Folk'd

by Laurence Donaghy

  “Ach, Danny…ya wanker ye. Fuck me, what’s the craic?”

  “Not bad, lad, not too bad. Busy at work like, you know how it is. This fuckin’ network thingy goin’ live and all that oul guff.”

  “Aye I seen that on the news. Seen your ugly face in the background at that press conference an all. Jesus Christ Almighty. You looked a sight. What‘s with the half-mullet you’re sportin’? Fuckin’ tryin’ out for a rock band are ye?”

  “Aye, and yer Ma’s the biggest groupie. She’s sucked my cock so many times she’s worn a lip-groove into the shaft. Fits her mouth like a key in a fuckin’ lock.”

  Steve laughed long and hard at this. Danny grinned. He’d always been quicker off the mark than Steve wit-wise, but Steve had never minded a bit; when he was outmatched in a game of Yer Ma, he’d just roar with laughter.

  “Anyway lad,” Danny said, “there’s a few of us headin’ out tonight. It’s a special occasion.”

  “Oh aye? What’s that?” Steve asked.

  “Did you not see it? The Grand Opening?”

  “Lad I’ve seen fuck all,” Steve said, sounding harried. “What Grand Opening is this?”

  “Yer sister’s flaps.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Steve exclaimed, dutifully outraged. “Ya dirty bastard ye. See when I get ye lad I’m gonna knock yer melt in.”

  “So you’re comin out, then?”

  There was a slight pause from the other side.

  “Um…” Steve replied, his voice suddenly a lot less confident than before.

  Danny heard something in the background. Footsteps. And a sound. It was small, muffled, but he knew it must have been Ellie. And somehow at that moment he knew also that she was holding wee Aaron in her arms.

  He hadn’t told Michael Quinn the full truth about he and Ellie; somehow by the look on the miserable fucker’s face he didn’t think he would have appreciated hearing that he had once, however briefly, done a little more than know his daughter at Queens as a casual acquaintance, although the word casual could probably have been used in a slightly different context.

  Ellie had been fun. Ellie and he had hooked up one night in the Attic, his Saturday night student haunt. And they’d gone back to her tiny little flat in the Halls and they’d done what young people are wont to do - twice, with pizza for afters. And she’d called him sweet but corny, and he’d shot right back by saying he hadn’t mushroom for girls with pepper only in their personalities. And after this pizza-laden pun exchange, they’d decided they quite liked each other and had dated, for a while.

  Until Maggie happened to him.

  Until Steve happened to her.

  The road not taken? Nothing as dramatic as that. But more than once he’d found himself wondering if he would have been a little more willing to go visit Steve if Steve had ended up with someone else but her, if he shied away from that house not just because he had a morbid fear of nappies and baby sick but also of seeing her be this Mummy person when what he remembered her as was this half-naked girl reclined on a bed, matching him pun for pun, joke for joke, the first time a girl had ever done that.

  “Who is it, love?” he heard from the other end. He kept quiet, thinking he should probably tell Steve to say hello on his behalf, but not quite able to bring himself to do so.

  “It’s Danny. He says hello.”

  Danny blinked at the lie and also at his own surprise at hearing it. From the other end of the line the conversation became a lot more muffled suddenly, and he guessed - correctly - that Steve had just clamped his hand over the transmitter end of the phone.

  His front door opened. “Hey love,” Maggie said easily, and then spied he was on the phone. She rolled her eyes. “Work, again?”

  “No…” Danny replied. “Er, I’m phonin’ Steve. Thought I might ask if he wants to go out.”

  Why was he nervous to admit that to her? Why would she have a problem with that? And indeed, she didn’t in the slightest. “Oh, that’ll be nice,” she said, pecking him on the cheek and moving into the house proper. She was carrying a few Sainsburys bags and these she placed on the kitchen counter.

  “Hello? Danny?”

  It was Ellie. Ellie was on the ‘phone to him. Ellie was speaking to him right now.

  Ridiculously, ludicrously, his mouth dried up. He opened it to respond to her greeting, but no sound emerged. Standing up at the foot of the stairs, he found his legs waver and he sat, a trifle heavily, on the steps below him, banging his arse as he did so with the suddenness of the motion.

  This was absurd. He’d just this minute finished legitimising Ellie in his own mind, and now confronted with her voice, he had to force down the most immense tide of relief that washed over him, as if…as if she’d been gone. Well, she had been. She’d been gone for almost two fuckin’ years. Jesus. What was wrong with him?

  “Danny?” she said again. “Danny, hello? Are you there?”

