what she calls it, is it?’
Joe paused then dropped a spoonful of sugar into his tea. ‘Look what you made me do, Belle.’
Belle smiled, pleased at her son-in-law’s dissent.
Lenny, moving about rhythmically in the corner of the room, didn’t look up.
‘Joe’s been at the Britannia Kitchens roadshow at the Brighton Centre. His company had a stand there.’
Lenny looked up, taking in the suit. ‘That’s what you do, then?’
‘Course it’s what he does, I told you.’
‘What?’ Joe said to Lenny, over Belle’s head.
‘Build kitchens?’
‘He doesn’t build kitchens, he sells them, but that isn’t what Joe does.’ Belle slurped her tea and started on the biscuits. A flake of chocolate melted in the corner of her mouth and ran in a rivulet down one of the wrinkles there. ‘Joe makes money.’
‘I’m a carpenter,’ he cut in. ‘By trade, I’m a carpenter.’ Why did he think this sounded better than making money?
‘Was a carpenter.’ Belle wasn’t having any of it. ‘Now you just make money. Got a whole office full of people working for you. Joe’s got his own company.’
‘I’m a carpenter by trade. My dad was a carpenter.’ If Lenny didn’t look up or say something soon, he thought he was going to explode. ‘I’m from Brighton,’ he yelled. ‘Brighton born and bred.’
Lenny turned her back on him and clicked the clasps on the case shut.
‘Cassidy Street. Right there on Cassidy Street.’ He gestured blindly at the net curtains as if his entire past lay just beyond them.
‘Calm down, Joe,’ Belle said, leaning forward to pour herself another cup of tea and farting. ‘You’ve earned the money. No need to be ashamed of it.’
Lenny drank her tea in one go and at last turned to look at him. ‘What makes you think I’m from Brighton?’
‘I don’t know, I …’
‘You think I’m from Brighton?’
Belle started rattling the biscuit tin. ‘These’ll melt if we don’t eat them. What’d you put them so near the fire for, Joe? Look at this!’ She held up her hands, covered in chocolate, for him to look at. ‘Look at this, Joe. Why’d you get the chocolate ones out? It’s a bloody sauna in here with the gas on and you know what I’m like with the chocolate ones.’ She let out another fart. ‘I’ll sit here and eat them all. Why’d you get these ones out?’
‘I don’t know.’
Belle was disappearing out of earshot.
‘Turn the heating down, Joe. Have a fiddle with the thermostat or something, there’s bloody chocolate everywhere.’
‘Skirton Street,’ Lenny said.
‘What?’ Joe couldn’t hear. The flat was suddenly made of chocolate and it was melting.
‘I grew up on Skirton Street. The one after Cassidy.’ She was smiling.
Lenny the hairdresser was smiling.
‘The thermostat, Joe. Just behind the microwave.’
‘Skirton Street. I know Skirton Street,’ he said to Lenny.
‘There you go then,’ she said, walking past him into the kitchenette and re-emerging with the carpet sweeper.
‘Don’t know why you put the microwave there,’ Belle said to Joe, ‘I can’t get to the thermostat.’
‘All right, Belle, I’ll sort it out.’
‘It’s just behind the microwave.’
He went into the kitchenette and found the thermostat, which was above the sink. When he went back into the living room, Lenny was gone. ‘Where did the hairdresser go?’
‘Don’t know why you put the microwave there.’ Belle shook her head. ‘Didn’t you get me any tissue, then? I’m covered in bloody chocolate.’
Joe went back into the kitchenette and pressed his knuckles into the sink rim, letting his head drop between his shoulders. After a few minutes he grabbed the kitchen roll off the windowsill and went back into the living room.
‘Pass me that.’ Belle flicked her eyes over him, her hands full of kitchen roll. ‘You should phone Linda or I’ll be getting into trouble for keeping you here.’
He stood there watching the kitchen roll moving in her hands, the rings and liver spots suddenly intensely familiar.
‘I’ll be getting into trouble,’ she said again.
He sat down in the armchair that matched the lamp-shades on the standard lamps and dialled home.
After a struggle, Belle dragged the small leather pouf across the rug towards her. She heard ‘Brighton’, and ‘I called in to see your mum’, and ‘Just a cup of tea. I’m leaving now’, then settled her head back against the cover she’d crocheted for the wheelchair, put her feet up on the pouf and let out a small, silent fart. Joe was going to do something stupid, she was suddenly convinced of it – and Joe wasn ‘t the kind of man who could get away with doing stupid things and not suffer the consequences. What had she done?
Linda went into the shed to look for a bucket. She couldn’t remember whether they had a bucket or not, but she hadn’t been able to find one in the house or the garage so if they did turn out to have a bucket, this is where it would be. The torch-beam swung across the red-tiled roof and upper-storey windows of the doll’s house Joe built Jessica for her fourth birthday that was put into storage by the time she was six, after the incident with the Sindy dolls. Linda had been cleaning Jessica’s room one day and opened up the doll’s house to find a scene inside worthy of a Turkish prison. Jessica had a penchant, it turned out, not only for cutting off her dolls’ hair, but for holding bits of them – usually the forehead or breasts – against light bulbs until the plastic melted. There wasn’t a doll with nipples intact or a complete forehead left. The light hit a Classic Cars calendar for 1979, hung on a rusting nail, the page turned to May. The girl in the picture was wearing a white cowboy hat and looked happy. She didn’t know why Joe had put the calendar up. The off-cut from the lounge carpet at Whateley Road that he had put down on the shed floor was much more Joe than the Classic Cars calendar; much more the Joe she knew anyway. She looked down at the orange swirls, remembering Whateley Road as clearly as if it was a place she could walk into. They’d had a bucket at Whateley Road – Jessica’s old nappy bucket – that she used to mop the kitchen and bathroom floors with twice a week, and that Joe used to wash his car and the windows with. Whateley Road had been immaculate – bacteria free.
Then she moved to Pollards Close and met Dominique, who didn’t mop floors or put magazines at right angles on the coffee table, or iron the family’s underwear. Once a week an elderly woman with facial hair and arthritis came and cleaned No. 4 Pollards Close. She did the ironing as well, and in between her weekly visits Dominique
