‘Ariel’s “tasty” dog.’
‘When you said stick them up with grey brackets… ?’
‘You get them here.’ He went and picked up a handful of the grey L’s. ‘Twenty pence each.’
‘That’s cheap.’
‘There’s nowt to them. You drill in these, put the plug in the wall and that expands so they don’t come out again and you screw in your screw. Oh. Is your wall brick or, like, cavitied?’
Kerry pictured it. Last winter when the pipes went funny something discharged itself endlessly, night and day, inside that wall. It had definitely sounded like a cavity. Christmas she had spent reading in the kitchen listening to the cavity filling up with water. She told Derek this. He frowned.
‘That doesn’t sound very good, does it?’ He fished out a packet of plugs. ‘Anyway, these are for, like, cavitied plasterboard walls.’
‘Oh… it’s an outer wall I’m on about.’
‘Then that’s what you call a brick wall. You want the other plugs.’
‘Right.’ Kerry straightened up. She glanced across and the bairn was looking restless, a packet of curtain hooks wedged into her mouth. ‘I’ll not get stuff now. I’ve got to go home and find out whether we’ve got a drill or not.’
‘This is the bit you want. A twelve or an eight.’
‘Oh. Right.’
‘Your own place, is it?’
‘Ariel’s tasty “fucking” dog!’
Derek shook his head. ‘I’m sorry about them lads.’
She took off the bairn’s brake. ‘Yeh. It’s me own place.’
‘Well, I hope you get your shelves sorted out.’
‘I’ll be back.’
‘Aw, look, man, you’ll love this. Look!’
Kerry came back into the front room to see Simon, his voice raised excitedly, dragging out his Picnic Cool Box.
‘You’ll fucking love this.’
‘What is it?’ Here Ray was less sure of himself. He was much less cocky in Kerry’s house. Simon had set the white plastic chest between two armchairs in front of the telly. He flipped open the lid to show Ray it was full of cans of lager, all kept cool. ‘Look—we leave it right here. It’s all ready for the fuckin’ World Cup.’
‘Ariel’s tasty dog!’ Ray said and sat down in the chair next to Simon. They opened a can of lager each.
‘The bairn’s just gone off to sleep,’ Kerry said, heading for the kitchen. ‘Keep your voice down a bit.’
They didn’t say anything but when she was in the kitchen she could hear through the serving hatch that Simon said ‘Ariel’s tasty dog’ again.
The kitchen table was stacked with the paperbacks she was reading just now—The Go-Between, The Tempest, Emma and York Notes on all three of them. Her A4 pad was out and a reporter’s book of pencilled notes. The kitchen noticeboard was a collage of the bairn’s scribbles and potato prints and Kerry’s clippings and marked essays and forms. On the cooker pans were bubbling and she had about twenty-five minutes to read before dinner needed to go out.
Scene One was a long one in The Tempest. She liked the name Miranda and wished she’d thought of it before, to give to the bairn. They’d settled on Julie.
When she had shelves up, covering the length and height of the outer wall of their bedroom, would she arrange her books alphabetically? Or would she put them in any old order, for the fun of seeing what ended up rubbing shoulders with what?
* * *
The football was finished and they had made a little pyramid of their empty cans on top of the telly. They were throwing the bairn’s toys to knock them off.
‘Tea’s ready,’ Kerry said. ‘Are you stopping for your tea, Ray?’
Ray held up a spongy dog with floppy ears. It was Julie’s first toy. Simon had brought it to the hospital. ‘Ariel’s tasty dog!’ Ray cackled. He sniffed the toy and smacked his lips. ‘Ariel’s “tasty” dog!’ With that he bit off one of the spongy dog’s ears.
‘Ha ha ha ha ha!’ He spat it out and threw the toy down. Then he saw that Simon wasn’t laughing.
‘The bairn’s had that since she was born, you tit!’
‘So?’
‘So you’ve fuckin’ knacked it. I bought that for her when she was born!’
‘Oh.’
Kerry picked the dog up. She asked Simon, ‘Have we got a drill?’
Ray looked worried. ‘What?’
‘I want to put my own shelves up. Like staggered shelves up. For my books.’
‘I’ve got a drill somewhere. What are we going to do with the bairn’s dog?’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘It’s bloody ruined, isn’t it? Your mate’s bloody ruined it.’
Ray tried to make them laugh. ‘But it was Ariel’s tasty dog!’
Kerry tossed the dog into Simon’s Picnic Cool Box. ‘Get out of my house, Ray. Don’t fucking come back.’
They were in bed early that night. Kerry tended to stay awake later, sitting up to read. She was still on with her Shakespeare. Simon was getting so that he hated the cover of that book. It was an old-fashioned one, and reminded him of the books in school.
‘Ariel’s tasty dog,’ he murmured to himself, lying away from her as she read.
‘What?’ she asked, and the phone rang.
They let it go a few times, down in the hall.
‘It’s past midnight,’ she breathed.
‘Something’s happened,’ he said, sitting up now.
‘It’ll be your mam. She’s died.’
‘It could be anyone. Anyone could have… had an accident.’
The rings went on.
‘Aw, get it,’ Kerry said. ‘It’ll have the bairn awake.’
He got up and went downstairs in his underpants. They were partly rucked up and she saw he had a spot coming on his bum. Funny, she thought, what you notice. The ringing stopped and she listened hard to catch what Simon was saying. She couldn’t pick it out so she looked at the book again, but nothing would stick. She realised her heart was hammering away. It was as Simon had said, when he was drunk and sentimental on New Year’s Eve, having a bairn made you scared of many more things. And that included the phone ringing when you weren’t expecting it. It
