The key.
He’s back.
Unfurl your heart.
Bursting into the room like a striker who’s just clinched the World Cup (Mouse’s love diminishes, a touch). ‘You won’t believe it.’ Dropping to his knees, bursting with triumph.
‘Mum?’
‘Dad?’
‘Well … no … but you wait.’ He whips up his shirt and out tumble three bread rolls and a chicken leg and two cigarettes unlit which Soli promptly snatches.
‘Not for another five years, mate,’ and slips them into her pocket. ‘Besides, you need a lighter.’
But Tidge pulls out a matchbox with a gleeful voilà and rattles it high and dances around the room in a delirious jogging dance, pumping his arms like a sprinter warming up.
‘As silly as a wet hen,’ Mouse observes, leaning against a wall.
‘You next, dude, come on.’ Tidge points at him.
‘Excuse me. I’ll decide who’s next, thank you very much.’ Soli snatches the matchbox. ‘And I’ll be twenty minutes. To the dot.’ She glares at Tidge.
He dances his fingers up her tummy — ‘Go on then, go‘ — cackling like he’s drunk and flopping in a cartoon fall backwards onto the bed.
‘And in a decade,’ Mouse adds drily from his wall, ‘we’ll be wanting those cigarettes back.’
When a man speaks or acts with good intention then happiness follows him like his shadow that never leaves him.