Jen’s eyes open. She is in bed. And it’s the twenty-sixth.
It’s Day Minus Three.
She goes to the picture window. It’s raining outside. Where is this going to end? Cycling back – what, for ever? Until she ceases to exist?
She needs to know the rules. That is what any lawyer would do.
Understand the statute, the framework, and then you can play the game. All she knows so far is that nothing has worked. She can only infer from travelling backwards that she hasn’t managed to stop the crime. Surely.
Stop the crime, stop the time loop. That must be the key.
She hastily refreshes her email, looking for a reply from Andy Vettese, but there’s nothing. She goes downstairs to find Todd hunting for something.
‘On the top of the TV unit,’ Jen says. She knows he will be looking for his physics folder. She knows because she’s his mother, but she also knows because this has already happened.
‘Ah, thanks.’ He throws her a self-conscious grin. ‘Quantum today.’ God, he towers over her. He used to be many feet shorter than her, would reach
his arm right up vertically when he was on the school run, his warm hand always finding hers. He’d get frustrated if she couldn’t take it, when she was fussing with her handbag or reaching to press the button on the traffic
lights. She had felt guilty each time. It’s crazy the things mothers feel guilt over.
And now look, over a foot taller than her and refusing to meet her gaze.
Maybe she had been right to feel guilty, she thinks hopelessly. Maybe she should have never done anything except hold his hand. She could come up with a thousand maternal crimes: letting him watch too much television, sleep-training him – the lot, she thinks bitterly.
‘Do you know who Joseph Jones is?’ she says quietly, watching him carefully. Not to see if he tells her, but to see if he lies about it, which she thinks he will. A mother’s instincts are better than any lawyer’s.
Todd puffs air into his cheeks, then plugs his phone in the charger on the kitchen island. ‘Nope,’ he says, a studied frown crossing his features. He’s never once charged his phone there before school. He charges it overnight. ‘Why?’ he asks.
Jen appraises him. Interesting. He could have easily said, ‘Clio’s uncle’s friend,’ but he chose not to. Just as she expected.
She hesitates, not wanting to do something big, wanting to plan her moment. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she says.
‘Alrighty. Mysterious Jen. More a question than an axiom. Shower time.’ Todd leaves his phone charging. Jen stands there in the kitchen, without a theory, without a hope, and with the only person who might be able to help lying to her.
She glances at the stairs. She’s got between five and twenty minutes.
Todd sometimes takes long and contemplative showers, sometimes quick ones, rushing so much to get dressed afterwards that his clothes stick to his wet skin. She tries to get into his phone but fails the PIN request twice.
She dashes upstairs. She’ll search his room instead. She’s got to find something useful.
Todd’s room is a dark cave, painted bottle green. Curtains closed. A double bed with a tartan cover on it sits underneath the window. A
television faces the bed. There is a desk in the corner, underneath the stairs that lead up to her and Kelly’s bedroom. It’s neat but not cosy: the way many men keep their spaces. A black lamp and a MacBook sit on the
otherwise empty desk; an exercise bike leans against the far wall.
She opens his laptop, and fails that password log-in twice, too. She looks around his bedroom, thinking how best she can use the time.
Frantically, she opens his desk drawers and the ones in his bedside tables and looks under the bed. She pulls the duvet back and feels around in the bottom of the wardrobe. She just knows she’s going to find something. She can feel it. Something damning. Something she can never forget.
She ransacks the room. She’ll never be able to get it straight again, but she doesn’t care.
She’s already wasted six minutes. One unit of legal time: an hour divided into tenths. Her gaze lands on his Xbox. He’s always on it. He must talk to some people on there. It’s worth a shot.
She powers it up, listening out for the shower, then navigates to the messenger section. It’s a dark world in there. Messages with random people about spooky games, fighting games, games where you earn enough points to buy knives to stab other players with …
She goes to the recent sent items, which has two messages in. One to User78630 and one to Connor18. The first says: okay. The one to Connor says: 11pm I’ll drop it off?
She will ask Pauline about Connor. See if he’s wrapped up in anything. It seems too much of a coincidence that they have started spending time together just as Todd goes off the rails. And 11 p.m. drop-offs … that doesn’t sound good.
