Jen looks at her handsome son and thinks about everything that future-Todd will miss out on. University, marriage, some graduate scheme with other geniuses. But instead, what faces him? Remand, a trial, prison. Out by the time he’s thirty-five. The knowledge, for ever, that he has taken a life, for whatever misguided reason.
‘Are you going to order, or shall I?’ Todd says, waving the Domino’s app at her on his phone.
They must have agreed to get a takeaway. ‘Yeah – let’s just wait for Dad.’ Henry VIII pads over and leaps up on to Jen’s lap. He is slimmer, too, she thinks ruefully.
Todd makes an over-the-top puzzled face, a cartoon double-take. ‘Oh-kay,’ he says. ‘Dad’s away, but sure. You do that, Jen.’
‘Is he?’ she asks sharply. ‘At risk of being accused of being old,’ she adds, rictus grin in place, ‘remind me where he is?’
‘It’s Whitsun.’
‘Oh,’ Jen says. She can feel her mouth make the shape, a round, significant O. Kelly goes away every Whitsun weekend, camping with old friends from school. A long-standing arrangement. She’s never met them, something that she had wondered about but that Kelly had explained easily. ‘Oh, they’re not local, I just see them on that one weekend. Honestly, it’d bore you to tears.’
‘Pizza for two then,’ she says to Todd, but, in fact, she’s thinking: That’s why. That’s why today. Out of all of the days that have come before.
Thank God. Thank God she turned on Find My iPhone this morning on Kelly’s phone, the same way she does each morning now. When she checked earlier, he was in Liverpool, but she’ll look again.
‘Let me think,’ Jen says, getting her phone out, ostensibly ordering pizza but, really, looking at Find My iPhone. Kelly goes camping in the Lake District. Lake Windermere. Same spot every year.
But look. Here is his blue spot. Not in the Lake District at all. At a house in Salford.
Jen looks back up at her son, who is staring down at his phone, an expression of concentration on his face.
‘Todd,’ she says, cringing as she says it. Her baby, post exam, looking forward to pizza with his mother; he deserves better. He looks up at her in surprise. ‘How bad would it be if I had to pop to the office? Just quickly – we can have the pizza afterwards.’
Todd’s eyebrows rise in surprise, but then he waves a hand. ‘Yeah, fine,’ he says. ‘Don’t worry. I shall go immerse myself in H2O. Also known as a bath to mere mortals.’
Jen laughs softly to herself, then rubs at her eyes as he stands and leaves the living room. Is this the right thing to be doing? More neglect of Todd, not less, in search of answers? But she’s got to know for sure.
She decides to get a taxi so that she can arrive incognito.
‘Won’t be long,’ she calls to Todd. She hears the sound of the bath running, doesn’t catch his reply. She hesitates at the bottom of the stairs, torn, torn between duties. But it’s all for him, she decides as the Uber app vibrates to say her car is a minute away. It’s all to save him, wonderful him.
‘Get extra bacon on mine,’ Todd calls.
‘Sure thing.’
She waits out on the street for the taxi.
It’s the height of summer. Geraniums, sweet peas, roses in her neighbours’ gardens. It smells like a perfumery. The air is soft. It’s raining lightly, warm drizzle, but Jen doesn’t mind. It’s humid, like a steam room.
She reaches to pluck off the petal of a peony at the very corner of her driveway, in the only tiny patch of soil they can be bothered to maintain. Once white, it’s now a deep brown around the edges, like an old newspaper, but it still smells of delicious, pungent vanilla.
She looks up at their sleeping house, one light on in the frosted bathroom window, thinking of her son and his pizza. He’ll understand one day.
As the Uber pulls up, she thinks suddenly of how much she trusted her husband. She trusted him so much. Camping with people she’s never met. She never thought, never thought once.
She tugs on the cool plastic handle of the Uber and is greeted by Eri, a middle-aged man with a beard wearing a baseball cap. The car smells of artificially sweet air-fresheners and chewing gum.
She hands him a clutch of twenties she got out of the emergency drawer in the kitchen, their paper as soft and dry as the peony petals. ‘I’m following someone,’ she says.
‘Oh.’ Eri considers the notes, then eventually takes them.
‘I’ll pay whatever I owe on the app, too. We need to keep an eye on this.’ She shows him the phone. ‘If the blue dot moves, we might need to … redirect.’
‘Okay then,’ he says. ‘Like in the movies,’ he adds, his eyes meeting hers in the rear-view mirror.
‘Mmm.’ Jen sits in the back, leaning her head against the cold window, watching her street rush by. A woman in a black cab following her husband. The oldest story in the book, with a twist. ‘Like in the movies,’ she repeats.
Call of Duty awaits you, Todd texts Jen.
God, isn’t it funny, Jen thinks, the lights of Merseyside rushing by like scattered colourful stars, how you can forget entire phases of your life? The PS5 phase, Call of Duty. Two controls they had to charge all the time, they’d played so much. They had been so addicted. When they weren’t playing it, they would shoot at each other around corners of the house. ‘This is Black Ops,’ Todd would say to her, walking into the kitchen, holding an imaginary walkie-talkie.
Jen wonders now, as they race down the motorway, lit-up blue signs passing above their heads like they’re flying, whether she had been irresponsible to let her son play that game, ignoring the warnings about violent computer games. It wouldn’t happen to them, she had thought. She had been too lax. She must have been. Raised by a lawyer, she’d wanted to teach a kid how to relax and have fun – but had she gone too far?
Kelly’s spot is at the end of a track road, just a little way off the motorway junction at Salford. Eri drives dutifully, not saying anything.
As Jen is considering whether this is a good idea, he says: ‘You don’t look very happy.’
‘No. I’m not.’
Eri turns the radio off completely. The air is warm, the car a lit-up cocoon. ‘Are you following your husband?’
‘How do you know?’
Eri catches her gaze in the mirror, then helps himself to a second stick of powdery Wrigley’s. He holds one up for her, and she declines. ‘Usually is,’ he says.
Jen turns her mouth down, pleading the fifth. She’d usually make small talk, try to make the taxi driver feel okay about being nosey, but she doesn’t today.
They come off at a roundabout, take the second exit, then head out into the country. The track road is unlit, not even tarmacked. Just mud. The hairs on Jen’s arms rise as they travel down it. The smells of the countryside in summer drift in through the air-con. Haybales. Rain on hot pavements after a long drought.
‘Maybe I should get a role in the films,’ Eri says cheerfully. ‘Following husbands.’
‘Maybe.’
They head up what looks like a private drive, an unmarked hairline fracture on Google Maps.
‘Should we go all the way up?’ Eri asks. He takes his baseball cap off. His hair was perhaps once thick but has now thinned out, fine strands still curling like a baby’s after a bath.