Day Minus Five Hundred and Thirty-One, 08:40

Day Minus Five Hundred and Thirty-One, 08:40

It’s May, but May the previous year. This isn’t right, how far back she is. She’s got to speak to Andy. To ask what to do. To stop it. To slow it down.

Jen descends the stairs and can tell just from the light and the noise of the house – Kelly cooking, Todd chattering away – that it’s a weekend. She stops on the penultimate step, just listening to her husband and her son’s easy banter.

‘That would be uninterested,’ Todd is saying. ‘Disinterested means impartial.’

‘Why, thanks, OED,’ Kelly says. ‘I actually did mean impartial.’

‘No you didn’t!’ Todd says, and they both explode with laughter.

Jen walks into the kitchen. ‘Morning, beautiful,’ Kelly says easily. He flips a pancake. The scene looks so normal. But … the photograph. He has some relative, out there, that he’s never told her about.

It’s painful to look at him, like looking at an eclipse. Jen can feel herself squinting. ‘What?’ he says again.

Her gaze goes back to Todd. He is a child, a kid, an adolescent. Huge feet and hands, big ears, goofy teeth that haven’t yet settled and straightened. Four spots on his cheeks. Not a sniff of facial hair. He’s short.

She drifts over to where Kelly is flipping the pancakes.

‘So you were saying you are impartial to my computer game?’ Todd asks Kelly.

Kelly’s black hair catches the sunlight as he adds more pancake batter to a pan. ‘Yeah – that’s what I meant.’

‘I smell bullshit.’

‘All right, all right,’ Kelly holds his hand up. ‘Thanks for the lesson. I meant uninterested. You shitbag.’

Todd giggles, a high, childlike giggle, at his father. ‘Just think – you could’ve had two of me, if you’d had another. A double pain in the arse,’ Todd says.

‘Yeah,’ Kelly says, something old and whimsical crossing his features for just a second. He always wanted another child.

‘You’re more than enough,’ Jen says to Todd.

‘Hey, we’re all only children,’ Todd says, reaching for a banana and unpeeling it. ‘I never thought of that before.’ Jen watches Kelly closely. Is it this conversation? Is that why she’s here?

He says nothing, busying himself in the kitchen. ‘We are,’ he says casually after a second or two.

Jen looks out at the garden. May. May 2021. She cannot believe it. Early-morning sunbeams funnel down, like shafts from heaven. Their old shed is still out there, the one they had before they got the little blue one. Jen is wondering if anybody else could tell two Mays apart, just from the way the light hits the grass.

‘Right, I need to shower,’ she says.

She goes to the very top of the house, where she sits on the exact centre of their double bed and uses a phone she had too long ago to google and dial Andy’s number.

‘Andy Vettese.’

Jen goes through the usual spiel hurriedly. The dates, the conversations they have already had. Andy keeps up in the way that he does, his silence somewhat misanthropic, but avid, Jen thinks. She tells him about the Penny Jameson in the future. He says he was being put forward for it.

He seems to believe her. ‘Okay, Jen. Shoot. What do you want to ask?’

‘I just – it’s eighteen months before,’ she says, trying to turn her attention back to the task at hand.

‘Do the days you’re landing on have anything in common?’

‘Sometimes … I always learn something. But …’ She cradles the phone between her shoulder and her ear and rubs her hands down her legs. She’s freezing cold. She has very old nail polish on, an apricot shade she went through a phase of loving but dislikes now. ‘So many things ought to have worked to stop it that haven’t.’

‘Maybe it isn’t about stopping it.’

‘Huh?’

‘You say he’s bad, right? This Joseph? Maybe it’s not about stopping his murder.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, if you stop it, seems like you have another problem.’

‘Huh?’

‘Maybe it isn’t about stopping it but about understanding it. So you can defend it. You know? If you know the why, then you could tell a court that.’

Jen’s ears shiver after he’s finished speaking. Maybe, maybe. She is a lawyer, after all. ‘Yes. Like, it was self-defence, or provocation.’

‘Exactly.’

