The Silence Between Breaths by Cath Staincliffe

Author:Cath Staincliffe [Staincliffe, Cath]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472118028
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2016-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

Nick

They were lesbians! For fuck’s sake. It turned his stomach. Swapping tongues in public. Disgusting. People like that shouldn’t be allowed to keep animals. Or have children. That was one thing the Muslims got right: no homos. He’d never have looked after the dog if he’d realized. He didn’t think Eddie had noticed – he was still bent over his drawings. It was a perversion, a sin. That was what the Bible said. In fact, he was pretty sure that all the major religions were against it. Of course, the Church of England had been watered down so much, trying to be trendy, trying to stay in business – they’d got women bishops and gay vicars, the lot.

And it spread, that sort of free-for-all, like a disease, with all the equal-opportunities crap, where you couldn’t call a spade a spade or a queer a queer, until people couldn’t tell right from wrong any more.

If either of his kids . . . Just the thought made him want to thump something. And tomorrow the wedding, the best man – he was a shirt-lifter. Lisa had told him.

‘I don’t want you making any nasty comments,’ she had said. ‘He’s a nice bloke. So live and let live, yeah?’

He’d grunted some sort of agreement even though he thought she was wrong. Live and let live was really a form of apathy, laziness. Everything deteriorated, standards and that. Values, morals, tradition went out of the window. Take St George’s Day, next week: it should be a public holiday. They should celebrate it at Eddie’s school, our patron saint, but no – it was an afterthought, if that.

‘Can we have a cat, then, Dad?’ Eddie said.

‘What?’

‘You said we can’t have a dog so can we have a cat?’

‘No.’

Eddie wrinkled his nose. ‘A fish?’

‘Maybe,’ Nick said.

‘A shark?’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

‘I’ll draw a shark,’ Eddie said. ‘I’ll draw a shark eating you.’ He eyed Nick, his mouth set, mutinous.

‘Yeah?’ Nick said.

‘With lots of blood and your leg hanging off.’ He picked up a red pen, found a clean piece of paper.

‘That’s not very nice,’ Nick said.

‘You’re not very nice,’ Eddie said. ‘I hate you, you’re so mean.’

‘Oi, that’s enough.’ He checked his watch. It was ten past twelve and their new arrival time was 13.08. An hour, near enough.

The coloured girl’s phone, still charging, trilled with another alert.

He got out his own phone, looked up the odds on the Manchester derby. The signal was patchy and he couldn’t connect. At least they’d be back home in time: kick-off was at four o’clock, Sunday. United would win it, he just knew they would. They were already doing way better than the previous year – which had been an unmitigated disaster. Moyes couldn’t run a bath, let alone a Premiership football team. He’d cocked up the transfer window, trying to buy three of the world’s best players and failing every time. Then he’d stuck in his old pal Fellaini, who played like a girl. United hadn’t even made it into the Champions League.

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