On heat

Be beguiled by this exclusive extract from Elizabeth Day’s new short story

There is a dog tied to the railings outside his local cafe. James is more of a cat person, normally, but this dog looks like he needs help. Or it. Is an animal a he or an it? He’s never been sure. The dog is well kept and glossy, with a red leather collar, and he/she/it is panting in the heat, tongue lolling. The sun is beating down, forming a curiously precise semicircle on the pavement around the animal’s shape, so that the effect is rather like a spotlight or a Gestapo interrogation.

Poor beast, he thinks, observing it from the first-floor window of his study. Must be hell to have a fur coat in this weather.

The cafe has put out a scattering of tables on the pavement in an effort to be continental. A woman sits at one of them, bare legs crossed, her denim cut-offs riding high up her thigh. She shows no interest in the dog, preferring instead to tap at the screen of her phone. She is wearing sunglasses and her skin is the palest brown, like the underside of a mushroom. Her nails are painted dark red, the varnish chewed at the ends.

She must be 19 or 20, he guesses. The perfect age. Ripe, yet unaware of her own beauty.

He’s been having an affair with an editorial assistant at his publishing house. She’s called Cressida and is absurdly young. Shoulder-length dirty-blonde hair, cut in a blunt fringe across her forehead. Messy skirts and Breton tops.

He doesn’t love her. But nor can he stop thinking of her body: the creaseless wonder of her skin; the flatness of her childless stomach.

He returns to the computer screen, where he has typed a few desultory paragraphs of his latest novel.

‘She felt the blister against her shoe,’ he reads aloud to himself, ‘the nuchal-fold tenderness of its pressure.’

Jesus, what an awful sentence.

He contemplates it as he sips the bottled drink his wife had given him. It has a fizzy, fermented taste and is called kombucha. The consensus seems to be that it’s good for your digestion. Patsy introduced him to it after his doctor made him stop drinking caffeine. One had to be careful when one was hurtling towards 70 and did less exercise than one should.

He glances down at his tummy. Automatic reflex. There’s more of it there than he’d like.

He pulls up his T-shirt to reveal wrinkly flesh, saggy in unexpected places. And then, because there’s no one around, he lifts the waistband of his jogging bottoms and checks his penis. It lies there, limp and curled, conveying defeat. A smattering of grey in his pubic hair.

God he misses the Viagra-free erection. What a luxury it had been, and how little he had appreciated it. The delightful frequency of adolescent tumescence. He wishes he could tell young boys what a gift it is to get hard without even wanting to.

He stares at the kombucha bottle. ‘Unpasteurised, unadulterated, wild-ginger sparkle’ reads the label. He thinks of a redhead he once bedded who scratched his back in the grip of passion, leaving shallow rivulets of pink.

He misses coffee.

Patsy, his wife, is always trying to make him healthier than he wants to be. The other day, at breakfast, she had presented him with two amber-coloured pills, swollen like maggots.

‘What are these?’ he’d asked.

‘Omega-3 complex.’

‘Oh darling. Don’t you think I’ve got enough complexes already?’

She laughed. Patsy thought all his jokes were funny. It was one of the reasons he had married her.