‘Where are we going to sleep?’ Crystal said.
Gull Gilbert leaned back in his chair. ‘Depends,’ he said. ‘Do you snore?’
‘How would I know?’
Ivor crawled under the table. The sand was everywhere. The grains he’d already picked up kept scattering out of his hand. ‘I think we should take our shoes off,’ he said. He followed the gritty trail out into the middle of the kitchen.
Gull Gilbert was staring at Crystal. ‘You’ll have to sleep in my room.’
Crystal stared back, harder. ‘Why?’
Gull Gilbert’s eyes shifted away, he put his leg down from the table, got up and started pacing. He pointed to her beer. ‘Are you going to finish that?’
‘I already did.’
He reached out and shook it to check, then crushed the empty can in his fist.
Ivor tipped the sand in the bin then sat back down. No one had finished their soup. Gull Gilbert was circling the edges of the room, wall to wall to wall.
Ivor took a spoonful and raised it to his mouth, but he couldn’t do it. He pushed his bowl away. His spoon had rust on the handle. His stomach made a thin, hollow noise. ‘Soon we have to go and sit in the armchairs,’ he said.
Crystal was moving her chair closer. Ivor sat very still. What he was probably meant to do was lean in to her and smell her hair, like his father used to do to Mev.
His breathing was so fast and shallow it was as if he couldn’t catch up with it.
‘You took too many crackers,’ Ivor told her.
Crystal stopped moving for a moment, then tipped her chair back and swung on its spindly legs. She started humming something fast and looping.
Gull Gilbert turned on the TV. There was someone on there doing a magic trick with cards, but you could see where she’d tucked the spare ones in her pocket. He picked up the remote and changed the channel. A zebra was running through a wide river. He changed the channel again and there was a crowd of people. He flicked it again and again.
The room was cold and dark. The blue from the TV and the orange from the lamp cast a strange, underwater light. Crystal’s chair was almost at the point where it would snap. Gull Gilbert was staring at the screen with unfocused eyes. His hair had sprung up slowly from under its layer of gel. He kept moving from channel to channel without stopping, one image blurred into the next; there was a voice, then music, then more voices. The zebra was still in the river, the crowd of people was getting bigger. The magician’s hidden cards fell on the ground like leaves from a wilting plant.
Ivor pushed his plate off the table. It slid across the shiny wood and kept sliding, then seemed to pause for a moment before it hit the floor and shattered.
Crystal stopped tipping. Gull Gilbert blinked and looked around.
Ivor picked up his glass. It glinted in the TV’s light. He held it out over the floor, then he dropped it.
Slowly, Gull Gilbert’s elbow moved towards his plate. It teetered on the edge of the table, then broke with a hard clunking sound across his shoes.
Crystal picked up her plate, licked off the last crumbs, and dropped it. She got up and kicked her chair over behind her.
Then they all picked up their stupid eggs, raised them in the air, and smashed them into a million glorious pieces.
Ivor finally caught up with his own breath. His hand touched against Crystal’s hand and he tried to make it mean that he would miss her when she wasn’t there. Even though he didn’t know if you could say that just with hands.
The sea paced with its heavy boots through the house. If you listened closely, you could tell how high the tide was, and what kind of waves were breaking. Ivor’s father could walk out the front door and know that the waves were mushy, or that it was low tide and the waves were clean as a damn whistle.
Ivor picked up his can and rubbed the back of his neck. Later, but not now, he would clean up the house, and whoever came in next, whenever they came in next, would find, what? Not anything worth mentioning really: a scatter of crumbs, a few missing plates, a lamp that had been left on by mistake, sand in the floorboards, a smudge of breath on the bathroom mirror that could have been anyone’s.
The baby was teetering on the edge of speech. Bru, she would say. Da Da Da. She had a way of looking at him as if she knew. Her forehead would furrow and her eyes would go dark as oil. Then he would pick her up and carouse around the room, giddy up, giddy up horsey, while the mist pressed against the windows from the sea, wet and dripping like bedding on a line.
They were there for three months. His wife, Lorna, had a temporary posting and they’d been given the use of a small, brick house in a terraced row. Theirs was on the end and it backed onto rough ground: tussocks, bracken, horned sheep sprayed blue and red, as if they were going into battle. Beyond that were fields, hedges tangled like wires, a few lonely farmhouses. The beaches were stony. The trees were not in leaf. In front of the house there was a road that hardly anyone drove along, then a barbed-wire fence with No Entry signs and cameras that pointed in all directions. Behind the fence were the dishes, where his wife went to work every morning and came back later and later into the evening. Sometimes she would have a shift in the middle of the night, and when Jay turned over in bed to hold her, she would be gone.
The dishes were on the edge of the cliff and could be seen for miles – hard white shapes that looked like a chess set waiting to be played. They were data gatherers, listening stations, bigger than the house and smooth and silent. Some were full spheres, some were hexagonal, others hollowed like the dip in an ear. At the centre of each tilted dish there was an antenna that reached upwards, and, sometimes, if Jay watched carefully, he would see them slowly turn, like a flower might, or someone following a voice that no one else could hear.
It was early morning and Lorna had already left. Jay was in the kitchen clearing away the breakfast things. It was cold outside. Rain blew across the road in thin lines. He turned the heating up higher.
The baby was strapped in her chair. He wiped her face with a warm cloth. Her skin was so soft, almost translucent, except for all the dried food stuck to it – it was on her cheeks and on the floor. Some was in her wispy hair. She laughed and squirmed while he wiped around her mouth, then puckered her lips and blew a bubble. Jay crouched down and tried to blow one too but it didn’t work and he ended up drooling down one corner of his mouth. The baby laughed and blew another one.
‘How are you doing that?’ he said.
‘Hamna fla,’ the baby told him.
‘Oh, OK,’ Jay said. ‘I thought you were doing it a different way.’
He picked up the plates and put them in the sink, then ran the hot water until the washing liquid foamed up. He plunged his hands in and his wrists went red.
‘What do you want to do today?’ he said.
The baby banged her hands against her tray.
‘Do you want to go out anywhere?’
She banged again.
‘Or we could play that xylophone game you seem to like so much.’
She kept banging.
‘Bang your hands if you’ve got food in your hair.’
She kept banging.
‘Bang your hands if you woke me up five times