what comes after Christmas.

Carl sucked on his teeth but didn’t say anything when the camper van parked in their street. The neighbours would squabble about it soon enough. Moaning about parking spaces. And about how big it was and how much room it took up. How expensive it was. With a satellite dish tracking system and all the mod-cons. Dr Fleming could easily have bought one of the houses in the street and have cash left over to park wherever he liked.

Because of who he was, nobody would complain directly to him. He owned the big house on the hill. And there seemed to Carl plenty of room inside his complex—not that he’d ever been inside but he’d heard talk about how expensive and wonderful it all was from other workers—to park his van.  

Live and let life was Carl’s motto. He’d met Dr Fleming once when nobody else was about and the birds were just beginning to stir. That was the time Carl liked best. He liked to roam through the wooded parks and the golf course, breathe in fresh air, let the kinks work the way out of his body. Sometimes he’d find a present, a bird feather or a special stone. He’d take them home and show them to Choma and their two girls. They used to love that kind of thing almost as much as him, but not as much lately as they’d grown some. The light in the girls’ eyes came from the phones and tablets they pressed to their noses. Carl didn’t understand that but accepted it was progress. His girls were like everybody else’s girls.

Dr Fleming was a big man. Well, compared to Carl, everybody was a big man. But he was well over six-foot. Broad, but not fat, with salt-and-pepper hair. He specialised in printing money by treating women for something they didn’t need.

Choma had explained it to him, but he hadn’t really been listening and it still made no sense to him.

He just knew what he’d seen. A big man whittling down a lovely little old dog with a stick, while the dog whined and fretted and tried to get away. But Dr Fleming held the lead tight.

Carl studied the clouds and the trees and the dark green swelling, not for the threat of storms but because they lifted him too and set him down. The dog’s suffering was to him like a drowning. Despite their differences in size, he took the stick off Dr Fleming and beat him about the head and back with it.   

The miracle wasn’t this happened. But how quickly it took place and all without exchanging a word. Carl took the dog home with him and called it Dusty.

Dust could get in everywhere, including his heart. It grieved Carl greatly that he no longer had a companion for his morning walks when Dusty died. But he knew that was the nature of things and he’d been let loose on the great long barking run, one last time.

Dr Fleming had not come back for his dog, not then and not now. In his innocence and experience, Carl sought his wife’s kind face and her soft hands for solace.

Adira, although a year younger than Naama, held sway in every way. She held the keys clenched in her fist as she bundled into the kitchen, her big sister at her back.

‘A man gave us this,’ she said.

Later, Carl wondered if it was cowardice not to take the van keys off her and take them back. Or some kind of perversity in getting a shot of a shiny toy on eight wheels he’d never be able to afford. Or was it some kind of hospitality he had to accept as graciously as he could, even though he couldn’t stomach it?

It was all of those things and none of those things. Because when he opened his mouth to protest, soft little Naama stuffed the van documents, with his name and two sets of keys, into his hand to silence his protest or questions. It seemed a low blow to even mention how much it would cost to insure such a vehicle.

‘It’s done,’ Chooma waved a folder in the air.

She knew him too well. She knew how he’d worry himself into a fix. That he could fix anything mechanical, which was a blessing because all their cars began by being only a collection of loosely assumed parts. He could calculate the fuel needed for each trip to within a single digit and drop of diesel. But to her husband, writing was like moths flapping in his stomach, it made him nervous and made no sense. Numbers were his friends.

It did not hit him how clumsy he’d been getting up from the table. How suddenly he’d left that dignified part of him behind. How he’d missed his chance to stop it.

They’d clattered into the van together. And stared with awed fascination. Feeling even the metallic walls with the tips of their fingers, like nursery kids trying to describe the contours of the fittings in their new world. And explain them to each other with gulping laughter, as if that would make them disappear.

   Carl turned his head to listen to what he knew. When he turned the key in the ignition barrel, the engine crooned.  The ergonomic driver’s seat hugged him. He moved the satellite dish one way, then the other. The big screen behind him writhed like lightning and came to life with loud American voices that sold the dream. He was an uncrowned king sitting high as a periscope in his mobile home, sat-navigation, and a full tank. The world was his to navigate. It was a small thing. A petty thing. How uneasy he was when he rounded the first corner and took the first hill beside the janitor’s old house. It was like coming into the open and out of a dream.