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

waiting outside playschool. He could have it finished by tonight. All finished, clean and ready for Laura’s bedtime.

‘Hiya again.’

One of the mums. She was fifty if she was a day, with hair bleached so hard, so mercilessly it looked made of seaside rock. He might stretch out a hand and just break a piece off. Her face was papery from a good few decades of smoking. When she smiled, that paperiness made her eyes look cruel. Trish had cured Dave. She tore up two hundred duty-frees once, after returning from Spain. She kept him locked indoors fagless one whole bank-holiday weekend.

The bleached mum grinned at him. ‘Don’t you wish they kept them all afternoon, too?’

He never liked to get into conversations here. It made him look too involved. He was here doing a favour, picking up the bairn. It wasn’t a routine, he was just here every dinnertime. He wasn’t part of the mums’ set. Their fleet of candy-striped, dirt-mottled pushchairs, their squawling brats, their hissing at each other, their sucking on fags in all weathers. Dave didn’t want to be drawn into their orbit and yet he invariably was.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Especially when you’ve got things to do.’

‘Have you got things to do this afternoon?’ Her voice had dropped a note, she looked side to side.

God, he thought, I know what’s coming. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’m doing up our Laura’s room. Pink.’ Sugar-and-spice pink. But the bleached mum’s surreptitious glance was switching about again, as if she was gearing up to something outrageous. He knew what. That glance took in a certain gaggle of mums all too familiar to Dave, a set studiously ignoring him today. A set with whom he’d had doings in the past. They ignored him, but they were talking about him, he knew. Hiss hiss hiss. He sighed.

‘I’ve been saving up the child allowance,’ the bleached mum said.

They’re late letting the kids out, he thought. It’s gone right chilly. Shit, she looks her age! Guess what’s coming next!

‘That’s nice,’ he said. ‘What are you planning to do with it? Go somewhere nice?’

‘I hope so.’ She was looking sly again, carrying on really shifty. Probably didn’t know what to say or do next. Well, he wasn’t about to help her out. He had stuff to do anyway. A room to strip and paint, a thousand stuffed toys to relocate and protect under sheets from spattered pink drops. He had plenty on today, thank you. Dave was a busy boy. First he had to find somewhere for Laura to spend her afternoon…

The bleached mum had gathered up her nerve. ‘Them lasses.’ She nodded at the group standing to one side, now giggling among themselves, clutching at each other. ‘Them lasses were on about summat yesterday… summat you do… that you’ve done for each of them… a service you offer…’

Dave tensed. Fuck! Word’s getting about. A one-off first and then it snowballed. He’d never meant to let the numbers mount. This one was the oldest yet. ‘Yeah?’

‘Twenty quid?’

Five more than he’d got off the last one. He frowned.

‘That’s for an hour, so long as it’s now and that you baby-sit our Laura till five as well, no charge.’

These negotiations over, the skills they could offer hung for a moment in the damp air. Right now! she thought. She hadn’t been expecting right now, yet it made her feel sexy, really.

‘All right,’ she said.

Pull the curtains on the daylight, he thought. Do it quickly, as you’d rip off a plaster. Get it over with, then get onto the chores. You want to paint, paint, paint, paint, paint till teatime at least.

The shack’s doors flew open and there was an eruption of energy, of small bodies pulling on anoraks, waving arms and crumpled, still-wet finger paintings. The kids tumbled out, sure of being gathered up, knowing whereabouts those who waited stood. Dinnertime. Dave hoped the bleached mum had something decent in to eat.

A big expense, of course, had been putting twelve TVs in the gym. Same thing in Sedgefield. Andrew never skimped. MTV was on continuously. Music all day, pounding in every room; it helped to get people addicted to the adrenaline rush. Andrew explained, ‘We grease their chemical reactions with cheap music. It’s all very scientific, it’s all very primal and sexual, actually,’ and he raised an eyebrow.

At his urging Trish had taken an access course in science. He had let her go part time to do it. It was all about nutrition and, as he saw it, a vital part of her job. She thought he was very kind.

‘Sound’s off in the main reception area.’ Helen looked red in the face and cross. She’d been stretched up on her swollen, exercised calves to reach the suspended screens.

‘What?’ asked Trish and went to look.

Andrew had asked her if she wanted to go to university to do a science degree. Her! The best course was in Leeds, he reckoned. But it was part time. A hell of a run out. She’d have to think about it. What would it mean, what impact would it have on her job, on her family life? And was she brainy enough?

‘There’s no volume knobs.’ Helen jabbed at one of the TVs. Trish had to agree. The volume must be controlled from some central point. Funny they’d never noticed before. The things just came on, busy and loud, each morning, went off again at closing. Neither she nor Helen was gifted on the technical side. It was people and bodies that they worked with. On the four TVs hung from the ceiling in the reception area Take That were dancing, spinning and flexing their torsos to silence. They didn’t half look queer, Trish thought, dancing with no music on.

‘I’ll go and ask Andrew.’

These were Andrew’s quiet hours in his mirror-windowed office. Helen tried to point out she’d already had a word, but Trish had vanished in his direction.

She grunted ‘Harder!’ as if by rote, thinking it the thing to say in the circumstances. Still, Dave