Swallowing Grandma by Kate Long Page A

seem to be any damage. ‘He were in among t’ dirty sheets. He mustn’t have seen me. Poor thing.’ She put her hand under his chin and lifted his muzzle. ‘Oh, see his little face, his eyes are all glazed.’
    He didn’t look particularly bothered to me but I left her to her fussing. I straightened the pillows, finished tucking the sheets in both sides, and pulled the duvet and bedspread up on my own while Poll sat in the Lloyd Loom chair nursing the dog on her lap. They’d have made a good study for one of those collector’s plates, The Faithful Pal: see the fine detail of the matted sheepskin slipper, admire the workmanship needed to capture the tiny bobbles on the inside-out cardigan . After a while she raised her head and said, ‘He’s gettin’ owd.’
    ‘Right,’ I said. We were both thinking about Winston dying, and I didn’t want to. ‘I’ll make some dinner, shall I? Will that gala pie be all right still, or does it want binning?’
    She left Winston on the bed and came down after me. While I was cutting slices of pie with the huge sharp knife she came into the kitchen and slapped her hand down on the worktop next to me.
    ‘Here,’ she said ungraciously. ‘If it’s that big a deal. Of course, we may not be able to heat the house this winter.’
    Like bollocks we won’t, I thought, unrolling the five-pound notes. Thirty quid! ‘Thanks,’ I muttered. It was probably my child benefit anyway.
    ‘I say, I don’t know what you want it for. You’ve everything here. Young ’uns today, they expect everything on a plate. My best blouse when I was little was med out of a pair of bloomers my mother never wore. Pink silk. And very smart it was too. I never had a dress as a girl that didn’t have a flaw somewhere in t’material.’
    One quick thrust with the knife and we’d have had an instant end to all these stories of wartime hardship. I could wipe the blade on the Bailey’s tea towel and carry on cutting pie. No jury in the land would convict me.

    *

    By September, I felt like a whale.
    ‘Ger away. You’ve a long way to go yet,’ said Poll, Job’s Comforter in tracksuit bottoms. ‘It gets so’s you can barely move. And if you go overdue, like I did wi’ Roger, well. I can’t tell you. It’s terrible, that last six week.’
    Late that night Roger took me outside to get cool. We perched on the low front wall, me facing the house opposite and him side-on with his back against the gatepost. You could barely see the stars. I was looking for Orion.
    ‘Hey,’ I said, I thought he’d be pleased with this, ‘I’ve just noticed something. If I look straight at that tiny star to the left of Orion’s belt, I can’t see it. It disappears. But if I turn my head and squint at it out of the corner of my eye, it comes back again. It’s magic. Is it magic? A magic star?’
    He was using a pair of nail scissors to unpick a badge from the knee of his jeans. ‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘It’s to do with the receptors in your eyes.’ The badge was coming away, thread by thread. ‘The ones at the corner of your eye are better at distinguishing variations in light, the ones in the middle work best at picking up colour. So if you want to see something faint but monochrome, you look sideways at it.’
    ‘That’s fascinating,’ I said.
    ‘It’s only science,’ he said. The badge peeled off completely and he threw it over his shoulder into Poll’s rose bushes. ‘I’m going Tuesday. You do know, don’t you?’
    I nodded.
    ‘Are you coming with us?’
    For a second I thought he was asking me to go and live with him in Sheffield. Hope leapt up inside me like a spurt of blood.
    ‘Vince is driving over to help me unpack. You can come up in the Metro with me, and go back with him in the Manta.’ He said ‘the Metro’ like it was the most sacred phrase in the English language. Vince had taken him to see it on his birthday, at the start of August, put the deposit down, and they’d picked it up