Jen wishes she could go back to Day Zero, just once, to watch it again, knowing everything she knows now.

‘I don’t know if I told you this in the future, but I always tell my wannabe time travellers the same thing: if you seek me out in the past, tell me you know that my imaginary friend was called George, at school. Nobody knows that. Well – apart from the travellers I’ve told. So far, nobody has ever come to tell me.’

‘I’ll tell you,’ Jen says, moved by this personal piece of information. By this clue, by this shortcut, by this hack.

She thanks him and says goodbye.

‘Any time,’ he says. ‘Speak to you yesterday.’

Jen smiles a wan, sad smile, hangs up, and thinks about today. It’s all she has, after all.

Today. May 2021.

May 2021. Something is creeping towards her consciousness, like a fine mist gathering on the horizon.

It hits as some thoughts sometimes do. It arrives without warning. She checks her phone. Yes. She’s right. It is the sixteenth of May 2021.

That’s when it lands.

Like a sucker punch, so violent it knocks her off her feet momentarily: today is the day her father dies.

Jen pretends to resist the urge to do it. She’s not travelling back in order to see her father, to right one of the big wrongs in her life, she tells herself as she straightens her hair. She’s not doing this to say goodbye to him. She’s here to save her son.

But all morning she thinks of that morgue goodbye, just her and his dead body, his hand cold and dry in hers, his soul someplace else.

She watches Todd play Crash Team Races Nitro-Fueled – their game du jour – while fiddling madly, crossing and uncrossing her legs. Eventually, Todd goes, ‘What?’ to her, and she wanders off, leaving him to it.

She googles Kelly on her phone while standing in the hallway. There is nothing, no online footprint at all. She puts his surname into an ancestry site, but it throws up hundreds of results around the UK. She finds a photograph of Kelly and reverse-image searches it, but nothing comes up.

She drifts upstairs. Kelly is doing his accounts. ‘I’m being patronized by Microsoft,’ he says to her. Cup of coffee on a coaster. Small smile on his face. As she approaches, he angles the computer just ever so slightly away from her. She catches it this time. Must have missed it the first.

Maybe he has another income stream somewhere. Drugs, dead policemen, crime. Does he have more money than a painter/decorator ought to? Not really. Not a lot, she doesn’t think. Nothing she’s ever noticed – and wouldn’t she have? A memory springs up from nowhere. Kelly having given money to charity, a couple of years ago. Buckets of it, several hundred pounds. He hadn’t told her, and when asked he had explained it as anonymous philanthropy thanks to a good job that had come in. It had bothered Jen in that intangible way it does when your husband lies to you, even about something benign. The lie hadn’t been bigger than what it was, but, nevertheless, it had been one.

‘Hey, strange question,’ she says lightly. ‘But do you have any living relatives? You know, a cousin, once removed …’

Kelly frowns. ‘No? Parents were only children,’ he says quickly.

‘Not even a very distant relative, up another generation maybe?’

‘… No. Why?’

‘Realized I’d never asked about the wider family. And I got this – this weird memory of seeing an old photograph of you. You were with this man who had your eyes. He was thicker set than you. Same eyes. Lighter hair.’

Kelly appears to experience a full-body reaction to this sentence, which he disguises by standing up abruptly. ‘No idea,’ he says. ‘I don’t think – do I even have any old photographs? You know me. Unsentimental.’

Jen nods, watching him and thinking how untrue this is. He is not at all unsentimental.

‘Must’ve made it up,’ she says. They’re just eyes. Perhaps it’s only a friend in the photograph.

Jen meets those blue irises and suddenly feels as alone as she ever has in her entire life. She is supposed to be forty-three, but, here, she is forty-two. She’s supposed to be in the autumn, but she’s in a spring, eighteen months before. And her husband isn’t who he says he is, no matter what time zone she’s in.

And her father is alive.

Her father who loves her unconditionally, even if that is in his own way. Just as Jen feels she must examine her own parenting in order to save her son, she wants, now, to turn to the person who raised her.

