That Night

by Gillian McAllister

  Her clothes litter the bedroom floor like she evaporated out of them and disappeared. She steps over them, getting out new jeans and a plain jumper. Their bedroom is filled with warm autumnal light. The floorboards look glossy with it. Last night’s mist has vanished without a trace.

  Jen scrapes her hair back and ventures out on to the hallway, standing outside Todd’s empty room.

  Why did he do it? Why did he have a knife on him? Why did he do it outside their house? Who was he, this grown man her son tried to kill? Is he still alive?

  Jen stares and stares at the door to her son’s bedroom, lost in thought of how she came to raise a murderer.

  Teenage rage. Knife crime. Gangs. Antifa. Which is it? Which hand have they been dealt?

  She heads downstairs. She can’t hear Kelly at all. She glances out of the window on the first floor as she descends their stairs, the window that she stood at only hours ago, while everything changed.

  The street bears no stains – the rain must have washed the blood away. The ambulance and police have moved on. Even the police tape has gone.

  She raises her eyes upwards, towards the blue autumn skies, then down again. Something is strange about their driveway, and not just the memories of last night. She can’t work out what. But it’s something.

  She hurries downstairs. It smells of last night in here, before anything happened. Food, candles, cooking. She can’t even remember what they had – she has a terrible memory, something Todd points out often.

  She puts her hands on the kitchen counter and tries to breathe deeply.

  She hears a voice, right above her, a deep male register. Kelly. She looks at the ceiling, confused. Where is he? Todd’s room? He must be searching it.

  ‘Kell?’ she calls out, running back up the stairs. ‘We need to get on – I’m going to google for a solic –’

  ‘What?’ a voice says. It comes from Todd’s room, and is unmistakably his.

  Jen takes a step back so massive it makes her stumble at the top of the stairs.

  Todd emerges from the confines of his room, wearing a black t-shirt and jogging bottoms. He has clearly just woken, and squints down at her, his pale face the only light in the darkness.

  ‘What?’ she says to him. ‘How are you here?’

  ‘Huh?’ he says. He looks just the same as he did. Not a mark on him. Even in her confusion, Jen is curious. Same navy-blue eyes. Same tousled hair. Same tall, slim frame. But he’s committed an unforgivable act. Unforgivable to everyone, except maybe her. But how is he here? How is he home?

  ‘What’re you talking about?’ he says. ‘This is weird, even for you. A Jen out of ten.’

  Jen sidesteps the inside joke. Not today. ‘Did Dad get you? Are you on bail?’

  ‘On bail?’ He raises a disdainful eyebrow. It’s a new mannerism of his, emerged since he started dating Clio. Jen wonders if it belongs to her. ‘I’m about to meet Rory.’

  ‘What?’ Jen says in barely a whisper.

  For the past few months he’s looked different. Slimmer in the body, in the hips, but bloated in the face. The pallor somebody gets who is working too much, eating too many takeaways and drinking no water. None of which she is aware Todd is doing, but who knows? She steps towards him and looks closely at him. ‘How did you get home – and what happened?’

  ‘Home from where? Look – we’re going for breakfast.’

  He regularly goes for breakfast with them, these friends, like he’s in an American sitcom. Jen wonders if it irritates her because it was an avenue never available to her.

  ‘I …’ Jen says, rubbing at her forehead. ‘What happened last night?’ she says. She looks around her, at the picture window and back at Todd.

  He is staring at his phone, at a WhatsApp notification. He swipes on it, then begins typing. After he’s finished, he says, ‘I played Call of Duty,’ as though she is a customer who will merely wait to be addressed. She feels a flare of temper.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I – what?’

  ‘Stop avoiding it,’ she says.

  ‘Avoiding what?’ Todd says. His expression twists in bemusement, nose wrinkles up just like when he was a baby.

  ‘Your arrest.’

  ‘My arrest?’

  Jen can tell when her son is lying – she has had practise at that recently, as almost everything he says seems to be a lie – and he is definitely not lying at the moment. He looks at her with his clear twilight eyes, a question mark inscribed across his features.

