On the way home, she thinks about Ryan Hiles, and about the missing baby. She can still see the poster. There is something she recognizes about that baby. An instinctive familiarity, as though they may be a distant relative, someone she now knows as an adult … someone she has perhaps met, but she can’t think. Jen has never been good with babies.
She got pregnant with Todd accidentally, only eight months after she met Kelly. It was a shock, but he used to joke they’d had a decade’s worth of sex in that year, which is true. The little camper van and their clothes strewn across the floor are her only memories of that time. His hips against hers, how he’d said to her wryly one night that everybody would be able to see their van rocking. How she didn’t care.
They’d been in their early twenties. She’d been on the pill, and most of the time they used condoms. Something about the impossibility of the pregnancy was what made her keep the baby. That, and a single sentence Kelly had said: ‘I hope the baby has your eyes.’ Right away, as with millions of women before her, she had thought, But I hope he has yours. Sperm had met egg, and each of their thoughts had met the other’s, and she felt immediately ready. Like she’d grown up in the space of a two-minute pregnancy test, looking to a future generation instead of to herself.
But she hadn’t been ready, not at all.
Nobody had warned her of the car crash that was labour. At one point she had been sure she was going to die, and that conviction never really left her, even after she was fine. She couldn’t believe women went through that. That they chose to do it again and again. She couldn’t believe pain like that actually existed.
She had begun her motherhood journey with pain, but also in fear: of the judgement of health visitors, of GPs, and of other mothers.
Todd hadn’t been what anybody would call a difficult baby. He’d always slept well. But an easy baby is still difficult, and Jen – a fan of self-recrimination anyway – was thrust into something that would in other circumstances have been described as torture. And yet to describe it as such was taboo. She’d looked down at him one night, and thought, How do I know if I love you?
Jen can see that she was susceptible to wanting it all. A woman working in a job that took as much as you were able to give. Having a repressed father. Vulnerable to people’s judgement, to reading huge amounts into the small things people say. That vein of inadequacy running through her that led her to say yes to banal networking events and taking on more cases than she could realistically run led – in parenthood – to misery.
She’d wanted to sleep in the same room as Todd, for him to hear her breathing, she’d wanted to breastfeed, she’d wanted, wanted, wanted to do it perfectly, and maybe that was compensation for what she should have felt but didn’t.
She’d tried to tell a health visitor about all this, but they had only looked uncomfortable and asked if she wanted to kill herself.
‘No,’ Jen had said dully. She hadn’t wanted to kill herself. She had wanted to take it back. She’d driven to work to see her father, walked around the office like a zombie. In the foyer, her father had hugged her extra tightly, but hadn’t said anything. Hadn’t been able to say anything: that she was doing a good job, did she need help? A typical man of his generation, but it had still hurt.
Like all disasters, it ebbed away, and the love bloomed, big and beautiful, when Todd started to do things: to sit up, to talk, to smear Bourbon biscuits over his entire head. And, until recently, when his friends had descended into teenage sullenness, he hadn’t. Still full of puns, of laughs, of facts, just for her. At the beginning, the love she had felt for him had been eclipsed by how hard it had been in the early days, and it wasn’t any longer. That was all. An explanation as big and as small as that.
But she’d been too afraid to have any more children. She looks at the road unfolding in front of her, now, and thinks that the baby in the poster is a girl. She finds a little hard stone of regret in her stomach that she didn’t have that other child. A sibling for Todd, somebody he could confide in, somebody who could help him now, more than she can.
She can’t let it happen. She can’t let the murder play out. She can’t have him lose everything. Her easy little baby who unknowingly witnessed his mother crying so often, she can’t bear for this to be his end. She can’t bear for him to be bad. Let him, let him, let him – and her – be good.
Day Minus Eight, 19:30
‘Ready?’ Kelly says to Jen when she arrives home. He’s standing in their kitchen, trainers and parka on, a smile on his face. He doesn’t notice her misty eyes.
‘For …’
‘Parents’ evening?’ he says, a question in his voice. Henry VIII is winding his way around Kelly’s feet.
Parents’ evening.
Perhaps it’s this. Perhaps this is why she’s skipped back more than one day. Like Andy said. This must be an opportunity, of some kind or other. She remembers dreading this but, tonight, she feels ignited by it. Bring it on, let me notice the thing, let me figure this out, and let it end.
‘Sure,’ she says brightly. ‘Yeah, forgot.’
‘I wish,’ he says. ‘Let’s just not go.’ Kelly hates these sorts of things too, though for different reasons, his relating to the Establishment. The last time, she took a selfie of them in the car, wanting to put it on Facebook, and he stopped her.
He holds the door open for her now. ‘How was the office?’
Jen looks down at her jeans and T-shirt. ‘Yeah – had a meeting with an old client, second divorce,’ she says glibly as they leave, as though she does much repeat business. Kelly doesn’t seem to mind enough to ask.
The school hall is set up with tables spaced so evenly it looks like something from the military. At each one sits a teacher, two empty plastic chairs in front of them. Jen thinks of Todd, at home alone, playing Xbox, unknowingly waiting for his arrest for possession of a knife he might not even have.
The first time she lived this evening, all of the reports were glowing, to her relief. Mr Adams, the physics teacher, described Todd as a joy. Jen had been distracted by work, she remembers, considering what to do about Gina’s divorce, and how to convince her to allow her soon-to-be-ex access to their children, but that single word had pierced through the membrane of busyness, and she’d grinned as Kelly said drily, ‘Just like his parents.’
Jen is sitting here opposite the same man now. The hall is brightly lit, the floors shining.
Jen and Kelly sent Todd here, to a good comprehensive. They didn’t want Todd to go to private school, to become part of the institution. They settled on this, Burleigh Secondary School, a place full of well-meaning teachers but with terrible, dated classrooms and grotesque bathrooms. Sometimes, today in particular, Jen wishes they’d chosen somewhere else, someplace where a parents’ evening would provide Nespresso coffees and comfy chairs. But, as Kelly had once said, ‘He’ll get decked later in life if he spends his formative years in a choir singing hymns with a load of knobs.’
‘Yes, sharp, engaged,’ Mr Adams is saying. Jen’s attention is firmly on him. He’s an avuncular sort of man, big ears, white hair, a kind face. He has a cold, smells distinctively sweet; the scent of Olbas oil on a handkerchief. She missed this last time. It doesn’t matter, but she still missed it. Along with what else?