Chapter 2
She recognised his lights as they swung round the corner and the indicator flicked on to pull over and stop for her. The car looked invitingly dry. Too dry to break up with someone in? No. Besides which, by the time she was sat in it for three minutes it would be soaking. Why would it be soaking? Because she was soaking. Why was Lia soaking? BECAUSE HARRY WAS LATE. She pulled at the door handle forcefully and her wet fingers slipped off the plastic and she caught herself across the nose with a slap. Her eyes immediately sprung with water, ending their time as the driest thing about her in that moment.
Harry gallantly leant across and pulled the door handle, pushing the door open and leaning across the gear stick. Lia reluctantly nodded a thanks to him and climbed into the passenger seat. She tried to wipe the rain off her face but her hands were so wet she couldn’t accurately say that she was helping at all.
“Are you alright?” Harry asked lightly and Lia turned her head sharply to glare at him. Even the act of rotating her neck quickly made water droplets spin out of her fringe and give him a mini shower. A tiny experience of what she had gone through waiting for him.
“Do I look alright Harry?” Neither of them said anything, but there was far from silence in the car. The engine, the rain, the wipers, the snuffling… it built up into a maelstrom inside Lia’s head. Hang on, the snuffling? “What’s that noise?” She said, whipping her head round to look at the back seat. The whip sent more water flying at Harry and he knew better than to complain.
“It’s a surprise.” Harry said cheerfully, “it’s why I was late!” He indicated back out of the lay-by and merged into the rush hour traffic.
“What is it?” Lia repeated, an icy weight settling into her stomach at his coy behaviour and the noises coming from the boot.
“It’s a surprise.” Harry said again.
“I don’t like surprises.” Lia said, her jaw tense.
“Well, it won’t be one for long. I’ll have to get it out the second we get home.”
“Is it alive?” Lia’s eyebrows shot up into her sodden fringe, pulling more droplets of ever descending water out of her hair and into her face.
“Might be.” Harry said, irritatingly bending all the syllables round a corner. Lia groaned. Harry flicked his eyes off the car in front of them and over to Lia, “What?”
“Why is there an alive thing in the boot of your car?” Lia tried to keep her voice not too grumpy, in case there was a reasonable answer. She was feeling more and more convinced there was not going to be.
“Oh don’t press it. You’ll ruin the surprise.” Harry whined.
“It’s not a surprise if you know a surprise is coming.” Lia snapped back, “It’s an impending thing that I’m aware of, which means it’s not going to surprise me so you might as well tell me.” This was why Lia had always hated surprises. Well, actually no, not surprises. Surprises that were actually surprises were fine (if they were good surprises). When something truly leapt out of the blue and into your life in a wonderful way: brilliant. When someone dangled something but refused to tell you the details, then it was awful. Once someone said there was a surprise there was nothing Lia could do to not guess what it was, and invariably her imagination was better at conjuring up what she might want than the surprise giver was. It meant gearing up for some sort of disappointment. She’d always maintained that once you knew a so-called-surprise was coming, it was better to just know what it was straight away so that you could start looking forward to it and thus elongate the happiness. Harry had other ideas.
“Alright it’s a dog.” Harry said loudly and angrily. Lia took a moment to compose herself. There was a calmness borne of anger descending on her.
“Whose dog?” She asked, her voice just about audible over the traffic and the stormy weather. There was still a chance he was just looking after someone’s dog.
“Ours. She’s called Florence.” Harry pronounced it so happily that a casual onlooker might have assumed that Lia and Harry had often merrily discussed obtaining a dog called Florence. The onlooker would have assumed the young couple often curled up on the sofa talking about how much they wanted a wonderful canine to love between them, and if only one would drop into their lap/boot they would name it Florence and all live happily ever after.
Lia had no idea what to say.
“Say something.” Harry prompted, and Lia could feel his insecurity in his voice.
“I don’t know what to say.” She admitted.
