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And maybe that’s all she needs to know.
‘I have to wonder, though,’ he says, ‘how you would be able to create enough force to enter a time loop? It would have to be –’
‘I know,’ she says quickly. ‘A superhuman kind of strength. That one remains a mystery.’
She raises a hand to him, then turns and walks back to her son, and the path they are on together. Here, deep in the past, she feels almost ready.
Todd takes the headset off and beckons her over, offering her a mint. ‘C10H20O,’ he says, crunching one. ‘The chemical formula for menthol.’
‘How do you know that?’ she says. God, she loves him. She drapes an arm around his shoulders. He glances at her in surprise. Oh, just let them stay here, in his boyhood, together, without anything else.
‘Just do. I mean – it’s only two oxygen molecules different from decanoic acid,’ he says happily, as though that is an explanation.
This is exactly the sort of sentence Jen would’ve laughed at. ‘Thanks for the clarification,’ she would have said. She might have said. But she doesn’t today. Banter can hide the worst sins. Some people laugh to hide their shame, they laugh instead of saying I feel embarrassed and small. She suddenly thinks of Kelly. The easy humour they’ve always had. But when has Kelly ever told her how he felt? If she observes him dispassionately, what might she see?
Anyway, even if this knowledge about Todd, this compassion, doesn’t stop the crime, Jen is glad she has it anyway. Glad her son spoke his truth to her that night in their kitchen when he said he cared about physics.
‘What’re your thoughts on time travel?’ she asks him.
‘Totally possible,’ he says.
‘Yeah?’
‘They say time is only linear because of cause and effect.’
‘You’re going to have to come down a level or two …’
‘A way of us thinking – well …’ he glances at her face. He raises his eyebrows at a doughnut stand. She nods, and they queue there. ‘Never mind,’ he says.
‘No, what?’
‘You’ll find it boring. I can tell. Your eyes glaze over.’
‘I won’t,’ she says hurriedly. ‘I’m never bored by you. You explain things so well.’
He comes to life. ‘All right then. Time is just a way of us thinking we are free agents. That our actions have cause and effect. That’s what makes us think that time flows in one direction, like a river.’
‘But it doesn’t?’
Todd shrugs, looking at her. ‘Nobody knows,’ he says, and Jen instantly feels very sorry for past-Jen, and even more so for past-Todd. That she felt – that she decided – that this relationship with her son, this intellectual relationship, wasn’t accessible to her. As it goes, she now knows more about non-linear time than anyone.
‘Like the hindsight paradox,’ he continues, when he’s bought the doughnuts. ‘Everyone thinks they knew what was going to happen. They said, I knew it all along! but, actually, they would say that no matter what the outcome. Because our brains are so good at considering every possibility. We’ve known whenever anything was going to happen.’
Jen thinks about that. Tries to digest it. Todd would be able to solve his own crime in five seconds flat. He’s so smart. And here he is, still a kid, his mind unmuddied by convention. He’s the perfect person to have this chat with, out of everybody in the whole world. What are the chances of that?
She decides, eventually, to say just that. ‘You’re so smart, Toddy,’ she says.
They walk past a medical stand, diabetes tests, ECGs, a stand about the importance of abdominal aortic scanning. ‘Want your aorta scanned?’ he jokes, but she knows he heard her, knows he took in the compliment. Sure enough, he says: ‘When I discover some new chemical compound, you’ll say, I knew it all along!’
Jen laughs. ‘Probably.’
Todd opens the doughnuts. ‘Want a whole one or a bite?’ he offers.
And, for some reason, Jen remembers this exact, exact, exact moment. She had said no. She was on a diet. That’s right. And, God, she’s in fucking size twelve jeans. Not what she is in in 2022.
‘A bite, please,’ she says, standing in a crowded corridor of the NEC, with her son, who thrusts a sugared piece towards her. People huff past them, annoyed, but they don’t care. She bites it off the end of his finger, like an animal, and he laughs, eyebrows up, smile wide, suspended, suspended in animation, in her gaze.
Ryan
