“Yeah,” he replied absently.
“How’d it finish anyway?”
He stopped at the top of the staircase and looked at her expectant face. For a moment he contemplated coming clean, telling her the truth, that he’d fallen into some sort of half-trance listening to the sound of her soft sleep-breathing and hadn’t an earthly how the movie ended. It sounded romantic, after all. It’d probably get him brownie points.
“I…she…um, she got yer man.”
“Which one?”
“Um. The nice one?” he hazarded.
“No, I mean which version of her?”
Having paid zero attention during most of the movie, Danny was now completely lost. “…both of her?” he ventured.
“Oh,” Maggie said. She shrugged. “I like happy endings.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
***
It was only when his Da grew a tail that Danny realised he was dreaming.
He’d found himself in a twilit world, in the countryside, with nary a sight of civilisation in all directions, and had been tempted to start looking for the clubhouse as, being a city boy his entire life, he imagined the countryside as one overlapping golf course after another. Despite the abruptness of his arrival here he’d kinda accepted it in the casual way you do when sleep claims you and the world doesn’t have to make sense anymore.
“Son.”
His Da was here, standing beside him, wearing the same shitty suit he’d worn the last time Danny had seen him before he’d fucked off out of his life. He wasn’t surprised. “Da,” he returned. He glanced around. “This where you’re livin’ these days is it?”
“No one lives here,” his Da told him, and Danny saw an ochre tint seep into the colour palette of the vista around him, as if someone had just thrown a crimson veil over his head. He looked at his Da with his eyebrows arched, and his Da nodded upward, and Danny looked to see that the Moon, emerging from a cloudbank, had become bored of being blotchy white and decided to plump for red.
It was then that he noticed his Da had grown himself a tail. It wasn’t a rat’s tail, which surprised Danny a little; more a doggie tail. It wasn’t wagging either, just sort of hanging limply behind him.
“You’ve a tail there.”
“I know.”
“I’m dreaming.”
“Mostly.”
“Why’d you fuck off? Why’d you leave us?”
“It’s complicated.”
“I read your letter.”
“My letter?” his Da laughed shortly. “You’d be surprised, son.”
“You couldn’t hack it, could you.”
“No. I couldn’t.”
“Being a father.”
“No,” Tony replied, steel in his voice. “Not that. That’s not what I couldn’t deal with.”
“So what was? The paint scheme in the hall? My Ma burnin’ the chips? What? Somethin’ must have caused you to go – fuck this. So what was it, Da?”
“Now’s not the time.”
Danny sighed. “This is one of them cryptic fuckin’ dreams then,” he said.
“Life is cryptic. Why should dreams be any different?”
“Thanks, Rover.”
His Da didn’t rise to it. He was more concerned with the countryside around them, which was, Danny had to admit, a fair bit creepier given the red tint to everything. Rustles and crackles reached his ears, which was also a bit strange, given that there was fuck all wind to produce any movement. But then, he imagined the laws of physics applied only loosely to imaginary places.
“I tried to come back,” his Da told him, his voice going up a little, as if he were worried and wanting to get the words out as quickly as possible. “I…well, I did come back. But you don’t remember that now. It’s changed. It’s all changed. And it’ll change again before the end of all this. But you – you’ll remember. That’s what your power is, Danny. The sword can change the rest of us. It can change the whole world. But not you. Not for long.”
Rrrrroooooo.
“Was that,” Danny said, very slowly, his shoulders stiff as a board, “a wolf?”
“No. It wasn’t.”
His Da ripped his eyes from scanning the surrounding hills and walked to him, placed his hands on his shoulders so he could look into Danny’s eyes. Danny realised he was taller than his Da by a good four inches. Huh. What about that.
“You don’t understand, Danny. You think I didn’t want you? I wanted you more than anything. That’s what got me into this fuckin’ mess in the first place. That’s what gave him his in with me. I made the deal. But he fucked me over. Just like they always do. That’s what they do, Danny. What they are. They hate us and they want everything we have, everything they say we took away.”
The Moon was obscured by another cloudbank. The ochre pastels retreated around them, and a significant part of the menace of the landscape seeped away with it. Danny, for a moment spellbound by his dream-father’s words, found himself pulling away from his grasp.
“Well that was informative,” he returned bitterly. “Glad we had this chat. Feel free to stop by my other dreams. I’d love to see you in the one about the big pair of brown trunks chasin’ me down the city centre.”
