their skins off,” and I say, [anxious, raised voice] “I don’t want to hear about it, Steve.”
Funny he’s not home yet. I’m three quarters of an hour late myself, which is almost unprecedented (!), but it’s not like Steve to miss the 5.37. It’s quite funny really; we moved down from Chessington to Thomas Hardy country – that’s what they call it round here, like living in a book! – but Steve’s still a commuter, still does this job in the lab at Salisbury which is really hush-hush. I tell people he works for British Gas, which turned out to be quite a good idea because no one can ever think of an interesting follow-up question when you say British Gas, unless they want to complain about automatic switchboards. I say, “I know, I know, it’s terrible, I know, push this, push that, yes, I know, please hold while we try to connect you, I know!” but it’s better than arguing about animal rights, as I always get upset by that, obviously, when you consider how I personally quite like cute cuddly mice and everything, and when you consider my job! I tell Steve I don’t like my job very much; I love it actually, but if Steve knew how much I loved it, he’d say it wasn’t normal to be so enthusiastic, the place was unbalancing me, and start campaigning for me to leave. He hates to see me unbalanced, Steve. I told him I loved the civil service, you see, years ago. That’s not normal, he said, and the next thing I knew, I’d left.
When we moved down here five years ago we didn’t expect to find a job at all that would suit my meagre talents (!) – my “MTs” – but then this job came up at Bathsheba’s, which, yes, IS a bit of a dramatic name for a petting zoo, but as Mr and Mrs Bryan say, everything else is named after Thomas Hardy things around here, so why shouldn’t we be Bathsheba’s Barn, with our Pair of Blue Eyes Teddy Bear Shop and a café called Far from the Madding Crowd? If Steve ever gets suspicious that I’m enjoying it, I invent something – tell him Mr Bryan is unnaturally close to the sheep, or the hamsters are smelly or something – and the bad news seems to cheer him up. Bathsheba’s. It’s a lovely name. Mr and Mrs Bryan aren’t big readers, they don’t pretend to be, but they got this big list of Thomas Hardy names from somewhere (I think everyone’s got one), and we’re working through it gradually and I think it’s lovely. We’ve got a tiny goat called Eustacia and a goose called Jude. And you’d never think of names like that, would you? You’d call them Titch and Quackers or something. I did try to read one of Thomas Hardy’s books recently, what Steve would call Overdoing It, but it was quite good, no really. Quite sad. Full of horrible ironic things that are somehow bound to happen; you see them coming, and you think, “Oh no, there’s no escape from the very thing they were trying to avoid, no, no!” I got about halfway before I gave up. The thing is, it does put you off a bit when every time the name Tess comes up, you visualise a chicken.
Oh where’s Steve? He knows I get worried if he’s late. He ought to, we’ve been together since we were eighteen, it’s our twenty-fifth anniversary in a couple of weeks, his mum’s doing all the catering in case I couldn’t cope with the worry, which is very nice of her, but at the same time, obviously, a bit worrying. Oh come on, Steve, I can’t start cooking for tonight – can’t start applying my meagre culinary talents, my MCTs! – till you get home and decide what you want. I’ll start tucking into the biscuits in a minute! That biscuit barrel is lovely, anyway, there’s no way Steve can say, “They saw you coming Henny” like he did with the lemon clock. We could use the old one for nuts and bolts or something. Not that we’ve got any nuts and bolts; we might have to buy some specially. Oh come on, Steve. He’s an hour late! And now it’s going to be awful when he gets home because whatever I say to him, even if I don’t mention it, even if I say I did notice he was late but it didn’t bother me, he’ll say, “Don’t go accusing me of anything, Henny; it’s YOU that’s not normal” and I won’t be able to talk to him about Mr and Mrs Bryan offering me the job of manageress; I’ll just have to go in to work tomorrow and say we talked about it, and Steve was all in favour but in the end I decided against it. [Rehearsal] We talked about it, Steve was all in favour. Oh come on, Steve! Come on. [Opens tin] I think I need a biscuit.
