Wrong Place Wrong Time

by Gillian McAllister

Jen befriended his mum, Pauline, years ago. She is just Jen’s sort of person: jaded, sweary, not a natural mother, the kind of person who implicitly gives Jen permission to mess up. Jen has always been drawn to these types of people. All of her friends are unpretentious, unafraid to do and say what they think.

These are my kind of people too.

She always found motherhood so hard. It had been such a shock. Such a vast reduction in the time available to her. She did nothing well, not work nor parenting. She put out fires in both for what felt like a decade straight, has only recently emerged. But maybe the damage is already done.

He had been irritated by Jen’s appearance at the school pick-up, and annoyed with Kelly, too. “Can either of you two get hobbies?” he’d said, when they were all at home by four o’clock.

petrichor.

Smell of rain

Whatever it is you’ve done, Jen thinks, I’ll never not love you.

Here he is, right in front of her, telling her who he is. She’s let her own insecurities about being stupid turn his intellectualism into something to be laughed off. Laughed at.

“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.”

but she still misses him in the way that children will always miss their parents’ guiding hands, the way they can hold your problems away from you, if only temporarily.

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.

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

The maternal habit of a lifetime, feeling guilty no matter which she chose.

Everyone has to make rent, and heartbreak is more ubiquitous than crime.

Isn’t that the oldest story in the book? Humor, banter, as defense mechanism.

“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

“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.

“Like the hindsight paradox,” he continues, when he’s bought the doughnuts. “Everyone thinks they knew what was going to happen. They said, I knew it all along! but, actually, they would say that no matter what the outcome. Because our brains are so good at considering every possibility. We’ve known whenever anything was going to happen.”

Their family has always been so full of charm, exactly what she wanted after her repressed upbringing. But isn’t humor a different kind of repression?

Micro-emotions, are they called that? The abilities humans have to detect small changes.

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.

Oh the years passing by us

But then, isn’t this truth more palatable than the other? Maybe, but being damned if you do and damned if you don’t is still damned.

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.

The lack of fucks he gives to the whole world, in the future. Both inspirational and slightly dangerous. He excites her. They were good together. They are good together. But the foundation of it is this: lies. A crumbling cliff edge.

Life’s too long. That’s so clever. He puts his head in his hands, standing up, like a madman. He loves her. He fucking loves her. Life’s too long for work. She’s right. She’s so fucking right. His clothes are off, and he’s back in the bed within a minute, with her. “Do you like mornings yet?” he says. “I like them with you.”

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