by Lisa Jewell
Imagining that this urgent awakening might have something to do with the fullness of Digby’s bladder and the severity of his need to empty it, not to mention any unexpected effect that his snaffling of last night’s vindaloo might have had on his doubtless delicate stomach, Dig hopped briskly out of bed, jumped into a pair of boxers and encouraged the creature into the living room with a slap to the back of his bare thighs, hoping that he would then leap up on to the recumbent figure of Delilah nestled into Dig’s sofabed, and begin snuffling into her ear the news of his full bladder.
This plan didn’t work. Instead of waking his mistress, Digby sat stiffly on the floor at the foot of her bed, staring imploringly at Dig and whimpering very quietly, a grain of yellow rice hanging resolutely from his oily whiskers. Dig patted gently at the duvet covering the apparently dead Delilah in an attempt to lure Digby towards her ear but the dog just looked at him as if he was slightly retarded and whimpered again, and Dig realized that he had only three choices:
wake up the angelically, beautifully slumbering Delilah and insist that she take the dog outside
take responsibility himself for the emptying of Digby’s bladder, or
let him piss on the carpet.
Option (1) seemed a bit cruel, and option (3) was a complete no-no, which left him only one feasible alternative. However, it was seven o’clock in the morning, it was still raining and Dig would have to get properly dressed and take the dog outside, as he had no access to a garden. These were all truly horrible considerations and it was the prospect of these that led to Dig gingerly gripping the beast around his bony undercarriage, picking his way over the scavenged foil curry containers strewn around the kitchen floor, and holding him firmly aloft out of the kitchen window, over the early rush-hour noises of Camden Road, while making ‘whooshing’ noises under his breath in an attempt to charm open Digby’s urethra.
The dog reacted badly to the situation he found himself in, flailing around wildly in Dig’s hands and staring at him with madly bulging eyes as if to ask, ‘Why are you trying to kill me? What have I ever done to you?’
Dig realigned his fingers beneath Digby’s belly and began to push his fingertips into the point where he imagined his bladder sat, attempting to squeeze the business out of him as if emptying a hot-water bottle. Digby liked this even less and started kicking his tiny legs around ever more frantically, but finally Dig felt the animal begin to relax in his hands and breathed a sigh of relief as a jet of dog pee streamed elegantly from between the creature’s legs like the squirt of water from a cherubic statue in a water fountain, arcing gently and cascading down towards the lower branches of the chestnut tree outside Dig’s window. ‘Good boy,’ said Dig, ‘that’s a good boy…’
‘Oh my God!! Oh Jesus!! What are you doing?’
Dig jumped in his skin as a shrill female voice reverberated around the kitchen, and he felt a pair of hands dragging him away from the window.
‘Put him down—let go of him, for God’s sake!!’
He spun around without thinking and certainly without first verifying with the dog that his bladder was fully empty and watched in horror as Digby’s still-active spray sprinkled in a generous crescent all over the kitchen surfaces, across the hob, into the sink and, finally, all down the front of Delilah’s bra and knickers and into a foil container at her feet.
Dig barely had time to register the disaster before he was overcome by the breathtakingly erotic realization that Delilah was standing in front of him in her bra and knickers looking like some kind of Greek goddess, despite the rivulets of lemon-coloured dog-pee trickling down her fantastically flat stomach and into the waistband of her knickers. He gulped. The stream of pee stopped as suddenly as it had started, and the shell-shocked trio found themselves rooted silently to the spot in horror, the only sound that of the last few droplets of Digby’s pee hitting the tiled floor…splish…splish…splish.
Delilah opened her mouth and looked down with disgust at her dampened body, her face contorting as the full horror of her situation hit her. ‘Eeeeeegh!!’ she squeaked, ineffectually flapping her arms up and down. ‘Eeeegh!!’
Dig dropped the dog to the floor, where he began slipping and sliding around in the puddles he’d made there. ‘Oh Jesus! Oh Delilah! I’m so sorry…oh God…here’—he grabbed a brand-new J-cloth from the side of the sink—‘here—let me help you.’ He started sponging at Delilah’s rigid body, desperately trying to avoid the rude bits, which was tricky as that’s where most of the pee was.
