Read Instructions for a Heatwave for Free Online

“It’s got sauce along the crust.”
    “Daddy, you’re not
listening
. Where are your eyes?”
    The phone starts to ring. Vita is talking louder and louder; Hughie is removing bits of food from his plate, saying he can’t eat this either, or this, and Claire is shouting something from the hall.
    “What?” he says, darting up, through the living room and to the hall, where his wife is poised on the doorstep. “I can’t hear you.”
    She is framed in the doorway, the sunlight illuminating the stuff of her blouse, her hair aflame around her small, freckled face. His heart hurts with the sight of her. Stay, he wants to say, don’t go. Stay with me.
    “I said,” she says, “that’s probably your mother. She’s been calling and calling all afternoon.”
    “Oh,” he says.
    “She’s lost a key or something.”
    “Right.”
    Behind him, he hears the ringing telephone stop abruptly and Hughie say, “Hello?”
    “Claire?”
    “Yes?” She has one hand on the door, a foot out on the step.
    “Don’t go.”
    “What?”
    “Please.” He takes hold of her wrist, where the gathered bones of her hands meet with the long bones of her arm.
    “Michael—”
    “Just tonight. Just stay here tonight. Don’t go to this thing. I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the Industrial Revolution. Stay with us. Please.”
    “I can’t.”
    “You can.”
    “I can’t. I promised them—”
    “Fuck them.”
    A mistake. Her face contorts in anger. She stares at him. Behind him, he hears Hughie telling his grandmother that Daddy can’t come to the phone because he’s shouting at Mummy on the doorstep. Claire looks at him as if she will speak but then she bows her head, she shifts her other foot out onto the path, she closes the door after her.
    It takes him a moment to comprehend that she’s gone. He stares at the door, the tarnished brass of the lock, the way the glass fits so neatly into the wood. Then he realizes Hughie is next to him.
    “Daddy! Daddy!” he is shouting.
    “What?” he says, looking down at him, this miniature version of his wife who has just left, has stepped out of the door, away from them all.
    “Granny’s on the phone. She says—”
    He moves through to the sitting room and picks up the receiver. “Mum? Sorry I was—”
    Disconcertingly, his mother is in the middle of a sentence, a paragraph or possibly something even longer. “… and I said to the man, Well, I don’t need any pop today, you’ll just have to come back on Thursday, and do you know what he said to me? He said—”
    “Mum,” he says again. “It’s me.”
    “—not as if he had that much in his van anyway and—”
    “Mum!”
    There was a pause down the line. “Is that you, Michael Francis?”
    “Yes.”
    “Oh. I thought I was talking to Vita.”
    “No. It was Hughie.”
    “Oh. Well. I was telling Claire this afternoon—and she sounded so busy, I can’t tell you—that the problem is that he’s got the key to the shed and—”
    “Who?”
    “And I told him that breakfast was ready but you know what he’s like with the paper—”
    “What paper?”
    “The thing is that the freezer’s in the shed, as you know.”
    He puts a hand to his brow. Conversations with his mother can be confusing meanders through a forest of meaning in which nobody has a name and characters drop in and out without warning. You needed to get a toehold, just a slight grasp on your orientation, ascertain the identity of one dramatis persona and then, with any luck, the rest would fall into place.
    “… she said she didn’t have time today but—”
    “Who? Who didn’t have time?”
    “I know she’s always so busy. She’s got a lot on.”
    This is a definite clue. There is only one person for whom his mother uses this phrase. “Monica? Do you mean Monica?”
    “Yes.” His mother sounds injured. “Of course. She doesn’t have time today because of the cat and so I was wondering whether you—”
    “Me?” He