see.
‘I never wanted the big job, big house, all that,’ he adds.
She glances down at the table, smiling. It is such a Kelly thing to say, the attitude, the confidence, the edge, she finds herself tumbling. And, for much of their marriage, they were poor but happy.
‘Tell me about the most interesting case you have on,’ he says. And she remembers this, too. She’d confided in him about some divorce or another. He’d listened for so long, genuinely interested. So she’d thought.
‘Oh, I won’t bore you with that.’
‘Okay – tell me where you want to be in ten years.’
She looks at him, hypnotized by him. With you, she thinks simply. The old you.
But hasn’t he always – God, what is she thinking? – but hasn’t he always been a good husband to her? Loyal, straight-up, sexy, funny, attentive. He has.
The knee is back again. He rolls up through his foot, moving his knee against hers. Jen’s stomach is set on fire immediately, like a match struck with only the merest touch to the box.
As the evening air gets blacker and blacker outside, the rain heavier, the café steamier, they talk about everything. The media. They briefly touch on Kelly’s childhood – ‘only child, both parents dead, just me and my paintbrush’ – and where Jen lives. They talk about their favourite animals – his are otters – and if they believe in marriage.
They talk about politics and religion and cats and dogs and that he is a morning person and she a night owl. ‘The best things happen at night,’ she says.
‘The best thing is a 6 a.m. cup of coffee. I will not be taking any arguments.’
‘Six o’clock is the middle of the night.’ ‘So stay up then. With me.’
They get closer and closer, as close as the table will allow them. She tells him she wants a fat cat called Henry VIII, Kelly having no idea that they do get one, and he laughs so much he shakes the table. ‘And then what’s his heir called? Henry IX?’
They talk about their favourite holidays – Cornwall for him, hates flying – and their death-row meals – they both want a Chinese takeaway.
‘Oh, well,’ he says, around ten o’clock. ‘Just a rough upbringing, I guess.
I want to give my kids better.’
‘Kids, hey?’ And there it is. A layer of Kelly that Jen knows to be true. ‘I mean – yeah?’ he says. ‘I don’t know – just something about raising
the next generation, isn’t there? Teach them the stuff our parents didn’t teach us …’
‘Well, I’m glad we’ve skipped the small talk.’ ‘I like big talk.’
‘Did you come in yesterday just – on the off chance? Of work?’ she asks, wanting to understand, fully, their origin story. He’d gone in to check with her dad, then come out only five minutes later.
‘No. You know,’ he says, seeming to be wanting something from her, his expression expectant, ‘your dad and I have a mutual acquaintance. Joseph Jones? You might’ve met him.’
A bomb explodes somewhere, or that’s how it feels, at least. Dad knew Joseph fucking Jones? The world seems to stop, for Jen, for just a blink.
‘No, I haven’t,’ she says, almost a whisper. ‘Dad deals with everyone.’
It’s as though she’s popped a balloon. Kelly’s shoulders drop, perhaps in relief. He reaches for her hand. She lets him take it automatically. But her mind is whirring. Her father knew Joseph Jones? So – what? Her father is
… Is what? If Jen were a cartoon, a burst of question marks would appear above her head.
Kelly’s fingers are playing piano on her wrist. ‘Shall we get out of here?’ he asks.
They leave the café and stand outside in the March rain. The streets are washed with it, the spotlights of the high street reflected, the pavement a wet gold. He draws her to him, right outside the café, a hand on the small of her back, his lips right next to hers.
This time, she doesn’t kiss Kelly. She doesn’t ask him back to hers, where they would talk all night on her bed.
Instead, she makes her excuses. His brows lower in disappointment.
He walks off down the street, a backwards wave behind his head, because he knows she will still be looking.
Jen stands on the street, alone, as she has a thousand times since this all began. She draws her arms across her body, thinking of how to save her son
and thinking, too, about how nobody will save her, nobody can, not even her father, and especially not her husband.