“Remembering is your power,” his Da said, and then his face hardened and Danny realised with faint shock it was the first time he’d ever seen his Da stern at him. “Assuming that you want to remember…”
The thing sprang at him then, before Danny could respond, the words choked in his throat, and for all the world it seemed as if the thing had sprung directly from the flash of anger he‘d felt at that final accusation. He was thrown apart from his Da as the thing knocked him flat to the ground. It was big, it was mis-shapen. That was all he was able to process about it from his terrified vantage point on the grass.
His Da was screaming. Not in terror, but in challenge. Danny watched him roll and twist and throw the thing off of him, sending it scrabbling for purchase on the surface until it was able to bring its four legs to bear and get back on its feet, its back low, its teeth bared. He could see some wolf in it, only in the sense that you could see some goldfish in a Great White.
Its head, hanging too low on a neck too long, turned from his Da - currently struggling to get to his feet - to him and that was when the clouds hiding the Moon no longer did so, and bathed in the scarlet rays of the impossible Moon the thing was even more horrific than it had been before in the darkness.
He’d like to wake up now, he decided. Very much.
As if things couldn’t get any stranger, the misshapen monstrosity then decided it was time to speak. He never really saw that maw of a mouth move, or saw a tongue - though how the thing could expect to accommodate a tongue amidst that sea of teeth it displayed, he wasn’t sure.
“Connnnnnnsssssider it grannnnnnnnnted,” it somehow said, and emitted a series of nails-on-chalkboard squeals that were rhythmical enough to sound like laughter.
It sprang for him, and never got there, barrelling into the body of his father instead, who had thrown himself into the path of the onslaught. He watched as the thing and his Da rolled crazily on the grass, and with a yank of its head it had pulled the tail right out of his Da’s hide, coming loose with a wet crunch and a spray of blood as red as the moonlight that illuminated the scene.
***
“That was some nightmare you had last night,” Maggie was saying, between strokes of the toothbrush into her mouth. She was obsessed with brushing those fuckers. If he spent as much time in her mouth as that brush did, he’d be the luckiest guy alive.
In the midst of vigorously scorching his head dry with a head towel, Danny paused, his head still enveloped within the towel’s bowels. “Was it?” he said.
“You clung to me for about an hour after you came out of it,” she said, sounding amused. “Don’t worry by the way, I won’t be tellin’ Steve that tonight. What was it about, anyway?”
He poked his head out, the towel draped around his shoulders.
“Something about a dog and a golf course,” he said vaguely, feeling the details of the dream evaporate into mist the harder he tried to make them solidify. “One of them oul weird ones.”
“My poor baby,” she cooed, cupping his face with her hand and kissing him on the lips, tasting of toothpaste. And of red. The sensation passed across his tongue and he must not have been able to disguise it because she frowned and pulled her head back from his. “What’s the matter? Is that brand not that nice?”
“No,” he reassured her. “It’s just…well I haven’t brushed yet. Bit self-conscious.”
“Such a gentleman,” she cooed.
“One of a kind,” he replied, starting to brush. When he’d finished, she was nowhere to be found. Assuming she was combing her hair in the mirror, he walked back into the bedroom.
“Hey.”
He started slightly. She was there, on the bed. The bra and panties she’d worn in the bathroom had been discarded. She was looking at him with a quirked eyebrow and a smile of intent. Her finger curled and she beckoned him to her.
“All minty fresh…?” she said, and although the words were absurd somehow she twisted them in her mouth so that they seemed sensuous.
He knelt on the bed and dipped his mouth to hers by way of reply, and as their lips met and he felt her tongue slip into his mouth, he felt some of that tension melt away under her ministrations. She pushed forward, kneeling upright herself, so that they could continue to kiss even as she arched her back sufficiently to be able to slide off his boxers.
“We probably won’t get a chance tonight,” she said breathily, as they finally broke the kiss.
She had a point and she put it to good use. He had to admit. And looking down, it seemed like he had a point too.
He slid forward, she fell backward, landing softly on the mattress so that suddenly her legs were on either side of his hips, wrapping around his back. He put his hands on either side of her head and lowered his face down for another kiss, dropping his lips to her neck and planting soft little rows of lip-tracers in a line from her shoulder to her ear. She moaned underneath him. It was time.
In a few motions he was inside of her, feeling her warmth and her wetness and losing himself in the glory of that sensation-
“Uh. Danny?”
Her voice wasn’t dripping with passion anymore. He looked down and saw confusion in her eyes as she stared up at him and then dropped her eyes significantly to where they were currently joined together.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” she said.
