9
Maxine had made a pot of chicken casserole and a big dish of white rice. The four of them had already gone through three bottles of wine by the time they sat down to eat. On the sideboard the monitor crackled every now and again with interference. If one of the twins coughed or cried out, a semicircular bank of lights lit up, green to begin with, becoming red as the volume increased.
‘Ever been breathalysed, Felix?’ asked Jed. He was spooning a second helping out of the pot. A line of juice trailed across the tablecloth and over the rim of his plate.
‘Jed, you messy sod,’ said Maxine. She reached over with a napkin.
‘It’s only gravy. Anyway, that’s what these chuck-away tablecloths are for, in’t it? For spilling on?’
‘It’s not gravy, it’s sauce.’
Felix said he’d only been stopped by the police once, for a faulty brake light.
‘Oh, Mr Dangerous,’ said Abbie, but winked at him and squeezed his thigh under the table.
‘I’d probably get the sack for drinking and driving,’ he explained.
‘It’s not like that at our place. There’s some of ’em with all kinds of criminal records, but nobody bothers. Most of ’em are still pissed in a morning from the night before, and go to the pub in the lunch hour for a top-up.’
‘Isn’t that dangerous, working with explosives?’ asked Abbie.
‘Suppose so. Anyhow, this cop car is following me home once, right up mi arse, he is, and I’ve had a couple so I’m sweating a bit. Then the flashing light starts, and he gives it a go with the siren, so I pull over and sit there while he gets out and walks up alongside. And there’s this packet of Juicy Fruit down by the handbrake, so quick as a flash I flick a piece into mi gob and start chewing like mad, to cover the smell of ale.’
‘Bit of a giveaway, isn’t it? If I were a policeman I’d breathalyse anyone who smelt remotely of chewing gum,’ observed Felix.
‘Anyhow, I winds the window down and he gives me the spiel, then pushes the bag in mi face and tells me to blow. But when I put mi lips to this breathalyser thing, the chuddie gets all over the mouthpiece and stuck in the end, and when I gives it back to him there’s this big blob of Juicy Fruit stuck to it, all stringy and hot. So his machine’s knackered and he hasn’t got another, and for ten minutes he’s trying to clean it with a packet of Wet Wipes I’ve found in the nappy sack. Bloody farce, it was. Then he takes mi name and address, like he’s going to come and see me later, but he never does. Humiliated, probably. Snookered by a lump of chuddie. You can just hear the other coppers down at the nick ripping the piss out of him. Useless, they are.’
‘So when was this?’ Maxine wanted to know.
‘I don’t know, three or four years ago.’
‘You never told me. Where were the kids while you were drinking and driving? Not in the back of the car, I hope.’
‘Were they hell. I’d been at a darts match. I don’t take the kids to a darts match, do I?’
Maxine had started collecting the plates. Jed had to shovel the last lump of chicken from his before she stole it away and put a dish down in its place.
‘Only apple crumble, I’m afraid. Keep your forks. I’d wanted to do a mille feuille but the kids were round my ankles all day.’
‘I’m amazed you’ve even managed to bake a crumble. It’s more than I ever manage,’ said Abbie helpfully.
‘Don’t be too amazed. Jed got it from the garage on his way back from work. It’s probably still frozen in the middle.’ She went to the fridge for another bottle of white wine and handed it to Felix. ‘Open this, will you, while I dollop the pudding out.’
Felix scraped away the foil with his thumb, inserted the corkscrew and pulled, but the cork remained where it was. Eventually he stood up to give himself more elbow room, but it wouldn’t budge.
‘Give it to Jed,’ said Abbie.
‘No, honestly, I think it’s coming,’ said Felix, bent double now, with the bottle between his thighs and a napkin wound around the handle to stop the metal biting into his hands.
‘Pass it here, man,’ said Jed, ‘before you give birth to yourself.’
Felix handed it over and without too much effort Jed eased out the cork, then began filling the four empty glasses. ‘Don’t tell me, you’d loosened it for me, yeah?’
Red-faced with effort and embarrassment, Felix sat down and held out his right hand to show Abbie the pressure mark where the corkscrew had dug into the fleshy part of his thumb. Abbie nodded and asked him to pass the custard.
