don’t know.’
‘It must be weird,’ she persisted, ‘to suddenly stop doing something like that – after all these years – especially something like flying.’
She was floundering. They’d told her, but not Steph, that Mick had been made redundant. They’d told her that Florida would be his last flight, but they hadn’t told her what to think about this. Whether it was a good or a bad thing; whether it was something they were meant to be celebrating or not talking about. She’d been given facts without guidelines and wasn’t that interested anyway, so she was floundering.
‘Yes, it must be,’ Dominique trailed off.
She opened the fridge then shut it, staring at the magnetic letters on the door’s white surface for a while, trying to make out a pattern. Then, yawning, she went over to the kitchen table and sat down.
‘What are you doing?’ she said, watching her older daughter.
‘A sketch for a mural.’ Delta turned the sketch pad round and carried on adding details with a pencil.
‘What is it?’
‘A matador delivering the coup de grâce. I thought I could paint it on the wall opposite my bookshelves.’
‘Well, I don’t mind you painting there, but …’
Delta wasn’t listening. She turned the sketch pad back round to face her.
‘Won’t it give you nightmares?’
Dominique sat staring at the Great Wall of China, which was December’s picture on the calendar they got free every year from Mr Li’s Chinese takeaway. Then she went to find Mick in the study.
‘That was Station Pets,’ he said when she went in, signalling to her to shut the door. ‘They’ve got two hamsters left: a boy and a girl.’
‘Well, we only want one.’
‘Why don’t we just buy them both – she won’t be expecting two.’
‘But they’ll breed, Mick.’
‘So they’ll breed … we’ll buy a bigger cage or sell them or drown them or something.’
‘Don’t hamsters eat their young?’
‘Not these ones – they’re Russian hamsters. I told him we’d take them both.’
‘So why did you even ask me?’
He smiled at her. ‘He’s got a cage with a wheel, and because we’re taking two hamsters he recommended buying an extension with plastic tubing so they’ve got more to do … some kind of hamster gym. He’ll throw in the exercise ball for free.’
‘Hamsters need exercise?’
‘That’s what he said.’
‘Well, if we’re buying the hamsters we should buy whatever goes with them, you know, whatever makes them happy.’ She watched him run his finger along the edge of the desk. ‘What about the Sindy House?’
‘We’d better keep it – she might change her mind again. We could just give her both anyway.’
‘The Sindy House and the hamsters? I don’t know, Mick.’
She looked at him standing there in his uniform. How did he do it? How did he walk off a plane and into No. 4 Pollards Close and just pick up all the threads like that as soon as he crossed the threshold? She couldn’t have done that. He’d just landed a plane that had been in the air for over eleven hours and here he was talking about hamsters and Sindy Houses like he’d never been anywhere but here all the time. Maybe that’s why she stopped flying when she had Delta. Why they both decided she should stop when Delta arrived, because they both knew that if she carried on, one day she’d get onto a plane and never come back. Whereas Mick never had to come back because he’d never left in the first place.
‘Stephanie wants pancakes for breakfast,’ she said, as the phone started ringing again.
‘Hello?’ Mick sank onto the corner of the desk, his hand resting in his groin while staring at Dominique. ‘Hello? Monica? No – I just got back from Florida. Didn’t hear about any tornadoes – what? She’s just here,’ he said, passing the receiver over.
‘Stephanie wants pancakes,’ Dominique whispered, in a sudden panic.
‘You said.’
‘Don’t make Scotch ones, I want normal ones – lemon – sugar.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll sort it out.’ Mick blew her a kiss then left the room.
Sitting down at the desk, Dominique watched the door shut behind him. She was alone in the study with her mother.
‘Dominique?’ The voice was impatient, almost angry.
The first of her mother’s boyfriends she remembered was Clive, a child-development researcher, who specialised in Early Years. His arrival in their lives coincided with her own early attempts at speech, and on his advice the ‘mumumuh’ she was beginning to stutter was encouraged to become ‘Monica’ rather than ‘mummy’ because Clive believed that the great universals ‘mother’ and ‘father’ should be unleashed from their biological fetters and given spiritual status instead. They even managed to get the Danish au pair to go along with this. Clive stayed in their lives for only nine joss-stick-filled months, but two of his legacies remained (because they suited Monica): a belief that yoga was necessary to civilisation, and that Dominique should never have recourse to use the word ‘mother’ or any of its diminutives.
When she’d had Delta, she’d asked Monica if her daughter could call her ‘grandma’, but Monica said there was no way she could do ‘grandmother’ when she hadn’t even done ‘mother’.
‘Dominique?’
‘Sorry, sorry – we just got back from the airport. Where are you, anyway? Minnesota?’
‘Minnesota? Who told you I was in Minnesota?’
‘Mick did, I think. Anyway – I thought you were in Minnesota.’
‘I was in Montréal. Montréal’s got nothing to do with Minnesota. Are you sure he said Minnesota?’
Dominique wasn’t sure any more.
‘You probably heard him wrong.’
‘Probably. I don’t remember.’
‘That’s your problem, Dominique, there’s very little you do remember.’
‘I remember things,’ Dominique said slowly.
‘What would I be doing in Minnesota anyway?’ Monica cut in.
‘I don’t know, but weren’t you meant to be spending Christmas there?’
‘Where?’
‘Minnesota.’
‘I wasn’t in Minnesota,’ Monica exploded, ‘I was in Montréal. Montréal, Canada.’
‘Sorry,’ Dominique said. Then again, ‘Sorry.’
‘And no, I wasn’t meant to be spending Christmas in Montréal – I was running tests on healthy animals with the help of some people there so that we can get this new red food dye approved.’
‘So …’ Dominique said, unwilling to follow any of this. ‘Where are you now?’
‘Gatwick.’
‘Gatwick?’ Dominique sat up and looked out the study window at the side passage where there was mint growing between the paving slabs and the fence. ‘We were just at Gatwick.’
‘I’ve got some other people to see at Ciba Pharmaceuticals about the new dye, which is why I flew back.’
‘Ciba?