‘Eeeeegh!’ said Delilah.
‘Here,’ said Dig, handing her the damp cloth, ‘you do the other…bits. I’ll…er…put the shower on for you.’
‘Eeeeegh!’ said Delilah again, picking the cloth gingerly from his hands and rubbing it stiffly along her inside legs. Dig tried not to stare at the soft golden down poking from her knickers as he made his way past her towards the bathroom.
He had to negotiate piles of Delilah’s belongings in the overcast gloom of what had been his living room and was now effectively Delilah’s bedroom. Her two suitcases had been left on the floor and opened wide, their entrails spilt all over the floor and piled up in small heaps here and there. There were three glasses of water balanced on the table by the bed and stacks of paperwork spread out all over the place. Dig had to resist the urge to start tidying things as he made his way across the room, and he clenched his fists into balls as he walked, repeating silently to himself, ‘Don’t be anal, don’t be anal, don’t be anal.’
The bathroom, too, was unrecognizable, sporting a sophisticated array of white-packaged bottles and jars containing all manner of fluids for the removal, cleansing and general facilitation of the contact lenses that Dig hadn’t realized Delilah wore, plus a variety of beauty products housed in mint-green packaging that promised to perform what sounded to Dig like the stuff of miracles, and a simply enormous bag of cotton-wool balls on top of the cistern. She had also used one of his towels, which threw his weekly towel rota into complete disarray, and had left the bathmat on the floor, instead of leaving it on the side of the bath, so that it was still damp this morning even though she’d used it the night before and—oh God—she’d finished a toilet roll at some point and had left the new one just sitting balanced on top of the empty one—just sitting there—balanced—when all she had to do—it was so simple—was to take the old roll off, throw it in the bin and slip the new one on. I mean—for God’s sake—how could anyone be so lazy.
Don’t be anal. Don’t be anal. Don’t be anal.
He flicked the switch for the shower and tested the temperature, straightened the towels, replaced the toilet roll and put all of Delilah’s bottles into nice straight, satisfying lines before heading back towards the kitchen, where Digby was still where Dig had left him, curled up on the floor in a puddle of his own pee, wondering where he was and why strange men were trying to throw him out of windows, and where Delilah was still scrubbing at herself with the new-five-minutes-ago-but-soon-to-be-thrown-in-the-bin J-cloth.
Dig stopped at the threshold of the kitchen, stopped and just stared for a moment at the sight before him—not the mess, not the dog pee all over everything and the bits of turmeric-tinted sauce staining his porous white floor tiles and the grains of oily rice slowly solidifying and sticking to the floor—but the glorious sight of Delilah, standing with her back to him, her long legs splayed out at strange angles to allow for cleaning, her golden hair swinging back and forth in the slowly pervading sunlight from the window, her stretch-jersey underwear dazzlingly white. She looked like the models in the photographs on the underwear packets he’d seen in M&S. She was magnificent. How could he have ever let her get away, all those years ago? He should have followed her to the ends of the earth and back, he should have been there at the church ten years ago to stop her marrying this Alex person, he should have fought for her. Girls like Delilah only came along once in a lifetime…or did they?
His fantastic reverie was disturbed at that moment wh
en Delilah suddenly spun around violently on the spot, regarded him with bulging, tearful eyes, brought one hand up to her mouth and charged past him, pushing him out of the way with her other hand and running noisily towards the bathroom.
‘Are you OK?’ he called after her, following.
He caught up with her just in time to see her grip the wash-basin firmly with one hand, pull her hair back from her face with the other and throw up rambunctiously into the sink.
‘Oh God,’ he thought to himself, ‘not the sink! Please—not the sink! That’s what toilets are for.’ But instead he said, ‘Oh Delilah! You poor thing. Are you OK?’, and patted her back and brought her a glass of water. She assured him that she was fine while she sat shivering and shaking on the edge of the bath, her creamy skin looking clammy and damp, gripping the glass to death between her hands.