After the meal, they sat at the table for another hour or so with the dirty dishes in front of them, talking about houses, about holidays and eventually about work. Maxine had opened a designer clothes shop in another town about eight miles away and wasn’t sure if it was going to be a success or not. Every second Tuesday in the month she drove into Manchester to load up with cut-price stock from the warehouses and outlets along Newton Street. Some of the clothes were genuine, or genuine seconds at least, but most of them were cheap copies and came supplied with a roll of designer-labels which Maxine stitched on by hand. Most evenings after the twins had gone to bed she sat in front of the telly with a needle and thread, and said she’d be ten times quicker if only Jed would buy her something called an over-locker, which not only made the job easier but gave a more professional finish. The people who bought the clothes knew they weren’t the real thing, but as long as they looked right and carried the proper logo they didn’t care. ‘Sometimes they’re better quality than the originals.’
‘What kind of stuff is it?’ asked Felix.
‘Oh, just crap really. Like that shirt Jed’s wearing.’
‘Thank you, my angel.’
‘You’d pay 400 for that in London and I bought it for twenty-five.’
‘You shouldn’t have, sweetheart, you really shouldn’t have.’
She ignored him, and carried on ignoring him as she undid the front of his shirt to demonstrate the stitchwork around the inside of the buttonhole, then dragged the collar to one side to show off the label.
‘Have you finished with me now?’ asked Jed, after Maxine had taken her seat again.
‘Yes. And fasten yourself up, will you? We don’t want to sit here looking at your hairy chest all night.’
Abbie said, ‘Sounds like you’re on to a real winner.’
‘Maybe, maybe not. The rent’s pretty high, even though I’m not in the middle of town, and I could do with more stock, so there’s always a bit of a cash-flow situation. I’m thinking of borrowing more from the bank but Mr Skinflint here thinks it’s a bad idea.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ said Jed. ‘I’m just a tailor’s dummy.’
‘Anyway, I want to design my own stuff really. Buying and selling is OK, but my heart’s not in it.’
‘Tell me about it,’ said Abbie sourly, and went on to talk about market research and the blow-job incident in the precinct. Maxine was disgusted and said she should have slapped his face. Turning to Felix, she said, ‘So did you run after this guy and give him what for?’
‘Oh, you know me, I can’t even get the cork out of a bottle.’
‘Maybe he was married,’ said Jed, filling his glass and reaching towards the mantelpiece for a packet of cigarettes.
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ asked Abbie.
‘You know, like in the joke. What’s the connection between chicken Kiev and a blow job? Go on, ask me, Felix.’
‘Don’t humour him,’ said Maxine.
‘Let him speak. Go on, Felix, ask me.’
‘All right, Jed, what is the connection between chicken Kiev and a blow job?’
‘You don’t get either of ’em at home.’ He exhaled a stream of smoke towards the lightshade - a white paper globe suspended from the ceiling - then roared at his own joke. It was the kind of laugh that made everyone else laugh, everyone except Marine, who slapped him hard on the shoulder and said, ‘Do you know what the saddest thing about that is?’
> ‘Go on, tell me,’ he said. The lightshade was swinging from side to side, as if from the reverberation of his laughter.
‘That you couldn’t think of anything more exotic than chicken Kiev. How pathetic is that? You’d got the whole of Delia to choose from and all you could think of was chicken Kiev. Two ninety-nine for a pack of four from Safeway. Pathetic. I think we’ve even got one in the freezer.’
‘Yeah, right at the bottom. Frozen solid. Next to the blow jobs,’ he said.
‘Well, pardon me,’ said Marine, standing up and piling the four pudding bowls on top of each other and throwing the spoons into the custard jug. ‘It’s just with a business to manage, two girls to look after and a house to run, I’ve got better things to do than…’
With her voice trailing off, she picked up the bowls and the jug and walked towards the kitchen.
‘Than what? Stick a meal in the oven?’
She turned around ‘Better things to do than suck your dick.’
‘Hurray!’ shouted Abbie, and applauded the comment.
Then from inside the kitchen Marine shouted, ‘Anyway, it’s more like fast food with you. It’s all over in five minutes and I’m still hungry. Know what I’m saying, Abbie?’
