He arrives, and a stranger is in Jen’s kitchen. A ghost. The past, her history. Todd’s a child, he looks barely older than ten. He developed late. She’d forgotten. All the worrying she did about it, gone, into the ether, as soon as it corrected itself. Everything in parenthood feels so endless until it ceases. He shot up sometime before his sixteenth, seemed to lengthen in his sleep. Hormones, growing pains, his voice broke, his arms became spindly and elongated before they filled out. But here he is, before it happened. Her little Todd.
‘It is today,’ she says, her mind idling like a spinning wheel. October, October, October. She has no idea. It isn’t his birthday. It isn’t a significant date in any way. But clearly, it is. To him.
‘Get dressed then,’ he says. Then adds happily, ‘I will, too.’ Jen knows that she can’t ask where they’re going: can’t let on that she has forgotten.
He turns to her as he always used to. Jen encircles his bony shoulders with her arm in the hallway, hope firing down her spine like somebody’s struck a match. This is it. This must be it. Significant outings with her son are where she is being led.
Staying in Wagamama’s with Todd on that chilly autumn birthday night was the right thing to do. No child can be loved too much. And so Jen is really getting what she has always most wanted: a do-over in parenting.
‘What do you think I should wear?’ she asks him, hoping for clues.
‘Definitely smart-cas,’ Todd says, like a child actor. She follows him up the stairs. His walk is different, the awkward lope of the child who isn’t yet comfortable in his own body.
‘Smart casual, okay,’ she echoes.
Todd follows her into her bedroom and ambles through to use their en suite shower. Oh yes, that’s right, he went through a phase of preferring that one, for no reason at all. Just the rhythm of family life, like the way Henry VIII finds a favoured spot to sleep in and changes it every few months. Todd didn’t care too much, when he was fifteen, about privacy. Didn’t reach the teenage self-consciousness until late, too. She remembers being troubled by the open door to the en suite, but not knowing quite how to address it. Soon enough, like many things, it had addressed itself, and he had begun to use the main bathroom, door firmly locked into place.
‘Using this towel,’ Todd calls.
‘Okay,’ Jen shouts back softly. ‘Sure.’
She heads out on to the landing, hoping to find Kelly, but there’s no evidence of him around. His car isn’t on the drive. His trainers are gone. It’s so early. Is he at work – or …？ He was gone before she woke this morning, no opportunity to put the tracker on his phone.
Jen’s fingers brush the paintwork of her bedroom. It’s still magnolia, the way it was before they painted over it, grey, then got the new carpets; she lives their renovation in reverse.
There’s nothing in her phone to mark this date. She searches her emails, but there’s nothing there either. She’s about to go and check the fridge for tickets stuck up with magnets when Todd speaks.
‘Although,’ he calls, his voice small over the running shower, ‘the NEC is huge, so maybe trainers?’
Right. The science fair at the NEC. A good day out. Sweets on the motorway, laughs, hot chocolates on the way home. Jen had been bored by the science, but she hopes she hid it well. Evidently not.
‘Really, that is totally expected,’ Todd says, watching a smoking test tube dispassionately. Big feet, big hair, a hidden smile. He’s pretending not to enjoy himself, but he’s buzzing. ‘What did they expect from solid CO2?’
‘Well, it looks like magic to me,’ Jen says.
Todd shrugs. They cross over the blue-carpeted hall, browsing the stands. It’s crowded in here, the high ceiling doing nothing to offset the claustrophobia, the artificial heat, the dichotomy of the people who want to be there inevitably paired with people who do not, who are indulging them, who love them.
Jen’s lower back is aching, just as it did the first time she lived this day. She’d wanted to go to the shop, the café, had looked at her phone too much instead of at the science exhibits and her son. She determinedly hasn’t looked at anything else, today.
‘That one looks good,’ Todd says now, pointing. A small marquee has been set up along the edge of the exhibition hall. An official-looking man in a hi-vis jacket is manning it. Through the throngs of people walking slowly, stopping to fiddle with things, buying cans of Coke at the various stalls, Jen can see its name: THE SCIENCE OF THE WORLD AROUND US.
Todd strides off ahead of her, and she follows. He goes towards a space exhibit, Jen towards a section called THINGS TO PLAY WITH.
‘Anything catch your interest?’ a woman in a blue T-shirt behind a glossy white counter says. Various science gadgets litter the desk in front of her. Something that looks like a crystal ball that calls itself a radiometer. Newton’s Cradle. A giant clock that has all of the world’s time zones on it.
Jen is hot, the veins in her hands swollen. There are too many people in here, in this all-white space. She feels like Mike Teavee. She looks around for Todd. He’s still in the headset, his shoulders shaking with laughter. He has a tote bag slung over his shoulder with various pamphlets and freebies in it. Soon, he will pick up some free mints. They eat them for months afterwards.
‘No, thanks,’ she says to the woman, moving away from the weird science toys.
She turns around in a slow circle, looking at the exhibitions. Surely, surely, surely, she could learn something here.
And that’s when she sees him. At a busy stand called WRONG PLACE, WRONG TIME. Andy. It’s Andy, younger Andy, lither, and – very interestingly – more smiley, too. He’s handing out pieces of paper. ‘It’s part of my research into memory,’ he is telling a woman there with her twin boys.
Jen takes one. As his eyes meet hers, there’s nothing. Not even a flicker. Of course there isn’t.
‘Memory?’ she says.
‘Yes – specifically, the storage of it. How, in people with good memories, that storage is very organized.’
‘Do you study subconscious memory?’ she asks. She had no idea he had started out like this. He never said. She never asked. ‘Or’ – she gestures to the sign – ‘time?’
‘Same thing, aren’t they?’ he says with a small smile. ‘The past is memory, is it not?’
Suddenly, alone in a crowd, here in the past, Jen feels like she is almost at the end. Feels, instinctively, that this is the last time she will see Andy. The gruesome past is rushing towards her.
She takes one of his questionnaires, then leans her elbows on the counter in front of Andy. ‘We’ve met,’ she says.
Confusion flickers across his features. ‘Sorry – I …？’
‘It is in the future that we’ve met,’ she says. But then, actually, she thinks that is unlikely to be true. On the day she figures it all out, whenever that is, Andy seems to think it will play through from there, erasing everything, erasing all this backwards stuff, which really has just been research into the past, hasn’t it? So it’s truer to say that they have never met. How funny. Their truths are the same, here in the NEC, years back.