Twelve days back and Jen opens her eyes on the exact day Nicola Williams texted Todd’s burner phone saying, It’s in place but see you tonight. Jen is
therefore determined to follow Todd today, not to let him out of her sight. Personal investigators be damned. This has got to be the better way. Jen can’t start over again with Gina today. It’s too disheartening to lose it all when she sleeps.
She follows Todd to school and intends to wait outside, all day, in the car park. As long as it takes. She has absolutely nothing better to do. The only requirement of today is that Todd has zero opportunity to meet Nicola alone.
She sends some work emails while she waits, eyes on Todd’s car, and on the school doors. She researches local missing babies, and goes deeper into the probate registers, looking for Ryan, but she uncovers nothing.
It begins to rain around eleven o’clock, fat drops that land like falling pennies that disappear to nothing on her windscreen. She stares out as the car park becomes a moving, shivering river. She’d forgotten this. Mid- October had been unseasonably wet.
Jen stares up at the rain striking the windscreen, thinking about the weather, her son, and the ripple effects that can spread from a single raindrop.
She thinks about what the implications are for the changes she makes today. She wishes she understood it.
Maybe she can. It’ll just take a tedious explanation first.
She dials Andy’s office and is surprised when he answers straight away. ‘You won’t know me,’ she starts hesitatingly.
‘No, clearly not,’ he says, deadpan.
She explains her predicament as briefly as she can while he
communicates a baffled and judgemental silence down the phone to her. ‘And that’s about it,’ she finishes.
A beat. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I do get these calls from time to time, so I can’t say I’m surprised.’
‘No. Pranksters, usually, right?’ Jen says. She’s seen them about, too. She read another thread on Reddit this morning from somebody claiming to
have time-travelled to 2022 from 2031. She didn’t believe it, despite experiencing much the same thing herself. This guy couldn’t even prove it. Says there’s a nuclear war in 2031, and nobody can disprove that anyway.
‘Yes, exactly. Hard to know who to believe, isn’t it?’ he says. She can’t bear it; she can’t bear for anyone – even this virtual stranger – to think her mad or needy or a malingerer, someone who calls up professors and
bullshits them.
‘Yeah. Look – later on in October you’re shortlisted for – and win – an award,’ she says. ‘The Penny Jameson. This won’t help me much today, but – well. There you are. You win.’
‘That award is –’ ‘Embargoed. I know.’
‘I don’t know I’m shortlisted. But I do know I’m in for it. But you shouldn’t.’
‘Yes,’ Jen says. ‘It’s all I’ve got, my proof.’
‘I like your proof,’ he says succinctly. ‘I’m happy to accept it.’ The clarity of scientists. ‘I’ve just googled that award. It isn’t anywhere online.’
‘That’s what you say the next time.’
Another beat of silence while Andy seems to consider things. ‘Where?
Do we meet?’ His tone is noticeably warmer.
‘In a café in Liverpool city centre. I suggest it. You wear a T-shirt that says Franny and Zooey on it.’
‘My J. D. Salinger,’ he says in surprise. ‘Tell me, are you outside my office window?’
‘No,’ Jen says with a laugh.
‘This must be infuriating, then. To have to go through these – ah – these security questions – with me each time.’
‘Yes, it is,’ Jen says honestly. ‘How can I help?’
‘When we meet in Liverpool in a week’s time, you talk about the power of my subconscious landing me on certain days.’
‘… Yes,’ Andy says, and Jen is struck, there in her rainy little car, that it isn’t his expertise that matters, only somebody sympathetic actively listening on the end of the line. Some safe space to hold her thoughts up to the light: isn’t that what everybody needs, anyway? Gina; Todd, even?
‘Well, that is definitely happening. I’m skipping multiple days now. And I think the ones I end up on are significant – in some way.’
‘Well, good. I’m glad you’re working it out, within the framework
available to you,’ he says. She hears bristling, a hand across a beard. ‘So … you have more questions?’
‘Yes. I wanted to ask … let’s say in a few days, a few weeks, I work this out.’
‘Yes.’
‘I just want to know, really, the extent to which the things I’ve already
done will “stick”, so to speak? Like, I told Todd, on one of the days, that he kills someone in the future. But I’m now back before that conversation has taken place? So – has it?’
Andy pauses, which Jen is glad about. She needs somebody who
considers things. Somebody who doesn’t speak to fill silences, to make wild guesses. Eventually, he speaks. ‘It’s the butterfly effect, isn’t it? Let’s say you win the lottery on Day Minus Ten, and continue to go back through time, to Day Minus Eleven, Day Minus Twelve, and so on. If, at some point, you solve the crime, and wake up on Day Zero, are you still the lottery winner from Day Minus Ten?’
‘Exactly, that’s what I want to know.’
‘I don’t think so. I don’t think the things you’re doing now will stick. I think you will go onwards from the day you solve it, and only changes from that day forward will remain. They will wipe the rest. That’s just my feeling.’
Tap, tap, tap go the drops of rainwater. Jen watches them land and then spread, forming rivulets. She opens a window and extends her arm out, just feeling it, real rain, the same rain she’s experienced once before, on her skin. ‘And – just say if I don’t solve it.’
‘I think it’ll become clear. Have faith, Jen. There’s an order to things that we sometimes don’t even know.’