  ‘You were outside,’ Jen says. She gestures to the mid-landing window. And that’s the moment she realizes what the matter is with the scene. It isn’t the driveway: it’s the window itself. No pumpkin. It’s gone.

  Todd blinks at her slowly like an animal. He has two tiny scars left over from the worst of his teenage acne. Otherwise, his face is still childlike, pristine in that beautiful peach-fuzz way of the young.

  ‘You were outside,’ she says again, tearing her eyes away from the pumpkin-less windowsill that fires anxiety right down her body.

  ‘When?’ he says softly.

  ‘I was waiting up for you,’ she says, and for once he doesn’t roll his eyes. Gone is the teenage attitude of recent times. He must be concerned about her to feel so in control of this conversation. His gaze holds hers.

  ‘I wasn’t out,’ he says.

  ‘The clocks went back. I was waiting on the landing. I saw you come back and you –’

  ‘Hey?’ Todd says loudly.

  ‘What?’

  He pauses, maintaining eye contact, exactly the way he did last night when it was him performing impossible tasks, not her. ‘The clocks go back tonight.’ He doesn’t take his eyes off her. Some internal elevator plunges down the centre of Jen’s chest. She pushes her hair off her face and heads to the family bathroom at the back of the house, holding up one finger to Todd for just a second.

  She is sick into the toilet, the sort of sick she hasn’t been in years. Alcohol sickness. Norovirus sickness. Hardly anything comes up, only a sticky yellow stomach acid that sits right at the bottom of the water. She stares and stares. Tries to think.

  Todd does not know what she is talking about. That is clear. Even he wouldn’t deny this. But why? How?

  The pumpkin. The pumpkin is missing. Why does that feel so significant? Where the fuck is her husband?

  She sits against the cold shabby tiles. It’s forever on their list to renovate, but they never get to it. Kelly’s own DIY never gets done.

  She gets her phone out of her pocket and stares at it, bringing up the calendar.

  It is the thirtieth of October. The clocks do indeed go back tonight, and tomorrow will be Halloween. Jen stares and stares at that date. How can this be? She was mistaken. All day yesterday, she’d thought it was the thirtieth, but it wasn’t. It must have been the twenty-ninth. A simple error.

  No pumpkin on the windowsill. And Todd in his bedroom, saying he has no idea what’s going on. Not a simple error.

  She navigates to her last text message with Kelly and presses call.

  He answers warily, but immediately, as he has done for exactly the last six months. Since Nicola Williams. ‘Look,’ she says, a tiny, sarcastic laugh escaping.

  ‘Baby – what?’ She leans into his affection. Her husband, the romantic.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘At work,’ he says. ‘Why?’

  ‘Was Todd arrested last night?’

  ‘What?’ She hears him put something heavy down on a hollow-sounding floor. ‘For what?’

  ‘No, I’m asking you. Was he?’

  ‘No?’ Kelly says, sounding utterly baffled.

  ‘But we sat – we sat in the police station. You did your coat up – your hood – right up over your head. The clocks had just gone back, I was … I had done the pumpkin.’

  ‘Er,’ Kelly says, for once lost for words.

  ‘Wait – where are you?’ she says.

  ‘At work …’

  �
��But where?’

  ‘Merrilocks Road.’

  He said he finished there yesterday. Didn’t he? Yes, she’s sure he did. He was naked as he said it. She can remember it. She can.

  She puts her hand to her head. ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ she says. ‘What did we do? Last night?’ She leans her head back against the wall. ‘Did I do the pumpkin?’

  ‘What are you –’

  ‘I think I’ve had some sort of episode,’ she says in barely a whisper. She brings her knees to her chest and stares at them. No impressions where she knelt on the gravel. Not a single speck of dirt on them. Goosebumps erupt up and down her arms.

  ‘We …’ Kelly says, thrown. ‘You cooked a curry. Todd played on his X-Box.’

  ‘No pumpkin carving?’

  She hears Kelly shift the phone closer to his mouth. ‘I thought you were going to do that tonight. Remember, you said you couldn’t be arsed …’

  ‘Right,’ she says faintly, picturing how perfectly that pumpkin turned out, how he had looked at it.