Abbie found this so hilarious she had to spit a mouthful of wine back into her glass to stop herself choking with laughter. Felix laughed as well, but it wasn’t convincing. In fact it was so unrealistic that both Jed and Abbie turned towards him, and if the sound of crying hadn’t come crackling through the monitor he might Well have found himself having to explain just what sort of meal his own sexual performance amounted to.
‘Now see what you’ve done, stupid,’ bawled Marine.
But Jed was already on his way out of the room, ducking under the doorframe and clomping up the stairs, then crossing the landing above them, the floorboards squeaking under his weight. Through the monitor, they could hear him whispering and shushing one of the girls, saying, ‘All right, my little button. Sleepy time now. That’s the way. You cuddle up and dose your eyes,’ and a tiny, drowsy voice saying, ‘Daddy, my daddy.’
‘Does he always go up?’ Abbie asked Maxine as she came back in with a teetering pile of coffee cups balanced on a stack of saucers.
‘Mostly. If I go they want another story, or they want a drink or the toilet. But they see Jed and they nod off again. In fact he usually nods off with them. I went in at three in the morning last week and there he was, sprawled all over Alice’s bed, dead to the world. She’d fallen out and got in with her sister.’
‘I don’t suppose there’s much room for Jed and another person in a single bed?’
‘There isn’t much room in a double and I’m only tiny. When we got married I kept thinking he might roll over in the middle of the night and squash me, like one of those big fat pigs crushing its litter.’
‘Don’t tell me you never went to bed with him before you got married?’
‘Course I did. But not to sleep.’
‘Can you tell them apart?’ Felix asked.
The women looked sideways at him.
‘The twins, I mean. When they’re crying.’
‘When we had them, we wrote their names on ankle-bands so we wouldn’t get them mixed up. But after a while you just know: I can’t say how, exactly. It’s not like one of them has got blue eyes and the other’s got brown. But you just know. Even without looking, I can tell. It’s natural.’
Abbie held her wine glass with her fingertips and looked down into the last inch or so of swirling, pale-yellow liquid. ‘That must be nice,’ she muttered.
‘Sorry,’ said Maxine, and rested her head on Abbie’s shoulder.
Abbie kissed her hair and carried on looking into her glass.
When Jed came back into the room he was holding a bottle of brandy by the neck. From the way he carried it in his big hand it looked more like a small bell. ‘If you girls want to get it on, it’s fine, so long as me and Felix can watch, eh, Felix?’
‘You’re pissed, Jed,’ said Maxine. ‘And you know what brandy does to you.’
‘It’s Friday, in’t it? I’m just unwinding.’
‘Well, unwind with your mouth shut. Felix was just telling us about work.’
‘Er, yes, well, it’s fine. Busy, but fine.’
‘Got any juicy cases on the go?’
‘Yes. One or two interesting things. One in particular that’s keeping me occupied.’
He was thinking of Ruby Moffat, but when Abbie looked up from under her fringe and smiled, he was happy to let her think he was talking about her.
‘I read about that bull in the Strawberry Field. That’s right under your office, isn’t it?’ said Maxine.
‘Yes, we saw it happen.’
‘Kicked a boy, didn’t it? Is he all right?’
‘They took him in the ambulance but he died in hospital.’
‘Oh, no. That’s terrible.’
‘Do you get a car allowance, Felix, or does it come out of your own pocket?’ said Jed, pushing what looked to Felix like a goldfish bowl of brandy under his nose.
‘Jed! I was just asking about a boy who died, for pity’s sake,’ said Maxine, shaking-her head in disbelief.
‘Yeah, well, I got a bollocking for talking about funny stuff, so now I’m talking about cars.’
‘It’s a fleet car,’ said Felix, comfortable with this change in the conversation. ‘I get it on a lease arrangement. They pay for the servicing and the insurance, all I do is put petrol in the tank and air in the tyres. Then at the end of two years they buy it back at the going rate, so long as I haven’t trashed it.’
‘Well, then, you’re lucky you haven’t got kids.’
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ whispered Abbie.
‘Because if there’s one thing guaranteed to turn a car into a worthless pile of junk, it’s a kid.’
