‘I’ll speak to him,’ Kelly says from the top of the stairs.
She thought they’d got away without this stuff happening, this teenage stuff. Todd was an easy baby, a happy child. The only drama they’d had over this last summer was when a girl, Gemma, dumped him for being too weird. He’d come home heartbroken, not spoken for a full twenty-four hours, leaving Jen and Kelly guessing. He’d sat on Jen’s bed the next evening, when Kelly was out, crossed his legs, told her what happened, and asked if she thought it was true. ‘Absolutely not,’ she’d said, while guiltily wondering if there was a way to tell him … well, maybe? Not too weird, but definitely nerdy. He’d shown her some of the messages he’d sent. Intense was the word for them. Long missives, science memes, poems, text after text after text without a reply. Gemma had clearly been cooling off – thanks for that, chat tomorrow, nah bit busy today – and Jen had winced for her son.
But now this: knives, murders, arrests.
Kelly is silently appraising his son, his head tilted slightly backwards. Jen wishes he’d blow up, escalate things somehow, but evidently, he decides not to. Todd looks suddenly angry. His jaw is fixed.
He holds his palms up but says nothing more.
‘So if I check your bank statements – you didn’t buy it? It won’t appear there?’ Kelly asks.
Todd calls his bluff, looking levelly up the stairs. After a few seconds, he breaks eye contact with his father, shrugs himself out of his coat. He kicks his trainers off, feet bare on the floorboards. ‘That’s right,’ he says, his back to Jen as he hangs his coat up, something he never usually does.
‘We understand, you know – wanting to feel … protected,’ Kelly says. ‘Look – come with me. Take a walk.’
‘Do we? Understand that?’ Jen says. She looks up at him in surprise.
Todd turns violently away from her, running the rest of the way up the stairs and pushing past Kelly.
‘What do you think I’m going to do, kill you?’ Todd says, so softly Jen wonders if she’s misheard. Her whole body heaves.
‘Unless you tell me where you got it – and why – you won’t be going anywhere. Not for days. Not even to school,’ she says.
‘Fine!’ Todd shouts.
He goes into his bedroom, the door slamming so hard it shakes the whole house. Jen stares at Kelly, feeling like she’s been slapped.
Kelly runs a hand through his hair. ‘Fucking hell,’ he says to her. ‘What a mess.’ He swipes at the cabinet that stands at the top of their stairs. A piece of paper falls off it which he picks up, rubbing at his forehead. That piece of paper is an offer of a big job, one Kelly refused because they wanted him to go on their payroll rather than stay self-employed, and he’d said he’d never do that.
‘What’s happened to him?’ she says.
‘I don’t know,’ Kelly snaps. He shakes his head. ‘Let’s fucking leave it.’ He isn’t directing the anger at her, Jen knows. It’s his temper, sudden and volatile when it eventually goes. He once exploded at a man in a bar who touched Jen’s arse. Said he’d be happy to see him outside, which Jen couldn’t believe.
She nods, now, too choked up to speak, too panicked with what she fears is to come.
‘We can deal with’ – Kelly waves a hand – ‘all this tomorrow.’
Jen nods, happy to be directed. She takes the knife upstairs with her and puts it underneath their bed.
She and Todd cross paths later that evening, he coming down for a drink, she about to go upstairs for the night. She’d ordinarily be in a whirlwind of laundry and other banal tasks, but she isn’t, tonight. She’s just watching him across the kitchen without the busyness of normal life surrounding them.
He fills a glass from the tap, downs it in one, then fills it again. He pulls his phone out and scrolls on it while sipping, half smiles at something, then puts it back in his pocket.
She pretends to occupy herself. Todd strides past, glass of water still in hand, but just before he goes upstairs, he checks the lock on the front door. He gets one step up the stairs, turns around, then checks it again. Just to be sure. It looks like a check undertaken out of fear. Her skin feels chilled as she watches.
As she falls asleep, she finds herself thinking that Todd is here, safe in their house, grounded. And she has the knife. Perhaps it has been stopped. Whatever it is. Perhaps she will wake and it will be tomorrow. The day after. Anything but today again.
Day Minus Two, 08:30
Jen wakes up, sweat gathered across her chest. Her phone is lying on the bedside table, but she doesn’t check it. A perverse impulse to keep hope alive resides within her.
She pulls on Kelly’s dressing gown, still damp in places from his shower, and heads downstairs. The wooden floors are lit up by the sun, glossy with it. The honey light warms her toes and then her feet as she steps forwards.
Please don’t let it be Friday again. Anything but that.
She peers into the kitchen, hoping to see Kelly. But it’s empty. Tidy, too. The counters clear. She blinks. The pumpkin. It isn’t here. She walks into the kitchen, then spins around uselessly, just looking. But it’s nowhere. Maybe it’s Sunday. Maybe it’s over.
She brings her phone out of the dressing-gown pocket, holds a breath, then checks it.
It is the twenty-seventh of October. It is the day before the day before.
Blood pounds in her forehead, hot and stretched, like somebody’s turned a heater on. She must be mad – she must be. The pumpkin isn’t here because it hasn’t yet been purchased by her.
Apparently, it is Thursday, eight thirty in the morning. Todd will be on his way to school. Kelly will be at Merrilocks. And Jen – Jen should be at work. She looks out at their garden, the grass gilded by the early-morning sun. She makes and gulps a coffee that only jangles her nerves further.
If she’s right, tomorrow will be Wednesday. Then Tuesday. And then what? Backwards for ever? She’s sick again, this time into the kitchen sink, spewing up sweet black coffee, panic and incomprehension. Afterwards, she rests her head briefly on the ceramic edge and makes a decision. She needs to talk to someone who understands her: her oldest friend and colleague, Rakesh.
The street outside Jen’s work is often blustery, caught in a wind tunnel in Liverpool city centre. The October air gusts her coat up and around her thighs like a bawdy dancer’s. Later, it will begin to rain, huge, fat drops that turn the air frigid.
Jen had wanted to live closer to town, but Crosby was as close as Kelly said he’d get. He hates the noise of cities, doesn’t like the mess, the bustle. Also Scousers, except you, he had said once, she thinks in jest. Kelly left his hometown behind when he met Jen. Both parents dead, his schoolfriends all wasters, he says, he hardly goes back. The only connection he has to it is an annual camping trip with old friends, on the Whitsun weekend. He’d wanted to live out in the wilderness, he said, but she made him move back to Crosby, with her. ‘But the suburbs are full of people,’ he’d said. He is often this way. Dark humour crossed with cynicism.
She pushes open the warm glass door, the foyer ablaze with sunlight, and heads down the corridor to Rakesh’s. Rakesh Kapoor – her biggest ally, and long-time friend – was a doctor before he became a lawyer. Ludicrously overqualified, logical to a fault. Jen thinks he’s the kind of man Todd might become. The thought hits her with a wave of sadness.