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However, the determining factor in all of this was usually more how tired he and Sally were. It was now after eight. The kids had been home since three thirty and done nothing except muck about, while Phil's feet had yet to touch the ground - and he guessed they probably wouldn't that evening.

  The astronomy book had been a favourite of his as a child, quite basic, but the diameter of the earth was well within its scope he imagined. However, Elspeth's eyes had glazed over long before Phil turned to the right page. And the problem with books of course was that you had to physically copy out the information: write down: "The earth's diameter is,… ." Whereas with the Internet you could just cut and paste the required sentence into a blank document, then print it off.

  "But what if the information is wrong, Elspeth? We must be careful of our sources on the Internet, and do some cross checking."

  "Your book might be wrong, too."

  "I suppose it might, but one takes it on trust that the information was checked before the book was published. On the Internet, anyone can publish anything, but it doesn't mean its true."

  Phil was getting very tired though and was tempted just to print the bloody thing off for her like she wanted him to. His guts were on fire and he suddenly remembered he'd not moved his bowels yet. The problem with that was Sally would be wanting a bath at eight thirty, the kids needing baths straight after, and they'd all pull a face if he sullied the air for them. He really wished there was another option but there wasn't, though it still made him feel mean and guilty, made him wonder if his bathroom odours were worse than anyone else's, and if he shouldn't perhaps be going to the doctor about that as well!

  "Hi Marty, how's it going."

  Marty was by now glued to his Gamestation, his attention gripped, mid race in the rancid, airless gloom of his bedroom. He responded with a grunt and Phil sensed at once he was intruding.

  "Any homework, mate?"

  He grimaced inwardly at his approach - could one ever really be mates with one's children? He wanted to think so, but sometimes he wondered - your mates went their own way, lived their own lives and you respected them for it. Your children were different though, needed discipline now and then. Marty shrugged, his eyes not moving from the screen.

  "Is that yes or no?"

  Marty sighed impatiently and snapped the game onto pause. "Not tonight. Mrs Walsh is away. Innit? We had a crappy stand in."

  "Language, Marty!"

  "What?"

  Crappy was no longer considered bad language apparently. "And what's this "innit"? Whatever does that mean?" Oh, shut up Phil, you sound just like your father!

  Marty sighed again, "Sorry," he said, but there was a sneer in it, and Phil felt his guts twist again. Should he stamp on that, or would that be too sensitive, too extreme? He let it go, but wondered if it was the right thing to do. It didn't seem so long ago he was holding Marty in his arms, an unbelievably tiny baby, all sticky and sleepy, his heart seared by a shockingly intense love. And now he sensed the bonds fraying, sensed that inwardly his son was laughing at him, that his son found him ridiculously old fashioned or un-cool, or whatever the vernacular was these days.

  "No homework then," said Phil, just to confirm it. Then he left Marty to his game and closed the bedroom door. As he turned away, he heard the squeal of brakes and the crunch of metal as Marty's virtual street racer was involved in a virtual pile up.

  "Oh,.. BOLLOCKS!"

  Phil bit his tongue, but he was too tired to remonstrate. Perhaps bollocks was no longer considered rude either in the modern world. Trevor, Phil's father in-law, used it all the time, and he was a retired Bank manager, whom Phil might have expected to know better.

  Feeling the wind leaking out of him now, he slipped into the bathroom, sealed himself in, locked the door and settled down to do what he had to do. There was a time, pre-children, pre-marriage when the bathroom had provided a guarantee of privacy and quiet, but nowadays there was nothing like sitting on the toilet for making one of the kids come banging on the door, desperate for a wee.

  Sure enough within moments, Marty was outside hopping from one foot to the next. "You'll have to wait," said Phil, his patience thinning. But even kids of Marty's age tended to hold on until they were seconds away from wetting themselves - too busy with other stuff to waste time emptying their bladders until they definitely had to - so he knew Marty wasn't faking. Marty continued to hop and, with a groan, Phil decided to leave things half finished, so to speak, or he'd have Marty mimicking his bathroom noises as well just to hurry him along. Marty rushed in as Phil came out and feigned choking on the air. Phil felt humiliated, humiliated by his son, and his stomach gave another twist in protest.

