Free Wake Up Happy Every Day by Stephen May Page B

sad smile, as she takes in all the vandalism time has done to me since the last time she really looked. I see her thinking that something radical needs to be done. You know, when I was younger people used to mistake me for Bono from U2. Well, it happened once or twice. And Bono – he still looks like Bono, doesn’t he? I, on the other hand, I look like Baldrick from the Blackadder TV series. Or at least that’s who I’m mistaken for these days. Sarah says she doesn’t mind. She says, ‘I like Baldrick, he’s my favourite.’
    Sarah looks OK, of course. More than OK. If you were being picky you might say legs are a bit varicosed, breasts slightly less pillowy than they once were – we both blame Scarlett for that – but generally she’s looking good. Forty-two and she could be, oh, thirty-eight, easy.
    ‘Russell kept himself in trim,’ she says finally.
    ‘Look what happened to him,’ I say, and I smile at the accidental rhyme which is like something from Hilaire Belloc.
    ‘What’s so funny?’
    ‘Nothing. I don’t really know.’
    And we pull all the blinds but this house is fifteen million dollars’ worth of too damn airy, too damn spacious, too damn everything, and we can’t keep the light out. Not really. That goddamn light gets everywhere. We lie awkwardly under a duvet on the sofa and hold each other and listen to the freeform music of the city. And Sarah talks about how the search for real fun is going to need imagination, planning, and organised thinking. What we need is proper project management.
    ‘Targets, goals, objectives,’ I say.
    ‘Absolutely,’ she says.
    ‘Milestones,’ I say. She nods.
    She goes on about how we are going to need smart objectives to make the best of our new situation, our new lives. We are going to need goals that are specific and stretching, measurable and motivating, achievable and agreed, relevant and reinforced, timed and trackable. SMART in other words. Or SSMMAARRTT I suppose, strictly speaking. She gets quite excited. Quite passionate. There’s heat in her voice. A flush across her neck. My shy snail stirs a little. Not too much, but a little. She talks about storming, forming, norming – which are, apparently, the three necessary stages of change for any organisation, even a small one like our little family.
    I tell her not to bring her filthy performance-management talk into the bedroom, not unless she’s prepared to take the consequences, and she giggles and we cuddle for a while. I don’t know about Sarah but I certainly feel unusual. Sleepy and buzzy at the same time. I guess I feel all moneyed up.
    I’m in this foggy twilight world for a while – a short time? A long time? I have no idea – and then Scarlett wanders in and squirms her way between us.
    ‘Hello, lovely,’ I say.
    And Sarah gets up, makes tea and comes back and explains to Scarlett about the game. The game that means I’m going to be called Russell from now on, rather than Daddy. If we keep it up we get to win a massive prize. Scarlett nods and gurgles. She has an extensive repertoire of nods and gurgles as you might imagine, and I’m pretty fluent in them. This, I reckon, is a yes, I get it kind of nod. It’s a Daddy’s called Russell, now can we get on with breakfast and Nickelodeon please? kind of gurgle. It’s a nod and a gurgle that says that Scarlett is impatient for some of the best kind of love.
    None of this second-best shit.

Eleven
    LORNA
    Lorna has never really done sweat. She avoided sports at high school, her mum wearily colluding in the skiving by agreeing to pen the necessary notes until, in the end, everyone quietly accepted that during PE Lorna would just make her way to the library or the textile room.
    It’s textiles she’s doing now, she supposes. Crocheting what will become a cuddly mouse for Armitage Shanks to play with while Megan does her rough games. Her silly PE. Funny how life could change so much, and also hardly at all at the same time. She can