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Those two words are doubly significant. A betrayal, but also a prophecy of how far back she may have to go.
Day Minus One Thousand and Ninety-Five, 06:55
Jen has an iPhone XR, she thinks. It feels like a big rectangular block in her hand. She stares down at it in shock where it rests against the duvet. She upgraded it – she remembers it so clearly – because it stopped connecting with her car’s Bluetooth and she couldn’t check up on her neediest clients on the way home from work.
She checks the date now. The thirtieth of October 2019. A Wednesday. Three years before. Almost exactly three years before.
She makes a cup of tea downstairs, the house silent and empty. Todd isn’t up yet. Kelly isn’t here, even though it’s so early.
Their oak tree out the back is in all its autumn splendour. Three mushrooms poke out of the base of the tree. She opens the door. The ground has that smoked-damp smell, winter revving its engine softly.
She sips her tea, standing with cold bare feet on the patio, wondering if she will ever see November 2022. The steam curls upwards, obscuring her vision.
Jen is angry, and now fixated on what it is that she is supposed to uncover about her husband or her son.
Kelly has been a natural father. Kelly is a natural everything, never plagued by a surplus of thoughts, by resentment, by guilt. He loved the baby they made, and that was that. Jen had watched his transformation with interest. ‘That smile makes it all worth it,’ Kelly had said one morning at four o’clock, the moon out, only the owls and the babies of the world awake.
But sacrifice is a different notion for men and women. Worth what, exactly? Kelly did not have his body change, his nipples crack right across the centre like smashed dishes. Jen now agrees it is worth it all, but she sometimes wonders if that is because some of the things she lost have been given back to her. Sleep. Time.
That is where the damage might live, she thinks, if she has somehow caused something to happen within Todd, which she is sure she must. Never a confident parent, Jen feels certain, deep inside herself, that something must have happened. Maybe in Todd’s early years. When Todd was four, she clean forgot to collect him from nursery, thought Kelly had done it. Todd had been waiting with his key worker outside a locked-up nursery. She winces as she thinks of it now, standing here in the mildewing autumn. Is it that sort of thing that would lead him to think, much, much later in life, that he must solve whatever his father is mixed up in? It isn’t about Kelly, perhaps, but Todd’s response to it.
‘Hope you’re ready,’ Todd shouts from upstairs, his voice wobbling, still breaking. ‘It’s finally here.’
Anxiety fires off in Jen’s stomach. She has no idea what today is, and she has no idea what to expect her son to be like. He’ll be fifteen. Jesus Christ.
He arrives, and a stranger is in Jen’s kitchen. A ghost. The past, her history. Todd’s a child, he looks barely older than ten. He developed late. She’d forgotten. All the worrying she did about it, gone, into the ether, as soon as it corrected itself. Everything in parenthood feels so endless until it ceases. He shot up sometime before his sixteenth, seemed to lengthen in his sleep. Hormones, growing pains, his voice broke, his arms became spindly and elongated before they filled out. But here he is, before it happened. Her little Todd.
‘It is today,’ she says, her mind idling like a spinning wheel. October, October, October. She has no idea. It isn’t his birthday. It isn’t a significant date in any way. But clearly, it is. To him.
‘Get dressed then,’ he says. Then adds happily, ‘I will, too.’ Jen knows that she can’t ask where they’re going: can’t let on that she has forgotten.
He turns to her as he always used to. Jen encircles his bony shoulders with her arm in the hallway, hope firing down her spine like somebody’s struck a match. This is it. This must be it. Significant outings with her son are where she is being led.
Staying in Wagamama’s with Todd on that chilly autumn birthday night was the right thing to do. No child can be loved too much. And so Jen is really getting what she has always most wanted: a do-over in parenting.
‘What do you think I should wear?’ she asks him, hoping for clues.
‘Definitely smart-cas,’ Todd says, like a child actor. She follows him up the stairs. His walk is different, the awkward lope of the child who isn’t yet comfortable in his own body.
‘Smart casual, okay,’ she echoes.
Todd follows her into her bedroom and ambles through to use their en suite shower. Oh yes, that’s right, he went through a phase of preferring that one, for no reason at all. Just the rhythm of family life, like the way Henry VIII finds a favoured spot to sleep in and changes it every few months. Todd didn’t care too much, when he was fifteen, about privacy. Didn’t reach the teenage self-consciousness until late, too. She remembers being troubled by the open door to the en suite, but not knowing quite how to address it. Soon enough, like many things, it had addressed itself, and he had begun to use the main bathroom, door firmly locked into place.
‘Using this towel,’ Todd calls.
‘Okay,’ Jen shouts back softly. ‘Sure.’
She heads out on to the landing, hoping to find Kelly, but there’s no evidence of him around. His car isn’t on the drive. His trainers are gone. It’s so early. Is he at work – or …? He was gone before she woke this morning, no opportunity to put the tracker on his phone.
Jen’s fingers brush the paintwork of her bedroom. It’s still magnolia, the way it was before they painted over it, grey, then got the new carpets; she lives their renovation in reverse.
There’s nothing in her phone to mark this date. She searches her emails, but there’s nothing there either. She’s about to go and check the fridge for tickets stuck up with magnets when Todd speaks.
‘Although,’ he calls, his voice small over the running shower, ‘the NEC is huge, so maybe trainers?’
Right. The science fair at the NEC. A good day out. Sweets on the motorway, laughs, hot chocolates on the way home. Jen had been bored by the science, but she hopes she hid it well. Evidently not.
‘Really, that is totally expected,’ Todd says, watching a smoking test tube dispassionately. Big feet, big hair, a hidden smile. He’s pretending not to enjoy himself, but he’s buzzing. ‘What did they expect from solid CO2?’
