Folk'd Page 4

  Unwisely, she chose to intercept her daughter’s gentle lift of Luke from the pram, scooping him up from her arms before she could squeak a warning. Luke goggled in surprise and promptly decided he didn’t like this at all. After a few “aww’s” and swooshes up and down (not a help) she was forced to give him back to Ellie, who carried him through into the house proper. Danny noted he was on the receiving end of a glance from Christina that seemed to say - enjoy that, did you?

  Yep. Yep I fuckin’ did, he thought right back at her retreating form as she performance’d her way down the hallway, Ellie a few steps behind. Danny noticed belatedly he was all but alone at the doorstep with only the pram for company. He glanced in Ellie’s direction, and was surprised to see that she’d stopped and allowed Mummy to get on ahead.

  She smiled and tilted her head in what could only be an embarrassed apology by proxy. He smiled back at her and rolled his eyes, but in a casual, tuh! parents! way, far more nonchalant than he was actually feeling. Ellie accepted this and turned again, quickly vanishing from sight into the general living quarters of the house.

  “Daddy!” he heard her squeal.

  “Bon appetit,” Danny sighed, lugging the pram over the threshold behind him.

  ***

  It should have been a lovely dinner. The food was excellent. The setting – what Good Homes magazine would doubtlessly have described as the Quinn’s delightfully rustic dining room - was gorgeous.

  Instead, it was a bus ride to bollocks.

  Danny took in the tableau of dysfunction before him with the peculiar privilege of having the comfort of being an outsider and at the same knowing that him being that outsider was causing a major portion of what he was witnessing.

  Ellie was eating, alternating between smiling manically and jabbing her neck downward to nip at food, casting uncomfortable glances this way and that.

  “Daddy“ was Mr Michael Quinn, a suave executive in his mid-forties with iron-on respectability. He was head of a small telecommunications company, FormorTech, a minor rival to Lircom. Currently Daddy was sawing into a steak so thick it looked like Tyrannosaur thigh with a large serrated knife in impeccably observed silence. You had to hand it to the man. Even his moments of social inscrutability were professionally done.

  Christina, pecking daintily at some vegetables, had her eyes cast down. Christina was a strange one around food at the best of times; from what he’d been able to discern in the few times they’d met, she must have been able to draw fat content from oxygen itself, for Danny had never seen anything larger or more fattening than a broccoli stalk pass her lips, and yet the woman herself wasn’t exactly stick thin.

  Danny suspected that deep in chez Quinn’s attic terrified families of chocolate products were awaiting the day their hidden sanctuaries would cruelly expire, and they too would be frogmarched onto the trains to Christinavitz.

  For his own part, Danny found himself pushing his food around the plate with his cutlery glumly. He had waited until Ellie had picked her knife and fork before choosing one of his sets. He’d been at a wedding once where they’d had more than one pair of each implement and he and the other kids had marvelled at the forethought of the hotel to lay on spares for when you dropped the other one on the carpet and it got manky.

  Besides, he didn’t like eating anywhere but his own house, truth be told. The synaesthesia reacted more to taste than any other sensation, and when in another person’s house tasting their food it could be wildly unpredictable. He didn’t fancy trying to keep a straight face when an innocent mouthful of vegetables set off a series of flashes in his mind, anything from a childhood memory to an overpowering smell.

  But it wasn’t like the dinner was a total loss for everyone.

  “ASSSAawwwwwasszzzzaaahhhhbbbaaa!!!!”

  Little Luke, in an antique wooden high chair that looked like an Antiques Roadshow castoff (and that Ellie had twice inspected for splinters) was having the time of his life. He was within reach of most of the food, for one. He had twice as many targets as normal. He was currently mashing his plastic plate of baby-gruel with his palm and squealing with delight. Huge globules of food were hanging off his nose and chin. He was completely filthy, a street urchin amid the finery, and Danny had never loved him more than he did right then.

  As if picking up on this, Luke chose that moment to smile gummily at his Dad. Danny grinned right back and winked at his son. Dear old Daddy, seeing this exchange, seemed less enthused. He cleared his throat ostentatiously.

  “…did I tell you that FormorTech’s output is up by 12% this fiscal year, Ellie?”

  Ellie almost fainted with relief at having something verbal to respond to. “Oh, that’s great Daddy!”

  "Oh well…you know, I’ve been insisting to the Board that we push up the sales envelope these past twelve months. In fact I’ve been drilling it into them so consistently that some of my Directors, ah ha ha, have taken to calling me ‘Duracell Man’."

  Pushing up an envelope? Danny wondered how that worked. He had a mental image of Michael Quinn being eaten by a huge envelope, its mighty flap opening up hungrily and swallowing him whole, leaving only a slight gummy tang in the air and a world rejoicing.

