‘I don’t start back until tomorrow, but I said I’d walk with Todd,’ Clio explains.
‘That’s quite enough,’ Todd says. His backpack is over his shoulders just like it was when he was five, eight, twelve. He, too, is tanned. Much healthier-looking than in October. Less burdened. Jen can’t stop looking at him, thinking of his tears last night, his fury. An explosive argument, and now this: a huge leap backwards. What does it mean?
Kelly emerges out of the kitchen but stops when he sees Jen. ‘Are you off work?’ he says to her. ‘I didn’t want to wake you …’
‘I think I’m sick,’ she says spontaneously. ‘I turned my alarm off. Throat like razor blades.’
‘Bunk off. Sod the lawyers,’ Kelly says.
‘An astounding lack of work ethic from the Dad there,’ Todd commentates.
Kelly turns his gaze to Todd. ‘Work hard enough and, one day, you too can bunk off,’ he says.
This phrase isn’t what makes Jen stop, makes her wish she could press pause to absorb this moment. It’s the look that passes between Kelly and Todd. Pure affection. There is nothing barbed under it whatsoever. Their eyes are alight.
When was the last time she saw them interact like this? She can’t remember.
Todd reaches out to shove him, a mock shove. Jen’s gaze lands on them.
Throughout her entire career she has always looked for the absence of things as well as their presence. Evidence is often in what people don’t say. What they take out. The man who fiddles his accounts, trying to bury huge personal profit in twenty-five boxes of disclosure that he hopes the lawyers won’t be bothered to go through.
But she missed it at home. The lack of this easy banter. A clue in itself.
That is why she’s on this day, she thinks. To observe the contrast. The argument she overheard at the gate changed something for them, fractured it. And here she is, before it. And don’t things look completely different?
‘Anyway, nice to meet you,’ Clio says to Jen as Todd ushers her out.
‘Nice to see you again,’ she adds, looking at Kelly. And it’s this sentence that turns Jen’s attention away from Clio, and on to Kelly.
Her eyes meet her husband’s as Todd closes the door behind him. She doesn’t hear his car: they must be walking in the sun together. ‘Nice to see you again?’ she asks him.
‘Huh?’ He’s turned away from her, is heading into the kitchen. She reaches out for him. It’s legitimate. It’s perfectly legitimate to ask this, why Clio would say that to him, she tells herself. But why does she feel the need to think this way? She pauses. Because her husband can be evasive, comes the answer, from somewhere deep within her.
‘Have you met Clio before?’
‘Yeah, she came for lunch with Todd one day.’
‘Did she?’
‘Only for about five minutes. Think I interrogated her,’ he says with a charming smile. She can tell he’s thinking fast.
‘You never said. You never said you’d met her.’
Kelly gives a laconic shrug. ‘Didn’t think it was important.’
‘But you knew it would be important to me,’ she says. She hardly ever challenges her husband in this way. She’s always wanted to be … she doesn’t know. Easy-going. Easy to live with. ‘You know I’ve wondered what she’s like.’ She almost adds that she knows he knows her uncle’s friend. That, later, he asks Todd to stop seeing her, but she stops herself. He will only lie.
‘She’s nice,’ he says. The more she pushes, the more he dodges. She’s never noticed before, this quickstepping of his. Answering a different question. Answering the original question. He goes into the kitchen and opens a can of Coke. The pop of the ring pull sounds like a gunshot, which makes her jump.
Jen considers what to do, then gets dressed, pulling her trainers on. ‘Going to get something for my throat,’ she calls.
‘I’ll go!’ Kelly says, considerate as ever. ‘Or wait – don’t we have that stuff that –’
‘It’s fine,’ she says, slamming the front door behind her before he can object.
She drives to the school then waits in a side-street, watching for Todd and Clio to appear. They do after only five minutes, Truman Show-like, holding hands, their long limbs catching the sun. Clio is wearing a khaki boiler suit that Jen would look like a fat janitor in. Todd is in skinny jeans, no socks, trainers and a white T-shirt. They look like a wholesome advert for vitamins or something.
Jen is going to offer Clio a lift home, and try to pretend she isn’t insane for having followed them here.
She waits for Clio to see Todd in. But first, of course, they kiss. She shouldn’t be looking, a creep in a car, but she can’t stop. Their bodies are pressed together from their feet to their lips, right the way up, like somebody has sealed them. She watches for a second, thinking about Kelly. They still do kiss in this way, sometimes. He is good at that. Maintaining their chemistry, holding her interest. But, nevertheless, it isn’t the same.
When they finally part, Todd loping off with a smirk and a swagger, Jen leaves the side-street and pulls up alongside Clio.
‘I was passing,’ she says. ‘You want a lift?’
Confusion crosses Clio’s features. ‘You’re not on your way to work?’ she says. She has one foot on the pavement, one dangling off the kerb as she looks at Jen in indecision. God, Jen feels like some sort of evil perpetrator, picking up her son’s girlfriend, but … five minutes in the car where she can ask her anything. It’s too tantalizing to pass up.
‘No, no. Came to drop off something for Todd. Heading back now.’
‘Well, sure,’ Clio says happily. Jen is sort of glad to note that Clio is an appeaser, just like Jen herself is. Clio could easily draw a boundary here, but she doesn’t. Instead, she gets in beside Jen. She smells of toothpaste – perhaps Todd’s, Jen thinks darkly – and deodorant. A wholesome sort of smell. She has the trousers of her boiler suit rolled up, revealing smooth, tanned, slim ankles. Jen looks at them, feeling a wave of nostalgia for back then, whenever that is; some unknown time. When she went to pubs, when she kissed boys, when she was slim (never). When she had it all in front of her.
‘Where to?’ Jen says. She doesn’t explain her presence at the gate any further. In some ways, Jen is taking inspiration from her husband, who has been so good at lying that his secrets have been hidden in plain sight. There have been no over-explanations, no details at all, in fact. Only a complete lack of them. The best kind of liar. The smartest.
‘It’s Appleby Road,’ Clio says. A road behind Eshe Road North. Makes sense.
‘Oh, so you don’t live at Eshe Road?’ Jen asks lightly as she indicates and pulls away.
‘No, no,’ Clio says, but she looks surprised that Jen knows her address. That’s right: Jen has never been there. Is never supposed to have been there. ‘Just me and Mum at Appleby.’ Clio doesn’t elaborate, the same as last time.
Jen glances quickly at her as she comes to a stop at a roundabout. Their eyes meet for just a second.
Clio breaks contact, gets her phone out of her jeans pocket, angling her hips up to slide it out. ‘Kelly must think I live on Eshe Road,’ Clio says with a laugh.
Jen tries not to react. ‘Why?’
‘I’m always there, aren’t I?’ She pauses. ‘Kelly and Ezra and Joseph – they go way back, don’t they?’
‘Right, right, yes,’ Jen says. ‘Sorry – so did he … did Kelly introduce you to Todd, then?’
‘Yes, exactly,’ she says. ‘Well – when I came with Joe to drop something off for Kelly, Todd answered the door … and then … has he never said?’
‘Do you know – Kelly has so many friends,’ Jen says: a sentence which is the exact opposite of the truth, ‘I plain forgot.’
Clio turns her gaze to the left and looks out of the passenger window, not understanding the significance of the information she’s imparted.