‌Day Minus Forty-Seven, 08:30‌
A lot can happen in three weeks. It is the biggest jump back so far.
Eight thirty in the morning, Day Minus Forty-Seven. Nearly seven weeks back in total.
Jen stops at the picture window on her way downstairs. The street looks completely different. The sepia-brown of late summer, grasses parched from lack of rain. The breeze against her arms is warm. She wonders what Andy would make of it.
She went to bed last night with Kelly. He did an admirable job of acting normally. You wouldn’t know anything had happened unless you’d overheard it.
He’d been lying on their bed, hands behind his head, elbows out to the side. A caricature of a relaxed husband. ‘Work good?’ he’d said.
‘Full of documents. What’d you do?’
‘Oh, you know,’ he had said. ‘Showered, dinner, scintillating stuff.’
She remembers this line from last time. She had thought Kelly was just being dry, but sitting underneath his words last night was a kind of quivering fury. A man who had lost control of a situation.
She’d gone to sleep next to him, her husband the betrayer, because she didn’t know what else to do. He’d spooned her as he always did, his body warm. Once he was asleep, she’d looked at the skin on his arms. His – like hers – didn’t look any different, but he was made of different stuff to what she had thought.
And now it is forty-seven days back. She feels utterly alienated again,
like she did in those first few days. She has pink nail polish on her toes that she remembers getting done halfway through August, to see her through the final, warm, flip-flop days.
It’s mid-September. And what does she know? Kelly thinks Joseph is going to find something out, so he asked Todd to stop seeing Clio. He does, but then gets back together with her. Kelly asks Nicola Williams for help.
Nicola is injured, and then Joseph shows up and Todd kills him.
Jen knows more than she did but, in many ways, it feels like less, it’s so confusing. The doorbell goes, interrupting her thoughts.
She checks the date again. Right – it’s the first day back at school, Todd’s first in Year Thirteen. She tries to spring herself back into action.
‘Who’s that?’ she calls.
‘Clio!’ Todd says. Jen leaps back from the window and into her bedroom.
Did this happen the last time? Eight thirty … she’d have left already. Suited, booted, a typical weekday, latte in hand, divorces at the ready. But here, in the hub of family life, lies the secret. If he finds out, he’ll come
here. That’s what Kelly said.
‘I’ll get it!’ Jen calls. Even though she’s in a tatty and ancient pair of maternity shorts – fucking hell, couldn’t she have worn something nicer to bed back in September? – and a T-shirt through which you can definitely
see her boobs, she is going to answer that door. She pulls on a dressing gown and takes the stairs two at a time.
‘Hi,’ Clio says. And there she is. The woman her son has fallen in love with, breaks up with, gets back together with. Is forced to leave by his father. The woman – surely – at the heart of it.
Jen doesn’t know what to ask first.
‘Jen, right?’ Clio says. She – charmingly – reaches out to shake Jen’s hand. Her fingers are long and tanned from the summer, her grip loose, her skin dry, but soft, still child-like. She looks, otherwise, the same as in October. That fringe, those huge eyes, the whites of them shining healthily.
‘Yes, nice to meet you,’ Jen says.
‘I don’t start back until tomorrow, but I said I’d walk with Todd,’ Clio explains.
‘That’s quite enough,’ Todd says. His backpack is over his shoulders just like it was when he was five, eight, twelve. He, too, is tanned. Much healthier-looking than in October. Less burdened. Jen can’t stop looking at
him, thinking of his tears last night, his fury. An explosive argument, and now this: a huge leap backwards. What does it mean?
Kelly emerges out of the kitchen but stops when he sees Jen. ‘Are you off work?’ he says to her. ‘I didn’t want to wake you …’
‘I think I’m sick,’ she says spontaneously. ‘I turned my alarm off. Throat like razor blades.’
‘Bunk off. Sod the lawyers,’ Kelly says.
‘An astounding lack of work ethic from the Dad there,’ Todd commentates.
Kelly turns his gaze to Todd. ‘Work hard enough and, one day, you too can bunk off,’ he says.
