Terry Kingston emptied the kibble into Humphrey’s bowl, placed it carefully on the floor on top of yesterday’s newspaper (the Independent, 5th July 2011), partially obscuring both poor Milly Dowler’s and Rebekah Brooks’ faces, and told him to sit. The dog obliged, eager, adoring, awaiting further instructions.
‘Down,’ said Terry, and Humphrey went to the lino, head between his feet, eyes looking up into Terry’s.
‘Go on, then,’ Terry sing-songed at last, and Humphrey lurched to his arthritic feet and padded over to his dinner. His name tag tinkled against the metal of the bowl as he ate, and Terry found the noise strangely soothing.
‘Dinner’s nearly ready,’ said Maria, from behind him.
‘OK, thanks,’ he replied. He wondered briefly how his wife still had such a strong accent, she’d been in East London longer than she’d ever lived in Italy. He sat down at the oval dining table, which she’d covered with a transparent plastic cloth, so the wood could only peer through pitifully, as if desperate for air. Two faded stripy placemats sat on top of the plastic, the knives and forks laid out haphazardly either side of them.
‘This looks nice,’ he said disingenuously, as she put the bowl of gnocchi drowning in an unidentifiable sauce in front of him. He paused. ‘By the way, I won’t need dinner tomorrow night, thanks. I’ll be out.’
‘Oh, where?’
‘A private job,’ he said.
Maria didn’t ask more, simply nodded her dark head and started to eat.
Terry couldn’t think of anything else to say to his wife. He was annoyed with his client, dragging him into such a sordid business, and he didn’t want to tell Maria, implicate her in any way.
‘I think I’ll clean out Frank and Dean after dinner,’ he said eventually, as a way of starting conversation.
‘Really, Terry, do you have to talk about such things when we are eating?’
‘Oh – sorry, love,’ he said.
Terry Kingston adored his pets, almost certainly more than his wife these days, which was a shame for both of them. His love for his animals extended from Humphrey the spaniel, through Snoopy the cat (unremarkable in all but name), onto the pet rats Maria had been horrified by when he’d brought them home a couple of months earlier. Maria hated animals, thought they were dirty and pointless, and she insisted on Humphrey’s bowl being placed on newspaper that could be thrown away afterwards, he was such a messy eater it was dees-gusting, she said. But she loathed the rats especially – the sight of their pink eyes and whip tails made her stomach turn like a cranked engine, and she banished them to the spare room, the one where the babies had been meant to go, the ones that had never come, even when they’d been trying. Terry debated now if he should get rid of them, for her sake.
Terry finished his dinner and sat watching his wife. She looked like a little bird, small and delicate, although not pretty exactly, and he wondered again how they’d ended up together. He knew he had a pleasant enough face, but his eyes often looked like they were going to cry, like they might soon be brimming with tears, he suffered terribly from hay fever. Otherwise he was nondescript: average build, average height, mousy wavyish hair, and he prided himself on being the type of person who could meld into the background and just observe, and he found he enjoyed this, it was less stressful than trying to think of things to say.
Terry sometimes wondered whether Maria was as dissatisfied as he was these days, but she always seemed happy enough, and so he never dared broach it, risk having to talk about his feelings. What he did know annoyed her though was his increasing interest in miniature wargaming, the hours and hours he spent painting the figures, and he dreaded breaking it to her that he wanted to go to another convention in Nottingham next weekend. But, he reasoned, she seemed to be pretty busy herself with the choir these days, so hopefully she’d be all right about it. He just needed to pick his moment to ask her.