Four days back.
And, worse, the notebook is blank.
Jen lets a scream of frustration out in the kitchen. Of course it is. Of
course it fucking is. Because she hasn’t written in it yet. Because she’s in the past.
Kelly walks into the kitchen, biting into an apple. ‘God,’ he says, wincing, ‘these are tart. Here – try. It’s like eating a lemon!’
He holds it out to her, his arm extended, his eyes happy, crinkled. ‘Do you remember our walk last night?’ she asks him desperately.
‘Huh?’ he says, through a mouthful. ‘What?’
He clearly doesn’t. Telling him achieved nothing. Just twelve hours ago they sat here, together, and made a plan. The car crash, the conviction on his features as he turned to her. All gone, consigned not to the past, but to the future.
‘Never mind.’
‘You all right? You look like shit,’ he says. ‘Ah, married life. So romantic.’
But, inside, her mind is racing. If the notebook is blank, then – of course – the phone calls and emails to Andy Vettese haven’t yet been made, either. She checks her sent items: nothing. Of course! No wonder he hasn’t replied. It is so hard to get used to a life lived backwards. Even when she thinks she understands it, she doesn’t. It trips her up.
She needs to leave, get away from this Kelly who knows nothing about tomorrow, and the next day, and everything that follows. She needs to get
away from disappearing notebooks and knives in school bags, and from the scene of the crime that stands silently, waiting.
She needs to go to work. Back to Rakesh, and to Andy Vettese, too.
Ten o’clock in the morning. A sweet black coffee, her desk, and Rakesh. He has stood here thousands of times over the years, often swings by early and complains that he doesn’t want to start work. That was the foundation they built their friendship on: moaning.
‘Can you try to contact Andy for me?’ Jen says to Rakesh now.
She has just told Rakesh, again, what’s happening to her. Jen rushed through her explanation to Rakesh, appearing inauthentic and haphazard. She’s told it so many times, she has become tired of the tragedy of it, like somebody who’s seen so much death and destruction that they are immune.
Still, Rakesh seemed to believe that she really thinks this is happening to her, the same way he did last time. Passively, serious, perhaps internally diagnosing her with something, but not saying what.
‘I can’t get hold of him, and I need to,’ Jen says sincerely but urgently.
She needs to speak to Andy today: it’s all she has.
Rakesh steeples his fingers together in that way he does. ‘I’m sure I’ve never told you about Andy,’ he says with a small smile.
‘You do – in a few days.’
‘I see,’ Rakesh says, looking at her directly, his brown eyes on hers. He’s wearing a sweater vest, today, in purple, and holding a coffee. The rectangular outline of a box of cigarettes is visible in his trouser pocket.
Some things don’t change.
Jen can’t help but smile back at him. ‘Please call him. He’s nearby, isn’t he? John Moore’s? I can go to his office – whatever.’
‘What’s it worth?’ Rakesh leans on the doorframe. ‘Oh, are we negotiating?’
‘Always.’
‘I’ll do your costs schedule on Blakemore.’
‘God, deal,’ he says immediately. ‘You’re so easy. I would’ve done it for a potato.’
‘And I’ll take your cigarettes so you can get back on the wagon.’ She points to his pocket. He blinks, then pulls them out.
‘Wow. Okay. I see.’ He retreats back down the corridor. ‘I’ll call him now.’ He raises a hand, a parting gesture. ‘Let you know.’
‘Thank you, thank you,’ Jen says, though she doesn’t think he can still hear her. She rests her elbows on the desk she’s worked at for the past two decades, feeling momentarily relieved to have instructed an expert.
The sunlight warms her back. She’d forgotten this little warm spell. A few days in October that felt, for a second, just like summer.
Andy says he will come to Liverpool city centre in two hours’ time. Jen – like a mug – does Rakesh’s costs schedule for him.
