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How is he here? How is he home?
‘What?’ he prompts.
‘How did you get back?’
Todd’s brow flickers. ‘This is weird, even for you.’
‘Did Dad get you? Are you on bail?’ she barks.
‘On bail?’ He raises an eyebrow, a new mannerism. For the past few months, he’s looked different. Slimmer in the body, in the hips, but bloated in the face. With the pallor somebody gets when they are working too much, eating too many takeaways and drinking no water. None of which Jen is aware Todd is doing, but who knows? And then along came this mannerism, acquired just after he met his new girlfriend, Clio.
‘I’m about to meet Connor.’
Connor. A boy from his year, but another new friend, made only this summer. Jen befriended his mum, Pauline, years ago. She is just Jen’s sort of person: jaded, sweary, not a natural mother, the kind of person who implicitly gives Jen permission to mess up. Jen has always been drawn to these types of people. All of her friends are unpretentious, unafraid to do and say what they think. Just recently, Pauline had said of Connor’s younger brother, Theo: ‘I love him, but because he’s seven, he often acts like a twat.’ They’d laughed like guilty loons at the school gate.
Jen steps forwards and looks closely at Todd. No mark of the devil on him, no change behind his eyes, no weapons in the room beyond him. In fact, it looks untouched.
‘How did you get home – and what happened?’
‘Home from where?’
‘The police station,’ Jen says plainly. She finds herself keeping a distance from him. Just a step more than usual. She no longer knows what this person – her child, the love of her life – is capable of.
‘Sorry – the police station?’ he says, evidently amused. ‘Question mark?’ Todd’s expression twists, nose wrinkling up just like it did when he was a baby. He has two tiny scars left over from the worst of his teenage acne. Otherwise, his face is still childlike, pristine in that beautiful peach-fuzz way of the young.
‘Your arrest, Todd!’
‘My arrest?’
Jen can usually tell when her son is lying, and at that moment she registers that he is definitely not. He looks at her with his clear twilight eyes, confusion inscribed across his features. ‘What?’ she says in barely a whisper. Something is creeping up her spine, some tentative, frightening knowledge. ‘I saw … I saw what you did.’ She gestures to the mid-landing window. And that’s the moment she realizes what’s the matter. It isn’t the scene outside: it’s the window itself. No pumpkin. It’s gone.
Jen’s teeth begin to chatter. This can’t be happening.
She tears her eyes away from the pumpkin-less windowsill.
‘I saw,’ she says again.
‘Saw what?’ His eyes are so like Kelly’s, she finds herself thinking, for at least the thousandth time in her life: they’re identical.
She just looks at him and, for once, his gaze holds hers. ‘What happened last night, after you got back.’
‘I wasn’t out last night.’ The banter, the pretension, the posturing are all gone.
‘What? I was waiting up for you, you were late, but then the clocks changed …’
He pauses, maintaining eye contact. ‘The clocks go back tomorrow. It’s Friday today?’
Day Minus One, 08:20
Some internal elevator plunges down the centre of Jen’s chest. She pushes her hair off her face and heads to the family bathroom at the back of the house, holding up a finger to Todd for just a second. She shivers as she turns her back on him, like he is a predator she wants to keep an eye on.
She is sick into the toilet, the sort of sick she hasn’t been in years. Hardly anything comes up, just a sticky yellow stomach acid that sits right at the bottom of the water. She thinks of her pregnancy, when she told a doctor she was vomiting so much that only bile was coming up, and he apparently felt the need to say, ‘Bile is bright green and signals real trouble. You mean stomach acid.’
She stares and stares into the acid lining the bottom of the toilet. It might not be bile, but she thinks she might be in real trouble.
Todd does not know what she is talking about. That is clear. Even he wouldn’t deny this. But why? How?
The pumpkin. The pumpkin is missing. Where is her husband? She can’t think straight. Panic rises up through her body, a great pressure with nowhere to go. She’s going to be sick again.