She turns off the console and leaves Todd’s room. Seconds later, he opens the bathroom door.
They meet on the landing. He has only a towel around his waist.
She meets his eyes, but he doesn’t hold her gaze for long. She can’t gauge his mood. She recalls his facial expression from the night of the murder. There wasn’t any remorse on it, not anywhere, not even a bit.
What’s the point in going to the office if, when she wakes up tomorrow, it will be yesterday? There is, for the first time in Jen’s adult life, no point in working at all. She muses on this while feeding Henry VIII.
She tries calling a number she finds listed for Andy Vettese but gets no answer. She googles him again. He won some science award yesterday, for a paper on black holes. She emails two more people who have written
theses on time travel.
She thinks about how to convince her husband of what is happening.
Jen sighs and eventually finds a legal pad full of notes on a case that doesn’t seem to matter much right now. All she can hear is the soft hum of the heating.
In the notebook, she writes Day Minus Three. What I know, she writes underneath that.
Joseph Jones’s name, his full address Clio may be involved
Connor drop-offs?
It isn’t a lot.
For the first time in years, Jen is on the school run. The green school gates are clotted with parents. Cliques, loners, people dressed up, people very much dressed down – the lot. Jen would usually spend her time at the school gate paranoid everybody was talking about her but, today, she
wishes she had done this more often. For starters, it’s fascinating.
She spots Pauline immediately. She is alone, has lately been insisting on collecting Connor so she knows he’s been to school – he was recently told off for skiving – and then goes on to get her youngest, Theo. She is wearing a denim jacket and a huge scarf, is staring down at her phone, her legs crossed at the ankles.
‘I thought I’d try one of these school-run things,’ Jen says to her. ‘I’m genuinely honoured,’ Pauline says, looking up with a laugh.
‘Everyone here is a dick. Honestly – Mario’s mum has a Mulberry handbag with her. For the school run.’
Pauline is one of Jen’s easiest friends. Jen did her divorce, three years ago, separating her neatly from her cheating husband, Eric. Pauline had turned up at Jen’s firm for an initial consultation, screenshots of Eric’s infidelity in hand. Jen had known of her from the school but had never spoken to her. She made Pauline a tea and very professionally looked at the damning texts, sent from Eric to his mistress, and said she’d take Pauline’s case on.
‘Sorry you had to see them,’ Pauline had said in Jen’s office, pocketing her phone and sipping the tea.
‘Yes, well, it’s good to have the – er – evidence,’ Jen had said. And, despite herself – her stiff suit, the corporate surrounds – she felt her expression falter. ‘However – um … graphic.’
Pauline met her eyes for just a second. ‘So do you attach dick pics to the court petition?’ she had said and, right there in Jen’s office, they had exploded into laughter. ‘That was the first time I’d laughed since I found them,’ Pauline had said sincerely, later. And, just like that, a friendship was
born, out of tragedy and humour, as they often are. Jen had been so pleased when Connor and Todd had become friends, too. Until now.
‘Well, you’ve got me, here, unwashed,’ Jen says.
Pauline smiles and scuffs a Converse shoe on the floor. ‘You not working today?’
Todd appears in the distance, loping along with Connor, one of the only students who is taller than him. Thicker set, too, a unit of a kid.
‘No.’
‘How’s things? How’s your enigma of a husband?’ ‘Listen,’ Jen says, skipping past the small talk.
‘Uh-oh,’ Pauline says. ‘I don’t like that lawyerly listen.’
‘Nothing to worry about,’ she says lightly. ‘Todd is, I think – maybe – caught up in something …’
‘In what?’ Pauline says, suddenly serious. For all her humour, she is a formidable mother where it matters. She will tolerate smoking and
swearing, Jen thinks, but nothing worse. Look at her here: checking Connor has made it to school.
‘I don’t know – I just … Todd is acting strangely. And I just wondered – has Connor?’
Pauline tilts her head back just a fraction. ‘I see.’ ‘Exactly.’
