Gone to Prissy’s, it says, as though Prissy’s were round the corner, when Prissy now lives in Dubai. The moniker itself is duplicitous, for isn’t it always Priscilla Jules uses with him, the formality marking like urine the mistrust and rivalry of her sibling relationship? Prissy to the sister so as not to make waves, but to him Priscilla, the A-star pain in the coccyx who beat her to Daddy’s affections and every school prize. She might have given him notice or flight numbers, dates to score through on the calendar, but could not have said more than she said with those three words. This is what my distance has done, he observes. It has abbreviated Priscilla, cut her from insufferable to tender. It has made them close.
The immediate problem is the dog. He cannot always be there for the dog. It is Jules who is always there, and her absence is causing the beast to whine at unpredictable intervals. Though he has only just brought the creature in from a plod through the forest, it remains by the doormat. It has read the future out of his creased forehead, already foreseeing the long dark hours when Logan’s legs marinate in the stew of the motorway, and a walk, though only inches from its nose, remains the other side of seasoned oak.
Enough! he says to the dog. Achilles, enough! And it slinks away to the basket he designated a waste of money, the floor being good enough, why spoil the beast?
For some reason he cannot explain, Logan continues to sleep in the car. He buys a four-seasons sleeping bag for the purpose. The bed has become hers, and the thought of occupying it in her absence is like sleeping in the enemy’s trenches. Truth be told, excepting his study, the whole house has become hers. In the living room, her plumped-up cushions eye him ruefully. In the kitchen, the colour-labelled cabals of the spice rack wait to be plucked up by her fingers; the table yearns to be set. He takes blankets to his study and lies on the sofa like a sick child, but the growing disease of silence ticks through the house until he is wide awake with it. So Logan continues to sleep in the car. There, he can witness Jules’s pre-programmed lights flicking through their rituals, can pretend she is moving through the house, tucking and tidying while he is watching over her. The dog – whose howl is an insufferable blackmail – sleeps in the car beside him.