Jen and Andy arrange to meet in a café that Jen likes. It is unpretentious, cheap, the coffee good and strong. She finds romance in the retro quality it has: tea that costs pence, not pounds, ham sandwiches on the menu, torn vinyl benches to sit on.
As she walks there, weaving between shoppers and past off-key buskers, all the ways she’s ineffectually mothered Todd crowd into her mind.
Feeding him too much so he slept more, upending the bottle while watching daytime television, bored, no eye contact. That time she shouted in frustration when he wouldn’t nap. How early she went back to work
because her father put pressure on her; enrolling Todd in nursery so young, too young. Has she planted these seeds here? Was she a shit mother, or just a human? She doesn’t know.
Andy is already there, at a Formica-covered table: Jen recognizes him from his LinkedIn photo instantly. About Rakesh’s age, unruly hair woven black and grey. A T-shirt that says Franny and Zooey on it. J. D. Salinger, is that?
‘Thanks for seeing me,’ Jen says quickly, taking a seat opposite him.
He’s already ordered two black coffees. A miniature silver milk jug sits on the table, which he gestures wordlessly to. Neither of them uses it.
‘Pleasure,’ Andy says, though it doesn’t sound like it. He sounds jaded, like how she gets when pushed into giving free legal advice at parties. It’s fair enough.
‘This must be – I mean, this must be unorthodox,’ she says, adding sugar to her coffee.
‘You know,’ he says, sitting back with a small shrug. He has just a trace of an American accent. ‘Yes.’ He makes a lattice with his hands and rests his face on it, just looking at her. ‘But Rakesh is a good friend.’
‘Well, I won’t keep you long,’ she says, though she doesn’t mean it. She wants him to sit with her all day: ideally, into yesterday.
Andy raises his eyebrows, not saying anything.
He sips his coffee then replaces it on the table, calm hazel eyes looking at her. He motions wordlessly, the kind of gesture you’d make when letting somebody through a door.
‘Go ahead,’ he says crisply.
Jen begins to speak. She tells him everything. Every last piece. She talks fast, gesticulating, insane amounts of detail. Every last part. Pumpkins, naked husbands, Cutting & Sewing Ltd, the knife, how she tried to stay up, the car accident, Clio. The lot.
A waitress silently fills their coffees up from a steaming percolator, and Andy thanks her, but only with his eyes and a small smile. He doesn’t interrupt Jen once.
‘I think that’s everything,’ she says, when she has finished. Steam dances around the overhead fluorescent lights. The café is near empty on this day – whatever day it is – in the mid-morning, mid-week. Jen is so tired, suddenly, with somebody else temporarily in charge, she thinks she could sleep right here at the table. She wonders what would happen if she did.
‘I don’t need to ask you if you believe you are telling me the truth,’ Andy says after what looks like a moment’s consideration.
The somewhat passive-aggressive if you believe rattles Jen. The parlance of doctors, legal opponents, passive-aggressive relatives, Slimming World leaders …
‘I do,’ she says. ‘For what it’s worth.’
She rubs at her eyes for a minute, trying to think. Come on, she tells herself. You’re a smart woman. This isn’t so hard. It’s time as you know it, only backwards.
‘You win an award in two days,’ she says, thinking of the story she saw about him when he hadn’t answered her. ‘For your work on black holes.’
When she opens her eyes, Andy has paused, his coffee halfway to his mouth, the Styrofoam cup made elliptical by the pressure of his grip. His mouth is open, his eyes on hers. ‘The Penny Jameson?’
‘I think so? I saw it while googling you.’ ‘I win?’
Jen feels a petty, triumphant little spark light within her. There. ‘You do.’
‘That award is embargoed. I know I’m shortlisted. But nobody else does. It isn’t –’ he gets his phone out and types quietly for a second, then replaces it, face down, on the table. ‘That information is not in the public domain.’
‘Well, I’m glad.’
‘All right then, Jen,’ he says. ‘You have my attention.’ ‘Good.’
