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Prologue

Jen is glad of the clocks going back tonight. A gained hour, extra time, to be spent doing the ironing she should have done earlier. Jen hates the ironing basket. Eighteen years of motherhood, forty-six years on the planet, and she’s not sure she’s ever reached the bottom of it.

Now that it is past midnight, it is officially the thirty-first of October. Halloween. Jen is standing on the landing, bare toes in thick carpet, pretending she isn’t waiting up for Todd. He’s eighteen. He can do whatever he wants. It is pure coincidence that Jen is also awake, here, peering out of the window that sits in the exact centre of their house.

She has spent the evening – and some of the night – catching up on the tedious tasks parenthood seems to demand of her. School-trip forms, ordering textbooks. She has interspersed this with a solid five hours of screen time and some googling of eye floaters – worrying?

Jen has always come to life at night. When everybody else seems to wind down, she opens up like a flower in the heat. She’s even carved a pumpkin, which she sets down now on the windowsill.

She admires its cack-handed smile. Todd won’t care, but the neighbours do. The school mums do. A pumpkin, sitting in that picture window, says excuse me, we have our shit together.

She hears her husband Kelly’s feet on the landing above her and turns to look. It’s unusual for him to be up, he the lark and she the nightingale. He emerges from their bedroom on the top floor. His hair is messy, a blue-black in the dimness. He has on not a single piece of clothing, only a watch.

‘Jesus,’ he says, looking at the pumpkin on the windowsill, but he blows a smile out through the side of his mouth. ‘Well, whatever makes you happy …’ He descends the stairs towards her.

‘The neighbours will see you,’ Jen says, looking at him. A few of his dark chest hairs have turned white over the past year.

‘I don’t care,’ he says with a grin and, as he turns, that perfect, perfect arse that she’s loved for twenty years.

‘Todd’s not back,’ she says.

Kelly checks his watch. ‘It’s early evening, for him,’ he says. ‘Whatever,’ he adds, as he reaches the top stair.

‘His curfew is one.’ Jen looks at him.

Kelly just shrugs, then turns away from her.

‘The neighbours can now see your arse.’

‘They’ll think it’s one of your pumpkins,’ Kelly says, his wit as fast and sharp as the slice of a knife. ‘Come to bed? Can’t believe Merrilocks is done,’ he says with a stretch.

Kelly’s been restoring a Victorian tiled floor at a house on Merrilocks Road all week, sending her photographs of the process, the grimy tiles, the mud dissolving, their eventual clean emergence. Jen and Kelly are big texters, always have been, their iMessages a private, detailed archive of their life. They text all day. They text from the living room to the kitchen. They send photos, videos, voice notes, anything. Earlier, he sent her just a video of the rain, slithering down a window. She keeps every single one.