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

‘Why do you think the place always smells of Mr Sheen?’

‘That’s it! That's the smell. I’ve been trying weeks to work that out.’

‘Mm. That’s what it is. Mr Sheen.’

‘Funny, isn’t it? Once you’ve found out what a smell is that’s really bugged you, then you smell it everywhere after that. I think smell is a really evocative sense, don’t you?’

My God, it’s true, thought Trish. I smell furniture polish wherever I go.

She had a small daughter, just about to go to school, reading aloud already, mind. Her knick-knacks, breakables and ornaments had been stowed away for a few years now. Used to her home environment being safely clutterless, unfussy, she compensated by polishing surfaces till she could see her own face, smoothing the rounded corners as if everything were chrome.

I’m a furniture-polish fetishist, she thought miserably. And only a couple of days ago she’d been worried about not doing her share in the house. Dave, her bloke, spent more time at home and most chores fell to him. That’s all I do, really: run home from the gym at the end of the day and whizz a duster over everything in sight. That’s my contribution.

And she thought about making love with Dave. Last night’s accusation that she somehow inspected him during the process still nagged at her. It was true that Dave had let himself go, though. He had slackened. But do I really seem as if I’m checking him over, even then? My God, he’s alert and wary of my professional eye. Am I really that bad? Now she was imputing a cynicism to his every gesture made recently in her direction. When she licked him all over, from head to foot. Christ, now it seemed even to her that she’d been dusting him. Giving him the once over with Mr Sheen. Licking him back into shape. Poor Dave!

Native Americans they call them now, but we’d know them more properly as Red Indians. Teepees, arrows, peace pipes, all that. Well, apparently they’re topping themselves all over the place. The men, anyway, the young men, since they’re not in tribes or in the wilds any more, they feel they have no fixed role. They’ve nothing to do. They don’t feel like men.

Dave was home watching morning TV. He liked to watch the debates and that, keep his mind occupied, abreast of the issues. Morning TV coincided almost exactly with playgroup over at the council community shack.

And that bloke with Nirvana; shot himself. An icon for a generation, they reckoned, though Dave had never heard of him till he was in the paper. Said he was one of the Blank Generation, whom Dave hadn’t heard of either, but it turned out he was part of it too because he was under thirty. On the telly they said; roleless, overqualified, depressed. Mind, Dave he had nowt for qualifications and he had no job either.

He was a wonderful father.

When Trish came in bursting with energy and gleaming with aromatic oils each evening, she kissed his forehead. ‘You’re a wonderful father!’ The news would be on. Dave could never quite follow what went on in Bosnia. It was as if even wars conspired to block him out. He’d followed the Gulf War avidly and had even felt a real part of it. Doors were closing all about him these days.

Adverts. After the break, a phone-in on modern-day masculinity. Dave didn’t like phone-ins; if it became heated they cut the caller off. Time to pick the bairn up.

‘Pully push-downs?’

They were standing in front of one of the machines and Trish was showing a prospective member round each thing. At moments like these she was proud of all they had accomplished here. All these machines painted gleaming white, glinting chrome as they worked, the sweet tang of oil, of Mr Sheen. This whole place had been storage space for Fine Fare and Andrew had snapped it up. Useless, it had seemed; shelled out and grim. Almost like magic, they had given it form and function.

The prospective member shrugged. ‘That’s what the bloke at my old gym called them.’

‘We have different names for different things at different gyms.’

‘Does that cause problems?’

‘No, because bodies stay the same. Now, have you been bringing the bar down to your chest or to the back of your neck so that you can hear the bones cracking?’

He gulped. ‘My neck.’

‘That’s totally wrong. God, there are some real cowboys about! What you should be doing—otherwise you’ll do your back in good—is…’

She was in the saddle, demonstrating and talking at the same time when Andrew went sailing past in his silver shell suit.

My Cyberman! She smiled, almost letting the bar go.

‘Morning, love,’ he called out.

‘How’s Sedgefield?’

Andrew was disappearing into his office with its mirrored windows and the prospective member was caught in his and Trish’s crossfire.

‘Just wonderful. On its feet and running itself. That’s Phase Two under way!’

Trish said, slightly out of breath, ‘He’s just opened our second branch in Sedgefield this morning.’

‘Really?’

‘So if you drive—do you?—you can go there, too. We alternate days for saunas, so you could have one every day, but I don’t think that would do you much good. Yes, Andrew’s very enterprising.’

‘I had no idea it was such big business, this game.’

‘Oh, yes.’ She nodded, working on the bar again. ‘It is.’ The prospective member was watching a woman exercising her legs across the way, sitting down and slamming her knees together, stretching them apart again, her expression rapt, then startled.

‘That’s an abductor for your inner thighs,’ explained Trish. ‘Not very elegant, is it?’

Every time the woman opened her legs he could see what her T-shirt said. ‘Thrill Me.’

‘Keep going, Joanne!’ Trish yelled. ‘Think about being in the sun in a fortnight and getting that bum off!’

A surprise is always a good thing. It always does the giver good too, and so Dave decided to repaint their Laura’s room. Pink. There was some left over from doing the downstairs hall. It was under the sink. He made the decision