‘I’m going to go see Dad,’ she says. It comes from nowhere. She can’t resist. She needs to feel his warm hand in hers. She needs to watch him lay out the beer and the peanuts that he dies beside. She won’t stay. She’ll just – she’ll just tell him she loves him. And then leave.

‘Oh, cool,’ Kelly says. ‘Have fun,’ he calls, as she races down the stairs. ‘Say hi from me.’

Kelly and her father have always had a cordial relationship, but never close. Jen thought Kelly might search for a father figure, adopt hers willingly, but, actually, he did the opposite, always keeping Ken at arm’s length, the way he does with most people.

She calls her dad from the car, part of her brain still thinking he won’t answer.

But, of course, he does. And this proves to Jen, above almost anything else, that this is really happening. It really is.

‘A nice surprise,’ Jen’s father says to her. And there he is, on the end of the line. Back from the dead. His voice – posh, reserved, but mellowed into humour with age. Jen leans into it like a captive animal feeling a breeze after so long, too long.

‘Up to much? Thought I’d come over,’ Jen says, her voice thick.

‘Sure. I’ll put the kettle on.’

She closes her eyes into the phrase she has heard a hundred thousand times, but not for eighteen long months.

‘Okay,’ she says.

‘Great.’ He sounds happy. He is lonely, old, dying, too, though he doesn’t know it yet.

Everything Jen knows tells her that she shouldn’t be here. All the fucking movies would agree. She should only change things that might stop the crime, right? Not get too eager, so selfish that she tries to alter other things, too. To play God.

But she can’t resist.

He lives in a double-fronted Victorian house, three storeys high including the loft conversion. Double sash windows either side of the front door, dark-wood frames. Old-fashioned, but charmingly so. Like him.

She stares at him in wonder as he steps back, gesturing to let her inside. That arm. Full-bodied, warm-blooded, actually attached to her father’s alive body. ‘What …?’ he says, a mystified expression crossing his features.

‘Oh, nothing,’ she says, ‘I … I’m having a strange day is all.’

Her father remained in the matrimonial home after her mother died. He’d insisted, and she had nobody to help her convince him. The life of the only child. He told her the stairs would be fine, that he would still keep the gutters clear himself. And neither the gutters nor the stairs killed him, in the end.

‘How so?’

‘It’s nothing,’ Jen says, shaking her head and following him down the hallway that seems smaller, somehow, now that she is an adult. A very specific feeling settles over Jen when she comes here. A kind of just-out-of-reach nostalgia, covered in a fine film of dust, as though she might be able to grasp hold of the past if only she could try hard enough. And now here she is, right here, the spring of the year before her son becomes a murderer, the day her father dies, but it doesn’t feel like it.

‘You sure?’ he says to her. A backward glance as they move through the tired lounge. Sage-green carpets, hoovered carefully, but nevertheless grey-black at their edges. She’d never noticed that before. Perhaps she inherited her disdain of housework from him.

A round grey rug with geometric shapes on it. Ornaments he’s had for decades sit on various dark-wood shelves that jut out above fireplaces and radiators.

He switches on the kitchen light even though it’s the middle of the day. A striplight. It hums to life. ‘Did Morris vs Morris settle?’ he asks, a raise of his eyebrows. He pronounces the vs as and, the way all lawyers do.

‘I …’ She hesitates. She can’t remember at all, obviously.

‘Jen! You said it would!’

She tilts her head, looking up at him. This. She’d forgotten. Don’t all familial irritations get subsumed by grief, in the end? This sort of exchange would have annoyed her then, but it doesn’t today. She’s just pleased to be here, in the arena, not cast out by death.

‘Sorry – I’m tired.’

‘You’ve got four days before they take it off the table,’ he says. Suddenly, with the benefit of hindsight, she can see precisely where some of her insecurities have come from: here. In adulthood, she gravitated away from people like her father, made friends with misanthropic types like Rakesh, like Pauline. Married Kelly. They allow her to be the real, true her.

‘I know – it’ll be fine. We’ll settle it on Monday,’ she says.

‘What does the client think about the offer?’