  The final soap of the evening was still running. No point in settling into the lounge, then. Sally would not tolerate interruptions during the soaps. It was still drizzling a little, and the light was fading, but he could feel himself growing hot, stifled, enclosed, and he had to cool down, so he put on an old jacket and hat, then headed out to the garden. It was too wet to mow of course, but he could perhaps move a hoe around the borders.

  The shed was stuffed with the kids bikes and a massive football-cum-pool table that he'd held out against for months, before finally capitulating under a merciless onslaught of nagging and whining. They'd played with it for a week or so, then Sally had got fed up with it in the house, so it had been slung into the cabin, as he'd known it would be. It made it a nightmare to get his mower out and he swore the next time he snagged himself on it, he'd saw the bloody legs off and take it to the tip. They'd not touched the damned thing for ages now - "because mummy won't let us have it in the house!" And Sally wouldn't let Phil dump it, because it had cost a lot of money, and the kids were too idle to fetch it from the shed each time and set the damned thing up. So basically, it was in the way, and he couldn't do a damned thing about it.

  Phil looked at the solid wall of detritus in the cabin, at the football-cum-pool table sitting there like some giant four legged creature, sneering at him, and he felt his guts twist some more. He was ludicrously sensitive about the cabin, and had once tried to keep it fastidiously tidy, his tools neatly stored, a bit of old carpet on the floor. And sometimes, of a summer evening, he'd even sat in a deck-chair among the dust and cobwebs, with a book, or just thinking. It had been his sanctuary and he'd resisted the kids bikes for ages, preferring to have them in the garage, until Sally's Mini Cooper got scratched, and then it was goodbye to Phil's tidy little sanctuary. No one understood that these things mattered to him. Indeed what mattered to Phil was of no consequence at all, and it had been like that for so long he'd even begun to believe it himself.

  When he was a kid, his father had kept a border collie that had liked to sit at the top of the stairs. It was easy to step around it or over it, but it seemed the dog was always in the way and wouldn't do a damned thing Phil told it to. Then his dad had taught him not to squeeze around the dog but make the thing get up and move, so it knew its place, or next thing, said his dad, it would be growling at you to get out of its way. Phil guessed that's what they were doing with the kids - that before she was much older Elspeth would be telling him off for not doing her homework on time, and telling Sal off for not washing her clothes properly.

  Having given up on the cabin, Phil now harboured the dream of a little Summer house - there was just room at the bottom of the garden. He could even sleep in there, he thought - during his less rational moments - I mean Sally would never countenance that, even though she'd no apparent use for him in bed any more. It puzzled him: he wasn't needed much for anything really, but if he wasn't around she pulled a face. He had to sleep with her, so long as he didn't wake her when he came, so long as he lay corpse-still, didn't snore, kept to his side of the bed, and of course, kept his hands to himself! It was more the appearance of the thing, he supposed. If he'd purposely avoided sleeping with her - even once in a blue moon, it would mean he didn't love her enough. The fact that he might actually not love Sally at all any more was something
he did not allow himself to explore.

  Sally didn't want a Summer House - they were expensive and she saw no point in them. Instead, she wanted to extend the bedroom out over the garage, so she could have an en-suite bathroom that Phil struggled to see the need for, since the bathroom was directly across the hall anyway from the bedroom. It might stop the kids interrupting his bowel movements he supposed, except Sally had always made it plain the en-suite would be her private domain. He'd be allowed to urinate in it, she'd said, but not the "other" and the kids wouldn't be allowed in at all - not even to clean their teeth, since even that apparently innocuous activity sometimes resulted in globs of toothpaste hanging from the ceiling.

  No, there was something about an en-suite that was obviously more than merely the sum of its sanitary-ware. It was a selling point, Trevor had said, and Trevor knew the market, and Phil had to agree that most modern houses had them these days. Still, a Summer House would have been nice. One day.

