‘You going to bag me, then?’ Kelly says, Jen thinks impatiently.
The policeman obliges, and Kelly blows into the breathalyser, standing there by the side of the road as the cars whip by, his hands on his hips. He doesn’t ever drink when he’s driving, not even a pint. This is why Jen didn’t worry. This is why Jen didn’t remember. But look: she’s here. There must be a reason why. Once again, everything points to her husband.
‘Why would they breathalyse people randomly?’ Todd asks.
‘Oh, because some idiots like to drink on bank holidays and then drive.’
Kelly gets back in the car and winds the window up. He must be sitting on the wallet. It can’t be comfortable, but his face gives nothing away. Absolutely nothing.
He flashes Jen a quick, easy look. ‘Jesus, does he know this isn’t LAPD?’ he says.
‘Wasn’t it a bit scary, to be pulled over?’ she asks. ‘I’d always be terrified I’d done something wrong.’
‘Not at all,’ Kelly says mildly.
Jen bites her lip, there in the front seat, a spectator on her own marriage. When was the last time Kelly did tell her something had bothered him? Has he ever? She goes hot, suddenly, in the car. What keeps this man awake at night? What makes him mad? What will he regret on his deathbed? She suddenly finds, in the passenger seat next to the man she has pledged to love for ever, that she can’t answer a single one of these questions.
Jen is sitting in pyjamas, cross-legged, on the velvet sofa. An old lamp is lit, one they get rid of in a few years. Tonight, Jen is glad to be back here, in the past, in the comfortable surroundings she didn’t quite know she had missed.
Kelly’s wallet is in her hands. It’s brown leather, worn at the edges like a dog-eared novel. He has their joint-account card. That’s it – no credit cards, no debit cards of his own. He has three pound coins, his locker token for the gym and his driving licence.
Jen stares at them, spread across her lap. They’re totally normal. What she would expect to find. What illegal item could anybody possibly keep in their wallet, anyway?
She squints down at the ID. The hologram … she isn’t sure. She vaults off the sofa to get her own driving licence, setting them down side by side. Are the holograms the same? She holds them up to the light. No. They’re not exactly the same, no. His is … flatter, somehow.
She googles counterfeited driving licences on her phone.
‘The best way to tell,’ an article says, ‘is to look at the hologram. It cannot be successfully replicated.’ Accompanying it are two photographs: one of a real driving licence, and one of a fake.
The fake hologram looks exactly like the one on Kelly’s.
She can’t deal with this. Finding and finding and finding things which she wishes she could forget. She turns the lamp out, just sitting there in the darkness of the living room, on the comfort of their old sofa, her husband’s forged identity held in her hands.
Day Minus Five Thousand Four Hundred and Twenty-Six, 07:00
Jen is in a different bed. She knows it the same way she knows it’s roughly seven o’clock in the morning, the same way she knows when somebody has been discussing her just before she enters a room, or that a car is about to pull out in front of her. Micro-emotions, are they called that? The abilities humans have to detect small changes. You can’t explain it. You just know. Todd would call it the hindsight paradox, she supposes.
The light looks different. That’s the first tell. No blinds at the bay window. Instead, the room is cast in a grey light, filtered fuzzily through curtains.
It must be the winter. A radiator nearby is on; she can smell the hot metal of it, feel the artificial heat mingling with the chill in the air above the bed.
The mattress feels different. Old and lumpy, from when they had less money. Funny how you get used to having money. It seems easy. You forget what it’s like to live without it, to sleep on shitty mattresses and save up for takeaways.
She’s alone. She lies there in the grey light, just blinking and exhaling a long breath, afraid to look.
She runs a hand down her side, underneath the covers. Yep. Prominent hip bones. She is much younger.
Right. She steels herself, then gets out of bed. The carpet. She knows it instantly. The carpet orients her straight away. She is in her favourite house. The tiny house that sits alone in the valley. She’s chilled by this. To be alone with a man whose identity is fake.
She reaches down to find a mobile phone and is at least glad there is one there waiting for her. She breathes, then checks the date. It is fifteen years prior. It is 2007. December the twenty-first. Jen feels like she might be sick. This is fucked up. This is completely and utterly fucked up. She has a three-year-old. She’s twenty-eight. A giant leap back, skipping aged thirteen to three?
Jen is suddenly so angry that this has happened to her. She strides to the window, wanting to wrench it up, to scream out into the country air, to do something, anything, and – oh. There it is. Her favourite, favourite view. Still in their nomadic, off-grid phase with Kelly, before Todd needed to be settled at a school. In the little house in the valley, a Monopoly hotel of a house, where they never saw anybody.
Maybe it’s that? Maybe this life was damaging for him. Too isolated. She rests her head on the window instead of screaming out of it. How the fuck should she know? There are no fucking clues. Her angry breath mists up the window. Give me a tell, she thinks, staring at the vapour. It clears off, and she looks out. The beauty of the stark landscape, sepia-brown in the winter wilderness. The hills look old, tatty. Proper, untended, wild countryside, long, blond, beachy grasses. She had loved it here, and now she’s back.
She pulls a dressing gown around her, over a pair of tartan pyjamas she doesn’t remember even owning. She can hear Todd and Kelly in the living room. Loud chatter. She isn’t ready yet to go and see them.
Her body remembers the layout of the bungalow. She heads right, into the bathroom, before going through to see them. She needs to see herself first. To know what to expect.
She looks at the miniature striplight above the mirror. Her hand instinctively reaches to tug hard on it. She knows it will resist, that it is stiff, that, later, it breaks entirely. With a ping, she is illuminated.
It’s Jen from photographs. It’s Jen from her wedding day. Jen has looked back at this Jen often, thought wistfully that she didn’t know how great she looked. She’d focused on her strong nose, her wild hair, but, look: bright, clear skin. Cheekbones. Youth. You can’t fake it. There isn’t a single line on her face while it is at rest. She brings a hand to her skin, which yields like bread dough, springy and full of collagen, not the crêpe paper that awaits her at forty.
Jen turns to the door. She can still hear them. She knows that she will find them in the living room, in the December half-light.
‘Jen?’ Kelly calls.
‘Yeah,’ she says, and her voice is higher and lighter than it is in 2022.
‘He wants you!’ Kelly calls, his voice imbued with a harassed tone she remembers well. They were so swept up in it, in the demands of parenting a small child. The Jen of now can hardly remember why it was so difficult, can’t recall the exact details. Only that it was. Only the way her calf muscles ached in bed at night. Only the evidence that remained: toast still in the toaster, uneaten, forgotten in the chaos. Washing hung out at midnight, smelling of damp from too much time in the machine. Weird bodge jobs to make life easier: one time, they put a playpen up around the television to stop Todd turning it off all the time … things they knew to be kind of mad, but did anyway. Things they did just to get by.