‘Oh, I can’t remember.’ She waves a hand, wanting the conversation to be over. It wasn’t an idyll, was it, working together? It was hard sometimes, like this. Her father, driven, devoted, a stickler for detail. Jen, driven too, but more to help people than anything else.

She vividly recalls attending an important joint-settlement meeting with her father, who huffed when she didn’t have one form or other and she’d texted, My dad is a twat, over and over to Pauline, who sent back emojis. She almost laughs, now, it’s so bittersweet. The children we are with our parents.

‘Sorry – not sleeping well,’ she says, meeting his eyes. ‘I’ll be better on Monday. I promise.’

‘You look like – I don’t know. Yes – you look like when Todd was tiny and you never rested.’

Jen smiles a half-smile. ‘Remember those days.’

‘You can sleep anywhere when you have a baby, you’re so tired,’ he says wistfully. Just like that, a prism held to the light, he shows another facet of himself. He had always been competitive, repressed, but in the years leading up to his death he had mellowed somewhat, began to allow himself to feel, to reveal an oozing, doughy version of himself; a better grandfather than he was a parent. They got so little time together.

‘When I had you, I fell asleep at some traffic lights, once.’

‘I never knew that,’ she says.

An eerie sensation settles across Jen’s back, like a window’s open somewhere letting in cold air. What is she doing here? She shouldn’t be doing this. Finding out things she can never forget.

‘I’ve never said,’ he explains. ‘You never want your child to feel like they were a burden.’ He says this second sentence with evident difficulty, biting his lip as he finishes and looks at her. They’re standing in his dining room, in between his living room and kitchen. The light outside is beautiful, illuminating a shaft of dust in front of his patio doors.

‘No, I’m the same with Todd.’

‘It’s hard to have a baby. Nobody says.’ Her father shrugs, seemingly pleased to be passing what he regards as a normal day with his daughter.

‘Was I in the car with you?’

‘No. No!’ he says with a laugh. ‘I was on the way to work. God, it was – something else, those newborn days. Sometimes I wanted to call the authorities up and say, Do you know how hard it is to have a newborn?’

‘I thought Mum did it all.’

He turns his mouth down and shakes his head. ‘I’m afraid to say that Little Jen took over the house with those screams.’

She blinks as she watches him walk into the kitchen, where he painstakingly boils his stovetop kettle in that way that he always has. Full to the brim – damn the planet – the lid replaced carefully with a shaking hand. She hasn’t seen that kettle for so long. They sold this house a year ago. She hardly kept anything from it.

The kitchen smells antiquated. Of tannin and musk, a caravan sort of smell.

‘Why the lack of sleep?’ he asks.

‘A fight with Kelly,’ she says, which she supposes is true. She waves a hand as tears come to her eyes. She’s still thinking about the traffic lights. God, the things we do for our kids.

Her father doesn’t say anything, just allows Jen to speak, there, standing on the worn tiles. She meets his eyes, exactly like hers. Todd doesn’t even have these eyes, these brown eyes. Todd has Kelly’s. That’s the deal you make when you have children with someone.

‘What happened?’ her father says. Not a sentence he would’ve uttered twenty years ago. The kettle begins to bubble, rocking gently on the hob. Her father keeps his eyes on hers, ignoring it, like it is a distant tremor.

‘Oh, just the usual marital fight,’ she says thickly. What else could she say? Tell the whole vast story, from Day Zero to here, Day Minus Five Hundred – or thereabouts?

He leans against the counter opposite her. It’s the same kitchen it always was. Eighties-style, off-white Formica, fake oak. There’s a comfort in the tired quality. Cabinets containing crystal glasses he no longer uses. A floral plastic tea tray that will house a ready meal each night.

‘Kelly has been lying to me,’ she says.

‘About what?’

‘He’s involved in something dark. Maybe always has been.’

Her father waits a beat, then makes more of a noise than utters a word. ‘Huh.’ He brings a hand to his mouth. Age spots. Jen’s relieved to see them, to still be here, in the relative present. ‘What kind of thing?’