He shuffled out when she said she wanted to take a shower and wandered blindly through his messy living room, deliberately ignored the rancid mayhem and disoriented dog in his kitchen and made his way towards the blessed sanctuary of his bedroom. He flopped wearily on to his bed and turned his head to view the time. 7.15 a.m. Had so many disgusting things really occurred in such a short amount of time? Could so much have gone so disastrously wrong in the space of just fifteen minutes? He turned the other way, brought his knees into chest and closed his eyes. His mind soon filled with images of Delilah in her underwear, but this time without the dog and the pee and the curry and the mess and the vomit—this time, just Delilah, her underwear and him…
By the time Dig’s alarm went off at 8.15, he’d had a couple of gorgeous day-dreams and a long and, he thought, extremely well-deserved wank and he was feeling ready to start the day again, putting his previous attempt at day-starting well behind him.
The rain had stopped and the sun was positively bursting through his curtains. Delilah was wearing a pair of faded jeans, black crocodile-skin boots with high heels and a black polo neck when he walked into the now-uncurtained brightness of the living room. She was one of the few women who Dig considered suited to wearing jeans. She was crouching on the floor and leafing frantically through her paperwork, spreading the piles ever further and slurping on a mug of coffee as she went. She turned around when she sensed Dig behind her.
‘Hi!’ she beamed happily, rocking on her heels, ‘you recovered from earlier on yet?’
‘I think so,’ he said, scratching his head and balancing himself on the arm of the sofabed, which had not, he noted, been put away.
‘Sorry about all that. And sorry about shouting at you about the dog—I should have known that you weren’t trying to harm him—I’m probably a bit over-protective sometimes.’
‘Oh,’ said Dig, dismissively, ‘don’t worry about that. How are you, anyway? You know…’ He rubbed his tummy.
‘Oh God. Sorry about that, too! I’ve had a bit of a dodgy gut lately. I’ll try to do it in the toilet next time!’ She laughed, getting to her feet and rubbing at the knees of her jeans.
‘Oh don’t be silly! It’s fine. I mean—when you’ve gotta puke, you’ve gotta puke really, haven’t you?’ He giggled foolishly and then cleared his throat.
‘So, Dig,’ she asked, ‘heard anything from Nadine yet?’
Dig jumped a little—for such a closed book, Delilah had a disarming ability to ask awkward questions at very unexpected junctures. ‘Yeah,’ he said, tersely, ‘I spoke to her yesterday afternoon, actually. We had another row.’
‘About me?’
Dig shook his head. ‘Nah. About her. She’s an idiot. She’s getting back in touch with this wanker she went out with at university. She saw him last night. I don’t understand her.’
‘Well,’ said Delilah, decisively, ‘I do. She’s trying to get back at you.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘It’s obvious. She’s pissed off with you for spending time with me, so she’s phoned up her ex to try and make you jealous.’
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I’m not. I’m right. I know I am. She wants you to know what she feels like. Why else would she choose now, of all times, to get back in touch with this bloke?’
Dig shrugged petulantly.
‘You gonna call her?’
‘No.’ Dig was aware that he sounded like a child but he didn’t care. If Nadine could play it like a brat, then he could play it like an even bigger brat.
‘Jesus,’ sighed Delilah, ‘you two are behaving like a pair of kids. It’s just like when we were at school, remember? When you and me first started going out together and Nadine wouldn’t talk to you any more? Twelve years later and nothing’s changed—it’s pathetic.’ She scooped together a pile of papers and beat them off the floor to straighten the edges.
‘She started it,’ said Dig, continuing his brat theme.
‘So. Why can’t you finish it? Just pick up the phone and say, “All right, Deen, fancy a drink?” You’ll go out, you’ll chat, within an hour everything will be back to normal—I guarantee you. Honestly. You two should be married to each other and instead you’re not even talking to each other—it’s infuriating!’
Dig winced at this new reference to him and Nadine.
‘D’you want another coffee?’ he asked, gesturing at her mug with his eyes.
‘Er…no thanks,’ she said, ‘I’m actually really late for something.’
‘Oh yeah? What’s that then?’
‘Oh—nothing really. I’ve just got be somewhere in twenty minutes, somewhere in Surrey.’
