Folk'd Page 8

  “Bottle filling time for Daddy…” he said, and set about his work. Doing any sort of chore in the kitchen required engaging in a sort of balletic pirouette motion, given the extremely limited space involved. Danny had built up enough man-hours cooped up in here to have it down to a fine art.

  Remove steriliser from microwave using safety grips. Spin. Grab tea towel from oven door. Wrap around hand. Unscrew steriliser top. Yank hand away from steam escaping. Place lid on draining board. Allow bottles to cool while popping top off formula milk tin and boiling kettle. Line up bottles in a neat little row with their safety seals and teats lined up above them, also in a neat little row (this was optional, and slightly psychotic, but damn it was eye-pleasing).

  Pour in the boiled water from the kettle - Luke was on 7oz of milk now per bottle, so all he had to do was wait until the milk reached the purple number (amazing, he could remember the days of 3oz, when he was just a little peachy fuzz ball with the fattest little back). One scoop of milk per ounce. Place safety seals on. Screw on bottle tops. Shake mixtures, doing dance of choice (again, optional and psychotic, but fun). Pop on bottle tops and place in a row on the fridge door.

  Bask in glory as Ellie opens fridge and remarks on how wonderful a partner you are.

  All of this completed, he walked to the bottom of the stairs and frowned. He could still hear the faint rumble of running water from upstairs. Was this one of Ellie’s luxury baths containing between four and six unique bath-foaming products? He was continually amazed she actually sank in those things, the water was so gravid with oils. Maybe Luke was asleep and she’d decided to treat herself.

  He bounded up the stairs and checked the bedroom, but there was no wet snuffles emanating from the cot, no baby inside. And yet, weirdly, the jungle animal mobile above the cot was just on the final wind-down of a musical lullaby cycle. Just as he’d opened the bedroom door, the final two notes able to be powered by the clockwork mechanism had pling-plonged out in a weak little drawn-out squawk. She’d probably used it to keep the wee fella distracted while she was in next door filling the bath.

  He knocked on the bathroom door, rather absurdly, and then shook his head at his own folly and opened it.

  “Ellie I’ve-”

  He trailed off. The room was empty. And the bath was about a quarter-inch from overflowing. No steam was rising from the taps. The water had long since gone cold. In one long stride he was at the taps, screwing them as fast as he could, stemming the flow of water just in time.

  “Ellie!” he called. “Are you in the spare room or what? This fuckin’ bath was near overflowing! Do you want the whole upstairs flooded?!”

  He plunged his arm into the 18 inches or so of extremely tepid water and retrieved the plug (the chain had perished three months back and “fix the bastarding bathplug” had been on his to-do list ever since). A whoosh noise signalled the beginning of the waters receding. And still there was no answer from Ellie. What the fuck was she doing in the spare room anyway? There wasn’t anything in there but boxes and unpacked stuff and-

  -and nothing else.

  Danny stood at the doorway to the spare room, for the first time feeling a twisting in his stomach, an unsettled sensation. She wasn’t in there, and it wasn’t like there was anywhere to hide. Naturally Luke wasn’t in there either.

  His mind worked through the options, and threw up the next step. If they weren’t in the house, they were out of the house. Ellie took her mobile with her everywhere, mostly in the hopes that one of her mates would text her, which lately…not so much.

  He double-pressed the green call button on his mobile. As it flashed up the ‘connecting’ graphic he had his first little niggling thought - something’s wrong. Something’s wrong with Luke, something that came up so suddenly she had to leave the house that quickly she forgot about the bath running. Something so serious she hasn’t even had time to phone me yet. Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ…what could be that serious, that quickly?

  Images of ambulances and Ellie flashed through his mind, and his stomach gave another lurch. He forced down the panic with a conscious effort, even as the sound of his phone connecting-

  EEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  “FUCK SAKE!”

  He held back from the insane urge to throw the mobile against the nearest wall, only with some difficulty. When the call ended, and his fresh headache from the teeth-jattering sound was blooming nicely inside his cerebrum, he stood and breathed a couple of times, trying to think what the next step was. The mobile was fucked, that much was pretty certain.

  Home phone.

  He took the stairs two at a time, and was just U-turning at the bottom to make a beeline for the home phone when a knock came at the front door. Relief flooded over him. He’d locked the door reflexively upon entering the house. Stupid. And this was Ellie, returning from whatever errand she’d been called out on-

  The door was unlocked. It wasn’t Ellie.

  “Uh,” Danny said to the old woman standing on his doorstep, watching him with rheumy eyes, “Bee…sorry, love, if it’s about the tea leaves thing, you’ve called at a really bad time. Can ya call back?”