‘I don’t know. He’s meeting a criminal, I think,’ she says.

Her father’s eyes darken. ‘Kelly is a good person,’ he says firmly.

‘I know. But you’re never – you know.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t feel like you – you really ever liked each other?’

‘He is good to you,’ her father says, sidestepping her question.

Jen laughs sadly. ‘I know.’

She thinks of the house and the photograph again. She can’t figure it out, and neither can she figure out how to figure it out. It’s a locked mystery to her.

‘Remember that first day he came into the firm?’

‘For sure,’ Jen says immediately, but that’s all she wants to say. March belongs to her and Kelly, even if the memory has been eroded now. It means so much to them he inked it on his skin only a few months later. He hadn’t told her he was going to get the tattoo done. Had disappeared in the middle of the day, come home without saying anything. It was only when she undressed him that she discovered it; their shared legacy.

‘Remember all the scrappy work we did back then?’ she says.

It had been the early days of the firm when her father had taken Jen on as their trainee – a recipe for dysfunction if ever there was one. He had trained at a Magic Circle firm in the City but wanted to run his own firm, so moved home to Liverpool, head full of mergers, acquisitions and ambition. After her mother died – cancer, in the nineties – he had set up Eagles. Why he hadn’t called it Legal Eagles, Jen had never understood.

In those early days they had taken any work going, had stretched themselves to the limits of their expertise to avoid being late on the rent. They’d do powers of attorney alongside residential conveyancing alongside personal-injury claims. ‘Drafting codicils with the textbook under the desk across my knees,’ he says with a laugh.

Jen smiles sadly. ‘Do you remember the timeshare conveyances we did?’ she adds, happy to reminisce.

‘What’s that?’ her father says, but there is something strange about his tone. Something performative, as though somebody is watching.

‘Yeah – remember we did timeshare conveyances, and we had to keep that mad list of whose slot was when?’

‘Did we?’

‘Of course we did!’ Jen says, momentarily confused. Her father has a phenomenal ability to recall events from the past. She must have misunderstood, the memory not quite what she thought.

‘I don’t think so. But weren’t those the days, anyway?’ he says. ‘Pizzas in the office …’

Jen nods. ‘Sure were,’ she says, though it’s a lie.

‘And then it kind of all tipped over, didn’t it?’

‘Yeah.’ She remembers the spring when she met Kelly. The firm had finally started earning money. A few big client wins. They hired a secretary, and Patricia in Accounts. And now look at it. A hundred employees.

‘Stay for dinner?’ he says to her, pouring out two cups of tea.

She hesitates, looking at him. It’s four o’clock. He has between three and nine hours to live. Their eyes meet.

She takes her steaming mug wordlessly from him and sips it, buying time. She knows she shouldn’t do it. Don’t change other things. Stick to what you are supposed to be doing. Don’t play the lottery. Don’t kill Hitler. Don’t deviate.

But her mouth is opening to answer on her behalf. ‘Love to,’ she says, so quietly she hopes the universe might not hear if she says it under her breath, just to him, no witnesses, a private communication from daughter to father. She wants to stop being alone, just for a while, to stop figuring out all the incomprehensible clues, never moving forwards, only backwards, backwards, backwards, a game of snakes and ladders with only snakes.

‘What’re we having?’ she adds.

Her father shrugs, a happy shrug. ‘Whatever,’ he says. ‘Another person just sort of makes life feel official, doesn’t it? Even if we just have beans on toast.’

Jen knows exactly what he means.

It’s five past seven. Jen and her father have put a fish pie he’d had frozen for ‘God knows how long’ in the oven. She should be leaving, she should be leaving, she keeps thinking, her rational brain imploring her with a kind of panicky reasoning, but his feet – in slippers – are crossed at their ankles and he’s put Super Sunday on, and he’s so close to it, and she can’t leave him, she can’t, she can’t.

‘Might put a garlic bread in the oven, too,’ her father says. ‘I can eat for England these days. You know, your mum hated garlic. Says she ate too much of it in pregnancy.’

