Smotherlove

Someone wants to adopt you, they said. Funny, I thought. We’re cleaning up the streets, they said. I opened my mouth to speak and ended up here. I haven’t been out for two months. There are sixteen locks on the door.

Seventeen. You forgot the new one.

That’s him. I’m not speaking to him. Or her.

Now then Robert, if you stop this silly sulking we’ll take a trip to the beach, he says, and erects a deckchair.

Really?

He won’t like the beach. He doesn’t like the heat.

That’s her.

And his name’s Kenny, she says. And Kenny would prefer the countryside.

He can be Robert on the beach and Kenny in the countryside.

My name’s Donald, but I play along and say, I don’t mind where we go as long as we go somewhere.

The beach it is then.

At last. And once I’m out of that door I won’t be back. Then while she sulks in the deckchair, he brings in a picnic hamper, blanket, bucket and spade and a ghetto blaster circa nineteen eighty-five. I’m wondering exactly which beach we’re heading for when he presses the play button and I hear waves rolling on a beach and the occasional seagull.

Not fair! You said we were going to the beach.

You might get lost.

I won’t get lost. I’ve got a very good sense of direction.

You were lost when you came to us.

Not in the way you mean.

We couldn’t risk losing our baby boy.

I’m thirty-five. Let me out of here!

After all the sacrifices we’ve made for you.

Such as?

I don’t think this is working, he says. Shall we have a baby girl next time?

What shall we call her? Lucy.

Gwendoline, he says, then takes a short rope from his pocket and pulls it taut with a snap.

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