This phrase isn’t what makes Jen stop, makes her wish she could press pause to absorb this moment. It’s the look that passes between Kelly and Todd. Pure affection. There is nothing barbed under it whatsoever. Their eyes are alight.
When was the last time she saw them interact like this? She can’t remember.
Todd reaches out to shove him, a mock shove. Jen’s gaze lands on them.
Throughout her entire career she has always looked for the absence of
things as well as their presence. Evidence is often in what people don’t say. What they take out. The man who fiddles his accounts, trying to bury huge personal profit in twenty-five boxes of disclosure that he hopes the lawyers won’t be bothered to go through.
But she missed it at home. The lack of this easy banter. A clue in itself.
That is why she’s on this day, she thinks. To observe the contrast. The argument she overheard at the gate changed something for them, fractured it. And here she is, before it. And don’t things look completely different? ‘Anyway, nice to meet you,’ Clio says to Jen as Todd ushers her out.
‘Nice to see you again,’ she adds, looking at Kelly. And it’s this sentence that turns Jen’s attention away from Clio, and on to Kelly.
Her eyes meet her husband’s as Todd closes the door behind him. She doesn’t hear his car: they must be walking in the sun together. ‘Nice to see you again?’ she asks him.
‘Huh?’ He’s turned away from her, is heading into the kitchen. She
reaches out for him. It’s legitimate. It’s perfectly legitimate to ask this, why Clio would say that to him, she tells herself. But why does she feel the need
to think this way? She pauses. Because her husband can be evasive, comes the answer, from somewhere deep within her.
‘Have you met Clio before?’
‘Yeah, she came for lunch with Todd one day.’ ‘Did she?’
‘Only for about five minutes. Think I interrogated her,’ he says with a charming smile. She can tell he’s thinking fast.
‘You never said. You never said you’d met her.’
Kelly gives a laconic shrug. ‘Didn’t think it was important.’
‘But you knew it would be important to me,’ she says. She hardly ever challenges her husband in this way. She’s always wanted to be … she doesn’t know. Easy-going. Easy to live with. ‘You know I’ve wondered what she’s like.’ She almost adds that she knows he knows her uncle’s
friend. That, later, he asks Todd to stop seeing her, but she stops herself. He will only lie.
‘She’s nice,’ he says. The more she pushes, the more he dodges. She’s never noticed before, this quickstepping of his. Answering a different question. Answering the original question. He goes into the kitchen and
opens a can of Coke. The pop of the ring pull sounds like a gunshot, which makes her jump.
Jen considers what to do, then gets dressed, pulling her trainers on. ‘Going to get something for my throat,’ she calls.
‘I’ll go!’ Kelly says, considerate as ever. ‘Or wait – don’t we have that stuff that –’
‘It’s fine,’ she says, slamming the front door behind her before he can object.
She drives to the school then waits in a side-street, watching for Todd and Clio to appear. They do after only five minutes, Truman Show-like, holding hands, their long limbs catching the sun. Clio is wearing a khaki boiler suit that Jen would look like a fat janitor in. Todd is in skinny jeans, no socks,
trainers and a white T-shirt. They look like a wholesome advert for vitamins or something.
Jen is going to offer Clio a lift home, and try to pretend she isn’t insane for having followed them here.
She waits for Clio to see Todd in. But first, of course, they kiss. She shouldn’t be looking, a creep in a car, but she can’t stop. Their bodies are
pressed together from their feet to their lips, right the way up, like somebody has sealed them. She watches for a second, thinking about Kelly. They still do kiss in this way, sometimes. He is good at that. Maintaining their chemistry, holding her interest. But, nevertheless, it isn’t the same.
When they finally part, Todd loping off with a smirk and a swagger, Jen leaves the side-street and pulls up alongside Clio.
‘I was passing,’ she says. ‘You want a lift?’
Confusion crosses Clio’s features. ‘You’re not on your way to work?’ she says. She has one foot on the pavement, one dangling off the kerb as she
looks at Jen in indecision. God, Jen feels like some sort of evil perpetrator, picking up her son’s girlfriend, but … five minutes in the car where she can ask her anything. It’s too tantalizing to pass up.
‘No, no. Came to drop off something for Todd. Heading back now.’
