Cages by David Mark (acx book reading TXT) 📕

104. Baggy around the middle, loose at the neck. He can smell himself: all mildew and bad wine.

‘Are you awake? Have you, like, had a stroke? Because that’s the last straw, Dad. I’m serious, if you’ve had a stroke that will be totes unacceptable, yeah?’

Rufus would like to offer Dorcas some words of reassurance, but his tongue won’t unstick itself from the roof of his mouth. Barnacle-like, it clings to his soft palate, sucking the moisture from his mouth and no doubt getting itself pissed as a consequence. He doesn’t think he’s had a stroke, though he understands his daughter’s concerns. He makes a somewhat pitiful spectacle. The shiny leather patches on the sleeves of his corduroy jacket are the same shade as the battered chair in which he sprawls, boneless and crumpled. His pyjama trousers are tangled around his knees, somewhere beneath the partition wall of his old laptop. He can’t remember the colour, and can’t be bothered to look.

‘This is so crashy! Like, scuzz-central. Grossville. Have you eaten today? I don’t see why you’re like still so flabby – you like live on wine and paracetamol. Oh, and FYI, there’s a dead mole on the mat. And a shrew’s head, which is mad cause the cat’s been dead since last Christmas. Anyway, whatever. I don’t suppose you’ve like bought any more credit for my phone, have you?’

There’s a serrated edge to the way she asks, as if she already knows the answer but wants the reply to hurt. She’s seventeen now, his darling Dorcas, and stopped being his daughter the moment she started peppering her sentences with the word ‘like’. She’s his wife’s offspring now, and the very image of her mother, Shonagh. Startlingly attractive, but with a distinct nastiness around the eyes. Rufus had entertained hopes that by this age she would be a bohemian, a libertine: that they would attend rallies in Westminster and chain themselves to old oak trees together – maybe brew some potent scrumpy in one of the outbuildings and read one another selected passages by neglected poets. Had rather imagined she would become his assistant in some capacity: PA, researcher, a doting and dutiful companion and ever so slightly humbled to be the daughter of Rufus Orton, modern great.

She went the other way. There’s a bit of a sneer about her now. Would swap him for an Amazon voucher if somebody put the offer on the table. She won’t leave the house without make-up, watches pointless people saying pointless things on social media, and gets excited when imbecilic YouTubers release a new range of must-have merchandise. He hasn’t seen her reading a book since she was twelve. Apparently she can’t concentrate for long enough to get into novels. She’ll watch the occasional movie on a streaming channel, but only if she’s already heard of one of the actors. Rufus has lost interest in her, if he’s honest. Loves her, out of habit, but doesn’t see very much to admire. She doesn’t suit the house anymore. It’s old and crumbling, tucked away down the end of a long green tunnel of overgrown trees and backing on to a popular tourist trail, a couple of miles from Masham, North Yorkshire. It looks OK from the outside but the interior, and the kitchen in particular, look like the setting for a particularly grimy period drama about a morose farmer witnessing the death of a way of life.

‘I’m back, anyways,’ she says, and though his eyes are closed he’s sure he can hear the scrape of her lacquered eyelashes unsticking as she rolls her eyes. ‘I’ll be leaving early. Millie wore my top for drama – I saw the post on Instagram – so if she pops in tell her she’s a thieving cow-bag and I’m taking her Converse for the open day, right? You don’t have to do anything else. Just sit there and look for people who think you’re amazing. It’ll keep you busy.’

Rufus, in counsel with his uncooperative tongue, decides that silence is the best option. He can feel half a dozen smart-arse replies lining up like bullets, but he has just enough pride not to fire them. He can’t imagine feeling particularly good about himself if he made his eldest daughter cry by telling her that when her looks fade and she has to rely on her personality, she’ll be royally screwed.

There are scrapes, bangs and the damp thud of an avalanche of papers sliding off the end of the long farmhouse table, then angry footsteps to the door. He gets a smell of her. Perfume, pizza, nail polish, sweat. He feels briefly better for it. The kitchen is all mould and spilled wine and damp paper. It’s as if somebody has let in a sea breeze.

He stretches. Feels the headache in his shoulders. He rubs at the nape of his neck, trying to persuade the dull throb to push on to somewhere less important, like his legs. He has very little interest in his legs. They just sort of dangle there, occasionally propelling him to the car and from there to the village shop, where he and Dave, the long-suffering owner, have an ‘arrangement’. Rufus passes on signed copies of his books, and Dave pays him in bottles of red wine.

There’s a vibration, somewhere beneath him. He shifts, awkwardly, then makes a desperate lunge as the laptop slides off his knee and plunges down his bare legs to clatter onto the flagstone floor.

‘Fiddlesticks,’ he mumbles, out of habit. Then he catches himself. He’s made a conscious decision to stop living by Shonagh’s rules. He can damn well swear properly if he wants to. ‘Bloody shit,’ he manages, then winces at the inadequacy of the curse.

He retrieves his phone from under his left buttock, noting with some modicum of shame that he probably didn’t make for a particularly inspiring sight when his daughter came home and saw her father was largely naked from the waist down, save for a pair of leather