thank you.’ He checks his watch again. ‘Er, I really should get back to work now …’
‘Oh, of course. Um … can I just ask why you’re re-homing him?’
He looks at her, and she sees tiredness clouding those soft grey eyes. ‘Circumstances have changed,’ he says with a shrug.
‘Right. Well, you don’t have to worry about him. My children have been asking for a dog for years, driving me mad, coming up with names …’ She stops abruptly as he’s clearly not interested. ‘We’ll be off then,’ she adds.
James nods and says goodbye without addressing Buddy at all, then steps back into the house.
Kerry takes a moment to gather her thoughts in the small front garden. It was clearly once well-tended, its rectangular borders edged with scalloped tiles, but has now grown indistinct beneath a light covering of weeds. The paint on the front door is peeling, a piece of guttering is dangling down, and tiny pink flowers are sprouting in the cracks between the paving slabs. Kerry waits while Buddy sniffs a dandelion, half-expecting James to burst back out of his house and crumple to the ground for a last, heartfelt hug with his beloved dog. But there is nothing.
‘Heartless shit,’ she mutters under her breath, turning away and making her way down the quiet residential street with Buddy trotting meekly at her side.
As they walk together, Kerry notices a small shift, assuming at first that it’s the freshness of the breezy October day. She feels lighter somehow, and is conscious of a kernel of excitement fizzling inside her as she realises what’s happening.
She isn’t walking alone.
Of course, she and the children spend huge chunks of their weekends on Shorling beach these days, but Freddie and Mia tend to run off and dabble about in the rock pools or shallow waves. They don’t walk together, like this. And during these past couple of weeks, it has felt as if they don’t walk to and from school together either. As soon as she spots Audrey-Jane, Mia tears ahead to catch up, trying to ingratiate herself with excitable chatter which, to Kerry’s consternation, seems to be largely ignored. Meanwhile, Kerry feels obliged to engage in polite chit-chat with Lara and Emily, who seem inseparable and are clearly not keen to let her in. Even Freddie will do anything – lag behind, or tag along with any boy who’s roughly his age – to avoid walking at his mother’s side.
She keeps glancing down at Buddy as they walk, scarcely believing she’s now in sole charge of this living, breathing creature who will require regular feeding, play and exercise. He depends on me now. Both thrilling and terrifying, the thought lodges itself in Kerry’s mind. Still an hour till school pick-up, when she plans to bring Buddy with her to the school gates. She has it all figured out: how she’ll adopt a casual stance, so Freddie and Mia won’t suspect anything when they first spot her from a distance. They’ll wander across the playground towards her, not paying much attention. Then they’ll spot him and – the rest is a blur. It makes Kerry’s heart race just thinking about it.
Picturing James’s handsome but distinctly beleaguered face at the handover today, she glances down and says, ‘My circumstances have changed too, Buddy. I think we’re going to get along just fine.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Harvey Chuckles is standing on a small stage in a draughty community hall, knowing without a doubt that every child in this room would give anything to be somewhere else.
‘Wanna play outside,’ a boy complains, triggering a ripple of dissatisfaction.
‘Make him go away,’ a little girl shrieks from the front row of chairs.
The woman sitting behind her taps her on the shoulder. ‘Hush, sweetheart. Don’t be rude …’
‘But I don’t like him. Tell him to go, Mummy!’
‘Just be quiet and watch, Cordelia,’ the woman snaps. Harvey blunders on through his act, producing his dove pan, an ingenious device the size of a saucepan which enables him to make small objects disappear. By this point, he is wishing he could crawl into the pan and magic himself to a place where strong alcohol is administered. He has juggled beanbags, ridden his unicycle and played jaunty tunes on his one-man-band. Yet his doleful audience look as if they’ve been forced to watch one of those late night Open University programmes on BBC2. Why did they hire him, he wonders? Is it that this particular bunch of pre-schoolers would prefer a freestyle party with no entertainer, or that he is a particularly substandard clown?
Think, think. Balloon animals – that always delights them (well, it works with Sam, Harvey’s four-year-old nephew, though maybe he’s just been humouring him). With a rush of determination he kicks his dove pan aside.
‘Now,’ he announces, ‘I want you to come up with the most outrageous animal you can think of and I’ll make it for you …’ His yellow clown wig is making his head itch and the children are growing more restless by the minute. Whatever made him think this was a good idea? Before his recent incarnation as a children’s entertainer, Harvey had led a reasonably healthy, functioning life, grabbing whatever small acting job came his way and keeping mind and body in shape with regular runs along the long, flat sweep of Shorling beach. He’d never realised that small people, who are barely capable of going to the loo unaided, could be so bloody hostile. Performing in front of a roomful of young strangers is nothing like entertaining Sam, who laughs at anything he does.
‘Anyone think of an animal yet?’ he asks, sweating a little.
‘A dog!’ chirps one of the mothers.
‘A dog. Great! That’s an easy one. While I do this’ – he starts twisting the sausage balloons between clumsy fingers – ‘the rest of you can think of something more challenging for me …’
‘Mummy …’ whimpers a little curly-haired girl, dissolving into quiet sobs as Harvey finally manages to fashion his sausage balloon into a dog, yes, but a dog with an unsightly bulge between its back legs, like elephantitis of the testicles.
‘Bit of a malfunction there,’ he sniggers, aware that it’s wrong to laugh when a child is weeping just six feet in front of him. ‘Now, can anyone think of any other—’
‘Er, excuse me!’ trills the malnourished-looking woman who booked him for this birthday party. ‘Would you mind doing something musical again? I think …’ She winces apologetically, ‘the little ones might enjoy that more.’
‘Oh.’ He adjusts his slightly-slipped wig. ‘Yeah, that’s … that’s fine.’
‘It’s not that we don’t like your animals,’ she adds quickly.
‘No, no, music’s great, that’s an excellent idea …’ He drops his unused balloons by his feet and struggles back into his one-man-band contraption. It’s home-made, constructed during his student years, and seemed funny and quirky back then. Now, strapped to the fully formed body of a thirty-three-year-old man, it seems … ridiculous.
‘Play “Cuckoo Clock”!’ the curly-haired girl commands, having miraculously stopped crying. Relieved, he starts to play a vague approximation of the theme tune he hasn’t heard for decades. ‘That’s the old one,’ she complains.
‘Uh?’
‘They changed it,’ one of the mothers offers, ‘last week. It’s more, er … modern now.’
Harvey stops playing. ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t heard it.’
‘Haven’t you?’ the woman asks. ‘I’d have thought, with this being your job—’ She emits a small, withering laugh.
‘Nope, no idea.’ At this point in the game, there’s no point in pretending.
‘He doesn’t watch Cuckoo Clock,’ the curly-haired girl gasps.
No, he thinks, because I’m