‘Well, sure,’ Clio says happily. Jen is sort of glad to note that Clio is an appeaser, just like Jen herself is. Clio could easily draw a boundary here, but she doesn’t. Instead, she gets in beside Jen. She smells of toothpaste – perhaps Todd’s, Jen thinks darkly – and deodorant. A wholesome sort of smell. She has the trousers of her boiler suit rolled up, revealing smooth, tanned, slim ankles. Jen looks at them, feeling a wave of nostalgia for back then, whenever that is; some unknown time. When she went to pubs, when she kissed boys, when she was slim (never). When she had it all in front of her.
‘Where to?’ Jen says. She doesn’t explain her presence at the gate any further. In some ways, Jen is taking inspiration from her husband, who has been so good at lying that his secrets have been hidden in plain sight. There have been no over-explanations, no details at all, in fact. Only a complete lack of them. The best kind of liar. The smartest.
‘It’s Appleby Road,’ Clio says. A road behind Eshe Road North. Makes sense.
‘Oh, so you don’t live at Eshe Road?’ Jen asks lightly as she indicates and pulls away.
‘No, no,’ Clio says, but she looks surprised that Jen knows her address.
That’s right: Jen has never been there. Is never supposed to have been there. ‘Just me and Mum at Appleby.’ Clio doesn’t elaborate, the same as last time.
Jen glances quickly at her as she comes to a stop at a roundabout. Their eyes meet for just a second.
Clio breaks contact, gets her phone out of her jeans pocket, angling her hips up to slide it out. ‘Kelly must think I live on Eshe Road,’ Clio says with a laugh.
Jen tries not to react. ‘Why?’
‘I’m always there, aren’t I?’ She pauses. ‘Kelly and Ezra and Joseph – they go way back, don’t they?’
‘Right, right, yes,’ Jen says. ‘Sorry – so did he … did Kelly introduce you to Todd, then?’
‘Yes, exactly,’ she says. ‘Well – when I came with Joe to drop something off for Kelly, Todd answered the door … and then … has he never said?’
‘Do you know – Kelly has so many friends,’ Jen says: a sentence which is the exact opposite of the truth, ‘I plain forgot.’
Clio turns her gaze to the left and looks out of the passenger window, not understanding the significance of the information she’s imparted.
Bewildered, Jen spends the rest of the trip in silence. She drops Clio at her mother’s house, who comes out on to the drive and waves at Jen. She looks nothing like Clio. Clio must look like her father, just like Todd does.
Two hours later, Jen is doing yoga for the first time in her entire life, a
grotesque kind of downward dog in Kelly’s car, her head underneath the seats, her arse somewhere near the neighbour’s windows, it feels like.
Jen needs to find the burner phone again, the one she now thinks belongs to Kelly. She wants to use it to call Nicola.
And so this is what she is doing, while he’s out running.
But there’s nothing in his car. A few old coffee cups, a jack, an unopened bottle of Sprite. In a funny kind of way, she is glad he hasn’t hidden the
phone in here, under the seats or with the spare tyre in the boot. Kelly is never drawn to cliché, and she likes this, that he is not behaving exactly like every dishonest man before him. Like she still knows him, somewhere underneath the mess.
She shakes her head and walks back into the house, where she continues her search. Tool bags, the airing cupboard, old coats. Anywhere.
He arrives back later and she stops abruptly, trying to tidy away some of the mess she’s made. While he showers, she grabs his regular phone and
turns on Find My iPhone to track him. She’ll have to do it every morning, because she is travelling backwards in time, but so be it. She will do whatever it takes.
It’s five to eight in the evening. Kelly and Jen haven’t eaten yet. Jen is biding her time, waiting to confront Kelly about – well, everything, really. She’s just working out what to start with.
Todd is upstairs, on his Xbox. Jen can hear the noises of his games playing out like thunder and lightning above them.
‘Do you ever think he’s getting a bit – insular?’ Jen says. She’s sitting on one of the bar stools while Kelly leans his elbows on the kitchen counter, looking at her.
‘Nah, no way,’ he says. ‘I was the same at his age.’ ‘Computer games?’
