Wrong Place Wrong Time Page 3

  She leaves the bathroom and goes down to the kitchen. Mist shrouds the garden beyond their patio doors, erasing the tops of the trees to nothing. Kelly built this kitchen for them a couple of years ago, after she had said – drunk – that she wanted to be ‘the kind of woman who has her shit together, you know, happy clients, a happy kid, a Belfast sink.’

  He presented it to her one evening. ‘Expect to imminently have your shit together, Jen, because you’ve got the sink of dreams here.’

  The memory fades. Jen always advises her stressed trainees to take ten deep breaths and make a coffee, so that’s what she will do herself. She’s trained for this. Two decades in a high-pressure job does give you some skills.

  But as she approaches their marble kitchen island, her footsteps slow. A whole, uncarved pumpkin sits on the side.

  She stops dead. It may as well be a ghost. Jen thinks she might be sick again. ‘Oh,’ she says to nobody, a tiny slip of a word, a giant syllable of understanding. She approaches the pumpkin as though it is an unexploded bomb and turns it around, but it’s whole underneath her fingertips, firm and unharmed, and Jesus Christ last night didn’t happen. It didn’t fucking happen. Relief laps over her. He didn’t do it. He didn’t do it.

  She listens to Todd in his room. Opening and closing drawers, footsteps back and forth, the sound of a zip.

  ‘Back in the real world yet?’ he says, arriving in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs. His arch tone makes Jen jump. She stares at him. His body. He is slimmer than he was a few weeks ago, isn’t he?

  ‘Almost,’ she says automatically. She swallows twice. Her back feels shivery, like she’s ill, adrenalin burning a kind of feverish panic.

  ‘Well, good …’

  ‘I guess I had a horrible dream.’

  ‘Oh, bummer,’ Todd says simply, as though something could explain her confusion so easily.

  ‘Yeah. But – look. In it – you killed somebody.’

  ‘Wow,’ he says, but something shifts, just slightly, beneath the surface of his expression, like a fish swimming deep in an ocean, unseen, apart from the ripples created by it. ‘Who?’ he says, which Jen thinks is a strange initial question. She is accustomed to seeing clients not tell the complete truth, and that is what this looks like to her.

  He reaches to pull his dark hair back from his forehead. His T-shirt rides up, exposing the waist she used to hold when he was tiny and wriggly, just learning to sit up, to bounce, to walk. She’d thought motherhood was so boring at the time, so unrewarding, the hours and hours dedicated to the same tasks in a variety of orders. But it wasn’t, she now knows; to say so is like saying breathing is boring.

  ‘A grown man. Like, a forty-year-old.’

  ‘With these puny limbs?’ Todd says, holding a slim arm up theatrically.

  Kelly once said to her, late at night, ‘How did we come to raise an over-confident geek?’ and they’d had to muffle their giggles. Kelly’s dry wit is the thing Jen loves the most about him. She’s so glad Todd has inherited it.

  ‘Even with those,’ she says. But she thinks: You didn’t need muscle. You had a weapon.

  Todd shoves his bare feet into a pair of trainers. Right as he does it, Jen remembers this taking place on Friday morning. She’d marvelled at how he didn’t feel the October chill, worried his ankles would get cold at school. Worried, too – shamefully – that people would think she was a shit mother, that she was – what, exactly? Anti-socks? Jesus, the things she stresses over.

  But she had. She remembers.

  A frisson moves across her shoulders. Todd grabs the doorhandle, and Jen recalls the déjà vu. No. She’s fine. She’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Forget it. There’s no evidence any of it happened.

  Until there is.

  ‘I’m going straight to Clio’s after school. If she’ll have me. I’ll eat there.’ His tone is short. He’s telling her, not asking her; the way it’s been lately.