She suddenly became deeply distracted, flapping the papers about ever more wantonly, and Dig thought better of probing her with more questions and made his way to the kitchen to get himself a coffee. He was alarmed to note that Delilah had apparently managed to manoeuvre herself around the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee and a bowl of porridge, with hot milk (the slimy-looking pan had been left unwashed and unrinsed in the sink), without feeling the need to clean up any of Digby’s piss or at the very least pick the curry containers off the fucking floor. Dig was rendered speechless for a moment, well aware that even though he was cleaner and had higher standards than most, there could be very few people in this world who would feel happy about preparing food in amongst congealed curry and dog pee.
Delilah wandered into the kitchen, busily rearranging things in her handbag and clutching the spare set of door keys he’d given her the night before, a black sheepskin jacket slung crookedly over her shoulders. ‘Erm,’ she began, biting at her lower lip, ‘Dig. I…er…need to ask you a favour.’
‘Oh God,’ thought Dig, ‘what now?’
‘Sure!’ he smiled. ‘No problem!’
‘I was sort of hoping, if it wasn’t too much trouble, that you could maybe have Digby today?’ She smiled at him apprehensively.
‘Eh?’ said Dig.
‘Well, I wouldn’t normally ask, but I’ll be on trains and God knows what today, and I don’t know when I’ll be home, and it would just make everything so much easier if he wasn’t with me…’
‘But I’ve…um…I’ve got to go to work, Delilah. I can’t look after him. Can’t you just leave him here?’
Delilah shook her head sadly. ‘He’s awful when he’s left alone—he makes this terrible noise, like goats being tortured or something—painful. And he deliberately pees on beds. And he eats things. Toilet paper and stuff. It’s a spite thing. Can’t you take him with you? He’s ever so small and incredibly well-behaved—just stick him under your desk, I’m sure no one will mind.’ She opened up her face pleadingly.
‘Well…it’s not really up to me, you see—it’s my boss—we get all sorts of important people coming to the office, and he might not like it very much if Digby here was around.’
‘Oh I’m sure he won’t mind little Digby—he’ll probably love him! Please Dig—please. I’m begging of you. I’ll make it up to you tonight—I’ll cook you my famous lamb casserole—it’s Alex’s favourite! Please!’
Dig stared i
nto Delilah’s huge blue eyes and felt his minuscule reserves of resolve diminish rapidly to nothing. Toby wouldn’t mind about the dog—he would probably think it was quite cool having a dog around the place—and he was sure that Digby could behave himself for at least a day, and poor old Delilah really, really needed him to help her—she would be so grateful, and grateful women were, generally speaking, a very good thing.
So he nodded and he smiled and he said, ‘Yeah, sure, why not?’, and Delilah hugged him yet again, and Dig thought to himself that he really was building up a good, big stock of brownie-points here and that at some stage all this Good Samaritan stuff was going to start paying dividends, surely, and he hugged her back and imagined the lovely luminous white stuff she had on underneath all those clothes.
Delilah didn’t get back to Dig’s flat until half past ten that night. She didn’t tell him where she’d been all day and Dig didn’t ask, and there was certainly no mention whatsoever of the promised lamb casserole.
TWENTY-THREE
Nadine was experiencing what could fairly be described as the worst hangover of her life. Without a doubt. Her head was throbbing, her heart was racing, her blood was fizzing, her stomach was churning and she was feeling as miserable as sin. She was having rather severe difficulty piecing together the fragmented bits of last night’s events. She could just about remember having sex with Phil (bleugh), but she had absolutely no idea how such a terrible thing could have happened.
She’d managed to crawl out of bed forty-five minutes ago and had been dragging her pained body around the flat ever since, trying to make it do the things it normally did in the mornings, like wash its hair and make its toast and brush its teeth. It had been extremely difficult and extremely unpleasant, but she’d managed it somehow, and had been about to leave for work when she’d heard the phone ringing.
‘Hello,’ she sighed, painfully, perching on the arm of the sofa, expecting to hear her mother’s voice on the end of the line, telling her something bizarre, like that she’d been clearing out the loft and found Nadine’s old retainer brace and would she like her to bring it over that weekend or should she throw it away?