‘How interesting.’ Andy sucks his bottom lip into his mouth. He drums his fingers on the back of his phone.
‘So: is it scientifically possible?’ she asks him.
He spreads his hands wide, then repositions them around his cup. ‘We don’t know,’ he says. ‘Science is much more of an art than you’d think. What you say violates Einstein’s law of general relativity – but who’s to say his theorem should control our life? Time travel isn’t proven to be
impossible,’ he says. ‘If you can get above the speed of light …’
‘Yes, yes, a gravitational force a thousand times my body weight, right?’ ‘Exactly.’
‘But – I didn’t feel anything like that. Can I ask – do you think I went forwards, too, in time? So, somewhere, I’m living the life where Todd was arrested?’
‘You think there may be more than one of you?’ ‘I guess so.’
‘Hang on.’ He takes the knife from the cutlery pot sitting next to them. ‘Can you use this?’
‘Use it?’
‘A tiny papercut.’ He leaves the rest implicit.
Jen swallows. ‘I see. Okay.’ She takes the knife and makes – quite honestly – the most pathetic shallow cut along the side of her finger. Barely a scour.
‘Deeper,’ he says.
Jen directs the knife further into her cut. A bead of blood escapes. ‘Okay,’ she says, blotting it with a tissue. ‘Okay?’ She looks down at the wound, a centimetre long.
‘If that cut isn’t there tomorrow … I’d say you’re waking up in yesterday’s body, each day. You move from Monday to Sunday to Saturday.’
‘Rather than time-travelling?’
‘Right. Tell me.’ He sits forward. ‘Did you experience any kind of – compressing sensation when this happened? Or only the déjà vu?’
‘Only the déjà vu.’
‘How curious. The panic you felt for your son … do you think it caused that feeling?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jen says softly, almost to herself. ‘It’s mad. It’s so mad. I don’t understand it. I haven’t yet telephoned you. I do – later in the week. I leave loads of messages.’
‘It seems to me,’ Andy says, finishing his coffee, ‘that you do, actually, already understand the rules of the universe you are unwillingly in.’
‘It doesn’t feel like it,’ she says, and he allows a smile to escape again. ‘It’s theoretically possible for you to have somehow created such a force
that you are stuck in a closed time-like curve.’
‘Theoretically possible. Right. So – how do I – get out of it?’
‘Physics aside, the obvious answer would be that you will reach the inception of the crime, wouldn’t it? Go back to what made Todd commit the crime?’
‘And then what? If you had to guess?’ She raises her hands in a gesture of non-confrontation. ‘Nothing at stake. Just a guess. What do you think would happen?’
Andy bites his bottom lip, eyes to the table, then looks at her. ‘You would stop the crime from happening.’
‘God, I so hope so,’ Jen says, her eyes wet.
‘Can I ask a question that might seem facetious?’ Andy says. The air seems to quieten around them as Andy’s gaze meets hers.
‘Why do you think this is happening to you?’
Jen hesitates, about to say – indeed, facetiously – that she doesn’t know: that is why she has forced him to meet her. But something stops her.
She thinks about time loops, about the butterfly effect, changing one tiny thing.
‘I wonder if I – alone – know something that can stop the murder,’ Jen says. ‘Deep in my subconscious.’
‘Knowledge,’ Andy says, nodding. ‘This isn’t time travel, or science or maths. Isn’t this just – you have the knowledge – and the love – to stop a crime?’
Jen thinks about the knife she found in Todd’s bag, and about Eshe Road North. ‘Like, on every day I have re-lived, so far, I’ve learned something,
by doing something different … following someone or witnessing something I hadn’t the first time. Even just paying more attention to small things.’
Andy fiddles with his empty cup on the table, turning his mouth down, still thinking, eyes on the windows behind Jen. ‘Well, then, is it fair to say that each day you’re landing in is somehow significant to the crime?’
‘Maybe. Yes.’
