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Hard to get to know.
Sometimes dark.
Doesn’t travel.
Doesn’t like parties.
Doesn’t go on payrolls. Lives life under the radar.
Turns away from her friends at parents’ evenings.
Always seems to have enough money.
That dark edge. That dark edge he has to him, that sharp-as-lemons humour that prevents intimacy. Isn’t that the oldest story in the book? Humour, banter, as defence mechanism.
The way he sometimes will not compromise, will not elaborate. Will not, will not, will not. Would not move back to Liverpool. Will not work for an employer. Will not travel. Will not fly.
Joseph turns his mouth down. ‘Look, I don’t dob,’ he says. ‘I’m no grass. Ask your husband.’ He stands up, now, the conversation over. Jen, not caring who’s looking, allows tears to gather in her eyes as she stares at the space he left.
As she sits, trying to collect herself, she feels the slightest, softest touch on her shoulder, and jumps. Joseph has his mouth right next to her ear. ‘I’m sure you’ll find out the extent of it,’ he murmurs, then is escorted off.
Jen begins trembling as though there’s a freezing draught, but there isn’t: it is only his breath she can feel, in her ear, in her mind, while the storm rages on outside.
Day Minus One Hundred and Forty-Four, 18:30
‘Oh, it was mad,’ Todd is saying animatedly to Jen, his words tripping over each other. Jen is sitting on the loveseat in their bay window, thinking that her husband is involved in organized crime. ‘Fractional distillation didn’t come up at all. We did all the prep on it – we thought it would be the main question, and it just totally wasn’t?’ He fiddles with Henry VIII’s collar, the cat lying contentedly on his lap on the sofa. ‘It never goes the way you’d expect, you know?’ He shifts, unable to keep still, and the cat jumps down on to the floor. Three candles are lit along the windowsill.
Jen nods, smiling at her son.
The first thing she noticed this morning was that her phone was different. Her hand closed clumsily around it. It was chunkier, bigger than the slimline one that she got in early July. Shit shit shit, she thought. She knew she’d jumped back further before she checked the date.
It was June. The rose bush in the front garden of the house opposite was in full bloom as she stared out of her bedroom window, fat bundles of fragrant flowers clutched together, about to fall. How could it be June? Where was this going to end? In nothingness? In birth, in death? And – an even darker thought – it’s too late for Jen to kill him herself, like Kelly suggested, all those days ago. He’s inside.
The first thing that Jen thought, getting dressed in different clothes, clothes she throws out in several months’ time, was who Kelly is to Joseph. And how it might have worked: Joseph gets out of prison, comes to the law firm to find his old friend Kelly, Todd gets involved with Clio, doesn’t like what he finds out Joseph and Kelly are doing, and kills Joseph? It was plausible, but unlikely, she concluded. It seems a weak motivation for murder. And it leaves a lot to be explained: Ryan Hiles, the missing baby, Nicola Williams, the veiled conversations between Kelly and Todd. The thing Joseph knows about Kelly.
She looks at Todd, now, sitting in the lamplight with cat hair all over his trousers. ‘You’ll have aced it,’ she says thickly.
‘Well, I did actually enjoy it! Jed said I’m mental.’ He’s giddy. With relief, with the endorphins that follow stress, and with something else, maybe, too. Something that is missing in the autumn. Some lightness. ‘I mean – am I some sadist? … What?’ he says, stopping, looking across the room at her.
‘You’re not a sadist,’ she says, but even she can hear her voice is imbued with sadness. She misses this. Just normality, not fractured days, everything backwards. She doesn’t even know why she’s woken up on today, the seventh of June. Todd hasn’t met Clio yet. Joseph is inside. So what is it? She leans her face in the palm of her hand.
‘I wonder if I’ll get an A,’ Todd says thoughtfully. ‘Maybe just a B.’
He gets an A.
Only recently, Todd came home talking so happily about making polymer bouncing balls. ‘Polymer what?’ Kelly had said. Todd had hesitated, then pulled one out of his rucksack. ‘Got you one,’ he’d said lightly, confident enough to steal from school. They hadn’t minded, thought it was funny. He was overly interested in chemistry, so what if he shouldn’t have been allowed to take it? Maybe it’s that sort of thing that causes Todd to go wayward. Jen never gave much thought to what sort of parent she’d be, but maybe she was too relaxed, favouring banter over discipline. Fooled, by his intellect, into thinking he’d never rebel. But all kids rebel, even the good ones: they just rebel differently.
Jen looks at her handsome son and thinks about everything that future-Todd will miss out on. University, marriage, some graduate scheme with other geniuses. But instead, what faces him? Remand, a trial, prison. Out by the time he’s thirty-five. The knowledge, for ever, that he has taken a life, for whatever misguided reason.
‘Are you going to order, or shall I?’ Todd says, waving the Domino’s app at her on his phone.
They must have agreed to get a takeaway. ‘Yeah – let’s just wait for Dad.’ Henry VIII pads over and leaps up on to Jen’s lap. He is slimmer, too, she thinks ruefully.
Todd makes an over-the-top puzzled face, a cartoon double-take. ‘Oh-kay,’ he says. ‘Dad’s away, but sure. You do that, Jen.’
‘Is he?’ she asks sharply. ‘At risk of being accused of being old,’ she adds, rictus grin in place, ‘remind me where he is?’
‘It’s Whitsun.’
