Wrong Place Wrong Time(79)

‘He’s been up since five,’ Kelly says, pulling his hair back from his hairline. He raises his eyebrows to her. She’s shocked by how much it’s receded in the present day. Shocked by other things, too. His face is boyish. She finds him less attractive in his twenties than in his forties, she is surprised to find. He’s fatter here, too. They had a lot of takeaways, didn’t exercise. Any time to themselves was hard won, so precious that they spent it in blissful, sitting silence.

‘Go back to bed, if you want,’ she offers. She walks down the hallway to the door. Cold is seeping in from underneath it, an icy backwash. She wants to see the view properly. Her hands – so young, so unlined – remember the knack for opening the Yale lock and pressing the handle at the same time, and she pulls it open and – ah! – finds her valley.

‘It’s your day for a lie-in,’ Kelly says automatically from behind her. Yes, that’s right. They alternated the lie-ins religiously.

‘It’s fine,’ she says with a wave of her hand, with all the concern of somebody only here for the day; a babysitter, a nanny, somebody who can give the baby back.

It’s frosty out. They have a wreath on their door which she fingers absent-mindedly. Wellies outside, a stone porch. Milk bottles – they had an old-fashioned milkman. And then: the valley. Two hills meeting in an X. Dusted with the cold, like icing sugar. It smells delicious out here. Smoke and pine and frost, menthol, like the air itself has been cleaned.

Satisfied, she closes the door and turns back to Todd, who is walking towards her. When he reaches her, she bends to him, and he moves his face into her shoulder, and it is as seamless a motion as a long-forgotten dance. Her body remembers him, her baby, in all of his guises. Three, fifteen, seventeen and a criminal. She loves them all. ‘Go back to bed,’ she says, looking at Kelly.

He gives her a warm half-smile. ‘I feel like I’ve been shot out of a cannon, not just woken up,’ he says, yawning and stretching.

He doesn’t go, though. Like with most things in parenthood, he wanted support, to be understood, rather than for her to take over. He sinks on to the sofa.

She turns back to her son. With this person who, today, on the shortest day of the year, 2007, she has got to fix so that, as the clocks go back, in 2022, he doesn’t kill somebody.

The room is littered with toys she had forgotten about. The little yellow ice-cream truck. The Fisher Price garage, inherited from her parents. A Christmas tree sparkles in the corner. An old, artificial one that might still sit in their loft in Crosby to this day. The living room is dim, lit only by the fairy lights.

‘Now,’ Jen says, drawing back from Todd and looking at him in his tiny dungarees. He stares back at her wordlessly in that soulful way that he used to. Inky eyes, snub nose, pink cheeks, a studious expression on his face. She holds up a wooden block and he takes it very seriously from her, then drops it on to the floor. ‘Shall we pile them up?’ Jen says.

Todd stretches his hand out very, very slowly.

‘As tense as a hostage negotiation,’ Kelly says.

‘What is it they say – toddlers don’t play, they go to work?’

‘Ha, yeah.’

‘I was obsessed with blocks when I was a kid.’

‘Oh?’ Kelly leans back on the sofa, putting his legs up over one arm. He closes his eyes. ‘Would’ve thought you’d be – I don’t know. On the flashcards. You know. Always learning.’

‘Really not,’ Jen says. ‘It took ages for me to read.’

‘I don’t believe that. You wordy lawyers … you’re all the same,’ he drawls, and Jen smiles in surprise. He was more acerbic like this. In 2022, he’s still dry but, here, Kelly comes complete with a chip on his shoulder. She’d forgotten. How much he used to moan about work, come up with various business ideas and abandon them. He seemed to want to succeed, then chicken out.

‘What’s on these flashcards, then?’ she says.

‘Definition of jurisprudence, for starters … one should know this by aged two at the latest.’

‘Of course. And what is that, Kelly – age …’ Jen hesitates. ‘Twenty-eight?’

‘Good at English, less so at maths,’ Kelly says, quick as a flash. ‘Twenty-nine. Forgotten my age already?’

‘You know me.’

Todd laughs suddenly, out of nowhere, and claps at Kelly. ‘Yes, yes,’ he says to him.

‘What was yours?’ Jen asks him, thinking of how she felt in the back of the car with him as they got pulled over, trying to reach that part of him that perhaps she never has.

‘My what?’

‘Favourite toy.’

‘Can’t remember.’ Kelly shifts on the sofa, eyes still closed.

‘What did you want to be when you grew up?’

Kelly sits up on an elbow, looking at her sardonically, emotional unavailability coloured across his features. How can Jen have missed this? ‘Why?’

‘Just wondering. I’ve never known. And we’re so far from where you grew up … you know, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who used to know you.’

‘They’re all so far away. My mum always wanted me to be a manager,’ he says, changing the topic. ‘Isn’t that funny?’

‘A manager of what?’ Jen is stacking the blocks up in front of Todd, who has his hands clasped in anticipation, but, really, she is thinking how evasive Kelly can be.