his plate. It teetered on the edge of the table, then broke with a hard clunking sound across his shoes.
Crystal picked up her plate, licked off the last crumbs, and dropped it. She got up and kicked her chair over behind her.
Then they all picked up their stupid eggs, raised them in the air, and smashed them into a million glorious pieces.
Ivor finally caught up with his own breath. His hand touched against Crystal’s hand and he tried to make it mean that he would miss her when she wasn’t there. Even though he didn’t know if you could say that just with hands.
The sea paced with its heavy boots through the house. If you listened closely, you could tell how high the tide was, and what kind of waves were breaking. Ivor’s father could walk out the front door and know that the waves were mushy, or that it was low tide and the waves were clean as a damn whistle.
Ivor picked up his can and rubbed the back of his neck. Later, but not now, he would clean up the house, and whoever came in next, whenever they came in next, would find, what? Not anything worth mentioning really: a scatter of crumbs, a few missing plates, a lamp that had been left on by mistake, sand in the floorboards, a smudge of breath on the bathroom mirror that could have been anyone’s.
The baby was teetering on the edge of speech. Bru, she would say. Da Da Da. She had a way of looking at him as if she knew. Her forehead would furrow and her eyes would go dark as oil. Then he would pick her up and carouse around the room, giddy up, giddy up horsey, while the mist pressed against the windows from the sea, wet and dripping like bedding on a line.
They were there for three months. His wife, Lorna, had a temporary posting and they’d been given the use of a small, brick house in a terraced row. Theirs was on the end and it backed onto rough ground: tussocks, bracken, horned sheep sprayed blue and red, as if they were going into battle. Beyond that were fields, hedges tangled like wires, a few lonely farmhouses. The beaches were stony. The trees were not in leaf. In front of the house there was a road that hardly anyone drove along, then a barbed-wire fence with No Entry signs and cameras that pointed in all directions. Behind the fence were the dishes, where his wife went to work every morning and came back later and later into the evening. Sometimes she would have a shift in the middle of the night, and when Jay turned over in bed to hold her, she would be gone.
The dishes were on the edge of the cliff and could be seen for miles – hard white shapes that looked like a chess set waiting to be played. They were data gatherers, listening stations, bigger than the house and smooth and silent. Some were full spheres, some were hexagonal, others hollowed like the dip in an ear. At the centre of each tilted dish there was an antenna that reached upwards, and, sometimes, if Jay watched carefully, he would see them slowly turn, like a flower might, or someone following a voice that no one else could hear.
It was early morning and Lorna had already left. Jay was in the kitchen clearing away the breakfast things. It was cold outside. Rain blew across the road in thin lines. He turned the heating up higher.
The baby was strapped in her chair. He wiped her face with a warm cloth. Her skin was so soft, almost translucent, except for all the dried food stuck to it – it was on her cheeks and on the floor. Some was in her wispy hair. She laughed and squirmed while he wiped around her mouth, then puckered her lips and blew a bubble. Jay crouched down and tried to blow one too but it didn’t work and he ended up drooling down one corner of his mouth. The baby laughed and blew another one.
‘How are you doing that?’ he said.
‘Hamna fla,’ the baby told him.
‘Oh, OK,’ Jay said. ‘I thought you were doing it a different way.’
He picked up the plates and put them in the sink, then ran the hot water until the washing liquid foamed up. He plunged his hands in and his wrists went red.
‘What do you want to do today?’ he said.
The baby banged her hands against her tray.
‘Do you want to go out anywhere?’
She banged again.
‘Or we could play that xylophone game you seem to like so much.’
She kept banging.
‘Bang your hands if you’ve got food in your hair.’
She kept banging.
‘Bang your hands if you woke me up five times last night.’
She banged again.
‘Bang your hands if you think I’m the best.’
She stopped banging.
Jay ran more hot water and swiped plate after plate with the cloth, until they were all stacked on the draining board. He liked washing up now – the hot water, the steam, how, when he rinsed out a tin of tomatoes, he pretended there’d been a shark attack. He liked the way the bubbles had bits of colour in them. He would blow them off his hands so that the baby could watch them floating. He hardly ever felt like smashing it all against the wall any more.
He dried his hands and lifted the baby out of the chair and onto her mat. There was an arched bar over it with bells hanging down. They made a dull, jangling noise when she grabbed at them. They sounded like a doorbell and he wished he’d packed her other mat – the one without any bells. They hadn’t brought much from home – just a suitcase for him and Lorna and a few boxes of the baby’s things. He liked it that this house was small and empty. He could walk around each room seeing nothing that reminded him; just a table, a couple of chairs, a sofa, a wilting pot plant on top of the fridge that he watered every day.
He sat down next to the baby, then got up again. If he sat down he would fall asleep. He had that heavy, dull feeling behind his eyes which pushed down towards his jaw. It had been five times last night; the night before he’d lost count after seven. He straightened the curtains, the chairs, then picked up the cloth and wiped at another weird stain on the floor.
‘Was this you?’ he said to the baby.
She looked at him, frowning, like it was inappropriate to even ask.
It wasn’t even nine o’ clock yet.
After a while he noticed the sound of low voices coming through the kitchen wall. He stopped wiping the floor. There it was again: a low murmur of voices.
The wall was thin and connected with next door, but he didn’t think there was anyone living there. When they’d arrived there weren’t any lights on, and there were no cars parked at the front. The curtains were half-drawn and there was a pile of rubble by the steps – bricks and plaster – that looked as if a room had recently been knocked through.
He couldn’t hear what they were saying. He stayed kneeling on the floor. Water dripped off the cloth and pooled next to his leg. The voices rose and fell and then they stopped. The baby let out a cry and he turned to her quickly, thought he heard a door open and close somewhere. The baby cried out again and he picked her up and cupped her warm head with his wet hands.