‘Well – you know. I hate to break it to you, but he will be on porn sites.’ Kelly raises his hands, palms to Jen. It’s so easy. How is it so easy to interact with him in this way, their shared humour that they’ve always had? In the café, back on that first date, Kelly had been so quiet, so guarded, but by the end of the evening he had laughed her into bed.
‘What – while the war rages on in Call of Duty?’
‘Of course. Headphones in for the porn. Call of Duty on as a decoy.’ He gets up and turns to the cupboards, opening and closing them listlessly. ‘We have no food.’
‘I’ve just lost my appetite.’
‘Oh, stop. It’s perfectly natural, Jennifer.’
‘What, watching women with fake tits have fake orgasms?’
‘It taught me well.’ Kelly turns and raises an eyebrow at her and, despite, despite, despite everything, Jen feels her stomach burn. That dark little look, just for her. He’s been a good husband, or so she had thought. Not exactly ambitious, somewhat unfulfilled at times, but interesting, layered, sexy. Isn’t that what she always wanted?
‘I could go for a curry,’ he adds, evidently thinking about food as she is deconstructing their marriage in her mind.
She hears a phone vibrate. The kind of noise she would usually tune out, it’s so ubiquitous in their house. Kelly unconsciously puts his hand to his front pocket but, as he turns, she sees that his iPhone is in his back pocket. She watches him closely. Two phones. Both on his body. She never would have noticed. Why would she? The burner phone is small, like a pebble. He wears his jeans loose, low slung, always has.
Jen draws her head back in a reverse nod, appraising him. ‘Sure,’ she says. The Indian takeaway is a restaurant three streets up from theirs. They
love it, even though it is expensive (perhaps because). It is entirely made of wooden cladding, like something from Center Parcs, and is beautifully lit. Jen and Kelly say they can never eat in there because the waiters have seen them pick up takeaway in loungewear (pyjamas) so often.
‘I’ll go,’ he says.
Yes, this is right, isn’t it? He went out, came home carrying joyous scented bags of Indian food. Had he been back later than she’d expected? She doesn’t think so. God, not everything is a fucking clue, is it?
‘I’ll come.’
‘Nah. I’ll go. You relax. Watch some porn,’ he throws over his shoulder as he leaves. She can hear him laughing as he opens the front door. As though nothing whatsoever is amiss.
He’s either taking a call or meeting someone. That’s what Jen concludes. And so, right after he’s left, she heads to the picture window to watch him go. She leaves the light off. She stands there, invisible, just watching him walk.
Several houses down, somebody is waiting. Kelly raises a hand to him.
Jen shifts so she can still watch them, so close to the window that her breath mists it up. She squints, trying to work out who it is.
The sun has only recently set. Jen is much closer to summertime than she was yesterday. The sky is still silvery behind the black, shadowy houses. It helps to illuminate them. Jen sees Kelly clasp the man on the shoulder. The kind of gesture a teacher might make. A mentor, a therapist.
Or a very old friend.
In an almost-perfect echo of the night this all started, they turn around, and Jen sees that the person being greeted by Kelly is Joseph.
They walk a couple of metres down the road, then Joseph says something. They stop, and a small bag passes from Joseph to Kelly, brown, about the size of Kelly’s palm. He doesn’t open it or look at its contents. He puts it in the pocket of his jeans, touches Joseph’s shoulder again, then
raises a hand behind him as he leaves. Joseph heads back, past their house.
Jen shrinks to the side to remain unseen. Joseph’s eyes look up to the windows as he passes.
Todd emerges from his room just as Jen is thinking it through: so all that talk about no food, that was groundwork being laid, as carefully as an architect. Kelly was waiting for that phone to buzz, to signal Joseph’s
arrival. How sinister it is to relive your life backwards. To see things you hadn’t at the time. To realize the horrible significance of events you had no idea were playing out around you. To uncover lies told by your husband.
Jen would always have said Kelly was as straight as they come. But don’t all good liars seem that way?
‘Any danger of some food around here, or do I have to call social services?’ Todd says, coming up behind her.
