Free On Top of Everything by Sarah-Kate Lynch

Said he had cold hands. Funny, innit, what they object to, the old ones, not that she was so old then but you can’t tell a young ’un that, can you? Or you can try but you won’t get very far. Now, let’s see what we have here.’
    Standing at the kitchen counter, Stanley Morris paused to push a broken bread and butter plate out of his way with the side of his foot and wiped away some squashed banana with a J-cloth. I stared in embarrassment at the hideous mess strewn around us. It looked like a chimpanzee’s tea party gone horribly wrong, but Stanley Morris seemed to take it in his stride.
    He turned the tap on and the jet of water hit him straight in the eye.
    ‘I see what you mean,’ he said jovially. ‘Cor, this is an old model, this mixer, but that’s not all bad, that is. You can still get replacement parts for the likes of this. The new ones? Nah, you’ve got to be joking. Cheaper to put a new one in than repair the old one, even if it’s brand spanking new. Makes you sick, doesn’t it? Makes me sick.’
    As Stanley Morris continued to prattle on I quietly swept up the broken crockery and pieces of lamp shade, which reminded me of the chamber pot and the fact that I had been fired earlier — surely not the same day? It seemed a lifetime ago.
    ‘Beautiful part of London this, I reckon,’ Stanley chattered. ‘My old man’s old man worked the canal boats back in the dark ages. Hard to imagine everything being delivered by water though, innit? I ain’t been to the real Venice myself but my daughter has. She saw all sorts of things being delivered in them boats. Wotcha call ’em? Gondolas, yeah, gondolas:tables and chairs, cabbages, bottles of water, birds in cages, you name it.’
    He opened the door beneath the sink and, huffing, got down on his hands and knees to peer in.
    ‘Never been anywhere in Italy me,’ he continued, his voice echoing around my kitchen cupboards as he rattled around with his spanner. ‘Probably wouldn’t bother with Venice anyway. All that walking. Not a single car. But Rome, I could handle that. The Colosseum, Trevi Fountain, Spanish Steps. My daughter’s been there, too. Says you can get a good cup of tea at the bottom of the Spanish Steps but you’d better make the most of it because it’s the only one you’ll find in the whole of Europe.’
    He turned over and lay on his back, his torso and legs sticking out into the kitchen. His belly didn’t look anywhere near so beery lying down. It looked like the belly of a man who loved his mum and his daughter and was not fazed by smashed crockery and squashed banana.
    I felt an inexplicable rush of warmth for Stanley Morris.
    ‘My husband’s just told me he’s leaving me for another man,’ I told the bottom two-thirds of him.
    His spanner stopped rattling. He scooted out from under the sink.
    ‘You all right then?’ he asked. He didn’t seem embarrassed. Or even surprised. Maybe it happened more often than I imagined.
    I shook my head. I was not all right.
    ‘Come as a shock, did it?’
    I nodded. It had come as a shock. ‘We’ve been together since we were kids,’ I said. ‘We’ve been married for twenty years. I had no idea. I thought we were happy.’
    Stanley Morris nodded, sighed, then used his spanner toscratch a spot on his back in between his shoulder blades.
    ‘I know just how you feel,’ he said. ‘My missus left me without a word of warning and all. There was me thinking we was enjoying perfect marital bliss and there was her thinking she’d rather live in a tiny little flat on her own in Hounslow freezing to death and working at the local William Hill.’
    He shook his head and got up.
    ‘Uff. My knees, I tell you.’
    ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I told Stanley Morris, even though he was just the plumber.
    ‘Not much you can do,’ he said, turning on the tap. No jet of water. ‘There we go. It gets better, that’s all I can tell you, although you couldn’t be blamed for not believing