‘Did she?’ Jen says, getting up. ‘I’ll put it in.’

‘God, I hate Super Sunday. Vacuous.’ He begins channel-hopping.

‘Let’s watch Law and Order and criticize the procedure,’ Jen says over her shoulder.

‘Now you’re talking,’ her father says, navigating to the Sky menu. ‘Get me a beer, too,’ he says. ‘And some peanuts for while we wait.’

The hairs on the back of Jen’s neck rise up, one by one, like little sentries.

‘Sure,’ she says. She walks into the quiet of the kitchen and puts the garlic bread in the oven. The interior lamp illuminates her socked feet.

The beer is already chilling in the door of the fridge.

‘Help yourself to whatever,’ he calls through.

Jen finds the peanuts in a cupboard which seems to contain just about everything – orange squash, two avocados, chocolate-covered raisins, teabags, Mint Club biscuits – and brings them through for him.

‘I didn’t know Mum ate garlic when she was pregnant.’

‘Oh yes, tons of the stuff. Even raw, sometimes. She’d stick a few cloves in a roast chicken and eat them one by one,’ her father says. Jen can just imagine it. A woman she lost too soon, eating garlic cloves at the kitchen counter, greasy fingers, Jen inside her body. Todd inside Jen’s. Todd’s potential, anyway.

‘She said she overdid it. We always said’ – he takes the beer and peanuts from her in one hand, one deft movement. God, he is so healthy – ‘she wouldn’t eat her favourite foods in pregnancy if we had another, so she didn’t get put off.’

He leans forward and lights the fire. He wasn’t found with the fire on, a garlic bread and a fish pie in the oven. These are all changes Jen has made. It lights easily, zipping along from left to right, like words appearing on a typewritten page. The room is immediately filled with the soft, hot smell of gas.

Jen sits down next to it on a stool her mother embroidered the top of that her father has kept, no snack or drink for her, just watching him. Waiting.

What do you say to somebody when you know they will be your last words to them? You just … you don’t, you don’t leave, do you? Anxiety rushes over Jen like the fire her father has just lit, making her hot. She was never going to leave. How could she possibly leave him all alone?

And what if this could stop it? Somehow?

‘But you didn’t have another child,’ she says to her father, instead of cutting short the conversation, instead of leaving, instead of finding a way to say goodbye to him, now and also for eternity.

‘Never a right time, and then too late,’ he says simply. He opens the bottle of beer with a hiss. ‘The law – it takes so much, doesn’t it? You give it an inch … I always thought Kelly had the right idea, never letting work in so much.’

‘Who knows what ideas Kelly has,’ Jen says tightly, and her father looks embarrassed.

‘He’s got the right idea,’ he says softly. A strange and prescient feeling settles over Jen. Almost like … almost like, if her father knew he was going to die, he might tell her something. A key. A piece of the puzzle. A slice of deathbed wisdom that she could use. A side of the prism currently still in darkness.

They lapse into silence, the gas fire the only noise, a kind of rushing, like distant rain. It pumps out such a fierce heat, the air above it shimmers. She could stay here for ever, in her father’s quaint old living room, while a garlic bread cooks.

And that’s when it happens. Jen watches it pass over her father like a storm cloud. Peanuts and beer right next to him, just like they said. Sweat is the first sign, a milky dusting of it across his forehead, like he’s been out in drizzle. ‘Oh, wow,’ he says, puffing air into his cheeks. ‘Jen?’

Jen feels hot with panic. She didn’t think it would be like this. She thought it would be sudden.

He brings a hand to his stomach, wincing, eyes on her. ‘Jen – I don’t feel good,’ he says, his voice anxious, like Todd’s when he was little and fell over, looked to her first to see how he felt; his maternal mirror. And now here she is, at the end of her father’s life, their roles reversed.

‘Daddy,’ she says, a word she hasn’t uttered for decades.

‘Jen – call 999, please,’ he says. His eyes are brown, just like hers, imploring her. She gets her phone out. There is no question. There is absolutely no question. She has only the illusion of choice.