‘So as you go backwards – maybe you’ll skip a day. Maybe you’ll skip a week.’
‘Perhaps. Then I should be looking for clues on each one?’ ‘Yes, maybe,’ he says simply.
‘I hoped you’d – you know. Give me a hack. To get out. I don’t know, two sticks of dynamite and a code, or something.’
‘Dynamite,’ Andy says with a laugh. He rises to his feet and reaches out to shake her hand. Her eyes close as he does it, just for a second. It’s real. His hand is real. She is real.
‘Until we meet again,’ she says, opening her eyes. ‘Until then,’ Andy says.
Jen leaves the café after him, deep, deep in thought about what it might all mean. She calls Todd, wanting to know where he is. Wanting to know if there is something he is doing that she missed the first time she lived this day, feeling a renewed kind of vigour for working out how to change things, for saving him.
‘All right?’ he answers. It’s quiet in the background. Jen, caught in a Liverpool wind tunnel, turns her body away from the gust.
‘Just wondering where you are,’ she says to him.
‘Online,’ he says, and Jen can’t help but smile. At just him, lovely him. ‘Online – in our house?’ she says.
‘I have a free period. So I am in our house, on our VPN, on my bed in Crosby, Merseyside, UK,’ he says, a laugh in his voice.
She looks at the sky and thinks, Well, I’ll see. She might see August
before November. But she’ll get to the beginning of the problem, whenever that is.
The moon is out, an early lunchtime moon, hanging above both of them, whichever versions of themselves they are. She, in the past. And Todd, undergoing whatever changes that lead to him killing somebody in four days’ time.
‘I’ll be home soon,’ she says. ‘Where are you?’
‘The universe,’ she says, and he laughs, a noise so perfect to her it may as well be music.
Jen is back at Eshe Road North, hoping to find Clio. She assumes she doesn’t live with her uncle, but perhaps he can direct her to Clio’s address.
Jen believes the key rests with Clio. Todd met her a couple of months ago – as far as Jen knows, but you can add at least a few weeks for teenage secrecy. It can’t be a coincidence that that is when it began, along with his friendship with Connor. It being an amorphous, hard-to-describe change.
Sullenness, secrecy, that strange pallor he has at times.
And so here she is, knocking. Almost immediately, a female form appears in the frosted glass. Jen’s heart rises up in her chest.
The door opens, and Jen can’t help but marvel at Clio’s beauty. That short, chic fringe, her close-together eyes. Her hair is snarled, undone, but it looks good for it, rather than the insane way Jen would look if she tried the same.
‘Hi,’ Jen says.
Clio glances over her shoulder, a quick, automatic move, but Jen spots it and wonders what it means.
‘Todd’s mum,’ Jen says, realizing after a second’s hesitation that although Jen has met Clio, Clio has not met Jen.
‘Oh,’ Clio says, her striking features slackening in surprise.
‘I just wondered …’ Jen says. She glances down. Clio has stepped back slightly. Not to let Jen in, but as if she is about to close the door. Jen thinks of her open, curious expression the first time she saw her, when she was in those ripped jeans at the end of this same hallway. Clio’s face now, when Todd isn’t here, is totally different. ‘I just wondered if we might have a bit of a chat?’ She gestures to Clio. ‘It’s nothing to do with – it’s nothing to do with you, really. I’m fine with your – with your relationship. Can I come in
… just for a sec? Is this where you live?’ she gabbles.
‘Look – I can’t …’ Clio says. Jen looks around the hallway. Clio’s coat is hanging up, thrown over the door to the cupboard that Ezra closed. Over the coat is a Chanel handbag, Jen thinks a real one. They’re worth at least five thousand pounds, aren’t they? How can she afford one? Unless it’s a fake?
‘It’s nothing bad,’ Jen says, her eyes still on that bag.
Clio’s brows knit together. Her mouth begins to scrunch up into a delicate kind of apology. ‘I really …’ she says, her hands wringing together. She
takes another step back. ‘I’m so, so sorry. I really – I just really can’t …’ ‘You can’t what?’ Jen says, totally bewildered.
