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‘She’s nice,’ he says. The more she pushes, the more he dodges. She’s never noticed before, this quickstepping of his. Answering a different question. Answering the original question. He goes into the kitchen and opens a can of Coke. The pop of the ring pull sounds like a gunshot, which makes her jump.
Jen considers what to do, then gets dressed, pulling her trainers on. ‘Going to get something for my throat,’ she calls.
‘I’ll go!’ Kelly says, considerate as ever. ‘Or wait – don’t we have that stuff that –’
‘It’s fine,’ she says, slamming the front door behind her before he can object.
She drives to the school then waits in a side-street, watching for Todd and Clio to appear. They do after only five minutes, Truman Show-like, holding hands, their long limbs catching the sun. Clio is wearing a khaki boiler suit that Jen would look like a fat janitor in. Todd is in skinny jeans, no socks, trainers and a white T-shirt. They look like a wholesome advert for vitamins or something.
Jen is going to offer Clio a lift home, and try to pretend she isn’t insane for having followed them here.
She waits for Clio to see Todd in. But first, of course, they kiss. She shouldn’t be looking, a creep in a car, but she can’t stop. Their bodies are pressed together from their feet to their lips, right the way up, like somebody has sealed them. She watches for a second, thinking about Kelly. They still do kiss in this way, sometimes. He is good at that. Maintaining their chemistry, holding her interest. But, nevertheless, it isn’t the same.
When they finally part, Todd loping off with a smirk and a swagger, Jen leaves the side-street and pulls up alongside Clio.
‘I was passing,’ she says. ‘You want a lift?’
Confusion crosses Clio’s features. ‘You’re not on your way to work?’ she says. She has one foot on the pavement, one dangling off the kerb as she looks at Jen in indecision. God, Jen feels like some sort of evil perpetrator, picking up her son’s girlfriend, but … five minutes in the car where she can ask her anything. It’s too tantalizing to pass up.
‘No, no. Came to drop off something for Todd. Heading back now.’
‘Well, sure,’ Clio says happily. Jen is sort of glad to note that Clio is an appeaser, just like Jen herself is. Clio could easily draw a boundary here, but she doesn’t. Instead, she gets in beside Jen. She smells of toothpaste – perhaps Todd’s, Jen thinks darkly – and deodorant. A wholesome sort of smell. She has the trousers of her boiler suit rolled up, revealing smooth, tanned, slim ankles. Jen looks at them, feeling a wave of nostalgia for back then, whenever that is; some unknown time. When she went to pubs, when she kissed boys, when she was slim (never). When she had it all in front of her.
‘Where to?’ Jen says. She doesn’t explain her presence at the gate any further. In some ways, Jen is taking inspiration from her husband, who has been so good at lying that his secrets have been hidden in plain sight. There have been no over-explanations, no details at all, in fact. Only a complete lack of them. The best kind of liar. The smartest.
‘It’s Appleby Road,’ Clio says. A road behind Eshe Road North. Makes sense.
‘Oh, so you don’t live at Eshe Road?’ Jen asks lightly as she indicates and pulls away.
‘No, no,’ Clio says, but she looks surprised that Jen knows her address. That’s right: Jen has never been there. Is never supposed to have been there. ‘Just me and Mum at Appleby.’ Clio doesn’t elaborate, the same as last time.
Jen glances quickly at her as she comes to a stop at a roundabout. Their eyes meet for just a second.
Clio breaks contact, gets her phone out of her jeans pocket, angling her hips up to slide it out. ‘Kelly must think I live on Eshe Road,’ Clio says with a laugh.
Jen tries not to react. ‘Why?’
‘I’m always there, aren’t I?’ She pauses. ‘Kelly and Ezra and Joseph – they go way back, don’t they?’
‘Right, right, yes,’ Jen says. ‘Sorry – so did he … did Kelly introduce you to Todd, then?’
‘Yes, exactly,’ she says. ‘Well – when I came with Joe to drop something off for Kelly, Todd answered the door … and then … has he never said?’
‘Do you know – Kelly has so many friends,’ Jen says: a sentence which is the exact opposite of the truth, ‘I plain forgot.’
Clio turns her gaze to the left and looks out of the passenger window, not understanding the significance of the information she’s imparted.
Bewildered, Jen spends the rest of the trip in silence. She drops Clio at her mother’s house, who comes out on to the drive and waves at Jen. She looks nothing like Clio. Clio must look like her father, just like Todd does.
Two hours later, Jen is doing yoga for the first time in her entire life, a grotesque kind of downward dog in Kelly’s car, her head underneath the seats, her arse somewhere near the neighbour’s windows, it feels like.
Jen needs to find the burner phone again, the one she now thinks belongs to Kelly. She wants to use it to call Nicola.
And so this is what she is doing, while he’s out running.
But there’s nothing in his car. A few old coffee cups, a jack, an unopened bottle of Sprite. In a funny kind of way, she is glad he hasn’t hidden the phone in here, under the seats or with the spare tyre in the boot. Kelly is never drawn to cliché, and she likes this, that he is not behaving exactly like every dishonest man before him. Like she still knows him, somewhere underneath the mess.
She shakes her head and walks back into the house, where she continues her search. Tool bags, the airing cupboard, old coats. Anywhere.
