Ken was checking the weather from his bedroom window when he saw Crackle walking down the path towards the front door. Tamara was at the back of the house in the kitchen. Ken shouted, “Tamara, don’t answer the door.”
“Who is it?” she said.
“Him.”
“Oh.”
She didn’t know how to explain to Crackle why she’d chosen the baby instead of him, so she ran upstairs and shut herself in the back bedroom, the one she had slept in as a child. Some of her toys were still there, lined up on the shelf. She sat on her narrow bed, closed her eyes, and listened to the doorbell ringing and ringing. Brandy barked frantically.
When the banging on the front door started, she took Jennifer, the doll whose eyelashes she’d once trimmed with nail scissors, down from the shelf and rocked her in her arms. Now that Tamara was grown up Jennifer felt cold and stiff and unfamiliar. She put her back on the shelf, next to Barbie in the wedding dress and Paddington Bear.
He was kicking at the front door now and shouting for her. “Tamara, Tam, I know you’re there. I got to talk to you.”
She went out on the landing and saw Ken at the top of the stairs. He had a duster in his hand, and was rubbing it automatically along the banister rail.
“Shall I just go and talk to him?” she said.
“Stay where you are,” Ken ordered. “You’re finished with him for good. You promised.”
Tamara nodded, but she knew that she would never finish with Crackle. She was his woman for life, his handmaiden. It didn’t matter what bad things he did. He wasn’t like ordinary people, he had been chosen by Satan to do Satan’s work on earth. The day after their wedding she had asked him when Satan wanted them to begin this important work. For some reason he grew angry and said that there would be a sign one day.
She knew he was a crack head: that he would need to go to a crack house for a few days each week. But he’d got it under control, he said. Satan approved of crack: it was part of his plan to rule the world.
When the noise at the front door stopped, Tamara ran to the bedroom window and watched through a chink in the net curtain as Crackle stomped through the slush on the pavement. She longed to run down to him. He looked sad all on his own.
Ken saw her face and said, “You’ll get over him.” He didn’t know that Tamara belonged to Crackle. Handmaidens had to stay with their men.
“What’s going to happen then, Dad?” she said.
She wanted to know what was inside her dad’s head. She followed him down the stairs, pausing occasionally when he stopped to dust the wooden treads on either side of the stair carpet. “We’ll try and get Storme back. We’ll get a solicitor and do it properly. You’ll grow your hair and let the blonde come back and I’ll stop drinking and get a grip and go to work.” Tamara said automatically, “And will we be happy ever after?”
Ken pulled Tamara towards him and tried to hold her. It was years since she’d allowed him to show any affection to her. He felt her stiffen with embarrassment, and he quickly let go of her again and went into the kitchen to put the kettle on, though tea was the last thing he wanted. There was a bottle of Johnnie Walker in the living room, next to the tropical fish tank, but he was going to the hospital to see Storme, and he couldn’t turn up there drunk. Staff Nurse Fox had already had a go at him. He would just have to pray hard to Jesus and ask him to lessen the pain of being sober.
Tamara went into the living room, and switched the television on using the remote control. There was a satellite dish attached to the pebble-dashed front wall of Ken’s house. He was able to receive eighty-seven TV channels. When he came into the room with the tea Tamara was pressing the plus sign of the remote control and working her way through all of the eighty-seven channels. The constant flickering of the screen annoyed Ken, but he kept quiet.
“There’s nothing on,” she complained.
She eventually stopped at a shopping channel and watched an American woman in a leotard demonstrating a metal rocking device called ‘A Tummy Trimmer’ in front of a screaming studio audience. The woman had a figure so perfect that it looked moulded out of plastic. The camera closed in on the woman’s face. She was smiling through unnaturally white, gritted teeth and saying, “I’m so excited by this product.”
Tamara grew excited herself at the prospect of owning a Tummy Trimmer.
“I might get one of them,” she said to Ken.
“Why?” he said. “You’ve got nowt on you.”
“I ‘ave,” she said. “I’ve got a belly lately.”
Ken looked at her thin ankles, showing beneath her black jeans. They reminded him of the bleached bones they had in glass cases in museums.
“Don’t be so bleddy daft,” he said. “You’re nowt but skin and bone.”
“No, look, I have got a big belly.” She really wanted a Tummy Trimmer. She got to her feet and hauled up the folds of her baggy black jumper. The top button of her jeans was undone. The yellow zip was halfway down, and her belly was distended. Ken was surprised by the size of it. He said, “You look pregnant.”
“I told you I’d got a belly.” Tamara laughed. “Will you send for a Tummy Trimmer for me, Dad? I’ll have it for Christmas, shall I? Then you won’t have to go shopping.”
“But why is your stomach so big, Tam?” Ken couldn’t understand why he hadn’t noticed it before.
Tamara said, “I dunno, but I can’t be pregnant, I’m on the pill.”
“Then you ought to go to the doctor, that’s not normal. Are you still having your monthlies…?”
Ken was sufficiently worried to overcome his normal reticence about mentioning menstruation to his daughter. He had never acknowledged to Cath, his wife of twenty-one years, that she bled for a week every month.
Tamara tried to remember the last time she’d had a period: was it weeks, or was it months ago? She didn’t take her contraceptive pills in the normal way. Crackle had told her that if she took a pill every day instead of for twenty-one days, she wouldn’t have a period at all. Crackle hated his women to bleed; it was one of his things.
Tamara sometimes forgot her pill. She usually remembered to take two instead the next day to make up for it. She had only a sketchy idea of how anything worked, including her own body.
Ken went upstairs and had a wash and a shave, and changed into his second-best suit. When he looked into the living room, to tell Tamara that he was leaving to go to the hospital, she was still watching the American woman who was now claiming that the Tummy Trimmer had changed her life for the better. Crackle had mentioned her big belly yesterday; that must have been the reason that he hadn’t wanted sex or asked to see her dance naked for Satan, like he used to.