  He swallowed to moisturise his throat and found himself turning away from the kitchen and from Maggie standing in there, shielding the phone with his body. “Hey,” he said, his voice having dropped significantly in volume. “I didn’t…I…um,” and he was floundering now (why? why? why?) “…I didn’t expect to be talking…to you. How…uh, how are you?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Yeah?” he said, overjoyed beyond measure. “You are?”

  “I was wondering if you and Maggie wanted to come over,” she said. “For dinner.”

  “Yes…yes, that sounds good.”

  “It’s just that…” and she sighed. “Well, Steve won’t tell you this,” and her own voice dropped in volume now, “that’s why I sent him to change Aaron, but the fact is, we don’t really have the money for going out. But he really misses you, Danny. The rest of them too, but especially you. It’s the forlorn look in his eyes when he calls you a miserable shitstick of a dirty bastard. Gives it away. So it’d be nice if you could come to us. What d’you think?”

  I don’t know what I think. I don’t know why I don’t want you to stop talking to me, or why I feel like your voice is as familiar to me now as it was way back when.

  “Yeah,” he said weakly. “That’d be grand, Ellie.”

  “Tomorrow night then? About seven? Suit ye okay?” she said, all business again. A noise erupted in the background. She sighed. “Danny I’ll have to run - is that-”

  “Yes,” he said, feeling a sudden panic to close the deal. “Yes, yes it’s okay. We’ll be there.”

  “Great. Cheerio,” and she was gone.

  “Goodbye,” he said into empty space.

  “Sorry about that lad,” Steve’s voice sounded. “Teething troubles with the wee fella. Was she sayin’ to ye about the-”

  “Yeah. Tomorrow at seven,” Danny said hollowly.

  “Aye. Long as you’re not expecting haute cui-fuckin-sine like. Although speakin’ as someone who was subjected to your Ma’s cookin’ as a teenager more than a few times, you’d have a fuckin’ like lad,” Steve said, sounding a bit worried.

  “Yeah,” Danny replied, snapping out of his reverie. “Yeah, sorry lad…um…” and he tried to think of a riposte but couldn’t, so his mind threw up something else instead, “here, I bumped into her Da today at work…” and he winced and held the phone away from his ear for a moment, before gingerly putting it back again when the tirade had subsided. “I see what you mean about him, lad. Barrel of laughs isn’t he?”

  “You’ve no idea,” Steve said grimly. “Normally he’s enough of wanker like, but see this last few days…he’s been even worse. I think he’s losin’ it lad. He forgot the name of his own fuckin’ grandchild. Swear to fuck. And this guy’s meant to be a corporate hotshot?” he snorted derisively. “Troubleshooter my balls. Windee licker more like.”

  “What did he call him?” Danny asked. More to the point, he thought, why did he want to know? But he did. He really did.

  “Ach I can’t even remember now lad. Listen, I’ll have to run. See ye tomorrow. And…” Steve hesi
tated, obviously extending himself beyond his masculine comfort zone, “…uh, it’ll be really nice to see ye both.”

  He was gone a moment later. Danny switched off the cordless and sat looking at it for a few seconds. Hearing the lull in conversation from the hallway, Maggie poked her head out from around the kitchen entrance. “Can you give us a hand with starting the dinner?” she called.

  He got up and walked to her, smiling sheepishly so that she looked at him with eyes suddenly narrowing. “Speaking of dinner…” he began, and filled her in on the plans he’d made, again steeling himself for protests or for objections.

  “Hey, sounds like fun,” she said, and then winked at him. “Be nice to coo over the wee chicken and how cute he is and then at the end of the night go - right we’re off, see ya!”

  She kissed him and laughed. He didn’t.

  Her lips tasted of…and this was crazy, this was insane, but he had the oddest sensation that they tasted of…red? But how could anything taste like a colour? It bothered him, itched at him, but not nearly as much as his other overriding sensation from kissing her and the thought that came hard on its heels.

  Why did red taste wrong?

  Her lips aren’t purple. He’d written that on the minutes during his little mental walkabout at the meeting this morning.

  “What’s up, babe?” she said, pausing to look at him askance. “You’re miles away.”

  “I…” he said, and with an effort he pulled himself back, “…sorry, I’m just…thinking about tomorrow night. Just hoping it goes well.”

  She grinned easily, confidently. “It will, don’t you worry. Wait and see.”

  He turned away and busied himself in some menial task of starting tonight’s dinner, telling himself it was to assist in his role as fellow housework doer and all-round modern man. And definitely not, for talk’s sake, because she had looked for a moment like she was going to come over to him and kiss him again and he wanted to avoid that.

  ***

  Dinner had been consumed, and Danny was just closing the cupboard after sliding the last plate back into place. He stared at the closed cupboard door for a moment and then reopened it and regarded his crockery collection. Generally speaking he didn’t think of himself as an rabid fan of kitchenware, so this was in itself a fairly remarkable act.

