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She sits on the cold chequerboard tiles.
She gets her phone out of her pocket and stares at it, bringing up the calendar.
It is Friday the twenty-eighth of October. The clocks do indeed go back tomorrow. Monday will be Halloween. Jen stares and stares at that date. How can this be?
She must be going mad. She gets up and paces uselessly. Her body feels like it’s covered in ants. She’s got to get out of here. But out of where? Out of yesterday?
She navigates to her last text message with Kelly and presses call.
He answers immediately. ‘Look,’ she says urgently.
‘Uh-oh,’ he says, languid, always amused by her. She hears a door close.
‘Where are you?’ she asks. She knows she sounds crazed, but she can’t help it.
A beat. ‘I am on planet Earth, but it sounds like you might not be.’
‘Be serious.’
‘I’m at work! Obviously! Where are you?’
‘Was Todd arrested last night?’
‘What?’ She hears him put something heavy down on a hollow-sounding floor. ‘Er – for what?’
‘No, I’m asking you. Was he?’
‘No?’ Kelly says, sounding baffled. Jen can’t believe it. Sweat blooms across her chest. She starts to rub at her arms.
‘But we sat – we sat in the police station. You shouted at them. The clocks had just gone back, I was … I had done the pumpkin.’
‘Look – are you okay? I need to finish Merrilocks,’ he says.
Jen sucks a breath in. He said he finished there yesterday. Didn’t he? Yes, she’s sure he did. He was at the top of the landing, wearing only a tattoo and a smile. She can remember it. She can.
She puts a hand to her eyes as if she can block out the world.
‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ she says. She starts to cry, water lacing her words. ‘What did we do? Last night?’ She leans her head back against the wall. ‘Did I do the pumpkin?’
‘What are you –’
‘I think I’ve had some sort of episode,’ she says in barely a whisper. She rolls her pyjamas up over her knees and stares at her skin. No impressions where she knelt on the gravel. Not a single speck of dirt on them. No blood under her nails. Goosebumps erupt up and down her arms fast, like a time-lapse.
‘Did I carve the pumpkin?’ she asks again, but, as she speaks, some deep realization is dawning all around her. If it didn’t happen … she might have lost her mind, but her son isn’t a murderer. She feels her shoulders drop, just slightly, in relief.
‘No, you – you said you couldn’t be arsed …’ he says with a little laugh.
‘Right,’ she says faintly, picturing exactly how that pumpkin turned out.
She stands and stares at herself in the mirror. She meets her own eyes. She is a portrait of a panicked woman. Dark hair, pale complexion. Hunted eyes.
‘Look, I’d better go,’ she says. ‘I’m sure it was a dream,’ she says, though how can it be?
‘Okay,’ Kelly says slowly. Perhaps he is about to say something but decides against it, because he says only ‘Okay,’ again, then adds: ‘I’ll leave early,’ and Jen is glad he is this, a family man, not the kind of man who goes to pubs or plays sport with friends, just her Kelly.
She leaves the bathroom and goes down to the kitchen. Mist shrouds the garden beyond their patio doors, erasing the tops of the trees to nothing. Kelly built this kitchen for them a couple of years ago, after she had said – drunk – that she wanted to be ‘the kind of woman who has her shit together, you know, happy clients, a happy kid, a Belfast sink.’
He presented it to her one evening. ‘Expect to imminently have your shit together, Jen, because you’ve got the sink of dreams here.’
