‘Yeah, right.’
The truth was, and he thought it over later that afternoon as he started in earnest with the emulsion and white spirit, the truth was that he was unnerved. Other men unnerved him and they always had. He had never worked out why. It wasn’t that he spent much more time with women, either, mind. So he put it down to his being a loner. Did the thought that everyone unnerved him make him feel any better?
When there were no women about, men were odd together. There were rituals of brashness and Dave felt excluded from these and therefore from whatever greater confidences were later tendered.
As he mixed his paint in Laura’s room, Dave asked aloud, ‘What do men say to each other when they’re alone?’ The words bounced off half-stripped walls. Curls of cartooned paper rustled round his feet. He’d spent three hours stripping already. Fucking therapeutic, mind. Drips of pink up his forearms from stirring too hard. He could still smell the bleached mum on him.
So what was it? What put him off the company of other men? What made him prefer hanging round women?
Yet he was like a stranger outside playschool. His were brief excursions into the world of women and, of late, they had been paid for. The women showed him plainly he was no honorary member. He was still Other and the battle lines were drawn. What was the centre of the female world? Dave was at home in it whether it was the furled wetness of a ready cunt or just chatting over tea, when women opened up confidences, their unstitched wounds. He knew the kinds of things women said together, he could imagine those. Men frightened him because his imagination ground to a halt with them.
He took a cloth, soaked in the tang of white spirit, and thoughtfully dabbed off the paint spots on his arms. Paint splattered in the wrong place looks so alarming, so permanent.
Spending so much time at home made Dave competent there. At home he could deal with things. Actually, he should have his own mid-morning TV show, telling others how to do their houses up, keep things looking nice. He thought if he could only bring the world into his own domestic space, then that would make it safe.
Oh, right, he thought, dipping his brush. Safe. Yeah.
One wall left to strip, two to paint, one was complete and pink. Already it was dark outside, a smoky blue night. He’d have to go fetch Laura soon. What had he been thinking of? He didn’t even know the bleached mum’s name. Hang on—Joanne. He knew the way back to her door by remembering his own steps away: no address. This impersonality shocked him. To think, only hours before he’d shot his load there, left his daughter there and if there was an accident he wouldn’t be able to say where he’d been. Somewhere out across this estate, a stranger was sitting with his bairn.
He recalled Laura at about two, speech welling up in her, giving names to her favourite things about her.
Trish she called ‘Mimi’, which Dave had thought was sweet, but Trish didn’t like much. ‘Makes me sound like a stripper. Get her to stop.’
His hands were gloved in slick pink. He smeared it on empty patches of wall, leaving prints that looked as if someone had slipped down. The carpet was a right mess. Shit! Pink on blue carpet; they’d been after a boy. He hadn’t cleared the squirls of old torn paper before painting, and now they were trodden to mush everywhere. Laura’s bed, her belongings, her toys were huddled in the centre. It looked as if there was going to be a jumble sale.
The paint was old, tainted with the tin’s rust, and the colour came out patchy. The obstinate shreds of wallpaper he’d left were showing through. It was all a disaster.
Bon Jovi had been playing the whole time on the little cassette player on the floor in the hall.
Could he rely on the woman with the seaside rock wingtip hairdo? Would she think for herself and bring his daughter back to him? Would she think to spare him the trip out?
Dave had decided already, some time ago, he was the type to whom nothing was spared. His was the life all the hard knocks got to. If he was coming downstairs with armfuls of laundry piled above his head, he would be sure to slip down the stairs on dropped socks. He would be the one banging his elbows on hard doorframes.
And look, he couldn’t even paint straight. The room echoed dully about him. It was all pink now, wet and streaked in patches. With the dark coming in from the uncurtained window the room looked desolate.
In the past few weeks of his exciting new, secret career move, Dave had seen so many bedrooms. And, in the dark tonight, peering out of the window with no curtains or nets to obstruct him, he thought all the gaps between houses seemed futile. Oughtn’t we to pool intimacies more? Shouldn’t all these identical little box houses be interconnecting? If they did, Laura wouldn’t seem lost to him now, stuck in someone else’s world, half an estate away.
Down in the dark street, here was the bleached mum now, bringing his daughter. They were clanging the gate, chatting pleasantly. And up the street came the other mums, like a calm procession, streaming up the tarmac paths, over the scrubby grass. All the mums from outside playgroup with their stained pushchairs and their musical silk roses on their bedside tables and their electric blankets. Each of them coming to his door. Some of them looked up to the lighted window where he stood with his paint roller. An ideal husband.
‘Here I am, ladies,’ he yelled. He’d already opened the window for the fumes.
‘What do I think