  It was so clean. So orderly. He lifted one of the saucers from the top of the pile and examined it in his hands for a few seconds. He’d bought this…yes, as part of a set in Debenhams, when they’d been moving into this place. They’d been so excited, running around Castle Court like two idiots, dissolving into paroxysms of glee at having to decide whether getting an apple corer and a juicer was a necessary expense.

  Something made him sniff the freshly-washed saucer. It smelled of not smelling of almond and coconut. That doesn’t even make sense. What the hell am I thinking? He sighed, replacing the plate with a chink-

  “What’s wrong?”

  Her hands wrapped around his upper chest from behind. The instinct to drop his jaw and plant a kiss on them was neck-and-neck with the instinct to take a step sideways and break the contact off altogether.

  “Nothing,” he half-lied. After all, what was he supposed to say? The dishes were giving off a smell they didn’t smell of? “Just wondering what you fancy doing tonight.”

  “We-ee-ee-ll…” she said, and gently spun him around so his back was against the countertop and she could move closer to him. She was pursing her lips and giving this some intense consideration. Her breasts were squashing themselves into his torso. “I don’t know,” she concluded eventually. “We can go out and catch a movie if you feel like it. Go for a drive maybe. Go have a few drinks. Normally I’d say we could stretch to hitting a club after the drinks but what with going to Steve and Ellie’s tomorrow night and with the hangovers you get we might be better off limiting ourselves…”

  “Limiting ourselves?” he echoed. “You call that limiting ourselves? We’re coming down in choices, Maggie. It’s a big old choices smorgasbord and everybody’s invited.”

  He couldn’t get over it. Somehow the plethora of options for how the night could unfold that lay before him just seemed astonishing. So much freedom. He felt almost guilty (why?) just thinking about it.

  “And I wasn’t even finished yet,” she said, looking up at him with sparkling eyes, “those are just the ones that involve going out. There’s plenty of things we could do right here at home…”

  She stood on tiptoes and kissed him, softly, on the lips.

  “How about some quiet time with a DVD and our big comfy sofa?” she said softly.

  “You’ll just pick a romcom.”

  “However could I sweeten the deal?”

  “However indeed…”

  Thus it was that a short time later they found themselves ensconced on the large, full-backed, luxurious large leather sofa, one so soft that you didn’t so much sit on as sit in the damn thing. Maggie’s head rested on Danny’s chest. The DVD they’d picked – some bollocks about some girl missing a train, or not missing a train, and being somehow split in two because of it, passed by mostly unnoticed in the hindquarters of Danny’s mind. Try as he might – and he wasn’t – he couldn’t focus on it. Two things were occupying his attention.

  The first was the feel of Maggie’s head on his chest. It was intimate, casual, the sort of thing couples did without even thinking. It didn’t feel uncomfortable, it didn’t feel unwelcome…but the one impression he couldn’t shake no matter how he tried was that it felt, well, new somehow. As if her chin hadn’t worn a groove in his chest that fitted it like a gun in a holster.

  The second was the quiet.

  Oh the movie made noise, of course; the surround sound system he’d paid some guy a few quid to install when they’d been outfitting this place (one of his wee treats to himself after landing the graduate job at Lircom) was working its usual magic and thanks to that he could now hear Paltrow snivelling in full 5.1. Marvellous.

  It was like the saucer all over again, but a different sense this time. Now he wasn’t hearing noises that he felt somehow he should be hearing. Nothing dramatic, no, he was certain of that. Not a big noise. A soft noise. Rhythmic…

  …and then, to his astonishment, he heard the missing noise, coming from right underneath him.

  “Maggie?”

  “Bunh?” she murmured, starting only slightly before re-snuggling back into his chest and immediately drifting off again.

  He listened to the sound of her sleeping, becoming more convinced with each passing inhale/exhale cycle that, no, it wasn’t the exact noise he’d been listening out for…but in a way he couldn’t explain, even the approximation it was giving him was strangely comforting, comforting in a way that very few things had been these few hours. He clung to it.

  “How…” Maggie eventually said, interspersed with a yawn as she slowly extricated herself from his chest, “…how long have I been out…sorry…didn’t realise I was tired…”

  “Don’t worry about it. You’ve only been out a few minutes.”

  She glanced at the clock and raised an eyebrow. “A few minutes?” she repeated, and glanced at him. “Try two and a half hours, Danny. It’s almost 1am.”

  “What? It can’t be-”

  It was.

  “I’d always meant to watch that movie,” Maggie was saying as they ascended the stairs to bed moments later. “We really should give it back to Lisa. She loaned it to us yonks ago.”