DISHWASHER

With his bath-bomb dry eyes, Steve tracks the glass collector as far as the bar. There the member of staff plants their glasses down on the draining rack, streaked with tiger-stripe ale froth.

Tony checks his phone and gasps,

‘I’m still knackered, mate. She’s almost sleeping through, but I don’t feel like it.’

‘Wait till she’s got legs, Tony. Fuck me. Game changer.’ Steve shakes his head, but cannot hide the knowing smirk. 

Retrieving the burned, solitary chip from the bowl on the table and crunching down on it, Tony silently mouths something but no words climb higher than his throat. He immediately regrets the chip and takes a greedy slurp of his pint. 

‘Telling you, it seemed like one minute they were they were cute little things that slept, screamed and shat, then they’re trying to pull the TV down, up over the neighbour’s fence, you name i-’

‘ALRIGHT! Alright, ‘kin’ ell pal, you getting off on this or what? I’m not daft. Sake!’

‘Nah, course you’re not, mate. Just giving you a heads up, that’s all. We caught our Luke piling into a dishwasher tablet one morning. Thought it was over. Lucky, we were. He brought most of it back up and that was it. Little fucker. I heard about someone else’s nipper doing that, ended up in a coma.’

 Tony can’t remove the taste of the carcinogens from his tongue. He looks at Steve and says, 

‘Bad that. We’ve got locks on everything and Denise has already started putting stuff out of reach. She’s well on it.’

‘Nah, give em half.’

They turn towards the gravelly drawl from the next table, where an older man downs the rest of his pint. The pub falls near-silent when Linda, the duty manager flicks off the TV sports news channel to close up.

‘Y’what mate?’ Says Steve, thinking he heard him right. Tony has one arm in his coat, a look of cynicism plowed into the middle of his collapsing face, unbelieving.

‘GIVE ‘EM HALF! You have to learn ‘em danger. Too fucking soft, kids, nowadays. No worse than that fizzy shit they all drink, couple o tablets.’

Tony is already halfway out the door, his jacket flailing behind him. Steve bursts out laughing, smacks the table, and says,

‘Different sort of tablet, we’re on about, mate! Better catch him up.’ As he’s one foot out of the door, the man growls,

‘Good parenting requires trust!’