Page 53 of Has Anyone Seen My Sex Life?
‘Stu, do Eve’s teeth…I just need to chat to Danny…’
I drag him into our bedroom and close the door softly before slapping him slightly across the arm.
‘Where the hell have you been? I called like a million times!’
He reaches into his pocket. ‘Oh yeah, you did. Sorry, it’s been on silent as I had meetings. What’s up?’ That look, that nonchalance, makes me want to murder him with the comb in my hand. He looks at the package on the bed. ‘Did my stuff arrive? Is it because of that?’
I hit him again. I can hardly catch my breath for wanting to tell him. ‘Tim, in the kitchen. Did you say hello?’
‘Well, yeah. I wasn’t going to ignore him.’
‘He knows.’
‘He opened the package?’
‘What’s in the bloody package?’
Danny strolls casually over to the bed and uses his car key to slice open the tape on the box. I don’t want to know but I must suffer this anguish as part of this ruse. He pulls out a harness. A climbing harness. Wait, no…it has a penis attached. It’s a strap-on. He bought a strap-on from the internet and it’s on my bed. The bedroom door opens. Danny drops the strap-on to the floor. Stu holds a wet baby under one arm wrapped in a towel, flailing her limbs about as she can’t see anything.
‘What do I dress this one in? Does she wear a nappy to sleep?’
We both stare at him, in wonderment at the question but also fretting whether he saw anything. He looks at both of us curiously. Eve appears at the door dressed as Wonder Woman. I should have brought my wine upstairs.
‘Nappy, vest and sleepsuit in the second drawer down. Eve, get in your bedroom.’ I point at Danny. ‘You need to give Daddy and me two minutes together.’
The bedroom door closes. Danny turns to me with a look. I am close to wrestling him to the bed with anger.
‘Captain Mintcake.’
‘Yes?’
‘Tim knows.’
The look drops from his face. ‘Well, what’d you tell him for?’
‘I didn’t. He doesn’t know it’s you…but we got the lead on a story today about some wannabe erotic arty person living in the Lakes and our job is to reveal his identity.’
‘Oh. So why’s Tim here? Surely that’s not a grand idea.’
‘Never mind that, you didn’t tell me people offered you money from this. A million quid. What the hell?’
Danny shrugs like it was none of my business. For all the times we’ve sat at our dining room table chatting about bills and how we’d finance the mortgage, I can’t understand how he’d not lap up the opportunity to have the financial freedom that amount of money could bring. I am angered by his casual rejection of something that might be so important to us as a unit.
‘Because I don’t want people to know,’ he replies. ‘I’m not doing this to be famous. This is my thing. You want me to do this full time? For my kids to say that their dad draws minge for a living?’
‘Then why do it?’
He doesn’t quite understand which way I’m riding in with all of this. He assumes I’m OK with a strap-on lying on my bedroom floor? I still have all the questions. I’m shocked that he thinks I wouldn’t have residual feelings about it all. There is a knock on the door and it opens slightly. Stu stands there with a shirt on this time and a baby with a sleepsuit wrapped around her.
‘I’m sorry. I have two degrees and a masters but even I can’t figure this out.’ He stands there and senses the tension between us. Danny gestures him to enter the room. I’m not sure what Stu used to wash Polly’s hair but she smells a lot like Lynx Africa.
‘Meg’s work fella downstairs knows about the Mintcake situation.’
‘Why’d you tell him?’
Why has this been the assumption, twice already?
‘I didn’t…It’s out there. There’s word at the paper about some mysterious sex artist and we’ve been asked to try and find out who he is.’
