Day Minus One Thousand and Ninety-Five, 06:55
Jen has an iPhone XR, she thinks. It feels like a big rectangular block in her hand. She stares down at it in shock where it rests against the duvet. She upgraded it – she remembers it so clearly – because it stopped connecting with her car’s Bluetooth and she couldn’t check up on her neediest clients on the way home from work.
She checks the date now. The thirtieth of October 2019. A Wednesday.
Three years before. Almost exactly three years before.
She makes a cup of tea downstairs, the house silent and empty. Todd isn’t up yet. Kelly isn’t here, even though it’s so early.
Their oak tree out the back is in all its autumn splendour. Three
mushrooms poke out of the base of the tree. She opens the door. The ground has that smoked-damp smell, winter revving its engine softly.
She sips her tea, standing with cold bare feet on the patio, wondering if she will ever see November 2022. The steam curls upwards, obscuring her vision.
Jen is angry, and now fixated on what it is that she is supposed to uncover about her husband or her son.
Kelly has been a natural father. Kelly is a natural everything, never plagued by a surplus of thoughts, by resentment, by guilt. He loved the baby they made, and that was that. Jen had watched his transformation with interest. ‘That smile makes it all worth it,’ Kelly had said one morning at
four o’clock, the moon out, only the owls and the babies of the world awake.
But sacrifice is a different notion for men and women. Worth what,
exactly? Kelly did not have his body change, his nipples crack right across the centre like smashed dishes. Jen now agrees it is worth it all, but she
sometimes wonders if that is because some of the things she lost have been given back to her. Sleep. Time.
That is where the damage might live, she thinks, if she has somehow caused something to happen within Todd, which she is sure she must. Never a confident parent, Jen feels certain, deep inside herself, that something must have happened. Maybe in Todd’s early years. When Todd was four,
she clean forgot to collect him from nursery, thought Kelly had done it. Todd had been waiting with his key worker outside a locked-up nursery.
She winces as she thinks of it now, standing here in the mildewing autumn. Is it that sort of thing that would lead him to think, much, much later in life, that he must solve whatever his father is mixed up in? It isn’t about Kelly, perhaps, but Todd’s response to it.
‘Hope you’re ready,’ Todd shouts from upstairs, his voice wobbling, still breaking. ‘It’s finally here.’
Anxiety fires off in Jen’s stomach. She has no idea what today is, and she has no idea what to expect her son to be like. He’ll be fifteen. Jesus Christ.
He arrives, and a stranger is in Jen’s kitchen. A ghost. The past, her history. Todd’s a child, he looks barely older than ten. He developed late. She’d forgotten. All the worrying she did about it, gone, into the ether, as soon as it corrected itself. Everything in parenthood feels so endless until it ceases. He shot up sometime before his sixteenth, seemed to lengthen in his sleep. Hormones, growing pains, his voice broke, his arms became spindly and elongated before they filled out. But here he is, before it happened. Her little Todd.
‘It is today,’ she says, her mind idling like a spinning wheel. October, October, October. She has no idea. It isn’t his birthday. It isn’t a significant date in any way. But clearly, it is. To him.
‘Get dressed then,’ he says. Then adds happily, ‘I will, too.’ Jen knows that she can’t ask where they’re going: can’t let on that she has forgotten.
He turns to her as he always used to. Jen encircles his bony shoulders with her arm in the hallway, hope firing down her spine like somebody’s
struck a match. This is it. This must be it. Significant outings with her son are where she is being led.
Staying in Wagamama’s with Todd on that chilly autumn birthday night was the right thing to do. No child can be loved too much. And so Jen is really getting what she has always most wanted: a do-over in parenting.
‘What do you think I should wear?’ she asks him, hoping for clues. ‘Definitely smart-cas,’ Todd says, like a child actor. She follows him up
the stairs. His walk is different, the awkward lope of the child who isn’t yet comfortable in his own body.
‘Smart casual, okay,’ she echoes.
Todd follows her into her bedroom and ambles through to use their en
suite shower. Oh yes, that’s right, he went through a phase of preferring that one, for no reason at all. Just the rhythm of family life, like the way Henry VIII finds a favoured spot to sleep in and changes it every few months.
Todd didn’t care too much, when he was fifteen, about privacy. Didn’t reach the teenage self-consciousness until late, too. She remembers being troubled by the open door to the en suite, but not knowing quite how to address it.
Soon enough, like many things, it had addressed itself, and he had begun to use the main bathroom, door firmly locked into place.
‘Using this towel,’ Todd calls. ‘Okay,’ Jen shouts back softly. ‘Sure.’
She heads out on to the landing, hoping to find Kelly, but there’s no
evidence of him around. His car isn’t on the drive. His trainers are gone. It’s so early. Is he at work – or …? He was gone before she woke this morning, no opportunity to put the tracker on his phone.
