Folk'd Read online

  Despite the general shittiness of the conversational topic, Danny laughed. He couldn't help it. Steve had the most ridiculous way of mixing his metaphors that never failed to crack him up; and if in doubt, he would stick ...to a blind donkey on the end. They had remarkable wisdom, the visually impaired Equus africanus asinus.

  "You’ve a perfect right to call your Da all the names you want," Steve went on, "but some power-suited ganch who knows fuck all about you or your family doesn’t."

  They went back to the digging for a while. Danny didn't much feel like saying more on the subject, and Steve sensed it with the practised ease of two people who've known each other for well over a decade.

  "Right. Back’s broke on this fucker. I'm havin’ a break," Steve said. It was true; they had been at it for almost an hour now, and the little hump of earth that had been a source of consternation for Ellie since they moved in to Regent Street just over a year back had been all but eradicated. Danny was quite proud of his efforts, but slightly worried too; was he setting a precedent here? Was she going to expect him to do things like put up shelves now?

  Or - his blood chilled even at the thought - re-decorate?

  A smell made his nose twitch. A familiar smell. He glanced sidelong at Steve, who was bent over shielding something from the elements. When he straightened up again, Danny's suspicions were confirmed.

  "You're jokin’ me aren't ya?"

  Steve blinked, having just taken his first long inhalation. "Jesus Christ lad, it’s only a wee joint sure." He patted his pockets. "Ya wantin’ one?"

  Danny looked shocked and affronted. "What’s this? Peer pressure?"

  Steve gave his best devilish grin. "Yep. All the cool kids are doing drugs you know," he said, and snickered evilly. "If you don’t take one, you’re a big fuckin’ girl’s blouse and the girls won’t like you. Actually," he paused judiciously and took another draw, "I’d better not say that part to Ellie. She'd have ye on ten a day.”

  “Aye,” Danny agreed, “she’s the jealous type alright.”

  “Fuck knows why. You're an ugly cunt."

  "Cheers."

  "Not a worry," Steve said. He fished out another joint and proferred it to Danny. Danny looked down at the little white tube, unevenly rolled (Steve never had been the best at it). He shook his head.

  "That horse has bolted, lad. It's not for me."

  "Horse has bolted!" Steve cried in despair. "Listen to ye! You’re twenty-three years old for the love of fuck! Just because you’ve a ball and chain now and a wee fella on the go doesn’t mean you can’t have a laugh now and again!"

  Danny sighed. "Steve, it was only fun because we were nineteen and we lived in a flat the size of your Danielle's thong."

  Steve spluttered indignantly on his soft drugs.

  "You leave my sister's knickers outta this!"

  Danny shrugged. "I try, but my mind keeps goin back to them. Anyway," he added quickly, seeing Mt. Steve was about to erupt in a shower of brotherly rage, "my point is, things have changed."

  Steve lifted the spade pointedly. "Yep. This is nightlife for you now."

  "Ach away," Danny replied, "if I’d wanted to go out tonight Steve I would’ve. I mean c’mon, we joke with Ellie but it’s not like we're afr-"

  "Hey!" a familiar female voice called.

  In one smooth in-unison motion both scrambled into action, chins off spades, cutting surfaces stuck back into the ground with renewed vigour. In a moment of panic Steve flapped the joint from his mouth, kicking it behind him with a brilliantly executed mid-air backheel volley even as it fell from his lips.

  "Boys?"

  They turned, and beheld Ellie, holding a tray of goodies featuring Wotsits and beer, a six-pack of cans sitting proudly, giving off rays of frosted-ice goodness.

  Like ravenous wolves, spades cast aside, Danny and Steve descended on their prey.

  A short time later, Danny was allowing another long draught of cold beer to wash down his throat. Ellie's hands were wrapped around his waist from behind him. She smelled of apricots and baby milk. Steve was standing off to one side, chugging from his own share of the booty. He was staring up at the stars now.

  Danny wondered if his friend was alright. It had been, what – about a year now, maybe more? – since the big break-up between Steve and Maggie. Since then, Steve had done alright, women-wise. He’d a mouth like a sanitation plant and a mind like the Reader’s Letters pages in dirty magazines, but girls had a way of sensing that he was a decent fella beneath it, that it was all bluff and bluster.

  Since Maggie, Steve had had a few bits of luck here and there, but Danny had sensed that his friend’s heart wasn’t quite in it. Even the cameraphone pictures he’d sent of the sleeping girls’ tits had seemed somehow hollow.

  Not for the first time, Danny contemplated bringing up what had happened between Steve and Maggie, broaching the subject of the cause of the break-up. They were fellas, not girls, which meant traumatic life experiences weren’t immediately the cause for a ringaround of close mates, a crying session, loud music, vodka, soppy DVDs and the general consensus that all men were cunts anyway.