More parents begin to gather around them by the gates. Eleven-year-olds and fifteen-year-olds greet their parents and Jen thinks how she’s only done this a handful of times, instead choosing to sift through disclosure at the office, appraising trainees, making bundles of documents. Earning money. She wonders, now, quite what it was all for.
‘He seems fine …’ Pauline says slowly, and Jen is so thankful, suddenly, here, for her friend, who has understood the subtext and chosen not to take offence. ‘But let me do some digging,’ she adds, right before Connor and Todd arrive.
‘All right,’ Connor says to Jen. He has a tattoo that looks like a necklace, rosary beads maybe, disappearing into the neck of his T-shirt. Tattoos are personal choice, Jen tells herself. Stop being snobby.
He takes his cigarettes out of his pocket, which Jen is relieved to see
Pauline wince at. He flares the lighter while still staring at Jen. The flame
illuminates his face for the briefest of moments. He gives her a wink, so fast you’d miss it if you weren’t looking for it.
It’s been a difficult evening. Todd left as soon as he got home; ‘Going to Clio’s,’ he said. He had been irritated by Jen’s appearance at the school pick-up, and annoyed with Kelly, too. ‘Can either of you two get hobbies?’ he’d said, when they were all at home by four o’clock.
After he left, Jen looked up Clio on Facebook. She is a couple of years older than Todd, but in education still. An art college nearby. Her page is meticulously curated. Model-like shots of her, a strangely high number of political memes, a lot of bunches of flowers. Pretty innocuous teenage stuff. Jen is going to go and see her, soon, she has decided. To talk to her.
She tidies up, thinking about what Pauline might find. It’s useless to clean, she acknowledges, as she scrubs at the kitchen countertops and stacks the dishwasher. When she wakes up, yesterday, none of this will have been done, but isn’t that kind of always the way housework feels?
Pauline calls her twenty minutes later. ‘I have spoken to Connor,’ she says. She always speaks without any introduction at all, always gets straight to the point. ‘And I’ve done some digging.’
‘Shoot.’ Her arms feel chilled as she draws the curtains across their patio doors.
‘I’ve checked Connor’s phone. Nothing suspicious. A few unfortunate photographs. Takes after his father.’
‘Jesus.’
‘What’s going on with Todd?’
‘He seems to know these older men – an uncle and friend of his new girlfriend. There’s a weird vibe at their house. Plus, they own a company called Cutting & Sewing Ltd. It’s brand new, no turnover, no accounts. I think it’s got to be a front. Pretty unusual for two blokes to set up a sewing company, right?’
‘Right. That … all?’
Jen sighs. Obviously not, but the rest is unbelievable. A dark underworld ending in a murder that she’s got to crack open. She turns away from the patio doors, spooked.
And that’s when it comes to her. Just like that. The news story she watched yesterday, the road traffic accident. It happens tonight, is on tomorrow’s news. She can use it. She can use it to convince the person she needs to confide in the most. If she can convince Kelly, maybe it will break the cycle, break the time loop, and she’ll wake up on tomorrow.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ she tells Pauline. ‘Don’t worry. It’s – it’s nothing, probably,’ she adds, wondering why she has always felt the need to do that. To be easy-going, not to worry people, to be good.
‘Hope so,’ Pauline says.
Kelly wanders into the kitchen, much later, after ten at night. ‘What?’ Kelly says curiously, catching her expression. ‘What’s up?’ ‘Will you come somewhere with me?’ she says.
‘Now?’ he asks. He looks at her for a beat. ‘You in full madtown?’ he says with a small, wry smile. After they first met, and went travelling
around the UK in a little camper van, they lived for years in the Lancashire countryside, just the three of them, in a little white house with a grey slate roof at the bottom of a valley that caught the mist in the winter like a
candyfloss hat. Jen’s favourite ever house. Kelly had coined this term back then, when she used to come home and download her entire working day to him. She’d never needed anybody else.
‘Totally,’ she says.
‘Come on then. We can walk.’
Their gazes meet, and Jen wonders what she might be about to set in motion, wonders whether the future is different, now. Wonders if, together, they might make it worse, if there is some alternative future unspooling as she stands here, motionless, in her kitchen, where Todd himself is murdered, where he runs away, where he attacks more than one person.
