Wrong Place, Wrong Time (11)

He fills a glass from the tap, downs it in one, then fills it again. He pulls his phone out and scrolls on it while sipping, half smiles at something, then puts it back in his pocket.

She pretends to occupy herself. Todd strides past, glass of water still in hand, but just before he goes upstairs, he checks the lock on the front door. He gets one step up the stairs, turns around, then checks it again. Just to be sure. It looks like a check undertaken out of fear. Her skin feels chilled as she watches.

As she falls asleep, she finds herself thinking that Todd is here, safe in their house, grounded. And she has the knife. Perhaps it has been stopped. Whatever it is. Perhaps she will wake and it will be tomorrow. The day after. Anything but today again.





Day Minus Two, 08:30





Jen wakes up, sweat gathered across her chest. Her phone is lying on the bedside table, but she doesn’t check it. A perverse impulse to keep hope alive resides within her.

She pulls on Kelly’s dressing gown, still damp in places from his shower, and heads downstairs. The wooden floors are lit up by the sun, glossy with it. The honey light warms her toes and then her feet as she steps forwards.

Please don’t let it be Friday again. Anything but that.

She peers into the kitchen, hoping to see Kelly. But it’s empty. Tidy, too. The counters clear. She blinks. The pumpkin. It isn’t here. She walks into the kitchen, then spins around uselessly, just looking. But it’s nowhere. Maybe it’s Sunday. Maybe it’s over.

She brings her phone out of the dressing-gown pocket, holds a breath, then checks it.

It is the twenty-seventh of October. It is the day before the day before.

Blood pounds in her forehead, hot and stretched, like somebody’s turned a heater on. She must be mad – she must be. The pumpkin isn’t here because it hasn’t yet been purchased by her.

Apparently, it is Thursday, eight thirty in the morning. Todd will be on his way to school. Kelly will be at Merrilocks. And Jen – Jen should be at work. She looks out at their garden, the grass gilded by the early-morning sun. She makes and gulps a coffee that only jangles her nerves further.

If she’s right, tomorrow will be Wednesday. Then Tuesday. And then what? Backwards for ever? She’s sick again, this time into the kitchen sink, spewing up sweet black coffee, panic and incomprehension. Afterwards, she rests her head briefly on the ceramic edge and makes a decision. She needs to talk to someone who understands her: her oldest friend and colleague, Rakesh.

The street outside Jen’s work is often blustery, caught in a wind tunnel in Liverpool city centre. The October air gusts her coat up and around her thighs like a bawdy dancer’s. Later, it will begin to rain, huge, fat drops that turn the air frigid.

Jen had wanted to live closer to town, but Crosby was as close as Kelly said he’d get. He hates the noise of cities, doesn’t like the mess, the bustle. Also Scousers, except you, he had said once, she thinks in jest. Kelly left his hometown behind when he met Jen. Both parents dead, his schoolfriends all wasters, he says, he hardly goes back. The only connection he has to it is an annual camping trip with old friends, on the Whitsun weekend. He’d wanted to live out in the wilderness, he said, but she made him move back to Crosby, with her. ‘But the suburbs are full of people,’ he’d said. He is often this way. Dark humour crossed with cynicism.

She pushes open the warm glass door, the foyer ablaze with sunlight, and heads down the corridor to Rakesh’s. Rakesh Kapoor – her biggest ally, and long-time friend – was a doctor before he became a lawyer. Ludicrously overqualified, logical to a fault. Jen thinks he’s the kind of man Todd might become. The thought hits her with a wave of sadness.

She finds him in the kitchen, stirring sugar into a tea. The kitchen is a small, soulless dark purple space with a stock image on the wall of a sunset. Jen remembers her father choosing this burgundy colour when they took the lease here three years ago, eighteen months before he died. The paint had been called Sour Grapes. ‘Perfect for a law-firm foyer,’ Jen had said, and her father – usually serious – had exploded into sudden, beautiful laughter.

Rakesh greets her with only a raise of his dark eyebrows and a lift of his full mug. He, like Jen, is not a morning person. ‘Do you have a minute?’ she says. Her voice trembles in fear. He’ll never believe her. He’ll cart her off somewhere, section her. But what else can she do?

‘Sure.’ She leads him down the corridor and back to her office, where she perches on the edge of her messy desk. Rakesh hovers in the doorway but closes the door when he sees her hesitate. His bedside manner is excellent. Kind but jaded, he favours sweater vests and poorly fitting suits. He left medicine because he didn’t like the pressure. He says law is worse, only he doesn’t want to leave a second career. They became friends the day she hired him, when, in his interview, he said his biggest professional weakness was office doughnuts.

Jen’s office faces east and is lit with morning sun. One wall is lined with haphazard files in pink, blue and green, their ends sun-bleached – a sure sign they ought to be archived, something Jen finds far less interesting than seeing clients.

‘How do you feel about giving a medical consult?’ she asks Rakesh with a small laugh, followed by a deep breath.

‘Unqualified?’ he says lightly, as quick as ever.

‘Your disclaimer is safe with me.’