said, grimacing inwardly. Yes, he was not blind to the irony of her question, he thought, as the woman shovelled up the crispy remnants of batter. That was all that was left of his life now. Scraps.
‘More?’ she asked, the scoop still poised, prepared to be generous. The kindness of strangers. He should learn her name, Vince thought. He saw more of her than he did anyone else.
‘No, thanks. That’ll do.’
‘Thisldo’ they had called their house, a jokey idea that seemed stupid now, but they had been a jokey kind of family once. A unit that functioned at the top of its game – barbecues in the back garden, friends round for drinks, trips to Alton Towers, foreign holidays at four-star resorts, a cruise or two. Living the dream, compared to a lot of people. The dream of a middle-aged, middle-of-the-road, middle-class man.
They had loaded up the boot every weekend at Tesco’s and never stinted on Ashley’s dance classes, horse riding, birthday parties, tennis lessons. (School skiing trips. You needed a second mortgage for them!) And all the time he spent ferrying her to ‘sleepovers’ and ‘playdates’. She didn’t come cheap. (Not that he was resentful. He loved her!)
And driving lessons – hours, days, even, of his life that he would never get back, teaching both his wife and daughter to drive. Sitting in the passenger seat of his own car with one of them in the driving seat, neither of whom could tell left from right or even backwards from forwards. And then suddenly Ashley was in the back of a tuk-tuk and Wendy had a Honda with a UKIP sticker on the back that she zipped around in, looking for the new Mr Right now that Vince was suddenly Mr Wrong. Craig, the lifeboatman, had been jettisoned apparently in favour of the smorgasbord of Tinder. According to his wife, Vince could have had a whole Mr Men series of his own – Mr Boring, Mr Overweight, Mr Exhausted. And to add insult to injury, Wendy had gone back to her maiden name, as if he was to be erased entirely from existence.
‘Thisldo,’ he snorted to himself. Now it didn’t do at all and even Sparky treated him like a stranger. Sparky was an indeterminate kind of lurcher that had chosen Wendy as its alpha male even though Vince was inordinately fond of it and was the one who had usually taken it for walks or cleaned up its crap or fed it its expensive food – which in retrospect seemed of a higher quality than the tins of supermarket-own-brand stew he had been reduced to buying nowadays for himself when he wasn’t dining on fish and chips. He should probably just buy dog food for himself instead of the stew, it couldn’t be any worse. He missed the dog more than he missed Wendy. In fact, he was surprised to find that he hardly missed Wendy at all, just the home comforts she had taken away from him. A man bereft of his home comforts was just a sad and lonely bastard.
Vince had still been in the Signals when he met Wendy, at an Army mate’s wedding down South. He’d had a Balkans suntan and newly promoted sergeant’s stripes and she had giggled and said, ‘Oh, I do like a man in uniform,’ and two years later they were at their own wedding and he was on civvy street, working for a telecoms firm, first as an engineer, running the IT, before moving into the suit-and-tie end of the business, in management, ten years ago. He thought of Craig, the lifeboatman, and wondered now if it had been the uniform all along that she had liked about Vince and not the man inside it.
‘My mother warned me not to marry you,’ she had laughed as, exhausted and drunk, they had stripped themselves of their wedding finery in the bedroom of the hotel where they had their reception – a lacklustre venue on the outskirts of Wendy’s home town of Croyden. As a seductive prelude to their first night as a married couple the words didn’t augur well. Her mother – a mean-spirited, lazy widow – had indulged in a disproportionate amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth over Wendy’s choice of husband. Sitting in the front pew in an appalling hat, she may as well have been at a funeral from her aspect of grief. In subsequent years she had strived hard for the award for ‘Most Critical