Multitudes by Lucy Caldwell

Author:Lucy Caldwell [Lucy Caldwell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571313525
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2016-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

We boot up the Amstrad and sit side by side while he fires the newspapers at the doors and crashes into flowerpots and dodges the stray rolling tyres and remote-controlled cars and tornadoes. It’s banal and repetitive and weirdly hypnotic. Gradually, I feel my breathing lengthen and my heartbeat slow. I stop watching the computer screen after a while and watch Niall instead, his pale, creased forehead, his flicking thumbs. We sit there for hours. By the time he gives up on the elusive Perfect Delivery it’s almost teatime, so I microwave the jacket potatoes Mum has left cling-filmed in the fridge, three minutes each plate, and grate cheese carefully over. Niall eats his and most of mine. After we’ve finished, I do the washing-up, drying each knife and fork individually, eking them out. So long as you keep moving, I say to myself. It’s like in the game: you can speed up or slow down but you have to keep moving, because as soon as you stop, it’s over. I line up the last knife in its compartment and close the cutlery drawer. Niall is back up in his room by now, at work on whatever he’s cutting and gluing. I wet the dishcloth and wipe the table, then wring it out and drape it over the tap. I am more tired than I can ever remember being, more tired than I even knew was possible. I want to go to bed, but I don’t dare – in case I don’t wake up this time.

As I wonder what to do next, I hear Sheba whine by the back door and I realise we haven’t let her out all afternoon. ‘Come on then,’ I say, and she gives a little thump of her tail, or tries to. I unlock the door, and she hauls herself up and pads outside. The rain still hasn’t let up. She makes it across the yard and to the edge of the garden and squats: to make her puddle, I suddenly think, that’s what we always used to call it when we were little. I don’t remember a time without Sheba. I don’t remember when she was a puppy, except in photographs. She’s always just been there.

She shambles back to the house, and I let her in and kneel down on the floor beside her. She was really blonde once, platinum-bright, but now she’s kind of an ashy colour, and her muzzle is grey. She’s getting on: that’s what my parents say. Poor old Sheba’s getting on. I stroke her and see how knotted her undercoat is. So I tease her soft drifts of tummy fur until they untangle and brush through her damp topcoat with my fingers. It isn’t dirty, exactly, because she doesn’t go outside much any more, but it doesn’t feel clean. She’s too stiff and cumbersome to climb into the bath, and it seems cruel to blast her with a cold hose in the middle of winter, so she hasn’t been properly bathed for weeks.

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