Wrong Place Wrong Time(80)

‘Literally anything. That’s what she wanted. After our dad piss— disappeared,’ he corrects himself, glancing at Todd, ‘all she wanted for us was stability. To her – a boring office job. One holiday a year. A mortgage on a little place.’

‘And you did the opposite,’ Jen says, but internally she is thinking: Our dad. Our dad. The man in the photograph with Kelly’s eyes. She knew she hadn’t imagined the resemblance. She blinks, shocked.

He avoids her gaze. ‘Yeah.’

‘You said our dad?’

‘No – my?’

‘You said our.’

‘I didn’t.’

Jen sighs. He will stonewall her if she asks further. She’ll have to try something else. ‘I wish he could’ve met your mum,’ she says softly to him. ‘And mine.’

‘Oh, same.’

‘How old were you when she died, again?’ Jen asks, wondering why this feels dangerous, tentative. This man is her fucking husband, for God’s sake.

‘Twenty.’

‘And you last saw your dad when you were …’

‘God knows. Three? Five?’

‘It must have been so … to be an only child, and then no parents.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Do you think she’d have liked me – and Todd?’

‘Of course. Look. Going to take you up on that offer,’ he says. ‘Bed calls.’ He leans down and kisses her, full on the lips, the only thing that hasn’t changed between 2007 and now, and then saunters off to bed, leaving Jen alone with Todd.

Something makes Jen leave Todd in the living room with the blocks and follow Kelly down the drab, brown-carpeted hallway.

She reaches their bedroom, one ear still listening out for Todd, and stops by the door.

Kelly isn’t in the bedroom. Not that she can see, anyway. She edges the door open in the half-light and creeps in. Nothing.

Well, where is he, then?

She moves forwards across the room. The striplight is on in the bathroom. Did she leave it on? Just as she’s standing there, wondering what to do, she hears a sound. A quiet, anguished sort of sound, like somebody trying to keep something in.

He’s in there. She moves towards the bathroom door and peers inside. And there is her husband of twenty years sitting on the toilet lid, his head in his hands, sobbing. The only time Jen has ever seen him cry.

‘Kelly?’ she says.

He jumps, wiping hurriedly at his eyes with his fists. The backs of his hands come away wet. He looks so like Todd when he cries. Bottom lip going and all. Jen’s whole body feels heavy and sad as she watches him try to cover it up.

‘I’ve got this cold, it’s making my eyes stream,’ Kelly says. It’s a ridiculous lie. Jen wonders how many of them he’s told. And why.

But look at him, now, she thinks sadly. It’s the same look. It’s the same look he gives her in fifteen years’ time when their son kills somebody. Heartbreak.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘No, nothing, honestly, it’s this bloody cold. I hope it’s gone for Christmas.’

‘Is this about your mum?’ Jen says, her voice low.

‘Is Todd all right – is he …’

‘He’s in the living room, he’s fine.’ Jen moves across the tiny bathroom to Kelly. He stays where he is, on the toilet lid, but Jen moves in alongside him, putting her hand across his back and guiding him towards her. To her surprise, he lets her, his arm coming around the back of her legs, his head resting against her chest.

‘It’s okay,’ she says gently to him, the way she would to Todd. ‘It’s okay to be upset.’

‘It’s just this –’

‘Your Christmas cold, I know,’ Jen says, letting him live the lie, whatever it is. Letting him believe it. Something he said to her in 2022 comes to her, about a divorcing couple. Avoiding pain is priceless to some.

After a few minutes, Kelly releases her. He looks across at Jen as she leaves to go and check on Todd and says one single sentence to her: ‘I just miss her – my mum.’ It seems to cost him a lot; his body convulses as he says it.

Jen nods quickly. And there it is. Something her husband – for some reason – has not ever been able to show her.

‘I know,’ she says. And she does know, motherless herself. ‘Thank you for telling me,’ she says.

Kelly gives her a watery smile, his black hair everywhere. His eyes look especially blue. And, here, back in the past, something passes between them. Something more substantial than what has gone before. Something Jen can’t even name, but something which goes some way towards igniting some hope within her that Kelly isn’t what he appears to be. Please let that be so.

Jen walks back to Todd in the living room. It is old-fashioned. Green, worn carpet, dark-wood furniture. It has a specific smell to it. A comforting, homely sort of smell: cinnamon sugar, cookies, a blown-out candle somewhere. Jen guesses that, somewhere or other, an alternative version of her was baking last night. Funny how those things felt so important then. Go and see the Christmas lights, bake and assemble the gingerbread house. And – poof. They disappear into history, causing only stress and leaving no imprint, like a footstep on sand that gets washed away too swiftly. Her entire life, she’s been so concerned with how things seem to be. Keeping up appearances. Having it all, the house with the carved pumpkin so everybody knew they’d done it. And yet. What was it all for?