Page 19 of Break the Ice

‘Dippy what?’

‘Like soft-boiled.’

‘Oh, in the cute little cups with the toast sticks.’

‘The soldiers,’ she explains. I furrow my brow. ‘Because they’re all straight in a line like soldiers. Maybe that’s what I can do for the entire car ride, we can chat cultural differences, like I have no idea what a sophomore is – I’ve never understood that. You can clarify that for me so now I can watch all the high-school dramas and know.’

‘Second year, that’s literally all that means,’ I say.

‘Oh,’ she says, laughing. She suddenly pauses for a moment, raising a hand. ‘Hold up. Do you hear that?’

I lean forward, wondering if there’s something wrong with my engine. Until I realise what it is and we both turn around. The dog has finally stopped. ‘He looks so chilled,’ Phoebe says. ‘Maybe he’s tired himself out. There was only so much his vocal cords could take.’

She turns back and listens to the song playing. Then she turns it off, and the dog starts to howl again. She plays around with the stereo, turning down the volume, changing station and back again. It’s the song. He seems to quieten down when the song is playing.

‘Is this…’ she asks.

‘Stevie Wonder, “For Once in My Life”.’ Maybe it was all the loud Christmas rock music these British radio stations like to play. Maybe the doggy was rebelling.

‘The dog has taste.’

I smile. Indeed he has. ‘Is it the one song though? Can we try him out with a greatest hits selection? Hook up my phone to Bluetooth.’

‘We can try. You like Stevie?’ she asks the dog.

The dog barks.

‘That’s a good name for the dog,’ I say.

‘Stevie?’

‘Christmas Steve. Given the day and everything. I don’t think I can keep calling him Poochy.’

She laughs and puts a hand out so Steve can nuzzle into it. Steve the Wonder dog. It’s perfect. Now sit, be quiet, don’t pee on my back seat. Work out a way to keep Phoebe busy so she’ll stop talking at me.

NINE

PHOEBE

He’s very earnest. And very straight. It’s the projective geometry thing he’s got going on, the way he cleans his glasses and checks for spots, the way his trainers are super white like he might clean those too. He also doesn’t laugh at my stories and some of my stories are bloody brilliant so that’s frustrating. Still, super American, straight-down-the-line, always uses his ‘blinkers’, Joshua is going to get me to Devon, so what’s four, maybe five hours together? At least he has decent taste in music, and the dog seems to agree.

‘You need to pee when we tell you, Steve. This is important. You can’t pee in the car.’

Steve may have calmed down but he’s still not sure about how to make pee-pee. I have tried to explain the importance of scheduled toilet breaks but he looks up at me, still very confused by this white stuff on the ground.

‘Is it cold on your little paws? Do you need shoes?’ Do they do shoes for dogs? Maybe he can’t pee because it’s frozen in his little dog penis? I stick my leg in the air so he can understand what he needs to do, but he cocks his head to one side, clearly wondering what I’m doing. Maybe he needs to do a poo. Maybe I should squat?

‘What are you doing?’ Josh asks me, appearing with a cup of coffee.

‘I’m trying to model how he should be relieving himself. I don’t know how to train a dog but maybe it’s a case of see one, do one.’

He wrinkles his nose as a lady looks at us curiously.

‘Maybe you’d like to take over? Maybe it’s because he’s a boy – he needs you to show him,’ I say, handing the lead over. He pulls a face, clearly unimpressed. I’m not sure why. They are both boys, after all.

It’s been a slog to get down the motorway, so we’ve stopped in some place called Sunbury, which doesn’t have a services but has a big Tesco, and if there’s one thing Mr Americano needs to know it’s that big Tesco is everything. It beats Costco hands down. I only go to Costco with my sister and that’s so I can buy the giant hot dogs, because Lord knows what I’d do with thirty tins of tuna and forty doughnuts. We prop ourselves up against the car in a small corner of the car park, waiting for Steve to realise what he needs to do, watching as people flit in and out, trudging through the snow. It’s a strange mix of people panic-buying toilet paper and bottled water, turkeys and tinfoil all with an expression of sheer terror because they’ve left it until the day before Christmas to get things done.

‘I feel we should be somewhere more glamorous the day before Christmas,’ I say. To our left is the glow of the supermarket, to the right is the buzz of the motorway. It really is giving the best of the Greater London suburbs.