Playing Out by Paul Magrs (free biff chip and kipper ebooks TXT) 📗

wife recovered from nervous exhaustion on his Bupa insurance. I met him when we first moved in and he brought Emma’s clothes, her cheese plants and a Hoover in his car. All the way from Buckinghamshire, so he must be fond of her, I thought, despite all her late-night rantings about her evil father. He took me gently aside in my nice bright kitchen and warned that, at the end of the academic year, he wanted his daughter sent back to him intact. I laughed in his face at the time.

Later, when we stopped eating meals together—after a particularly rushed concoction of Emma’s into which she had slipped an entire jar of garlic granules by mistake and still expected us to eat it—dinner became an even more elaborate charade of careful planning. When I let Emma do hers first, however, I would go to the cupboards to take out the dripping, filthy utensils and crockery and just about quell the nausea in time to hear the actress’s decorous retchings and splashings from the bathroom. Which put me right off cooking again.

Emma would appear jauntily pale in the kitchen, unashamedly wiping her mouth on her sleeve, belch bile fumes at me and ask, ‘Aren’t you eating tonight?’

I tried to get in with my cooking before she did. Which was easier those nights she had her friends round for tea. They liked to eat late and on the floor in the living room, where they played Wink-Murder and talked about their respective senses of isolation. I would come downstairs to find the curtains pulled down, chairs overturned, dirty plates strewn. Everyone looking guiltyish. In their hands Wink-Murder could turn rough. And once I found one of the Adonis queens from theatre studies whom Emma had befriended, standing in the centre of their seated circle in nothing but a towel. Emma was looking straight up at his polite bulge in front and enjoying the game, popping soft mints into her mouth.

I guess I was making a nest and lining it with the stuff I wanted around me. At first, even though it was late in the year, the light came slanting yellow and clean through the house all day. When I filled the place with flowers, tucking them into jars of coloured glass and two by two into wine bottles, they shone.

Maybe I should have let Emma have more of a say in the way it looked. But she paid very little attention. The housework she did do was bathroom cleaning, sporadically and with great aplomb. This never prevented me finding the occasional spattering of vomit down the toilet bowl, the slovenly beige bulge at the U-bend’s mouth..

Emma showed off the house and—to begin with—her housemate to her new, theatrical friends. They weren’t real theatrical friends. They were, for the most part, pinched-looking, oddly dressed, nice middle-class boys and girls who, in order to be given second-class degrees, were required by their third-rate department to perform in about four plays apiece and perhaps have a stab at directing one. Emma worked hard at befriending them so that they would give her parts. She wined and dined one called Simeon to get to be Sally Bowles in Cabaret.

These friends looked at me askance. Especially the hugely fat girl called Clara whom Emma took as her extra-special friend. Clara was prone to feeling isolated.

I remember one night with Emma sitting on the floor grasping Clara’s vast hand and squashing it, almost singing as she told her, ‘Oh, but Clara, I care, I care, I care about you so much.’

Clara’s long hair was pulled into two poodle bunches, dyed fuchsia, and they seemed to have winched and contorted her face into a spiteful grimace. That chemical green, furred coat she wore was slumped across her shoulders like a blanket on an accident victim. And Clara was staring at me almost accusingly; ‘But do you care? Do you?’

Those small, beady eyes squinted at me and I looked back.

At that time, what I relied upon each morning to rid me of my fags-and-booze-induced headaches was my bare feet hitting the cold kitchen lino. It usually did the trick, but some mornings they nagged on. The day that Emma recommenced early-morning opera practice in the cellar was one of these.

She’d only started again because our morning routines had been forcibly altered at my insistence. Until then she had brought me coffee and the post in bed. Sitting up and being pleased, I was often mildly shocked by her rather sinister innocence in unfolding my bedclothes and climbing in beside me for five minutes. I put a stop to that in the end and the opera began in earnest. As I told her, she’d thank me for it one day.

This morning, though, as I fussed over the coffee-maker and slopped water over the side as I filled it, she appeared out of the cellar, banging its door hard behind her, and confronted me with a determinedly autonomous breeziness.

‘I need to know about The Tempest for a seminar today,’ she said, clutching to her chest a scarlet Mozart score.

Watching my toast char gently, I told her all about Caliban, about monstrosity, about cursing in taught languages.

Two nights before I’d been in my room with someone and, in the middle of the night, we were overtaken by a giggling fit which, thinking about it afterwards, I realised Emma must have heard.

That evening she had held one of her dinner parties and when my new friend and I came home we found them eating Smarties from dessert bowls and stirring themselves to dull conversation.

Emma walked in on my friend and me kissing in the kitchen and looked startled by us, so we just went to bed early. I admit now that I was making myself look a fool with him anyway. My flesh creeps to think of how I clung that weekend. Literally, the pair of us standing on the bridge as we went home that night. When it seemed risky and fun