May 2021. Something is creeping towards her consciousness, like a fine mist gathering on the horizon.
It hits as some thoughts sometimes do. It arrives without warning. She checks her phone. Yes. She’s right. It is the sixteenth of May 2021.
That’s when it lands.
Like a sucker punch, so violent it knocks her off her feet momentarily: today is the day her father dies.
Jen pretends to resist the urge to do it. She’s not travelling back in order to see her father, to right one of the big wrongs in her life, she tells herself as she straightens her hair. She’s not doing this to say goodbye to him. She’s here to save her son.
But all morning she thinks of that morgue goodbye, just her and his dead body, his hand cold and dry in hers, his soul someplace else.
She watches Todd play Crash Team Races Nitro-Fueled – their game du jour – while fiddling madly, crossing and uncrossing her legs. Eventually, Todd goes, ‘What?’ to her, and she wanders off, leaving him to it.
She googles Kelly on her phone while standing in the hallway. There is nothing, no online footprint at all. She puts his surname into an ancestry site, but it throws up hundreds of results around the UK. She finds a photograph of Kelly and reverse-image searches it, but nothing comes up.
She drifts upstairs. Kelly is doing his accounts. ‘I’m being patronized by Microsoft,’ he says to her. Cup of coffee on a coaster. Small smile on his face. As she approaches, he angles the computer just ever so slightly away from her. She catches it this time. Must have missed it the first.
Maybe he has another income stream somewhere. Drugs, dead policemen, crime. Does he have more money than a painter/decorator ought to? Not really. Not a lot, she doesn’t think. Nothing she’s ever noticed – and wouldn’t she have? A memory springs up from nowhere. Kelly having given money to charity, a couple of years ago. Buckets of it, several hundred pounds. He hadn’t told her, and when asked he had explained it as anonymous philanthropy thanks to a good job that had come in. It had bothered Jen in that intangible way it does when your husband lies to you, even about something benign. The lie hadn’t been bigger than what it was, but, nevertheless, it had been one.
‘Hey, strange question,’ she says lightly. ‘But do you have any living relatives? You know, a cousin, once removed …’
Kelly frowns. ‘No? Parents were only children,’ he says quickly.
‘Not even a very distant relative, up another generation maybe?’
‘… No. Why?’
‘Realized I’d never asked about the wider family. And I got this – this weird memory of seeing an old photograph of you. You were with this man who had your eyes. He was thicker set than you. Same eyes. Lighter hair.’
Kelly appears to experience a full-body reaction to this sentence, which he disguises by standing up abruptly. ‘No idea,’ he says. ‘I don’t think – do I even have any old photographs? You know me. Unsentimental.’
Jen nods, watching him and thinking how untrue this is. He is not at all unsentimental.
‘Must’ve made it up,’ she says. They’re just eyes. Perhaps it’s only a friend in the photograph.
Jen meets those blue irises and suddenly feels as alone as she ever has in her entire life. She is supposed to be forty-three, but, here, she is forty-two. She’s supposed to be in the autumn, but she’s in a spring, eighteen months before. And her husband isn’t who he says he is, no matter what time zone she’s in.
And her father is alive.
Her father who loves her unconditionally, even if that is in his own way. Just as Jen feels she must examine her own parenting in order to save her son, she wants, now, to turn to the person who raised her.
‘I’m going to go see Dad,’ she says. It comes from nowhere. She can’t resist. She needs to feel his warm hand in hers. She needs to watch him lay out the beer and the peanuts that he dies beside. She won’t stay. She’ll just – she’ll just tell him she loves him. And then leave.
‘Oh, cool,’ Kelly says. ‘Have fun,’ he calls, as she races down the stairs. ‘Say hi from me.’
Kelly and her father have always had a cordial relationship, but never close. Jen thought Kelly might search for a father figure, adopt hers willingly, but, actually, he did the opposite, always keeping Ken at arm’s length, the way he does with most people.
She calls her dad from the car, part of her brain still thinking he won’t answer.
But, of course, he does. And this proves to Jen, above almost anything else, that this is really happening. It really is.
‘A nice surprise,’ Jen’s father says to her. And there he is, on the end of the line. Back from the dead. His voice – posh, reserved, but mellowed into humour with age. Jen leans into it like a captive animal feeling a breeze after so long, too long.
‘Up to much? Thought I’d come over,’ Jen says, her voice thick.
‘Sure. I’ll put the kettle on.’
She closes her eyes into the phrase she has heard a hundred thousand times, but not for eighteen long months.
‘Okay,’ she says.
‘Great.’ He sounds happy. He is lonely, old, dying, too, though he doesn’t know it yet.
Everything Jen knows tells her that she shouldn’t be here. All the fucking movies would agree. She should only change things that might stop the crime, right? Not get too eager, so selfish that she tries to alter other things, too. To play God.
But she can’t resist.
He lives in a double-fronted Victorian house, three storeys high including the loft conversion. Double sash windows either side of the front door, dark-wood frames. Old-fashioned, but charmingly so. Like him.
She stares at him in wonder as he steps back, gesturing to let her inside. That arm. Full-bodied, warm-blooded, actually attached to her father’s alive body. ‘What …？’ he says, a mystified expression crossing his features.
‘Oh, nothing,’ she says, ‘I … I’m having a strange day is all.’
Her father remained in the matrimonial home after her mother died. He’d insisted, and she had nobody to help her convince him. The life of the only child. He told her the stairs would be fine, that he would still keep the gutters clear himself. And neither the gutters nor the stairs killed him, in the end.
‘How so?’
‘It’s nothing,’ Jen says, shaking her head and following him down the hallway that seems smaller, somehow, now that she is an adult. A very specific feeling settles over Jen when she comes here. A kind of just-out-of-reach nostalgia, covered in a fine film of dust, as though she might be able to grasp hold of the past if only she could try hard enough. And now here she is, right here, the spring of the year before her son becomes a murderer, the day her father dies, but it doesn’t feel like it.
‘You sure?’ he says to her. A backward glance as they move through the tired lounge. Sage-green carpets, hoovered carefully, but nevertheless grey-black at their edges. She’d never noticed that before. Perhaps she inherited her disdain of housework from him.
A round grey rug with geometric shapes on it. Ornaments he’s had for decades sit on various dark-wood shelves that jut out above fireplaces and radiators.