say. Still his irritation was building. He needed a knife to get a start on stripping the wrap off the pizza.
“Pepp-er-only,” he sang to Aisling. “Pepper-only and geese, Aisling. Won’t that be the bee’s knees? The cat’s pyjamas?”
Aisling made no move. He closed the oven door and tickled her ankle. She didn’t react. Brid frowned at him.
“You’re in fine fettle,” she said. “Things went well for you today?”
“Pepp-er-only?” he said to Aisling. “Geese too?”
“It’s not geese,” she said still buried in her mother’s neck. “It’s cheese, Daddy. Don’t be silly.”
“Breakthrough Day?” Brid asked him.
It was a code word he wished she’d forget, something from long ago when they’d talk together for hours about what he had written that day.
“Well, I talked to Breen.”
Brid made a face.
“He liked it,” Fanning went on. “Very positive.”
Brid closed her eyes and sighed. Aisling let herself be picked up. Fanning loved the weight of his daughter. The ease and trust she expressed with her whole body when she draped herself over his shoulder. Her cheeks were raw from crying.
“Are your toothies hurting you, love?”
She shook her head.
The smell of her hair, even the staleness of her clothes. But most of all the feel of her baby fat cheeks on his neck.
Brid yawned and draped her coat over the couch.
“He always ‘likes it,’” she said. “But he does nothing about it.”
Fanning felt Aisling grow alert in his arms. She must sense his anger.
“We’ll get there,” he managed to say.
“I thought you had another one of your field trip things today.”
Fanning’s anger vanished when he saw again the arm raised, the thumb cocking the hammer, the barrel inches from the bloodied dog’s head.
Aisling twisted around awkwardly, and leaned back against his arms.
“Daddy, you’re wivering.”
“Shivering,” Brid said quickly. “Shivering, Aisling. Don’t use Daddy’s make-up words any more.”
Fanning’s arms were turning to water. A sour taste filled his mouth, and an image of the men yelling to finish the fight flared in his mind again.
“Are you okay,” Brid asked. “Have you the flu or something?”
Aisling was playing with his shirt buttons.
“I’m okay,” he said.
“Well I’m wasted,” Brid said.
She sat down heavily on the couch and began drawing out notebooks from her bag. Fanning heard the gunshot again, felt how his ears had rung.
“Staff meetings,” she murmured. “The tenth circle of hell.”
The dog would have been thrown into a pit or something, its torn lifeless body there to rot and be forgotten about. They’d find others, train others.
“And it’s a marking night too,” Brid said. “Jesus.”
Aisling seemed to have calmed down. His strength was coming back. He began to dandle her a little, bobbing and weaving gently.
“That can wait,” he said.
“It can’t,” she said without looking up.
“If people only knew,” he said, “how much work teachers actually do.”
She glanced up with that curious smile that had so aroused him in the past. Then her expression changed, and her eyes lost focus
“Breen,” she murmured. “I’d like his job. If that’s what you could call it.”
Fanning poured soup into bowls. He put an ice cube into Aisling’s and tested it with his little finger. She was crying again, and Brid was trying to humour her.
Brid found time on the weekends to make the soups for the week. It was something she liked doing, she said, because she knew that Aisling would be getting at least one solid part of her day’s food homemade and organic too.
Fanning admitted he was hopeless about food. He enjoyed a meal, and the more variety the better, but something happened to his brain when it came to organizing and cooking a serious meal. He’d liked to make Brid laugh back in their early days, about cavemen multitasking, cooking with fires and so forth.
Time had gone strange somewhere in the past few years. The clock ruled now, with things that had to be done, and by a certain time. Awkward bills came in the post, and everything cost so much. They’d had a few heart- to-hearts about it, the money / house / career — monster. It didn’t help really.
He and Brid had been together since third year — except for the summers when he had gone to London and Copenhagen, that is. They had just carried on after they got their degrees, even staying in the same flat. Both of them were vehemently for staying in Dublin while so many had left. There was not even a hint of any boom back then. He had always regarded himself as being on the ball, alert to social change, to the zeitgeist, no matter how small the signs. Being alert was his strength, he felt, noticing things, especially things that everyone else seemed to ignore.
He licked the soup off his finger and he took out a bib for Aisling. It was the only one she’d allow now, the one with the elephants. There was something sticky on the floor underfoot. A door closed hard in the adjoining flat, where the Spanish kids had arrived before Christmas, and he heard their television go on.
Aisling had stopped crying. He heard Brid’s footsteps in the hall. Aisling was asleep on her shoulder, her cheek almost flag-red now. Brid hadn’t even had a chance to get out of her school clothes. Gingerly, she edged onto the seat. Teeth, she mouthed at Fanning. He turned to the cooker and checked on the pizza. He glanced back at Brid to offer her a smile. It was a small way of saying thanks for all that she did. But her eyes were closed too now. Already her breathing had slowed. He wondered why she hadn’t put Aisling down if the child was so sleepy or aching with baby teeth? Even lie beside her a few minutes like at bedtime.
Was this what they called the terrible twos? Brid wondered if it was some separation anxiety thing and she felt guilty, especially at the babysitter’s. But even during their worst arguments she had never come out straight and told him that she wanted him to take over the breadwinning thing and let her stay at home with Aisling.
He pushed the edges of the hardening yolks as they began to flap. He’d lost count of the number of times Brid had fallen asleep with Aisling at bedtime only to wake up with a start herself and start marking student stuff until well after eleven. All the while he’d had his notebooks out pretending to work, or revising, or editing.
“I was having a dream,” she murmured. A small wistful smile appeared, and she opened her eyes.
“You’ll never guess,” she said, and yawned. “This guy knocks at the door. He wants to buy your script off you. ‘Any price,’ he says and he wants to make it. And we have to go with him to Hollywood so we can coach him getting the Irish accent right…”
She opened her eyes wide and stared at him.
“Brad Pitt auditioned” she whispered, “I’m ashamed to say.”
A surge of irritation swept through Fanning. He felt he was losing control of the muscles in his face and neck. He tried to hold a smile, but he had to turn away.
“It must be a good omen,” she murmured. He knew she was still smiling.
“Well,” he began to say, his throat almost too tight to let the words through. He stopped when the phone went.
Chapter 14