  She stands and stares at herself in the mirror. She looks haggard, but that is nothing new. Thin skin around her eyes, the hallmark of over-forty. A hunted look that she hasn’t seen before. More than ever, she wonders what happened to the girl who met Kelly at the pedestrian crossing in 1999.

  ‘Right, I better go,’ she says. Kelly tries to interject, but she cuts him off, hangs up the phone. She needs to figure this out, alone, before she gets certified by her husband or son.

  She leaves the bathroom and goes down to the kitchen, stopping dead in the hallway. A whole, un-carved pumpkin sits on the side. ‘Oh,’ Jen says to nobody, a tiny hiccough of a word, a giant syllable of understanding. She approaches the pumpkin as though it is an unexploded bomb and turns it around, but it’s whole and firm and cool beneath her finger tips and Jesus Christ last night didn’t happen. It didn’t fucking happen.

  Despite herself, something light moves across Jen’s chest. She is a lottery winner, a bullet dodger, a pardoned criminal. It was a dream, a hallucination … nothing. No. It must have been a vivid dream.

  Todd is upstairs, getting ready. Kelly is finishing the flooring job he actually finished yesterday. And Jen is here, having not carved a pumpkin, but having gone mad instead.

  And that’s when the thought arrives, fully formed. What if the weapon is in that bag? What if the bullet hasn’t been dodged? What if the crime is going to happen? What if it was a premonition? The entire lived day, leading up to that horrible moment on the landing?

  Jen goes hot and then cold. Exactly the same as she did when she diagnosed herself with epilepsy earlier today. It’s probably anxiety. Made up, made up, made up.

  Still, she glances up the stairs. Todd’s in the shower. She can hear the water.

  She grabs the rucksack. Not in eighteen years of parenting has she gone through his things, but she does today. It’s worth it. For her peace of mind or his, she isn’t sure.

  Front pockets, side pockets. Tuneless shower singing.

  There are two folders and a pencil case in his bag, so adorably infantile something unspools in Jen’s chest.

  The water begins to run. He’ll be ages. Sprucing up.

  The bottom of the bag is lined with the crumbs from a thousand sandwiches before. She’ll say she’s cleaning it out, if he emerges.

  If there is something suspicious in this bag then she is not mad but – but then what? She’s psychic? Now that is a delusion.

  She continues digging. Todd is as messy as she is and screwed up pieces of paper and discarded leaflets cut at the skin on her hands as she frantically digs.

  And what’s this? Right in the back? A sheath, a leather sheaf. It’s as cold and hard as a thigh bone, sitting right there against the back of her son’s rucksack. She knows what it will be before she pulls it out.

  She breathes deeply, steeling herself, trying to calm down, then pulls at the sheaf, unbuttoning the top and sliding the handle out.

  And – inside it … a knife. The knife.

  She stands there, staring at it, at this betrayal in her hand. She hasn’t thought what she would do if she found something. There is no way she can just leave it there. She can’t take the risk that it was a weird dream, that it was nothing.

  She’s got to take it. Right?

  She wrenches open the under-stairs cupboard. Shoes and sports equipment crowd out and she fumbles with them, pushing the knife right to the back where it sits like a spectre. She can hear Todd on the stairs. She leans the knife against the back wall and retreats out of the cupboard.

  Todd – wet hair, red cheeks, oblivious – picks up his bag. She watches him carefully, to see if he notices the difference, the lightness, but he doesn’t seem to.

  ‘I found a knife in Todd’s bag,’ Jen says, presenting it to her husband the second he arrives home that afternoon.

  Kelly stands there in front of her, the knife held across his hands like some archaeological find, inspecting it.

  ‘I didn’t ask him about it,’ she says. ‘I just took it.’

  Kelly nods, staring down at it, not saying anything. Jen remembers his heartbroken face from last night – no, from the night that didn’t happen – and thinks she sees a milder version of it here, too. Kelly is a lover, not a fighter, one of life’s romantics: he said on their first date, when he asked her question after question, that he thought they were going to be together forever.

  And he’d been right. They’d made it. The whole way. Twenty years married, seasoned liberally – so liberally – with jokes, sex, laughter. Jen’s eyes feel wet as she thinks about it, as she thinks about that fucking email from fucking Nicola Williams.