  Beatrice O’Malley blinked. He could almost hear those dry old lids sliding over her eyes. At any normal time he’d have had the presence of mind to be creeped out by her to the same extent as he always was, but right now he had more pressing matters at hand.

  “I’ll call back,” she croaked. “I’ll call back tomorrow night, Danny.”

  “Right, right,” Danny said, the door shutting. He could feel bad about being just short of rude later on, when Ellie and Luke were home and his ears stopped ringing from that aural assault they’d just suffered courtesy of his wanky mobile. Or, he mused as he dialled Ellie’s mobile number on the home phone, he could fail to feel bad entirely - that was an option he was leaving open-

  EEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Slam.

  “NAME OF SWEET FUCKIN’ JESUS CHRIST WHAT THE FUCK IS GOIN ON!!!!” Danny shouted to the universe at large. He stood there in the hall, a useless phone in each useless hand.

  Okay. Alright. Panicking wasn’t fucking helping anyone, and besides, it wasn’t like they could have gone far - the bath hadn’t overflowed before he’d gotten to it; Jesus, that mobile only played for about four minutes or something even when it was fully wound. It was a wonder he hadn’t seen them leave in the ambulance the street as he’d come home from work he’s hurt, she’s hurt and walked up the…

  He took a breath, settled himself - and almost shit a brick when his mobile started chirruping merrily to him in his hand. Adrenaline flooded through his body and the world went back to making sense in that glorious moment, even as he stabbed accept call and pressed it to his ear.

  “Ellie! Fuckin’ hell love I was starting to-”

  “Fraid not ,” Steve’s easy voice came back to him. Danny’s shoulders slumped. He rubbed his temple with his fingers.

  “I don’t have time to talk right now lad,” he said.

  “You haven’t even heard wh-”

  “I don’t have time, Steve,” Danny repeated. He dropped his hand from his temple and started idly spinning the wheels of Luke’s pram, folded up in the alcove beside where he stood.

  “Ach alright. Fuck ye then. I’ll call ye when you’re in better form sure.”

  An idea occurred to him then. “Wait!”

  “What?” Steve asked, still sounding a bit irked.

  “Haven’t heard anything from Ellie have ya?” Danny asked, knowing it was the longest of long shots even as he said the words. The best you could say about Ellie and Steve was that they tolerated each other‘s company and had not, as yet, resorted to pistols at dawn. “Recently like?” Like in the last four minutes?

  “No…not since last night. Why? Somethin’ the matter?”

  “I’m just back from work and she’s not here. Neither’s wee Luke.” Danny said, realis
ing this was the first time he’d spoken it aloud. Somehow it felt better to do that. It made it sound smaller than it felt.

  “Fucks sake,” Steve said, obviously thinking the same thing about the size of the problem. “She’s probably taken the wee man for a walk to the shops!”

  Danny’s eyes drifted downward to his free hand, seemingly noticing what he was doing and what he was doing it to for the first time. “The pram’s here,” he said slowly.

  “So she‘s carryin him then. Fuckin’ hell lad. Do you want me to send up a flare? Should I get on the blower to Tracy Island? Big panicky muppet ye.”

  Danny wanted to reach down the phone and throttle his smug fucking face. He didn’t understand. “No,” he said firmly. “No, you don’t know Ellie. She spends ten minutes packing a baby bag for a trip to the fuckin’ corner shop. Something’s wrong.”

  Some of the jokiness dropped from his friend‘s voice as he finally seemed to get the message that Danny was genuinely becoming concerned. “Ring her and see, then.”

  “I can’t. There’s somethin’ wrong with my mobile and the house phone. I can’t connect to her number.”

  Steve paused. “I’m on my mobile to you now…” he pointed out.

  “You try her number! Please…?”

  He heard a small sigh from the other end of the line, but considering the circumstances, that was small beer for asking Steve to voluntarily seek to speak to Ellie. “Right. I’ll ring you back sure, or I’ll get her to ring.”

  “Cheers, lad.”

  “No problem. And Danny?” Steve added, putting on his best sage advice tone. “Calm down for Christ’s sake. They’ll be back and crampin your style before you know it.”

  With that parting shot he was gone, and Danny was alone once again. It had been nice to be talking to someone, even if it hadn’t been Ellie or Luke. Without the TV going or wee Luke’s constant stream of babble he’d rarely heard the house this quiet. Through the stained glass panels at the top of the door he could see a dark shape at the bottom of the garden path; hope surged in him for a moment, but a few steps closer to the door so he could look through one of the adjacent transparent panels quashed it - it was Bee, only just now reaching the bottom of the garden path.