Jen pushes open the front door. She’s excited for it. To present him with actual, tangible proof.
The night air is chilly and damp, the same as it was on that first night. It smells of the mildew of autumn.
‘I have something to say to you, and I know how you’re going to react, because I’ve already told you,’ she says. Kelly’s hand is warm in hers. The road is slick with rain. Jen’s getting better at this explanation.
‘Is this about work?’ Kelly is used to Jen asking him about work, theorizing at him, though mostly all he does is listen. Just last week, she asked him about Mr Mahoney, who wanted to give his ex-wife his entire pension, just to save the battle. Kelly had shrugged and said avoiding pain was priceless to some.
‘No.’ And there, in the darkness, she tells him everything in total detail.
Again. She tells him about the first time, and then the day before it, and then the day before that. He listens, his eyes on her, the way he always has.
He doesn’t speak for a few moments after she’s finished. Just leans there, against the road sign, close to where the accident is due to happen, appearing to be lost in thought. Eventually, he seems to come to a conclusion, and says, ‘Would you believe this, if it were me?’
‘No.’
He barks out a laugh. ‘Right.’
‘I promise,’ she says, ‘on everything we stand for, all our history – that I am telling you the truth. Todd murders somebody this Saturday – late. And I’m moving back in time to stop it.’
Kelly is silent for a minute. It begins to drizzle again. He pushes his hair off his forehead as it gets wet. ‘Why are we here?’
‘For me to prove it to you. A car’s going to come along here, soon,’ she says, gesturing to the dark, quiet street. ‘It’ll lose control and flip on to its side. It was just on the news last night. My tomorrow. The owner escapes, totally unharmed. It’s a black Audi. It flips over there. It won’t go near us.’
Kelly rubs a hand along his jaw. ‘Okay,’ he says again, dismissive, confused. Together, they lean back on the road sign, side by side.
Just as she is beginning to think the car won’t come, it does. Jen hears it first. A distant, speeding rumble. ‘Here it is.’
Kelly looks at her. The rain has intensified. His hair begins to drip.
And then it rounds the corner. A black Audi, fast, out of control. The driver clearly reckless, drunk, both. Its engine sounds like gunfire as it passes them. Kelly watches it, his eyes fixed on it. His expression inscrutable.
Kelly pulls his hood up with one hand, against the downpour, just as the car flips. A metallic crunch and skid. The horn goes.
Then nothing. A beat of silence while the car smokes, then the owner emerges, wide-eyed. He’s maybe fifty, ambles across the road to them.
‘You’re lucky to be out of that,’ Jen says. Kelly’s eyes are back on her.
Disbelief, but also a weird kind of panic seems to radiate from him.
‘I know,’ the man says to Jen. He pats his legs, like he’s unable to believe that he’s really fine.
Kelly shakes his head. ‘I don’t understand this.’
‘A neighbour is about to come out, to offer help,’ Jen commentates. Kelly waits, saying nothing, one foot against the leg of the street sign,
arms folded. A door slams somewhere.
‘I’ve called an ambulance,’ a voice says a few houses down.
‘Do you believe me yet?’ she says to Kelly.
‘I can’t think of any other explanation,’ he says after a few seconds. ‘But this is – this is mental.’
‘I know that. Of course I know that.’ She squares herself in front of him so she can look directly into his eyes. ‘But I promise. I promise, I promise, I promise it’s true.’
Kelly makes a gesture, down the street, and they walk, but not home.
They stroll aimlessly, together, in the rain. Jen thinks he might believe her. Truly. And won’t that do something, surely? If Todd’s other parent believes it. Maybe Kelly will wake up with her, yesterday for him, too. It’s a long shot, but she has to try it.
‘This is completely batshit,’ he says. His eyes catch the overhead lights as they move. ‘There is no way you could’ve known about that car. Is there?’ She can see him trying to work it out.
‘No. I mean – literally, no.’
‘I can’t see how …’ His breath mists up the air in front of him. ‘I just don’t …’
‘I know.’
They take a left, then walk down an alleyway, past their favourite Indian takeaway, then start a slow loop back towards home.
