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That it is Day Minus Nine makes sense to Jen.
She has come to the school. She’s here, the day before parents’ evening, to see if she can get any insight into what was underneath Mr Sampson’s hesitation last night, in private. People are always more confessional in private.
‘He has mentioned a falling-out, I seem to remember,’ he is saying to Jen.
Mr Sampson teaches geography. Behind him there is a wall that seems to be a tribute to the features of the world he likes the most – the white desert in Egypt, a cave of crystals in Mexico. He is leaning back against his desk, facing Jen.
‘When? And with who?’ Jen says. She looks around this classroom which must greet Todd every morning but that she has never seen herself, never had time to, because of her job. Green speckled carpets. White desks that seat two students. Blue plastic chairs. She found out her mother died when she was in a classroom just like this. Called out by the head teacher. She hadn’t returned for several days afterwards. Her father had hardly talked about it. ‘Can’t change what’s happened,’ he’d said once. Repressed, unhappy at times, a very typical lawyer. Jen had been so determined to parent differently. Openly, honestly, humanely, but maybe she’d fucked it up as much as he had. Isn’t that what Larkin says?
Her phone rings in her handbag on the chair. Mr Sampson’s eyes stray to it. Jen checks it. ‘Just work,’ she says, declining the call. It instantly rings again.
‘Do answer,’ he says with a wave of his hand.
Jen picks up reluctantly. This is not what she is here to do. ‘I’ve got someone here for you,’ Jen’s secretary, Shaz, says. Mr Sampson busies himself at his desk.
‘I’ll be in late,’ Jen says.
‘It’s Gina. What shall I tell her?’
Jen blinks. Gina. The client who doesn’t want her husband to have access to their children. Some memory is coming to Jen, some small detail of Gina’s life. ‘Uh,’ she stalls, trying to think. That’s it: the last time Jen saw Gina, she’d turned to Jen, on the threshold of her office, and said, ‘I should’ve seen it coming. It’s literally what I do for a living. Personal investigator. For my sins.’ Jen had nodded slowly in recognition.
It cannot be a coincidence that Jen has woken up on this day, the day Gina is in her office. Maybe this isn’t about seeing Mr Sampson at all. ‘I’ll come in,’ she says. ‘Tell her to wait.’ She hangs up and turns back to Mr Sampson. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she says hurriedly. ‘When was this falling-out?’
‘A week ago, maybe? He said he’d had a domestic. That’s all …’
‘With who?’
‘He didn’t say. He was talking to someone – I just overheard.’
‘Who was he talking to?’
‘Connor.’
The same names. The same names keep coming up over and over. Connor, Ezra, Clio, Joseph himself.
‘He also said something about a baby?’
‘What?’
‘I’m not sure – it just came to me. Something about a baby.’
‘Right. It would have been good to know before now,’ Jen says, one of the very first times she has said exactly what she thinks to somebody like this, to somebody outside her immediate family or colleagues. How liberating it feels. Next, she will be telling clients to go fuck themselves.
‘Right …’ Mr Sampson says awkwardly.
She stares out of the window. It’s foggy out, but still mild. Summer still feels just within reach. She watches as the shallow mist moves like a tide back and forth over the playing fields.
She gives a friendly but helpless shrug, saying nothing, the kind of stony silence Kelly would impart. It is so therapeutic, not having to deal with the consequences of her actions. This meeting is contextless, like a dream, like a conversation with a drunk person who will not remember.
‘I’ll check in with him tomorrow,’ Mr Sampson says, and Jen hopes maybe that’ll help, somewhere, in the future.
The mist becomes mizzle becomes rain as Jen heads to her car. She looks absent-mindedly for Todd’s and spots it immediately. As she watches, Connor arrives, too. He’s late. She stands there with one hand on her car door, looking, hoping to see something.
But nothing happens. He locks his car and smokes a cigarette on his way into the building. His tattoo is hidden, today, under a round-neck jumper. At the door, he turns to Jen, raises a hand in greeting. Jen waves back, but she’s surprised: she didn’t know he’d seen her.
The police badge, the missing-baby poster and the phone were not on Todd’s wardrobe when Jen went home just now. She searched and searched for them, but they were gone. She assumed at first that he has not yet acquired them, but the texts on the phone date back to the fifteenth of October. Nevertheless, they’re nowhere to be found, and so she has nothing to show Gina, who she is now well over an hour late to see.
Gina is sitting in the chair in the corner of Jen’s office wearing a beige trench coat and a muted expression.
