Free Anticipation by Tanya Moir

meant I don’t have time.’
    He just looks at me. I remember, uneasily, that he’s watched me for three months now, and knows how my days are spent. Thinking. Staring at a computer screen. Drinking chardonnay in the afternoon. I can see it wouldn’t look like much from the outside.
    ‘If you don’t take her, she’ll be put down.’
    ‘Why don’t you take her?’
    ‘I’d love to.’ Jake pulls the dog’s blue-grey ears. ‘But it’s against body corporate rules. No dogs in the apartments.’
    ‘You live in an apartment?’ I realise I’ve been picturing him in a bungalow — ex-state, perhaps — somewhere off the Southern Motorway, with an eighties sofa he’s had from new and posters of supercars on the wall. Do single men still have houses like that? It’s a long time since I’ve been in one. ‘Which building?’
    ‘The Match Works, off Quay Street.’
    I know it, of course. A warehouse conversion down by Queens Wharf, all iron beams and exposed brick and mock-industrial kitchens. A wood-fired pizza oven on the roof terrace. I sold three of them myself, off plan. It was one of my better months, if I remember — the sort paying Jake’s bills now.
    ‘There must be someone else.’
    Jake shakes his head. ‘Her time’s up at the shelter. Nobody wants her.’
    We stare at the dog in silence.
    ‘She’s old,’ he explains. ‘Has trouble with her joints. People don’t want the vet’s bills.’
    The dog shivers a little in the twenty-five-degree heat, and looks down her long nose at me with a deeply hopeless expression.
    ‘Her racing name was Out of the Blue,’ Jake adds carelessly. ‘Mike called her Ella.’
    ‘You can’t just bring me a dog.’
    ‘Just take her for a few days. Till I find someone else. I can’t take her back to the shelter.’
    At six, he knocks off and goes home, leaving me with the dog. I’ve given her one of Maggie’s old blankets to lie on. All evening, she looks up at me from it with the sort of expression Dalmatianpuppies reserve for Cruella de Vil. I shut her in the laundry when I go to bed. She howls until three-thirty.
    In the comfort of my king-size bed I listen to her cry, and think about Ted Harding.

    In December of ’78, Maggie decides it’s time to clamber back up on the horse and set off in pursuit of another Ghost of Hardings Past. Blame Christmas or Dickens or her new bi-weekly hypnosis. Personally, I don’t want to go anywhere near this particular beast. One shoebox is enough. And as Annabel Miller will prove to me in a year or two more, some ponies shouldn’t be remounted. I’ve no choice, though, but to watch my mother take it for a canter.
    The services of our London researcher, guilty of the
News of the World
affair, are no longer required. Maggie has her eye on a softer target this time. One she can observe from the safety of living memory; a man who conducted his life in the sanitary glare of enlightened times. In short, she wants her Granddad Ted.
    Crunch we go up the pink shell path. And we’re in luck! Sarah’s having a good day.
    ‘Like?’ she says. ‘I don’t know what you mean. What’s
your
father like?’
    Maggie, checkmated, sips her gin. At the back of the house, William Biggs slumbers on behind his blackout curtains.
    ‘He was old,’ decides Sarah ruthlessly. ‘People always thought he was our granddad. He was on his deathbed for such a long time. My poor mum had to nurse him.’
    We stare at a photograph of Uncle Eddie on his father’s knee. Sarah’s right, Ted does look old. Maggie works it out. He’s fifty here; unseen Evelyn, already a mother of two, would be barely thirty. Ted has very short salt-and-pepper hair and a rugby player’s neck and — we must presume, since they are not Harry’s — Violet’s eyes. Eddie has them too. They stand out, both sets, black as the glass eyes of my old wooden doll, long-lashed and twinkling.
    Maggie turns the pages back, to a wedding photograph in anoval mount. Just the two of