Eventually, he takes her hand in his. ‘If it’s true, it must be horrible,’ he says.
That if. Jen loves it. It is a small step, a small concession from husband to wife. ‘It is horrible,’ she says thickly. As she thinks over the past few days of panic and alienation, her eyes moisten and a tear tracks its way down her cheek. She stares at their feet as they walk the streets in perfect sync. Kelly must be watching her, because he stops and wipes the tear away with a thumb.
‘I’ll try,’ he says simply, softly, to her. ‘I’ll try to believe you.’
When they get in, he pulls up a stool at the breakfast bar, sitting at it with his knees spread, his elbows on the counter, his eyes on her, brows raised.
‘Do you have a theory? On this – Joseph?’ Kelly says.
Henry VIII jumps on to the kitchen island and Jen gathers him to her, his fur soft, his body so fat and yielding, and puts her hands around him, like cupping a bowl. She’s so glad to be here. With Kelly. Sharing the same spot in the universe together, confiding in him.
‘I mean – no. But the night Todd stabbed him. It’s like he sees this Joseph, then just – he just panics. And does it.’
‘So he’s afraid of him.’
‘Yes!’ Jen says. ‘That’s exactly it.’ She looks at her husband. ‘So you believe me?’
‘Maybe I’m humouring you,’ he says languidly, but she doesn’t think so. ‘Look – I made these notes,’ she says, jumping up and grabbing the
notepad. Kelly joins her on the sofa in their kitchen. ‘They’re – I mean, they’re pretty scant.’
Kelly looks at the page, then laughs, a tiny exhale of a sound. ‘Oh dear, oh dear. These are very scant.’
‘Stop it, or I won’t tell you the lottery numbers,’ Jen says, and it’s so nice, it’s so nice to laugh about it. It’s so nice to be back here, in their easy dynamic.
‘Oh yeah – all right. Look. Let’s write down every possible reason he could have for doing this. Even the mad ones.’
‘Self-defence, loss of control, conspiracy,’ Jen says. ‘Working as a – I don’t know, a hitman.’
‘This isn’t James Bond.’
‘All right, cross that one out.’
Kelly laughs as he scratches a line through hitman. ‘Aliens?’ ‘Stop it,’ Jen says, through laughter.
They make more and more and more lists as the night draws on. All his friends, all his acquaintances that she could speak to.
On the dimly lit sofa, Jen’s body sags. She leans into Kelly, whose arm immediately snakes around her.
‘When will you – I don’t know. Go?’ ‘When I sleep.’
‘So let’s stay up.’ ‘Tried that one.’
She stays there, listening to his breathing slow. She can feel hers slowing, too. But she’s happy to go, today. She’s happy she got today, with him.
‘What would you do?’ she asks, turning to look at him.
Kelly folds his lips in on themselves, an expression on his face that Jen can’t read. ‘You sure you want to know that?’
‘Of course I do,’ she says, though, for just a second, she wonders if she really does. Kelly’s sense of humour can be dark but – just sometimes – his
very core self can seem this way, too. If Jen had to describe it, she’d say she expects the best of people, and Kelly expects the worst.
‘I’d kill him,’ he says softly. ‘Joseph?’ Jen says, her jaw slack.
‘Yeah.’ He pulls his eyes away from whatever he’s looking at and meets her gaze. ‘Yeah, I’d kill him myself, this Joseph, if I could get away with it.’
‘So that Todd couldn’t,’ she says in almost a whisper. ‘Exactly.’
She shivers, totally chilled by this incisive thought, this edge her husband sometimes exhibits. ‘But could you?’
Kelly shrugs, looking out at the dark garden. He doesn’t intend to answer this question, Jen can tell.
‘So tomorrow,’ he murmurs, pulling her back close to him, against his body. ‘It’ll be yesterday for you, tomorrow for me?’
‘That’s right,’ she says sadly, but thinking privately that maybe it won’t be, that maybe telling him has avoided that fate, somehow. Kelly’s quiet; he’s falling asleep. Jen’s blinks get longer.
They are here, tonight, together, even if they might part again tomorrow, like two passengers on two trains going in opposite directions.