Scene Two; petting zoo noises
Well, it was a bit strange Steve not coming home at all last night, but I have to say, after the first three or four hours of worrying whether he’d been knocked down by a bus, or had forgotten his own name after a freak blow to the head, or the mice in the lab had finally ganged up on him and torn the living flesh from his bones with their sharp little teeth, I thought – possibly for the first time ever in my life – “There’s a logical explanation for all this” and switched on the TV. It was very odd. Mad with worry for a few hours, ringing the hospitals, chewing my nails, and then, well, curled up with Changing Rooms. Where did Jude the goose get to? [Goose honk] He always looks depressed, this goose. [Honk] There he is! [She imitates the goose noise] Hello, Quackers! [Honk, honk] I know, it’s terrible, poor you, eh? [Honk] Yes, yes. Poor Jude. Yes.
I even got out the reviled tapestry last night. I had a drink. I thought, “You’re in shock, Henny. Go mad.” I fell asleep on the sofa eating crisps watching something called Never Mind the Buzzcocks. The thing is, I don’t know how I knew, but I did. I knew. He’s not coming back. When I finally rang the police this morning, they said, “About twelve hours? Just overnight, madam? Give it another twenty-four,” and instead of pleading with them to take me seriously, I said something really peculiar, what did I say? Hang on. They said, wait another twenty-four hours, madam … [Remembers] And I said, [cheerful] “Right-oh.”
Leaving the house was the most difficult thing about today. Every morning Steve and I leave the house together, you see, doing our checking in the kitchen: testing each appliance: taps off, cooker off, fridge shut, kettle unplugged; then door shut, light off, alarm set 1-9-7-6 (year we got married), double-lock the front door. Then we go in again. Taps off, cooker off, fridge shut, kettle unplugged; door shut, light off, alarm set 1-9-7-6, double-lock the front door. In again. Off, off, shut, unplugged; shut, off, 1-9-7-6, lock. Off, off, shut, unplugged, shut, off, 1-9-7-6, lock. We allow lots of time for this, because Steve’s a stickler, and if he gets outside and can’t remember whether the kettle was unplugged, we have to go back in and turn the alarm off and do it again, because he says he knows what I’m like, he doesn’t want me fretting about it all day, imagining the house burning down.
So this morning, I didn’t know what to do, with Steve not here. I looked round the kitchen and everything was –well, it was off. I mean, it was obvious everything was off. You can tell from looking whether things are off! So I set the alarm and shut the front door and locked it, and got in the car. And then I heard Steve in my head say, was the fridge shut? I pictured it; it was definitely shut. I mean, I hadn’t tested it, pushed it, and said the word “Shut”. But I still knew it wasn’t open. So I started the car, and drove to work, and really didn’t think about it until I’d just got past that exhaust centre place called Life’s Little Ironies, and then I got this picture in my head [fearful imaginings] of Steve getting back from wherever he’s gone, recovered his memory after a second blow to the head, patched the living flesh back on his cheeks after vanquishing the mice, and he goes in the kitchen expecting everything to be safe and orderly – and the door to the fridge is open. [The horror!] In fact it’s swinging open and the food inside is all rotten and there’s a pool of water on the floor. “Henny, how could you let this happen?” he yells, and he doesn’t see the water in time, and he slips on it, and as he slips he grabs the kettle and it’s not unplugged! And as he yanks it, the flex shorts at the plug and he dies in a shower of blue sparks and it’s all my fault!
“Are you all right, Henny?” Mrs Bryan said. I was sitting in the car in Bathsheba’s car park just outside the Gabriel Oak Experience – where twice a day the kiddies can take turns driving wooden stakes into the stomachs of pretend sheep blown up like balloons, apparently it was very memorable in the film, and we’re quite proud of it because it combines good old violent country know-how with a nice thing from a book, and at the same time features the sound of escaping air, which is always so popular with children. [Blows long expressive
