ATDTDA (13): Stiff at work, 366-367

[Paul Nightingale]

Back with Stray Reef announces his departure. Jesse is referenced four
times, three times as an obstacle of sorts, as "the screaming baby", when
Stray says she can leave him with her sister, and when Reef cites past
experience ("We've always found our way back together") to help persuade
her, before asking what's changed ("Baby, sure, but what else?"). And then
at the end , asleep, when Reef "kiss[es] him real gently on his head before
he went out the door".  These appearances punctuate exchanges between Reef
and Stray. She claims he will "leave [her] here alone, with winter on the
way, and the screaming baby", before insisting that her sister will help
out. This is what their improvised relationship has come to: "parlour-wife
pleading" juxtaposed to his earlier reference to "a regular life" (361). The
passage that describes their life together before Jesse's birth (359-360) is
apposite, not least "liv[ing] on the edge of that old day-to-day question"
(360). For Reef and Stray the child has changed everything: "Reef might not
be able to pull off successfully the guise of a respectable, wife-and-kids
working stiff the way Webb had. Meant he'd either have to level with Stray
or pretend to be up to his old rounder ways ." etc (218).