Page 10 of Has Anyone Seen My Sex Life?
He puts a hand to the back of his head, half-laughing. I still can’t register the emotion – he doesn’t even seem embarrassed.
‘You could re-gift it,’ he says.
‘Ewww…’
‘It’s unused. Save it for school tombola…’
‘They won’t know what to do with it. I’d go round someone’s house and see it being used as a dog toy,’ I reply.
‘Here Fido, be a good dog and go to your bed with your giant cock toy.’
We both laugh. Tess flies in and you’ve never seen me throw something in the cutlery drawer with such speed. She senses a moment between us and looks down at the empty box.
‘Eve stole the biscuit jar you know? She ate three Hobnobs upstairs.’ She loiters in the kitchen with book bags and school shoes.
Danny looks me in the eye. ‘We should get changed up, don’t want these girls to be late. Dimples, go get them hair tie thingies. We done here?’ he asks me.
Tess is Dimples, simply as she has two of them carved into both cheeks – the first thing I saw when she was born. I watch them together as he smooths over the bumps in her hair.
‘Are you just doing a ponytail?’ she asks her father.
‘It’s ponytails or I do you a bowl cut with kitchen scissors, those are your options.’
Tess, as always, is tickled by his frankness and sits there open-mouthed. I study him intently. He doesn’t even flinch at what we’ve just discussed: keep calm, carry on, nothing to see here. That was the thing with Danny. Fights were always easily resolved, there was never any grey area, always black and white. I bought you a dildo because we’re going through a bit of a sexual dry patch. The idea was that it’d get your juices flowing. It hasn’t? We’ll send it back. Many more pressing issues to deal with today.
I, on the other hand, of course have a million and one questions. Like why blue? And somewhere, floating on top of the more vacuous concerns, is a little whisper. I look at his eyes darting about, wondering why he didn’t address his concerns about our sex life before he clicked to buy. Why can’t I read that unfamiliar, vacant emotion in his face? It whispers whether this was meant for someone else, for another reason. It tells me my husband just lied to me.
‘Yeah, we’re done.’
Two
We got Mr T when he was just a pup from a mill deep in remote Smardale, a small village to the east of the Lakes where the population of sheep outnumber the humans by about five hundred. Danny was adamant it was a rite of passage now we were living in the countryside. He had heard a friend of a friend knew a farmer whose border collie had got knocked up by the dog from the next farm over, and he now had puppies to give away. I had one condition: I got to name it.
The selection process took place in an old stone farmhouse, like one I’d seen in films about pigs that could talk and herd sheep. All I remembered was a caged-off area containing a mass of paws. It was completely unnerving that we were going to separate one of these babes from their mother so I left the decision-making to Danny, who finally opted for the chubbiest furball there. He had a scrunched-up little face and markings across his front, not unlike the shape of a medallion. The mohawk at the top of his head sealed the deal.
‘We shall call him Mr T!’ I exclaimed.
The farmer looked confused. ‘What’s that, love? Tea? Like Yorkshire Tea?
‘No, like the eighties TV star. You know: “I ain’t getting on no plane!”… “I pity the fool!”?’ I mimicked aloud in my best baritone. I spied Danny shaking his head at me, half-begging me to stop but secretly pissing himself.
‘What’s her mother called?’ I asked.
‘Gyp.’
‘As in pain?’
‘Say what?’
‘Like my ankle’s giving me gyp.’
‘Is it, love? Should have said. Did you fall?’
‘What?’
I turned to Danny, who was in hysterics at this point. We’d been in the North for four months by that time. I may as well have moved to France for what I understood of people’s take on the English language up here, but to Danny it was all a major amusement. I shook my head as he cradled his little bundle of fur.
I was not Northern, not yet, and in no way was I going to have a dog called Skip, Fly or Gyp. Welcome to the family, Mr T. This is the baby, Little Miss T. Three years later we got a cat that I was convinced had a moustache, so we called him Magnum, and we’ve had fish and other pets, gerbils called Cagney and Lacey and a giant rabbit called Hasselhoff.