“You love dogs!” Harry proclaimed, so vehemently that Lia wondered if she did love dogs. She didn’t hate them. Who could hate dogs? But was there anything about her neat life full of clean tidy books that screamed “please bring a dog into it”? A book about a dog maybe. Why couldn’t he have bought her a copy of Call of the Wild? It could be wrapped up nice and neat right now on the parcel shelf. Possibly the first time in history that that weird boot divider would have ever been used for an actual parcel.
“Harry, why did you buy me a dog?”
“I bought us a dog.”
“Why did you buy us a dog?”
Harry’s mouth opened, then he frowned, closed it again, blinked a few times, and opened it again. “I felt like we needed something.”
She felt like her mouth exploded. “We did need something! A chat! A talk! A long discussion about our slightly clammy relationship. We didn’t need a dog! And why is it in the boot? Are you meant to keep dogs in the boot? Do you have food for it? Is that rolling around in the boot with it too? What breed is it? How old? Where from? How much exercise does it need? Why did you get a dog?”
“Clammy?”
A bi-product of being a librarian was getting very used to quiet. It wasn’t like you became a librarian because you were naturally hushed, but when you were in that environment for eight hours a day it often felt weird to come out and then come back to normal volume. As a result, Harry was quite unused to Lia being so loud.
“Clammy?” He repeated into the approximation of silence afforded by the surroundings. “Do you think I’m clammy?”
“No,” she sighed, “Not you, as in your skin is clammy. But… we’re clammy, or not… clammy. Forget about the word clammy. Something is weird with us, we’re… we’re on our way out or whatever and -“
“Is that what you think?!” He almost shrieked, “We’re over?”
“Well…” she squirmed, this was not how she’d foreseen any of this going. “Well you must have felt it too?”
“Why?”
“THE CONTENTS OF THE BOOT!”
“I didn’t get the dog because I think we’re over… I got the dog because we’ve not been clicking as well as we used to and we’re… we’re…” he petered out, “clammy.”
He said it so quiet she almost didn’t hear it. The rain had slowed a bit, leaving the windscreen wipers less intensely busy and a squeaking sound emitted from one of them at regular intervals. His voice was faint, and a little bit heartwarming. She smiled and put a hand over his where it rested on top of the gear stick. “Clammy.” She confirmed, “the relationship, not the hand.” She took her hand off because truth was it was actually clammy but that was largely to do with her overall soggyness.
They drove the rest of the journey without talking. Lia felt happier that something had been said. It wasn’t her being ungrateful, or over reactive or mean, or picky or insensitive… something was wrong! Weirdly, him thinking the relationship might be over made her feel closer to him in that, at least they weren’t on completely different pages. There was no driveway for their house so Harry found a space in the crowded street of cars and edged impressively neatly into the space.
“I can never do it first time.” Lia mused, momentarily forgetting the weird limbo they were in. He just said “yeah” in response and it came flooding back in. Were they about to go inside and break up? Would one of them move out tonight? If they were about to go in and break up was it in fact already over? “Come on then, let’s go in.” She said, unclipped her seat belt and climbed out of the car.
“Can you grab this bag?” He called, pulling a large carrier bag off the back seat. She took it, and he pulled out a leash from inside. Oh god the dog. In the silent consideration of the possible end of her relationship, she had managed to completely erase the concept of the dog from her mind. Never mind where she and Harry would sleep, break up or not, where was a dog going to sleep?
Harry opened the boot and the dog bounded straight out of its confinement and into the road.
“Oh god!” Lia spun round and watched the dog head straight into one of the gardens. “Call it back!” She looked at Harry worried. It wasn’t a busy street but there was the occasional car. As much as she didn’t want a dog, she also didn’t want a dog to get hurt because they were irresponsible owners.
“Florence!” He called, the dog didn’t look up. “She’s not trained yet.”
Lia checked for cars and then picked her way through the puddles and across to where the dog was neck deep in a hydrangea. Any drying out she had done in the car was being negated by the drizzle, the puddles and… and the dog shaking. Brilliant. She slipped her fingers into the collar around the dog… Florence’s neck.
They crossed back to Harry and he unlocked the door. Then the three of them stood in the hall and stared at each other, wondering who would decide what happened next.
What breed of dog is Florence?
1. Golden Retriever
2. Jack Russell
3. Pug
4. Spaniel
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