He nicked his butt with his fingers, sending it flying with one brisk flick, into the air and onto the tarmac beyond the hedge.  Martha thought smoking was a bad enough habit without littering the street as well, but then, his wife was at Church with the “hallelujah chorus,” as he called her few friends.  Three Job’s comforters, three aging women who spoke in tongues and sang “This is the Day” after saying grace, at tea and assorted biscuit get-togethers in their home.  He usually made himself scarce at such times, working in the basement when the old crows came around.  Their “get saved” pleas and lectures were boringly predictable, and always best avoided. 

“Bloody harpies!” he muttered, thinking of them, knowing that his wife would come home all fired up for God, mutter gibberish over her cocoa, come to bed and turn her back on him as usual.  She would have no truck with the ungodly since she got saved.  She could not “yoke herself to an unbeliever.”  She was now one of God’s elect, and thoroughly untouchable.  ‘Another bloody Virgin Mary in the making!’

The anaglypta under the dado rail hadn’t been painted for years and was quite yellowed in places despite her obsessive cleaning, since cleanliness and Godliness were somehow inextricably linked.  Cleaning did nothing to improve its appearance.  It only wore away the layers of paint in parts, revealing the paper of the sculpted pattern underneath.  On the stairs, it had the addition of greasy streaks where the children had habitually trailed their fingers up it, and some scribbling where one, when younger, had got hold of a biro.  The brown patterned wallpaper above it didn’t look any better, aged with years of dirt and grime.   The stair carpet, held in place by dingy wooden stair rods,  was worn and a little threadbare in parts.  The top step creaked.  So did the floorboards outside his daughter’s little bedroom at the back of the house, past the wood panelled bathroom.

The door of her bedroom was slightly open.  Light from her bedroom window crept through the spreading chink as he opened it, creating a widening pie-slice of light in the unlit hallway.  The child was ten, but her room still had nursery paper, a repeating pattern comprised of groups of A B C blocks, honey coloured jointed teddies, and dolls with pink frocks, golden curls tied up with red polka dot bows, and eyes which stared in frozen, blind, shocked expressions.  Her own toys were neatly displayed on the mantlepiece of an old blocked up black iron fireplace.  A golliwog lay at the end of her bed.  The child stirred under a dusky pink candlewick bedspread, coarse khaki ex-army blankets and faded floral flannelette sheets.