It is early morning, the low sun is glinting off wet tarmac. I’m in a coffee shop next to a petrol station, across the car park from the Travelodge where I spent the night, somewhere just north of Brighton. The middle leg of the band’s autumn tour is complete, and I’m on my way home. But first I want coffee.
“Can I take a name?” says the woman behind the counter.
“Um, yeah,” I say. “It’s Tim.”
“Great!” she says. “Can I get you anything else today, Tim?”
It’s always mildly humiliating to have a name like Tim used on you. It sounds deliberately belittling even when that is not the person’s intention. But it’s always deliberate on my part: whenever I meet someone called Tim, I use their name as much as I can: “Hi, Tim! How are things, Tim? So tell me, Tim, what have you been up to, Tim?”
It feels good to offload a bit of that humiliation on to somebody else. It may sound callous, but in my experience everyone named Tim does this. If that sounds somehow disloyal, remember: there is no honour among Tims.
I shuffle my way along to stand with the other waiting customers. Everyone, including me, is looking at their phones. Behind the counter, a staff member approaches us with a cup in her hands.
“I’ve got a latte here for the lovely Tim!” she says.
Some days later, on a cold and rainy morning, I am drinking a latte I made myself, in my own kitchen, with the middle one sitting next to me. We are both silent, both staring at our laptops, and both holding our feet up in the air to stop the tortoise biting our toes. I’ve tried giving the tortoise some lettuce, but he’s ignored it in favour of rampaging between the chair legs in search of human flesh.
My wife walks in with the dog at her heels.
“Stop following me!” she shouts, turning around. “You’ve been fed!” The dog wanders to the far end of the kitchen and eats the tortoise’s lettuce.
“It’s dog school this afternoon,” my wife says. “That will teach you.”
“How’s dog school going?” I say.
“The results have been mixed,” my wife says. “On the one hand, she’s attentive and eager to please.”
“A swot,” I say.
“But then all the dogs were given a toy each for training purposes, and she immediately disembowelled hers in front of everyone.”
“Oh,” I say.
“It was funny,” my wife says. “No one else laughed.”
“I am never going to dog school,” I say.
“Did you have any plans at all today?” she says. “Either of you?”
“Work!” says the middle one, pointing at his screen.
“I was thinking I might have a bath,” I say. “I’m still acclimatising.”
“Acclimatising to what, exactly?” my wife says.
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“Home life,” I say. “Versus road life.”
“You’ve been home for four days,” she says.
“It’s a whole different mindset,” I say, standing up. “It takes time to OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT?”
At my feet there is a hairy stump lying curled on the ground.
“That’s Monkey’s arm,” my wife says. She explains that Monkey was the beloved toy of a friend’s dog, but after a brief encounter with our dog Monkey is now an amputee.
“So she was given the arm, as a prize?” I say.
“What are they gonna do with it?” my wife says.
“They could sew it back on,” I say.
“There’s not that much left of Monkey,” she says. The dog steps between us, picks up Monkey’s arm and walks out of the room.
“Bad dog,” I say.
“Baby steps,” my wife says.
“Ow!” says the middle one, as the tortoise bites down on his toe.
I go upstairs to run a bath. As I’m turning the tap I notice a man staring at me through the window, his eyes just over the top of the frosted lower sash. He has something heavy in his raised hand; a piece of metal. I back out of the bathroom, and go to find my wife in her office.
“The scaffolders are here, then,” I say.
“They’ve been here all morning,” she says. “Didn’t you hear them?”
I go out to my office shed, where I sit back in my chair and think: life was so much simpler back at the Travelodge. And at the coffee shop just across the car park, where everybody knew my name.
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