  Ellie was doing her best to laugh at the Duracell Man thing.

  "Because, you see, the Duracell slogan was ‘just keeps going and going and going’…"

  Ellie's smile wilted slightly under the strain. "Yeah, Dad...I get it."

  “Lircom have been sniffing around us again, of course. I know Black would love to get his hands on our patents. But there’s no way I’m going to sell to him.”

  “Danny works for Lircom,” said Ellie, the eternal conversational optimist.

  “Yes,” Michael said neutrally, “well, I’m not sure how privy you’d be to senior management decisions, Danny. You’re still in the,” slight pause, “customer service team?”

  “Yep.”

  “Team leader at least, I assume?”

  “No,” Danny replied evenly. “No, just a regular call-answerer guy.”

  “And how do you find that?”

  “Wonderful. Every day seems like a blessing.”

  “The way FormorTech is performing, I wouldn’t be surprised if one day you found yourself working for me-”

  With immaculate comic timing, Luke chose that precise moment to let rip with an enormous belch.

  Who says you can't train a baby? Danny thought, redirecting his gaze from Michael to the food on his plate as he tried, not particularly hard, to suppress a smile.

  "Goodness!" Christina said. "Someone's enjoying dinner, aren't they!"

  Danny lifted his head, trusting himself to resume eye contact again. Michael was staring directly at him with a look of such naked contempt that it actually staggered him for a moment; there was nothing in those eyes but disgust. Danny felt a chill go down to his bones. He'd always known that Ellie's parents didn't exactly approve of the relationship, that they suspected he'd deliberately sabotaged their only darling daughter's incredibly bright future and dragged her down to his level.

  But it wasn't mere dislike he saw in Michael Quinn's eyes. It was hate, pure and simple. The bastard hadn't even the common decency to look away when he'd been caught in the act - he kept the eye contact right on going. Only when Ellie glanced over in their direction did the temperature of the look rise to something approaching civilised, did his lip uncurl. Danny was reeling. He'd never been hated by anyone or anything in his life. He had no idea how to react, except that a hot little ball of anger and humiliation was kindling in his stomach.

  "Where were we? Oh yes, your career, Danny!" Michael Quinn burst forth, all professionalism and cheeriness. "You’re still on the lookout for a better job?"

  "I've a few irons in the fire," Danny heard himself reply. It was his standard reply for anyone who asked him about his shitty job in that shitty callcentre. His brain wasn't in the game yet. He tried to prod himself back. He wasn't about to give this fucker the satisfaction.
>
  "Well that’s excellent news. After all, student jobs are for students – you can’t seriously expect to support a family on a callcentre salary…?"

  Danny felt a thrummm as his mind stepped back into the game. He narrowed his eyes. If Michael Quinn wanted to play, so be it.

  "I agree with ye totally. Trouble was, you see, when Ellie here found out she was pregnant, my first thought was that we needed to get some money behind us, get somewhere to live, give the baby a roof over its head. Lircom was hiring, they were handy on the bus, and they offered flexible hours while the wee fella's so young. It's not world-beatin in terms of wages, but we’re all fed and watered, and everyone has to start somewhere. I'm sure a great businessman like yourself appreciates that, Mr Quinn."

  He glanced at Ellie, not knowing what to expect when he looked at her. A corner of her mouth lifted. It wasn't exactly a resounding standing ovation, but it'd do.

  "Oh I do," the reply came. "But you'll appreciate that I want the best for my daughter and my grandson. I wish you'd reconsider my offer to accept a little financial help."

  And be indebted to you the rest of my days? Not fuckin’ likely.

  "It's appreciated, but we do okay," he lied. Any household that needed an emergency fiver wasn't exactly breaststroking idly through a sea of opulence.

  Quinn wasn't done yet, it seemed. "Perhaps your father could put in a good word for you at…I’m sorry, where does he…?"

  That little ball inside him began to burn. He could see Ellie stiffen in his peripheral vision and he knew she'd be preparing to intervene, trying to think of some way to defuse the oncoming storm. All he had to do was stall, give her time to think of something.

  "He doesn’t."

  "Doesn't...?"

  "Work."

  "Oh yes of course, my mistake. Ellie mentioned this to me some time ago. Health issues, I understand?"

  The table was silent now. Ellie knew it was too late to intervene, that any such attempt would only be so blatant as to make the awkwardness even more pronounced. It was just the two of them now, with Ellie and Christina looking on, observers in this back-and-forth.

  "He's an alcoholic," Danny said. He said it quietly, but he didn't mumble the word. The low volume in his voice wasn't borne from shame but from the effort of keeping his emotions in check.

