He came back. ‘I don’t believe him.’
‘Who?’ She pushed The Tempest away as Simon slid back under the quilt, shivering.
‘Bloody Ray! He’s out in Darlington. Pissed out of his head. Ringing up, all upset. He wanted to apologise, he said.’
‘He what? Ray?’
‘He wanted to talk to you, really, but I told him you were asleep. He’s bloody crackers. He reckons that, tomorrow, he’s gonna go round all the shops in Darlington to look for a toy dog exactly like the one he ruined.’
Simon snuggled down to sleep again. She listened to his five-o’clock shadow scrape on the pillow. She had a very hairy husband. Hirsute, she corrected herself.
‘He phoned after midnight to say that?’
Simon looked round. ‘He also said we were his favourite friends.’
She tutted. ‘Favourite bloody friends!’
‘He’s a nutcase.’
‘He’s your bloody friend, not mine.’
Simon’s hand slid across to her under the quilt. She watched its impression beneath the fabric, thinking of Jaws. He said, ‘He’s just Ariel’s tasty dog.’
‘Don’t start that again!’
In the next room the bairn started wailing.
‘Shite!’
‘I’ll go,’ Kerry said, though it wasn’t her turn. She was better at quieting her.
Simon groaned. ‘It’s like having two kids.’
When Kerry went to see her she was standing up in the cot, clinging to the bars and rocking backwards and forwards, yelling her head off. She’s a gutsy one, Kerry thought. She’s gonna have a right life, this one. She picked her up and she wasn’t wet or anything. She was just cross.
Mother and daughter had taken to having midnight traipses around the back garden. The bairn had come to expect them. She was just reminding her mam. As soon as Kerry took her down the stairs, into the kitchen, the bairn shut up. She gurgled, even, as Kerry opened the back door and stepped out into the gravid summer air. The lawn and bushes of dock leaves and nettles, all their hedges, were a deep mysterious blue. Kerry’s bare feet shushed through the grass.
‘You know, I wish we had called you Miranda,’ she told her daughter.
Julie just cooed with her head facing backwards over Kerry’s shoulder, as if she was being winded. She cooed because something had caught her eye.
Kerry turned, to squint at the bottom of the garden, trying to see what the bairn’s keen and milky-blue eyes had seen.
A lithe, bone-white, quite hairless fairy eased himself from under the hedge. He didn’t notice Kerry as she held her breath and gripped the bairn tighter. Ariel was intent on his mustard-coloured pit-bull terrier, which had shot under the hedgerow ahead of him and was now digging a hole in the lawn.
Simon will go crackers about his lawn, Kerry was thinking. He was painstaking when he laid that. It was like carpeting. And that was what he had been meant to be looking out for in Boyes this afternoon—shears—but Ray had kept distracting him.
Soon the dog had made a sizeable hole and moonlight glinted off something down there. Kerry assumed it was a bone but the grunting yellow dog took it out and laid it carefully on the grass. Then Ariel gave him a swift pat and they both bolted back into the undergrowth.
She watched a moment and then went to see. They had left her a spanking new drill, minus its bit. Julie clapped her hands. Well, Kerry thought, we can buy the right-size bit from Boyes, from Derek.
SEVEN DISENCHANTMENTS
Until the very end my grandfather kept a suitcase with him. ‘I’ll fight it tooth and nail, every step of the frigging way, and they’ll never get hold of it.’
The last time I saw him, in the home, where he died exhaling the dust of his carefully cluttered objets, he was clutching the case to his chest, struggling with inarticulate hands at the clasps.
His stockinged feet, meanwhile, curled about the gramophone which sat like a faithful hound. He was basking in crackling, booming Puccini arias. ‘I’ve taken up opera—me! Frigging opera!’ His feet, far steadier than hands, stroked the wooden gramophone’s sides. ‘I’ve found it’s the best there is for vibration. The vibration warms up my feet. When you start to die, it’s the frigging feet as gets hit first.’
How long would his shaken form hold up? I wondered. Opera couldn’t keep him warm indefinitely. I stepped past the bric-a-brac and the pleasantries, asking, ‘You wanted me for something?’
When he looked up there was fear and defiance in those eyes, a blue translucence like the finest china, cracked and patched with threads of dirty yellow glue. He must have decided I was an accomplice. Relenting, he said, ‘This suitcase. It has to be kept away from them.’
‘What’s inside it?’
‘Your frigging inheritance, my lad.’
‘Shall I open it now?’
I have always enjoyed opening presents. Despite what they say, the pleasure is neither in giving nor receiving.
It is always in opening, for giver and receiver both. The jouissance of discovery, the shattering of bondage. As a child I anticipated a career in either burglary or escapology. I Penetration and extrication have always been my areas of expertise. I could never stand a cluttered room or a bolted^ entrance. It strikes me now that, even during the gaudiest of sexual permutations enacted by my person, I have submitted j to very few enacted upon—or within—my person. I have always been the Alcatraz of sexual partners—immune and integral, even at the point of crisis.
In this particular scene, I must admit, my grandfather’s suitcase had me more than intrigued. I could not help it; an erotic frisson charges the air of any present-giving I am party to, whether that gift is a person, a unique opportunity or a device of some kind, which only I can open.
‘I’ve kept it till the bloody end, unopened—for you, son. Only you can open it. It’s all yours.’
I wrenched it from his feeble grasp, kicking the gramophone and causing the needle to shriek across several grooves as I did so. The music
