Wrong Place Wrong Time(28)

‘Talk about what?’ Jen says, suddenly remembering that Kelly thought they’d broken up. ‘You haven’t fallen out?’

Something seems to pass over Clio’s features that Jen can’t name. Some understanding, but Jen isn’t privy to what. ‘Please explain,’ she adds pathetically.

‘We broke up, but then we got back together yesterday – it’s … complicated.’

‘How?’

Clio shrinks back from Jen, drawing her arms around her stomach, folding in on herself, like somebody frail or feeling ill. ‘Sorry,’ she says, barely audibly, taking another step back. ‘I’ll see you soon – okay?’ She closes the door, leaving Jen there, alone.

It latches with a soft click, and through the frosted glass Jen watches Clio retreat.

She turns to leave. As she does so, a police car circles past. Very, very slowly. It’s the pace of it that makes Jen look up at it. The windows are up, the driver looking straight ahead, the passenger – who Jen is sure is the handsome police officer who arrests Todd – looking straight at her. As she walks to her car, defeated by Clio’s reaction, bewildered by the mystery facing her, the car circles back, going the other way.

Jen thinks about what Andy said as she drives away. About her subconscious, about what she knows, about things she might have seen and dismissed as insignificant, and about what she’s here to do. There’s nothing else for it, she thinks, as she drives away. She’s got to ask her son.

‘I have something I want to run by you,’ Jen says conversationally, walking to the corner shop with Todd. He will buy a Snickers. Last time, she bought a bottle of wine, but she’s not in the mood, tonight. They take this walk often. Todd because of his insatiable teenage appetite and – well, the same for Jen, actually.

There will be somebody in the corner shop wearing a trilby, and this trilby is Jen’s trump card. Unpredictable, vivid, true. She is glad she has remembered it. She can use it to convince Todd and then – if nothing else – find out what he would do in this situation. Her brainiac son.

‘Shoot,’ Todd says easily.

They turn down a side-street. The night air smells of other people’s dinners, something Jen finds endlessly nostalgic, reminding her of holidays with her parents to campsites when she was little. She will always remember the distant orange lights of other static caravans, the chink of cutlery, the swirling smoke of barbecues. God, she misses her father. Her mother, too, she guesses, though she hardly remembers her.

‘What would you do if you could time travel? Would you go forwards, or back?’ Jen says, and he looks at her in surprise.

‘Why?’ he asks.

Typically, before she can answer, he does: ‘I’d go back,’ he says, his breath blowing smoke rings out into the night air.

‘How come?’

‘So I could tell past me some stuff.’ He smiles, a private smile at the pavement. Jen laughs softly. Inscrutable Gen-Z-ers.

‘Then,’ he says, ‘I’d just email myself. From past me to future me. Sent on a timer. You can do that on some sites.’

‘Email yourself?’

‘Yeah. You know. Find out whose stocks and shares are going to go through the roof. Then go back in time, do a timed email, from me to me, saying: in September 2006, or whatever, buy shares in Apple.’

I’d just email myself.

Well, it’s something to try. An email, sent, timed, to be received at one o’clock in the morning on the day it happens, on the twenty-ninth, heading into the thirtieth. She will write it so it contains instructions. Get outside, stop a murder. Surely if she had advance warning, she could physically stop Todd?

‘You’re so smart.’

‘Why thank you.’

‘You might wonder why I’m asking,’ she says.

‘Not really,’ he says cheerfully.

She begins to explain travelling backwards, omitting the crime for now.

She is glancing at him all the time as they walk and talk. If she had to predict his response, she would say he will need no convincing. She knows him. She knows him. He – still a kid in so many ways – believes unquestioningly in time loops, in time travel, in science and philosophy and cool maths and exceptional things happening in his life, which he still, in his young mind, believes to be extraordinary.

Todd says nothing for a few seconds, staring at his trainers as they walk through the cold, his features wrinkled. He raises an eyebrow to her. ‘You for real?’ he asks.

‘Completely. Totally.’

‘You’ve seen the future?’

‘I have.’

‘All right then, Mother. So what happens?’ he says jovially, and she’s pretty sure he thinks she’s joking. ‘Meteors, the next pandemic, what?’

Jen says nothing, debating how honest to be.

He looks at her and catches her expression. ‘You’re not actually serious.’

‘I really, really am. You’re about to buy a Snickers. There will be someone in the corner shop wearing a trilby.’

‘… Okay.’ He nods, just once. ‘A time loop. A trilby. You’re on.’ Jen smiles at him, unsurprised he’s isolated the element of the future that he cannot control, that belongs to someone else: the hat.

This is exactly what she thought he would do. He is a much easier person to convince than Kelly.