  She turned to close his gate, and seemed to sense his eyes upon her, because she looked up and stared directly at him for a moment. His mind flashed back to the stare he’d endured from Michael Quinn the previous night, except this one wasn’t full of hatred. It looked almost like she was sad. But then, if he had to look in the mirror and see that face staring back at him, he’d look fairly fuckin’ miserable too…

  And then she broke the glance, and her head turned towards, of all fuckin’ things, his garden. He followed her gaze and felt that tug as if something was-

  His phone buzzed for attention. He had it answered almost before it had started to shake.

  “Hello?”

  “Danny.” It was Steve.

  “What’d she say? Did you talk to her? Is the wee man alright?”

  “Sorry lad,” Steve began his reply with, causing Danny’s heart to palpitate, “I phoned her number, but…there was some sort of crazy interference came through. Probably just this useless phone of mine-”

  “Interference? Like someone squealing? Loud as fuck?”

  “Yeah…”

  “Something must be wrong with her mobile, then. It’s been doing that all day.”

  “I dunno,” Steve replied, “I’ve never heard that before. And the call’s being picked up, like, she’s answering. It’s not going to voicemail. But as you say, it’s just that squeal. Near made my fuckin’ eardrums bleed.”

  Danny tried to think of something to say, but found that he couldn’t stop thinking about the conversation he and Ellie had had earlier that day, at lunch. When she’d told him she wanted to have a word with him. He’d known what that word would be. Maybe she’d known he’d known that. Maybe she’d decided to skip the conversation altogether.

  He tried to stop the words from bubbling to the surface. As ever, he failed.

  And I’m glad I did.

  Steve was talking on, to fill the silence. “Must just be interference where she is. Look…I hate to say this, but when I was visiting my Ma in hospital they told us to switch off…”

  Hospitals. Hospitals fucked with mobiles. Of course they did. It was a relief, in a perverse kind of way, to turn towards that kind of possibility; at least for a moment until the unpleasant ramifications of this becoming a factor had kicked in. He found himself sweeping his eyes over every available surface he could see from where he stood. Looking for evidence. Blood. Anything.

  “Do you want me to-”

  “No,“ Danny replied, softly but insistently, surprising himself as much as anyone else. “I’m gonna check a few things out– the neighbours. I’ll ring her ones, my Ma, her mates. Then,“ he paused, and made himself say the words, “I’ll phone the hospitals.”

  “Right. Are you…you alright, like?”

  “Me? Aye,” Danny said. He forced a note of lightness into his voice, as much for Steve’s sake as his own. “As you say. She’s probably nipped off somewhere and her mobile’s on the blink. I’ll kill her when I get her.”

  He walked to the front door, opened it, pulled it shut behind him, intending to begin rapping on the doors of the neighbours. The air was chilled, more so than he remembered it from his walk from the bus to here. He considered going back in for a coat, but decided against it - he’d only be knocking on a few doors after all.

  “Aye lad, keep it relaxed,” Steve said. “There’ll be some daft explanation for it all.”

  Seconds ticked past.

  “Lad…? You there?”

  “Yeah,” Danny said absently. He had found what Bee had been looking at, what had been flagging his mind for attention since he first walked up the garden.

  They’d busted their balls flattening that hump of earth, that wee mound. He still had the calluses on his right hand from the spade. And yet here it was, sitting pristine and undisturbed and looking as if no-one had ever been near it with a toothpick let alone a garden implement.

  As a puzzle, compared to, say, his girlfriend and his baby son being currently whereabouts unknown, admittedly it paled into insignificance he had to admit. And yet, as he bade Steve farewell and promised to ring him later and made his way to the first of his neighbours, Danny felt his eyes drawn back to his garden as if someone were reeling them in on a fishing line.

  Daft explanation. Right.

  Had to be.

  The First Threshold

  The hardwood floor was cold beneath his feet. They’d talked about sticking carpets down because that would be better for the wee fella when he became properly mobile, softer on his wee knees and elbows for all the spills and tumbles that would come with the toddler stage. But, as with the sofa against which he now sat, the sofa where old springs went to die, as with the freezer that needed defrosting every fortnight because the thermostat was fucked, intrusive financial reality had surfaced to swallow such laudable goals.

  At some point over the last few hours he’d removed his socks. He couldn’t actually remember doing it, but since he was now in his bare feet the evidence was fairly incontrovertible that he must have done. Probably to pass fifteen seconds worth of time without glancing at the clock, at the phone, without cradling his mobile and staring at it, willing it to light up with an incoming call and a caller ID picture of Ellie sticking her tongue out and crossing her eyes, which she had asked him to delete 47 times and which he’d lied to her 47 times that he had done.

  The phonebook weighed on his left leg, but he didn’t mind the sensation, just as he didn’t mind the cold, hard floor on his toes or slowly leeching all feeling from his arse. They were things that weren’t the lack of them, and for that he was grateful.