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‘Yeah, I mean – it’s no way to live. What’s the difference, really, between pretending to be a criminal and being one?’
Ryan doesn’t answer the rhetorical question, just looks at Leo, who shows him the door after a few seconds. ‘Adieu,’ Leo says softly as he leaves.
Ryan always wanted to change the world, but it doesn’t matter any more. Maybe he’s bitter but, suddenly, Ryan feels chewed up by a system he hadn’t even thought twice about getting involved with. From here on, Ryan vows, he will not give a fuck what anyone thinks of him: society, employers – anyone. He won’t let anybody get to know him. He will only let one person in: her.
He goes to his cupboard to say goodbye to it. He leaves most things here, at the station. The only things he takes are the talismans he can’t bear to part with. His badge and the missing-person poster with the baby on it. They are too precious to lose.
He’ll keep them with him, for ever. Whoever he is.
As he leaves, he thinks of the Jiffy bag sitting underneath the passenger seat of his car, containing a new fake ID, purchased from a criminal last night. He has no choice but to become Kelly. Anything else would tip people off. Joseph knows he likes Jen. He can’t be with her but become somebody else. There is no way back: he’s stepped into an identity as Kelly, petty career criminal, and now he’s got to live it.
Kelly Brotherhood: that’s the surname he chose when he elected to go undercover as Kelly, the criminal.
Brotherhood. To honour the real Kelly.
He thinks about what Leo said about the heads of organized-crime gangs. How they stay under the radar. No travel, don’t pay tax.
So he won’t go abroad, won’t get through airport scanners, shouldn’t ever get pulled over. But he can live. Love. Get married.
He tells his mother through tears. Then he tells a couple of Joseph’s associates that he’ll call them up when he’s back in the game but he’s staying under the radar for a while since Joseph’s arrest. After all this, he gets a tattoo. His skin scratches and burns, hot, as the needle scars his skin for ever. His wrist is marred, branded with his decision, made in haste in the middle of the night as the clocks went forward, but which he knows he will never regret. The date he fell in love with her, and the date he became himself.
Day Minus Seven Thousand One Hundred and Fifty-Eight, 12:00
It’s the day Jen meets Kelly. She’s always known this date, when the handsome stranger walked into the law firm. But, today, sitting at her desk working on the enormous 2003 desktop computer, she waits to meet him for the first time.
She has that March feeling. Fun in the sun and laughing with him. She will always feel that way – whatever happens. Whoever he is. Whatever his reasons for his betrayal, his secrets, his lies.
She never liked working in the reception area of her father’s law firm – people always thought she was a secretary – but today, she likes the vantage point. The plate-glass windows. The bleak March high street outside. The silence of the reception, ancient and sweeping and hers.
‘Jen,’ her father says, walking into the foyer. She turns her gaze to him. He’s forty-five. Strapping. Big, happy, healthy. She can’t bear it. His youth and his betrayal. His connection to Joseph. When she visited him in 2021, had the garlic bread with him – he must have known … he must have known what Kelly had been up to. Surely?
‘We need to file the Part 8 by four o’clock,’ he says.
‘Sure, sure,’ she says, no idea what he’s talking about.
As she’s pretending to type, clicking around on the fucking enormous and antiquated computer, she notices movement outside.
And there he is. It’s Kelly. Trying to look inconspicuous but, because she knows him, she sees him. He sticks out.
And he’s watching her. Trying to look like he isn’t. In a hoody, the same denim jacket he wears tomorrow on their date. That hair …
‘Jen?’ her father says. ‘Part 8?’
But Kelly’s coming in. A head poked around the propped-open door. A March gust whooshes in. They never liked the door closed, didn’t want to deter patrons.
‘All right,’ Kelly says. Her husband, who doesn’t yet know her name. Whose motivations she doesn’t yet know. ‘Just wondering if you want any painting and decorating done?’
They’re walking back from the pub lunch. The shared umbrella. Kelly has brushed his shoulder against hers several times.
‘We’re so late,’ she laughs.
‘I’m a bad influence.’
It’s quiet in the reception, only the noise of her computer whirring and, in the depths of the building, her father on the phone. ‘Tea?’ she says to Kelly.
He blinks, not expecting it, but nods anyway. ‘Sure.’
She disappears into the tiny kitchen off the reception, but this time she waits, watching him. And that’s when he does it: the thing she now knows he will do but that breaks her heart regardless. He slowly begins to root around on her desk. He’s good. His head bowed. Hands barely moving as his fingers sift gently. Unless you were looking at his hands, you’d never know.
