Wrong Place Wrong Time(47)

‘Oh yeah, keep it secret at all costs. Sail me and my first love up the river!’ Todd shouts. The back door slams. Feet on stairs inside.

Jen stays at the gate, trying to breathe.

It’s pointless asking them. Clearly, they will lie. And clearly, too, there is a secret at the heart of their relationship that they will do anything to keep. They will do anything, except tell Jen.

In the cool night air, three weeks before her son becomes a murderer, Jen hears her husband begin to cry in their garden, his sobs becoming quieter and quieter, like a wounded animal slowly dying.





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.