‘I really can’t talk about it with you.’
‘Talk about what?’ Jen says, suddenly remembering that Kelly thought they’d broken up. ‘You haven’t fallen out?’
Something seems to pass over Clio’s features that Jen can’t name. Some understanding, but Jen isn’t privy to what. ‘Please explain,’ she adds pathetically.
‘We broke up, but then we got back together yesterday – it’s … complicated.’
‘How?’
Clio shrinks back from Jen, drawing her arms around her stomach, folding in on herself, like somebody frail or feeling ill. ‘Sorry,’ she says, barely audibly, taking another step back. ‘I’ll see you soon – okay?’ She closes the door, leaving Jen there, alone.
It latches with a soft click, and through the frosted glass Jen watches Clio retreat.
She turns to leave. As she does so, a police car circles past. Very, very slowly. It’s the pace of it that makes Jen look up at it. The windows are up, the driver looking straight ahead, the passenger – who Jen is sure is the
handsome police officer who arrests Todd – looking straight at her. As she walks to her car, defeated by Clio’s reaction, bewildered by the mystery facing her, the car circles back, going the other way.
Jen thinks about what Andy said as she drives away. About her subconscious, about what she knows, about things she might have seen and dismissed as insignificant, and about what she’s here to do. There’s nothing else for it, she thinks, as she drives away. She’s got to ask her son.
‘I have something I want to run by you,’ Jen says conversationally, walking to the corner shop with Todd. He will buy a Snickers. Last time, she bought a bottle of wine, but she’s not in the mood, tonight. They take this walk often. Todd because of his insatiable teenage appetite and – well, the same for Jen, actually.
There will be somebody in the corner shop wearing a trilby, and this trilby is Jen’s trump card. Unpredictable, vivid, true. She is glad she has
remembered it. She can use it to convince Todd and then – if nothing else – find out what he would do in this situation. Her brainiac son.
‘Shoot,’ Todd says easily.
They turn down a side-street. The night air smells of other people’s dinners, something Jen finds endlessly nostalgic, reminding her of holidays with her parents to campsites when she was little. She will always remember the distant orange lights of other static caravans, the chink of cutlery, the swirling smoke of barbecues. God, she misses her father. Her mother, too, she guesses, though she hardly remembers her.
‘What would you do if you could time travel? Would you go forwards, or back?’ Jen says, and he looks at her in surprise.
‘Why?’ he asks.
Typically, before she can answer, he does: ‘I’d go back,’ he says, his breath blowing smoke rings out into the night air.
‘How come?’
‘So I could tell past me some stuff.’ He smiles, a private smile at the pavement. Jen laughs softly. Inscrutable Gen-Z-ers.
‘Then,’ he says, ‘I’d just email myself. From past me to future me. Sent on a timer. You can do that on some sites.’
‘Email yourself?’
‘Yeah. You know. Find out whose stocks and shares are going to go through the roof. Then go back in time, do a timed email, from me to me, saying: in September 2006, or whatever, buy shares in Apple.’
I’d just email myself.
Well, it’s something to try. An email, sent, timed, to be received at one o’clock in the morning on the day it happens, on the twenty-ninth, heading into the thirtieth. She will write it so it contains instructions. Get outside, stop a murder. Surely if she had advance warning, she could physically stop Todd?
‘You’re so smart.’ ‘Why thank you.’
‘You might wonder why I’m asking,’ she says. ‘Not really,’ he says cheerfully.
She begins to explain travelling backwards, omitting the crime for now.
She is glancing at him all the time as they walk and talk. If she had to predict his response, she would say he will need no convincing. She knows him. She knows him. He – still a kid in so many ways – believes
unquestioningly in time loops, in time travel, in science and philosophy and
cool maths and exceptional things happening in his life, which he still, in his young mind, believes to be extraordinary.
