Peripheral Vision Read Online Free Page B

window.
    â€˜You ate it all yesterday.’ Adrian shut the window and turned to me. ‘Or maybe she rubbed it over herself. Soon she’ll stink so badly I won’t be able to stand in the same room as her. What happened to our daughter? Can’t you get her to take a shower?’
    â€˜Can’t you?’ The words burst out of me. I wanted to suck them back in. I didn’t want a fight. I hate to fight.
    I didn’t dare tell him about the turd, or the cat’s tail with scraps of pink flesh still hanging from it, or the rutting. She’s a teenager, I told myself the night I heard her grunting and barking in the backyard with the boy who looks like a dingo, all pale bristly hair and pointy face. She’s had her implant so she won’t get pregnant. But the turd. The little exclamation mark of dried-up poo I found nestled behind her bedroom door. How could I explain that?
    â€˜At least she’s here for breakfast. She’ll turn out all right, you’ll see. You know most of them grow out of it.’ I felt my face wrinkle into an appeasing smile.
    â€˜That’s if we still want her.’
    â€˜Thanks a lot, Dad.’ Sienna had slunk inside and was crouched on her haunches in the corner of the room, beside the door to the lounge.
    â€˜You know I don’t mean it.’ He was smiling at her. He reached down to tousle her hair but she cringed further into the corner.
    â€˜Darling, come and sit at the table,’ I said. ‘I’ll cook you sausages.’
    She sneezed and scratched behind her ear. The soft curls of her strawberry blonde hair bounced as she scratched. Her foot thumped the floor. I could hear the packs of Dogteens gathering out in the streets, whooping and baying and shrieking as they did every weekend on their way to the local compound.
    â€˜Forget it.’ She rose to her feet in a fluid movement that took her out the back door in three long paces. ‘I’ll see you later. I’m in the traces today.’
    As soon as she’d gone I sat down heavily on the kitchen chair.
    â€˜She’s been bitten,’ I said to Adrian. ‘Did you see her neck? And she’s going to be hauling that dog!’
    â€˜She’s been bitten, all right. Some boy giving her a love bite.’
    â€˜No, no. I think it’s one of those dog bites where they pass on the virus.’
    Adrian held his fork mid-air, balancing a triangle of toast topped with a wobbly pyramid of scrambled egg. For a moment he did nothing, then he guided the food to his mouth and chewed slowly and swallowed.
    â€˜I want to take her to the doctor.’ I heard the crack in my voice.
    He put down his cutlery, edged his chair close to mine, and hugged me. I hadn’t noticed that my husband had got plump like me until then, when his belly moulded over my left arm. His double chin rested on my shoulder. His arms could barely encircle my torso. We were two Humpty dolls. I began to laugh. He held me tighter. He thought I was crying.
    â€˜That TV show is complete rubbish. You know that,’ he murmured into my hair.
    â€˜I know,’ I said, between giggles.
    He let go. I took his hand in mine, pressed his palm against my cheek. My giggles had subsided. A strange despair crept over me.
    â€˜How did we get so old?’
    Every Sunday afternoon the leader of the dogs, the packmaster, is towed on a float around the centre of town by thirteen Dogteens in harness. The remaining Dogteens, perhaps three or four hundred in this city, run alongside the float with the dog pack, laughing and shouting in that guttural canine tongue few adults have ever mastered, banging on drums and blowing whistles and doing cartwheels and funny dances.
    Adrian and I take the tram into town, and we settle at a cafe’s outdoor table. The young woman serving us, perhaps in her early twenties, is wearing a pair of clip-on dog ears. A fake fur tail hangs from the seat of her jeans. The cafe