Free Cold Light by Jenn Ashworth Page B

chair back. He waved his hands in the air. I thought he looked like Michael Aspel. ‘Think of the romance. The sand, the sea. Floating in the moonlight . . .’
    ‘. . . through a tide of untreated sewage,’ Barbara said, rolling her ‘r’s.
    Donald shrugged.
    ‘Your mother’s no imagination, you know that? She knows it, of course – otherwise why pick a man of vision, like myself?’ He winked. There was a moment of silence. ‘And you know what I found out at the library today?’ He started paddling through the papers on the table, sticking his pale, sausagey fingers between the flaps of scuffed paper folders.
    ‘I’m wanting to set the table now, Donald.’
    ‘And I can do that for you in a while,’ he said. ‘Go back to your tomato-carving and hold your horses one minute, will you?’
    She sighed, but didn’t say anything else.
    He turned back to me.
    ‘Now, Lola, have a look at this. Two years’ more education on you than your father ever had, so here’s a little test for you. Tell me what you think’s going on here. We’ll have a battle. Your qualifications against my self-training. A pound for you, if you guess it right.’
    He slapped the coin onto the table and I pulled the paper towards me. It was boring, having to stand in for Barbara like this.
    The sheet of paper was a grainy photocopy of a picture in a magazine but at first I thought it was a copy of a painting. A dragon. The creature had teeth; milky, almost transparent teeth. They looked like they were made of cartilage, or ice. It was all mouth, with eyes like shrunken walnuts pressed into the sides of its head.
    ‘Another fish, Dad? You going to go and catch one of these?’
    ‘Not likely,’ he replied. ‘These live so far under the sea that they’d probably implode and turn into fish paste if we brought them up to the top.’
    ‘Really?’ I was interested, in spite of myself. He’d told me stories before. Fish that crawl along the bottom of the sea like worms, fish that make their own light, transparent, poisonous jellyfish the size of cars that fly about in groups as big as football stadiums.
    I examined the picture, even though Barbara was crashing cutlery about. Partly it was because Donald had not been as enthusiastic as this about anything, not for months. Partly it was to make up for the bad Christmas present. I was scared that the shine on him would go out and he’d go back to staying in bed again if someone didn’t play along with him.
    ‘Oh I don’t know,’ Donald said, but he was still smiling, ‘I might have filled in the facts a little. Embellished, here and there. Why shouldn’t I? She’s a mythical-looking creature though, isn’t she?’
    ‘It’s a female one?’ I asked doubtfully. I leaned over and put my face closer to the picture, staring into its shadows. ‘How can you tell?’
    Donald slapped his hands on the table. I jumped back. This was the other side of the coin: sudden outbursts and enthusiasm over nothing.
    ‘By God, she’s getting close! You’re costing me a fortune. Have a look. Make your guess.’
    Barbara muttered from the sink, ‘For God’s sake,’ but she didn’t turn, didn’t tell us to stop and clear the table. I kept one eye on her back.
    ‘Is it pregnant?’ I asked, looking at the picture again. It was round, but fish don’t get pregnant with babies like animals do, do they? They can’t, because there is such a thing as fish-eggs, and people eat them. ‘What’s that, stuck to it?’
    ‘That’s your guess?’ Donald said, pushing the pound coin towards me with his finger and then sliding it away, teasing. He hadn’t teased me like that for ages. It was only a pound, but I snatched for it and he hid it under his palm and laughed. I was worried he was beginning to think I was too old for it. Or by the time he came out of himself, I really would be too old for it.
    I stared again, but the dots of ink that made up the picture were too big and the more I looked, the