‘How?’
Clio shrinks back from Jen, drawing her arms around her stomach, folding in on herself, like somebody frail or feeling ill. ‘Sorry,’ she says, barely audibly, taking another step back. ‘I’ll see you soon – okay?’ She closes the door, leaving Jen there, alone.
It latches with a soft click, and through the frosted glass Jen watches Clio retreat.
She turns to leave. As she does so, a police car circles past. Very, very slowly. It’s the pace of it that makes Jen look up at it. The windows are up, the driver looking straight ahead, the passenger – who Jen is sure is the handsome police officer who arrests Todd – looking straight at her. As she walks to her car, defeated by Clio’s reaction, bewildered by the mystery facing her, the car circles back, going the other way.
Jen thinks about what Andy said as she drives away. About her subconscious, about what she knows, about things she might have seen and dismissed as insignificant, and about what she’s here to do. There’s nothing else for it, she thinks, as she drives away. She’s got to ask her son.
‘I have something I want to run by you,’ Jen says conversationally, walking to the corner shop with Todd. He will buy a Snickers. Last time, she bought a bottle of wine, but she’s not in the mood, tonight. They take this walk often. Todd because of his insatiable teenage appetite and – well, the same for Jen, actually.
There will be somebody in the corner shop wearing a trilby, and this trilby is Jen’s trump card. Unpredictable, vivid, true. She is glad she has remembered it. She can use it to convince Todd and then – if nothing else – find out what he would do in this situation. Her brainiac son.
‘Shoot,’ Todd says easily.
They turn down a side-street. The night air smells of other people’s dinners, something Jen finds endlessly nostalgic, reminding her of holidays with her parents to campsites when she was little. She will always remember the distant orange lights of other static caravans, the chink of cutlery, the swirling smoke of barbecues. God, she misses her father. Her mother, too, she guesses, though she hardly remembers her.
‘What would you do if you could time travel? Would you go forwards, or back?’ Jen says, and he looks at her in surprise.
‘Why?’ he asks.
Typically, before she can answer, he does: ‘I’d go back,’ he says, his breath blowing smoke rings out into the night air.
‘How come?’
‘So I could tell past me some stuff.’ He smiles, a private smile at the pavement. Jen laughs softly. Inscrutable Gen-Z-ers.
‘Then,’ he says, ‘I’d just email myself. From past me to future me. Sent on a timer. You can do that on some sites.’
‘Email yourself?’
‘Yeah. You know. Find out whose stocks and shares are going to go through the roof. Then go back in time, do a timed email, from me to me, saying: in September 2006, or whatever, buy shares in Apple.’
I’d just email myself.
Well, it’s something to try. An email, sent, timed, to be received at one o’clock in the morning on the day it happens, on the twenty-ninth, heading into the thirtieth. She will write it so it contains instructions. Get outside, stop a murder. Surely if she had advance warning, she could physically stop Todd?
‘You’re so smart.’
‘Why thank you.’
‘You might wonder why I’m asking,’ she says.
‘Not really,’ he says cheerfully.
She begins to explain travelling backwards, omitting the crime for now.
She is glancing at him all the time as they walk and talk. If she had to predict his response, she would say he will need no convincing. She knows him. She knows him. He – still a kid in so many ways – believes unquestioningly in time loops, in time travel, in science and philosophy and cool maths and exceptional things happening in his life, which he still, in his young mind, believes to be extraordinary.
Todd says nothing for a few seconds, staring at his trainers as they walk through the cold, his features wrinkled. He raises an eyebrow to her. ‘You for real?’ he asks.
‘Completely. Totally.’
‘You’ve seen the future?’
‘I have.’
‘All right then, Mother. So what happens?’ he says jovially, and she’s pretty sure he thinks she’s joking. ‘Meteors, the next pandemic, what?’
Jen says nothing, debating how honest to be.
He looks at her and catches her expression. ‘You’re not actually serious.’
‘I really, really am. You’re about to buy a Snickers. There will be someone in the corner shop wearing a trilby.’
‘… Okay.’ He nods, just once. ‘A time loop. A trilby. You’re on.’ Jen smiles at him, unsurprised he’s isolated the element of the future that he cannot control, that belongs to someone else: the hat.
This is exactly what she thought he would do. He is a much easier person to convince than Kelly.
‘Do you know why?’ he says.
‘Something happens in four days. That I think I need to stop.’
‘What?’ he says again.
‘I – I … it’s not good, Todd. In four days’ time, you kill someone,’ she says. This time, it’s like lighting a bonfire. A tiny spark and then a rush. Todd’s head snaps up to look at her. Jen goes as hot as if she’s standing right by it. What if she makes this happen, by telling him? Surely the knowledge that you can kill is damaging to a person?
No. She has decided to do this and she needs to see it through. He can take it, her son. He likes facts. He likes people to be straight with him.
He doesn’t speak for over a minute. ‘Who?’ he says, the same question he asked the last time.
‘He was a stranger to me. You seemed to know him.’
He doesn’t react. They reach the lit-up shop, next door to a Chinese takeaway, and they stand outside it. Eventually, his eyes meet hers. She’s surprised to see that they’re wet. Just the slightest damp covering. It could be nothing. It could just be the lights of the shops, the cold air. ‘Well, I’d never kill anyone,’ he says, not making eye contact with her. She spreads her arms wide.
‘But you do. He’s called Joseph Jones.’ Her eyes are wet, too, now. Todd runs his gaze over her face, holds a finger up, and goes into the shop. He’s right, of course, he wouldn’t kill someone, unless he had no other choice. She knows him: he would ameliorate, confess. He would do a whole long list of things before killing. This is perhaps the most useful piece of information Jen has landed on.
Seconds later, he’s out, and his body language has completely changed. It’s infinitesimal. As though somebody momentarily pressed pause on his movements, then started him up again. Only a stutter.
‘Trilby,’ he says. A beat. ‘Present and correct.’
‘So you believe me now?’
‘You saw the trilby from down the street, I assume.’
‘I didn’t – Todd, you know that I didn’t.’
‘I would never kill someone. Never, never, never.’ His eyes look up, to the heavens, and Jen is sure – as sure as she can be – that she sees disappointment but also understanding cross his features. Like somebody who’s been told something. Like somebody who’s been told the ending, when they’re right at the beginning. She is blindsided by his reaction. It isn’t time travel that has outsmarted her: it is parenting.
He turns away from her. Jen knows him. He closed up as soon as she told him the details. ‘Why’d you break up with Clio?’
‘None of your business. Back together now, anyway.’
Jen sighs. They walk back in stony silence.
Kelly answers the door before Jen can get out a key. Todd brushes past him without speaking to him, going upstairs. Interestingly, he doesn’t tell Kelly what Jen just told him. Ordinarily, she’s sure they would take the piss together.