Jen’s fingers brush the paintwork of her bedroom. It’s still magnolia, the way it was before they painted over it, grey, then got the new carpets; she
lives their renovation in reverse.
There’s nothing in her phone to mark this date. She searches her emails, but there’s nothing there either. She’s about to go and check the fridge for tickets stuck up with magnets when Todd speaks.
‘Although,’ he calls, his voice small over the running shower, ‘the NEC is huge, so maybe trainers?’
Right. The science fair at the NEC. A good day out. Sweets on the motorway, laughs, hot chocolates on the way home. Jen had been bored by the science, but she hopes she hid it well. Evidently not.
‘Really, that is totally expected,’ Todd says, watching a smoking test tube dispassionately. Big feet, big hair, a hidden smile. He’s pretending not to enjoy himself, but he’s buzzing. ‘What did they expect from solid CO2?’
‘Well, it looks like magic to me,’ Jen says.
Todd shrugs. They cross over the blue-carpeted hall, browsing the stands.
It’s crowded in here, the high ceiling doing nothing to offset the claustrophobia, the artificial heat, the dichotomy of the people who want to be there inevitably paired with people who do not, who are indulging them, who love them.
Jen’s lower back is aching, just as it did the first time she lived this day. She’d wanted to go to the shop, the café, had looked at her phone too much instead of at the science exhibits and her son. She determinedly hasn’t looked at anything else, today.
‘That one looks good,’ Todd says now, pointing. A small marquee has been set up along the edge of the exhibition hall. An official-looking man in a hi-vis jacket is manning it. Through the throngs of people walking slowly, stopping to fiddle with things, buying cans of Coke at the various stalls, Jen can see its name: THE SCIENCE OF THE WORLD AROUND US.
Todd strides off ahead of her, and she follows. He goes towards a space exhibit, Jen towards a section called THINGS TO PLAY WITH.
‘Anything catch your interest?’ a woman in a blue T-shirt behind a glossy white counter says. Various science gadgets litter the desk in front of her.
Something that looks like a crystal ball that calls itself a radiometer. Newton’s Cradle. A giant clock that has all of the world’s time zones on it.
Jen is hot, the veins in her hands swollen. There are too many people in here, in this all-white space. She feels like Mike Teavee. She looks around for Todd. He’s still in the headset, his shoulders shaking with laughter. He has a tote bag slung over his shoulder with various pamphlets and freebies in it. Soon, he will pick up some free mints. They eat them for months afterwards.
‘No, thanks,’ she says to the woman, moving away from the weird science toys.
She turns around in a slow circle, looking at the exhibitions. Surely, surely, surely, she could learn something here.
And that’s when she sees him. At a busy stand called WRONG PLACE,
WRONG TIME. Andy. It’s Andy, younger Andy, lither, and – very interestingly
– more smiley, too. He’s handing out pieces of paper. ‘It’s part of my research into memory,’ he is telling a woman there with her twin boys.
Jen takes one. As his eyes meet hers, there’s nothing. Not even a flicker.
Of course there isn’t. ‘Memory?’ she says.
‘Yes – specifically, the storage of it. How, in people with good memories, that storage is very organized.’
‘Do you study subconscious memory?’ she asks. She had no idea he had started out like this. He never said. She never asked. ‘Or’ – she gestures to the sign – ‘time?’
‘Same thing, aren’t they?’ he says with a small smile. ‘The past is memory, is it not?’
Suddenly, alone in a crowd, here in the past, Jen feels like she is almost at the end. Feels, instinctively, that this is the last time she will see Andy. The gruesome past is rushing towards her.
She takes one of his questionnaires, then leans her elbows on the counter in front of Andy. ‘We’ve met,’ she says.
Confusion flickers across his features. ‘Sorry – I …?’
‘It is in the future that we’ve met,’ she says. But then, actually, she thinks that is unlikely to be true. On the day she figures it all out, whenever that is, Andy seems to think it will play through from there, erasing everything, erasing all this backwards stuff, which really has just been research into the past, hasn’t it? So it’s truer to say that they have never met. How funny.
Their truths are the same, here in the NEC, years back.
She holds a hand out to placate him. ‘I always ask you the same questions, but I’m hoping sometimes your answers will be different.’
He blinks at her, then slowly pulls the piece of paper back from her grasp. He’s still looking at her. His beard is darker and fuller. He’s slimmer. No wedding ring. Jen thinks of all the things she could tell him; the scant,
few details she knows about his life in the future. Perhaps he wouldn’t go on to study time loops. Perhaps she’d change his future entirely, though she couldn’t make that change stick.
And that’s when she plays her trump card.
‘You told me – in the future … to tell you that your imaginary friend was called George.’
