Wrong Place Wrong Time

by Gillian McAllister

Something is wrong. Something is about to happen. Jen is sure of this, without being able to name what it is; some instinct for danger, the same way she feels around fireworks and level crossings and cliff edges. The thoughts rush through her mind like the clicking of a camera, one after the other after the other.

Jen stares at his expression. Maybe he is regretful, maybe not. She can’t tell. Jen can read almost everyone, but she never could read Todd.

She turns to Kelly, and she will never forget the look her stoic husband gives her just then. She meets his navy eyes. The world seems to stop turning just for a second and, in the quiet and the stillness, Jen thinks: Kelly looks how it is to be heartbroken.

And that’s when the tears come. Hot and fast and wet. The tears for the future. And the tears for yesterday, and what she didn’t see coming.

Something is creeping up her spine, some tentative, frightening knowledge. “I saw . . . I saw what you did.” She gestures to the mid-landing window. And that’s the moment she realizes what’s the matter. It isn’t the scene outside: it’s the window itself. No pumpkin. It’s gone.

She knows what it will be before she pulls it out. A long leather pouch. She exhales, then unbuttons the top and slides a handle out. And – inside it . . . a knife. The knife.

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.

As Todd is swallowed up into the house, someone else leaves. She’s right in the way. The figure comes through the garden gate just as she passes and, suddenly, she is face-to-face with a dead man. No, that’s not right. A man who dies in two days’ time. The victim.

“Todd’s in safe hands. All right now,” he says. An instant dismissal by a pro. He motions to her, a kind of Which way are you going? gesture. No mistake about it, it means: Choose, because you are going, whether you like it or not.

He’s right, of course, he wouldn’t kill someone, unless he had no other choice. She knows him: he would ameliorate, confess. He would do a whole long list of things before killing. This is perhaps the most useful piece of information Jen has landed on.

Jen blinks in shock. Missing. Missing babies? Police IDs? What is this dark world Todd’s been plunged into? The final item is what looks like a pay-as-you-go phone.

And that’s when it happens. Recognition: Jen is sure of it. It passes across his features like a ghost.

She can’t let it happen. She can’t let the murder play out. She can’t have him lose everything. Her easy little baby who unknowingly witnessed his mother crying so often, she can’t bear for this to be his end. She can’t bear for him to be bad. Let him, let him, let him – and her – be good.

She waits a minute before leaving. She passes the boy, walking by the side of the road. She looks carefully at him. His gaze is fixed ahead. He can’t be more than sixteen, a teenager, a baby, burning bright, with no idea of the damage he is doing to his mother, waiting at a window back home.

“. . . Yes,” Andy says, and Jen is struck, there in her rainy little car, that it isn’t his expertise that matters, only somebody sympathetic actively listening on the end of the line. Some safe space to hold her thoughts up to the light: isn’t that what everybody needs, anyway? Gina; Todd, even?

“Everything you do is interesting to me,” she says, tears springing with the kind of reckless fatalism of somebody who won’t be here tomorrow; a deathbed proclamation, a call from a hijacked plane. A woman who can connect and connect and connect with her son, but it doesn’t matter, it won’t last. “I have never loved anybody as much as I love you. Never will,” she says plainly, her eyes wet. “I got it wrong. If I don’t show you that. Because it is so true – it is the truest thing.”

The world seems to stop, just for a second. See you at home. See you at home. See you at home. That can only be one person: her husband.

In the cool night air, three weeks before her son becomes a murderer, Jen hears her husband begin to cry in their garden, his sobs becoming quieter and quieter, like a wounded animal slowly dying.

How sinister it is to relive your life backward. To see things you hadn’t at the time. To realize the horrible significance of events you had no idea were playing out around you. To uncover lies told by your husband. Jen would always have said Kelly was as straight as they come. But don’t all good liars seem that way?

“Thank you,” Ryan says thickly. “I mean . . . in some ways, Kelly taught me a lot. I guess the best criminals do.”

But knowing the future is worse than not knowing. Isn’t it?

What makes somebody commit a crime? Well, maybe it’s about her mothering of him. After all, does every action a child performs not begin with their mother?

And that’s when she sees him. At a busy stand called WRONG PLACE WRONG TIME. Andy. It’s Andy, younger Andy, lither, and – very interestingly – more smiley, too. He’s handing out pieces of paper.

“Sometimes,” he says gently, when she’s finished, “the emotions of living something the first time prevent us from seeing the true picture, don’t they?” He rubs at his beard. “If I could go back – the things in my life that I would just stand and truly, fully witness, if I knew how they were going to turn out . . .” Jen stares at Andy, this younger, less jaded, more sentimental version of him. “Maybe it’s that . . .” she says. Watchfulness. Witnessing her life, and all its minutiae, from a distance, in a way. And maybe that’s all she needs to know.

Banter can hide the worst sins. Some people laugh to hide their shame, they laugh instead of saying I feel embarrassed and small. She suddenly thinks of Kelly. The easy humor they’ve always had. But when has Kelly ever told her how he felt? If she observes him dispassionately, what might she see?

Kelly. The alias Ryan had to choose for himself. “Something you’d turn your head to,” Leo advised. “Something familiar. That’s the first test they do to check you’re not coppers. Call your name in a bar, see if your head swivels.” “I’d always answer to my brother’s name,” Ryan had said in a low voice, thinking of the night, the night his brother got in too deep, owed so much money, so many favors. The night his brother tied the noose. They’d found him too late, by about half an hour, the coroner later said. He’d done it in the loft. He hadn’t wanted to be found.

She had it all wrong. Kelly isn’t involved in crime. He had been trying to stop it.

How segmented life is. It splits so easily into friendships and addresses and life phases that feel endless but never, never last.

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. But, first, you lie to me.

Does anyone care how or why we are forged into who we are? Dark, guarded, funny. Whatever. Or does it only matter that we are?

We only think of the bad things that happen, rather than those that, through fortune, pass us by.