‘Kelly. Yesterday, I told you I was living days backwards.’
Surprise breaks across his features like a sunrise. ‘Hey?’
She explains it the same way she did to Rakesh, the same way she already has to Kelly. The first night, the knife in his bag, everything.
‘Where is this knife now?’
‘I don’t know – his bag, probably,’ she says impatiently, wanting to not revisit conversations they have already had.
‘Look. This is fucking ridiculous,’ he says. She can’t say she’s surprised by this reaction. ‘Do you think you should – like – see a GP?’
‘Maybe,’ she says in a whisper. ‘I don’t know. But it’s true. What I’m saying is true.’
Kelly just stares at her, then at the pumpkin, then back. He goes into the hallway and finds Todd’s school bag. Empties it theatrically on to the hallway floor. No knife falls out.
Jen sighs. Todd probably hasn’t bought it yet.
‘Forget it,’ she says. ‘If you won’t believe me.’
She turns to walk away. It’s pointless, even with him. She concedes, as she ascends the stairs, that she wouldn’t believe him either. Who would?
‘I don’t –’ she hears him say at the bottom of the stairs, but then he stops himself. Jen is most disappointed in that half-uttered sentence. Kelly likes an easy life at times, and this is clearly one of them.
She showers in a rage. Well, then. If sleeping might be what makes her wake up in yesterday, then she simply won’t do it. That’s her next tactic.
Kelly falls asleep immediately, the way he always does. But Jen sits up. She sees the clock turn eleven and eleven thirty, when Todd comes back. At midnight, she stares and stares at her phone as 00:00 becomes 00:01 and the date flicks, just like that, from the twenty-seventh to the twenty-eighth, the way it should.
She goes downstairs and watches the rolling BBC news, which segues into the local news, about a road traffic accident that happened on the junction of two roads nearby at eleven o’clock last night. A car rolled over and the owner escaped, unhurt. She sees the clock strike one, then two, then three.
Her eyes become gritty, the adrenalin and the irritation at Kelly wearing off. She does laps of the living room. She makes two coffees and, after the second, she sits on the sofa, just for a second, the news still rolling. The accident, the weather, tomorrow’s papers today. She closes her eyes, just for a second, just for one second, and –
Ryan
Ryan Hiles is twenty-three years old and he is going to change the world.
It is his first day at work, his first day as a police constable. He has suffered through the application and interview process. He has endured the police regional training centre – twelve weeks in dreary Manchester. He has queued with the other officers on a herringboned floor, waxed and polished, and been given his uniform in a clear plastic bag. A white shirt. A black vest. His police number – 2648 – on his shoulders.
And finally, here he is, in the foyer. His hair wet from the relentless rain, but otherwise ready. He put the uniform on last night, in his bathroom, having waited and waited to do it. He stood on the toilet to see his body in the mirror. And there he was: a policeman. On the toilet, admittedly – but a policeman nevertheless.
More than the uniform, though, Ryan now has what he has always wanted: ability. Specifically, the ability to make a difference. And he is – right now, right this very second – waiting in the station to meet his tutor police officer.
‘You’re assigned to PC Luke Bradford,’ the enquiry officer on the front desk says to him, her tone bored. She is older, maybe mid-fifties, though Ryan has never been very good at guessing ages. Hair the colour of a piece of slate.
She indicates the row of pale blue bolted-together chairs and he takes a seat next to a man who he assumes is either a criminal or a witness: a young lad with a ponytail, staring at his hands.
Outside, rain batters the police station. Ryan can hear it running off the windowsills. It’s rained so much it’s been on the news. The wettest October on record. Trains not running, parks and gardens a sodden mess of leaves and water.
PC Luke Bradford arrives after twenty minutes. Ryan takes three deliberate breaths in and out as he approaches. This is it. The beginning.
Bradford crushes Ryan’s hand in a shake. He’s maybe five years older than Ryan – he is still a police constable, so he must be youngish. And yet he has sallow skin, eye-bags, smells of coffee. His dark hair is salted at the temples and above his ears. Ryan is athletic – if he does say so himself – and he swallows as he looks at Bradford, takes in the small paunch clearly protruding over his black trousers.
‘All right, welcome. God, is it still fucking raining?’ Bradford glances out at the car park. ‘First up, parade, then 999 jobs.’ He turns away from Ryan and leads him into the bowels of the place he will call work.
Parade. Bradford uses old-school language. But still, his first briefing. Ryan feels a dart of excitement like pins and needles in his stomach.
‘Kettle on,’ Bradford says to him.
‘Oh, sure,’ Ryan says, hoping to sound willing.
‘Tea round’s on the newbie.’ He indicates the briefing room. ‘Find out what everyone wants.’ He claps him on the shoulder as he leaves.
‘Okay, then.’
It’s fine, Ryan tells himself. He can make tea.
But tea, it turns out, is complicated. Fifteen cups. Different strengths, different sweetnesses, different fucking milks. Canderel, proper sugar – the works. Ryan’s hands are trembling by the time he’s ferried the last few mugs out, his knuckles burning. When he reaches the briefing room just as parade begins, he realizes he hasn’t made one for himself.
The sergeant, Joanne Zamo, is in her late forties, has the kind of wide smile that takes over a face. She begins to run through the list of active jobs, none of which Ryan understands. He is the only new PC here; the rest have been dispersed across the north. He gazes around the room, looking at the fifteen coppers and their fifteen cuppas. He’d hoped to find a mate here, someone his age.
Ryan left school at eighteen, worked office jobs with friends for the last few years. He had a great gig ordering stationery where nobody actually expected him to do anything productive but still wanted to pay him. He’d thought it was great, for a while, but it turns out ordering rulers and A4 lined paper is not enough for Ryan. He woke up one Monday morning, six months ago, and thought, Is this it?
And then he’d applied to join the police.
Zamo is giving out the list of call jobs. ‘Right,’ she adds. ‘Okay, who have we got here in new recruits? You.’ Her brown eyes light on Ryan. ‘Your tutor is Bradford?’
‘That’s right,’ Bradford says, before Ryan can.
‘Okay – you’re Echo.’ She looks straight at Ryan. ‘And Mike.’
‘Mike?’ Ryan says. ‘Sorry, no. I’m Ryan. Ryan Hiles.’
A flutter of Bradford’s eyelashes. A frisson that Ryan fails to understand. A beat. And then the room erupts.
‘Echo Mike,’ Bradford says, laughing, as though it is a punchline. He has one hand on the doorframe and one hand on his stomach. ‘Did you not learn about the phonetic alphabet at the Manchester academy, or do they not teach that these days?’