  Danny was quite thankful for that in many ways, but the whole male wall of silence thing did make it hard to know what was going on inside his mate’s mind. Assuming, of course, there was much going on in there beyond sexual fantasies and pondering matters of universal truth, like “if all the Premiership managers had a fight, who’d win, and why?”.

  He’d have asked Maggie herself, of course, but that wasn’t really an option either now was it…

  Something pulled Steve's mind from the murky depths. "What about the wee man?" he said. Danny looked at his friend; from time to time, Steve would surprise him by displaying an almost parental instinct for the baby.

  "D’you wanna listen for yourself?"

  Ellie handed him the transmitting end of a baby monitor. Steve raised it to his ear and absorbed the soft, cute snuffly baby breathing noises emanating from within. Danny grinned. Tonight was one of Luke's rare "play ball" nights, it seemed.

  "Finally went over fifteen minutes ago. Gave him enough Calpol to knock out Jabba the Hutt."

  "That's my clever girl," Danny said. "Mother of the yearrrow!" as her fingers dug painfully into his sides and she made as if to snap off one of his earlobes with her teeth.

  "Get a room yous two cunts," Steve said mildly.

  "Get a room? We're standin in front of our house," Danny pointed out.

  "Aye well," Steve said, and left it at that. Danny lifted his hands to Ellie's and gently de-coupled her from him, turning as he did so to give her an eyebrow wiggle and nod in Steve's direction. Ellie got it, thankfully, and did not protest.

  "It’s not usually this starry, is it?" Steve said, once again looking upward to the thousands of tiny pinpricks bleeding silver light into the orbital tapestry suspended above.

  "I was thinkin the same thing earlier," Danny admitted.

  "There's not even any midges about," Ellie observed.

  She was right. Ordinarily they'd be swarming all over the garden at this time of night at this time of year. But tonight, not a one. Even the main road into town, only a street or so, was quiet. The occasional car purred past, but the city was all but silent around them. It was beautiful, if slightly eerie; the sort of night, Danny thought to himself, you could imagine seeing figures lurch out of the mists in the distance and realise the quiet was due to an ongoing zombie apocalypse.

  "My granny used to tell me stories about the stars," Ellie said softly. "Nanny used to say that every single one of them was a soul on its way to paradise."

  "Really?" Danny said, unable to stop himself. "I heard an oul folk tale that they're all vast cauldrons of nuclear fusion brought together by gravitational pull, where hydrogen is turned into helium and the resulting waste energy is given off as heat. Silly superstitions, eh?"

  "And you an English student?" Ellie said. "You're about as poetic as a kick in the balls."

  "A
ch I just hate all that shite. Souls on their way to heaven," Danny snorted. "My hole."

  Ellie rolled her eyes. "Mister Misery guts. Just for that you don’t get to hear any of my Nanny's stories."

  Danny clutched a hand to his heart. "And after me and my colleague here doing such a sterling job tonight. I am offended."

  Ellie cast an appraising glance around the garden and nodded approvingly. "So yous did," she admitted, and her eyes glinted mischeviously in the moonlight. "Just think how much satisfaction you'll get from standing back and admiring the lovely wee fountain when you pick it up from B&Q on Saturday."

  A mouthful of cold beer arced out of Steve's mouth.

  "Do what now?" he spluttered.

  "Hold firm lad," Danny ordered him. "Don't cave in. She needs to sweeten the deal. Them's the rules, sweetheart."

  Ellie coughed delicately. "Well. Ah, obviously I can't promise you both the same incentives..."

  Steve gave an I could live with that shrug. "I-"

  "Shut it, you.”

  "Here wait a-"

  "Want me to start talkin about your sister's thong again?" Danny went on, ignoring the look on Ellie's face and knowing he was going to have to explain that one later.

  "How about a promise of more cold mead for my favourite warriors, upon completion of their mighty task?" Ellie offered.

  "Me like way serving wench thinks!" Steve replied, giving the thumbs-up.

  "Watch it with the serving wench," Ellie replied instantly, flashing him a sweet little smile, "or your balls will be Mighty Thor."

  Plop.

  Plopplop.

  Huge drops of rain started to impact on Danny's head and nose. He looked up and got one right in his left eye, the world blurring for a moment, the garden around them turning into a warped version of itself. He let loose with a reflexive string of curses and threw his arms above his head as they gathered the various implements and goodies from around them, shouting chaotic instructions amongst each other as they made a beeline for the shelter of the house.