Before she’s finished speaking, he has interrupted her with a sharp inhale. ‘George,’ he says, his voice full of wonder. ‘That’s what I tell the –’
‘The time travellers. I know,’ she whispers, the hairs on her arms standing up. Magic. This is magic.
‘How can I help?’
Jen tells him again. She’s lost count of the number of times she has told this story. Andy listens intently, his face less lined than before, his demeanour less grumpy, too.
‘Sometimes,’ he says gently, when she’s finished, ‘the emotions of living something the first time prevent us from seeing the true picture, don’t they?’ He rubs at his beard. ‘If I could go back – the things in my life that I would just stand and truly, fully witness, if I knew how they were going to turn out …’
Jen stares at Andy, this younger, less jaded, more sentimental version of him.
‘Maybe it’s that …’ she says. Watchfulness. Witnessing her life, and all its minutiae, from a distance, in a way.
And maybe that’s all she needs to know.
‘I have to wonder, though,’ he says, ‘how you would be able to create enough force to enter a time loop? It would have to be –’
‘I know,’ she says quickly. ‘A superhuman kind of strength. That one remains a mystery.’
She raises a hand to him, then turns and walks back to her son, and the path they are on together. Here, deep in the past, she feels almost ready.
Todd takes the headset off and beckons her over, offering her a mint.
‘C10H20O,’ he says, crunching one. ‘The chemical formula for menthol.’ ‘How do you know that?’ she says. God, she loves him. She drapes an arm around his shoulders. He glances at her in surprise. Oh, just let them
stay here, in his boyhood, together, without anything else.
‘Just do. I mean – it’s only two oxygen molecules different from decanoic acid,’ he says happily, as though that is an explanation.
This is exactly the sort of sentence Jen would’ve laughed at. ‘Thanks for the clarification,’ she would have said. She might have said. But she doesn’t today. Banter can hide the worst sins. Some people laugh to hide their shame, they laugh instead of saying I feel embarrassed and small. She suddenly thinks of Kelly. The easy humour they’ve always had. But when
has Kelly ever told her how he felt? If she observes him dispassionately, what might she see?
Anyway, even if this knowledge about Todd, this compassion, doesn’t stop the crime, Jen is glad she has it anyway. Glad her son spoke his truth to her that night in their kitchen when he said he cared about physics.
‘What’re your thoughts on time travel?’ she asks him. ‘Totally possible,’ he says.
‘Yeah?’
‘They say time is only linear because of cause and effect.’ ‘You’re going to have to come down a level or two …’
‘A way of us thinking – well …’ he glances at her face. He raises his eyebrows at a doughnut stand. She nods, and they queue there. ‘Never mind,’ he says.
‘No, what?’
‘You’ll find it boring. I can tell. Your eyes glaze over.’
‘I won’t,’ she says hurriedly. ‘I’m never bored by you. You explain things so well.’
He comes to life. ‘All right then. Time is just a way of us thinking we are free agents. That our actions have cause and effect. That’s what makes us think that time flows in one direction, like a river.’
‘But it doesn’t?’
Todd shrugs, looking at her. ‘Nobody knows,’ he says, and Jen instantly feels very sorry for past-Jen, and even more so for past-Todd. That she felt – that she decided – that this relationship with her son, this intellectual relationship, wasn’t accessible to her. As it goes, she now knows more about non-linear time than anyone.
‘Like the hindsight paradox,’ he continues, when he’s bought the doughnuts. ‘Everyone thinks they knew what was going to happen. They said, I knew it all along! but, actually, they would say that no matter what the outcome. Because our brains are so good at considering every possibility. We’ve known whenever anything was going to happen.’
Jen thinks about that. Tries to digest it. Todd would be able to solve his own crime in five seconds flat. He’s so smart. And here he is, still a kid, his mind unmuddied by convention. He’s the perfect person to have this chat with, out of everybody in the whole world. What are the chances of that?
She decides, eventually, to say just that. ‘You’re so smart, Toddy,’ she says.
They walk past a medical stand, diabetes tests, ECGs, a stand about the importance of abdominal aortic scanning. ‘Want your aorta scanned?’ he
jokes, but she knows he heard her, knows he took in the compliment. Sure enough, he says: ‘When I discover some new chemical compound, you’ll say, I knew it all along!’
Jen laughs. ‘Probably.’
Todd opens the doughnuts. ‘Want a whole one or a bite?’ he offers. And, for some reason, Jen remembers this exact, exact, exact moment.
She had said no. She was on a diet. That’s right. And, God, she’s in fucking size twelve jeans. Not what she is in in 2022.
‘A bite, please,’ she says, standing in a crowded corridor of the NEC, with her son, who thrusts a sugared piece towards her. People huff past them, annoyed, but they don’t care. She bites it off the end of his finger, like an animal, and he laughs, eyebrows up, smile wide, suspended, suspended in animation, in her gaze.
