Kenny is still a little stung that his daughter had better things to do than pop in to see him at the weekend. But at least he won’t have her going on at him. About taking his pills, that is, and eating fresh food. Fruit, she keeps bringing him. What does Kenny Munro want withfruit?Not to mention her obsession with sell-by dates. What was she thinking, throwing out those pies? He’s still reeling with the shock and wrongdoing of perfectly good food going to waste. ‘Young people,’ he mutters out loud. Not like his generation, born in wartime, with rationing, his mother baking cakes with dried egg.
‘Granddad’salwaystalking about the war!’ He remembers Ana giggling about this with her mum some years ago.
‘Well, it was a pretty big deal, love,’ Carly remarked.
‘But so long ago,’ she added, always the cheeky one. ‘Things have moved on!’
Unable to settle on the war documentary he’s currentlywatching, Kenny flicks over to watchCash or Crashon catch-up. It’s his favourite quiz show. However he’s feeling, it always lifts his mood.
‘How many legs does a tripod have?’ the quizmaster asks.
The middle-aged man looks nervous in his tight grey shirt. ‘Seven?’
Kenny guffaws in derision. He loves it when contestants show themselves to be idiots. Too busy poking at their phones, that’s the problem. Thus cheered by the lunacy of today’s world, he realises it’s nearly nine o’clock and he hasn’t had any dinner.
Stomach growling now, he wanders through to the kitchen. He doesn’t head for his usual cupboard where he stores his tins – but the other place. The secret place where he’d stashed some of the overflow. These other tins, he’d tucked away in a different cupboard, behind the half-used cans of wood varnish and paint stripper and a dented flask that probably still has the residue of decades-old tea in it.
It’s not tea he wants now as he pulls out various items to reveal the treasures hidden within. It’s the tinned fish he bought when it was on offer at some weird little grocers, close to the last place he lived. The shop was closing down and, unable to resist a bargain, Kenny had bought the dozen tins for mere pennies. Maggie had teased him for packing them up when they were moving to this place. ‘We’re not taking those with us, are we?’
‘Yes, we’re taking them,’ he retorted, and she’d let it go. She was an easy-going sort, kind and attentive and treating Kenny like a lord. Cooking, cleaning, shopping, arranging their holidays and dragging home the Christmas tree fromthe bloke who sold them out of his garage; all of that was Maggie’s area.
Until that Christmas, over three years ago now, when she’d gone out for the tree as usual. But instead of buzzing the intercom so he could go down to help her to carry it up, she’d burst into the flat like a hurricane, having dragged it up the fifty-six stairs all by herself.
‘Here’s your tree!’ she’d announced, flinging down the five-footer in the hallway and promptly bursting into furious tears.
Why hadn’t she asked for help? And it wasn’thistree; it was Maggie who insisted they had one. The only reason it had to be carried home on foot was because Kenny wasn’t prepared to have his car littered with needles. Surely that was reasonable?
That afternoon, Maggie packed her bags and called her sister, who drove over to whisk her away. And Kenny has never seen or even heard from her since that day. It was pretty shocking, to discover that the woman he’d assumed was perfectly fine, boiling his eggs for the requisite six minutes and pairing up his socks for all those years, wasn’t fine at all.
Why hadn’t she just said?
Women! They are a complete mystery to Kenny Munro.
Anyway, he’s not bothered about Maggie anymore because it’s easier really, living alone at eighty-four years old. He can please himself – at least when Carly’s not here, forcing laxative powders on him and telling him off about his tinned food. And this weekend, knowing she’s far away with someone or other, he can do – and crucially, eat – whatever he likes.
This stuff’s fine, Kenny tells himself as he extracts a can of pilchards in tomato sauce from the very back of the shelf. It’s rusting and bulging a bit, but it’s what’sinsidethat counts. That’s the canning process for you, he thinks, still smirking at that idiot man who didn’t know what ‘tripod’ meant. Tinned food lasts forever.
He opens the cylindrical can with some difficulty, as his ancient tin opener – also speckled with rust – has almost seized up. But finally, with no small degree of grunting and determination, he manages to tear off the lid.
This is the life, Kenny reflects, dropping two slices of stale white bread into the toaster. As it toasts, he forks the pilchards in their blood-red sauce into a small saucepan. They smell pretty strong but then fish does smell; that’s the point of it. If it didn’t you’d think something was wrong. Kenny feels satisfied now that he’s using up his stores and that Carly isn’t here to interfere. Because he isn’t one to waste things. Food, for one thing. And time, for another. So while he waits for his toast to toast and his pilchards to heat up, he fills a large tumbler with scotch and knocks it back in two gulps.
Multi-tasking, he reflects with a smile. At the shipyard he was always excellent at that, juggling numerous projects at a time.
Things are working out perfectly tonight. All alone in his little flat, as rain batters the windows, he carries his pilchards on toast and a refill of scotch to the small table by the window. He tucks in with gusto, his pleasure enhanced by the whisky and how he imagines Carly’s reaction to be, if she could see him now.
‘Dad, you can’t eat that! You’ll kill yourself!’
‘Young people today.’ He chuckles, forgetting for a moment that his daughter is in fact fifty this year and has raised three children to adulthood herself.
‘Call me if you need anything,’ she’d said before she swanned off on this mysterious weekend. As if he would!
Kenny shovels in the warm pilchards and toast and takes a big swig of scotch. What would he possibly need her for? As the alcohol floods his veins, he congratulates himself on the fact he doesn’t need anyone for anything. Not Carly or Maggie oranyone.Then, leaving his fishy plate on the table, he settles on the sofa for another episode ofCash or Crash, laughing heartily at some brainless woman who thinks the capital city of Mexico is bloody Calcutta!
Chapter Twenty-one
Carly
‘No I don’t,’ Dinah exclaims across the table. As if I’d asked,Do you suffer from incontinence, Dinah?I’d only wondered if she had any children, and it’s not the first thing I asked tonight. I mean, I didn’t dive right in, presumptuously, as Suki dished up perfectly cooked spaghetti with garlicky prawns, plus a watercress salad and delicious sourdough and posh deli butter and the cheeses I brought, all accompanied by lashings of chilled white wine. The children issue surfaced only after a somewhat stilted exchange of all of our background information, during which I felt as if I’d been grilling both Dinah and Oliver, although it wasn’t intended that way. But there’s something about awkward pauses with strangers that triggers a need in me to fill them.