  And that is when it happens. The words are on Jen’s lips, as natural as a spring bubbling from the earth, the exact same sentence she uttered yesterday. ‘More oysters in buckets?’ she says. The first time Todd went to Clio’s for dinner they’d had actual oysters. He’d sent her a photo of one, its entrance prised open, balanced on the tips of his fingers, captioned: You said I needed to open up more?

  She waits for Todd’s reply. That he’s pretty sure they will have something low-key like foie gras.

  He flashes her a grin which cuts through the tension. ‘I’m pretty sure we’ll just have something low-key, like, you know, foie gras.’

  She cannot. She cannot deal with this. This is madness. Her heart feels like it’s going to pound itself into a cardiac arrest.

  Todd picks up his bag. Something about the movement of it thumping on to his shoulder unnerves her further. It looks heavy.

  The thought arrives, fully formed, right then. What if the weapon is in that bag? What if the crime is going to happen? What if it wasn’t a dream, but a premonition?

  Jen goes hot and then cold. ‘Was that your computer I heard?’ she says, eyes to the ceiling. ‘It made a noise.’

  It’s laughably easy to make a teenager go to check a device, and Jen feels a guilty pathos, for just a second, as she watches his feet trip over each other in his rush to go and investigate. It’s habitual, a residual sympathy she’s always felt for Todd – too much, at times, getting involved with school-gate drama when he was left out of any social occasion – but, today, it feels misplaced. She’s seen him kill.

  Whatever it is she feels, it isn’t enough to stop her looking.

  Front pockets, side pockets. It’s a good distraction to be taking action. She hears Todd humming upstairs in that way that he does when he’s impatient. ‘’Sake,’ he says.

  Two chemistry textbooks, three loose pens. Jen puts them on the hallway floor and continues searching.

  ‘No notifications,’ he shouts. His tone is irritated again. Just recently, she’s felt like a nuisance around him.

  ‘Sorry,’ she calls, thinking, Give me one fucking minute, just one, just one. ‘Must’ve misheard.’

  The bottom of the bag is lined with the crumbs from a thousand sandwiches.

  But what’s this? Right in the back? A sheath, a leather sheath. It’s as cold and hard as a thigh bone, sitting right there against the back of her son’s rucksack. She knows what it will be before she pulls it out.

  A long leather pouch. She exhales, then unbuttons the top and slides a handle out.

  And – inside it … a knife. The knife.

  Day Minus One, 08:30

  Jen stands there, staring at it, at this betrayal in her hand. She hadn’t thought what she would do if she found something. She never thought she would.

  She holds the long, sinister black handle.

  The panic begins again, a tide of anxiety that goes out to sea but always, always returns. She wrenches open the under-stairs cupboard. Shoes and sports equipment and canned goods they can’t fit in the kitchen crowd out and she fumbles past them, pushing the knife right to the back. She can hear Todd on the landing. She leans the knife against the back wall and retreats out of the cupboard, tidying up the rest of his things back into the bag.

  Todd – disgruntled smile, young Kelly written across his features – picks up the bag. He doesn’t seem to notice the difference, the lightness of it. Jen stares at him as he opens the front door. Her son, armed, so he thinks, and with intent. Her son who thrust that knife with such force it split another person’s torso right open in three places. He throws a look over his shoulder, suspicious, and Jen thinks for a second that he might know what she’s done.

  He leaves, and Jen climbs the stairs and watches his car from the picture window. As he drives off, she’s sure she sees his eyes flick up to the rear-view mirror and meet hers, for just the briefest of moments, like a butterfly landing and leaving before you even notice, flapping its wings only once.

  ‘I found a knife in Todd’s bag,’ Jen says, the second her husband arrives home. She doesn’t explain the rest, not yet. She’s spent the day swinging between panic and rationalization. It was nothing, it was a dream, it’s something, it’s a living nightmare. She’s mad, she’s mad, she’s mad.

  Kelly’s face shuts down immediately, as Jen expected it might.

  He approaches her, picking the blade up and holding it across his hands as if it is some kind of archaeological find. His pupils have gone huge. ‘What did he say? When you found it?’ His tone is frosty.