  The soil was wet and heavy. He was wasting his time persevering with it, but carried on doggedly for half an hour, just for the solitude it afforded him. Then Sally called out from the conservatory door. The soaps must have had finished, he thought, and there was apparently no reality show to entertain her further that evening.

  "You never talk to me," she was complaining, straight off. "You just do your own thing and ignore me completely. I don't know why you bother coming home at all!"

  Phil glanced at his watch - she'd be off to bed in another half an hour. "You were watching telly." he said, but that was an argument that never washed.

  "Well, I'm not watching it now."

  "Okay, fancy a cup of tea?"

  "No. It'll keep me awake. Has Marty done his homework?"

  "He says he hasn't got any."

  "Are you sure? You know what he's like."

  Phil was thinking that if Marty chose to lie to him, that was up to Marty. That if he didn't do his homework, that was up to Marty as well. He wasn't going to carry the lad around all his life.

  "I don't know," said Phil. Was he sure? No, he was never sure where his kids were concerned. Yes, they both lied to him whenever they thought they could get away with it and no, he would never trust either of them to tell the truth. Sally scowled and Phil wondered what it must have been like to be so sick of life to make you scowl at it like that. He didn't feel that way, surely! All right, things were tiring, confusing, difficult as hell, but he was still looking for a way through while Sally appeared to have given up and the weight of it had crushed the breath from her. Or was it his fault perhaps? Was it living with him that had made her so miserable?

  "Do you have to wear that hat?" she asked.

  "Eh?"

  "You do know they laugh at you wearing that."

  "What? Who? The kids?"

  "The whole street. My dad says,… "

  "It's raining," explained Phil, not particularly interested in what Trevor had to say on the subject of his hat, though he could imagine. And if anyone was laughing at him, it would be Trevor - Trevor, who'd never forgiven him for catching Trevor unawares and marrying his daughter.

  "And those ear muffs you wear."

  "Ear muffs?" This was a new one, thought Phil. "You mean my ear defenders. But I only wear them when I'm mowing."

  "Well they make you look stupid!"

  There was no smile; Sally's mood was really sour tonight.

  "But the mower's noisy. It aggravates my ears. Makes them ring louder."

  She sniffed. "You and your ears. How much did that acupuncture cost?"

  Ah, now we're getting to it, thought Phil. "Erm, twenty quid," he said, instinctively lowering the cost a fraction to take the sting out of it. He didn't have the nerve to tell Sally he'd not actually had any acupuncture, but come away with just a handful of herbs instead.

  "Twenty pounds!" She was appalled. "I hope it worked."

  "Well not yet. I have to go back, maybe a few times."

  "That's what you think. We can't afford to go throwing money away on stuff like that."

  She was unusually argumentative, he thought. Indeed she seemed close to losing her temper, which wasn't like her at all.

  "Sally, the tinnitus is really upsetting me. If I go for a few months it's no more than what it costs us for a few weeks shopping. And if it gets rid of it it'll be worth it."

  "Doctor Jackson told you it was incurable, that you should just get used to it. I agree with him. Get used to it."

  Phil’s guts were really burning now, the acid rising. "Jackson's an idiot," he said. "I went in with a ringing ear and came out with a prescription for antidepressants."

  "And if you'd bothered to take them, you wouldn't be so grumpy now."

  "Grumpy? I'm not grumpy."

  "Then why are you raising your voice?"

  He paused, bit his lip. "Sally, is everything okay? Has something happened?"

  "Nothing," she said. "Everything's exactly the same as it always is."

  Phil suspected this might be the problem. "Look, why don't we have a run out at the weekend?" he said. "Or better still, I'll get Rick to baby-sit on Saturday night, and we'll book a table at the Crown."

  "The Crown's rubbish. Someone got food-poisoning there last week."

  "Then we'll go to Mamma Mia's." Phil hated Mamma Mia's - it was too noisy, too lively for him, the tables set too close together so he always ended up uncomfortably near to someone else's armpit - but Sally liked it.

  "All right, but I don't want Richard baby sitting. I'll ask my dad instead."