‘Do you know who that is?’ Jen says, pointing down to the street. This is surely better, actually, than asking Kelly. Todd is less connected to Joseph than she first thought, and is almost two months from killing him. And so maybe he won’t lie.
Todd squints. ‘That’s Clio’s uncle’s mate’s car.’
‘How does Dad know him? They were just talking.’
Todd shifts back from her, barely a step. Jen stares at him. Something significant has happened in his mind, but Jen has no idea what.
‘Do they know each other?’ Jen asks again. They both look back down at the street. The dark is gathering. Her husband just performed some sort of transaction right there, so brazenly. Jen can feel the significance of this, of
the argument Kelly and Todd go on to have, too. Information is rushing towards her. Perhaps an end is in sight.
‘I need to know,’ she says to Todd.
‘Look – I … I don’t want to be causing marital issues here.’ ‘Todd, you are not in a sitcom,’ Jen snaps.
‘Amazingly, I do know that. Yes, Dad knows Clio’s uncle and his mate.
Asked me not to tell you.’ Todd scuffs his bare foot on the carpet. ‘What? Why?’
‘He says they’re his old friends and you used to find them irritating. And you wouldn’t like that he’d got back in touch with them.’
‘He asked you to lie to me?’
‘Do you not find them irritating?’
‘I have no idea who they are.’ Jen is completely confused. In a few weeks’ time, Kelly tells Todd he can no longer see Clio, can no longer
associate with any of them. And yet – look. Items passed under streetlights; trades willingly arranged on burner phones.
Kelly has some association with Joseph. Clio and Todd got together and complicated it. And Kelly … Kelly thought it would fizzle out, that he
could cover it up for long enough, and, when it became apparent that he couldn’t, he told Todd to end it. And why.
That why is the missing piece. And Jen is fairly sure that, today, Todd doesn’t know why. Only Kelly does.
Todd holds his hands up. ‘I don’t know any more than that.’
‘Is Joseph trouble?’ Jen asks curiously while her mind performs a firework display of questions.
‘He might be a wheeler-dealer. I don’t know. He’s a bit of a wide boy.’ ‘How so?’
Todd turns his mouth down. ‘I don’t know. He doesn’t work, but he has money. I really don’t know.’
‘Does Clio know more?’ ‘No.’
‘I’ll ask Dad.’
Jen grabs a jacket and shoves her feet into trainers, heads out into the mild, soupy night, summer’s last exhale. She’s glad to do this away from Todd. He already knows too much, clearly.
She hurries along the street to the takeaway, feeling guilty about grilling Todd, feeling guilty in case he’s worrying, feeling complicit in her hurt in some way. He’s just a fucking kid. Of course he’d lie in order to keep his glamorous girlfriend.
Jen’s footsteps ring out as she half walks, half runs along the streets. The air is close, the sunset monochrome, rendered grey by cloud cover. The odd September leaf has fallen in the street. Brown, three-cloved, like a child’s depiction. More and more and more will gather and fall, and she won’t see any of them.
Jen rounds the corner of the street that the takeaway is on and stops when she sees Kelly. He’s got his back to her, is leaning on a street sign. His legs are crossed in front of him. He’s on the phone. The burner phone she discovered in Todd’s room in October. She registers now that that was after their row, so … why did the phone end up in Todd’s room? Does Todd take it from Kelly?
‘I’ve done it,’ he says. ‘So you’re going to have to be in play, too.’ Jen waits there, saying nothing. She walks a few silent paces back,
hidden behind a corner, still able to hear.
‘I’ll bring it to you. It’s a spare key, it’s on Mandolin Avenue, not far. I need to go now. Need to put in an appearance at home.’
That second sentence kills Jen more than the first.
She gapes, there, her hands flat against a wall while her entire world
seems to spin off around her. She’s about to charge at him, to ambush him, to yell, when he says, ‘Thanks. Thanks, Nic.’
While Jen’s lying husband emerges holding the takeaway, she collects herself. She needs to think. She wants to be sure she gains as much information as possible, rather than confronting him.
His footsteps slow when he sees her.
‘Hey?’ His smile is easy, but wary. He’s no fool. He knows she knows something.
‘What’s going on?’