  Once inside, Danny stared out in disbelief. It was pissing down. Rain danced off the path. Already the flat surface of the garden they'd worked so hard to create was beginning to swampify.

  "Where'd that come from?" Steve said, craning his head to catch a glimpse of the skies as he looked out of the front windows. Ellie had gone upstairs to check on the wee fella. "I coulda sworn there wasn't a cloud up there."

  Danny nodded in agreement. "At least we got everything done before it came on," he said, rotating his shoulders, feeling an ache begin to throb there. He grabbed the phone. "Taxi?"

  Steve nodded. "Cheers. Might take tomorrow off like."

  Must be nice to be able to afford to, Danny thought, even as his mouth worked to order the taxi.

  ***

  The wailing penetrated his dreams, his peaceful dreamless slumber, a hook baited with obligation that try as he might to swim away from, he eventually had to clamp down on and hang on as it jerked him to the surface.

  The bedroom was lit only with the soft diffuse glow of the nightlight, all long shadows and hulking squat shapes. He could see and feel Ellie beside him similarly rousing herself, even through the all-pervading siren of the wailing.

  Of all the shocks of parenthood, the myriad of little ‘oh shit’ moments that lined themselves up one after the other when a baby surfaced in your life – changing a nappy, making a bottle, burping, dressing them…all of that…nothing had quite prepared him for the crying.

  He’d been an only child to his own parents so he’d never had a brother or sister, but he’d been around babies – who hadn’t? He’d heard them cry loads of times, little cousins to be shushed by their parents and then taken away to calm down…

  It was the taking away bit that had lulled him into that false sense of security.

  Those first few nights, when Luke came home from the hospital, so tiny and so cute, the little fella had let rip with the wailing. They’d fed him. Sometimes this worked. They’d burped him. Sometimes this worked. They’d changed his nappy. Sometimes this worked.

  Sometimes, none of them worked.

  And when they hadn’t, when all avenues had been exhausted and still the crying continued, it had sank in to Danny that there was no taking away now. All there was was listening to this noise, this incredible undulating howl that rose up and down, got louder and quieter, hit pitches that reverberated inside the head and the teeth.

  It was torture. Worse, it was torture that got worse if you acknowledged it or let your frustration show with it – not just because losing your temper and snapping at the tiny little form you were responsible for inevitably made it wail all the more, but also because the horrible realisation that you’d just shouted at a baby settled on you, so now not only did you have the crying to deal with, you had the knowledge that you were a horrible human being too. Knowledge that only served to increase your despair.

  Thankfully, this wasn’t one of those times.

  As Luke glugged the bottle down, his little eyes went from wide open and staring to half-open and relaxed, to closed. Danny, his back propped up against the soft headboard, now had the task of navigating his partner’s sleeping form and performing the replacing-the-golden-idol scene from the beginning Raiders of the Lost Ark; one rash move laying Luke down flat in his cot and a giant rolling boulder’d seem like a fucking birthday present.

  Instead, pre-defeated, he sat there, Luke in the crook of his arm. His ridiculously small head on Danny’s chest, the little fella was breathing raggedly in and out with a barely-audible hnff, the legacy of a full stomach.

  He was so tired. The dinner with her parents. Digging the hole out of the garden. Having a few beers with Steve. They hadn’t gotten to bed until well after midnight.

  Luke needed burped. All that milk…he shouldn’t hold him while he slept – body heat…wasn’t good for…

  …so tired…

  …Danny’s head lolled to the side as sleep claimed him. Moments later, only the slow, rhythmical sound of sleep-breathing could be heard in the quiet dark of the bedroom.

  ***

  Regent Street awoke to the clanking and rattling of bin collection day, and moments later, to the whooping and hollering figure of Danny Morrigan, charging down the back alleyway, his face red with indignation.

  "Oy!"

  The binman turned. This took him longer than it should have done, for he was a very large specimen of humankind, a fact that wasn't lost on the young man currently skidding to a halt in front of him, his righteous anger wilting somewhat in the face of the odds.

  "Aye?" rumbled the binman. Two of his co-binmen behind him, until this moment flinging bins onto the automated emptier mechanism on the back of the lorry, paused in their work to regard Danny keenly. He didn't like being regarded keenly by big hulking bin-people. It wasn't him, he decided.

  Danny indicated the bin behind him. Ellie had insisted on putting a big fucking sticky plastic picture of a Daisy on the side of the thing, presumably on the basis that the local hoods would be less likely to steal a gay bin. His cheeks burned with shame.

  "You ah…” he mumbled, “you…you didn't empty this."

  A huge finger descended and indicated a plastic sticker on the bin lid.

  "Cos it’s contaminated."