This man, this kind, smart man on the end of the phone, becomes a guru to Jen. A wise old professor, a Gandalf, a Dumbledore. ‘But – like … what if I just cycle back forty years, to oblivion, and then that’s it?’ she asks.
Now perhaps her greatest fear. She swallows as she thinks this horrible, catastrophic thought. Oh, to have a brain that does not torture itself.
‘Well, that’s all any of us is doing, only in the other direction,’ he says, which does nothing to ease Jen’s anxiety whatsoever.
‘Do you mind if I just tell you everything I know? Just to … see if you can spot anything?’ she asks him.
‘Shoot. I even have a pad and paper. And I am soon to be crowned one of the great physics minds in Britain, if your premonition is correct.’
‘Oh, it is,’ she says. ‘Okay – so.’
And she tells him. She tells him about the missing-baby poster, the dead policeman and about the burner phone and the texts to Nicola Williams. She tells him about the port worker and how she suspects it’s organized crime.
She tells him about Nicola Williams maybe having been stabbed, too. She tells him every date, every time she knows. As she speaks, she hears the
sound of a pen being uncapped. Probably a fountain pen, a distinctive, hard click. ‘And that’s all,’ she says, breathless with having divulged everything.
‘So, putting that into chronological order …’ he says.
‘Okay, yes. Todd meets Clio in August. Her uncle is running some sort of – I don’t know. Crime ring.’
‘Okay, so then – into October.’ She hears him leaf through papers. ‘You say Todd appears to ask somebody called Nicola Williams for help. Perhaps setting her up – to meet, and then she’s harmed?’
‘Yes. And at this point, the seventeenth of October, the baby is likely already missing, and the policeman is also probably dead, his ID taken.’
Jen sits back. What was a stormy ocean is now so clear she can see the bedrock beneath it. ‘That’s that.’
‘Well, then. Seems like Nicola is the missing piece. She’s the one you know the least about. And a person who seems to be directly connected to Todd, and who was injured, too, two nights before the crime.’
‘Okay. Yes. I need to find Nicola,’ Jen agrees.
At three thirty, Jen follows Todd home and arrives at the door two minutes after him.
He turns to her, his face perhaps a little pale, but otherwise looking pretty cheerful, and says, ‘Did you know that a flea can accelerate faster than a rocket?’
‘I’m fine, thanks, had a half-day,’ she says sarcastically.
‘Well, then, Mother, look at this.’ He puts his bag down and begins rooting through it, a clear, sunny expression on his face. Not a sniff of organized crime, of gangs, of violence, dead policemen, of anything. ‘Look.’ He passes her an essay, grade A*, his fingers just brushing hers, as light as a feather.
Jen stares down at it, a biology essay. She vaguely remembers this. Last time, in the evening, she had issued a perfunctory well done. Todd’s A*s are the rule and not the exception. This time, she reads it properly. ‘It’s amazing,’ she says after a few minutes. Todd blinks in surprise, and that blink – it cracks her heart open just a little. She’s tried so hard, but look at
his shock. ‘How long did it take you?’ she asks. ‘Oh, you know, not long.’
‘Well, I couldn’t do it. I don’t even know what photosynthesis is.’ ‘Yeah.’ A soft laugh. ‘It’s plants, Mother.’
His eyes are on his own essay, reading it back, a sketch of a smile across his features. He’s so confident. She has done one thing right, at least.
Hopefully Todd will never sit up at night and doubt his own parenting, his intellect, his self.
‘What’re you going to do tonight to celebrate?’ she asks. He looks at her.
‘Absolutely nothing?’
‘You’ve no plans?’ she asks again.
‘Am I in a court of law?’ Todd says, holding his hands up. ‘You’re not seeing anyone? Clio? Connor?’
‘Oh, curiosity beckons, does it? I wondered when you’d get nosey about Clio.’
‘Consider that day today,’ Jen says weakly.
Todd turns away from them, heading into the kitchen. ‘Meh.’ ‘Meh?’
‘Not sure it’s a runner.’
‘What? She was your – your proper girlfriend.’
‘No longer.’ Todd’s jaw is clenched as he says it, staring down at his phone.
Kelly arrives in the kitchen. His gaze tracks Todd. He appears to be deep in thought, though he doesn’t say as much. ‘I have a job on,’ he says. He’s pulling his coat on.
‘Sure,’ Jen says vaguely. ‘What’s happened with Clio?’
‘It’s off limits,’ Todd says tightly. Kelly clatters some cans in their cupboards, then swears. ‘They are my Cokes,’ Todd says to him.
‘Well, later, then,’ Kelly says. ‘I’ll get my own Coke.’
‘Adieu,’ Todd says to Kelly, perhaps somewhat sharply. ‘I think I’m going to celebrate my essay by melting my brain on the Xbox,’ he says to Jen.
He grabs an orange from the fruit bowl and throws it to her with a laugh so loud it thrums in her heart like a bass drum. I love you, I love you, I love you, she thinks as she catches it. ‘Is this photosynthesizing, right now?’ she says, holding the orange up.
‘Don’t use words you don’t know the meaning of,’ Todd says, coming over to ruffle her hair. Whatever it is you’ve done, Jen thinks, I’ll never not love you.
The entire evening, he doesn’t leave the house. Jen checks on him at midnight, and he’s sleeping. She stays up until four, just to make sure, then goes to bed herself. There is no way that, today, he has seen Nicola Williams. None at all.