He immediately understands Jen, and he knows what a warning those questions are. ‘That phone call? Nic? No …’ he says, an educated guess. ‘You don’t think …’
‘Show me your pockets.’
He looks once down the road, back at the Indian takeaway. Then at his feet. A bite of his lip, then he sets the takeaway down on the ground and does what she has asked. She walks towards him.
Two phones and the brown package containing the key tumble out into Jen’s hands.
She says nothing, merely waiting for an explanation. ‘I – this is my client’s phone, Nicola. And her car.’
‘Stop lying!’ Jen shouts. Her words echo around the street, bouncing back distorted. Kelly’s face slackens in shock. ‘You’re lying to me,’ she says with a sob that she can’t contain. For all her intentions, it has descended into the domestic she wanted to avoid. She can’t help being emotional with him.
He runs a hand through his hair then turns on the spot. He’s angry. ‘Burner phones and illegal transactions, Kelly.’
He doesn’t say anything, just bites his lip and looks at her. ‘All right – yeah. The package. It isn’t for a client’s car.’
‘Whose is it then?’
He goes silent again. Kelly often allows pauses to expand, choosing to say nothing where other people would speak. Somebody else always talks first. But, this time, Jen waits too, just looking at him across the quiet, dark street.
His eyes run across her face. He’s trying to figure out what she knows.
He’s trying to work out how to play his hand. ‘The car is stolen, but it isn’t – what you think,’ he eventually says.
‘What is it then?’ ‘I can’t say that.’ ‘Why?’
He stops speaking again, staring down at his feet, evidently thinking.
‘What? Tell me or – we’re in trouble, Kelly.’ She holds a hand up. ‘I am not joking.’
‘I know perfectly well that you’re not joking,’ he says tightly. ‘And neither am I.’
‘Tell me what the fuck is going on, or I go.’
‘I …’ He paces again, another useless circle that seems to serve only to burn off steam. ‘Jen – I …’ His cheeks have gone red. She’s getting to him, she can tell. Her husband may be calm, but even he has a limit. Just look what he did in the police station on the night that started everything.
‘Just tell me who the key goes to. Just tell me who the guy was that you met just now.’
‘It’s … I’d tell you if I could.’
‘You don’t want to tell me what you’re mixed up in. Isn’t it as simple as that? You’re giving me a fucking no-comment interview, Kell.’
‘It isn’t even half as simple as that.’
‘I can’t just stand by and have illegal shit happen outside the house.’ ‘I know, I know.’
‘Missing babies. Stolen cars.’
‘Missing babies?’ he says. His eyes flash, then meet hers, his expression changing from irritation to panic.
‘The missing baby.’
He pauses, breathing hard, then looks at her. ‘If I say something – will you trust me on it?’
Jen spreads her arms wide, right there in the street. ‘Of course.’
Kelly comes over, grasping her shoulders urgently. ‘Do not look into that baby.’
Nothing could have shocked Jen more than this sentence. ‘What?’ ‘Whatever you’ve found. Stop.’
‘Who’s Joseph Jones?’
‘Do not look into Joseph Jones either,’ he says, his tone as vicious and as sharp as a snake’s.
They stand there in silence for a few seconds, Jen still in his arms. ‘Kelly – I … you’re asking me to –’
‘Just – stop. Whatever it is you’re doing. Stop.’
Jen hates this tone of his. It provokes an ancient emotion in her. Her body wants to run, she wants to escape: fear.
‘Why?’ she says, barely a whisper.
Kelly’s fuse finally reaches its end. ‘You’re in danger, Jen,’ he says. She steps back from him in shock. Her shoulders are covered in goosebumps. She begins to shiver, feeling so alone. Who can she trust?
Kelly looks at her. Behind the sorrow, she is sure she can make out an emotion on his features that she hasn’t ever seen before on him, that she can’t read.
She tells him not to come home with her if he won’t tell her anything else, and he doesn’t. He leaves. She doesn’t know where he goes, almost doesn’t care. The takeaway bag sits there, its brown sides buffeting slightly in the wind. She picks it up and takes it home, for Todd. For once, she has no appetite.