  "Oh," Michael absorbed this supposed revelation with such false, wide-eyed sympathy that for a moment Danny expected him to clasp his hands over his heart and swoon. "That must have been difficult for you. Growing up."

  "Daddy-"

  "Ellie," Danny said, holding up a placating hand. "It's-"

  "No," she said firmly, ignoring the gesture. "No, it's not fine. Daddy, is this really something we want to talk about at the dinner table? Unless you’d like me to talk about Granda Quinn? Or uncle Dermot? How’s he doing?"

  It was as if she'd stuck a pin in her father. His pomposity seemed to wheeeeee out of him like air from an escaping balloon. He sent his daughter a look of shocked betrayal. Ellie simply returned the look, before very deliberately turning her eyes away from her father and addressing her mother with a forced casualness.

  "So Mummy, what do you think of the little man? Isn’t he growing fast?"

  Christina all but threw herself for the conversational liferaft. "Oh he certainly is!" she exclaimed, "And he just loves his food! Don’t you my widdle man! Yes you do! Yes you do!

  Michael seemed to sense the moment had passed. "I’ll bet his granddad can get a big kiss from him…" he said with the sort of stiff spontaneity that it was a wonder he hadn't filled out a permission slip, "let’s see what-"

  He leant in close to Luke. Luke, quite reasonably in Danny's view, interpreted this not as a desire for a kiss but as a way of saying mmm that gloop all over your hands looks tasty, mind if I take a bite?

  Ever happy to oblige, the little fella promptly smeared his food-covered chubby little digits all over his grandfather's face. Michael Quinn recoiled as if shot, his face covered in carrot and potatoes.

  "Oh! Daddy..."

  Ellie scurried from her seat, a baby-wipe already in her hand. Where she fished them from Danny could never say; he was beginning to suspect she dispensed them from a slot in her stomach. He watched as a middle-aged businessman allowed his face to be cleaned, meek as a toddler.

  Sometimes it was the little things in life you learned to appreciate.

  The Call

  There’s something therapeutic about hard graft, people who hadn't done a hard day's graft in their entire lives often said.

  Danny wiped some dirt from the bridge of his nose and leant on the spade. The late evening breeze blew across him, cooling the sweat beading on his forehead.

  "Ya know," Steve pronounced grandly, "it's at times like this that ye..."

  Danny glanced bemusedly at his partner-in-sod, who was leaning on his own implement with less of a devil-may-care pose and more of a holy-fuck-I'm-ballixed slump. Steve had been a bit of a sportsman in school, but school had been almost six years ago now. He was cultivating a comfortable belly and by the looks of him, he was quite the botanist.

  "That you…what?"

  Steve shrugged. "Ach, I've lost the train of thought."

  "…it’s at times like this, with the moon on your back and only the honest toil of good manual labour to keep you warm that you look around, and you think to yourself...fuck me, I wish she’d let us go to the pub?"

  Steve grinned. "Aye, somethin’ like that lad."

  Danny let his gaze drift upward, away from the garden hump they were both manfully attacking, away from Regent Street in the balmy late evening moonlight, to the starry sky above. It was a gorgeous night. Belfast wasn't usually much for starfields with all the light pollution, but tonight was an exception; they could have turned off the lamp-posts and you could have almost read a book, such was the stellar lightshow going on above their heads. The air sparkled.

  "Here, back to work, you," Steve rebuked him indignantly. "Get the missus to rope me into your chaingang and then slack off, will ye? Cheeky fucker."

  Danny swung into reluctant action, but his momentum had gone somewhat. He caught his friend's eye and sighed. "You should have seen them two dickheads earlier..."

  "Who’s this?"

  "Her ones."

  Steve tsk'd disapprovingly. As tradition demanded, since they were no longer talking about football or tits and instead about real emotions, eye contact was to be avoided, and so he was ostensibly staring down at the soil below as he hacked his spade into the uneven garden surface. "Ach, that pair o fuckwits. They need their heads surgically extracted from their holes, them two. Sure you've always known that lad. No surprises there."

  "Her Da brought up my Da’s drinkin," Danny said quietly.

  Steve looked up, his surprise overriding the usual taboos. "Fuck. What’d ya do?"

  "Not much I could do, was there? Not like I can call him a liar."

  "No, but you could have told him that your family was none of his fuckin’ business. Pencil-necked shite."

  "It is sorta his business but, isn't it? I'm goin’ out with his daughter. I'm supposed to be the provider and the husband and the father and all that. And there's him, Mr Chief Exec, Mr Fuckin’ Success Story, and me..."

  He trailed off, then shook himself out of it and went back to safer pastures. "Besides, it woulda been kind of ironic – me stickin’ up for my Da?"

  "Blood's thicker than water to a blind donkey," Steve intoned gravely.