‘Here we go,’ said Maxine. ‘Light the blue touch and stand well back.’
Jed was pouring himself another glass of brandy and reaching over to top Felix up, even though Felix hadn’t tasted his yet.
‘They put adverts in car magazines saying one careful owner, non-smoker, no dogs. But the one question you want to be asking when you buy a second-hand car is this: how many kids? I’m telling you, we got that Espace three years ago and it’s not worth tuppence now. There’s feet marks on the ceiling. There’s half-eaten sweets in the door pockets. There’s gunge all over the windows. The rear de-mist is buggered from piling toys on the parcel shelf. There’s a five-foot gash all down the near side from one of the girls dragging her bike out of the garage…’
‘Actually that was me,’ said Maxine, standing up, but Jed wasn’t listening.
‘And I found a tomato growing under the back seat. A bloody tomato, with leaves and everything. Three years old and it’s not worth tuppence. I’m too ashamed to try and sell it. I might as well just dump it on the allotments and let some old codger keep his pigeons in it.’
Maxine had left the dining room and was now in the hall, reaching into the broom cupboard. Abbie folded her arms across her chest and leaned back in her seat, saying, ‘But you love them really, don’t you, Jed? I’ve seen you with them. You’d do anything for those kids.’
‘Don’t encourage him,’ shouted Maxine. ‘It’s his favourite subject.’
‘Course I love ’em. I love ’em to bits. But what about me? I’m practically crippled with carting them here, there and everywhere, one on each arm. I’m telling you, they’ve got it all wrong, those social scientists, about why women live longer than men. It isn’t bacon butties and booze that’s killing us blokes, it’s fatherhood. Arthritis in this knee, dodgy back, permanent fatigue. I’ve been to casualty five times with a grazed cornea, and when you get up the ‘ossie it isn’t drunks and junkies and people with broken arms waiting to see a doctor, it’s dads, all done in by their kids, all knackered. It’s the front fucking line. Look at these bags under mi eyes - I ought to be in London Zoo, eating bamboo shoots. I haven’t
had a full night’s sleep for four years, and don’t talk to me about having a holiday - that’s a joke. The car’s solid with luggage, not to mention the roof rack and the trailer, and all I’ve got is a spare pair of undies and a toothbrush. I go to work when I want a break. Gunpowder - it’s less dangerous. I don’t own one jacket that hasn’t been spewed on or ripped, and what’s worse, I don’t care. Why bother - I’m nobody. I’m just a bloody pit pony and a dishcloth.’
It was a speech from the heart, Felix thought, but a well-practised one. Otherwise, how could somebody who was so pissed connect such a sequence of thoughts and get the words to come out of his mouth in the right order? Jed was like the drunken man stumbling home from the pub: his body remembered the way even if his brain didn’t, and it was only muscle-memory and years of practice that stopped him lurching into some side alley and falling flat on his face. During his monologue, Marine had come to stand behind him. By inserting her index fingers into his armpits, she had made him rise from his seat. As he continued his rant, she slipped one arm into the sleeve of his coat, then the other, then stood on a chair to pull a bobble hat on to his head and wrapped a scarf so tightly around his neck he had to yank it forward to finish what he was saying.
‘I’m buggered and I’m skint. So you want kids, Abbie? Well, you can have mine, ‘cos they’re doing mi bloody ’ed in.’
Abbie said, ‘I don’t want your children, Jed. I just want one of my own and I haven’t got one.’
Then she started to cry. Maxine, invisible behind Jed’s great bulk except for the occasional glimpse of her hands, had almost finished dressing him. It was an act that seemed as well rehearsed as Jed’s outburst, the finishing touch being the application of the dog leash, which she wound tightly around his wrist before whistling for Smutty, who came scrambling across the hardwood floor and dutifully slipped his neck through the chain-link noose at the other end. Jed said he was sorry to Abbie, he hadn’t meant to upset her, ‘But I’m telling you this for your own good.’
Smutty dragged him towards the outside door, which Maxine held open. She had very nearly closed it behind him when his foot reappeared through the gap. ‘Wait a minute, I’m still in mi bloody slippers.’
The White Stuff Page 9