  ‘It’s brand new,’ Kelly says, flicking those eyes to her.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Unused.’

  Jen laughs, a hard, unhumorous laugh. ‘Right.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The thing is.’ She licks her lips.

  ‘What did you mean earlier. On the phone?’ Kelly says, soft Welsh accent spiking the consonants. She has always loved that accent.

  ‘Well. I – I mean. I saw this happen.’

  ‘You saw what happen?’ He holds her gaze, waiting.

  ‘I saw Todd stab somebody with this.’

  ‘While you were asleep?’

  ‘I wasn’t asleep.’

  ‘What,’ he says, the word not lilting upwards, not a question, just a statement of disbelief.

  ‘Yesterday, I carved a pumpkin and then waited up for Todd and he – he knifed someone, on the street.’

  ‘But …’ Kelly rubs a hand over his chin. ‘But you didn’t. You didn’t do that.’

  Jen turns away from him. ‘I don’t know what I did,’ she says, thinking of that smooth, uncut pumpkin, thinking too of the knife. That knife is the only piece of evidence she has that she isn’t crazy.

  ‘Look, we’ll just ask him about it. When he gets back,’ Kelly says. ‘And remind him that it’s a firearms offence.’

  Jen nods, saying nothing. What else can she do? Lock him up? Because of … because of what? It didn’t happen. She looks at Kelly, whose expression she can’t read. It hasn’t yet happened.

  Kelly’s gone to bed, the same as he did yesterday, and Jen’s stayed up. She has not carved the pumpkin, didn’t want to, didn’t want to connect the pumpkin and the murder, as though by not doing one thing it will stop the other.

  She makes a different tea to last time, in a different mug. This mug says Colonel Grumpy on it, an insult she once levelled at Kelly in a fury that made her incoherent and – according to him – amusing. It’s one of their things. Their in-jokes, enshrined forever on mugs. They have tens of them.

  Eleven becomes midnight becomes one. The thirtieth ticks over into the thirty-first, just as it did last night. She spends the entire evening on her phone, flicking through celebrity before and after surgery photographs.

  Three chamomile teabags into the kitchen bin. Three circulations of
the living room clock.

  Kelly wasn’t where he said he was five months ago, the second time in six months that it’s happened. He was with a woman called Nicola Williams. Jen knows because it flashed up on his phone while he was in the shower. ‘Thanks for today x’ it said. Nicola Williams is a depressingly common name, and Kelly has no social media, so Jen can’t search his contacts. She is keeping her counsel about it for three reasons: one: because she knows, if he was innocent, that it would destroy him that she asked; two: because, if she confronts him now, he will likely hide further indiscretions before she can find them herself; and finally, three: because it would break her fucking heart if he said he loved someone else.

  She bargains with the universe. Maybe not an affair. Let Todd be wayward, stupid about knives, but not a killer. And let this not be extramarital sex. Anything but sex.

  Her eyes become heavy at half past one. She thought the adrenaline would carry her through, but it doesn’t. She knows it was nothing. A random event that will be consigned to the past. A dream. A bit of confusion. Stress, maybe, her brain’s way of escaping her real problems. Now that it’s late, and the mug is different, the tea different, she can see that this is ridiculous. This bedtime vigil.

  Besides, she’s got the knife, shoved right into the back of their cupboard. He can’t use it. And maybe, maybe, maybe it was something else, she thinks. Some art project. Or just a mistake.

  At ten to two, she goes to the middle landing. She can hear Kelly snoring softly above her.

  She watches, not blinking, her eyes burning, standing at the window. This time, she has no mug. No pumpkin. This time, she thinks, it will be different. She has her shoes on. She is ready.

  01:59 becomes 01:00. 01:01.01:02. She relaxes completely.

  Until 01:11. And then he arrives, loping up the street exactly as before, only eleven minutes later.

  She runs out on to the drive just as Todd reaches the stranger. He’s already got it out, is holding the knife in his right hand, ready.

  He reaches the man and draws the blade back, and then it plays out exactly as before. The three stabs, the wound. The blood.