Kelly leaves the counter, his mobile ringing. She stares into the hallway, thinking about Todd.
‘What do you mean?’ she asks him.
‘I mean – you don’t usually pay attention to my stuff.’
‘Your stuff?’ Jen says, the world feeling suddenly still. Todd says nothing, reaching for a chicken ball and eating it whole. ‘Do you think I don’t listen to you?’ she asks.
A hazy kind of awareness is descending on her, the way cloud cover does: you can’t quite see it if you’re in it, but you can feel it.
Todd seems to actively consider the answer, looking down at his plate, his brow furrowed. ‘Maybe,’ he says eventually.
He is still staring at her. Kelly’s eyes. But everything else is hers. Dark, unruly hair, pale skin. Unbearably large appetite. She made him. And look: he thinks she doesn’t listen to him. Just says it like it is a plain fact.
‘It isn’t interesting to you,’ he adds.
‘Oh,’ she whispers.
‘I care about physics,’ he says. ‘So it isn’t funny that I care about Alexander Kuzemsky. I actually care about him.’
Jen experiences the eerie feeling of being wrong in an argument. So totally wrong. Her mind performs gymnastics. This isn’t about planets. This is about their relationship.
Todd with his fun science facts and his head in the clouds. Jen with her wry inability to understand what he is talking about. That’s how she has always thought of them. She and Kelly couldn’t believe they’d made such a cerebral child, clever in a totally different way to them, both so earthy, and Todd so … not. But he isn’t something made. He isn’t an object. Here he is, right in front of her, telling her who he is. She’s let her own insecurities about being stupid turn his intellectualism into something to be laughed off. Laughed at.
‘God.’ She puts her head in her hands. ‘All right. I see. I’m sorry. It’s not – I’m so sorry,’ she finishes lamely.
‘Okay,’ he says.
‘Everything you do is interesting to me,’ she says, tears springing with the kind of reckless fatalism of somebody who won’t be here tomorrow; a deathbed proclamation, a call from a hijacked plane. A woman who can connect and connect and connect with her son, but it doesn’t matter, it won’t last. ‘I have never loved anybody as much as I love you. Never will,’ she says plainly, her eyes wet. ‘I got it wrong. If I don’t show you that. Because it is so true – it is the truest thing.’
He blinks. His expression ripples into sadness, like a stone dropped into a pond. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘It’s just – you know.’
‘I know,’ Jen says. ‘I know.’
‘Thank you,’ he says again.
‘You’re welcome,’ she says softly, just as Kelly strides in.
‘I ate all the balls, because this last one’s mine too,’ Todd says with a smile. The joke’s a deflection, armour against their other family member witnessing this private moment, but Jen laughs anyway, too, though she wants to cry.
‘That was a client,’ Kelly says needlessly. Jen glances back at Todd. He puts the final chicken ball in his mouth and smiles up at her with his eyes. She reaches over to tousle his hair, which he leans into, like a neglected animal.
Todd drops the Tupperware right into the bin, something she would usually complain about but chooses not to, today.
‘Where to tonight?’ she asks him.
‘Snooker.’ He does a chef’s kiss in the air.
Jen nods quickly. ‘Well, have fun.’ Then she adds, ‘I’m going out too. Drink with Pauline.’
‘Are you?’ Kelly says in surprise.
‘Yeah, I did tell you.’ A lie. ‘Which venue?’ she asks Todd, hoping to sound only curious.
‘Crosby.’
She smiles at him. Because, the reality is, wherever he goes, she will be there too.
The entrance to Crosby sports bar is an anonymous little black door on the high street. A retro neon sign above it. An England flag above that. It is a twenties building with mullioned windows, red bricks and three chimneys along the top.
Jen pulls up in a car park at the back shared by two restaurants, the sports bar and a Travelodge. As she gets out of her car, she smells chargrilled meat, pushed out into the autumn air by a vent somewhere. God, she’s had a Chinese, but she could totally eat a burger.
She tries the door at the back of the bar, even though it looks like a fire door. It’s jammed shut, locked. She goes to the front, peering through the glass, hands either side of her head. It’s dark inside. She can’t see anything at all. She could just stay here, she thinks, the glass cooling her forehead. She’s so tired. She’s so fucking tired. Let her just stay here and cease to exist. Let her become part of the snooker club, an ornament. Not a tortured, living, breathing human.
A light flicks on inside, red-toned, dim, illuminating what is right in front of her: stairs, painted black. Shabby, stained, old and, more importantly, empty.
She pushes open the door and ascends as quietly as she can. They lead to an empty landing, two closed doors either side of it. The perfect place to sit and listen. The perfect place to take a risk.
She holds her breath. After a few seconds, she hears the click of the balls. The thump of the end of a cue on to the floor.
A full-length art deco window sits behind her, letting in the glow of the streetlights. The floor is painted black, rickety old wooden floorboards that creak as she moves.
‘Next week, for sure,’ Todd says. A click. He must have taken his shot. Jen leans over towards the hinge of the door and peers through, hoping nobody will see a single eye over here, in the darkness.
‘Maybe we can go away next summer,’ Clio says. It’s definitely Clio, her dreamy voice.
Todd moves back and forth in her vision. He holds his snooker cue like a staff, exactly the way a wizard in his favourite computer game holds it, his weight on it, his other hand on his hip. Jen’s heart turns over in her chest as she gazes at him, her son. He is acting. She is sure of it.
His hair is coiffed, his trainers bright white, pacing slowly around the snooker table, moving in and out of view. He is in full bravado mode.
‘If you’re still together,’ a male voice says. Jen is pretty certain it’s Joseph, though she can’t see him.
‘Sure we will be,’ Todd says. Nerves thrum in his voice. Jen can hear them, detectable only to her, like the shivering after a piano key is depressed.
‘Good shot,’ another voice says, perhaps Ezra.
‘Hope I’m not interrupting.’ This time, a female voice. Jen shifts so she can see. A woman has entered from a dark door at the other side of the snooker room. She’s about Jen’s own age, maybe slightly older. She has greying hair scraped back into a tidy ponytail. Her outfit looks casual, jogging bottoms and a T-shirt. She walks in an alert sort of way, full of verve, like an athlete.
‘Nicola,’ Joseph says. ‘A nice surprise.’
Nicola. Jen just about manages not to gasp.
‘Long time no see.’
‘Indeed.’ Joseph walks into view, leaning on the cue. Nicola follows him. ‘This is Todd, and Clio. And you know Ezra. Nicola used to work for us.’