  ‘He doesn’t know.’

  Kelly nods, staring down at the long, sharp blade, not saying anything. Jen remembers his angry behaviour from last night and thinks that, now, he just looks withdrawn instead.

  ‘It’s a brand-new knife,’ he says now, flicking his eyes to her. ‘I’m going to fucking kill him.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Unused.’

  Jen laughs, a hard, unhumorous laugh. ‘Right.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s just – I mean, I saw Todd stab somebody with this last night.’

  ‘What …’ he says, the word not lilting upwards, not a question, just a statement of disbelief.

  ‘Yesterday, I waited up for Todd and he – he knifed someone, on the street. You were there, too.’

  ‘But …’ Kelly rubs a hand over his chin. ‘But I wasn’t. You weren’t. You said that was a dream.’ He flashes her a quick smile. ‘Have you gone to madtown?’ he says, their abbreviation for neuroses.

  Jen turns away from him. Outside, their neighbour walks his dog past. Jen knows his phone is about to ring, remembers it from yesterday, but it does so before she can say it to Kelly. She needs to think of something else that’s about to happen to prove it to Kelly, but she can’t, she can’t think o
f anything except how has she woken up here, in some alternative, scary universe.

  ‘I was awake,’ she says, turning her gaze from the neighbour, thinking of all of the items that would be considered circumstantial evidence that yesterday didn’t happen: the smooth, uncut pumpkin, her son’s presence in the bedroom, the absence of any blood or police tape on the street outside. But then she thinks of the knife. That knife is the only piece of tangible proof she has.

  ‘Look, I didn’t see anything last night. We’ll just ask him about it. When he gets back,’ Kelly says. ‘It’s a criminal offence. So … we can tell him that.’

  Jen nods, saying nothing. What can she possibly say?

  ‘Get out from under my feet,’ Kelly says. He is addressing their cat, Henry VIII, so called because he has been obese from the day they rescued him.

  Jen, lounging on the sofa in their kitchen, winces. Kelly said exactly the same thing on Friday night. The first Friday night. He gave in then, fed Henry, said, ‘Fine, but know that I am judging you.’

  She gets to her feet and paces past Kelly. She can’t. She can’t just sit here and let a day play out that she’s already lived.

  ‘Where you off to?’ Kelly says to her, amused. ‘You look so stressed you actually just created a breeze as you came past me.’ Then, to the meowing cat: ‘Fine, but know that I am judging you.’ He opens a packet of Felix. Heat travels up Jen’s chest. She can feel a panicked blush rise through her neck and to her cheeks.

  ‘This all happened,’ she says. ‘This has all happened before. What’s going on?’ She sits down on the sofa and pulls uselessly at her clothes, trying to escape her own body, trying to express something impossible. If she hadn’t already lost her mind, she certainly looks as though she has now.

  ‘The knife?’

  ‘Not the knife, I only found the knife today,’ she says, knowing that this won’t make any sense to anyone but her. ‘Everything else. I have experienced everything else that’s happening. I have lived this day twice now.’

  Kelly sighs as he finishes feeding Henry and opens the freezer door. ‘This is mad even for you,’ he says sardonically. Jen tilts her head, looking up at him from her position on the sofa.

  They’d argued the first time they lived this night, about holidays. Jen always wanting to go on them, Kelly refusing to fly. A plane he was on once dropped five thousand feet during turbulence, he told her early on in their relationship. He’s not flown since. ‘You’re not remotely an anxious person,’ Jen had said. ‘Well, I am about this,’ he’d said, before getting a Magnum out of the freezer.

  ‘I know you’re about to eat a Magnum,’ she says now, but Kelly’s hand is already on the freezer.

  ‘However did you guess that?’ he says. ‘She’s a psychic,’ he says to the cat.

  Kelly leaves the kitchen. She knows he will go upstairs to shower.

