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‘I smell bullshit.’
‘All right, all right,’ Kelly holds his hand up. ‘Thanks for the lesson. I meant uninterested. You shitbag.’
Todd giggles, a high, childlike giggle, at his father. ‘Just think – you could’ve had two of me, if you’d had another. A double pain in the arse,’ Todd says.
‘Yeah,’ Kelly says, something old and whimsical crossing his features for just a second. He always wanted another child.
‘You’re more than enough,’ Jen says to Todd.
‘Hey, we’re all only children,’ Todd says, reaching for a banana and unpeeling it. ‘I never thought of that before.’ Jen watches Kelly closely. Is it this conversation? Is that why she’s here?
He says nothing, busying himself in the kitchen. ‘We are,’ he says casually after a second or two.
Jen looks out at the garden. May. May 2021. She cannot believe it. Early-morning sunbeams funnel down, like shafts from heaven. Their old shed is still out there, the one they had before they got the little blue one. Jen is wondering if anybody else could tell two Mays apart, just from the way the light hits the grass.
‘Right, I need to shower,’ she says.
She goes to the very top of the house, where she sits on the exact centre of their double bed and uses a phone she had too long ago to google and dial Andy’s number.
‘Andy Vettese.’
Jen goes through the usual spiel hurriedly. The dates, the conversations they have already had. Andy keeps up in the way that he does, his silence somewhat misanthropic, but avid, Jen thinks. She tells him about the Penny Jameson in the future. He says he was being put forward for it.
He seems to believe her. ‘Okay, Jen. Shoot. What do you want to ask?’
‘I just – it’s eighteen months before,’ she says, trying to turn her attention back to the task at hand.
‘Do the days you’re landing on have anything in common?’
‘Sometimes … I always learn something. But …’ She cradles the phone between her shoulder and her ear and rubs her hands down her legs. She’s freezing cold. She has very old nail polish on, an apricot shade she went through a phase of loving but dislikes now. ‘So many things ought to have worked to stop it that haven’t.’
‘Maybe it isn’t about stopping it.’
‘Huh?’
‘You say he’s bad, right? This Joseph? Maybe it’s not about stopping his murder.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, if you stop it, seems like you have another problem.’
‘Huh?’
‘Maybe it isn’t about stopping it but about understanding it. So you can defend it. You know? If you know the why, then you could tell a court that.’
Jen’s ears shiver after he’s finished speaking. Maybe, maybe. She is a lawyer, after all. ‘Yes. Like, it was self-defence, or provocation.’
‘Exactly.’
Jen wishes she could go back to Day Zero, just once, to watch it again, knowing everything she knows now.
‘I don’t know if I told you this in the future, but I always tell my wannabe time travellers the same thing: if you seek me out in the past, tell me you know that my imaginary friend was called George, at school. Nobody knows that. Well – apart from the travellers I’ve told. So far, nobody has ever come to tell me.’
‘I’ll tell you,’ Jen says, moved by this personal piece of information. By this clue, by this shortcut, by this hack.
She thanks him and says goodbye.
‘Any time,’ he says. ‘Speak to you yesterday.’