Her eyes flitted to the right, to the bedside table, where a few silver-foil wrapped packages sat beside the mobile phones and the books.
“Can’t we just…?” he asked. “You’re on the Pill, aren’t you?”
A wrinkle formed in her brow and she wriggled upward, so that he slipped out. She propped herself up on an elbow and looked at him with something approaching bafflement. “No,” she said, patiently and in a tone that brooked no argument, “no Danny, I can’t “just”. Jesus, I thought you understood that.”
“I do,” he replied, angry at himself, angry at her, grabbing for one of the foil packages, knowing full well by then it was too late. The moment had passed.
He drove her to work and dropped her off. The car radio did the talking.
***
Danny sighed when Outlook popped up the meeting reminder. He’d been over the moon to land this graduate job. During the first two years of his degree, while the summer break was on he’d signed up with recruitment agencies and took whatever shitty job they threw this way. One summer they’d sent him to the Parole Board HQ in the city centre and he’d turned up all cheerful and full of the joys to work as a receptionist.
“Good morning sir,” he’d asked his first member of the public in a chipper and chirpy tone, the summer stretching out before him and the prospect of no-fuss money for drinking a warm and fuzzy one. “What can I help you with?”
“Sex Offender registration.”
After that, and after a few other such bottom-of-the-rung offerings, the middle management opportunities presented to him by Lircom’s graduate scheme had seemed heaven sent. Responsibility. Promotion opportunities. Decent salary. Company bloody car! He felt as if a giant hand had reached down from On High and said - here ye are Danny, always knew you weren’t a bad lad.
As ever, though, it hadn’t quite turned out the way he’d expected it to. And meetings like this were part of that small print he hadn’t anticipated. He walked into the small meeting room and saw the other man had already arrived. Of course he had.
“Good morning, sir,” said Thomas.
“Morning Tom,” he said briskly. “How’s the…” and he paused, and wished not for the first time that he had Mr Black’s effortless knack, for he knew absolutely nothing about this man‘s private life, and wasn‘t sure he wanted to know, “…how’s tricks?” he managed.
Tom laughed nervously. Everything he did around Danny was nervously. He looked at him as if he were permanently caught in the final few seconds of a Bond movie and didn’t know whether to cut the red or the blue wire. Invariably in Danny’s experience he could be relied upon to cut the fucking annoying wire. “Tricks are grand, sir. Grand.”
“Goo-”
“Well,” Tom amended. “I say good. I bought a car last week and the previous owner must have been a bit of a cat fanatic.”
Knowing he just shouldn’t, but unable to stop himself, as if it were a scab that he simply had to pick the skin off of, Danny asked, “Why’s that, Tom?”
“Whole car smells of cat piss,” Thomas admitted freely. “Embarrassing when I have passengers. I always make sure to tell them it’s cat and not human, though.”
“That must reassure them,” Danny said faintly. He cleared his throat, staring down at the papers he’d brought into the room and restraining the urge to throw his arms around them and cling to them like they were a life-raft in choppy waters. “You’re wondering why I’ve called you in here,” he said.
“If it’s to discuss Cal and Alice,” Thomas interjected. “I’m on top of it. I’m going to tell them there’s a strict policy on workplace relationships, don’t worry.”
Danny frowned. “No, that’s not it…and what policy are you talking about?”
Thomas looked confused. “The ban on office romance,” he said.
“I’m pretty sure banning that would be illegal, Tom,” Danny said. And somehow because he could see what Tom’s next question would be, he felt compelled to add, “I’m not talking about actual physical relations, so to speak, within the building. That’s off-limits.”
“But the disabled toilet-”
“Those are just rumours, Tom. We’ve all heard them.”
“If we need proof, we could install a camera-”
“No we couldn’t, Tom!”
There was silence for a moment in the room. Danny fancied that outside he could see a few heads pop up from cubicles like curious meerkats on the lookout. Thomas looked cowed. “As I was saying,” Danny said, ignoring the junior manager’s hangdog expression, “I’ve called you in here today to…well, this isn’t easy, Tom…”
Thomas’ face fell even further at those words, and didn’t pick up for the five minutes it took Danny to lay it on the line. He had graphs. He had reviews. He had supporting evidence coming out of his fucking ears. He paraded it in front of Thomas’ poor stunned little face until he realised he could have been showing him hardcore pornography and the other man wouldn’t have batted an eyelid, such was his state of shock.
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