‘Bad morning?’
‘That obvious?’ she said, her eyes dropping to her torso, seeming to realise her shirt was buttoned up wrong and a tiny nappy dangled off her hip. ‘Oh. I stuck that there because I was changing Bob and needed more cotton wool, and… I can’t remember why.’
She gave a half-hearted laugh. ‘It’s clean.’
Beckett leant forwards and gently plucked a large crumb of toast from her matted hair.
Mary’s eyes widened. ‘I’m a wreck.’
‘Hey, I tried to microwave my wallet this morning. My barely lucid grandfather had to intervene.’
‘Do two knackered, floundering, possibly inept people make one half-competent one?’
‘I guess we’re about to find out.’
Beckett put the shopping away while Mary got Bob ready, and he felt a ridiculously warm twinge at seeing she’d eaten the food he’d bought last month. Gramps wandered around the house pointing out its more obvious defects, and promising Mary that next time he’d bring his tools over and get them sorted.
Beckett did wonder for a moment if this might not be a terrible idea – Gramps had been employed as a handyman a few times over the years and had used to complete their own DIY with skill and diligence. He then saw his grandfather’s hand trembling as he poked at a patch of crumbling plaster, and stopped wondering.
‘Are we going back to the café with the lunatic women?’ Gramps asked, once they were back in the car.
‘We’re going home,’ Beckett said. ‘And that’s really not a nice thing to call someone.’
‘If they don’t want to be insulted, then they shouldn’t behave like imbeciles.’
‘Also not an okay word.’
‘Why are the woman and the baby here? Have we kidnapped them?’
‘We invited them over for the morning.’
‘What, to our house?’ Gramps sounded incredulous, and then he did something Beckett hadn’t heard in, well, hardly ever. Gramps started to laugh. Not the reluctant chuckle Beckett had occasionally heard in the past. A full-on, belly-shaking, rip-roaring guffaw.
‘Um, why is that so funny?’ Mary asked from the back seat.
‘I have no idea,’ Beckett answered, knowing Gramps would lose control of his bladder if he didn’t calm down.
‘You finally meet a woman worth impressing, and you bring her to our hovel to hang out with a grumpy old codger.’ Gramps wheezed. ‘I thought doctors were supposed to be smart.’
‘Okay, so since we’ve brought up kidnapping, am I allowed to know where we’re going? Or do I need to memorise landmarks en route, because, due to barely going out since I moved, I’ve no clue where we are?’
‘We’re in Bigley,’ Beckett said, nodding at the sign up ahead. Gramps’ house was on one of the more respectable streets of a large village that had long been the butt of local jokes thanks to the unfortunate name of Bigley Bottom. This scorn had the advantage of meaning that, back in the golden years of the housing market, Gramps had been able to afford a mortgage for a 1950s semi with two reasonable-sized bedrooms and a boxroom, plus a kitchen-diner and living room on the ground floor.
Beckett had always considered it to be modest, yet adequate. It was only now, as he stopped the car beside their rickety fence, that he saw it through Mary’s eyes.
It was a hovel.
As she followed him inside, it only got worse.
‘Now this makes me feel better about the toast in my hair.’
How had Beckett not appreciated the level to which a house could fall into a complete state without Tanya? Although, while the grotty mess was recent, the mounds of clutter and random junk had been building up for years. It was the total opposite of Mary’s sparse cottage. The kind of house that, when he’d been shadowing an occupational therapist as a student, had made him feel appalled at the conditions some people allowed their elderly, ill relatives to live in.
‘Yeah. It’s been…’ He had no excuse.
‘It’s been impossible,’ Mary said, firmly. ‘Trying to keep earning, taking care of Gramps, sourcing Tanya’s replacement… it’s been impossible not to drop some balls under those circumstances. Most people wouldn’t have made it this far without cracking under the strain of it all.’
She looked at Beckett, shaking her head as if baffled. ‘And you found the time to stop and buy me groceries. You found the energy to even care that I might need some.’
