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Jen is in a different bed. She knows it the same way she knows it’s roughly seven o’clock in the morning, the same way she knows when somebody has been discussing her just before she enters a room, or that a car is about to pull out in front of her. Micro-emotions, are they called that? The abilities humans have to detect small changes. You can’t explain it. You just know. Todd would call it the hindsight paradox, she supposes.
The light looks different. That’s the first tell. No blinds at the bay window. Instead, the room is cast in a grey light, filtered fuzzily through curtains.
It must be the winter. A radiator nearby is on; she can smell the hot metal of it, feel the artificial heat mingling with the chill in the air above the bed.
The mattress feels different. Old and lumpy, from when they had less money. Funny how you get used to having money. It seems easy. You forget what it’s like to live without it, to sleep on shitty mattresses and save up for takeaways.
She’s alone. She lies there in the grey light, just blinking and exhaling a long breath, afraid to look.
She runs a hand down her side, underneath the covers. Yep. Prominent hip bones. She is much younger.
Right. She steels herself, then gets out of bed. The carpet. She knows it instantly. The carpet orients her straight away. She is in her favourite house. The tiny house that sits alone in the valley. She’s chilled by this. To be alone with a man whose identity is fake.
She reaches down to find a mobile phone and is at least glad there is one there waiting for her. She breathes, then checks the date. It is fifteen years prior. It is 2007. December the twenty-first. Jen feels like she might be sick. This is fucked up. This is completely and utterly fucked up. She has a three-year-old. She’s twenty-eight. A giant leap back, skipping aged thirteen to three?
Jen is suddenly so angry that this has happened to her. She strides to the window, wanting to wrench it up, to scream out into the country air, to do something, anything, and – oh. There it is. Her favourite, favourite view. Still in their nomadic, off-grid phase with Kelly, before Todd needed to be settled at a school. In the little house in the valley, a Monopoly hotel of a house, where they never saw anybody.
Maybe it’s that? Maybe this life was damaging for him. Too isolated. She rests her head on the window instead of screaming out of it. How the fuck should she know? There are no fucking clues. Her angry breath mists up the window. Give me a tell, she thinks, staring at the vapour. It clears off, and she looks out. The beauty of the stark landscape, sepia-brown in the winter wilderness. The hills look old, tatty. Proper, untended, wild countryside, long, blond, beachy grasses. She had loved it here, and now she’s back.
She pulls a dressing gown around her, over a pair of tartan pyjamas she doesn’t remember even owning. She can hear Todd and Kelly in the living room. Loud chatter. She isn’t ready yet to go and see them.
Her body remembers the layout of the bungalow. She heads right, into the bathroom, before going through to see them. She needs to see herself first. To know what to expect.
She looks at the miniature striplight above the mirror. Her hand instinctively reaches to tug hard on it. She knows it will resist, that it is stiff, that, later, it breaks entirely. With a ping, she is illuminated.
It’s Jen from photographs. It’s Jen from her wedding day. Jen has looked back at this Jen often, thought wistfully that she didn’t know how great she looked. She’d focused on her strong nose, her wild hair, but, look: bright, clear skin. Cheekbones. Youth. You can’t fake it. There isn’t a single line on her face while it is at rest. She brings a hand to her skin, which yields like bread dough, springy and full of collagen, not the crêpe paper that awaits her at forty.
Jen turns to the door. She can still hear them. She knows that she will find them in the living room, in the December half-light.
‘Jen?’ Kelly calls.
‘Yeah,’ she says, and her voice is higher and lighter than it is in 2022.
‘He wants you!’ Kelly calls, his voice imbued with a harassed tone she remembers well. They were so swept up in it, in the demands of parenting a small child. The Jen of now can hardly remember why it was so difficult, can’t recall the exact details. Only that it was. Only the way her calf muscles ached in bed at night. Only the evidence that remained: toast still in the toaster, uneaten, forgotten in the chaos. Washing hung out at midnight, smelling of damp from too much time in the machine. Weird bodge jobs to make life easier: one time, they put a playpen up around the television to stop Todd turning it off all the time … things they knew to be kind of mad, but did anyway. Things they did just to get by.
‘I’m here,’ she says, turning the light out in the bathroom and stepping into the hallway.
There they are. Jen’s eyes track to Todd, the Todd from her memories. Her son, three years old, barely a foot and a half high, Jen’s face, Kelly’s eyes, fat little hands outstretched towards her. ‘Todd the toddler,’ she says, his nickname rolling easily off her tongue, ‘you’re up!’
‘He’s been up since five,’ Kelly says, pulling his hair back from his hairline. He raises his eyebrows to her. She’s shocked by how much it’s receded in the present day. Shocked by other things, too. His face is boyish. She finds him less attractive in his twenties than in his forties, she is surprised to find. He’s fatter here, too. They had a lot of takeaways, didn’t exercise. Any time to themselves was hard won, so precious that they spent it in blissful, sitting silence.
‘Go back to bed, if you want,’ she offers. She walks down the hallway to the door. Cold is seeping in from underneath it, an icy backwash. She wants to see the view properly. Her hands – so young, so unlined – remember the knack for opening the Yale lock and pressing the handle at the same time, and she pulls it open and – ah! – finds her valley.
‘It’s your day for a lie-in,’ Kelly says automatically from behind her. Yes, that’s right. They alternated the lie-ins religiously.
‘It’s fine,’ she says with a wave of her hand, with all the concern of somebody only here for the day; a babysitter, a nanny, somebody who can give the baby back.
It’s frosty out. They have a wreath on their door which she fingers absent-mindedly. Wellies outside, a stone porch. Milk bottles – they had an old-fashioned milkman. And then: the valley. Two hills meeting in an X. Dusted with the cold, like icing sugar. It smells delicious out here. Smoke and pine and frost, menthol, like the air itself has been cleaned.
Satisfied, she closes the door and turns back to Todd, who is walking towards her. When he reaches her, she bends to him, and he moves his face into her shoulder, and it is as seamless a motion as a long-forgotten dance. Her body remembers him, her baby, in all of his guises. Three, fifteen, seventeen and a criminal. She loves them all. ‘Go back to bed,’ she says, looking at Kelly.
He gives her a warm half-smile. ‘I feel like I’ve been shot out of a cannon, not just woken up,’ he says, yawning and stretching.
He doesn’t go, though. Like with most things in parenthood, he wanted support, to be understood, rather than for her to take over. He sinks on to the sofa.
She turns back to her son. With this person who, today, on the shortest day of the year, 2007, she has got to fix so that, as the clocks go back, in 2022, he doesn’t kill somebody.
The room is littered with toys she had forgotten about. The little yellow ice-cream truck. The Fisher Price garage, inherited from her parents. A Christmas tree sparkles in the corner. An old, artificial one that might still sit in their loft in Crosby to this day. The living room is dim, lit only by the fairy lights.
