‘Need any painting or decorating done?’ he says, a big, fixed, hopeful smile in place.
‘What, just – spontaneous decorating?’ she says with a dry laugh. Something turns over in his stomach at that laugh. He didn’t expect this. He thought she’d be in on it. He’d thought she’d understand the code.
‘Er, yeah?’ he says.
‘Sure, we’ll just pull all the furniture away from the walls right now then, shall we? Do the legal work while you paint?’
‘Okay, I’m game if you are,’ he says easily.
‘We’re all right, thanks,’ she says. ‘But if we ever want some unplanned decorating done – you’re our man.’
She ignores him, turning her gaze back to her computer.
‘Can I just check with the owner?’ he asks.
‘How do you know I’m not the owner?’
‘Well, are you?’
‘… No.’
They hold each other’s gazes for a second, then explode into laughter. ‘Well, pleased to meet you, not-the-owner,’ he says.
‘Likewise, spontaneous decorator.’
She smiles at him, like they know each other, and shouts over her shoulder. ‘Dad?’ she says. ‘Someone here for you.’ She glances at Ryan just as he heads into her father’s office. ‘I’m Jen.’
‘Kelly.’
Day Minus Seven Thousand One Hundred and Fifty-Seven, 11:00
Jen’s eyes open. Please be 2022. But she knows it isn’t.
Hip bones. An old phone. A really, really old bed, God, it’s that low one that had the wooden sides. Air rushes out of her lungs. It isn’t over.
She sits up and rubs her eyes. Yes. Her flat, her first flat. The one she bought when she’d just started work. She’d put down a three-thousand-pound deposit; laughable in 2022.
It has one bedroom. She gets up and follows the worn path in the tattered brown carpet into the hallway and then into the living room. It’s been made boho by her soft furnishings: a chintzy curtain separates the sitting room from the kitchen, purple cushions line a deep windowsill to disguise the damp. She gazes at it now, in wonder. She’d forgotten almost all of this.
Morning light filters in at the grimy windows.
She checks her phone, but it doesn’t have the date on it. She turns the television on, goes to the news, then to Ceefax. Fucking hell, is this what they used to do to work out the date? It’s March the twenty-sixth, 2003, eleven o’clock in the morning.
It’s six months earlier, and it’s the day after she met Kelly for the first time. Today is the day of their first official date.
She looks at her phone, though she can hardly use it. It can send texts, make calls and she can play Snake on it. She navigates to SMS. Kelly’s last message is right here, in the thread of conversation with a man listed in her contacts as Hot Painter/Decorator? The man who she didn’t know was going to become her husband. Cafe Taco, 5.30pm? From work? xx he wrote, the text blocky and old-fashioned, the screen illuminated a neon calculator-green.
Her reply must be in a separate box, the messages unthreaded. Ancient.
She goes to the sent items. Sure, she’d said, a study in casual language. She doesn’t remember obsessing over it, but she’s sure she will have.
It’s late. She used to binge drink and binge sleep. She feels hung over. She doesn’t remember what she did the night after she first met Kelly, but she presumes it involved alcohol. She runs a finger over the kitchen counters – fake marble – and gazes at her possessions: legal textbooks, but lots of paperbacks with high-heeled women on, too. Candles in jars and stuck in the tops of wine bottles. Two pairs of suit trousers balled up on the floor, pants and socks still visible in them.
She takes a long shower, marvelling at the dirt between the tiles. Funny how we get used to things. She’s sure she never gave it more than a passing thought when she lived here. Just put up with the mould on the windowsills, the constant noise outside, that she had to budget for every penny.
When she’s out, in her towel, she heads to her desktop computer. Something occurred to her in the hot, scented steam and she wants to look it up now.
She presses the spongy button on the front of the machine and waits for it to power up, shower water dripping from the end of her nose and on to her carpet as she sits.
She watches the monitor spring to life and thinks. She had a best friend when she was a trainee, called Alison. Jen wonders if this is why that alias tripped off her tongue so easily, weeks ago. Alison worked at a nearby corporate firm. They used to meet every lunchtime, buy a Pret lunch. Alison would slag off the law. Later, she cross-qualified as a company secretary, and Jen had stayed where she was, divorcing couples, and they had lost touch, the way you sometimes do when a friendship is born out of a common interest only.
It’s so strange to be here again. To know she could dial Alison’s number, now, and catch up. How segmented life is. It splits so easily into friendships and addresses and life phases that feel endless but never, never last. Wearing suits. Dragging a changing bag around. Falling in love.
She blinks as Windows XP loads in front of her. Jesus Christ, it looks like something from an ancient hacker movie. She finds Explorer with difficulty. Her internet is dial-up, and she has to connect. Finally, she goes to Ask Jeeves and types it in: Missing baby, Liverpool.
And there it is. Eve Green. Taken in the back of a stolen car a couple of months ago. So this is why the personal investigator couldn’t find her: she was missing twenty years in the past. Kelly was involved in catching the ring that stole her, but they never found the baby. Kelly kept the poster. He must have shown Todd when he told him about it. That’s why the burner phone, the poster and the badge ended up in Todd’s room. And Kelly discussed it with Nicola, that she was never found.
Jen’s stomach rolls over. A lost baby, lost for twenty years.
She gazes out of the window at Liverpool, hazy in the low, winter-morning sun, trying to understand it. Her father is alive. Her best friend is Alison. In the future, she marries Kelly, the man she will have her first date with tonight and will have a child with, named Todd.
She thinks about the missing baby, Todd, Kelly, a crime ring made up of bad people and undercover people who are sometimes both. And, more than all that: she thinks about how to stop it.
The puzzle isn’t yet complete. Clearly, it isn’t over yet. She’s still here, in the deep past, still with things to do, to solve, and to understand.
In need of some light relief, Jen heads to the mirror and drops her towel, unable to resist looking at her twenty-four-year-old body. Damn, she thinks, two decades too late. She was a ten! But, like everyone, she didn’t appreciate it until it was too late.
At five forty, fashionably late, Kelly arrives in the café. Jen can tell, now that she has known him for twenty years, that he is nervous. He is wearing double denim, light and dark, effortlessly cool, the way he’s always been, that hair turned up at the front. But his gaze is skittish, like a deer’s, and he wipes his hand on his jeans before he comes over.
She stands to greet him. Her body is so slim, it’s so lightweight, like she’s been underwater and just got out. She bumps into fewer things. There is just … less of her. And she’s so supple, so boundlessly energetic, the hangover burned off in minutes, cured with coffee and sunshine.
Kelly leans to kiss her cheek. He smells of tree sap. That smell, that smell, that smell. She’d forgotten. An old aftershave, deodorant, laundry detergent – something. She’d forgotten his smell, and suddenly, she is here, in 2003, in a café, with him, the man she falls in love with.
She looks at him, her young eyes meeting his, and she finds she has to cover up a wave of tears. We do it, she wants to say. Once. In one universe, we make it all the way to 2022, still having sex, still having dates. We have a wonderful, funny, nerdy kid called Todd.