♦
They were having an improvised buffet lunch at the dining table when they heard footsteps on the stairs. Daisy paused in the doorway looking uneasy. It took Alex several seconds to remember because he’d helped dress a naked Richard five minutes ago, which had kind of taken up most of his short-term memory. He glanced across at Melissa. Fucking dyke. He decided to make this as obvious as he could. Daisy…He lifted his arm so that she walked over and stepped under it and let him squeeze her shoulders. He looked directly at Melissa and saw it in her eyes, she knew that he knew, Mum, too, a beaten look about her. And it was glorious and funny, seeing his parents and Melissa on the same team for once, at the other end of the pitch, several goals down. He turned to Daisy. What can I serve you from this fine spread?
But Daisy said, What on earth is that?
Tolliver, said Benjy, because the owl was sitting under its big dusty belljar in the centre of the table.
Cupboard under the stairs, said Dominic, trying to pull the family back together. Belongs to the owners.
The owners, said Daisy. She’d never thought about them, looking around as if she might be able to see them.
Alex did her a plate of cheese and oatcakes and assorted dips and they sat side by side eating, their radiant togetherness gradually driving everyone else out of the room apart from Benjy. Mum and Dad both touching Daisy on the shoulder as they exited, as if they were leaving a wake and she were the bereaved wife. Then they were gone and Benjy was building a model bridge out of hummus and carrots so Alex said, quietly, Are you going to get a girlfriend, then?
Alex. God. It’s not like buying a toaster.
My bad.
Girlfriend. The lurch of the world. She remembered a freezing January morning. Coming out of the Wheelan Centre. Smoky breath and mauve sky and the street lights going off. She and Lauren had held hands for ten, fifteen seconds, no more, then someone was walking towards them along the pavement and they’d let go. Like cuddling up when you were half asleep and pretending it never happened. Lauren. For now we see only as a reflection in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. It wasn’t simple, was it, or quick? The coin flipped, and flipped, and flipped.
Time speeding up now, Lauren answering a door in a street Daisy doesn’t recognise. Husband, two kids, the telly on in the background, face tired and lined but beautiful. We were at school together…? Are you sure…? Turning and running down the street in tears. And now she was crying for real and Alex rubbed her back and said, Come on, girl. Benjy looked up. Is Daisy OK? And Alex was genuinely unsure if she was crying because she was happy or sad. It was all getting a bit beyond him. So Benjy got off his bench and came round and sat on the other side of Daisy and wrapped his arms around her and said, Daisy sandwich, because that’s what they used to do with him when he was sad. They squeezed and let go.
Shit, said Daisy, wiping her eyes with an abandoned tea towel. Shitting shit.
♦
They play cards, they eat toast, they watch Monsters Inc. and Richard says, This is actually rather good, like the queen getting a mobile phone for Christmas, and everyone laughs because he has suddenly become more teasable. The chequered rug, perhaps, the fogginess in his voice, the way Louisa is nursing his foot. Though it is extraordinary, isn’t it? thinks Angela. She can remember the thrill of getting a colour television, she can remember when the Thunderbirds puppets were at the cutting edge of animation despite the fact that you could see the wires used to raise their eyebrows, whereas now…? You can’t tell the real dinosaurs from the animated ones, as someone said somewhere.
Melissa tries to ring civilisation but they’ve swung out of the signal’s orbit once again, so that when Angela challenges her to a game of Scrabble she is so spectacularly bored that she agrees and the two of them play as if it is a fight to the death. Orts. Beguine. P 
alanx for ninety-five. Benjy and Alex concoct a fantasy in which the ginger man and the girl with Charlie’s Angels hair are merely outer coverings for jelly-like aliens who feed on elderly people. Richard listens to Idomeneo (Colin Davis, Francisco Araiza, Barbara Hendricks…). Daisy looks at the pages of Dracula but the words just swim. Alex reads Andy McNab and Louisa reads Stephen Fry and Dominic goes away to start making supper and the rain stops and the world looks as if it has been serviced and mended and given back.
♦
The owner of this Orange mobile number is unavailable…
Jack. Hey. It’s Daisy. Remember? She looked around at the moraine of boy-crap. I’m halfway up a small mountain on the Welsh border. We’re on holiday. Listen… She looked out of the window. Benjy was on the lawn getting sopping wet, doing Ninja moves with a stick, except it wasn’t a Ninja weapon, was it, it was an umbrella and he was Gene Kelly. I’m really sorry. I think I understand now. If that rings any kind of bell then give me a call, yeh? It would be really good to hear from you.
♦
Gingerly, Angela thinks about Karen, about the birthday, just grazing the subject, like touching an electric fence with the back of your hand to stop your fingers gripping the live wire. Nothing. It’s the photographs of Dad, as if there’s been an absence all along and she’s been trying to fill it with the wrong person. A weight begins to lift. A little anxious, still, that Richard might not be able to find the pictures, that they might get lost in the post, that Dad might be turning away or obscured somehow, that he might not be looking at her.
♦
Big pie, two enamelled baking tins, Idomeneo in the background, Odo da lunge armonioso suono…In the distance I hear the sweet sound summoning me aboard… Tomato sauce with onions and garlic, because they’d been planning to swing by whatever supermarket they could find in Abergavenny before the Richard debacle, so Dominic has offered to make what he has christened rather grandly Olchon Valley Pie which will include pretty much anything he can find in the fridge and cupboards, parsnips, carrots, spinach, butter beans, pasta shells, pine nuts, chopped apricots, the last two of which will turn out to be an unexpected hit. All topped off with mashed potato and that weird cheese with the lost wrapper no one can identify. And on the side, to prevent Richard getting anaemia, slices of Saucisson Sec Supérieur à l’ancienne. Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc, McGuigan Hallmark Cabernet Shiraz, Hooky Gold, Bath Ales Barnstormer, apple juice, mango juice, strawberry and banana smoothie. Fizzy water. Pistachios.