  As he walks past her, he trails his fingers so lightly along her upper back that it makes her shiver. She meets his eyes. ‘You’re fine,’ he says. She wishes she hadn’t been so anxious in the past. She raises her hand to grasp his just as he’s leaving, as she has a thousand times before. His hand is her anchor, a woman alone, out at sea. And then he’s gone. If he is worried about the knife, or what she’s been saying, he doesn’t say. It isn’t his style.

  Jen puts on Grey’s Anatomy and leans back on the sofa, alone, trying to relax.

  Jen and Kelly met almost twenty years ago. He walked into her father’s law firm asking if they wanted any decorating done. Jeans slung low on his waist, a slow, knowing smile when his eyes landed on Jen. Her father had turned him down, but Jen had gone for lunch with him, more by accident than anything else. He’d walked out with her, at twelve o’clock, and they’d seen the rain-slicked pub opposite had a two-for-one offer on. All through the lunch, then pudding, then coffee, Jen kept saying she ought to get back, but they seemed to have so much to say to each other. Kelly asked her interested question after interested question. He’s the best listener she knows.

  She remembers almost everything about that date. It had been late March, absurdly cold and wet, and yet, as Jen sat there, at a little table in the corner of a pub with Kelly, the sun had come out from behind the dense cloud, just for a minute or two, and illuminated them. And, right then, it had felt, suddenly, like spring, even though it began to rain again only minutes later.

  They’d shared an umbrella from the pub back to the office. She’d let him leave with it, a totally deliberate act, and when he brought it into the office the following Monday, he left his keys on her desk.

  That date has come to define Jen’s sense of time. Each March, she feels it. The smell of a daffodil, the way the sun slants sometimes, green and fresh. An open window reminds her of them, in bed together, their legs entwined together, their torsos separate, like two happy mermaids. Each spring, she’s back there: rainy March, with him.

  Jen finds comfort, now, watching Grey’s Anatomy, as she has many times, in the cardiothoracic wing of the Seattle Grace Hospital, and in taking off her bra. Maybe this is her fault, she thinks, watching the television but not really watching it, too. She always found motherhood so hard. It had been such a shock. Such a vast reduction in the time available to her. She did nothing well, not work nor parenting. She put out fires in both for what felt like a decade straight, has only recently emerged. But maybe the damage is already done.

  It’s a dream, that’s all, she tells herself. Yes. Conviction fires up through her chest. Of course it was a dream.

  She turns Grey’s Anatomy off. The news replaces it automatically. She remembers this segment, about Facebook privacy settings being reviewed. The next one will be about an epilepsy drug being tested on laboratory mice. It’s hardly proof of time travel but, nevertheless, it pops up.

  ‘A new trial of a drug in the …’

  Jen turns off the television, leaves the kitchen and goes into the hallway. Upstairs, the shower is running, just like she knew it would be. She’s got to be able to use this stuff to convince somebody. Surely?

  She gets the knife out of the downstairs cupboard and inspects it. Unused, just as Kelly said.

  She sits on the bottom stair, waiting for Todd, the knife across her lap. Waiting up for him once more. But this time, she’s waiting for an explanation. Waiting for the truth.

  ‘I found this,’ Jen says, and something small and spiteful within her is glad to be having a new conversation, and not one she has lived before. She extends the knife out to Todd. He doesn’t take it.

  There are a million tells: his brow drops, he licks his lips, he shifts his weight on his feet. He says nothing and everything. ‘It’s a mate’s,’ he says eventually.

  ‘That is the oldest lie in the book,’ Jen says. ‘Do you know how many times lawyers have heard that?’ She swallows down more stomach acid. His shiftiness has confirmed it for her. It happens. It happens, tomorrow.

  ‘What are you doing, gulping like that?’ Todd says with an indolent shrug. This is how he has been lately, Jen finds herself thinking as she stares at the floor and tries not to be sick again. A boy full of secrets. She finds his shrugging presence sinister now, tonight.

  ‘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.