Todd says nothing for a few seconds, staring at his trainers as they walk through the cold, his features wrinkled. He raises an eyebrow to her. ‘You for real?’ he asks.
‘Completely. Totally.’
‘You’ve seen the future?’ ‘I have.’
‘All right then, Mother. So what happens?’ he says jovially, and she’s pretty sure he thinks she’s joking. ‘Meteors, the next pandemic, what?’
Jen says nothing, debating how honest to be.
He looks at her and catches her expression. ‘You’re not actually serious.’ ‘I really, really am. You’re about to buy a Snickers. There will be
someone in the corner shop wearing a trilby.’
‘… Okay.’ He nods, just once. ‘A time loop. A trilby. You’re on.’ Jen smiles at him, unsurprised he’s isolated the element of the future that he cannot control, that belongs to someone else: the hat.
This is exactly what she thought he would do. He is a much easier person to convince than Kelly.
‘Do you know why?’ he says.
‘Something happens in four days. That I think I need to stop.’ ‘What?’ he says again.
‘I – I … it’s not good, Todd. In four days’ time, you kill someone,’ she says. This time, it’s like lighting a bonfire. A tiny spark and then a rush. Todd’s head snaps up to look at her. Jen goes as hot as if she’s standing right by it. What if she makes this happen, by telling him? Surely the
knowledge that you can kill is damaging to a person?
No. She has decided to do this and she needs to see it through. He can take it, her son. He likes facts. He likes people to be straight with him.
He doesn’t speak for over a minute. ‘Who?’ he says, the same question he asked the last time.
‘He was a stranger to me. You seemed to know him.’
He doesn’t react. They reach the lit-up shop, next door to a Chinese takeaway, and they stand outside it. Eventually, his eyes meet hers. She’s surprised to see that they’re wet. Just the slightest damp covering. It could be nothing. It could just be the lights of the shops, the cold air. ‘Well, I’d
never kill anyone,’ he says, not making eye contact with her. She spreads her arms wide.
‘But you do. He’s called Joseph Jones.’ Her eyes are wet, too, now. Todd runs his gaze over her face, holds a finger up, and goes into the shop. He’s right, of course, he wouldn’t kill someone, unless he had no other choice.
She knows him: he would ameliorate, confess. He would do a whole long list of things before killing. This is perhaps the most useful piece of information Jen has landed on.
Seconds later, he’s out, and his body language has completely changed. It’s infinitesimal. As though somebody momentarily pressed pause on his movements, then started him up again. Only a stutter.
‘Trilby,’ he says. A beat. ‘Present and correct.’ ‘So you believe me now?’
‘You saw the trilby from down the street, I assume.’ ‘I didn’t – Todd, you know that I didn’t.’
‘I would never kill someone. Never, never, never.’ His eyes look up, to the heavens, and Jen is sure – as sure as she can be – that she sees disappointment but also understanding cross his features. Like somebody who’s been told something. Like somebody who’s been told the ending, when they’re right at the beginning. She is blindsided by his reaction. It isn’t time travel that has outsmarted her: it is parenting.
He turns away from her. Jen knows him. He closed up as soon as she told him the details. ‘Why’d you break up with Clio?’
‘None of your business. Back together now, anyway.’ Jen sighs. They walk back in stony silence.
Kelly answers the door before Jen can get out a key. Todd brushes past him without speaking to him, going upstairs. Interestingly, he doesn’t tell Kelly what Jen just told him. Ordinarily, she’s sure they would take the piss together.
Kelly is cooking a pie. When she sits down at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, he pours the sauce into the pastry-lined dish and opens the oven. The heat and the steam from the oven shimmer so violently he seems to disappear right in front of her.
That night, Jen googles how to send a timed email and then fires it off, hopeful, into the ether. As she falls asleep, she prays it works. She prays a future her, somewhere, stops the crime, and breaks the time loop.