  Phil's guts gave one last twist, and he felt himself going into shutdown. It was like a sinking feeling, a darkening, the shutters coming down in a last ditch attempt at self defence. He'd never understood Sally's dislike of his brother. Okay, Rick could be a little unconventional, and he dressed like a heavy metal rock star, though he was in his fifties. But he was a good man, and Phil loved him, loved his brother - while he barely tolerated Trevor, who was an overbearing ass. And they saw a lot of Trevor, while he hardly ever saw his brother!

  He and Sally didn't argue over this, or anything really. They would each go so far until one of them touched the wrong button and caused the other to withdraw into a sullen silence - a silence that might last for days. And no amount of probing would break it, until the damned thing had run its course.

  "What's up with you?"

  "Nothing."

  Phil hated it, but he couldn't help himself now. He lowered his eyes and turned to the hoe. "I'll just finish this off," he said, keeping his tone level and neutral. "Then I'll be in."

  "Suit yourself!"

  Sally collapsed into bed at nine. Elspeth had finally been wrestled undercover at eight thirty, while Marty was still shuffling about the kitchen, procrastinating, swallowing large quantities of orange cordial and then twisting out one long slovenly belch after the other.

  "Marty, please!"

  "Eh? What's up, Dad? Can I watch Top Gear?"

  "No you can't. You've been told to go to bed. Now go."

  "But all my mates at school watch it."

  "Marty, go to bed,… NOW!"

  Guilt. It was the last stress of the day - settling the house down, and the kids always seemed to push their luck, so Phil couldn't help but finally lose his rag and send them off with the impression of a ratty father. It was going up for ten now, and the house was not so much settling as shuddering to a halt. He'd wanted to read, but found that now he simply wasn't in the mood. The house hung raw and ragged like flayed meat all around him, and he could feel himself itching for the whisky bottle to make everything soft and smooth again.

  Wine and whisky - how much did that cost in a month? If he cut that out, he could easily pay for the acupuncture, and that would stop Sally moaning about it - except Sally drank as much as he did. Christ he hoped the acupuncture worked, otherwise he'd have to pretend. Imagine that: ears still ringing like stink, yet pretending they were fine - oh and not wearing his ear defenders because they made him look stupid an
d his family were embarrassed for him. Oh,… and his hat! He must not wear his hat! But how they knew the whole street was laughing at him was a mystery because no one in the damned street ever spoke to them!

  His head was spinning now. He poured himself out a very large whisky, while listening for Marty. A final belch from the bathroom told him the lad was about five minutes away from bed. It was close enough. He flopped down on the sofa with his laptop and his whiskey and let out a groan. The laptop had been a particularly difficult thing to acquire. In the end he'd had to lie to Sally, telling her it belonged to work. He'd actually paid cash for it at PC World, cash he'd accumulated by squirreling away the odd tenner here and there over a period of a few years. He needed it for his diary. The diary was of vital importance. It was his only confidant, his only listener.

  Chapter 4

  Phil had kept a diary since he was a teenager. It helped to calm his nerves, get the crap out his system. But private diaries and married life did not go hand in hand. He'd made the mistake early on of trusting the sanctuary of the diary. I mean reading someone else's diary was something you simply did not do, did you? Unless you were a woman. Women seemed not to understand that you never wrote the good stuff in there. You only wrote the bad stuff, the dark stuff, the stuff you had to get out of your system, the snatches of anger, the fleeting moments of despair. And though they were a transient thing for the writer, the diary preserved them for all time, giving the reader an impression of a very miserable and misanthropic author.

  Sally had got burned that way early on, thinking to satisfy her curiosity, and not realising the depth of the things Phil kept to himself. She had not understood them, not understood how deadly dangerous diaries were.

  "Marty's driving me up the bloody wall! Four hour feeds, small hours of the morning. Getting to work somehow, brain dead, sick of the smell of shit and baby milk. Don't know how much more I can take!"

  He came home to an hysterical and still postnatal Sally, who'd thrown the diary at him, told him to get out if he was going, that she'd manage on her own.