by Jon McGregor
He’d left for a meeting at the church then, and the American woman had gone back to her room, and she must have already started packing because by the time Catherine had been to the bathroom and washed her hair the woman had disappeared: the room empty, the sheets stripped, the front door key left on the bare mattress with a note.
She stood in the empty room for a few moments, feeling the blessed silence settle around her, and then she went downstairs to set the table for lunch. She scrubbed and pierced two jacket potatoes and put them in the oven. She washed and drained and mixed a salad, and made a dressing. She looked in the kitchen drawer where they kept their bank cards and passports and housekeeping money, and made sure everything was there. She checked that Michael’s new laptop computer was still in the study. She ran the vacuum cleaner around the spare room, emptied the wastepaper basket of yoghurt pots, straightened the rug. She took the crumpled sheets downstairs and put them in the washing machine, and when she went back upstairs she checked through her jewellery box.
It wasn’t that she’d thought the woman would turn out to be a thief. Not really. She just wanted some rational explanation for the way she’d felt about her, the suspicion and unease which she couldn’t bring herself to admit might have been unfounded.
It felt like a long time before Michael got home. He started telling her about the meeting almost before he’d opened the door, tugging off his shoes in the hallway and rattling on about misplaced funding priorities and a dean who cared more about church buildings than putting the gospel into practice. She waited for him to finish talking before telling him that the woman was gone, by which time they were sitting at the table with a dressed salad and two steaming baked potatoes between them. She showed him the note the woman had left, unfolding it from her cardigan pocket and smoothing it out on the table. THANK YOU, it said, SEE YOU AGAIN SOON. He smiled, and nodded, and draped a napkin across his lap.
‘What do you think she means?’ Catherine asked. ‘See you again soon?’
‘Oh, I’m sure it’s nothing. Just a figure of speech.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’ He straightened the napkin on his lap, and fiddled with his knife and fork. ‘Crisis over,’ he said. He poured out two glasses of water. ‘Did she take anything?’
‘No. I looked, but I don’t think anything’s missing.’
‘Did she say anything when she left, besides the note?’
‘No, nothing.’
They shut their eyes and said a prayer of thanks and cut open their potatoes, the steam rushing out into the room and filling the space between them for a moment while they each waited for the other to reach for the butter and the salt.
‘Well,’ he said. He was almost smiling. He felt vindicated, she supposed. ‘I imagine that’s that then.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I imagine you do.’
The Chicken And The Egg
Stickford
It’s not really something he likes talking about, to be fair. It is, in actual fact, quite a difficult thing to discuss. But it’s becoming more of an issue. It’s having knock-on effects. What it is, he has this fear of breaking open eggs. It’s a type of phobia. There doesn’t seem to be a Latin name for it. He’s checked. But essentially he has this fear that he’ll one day break open an egg and find a little baby chicken foetus curled up inside. Dead. Occasionally he imagines it being just about alive – limply flopping is the phrase which comes to mind – but he’s pretty sure that’s just him being irrational.
He is in actual fact quite sure the whole thing’s irrational but he can’t get the idea out of his head. He knows something about poultry-farming methods; he’s been looking into it, and he knows that the chances of a fertilised and developed egg making its way into the retail chain are just about impossible. For starters if it was an egg from a battery-cage site then it stands to reason it wouldn’t be fertilised. Due to the cages, that would be. And even on the organic or free-range sites they do have these incredibly strict inspection regimes. It would be a failure of what he’s been reliably informed are very robust systems. Millions and millions of eggs are produced every single day.
It would only take one.
It started when he overheard a man in a café describing it actually happening to him. The man was the owner of the café. He was talking to a woman at the counter who was ordering breakfast. He told her that some years previously, when he was working in the kitchen, he’d broken an egg and found a baby chicken inside. He described it in quite some detail, was the thing: how perfectly formed the foetus had been, with feathers and everything, how there was mostly blood and membrane where the yolk should have been. He told the woman it had quite shaken him up and he’d been unable to cook with eggs from then on. The woman changed her mind about what she was ordering. It’s a conversation he can remember very clearly. There were certain shapes the man made with his hands while he was describing it all.
But when he knew it had got really bad was this one time when he was staying with his wife at a B&B. It was out in the country somewhere and the landlady kept chickens in the garden. His wife had liked that. She’d thought it was very authentic. Only he’d noticed that there was a rooster in with the hens, and then at breakfast he’d found these dark-red specks in the yolks of their fried eggs. Tiny specks, to be fair, about the size of a pencil mark made with a very sharp pencil. But he’d understood what they were. And the trouble was, he hadn’t wanted to say anything to his wife, and he hadn’t wanted to offend the landlady, and so he’d gone ahead and eaten the bloody things. And then what was awful was that they were absolutely delicious: they were literally the freshest eggs he’d ever eaten and they really were very good. Creamy and soft. Light. But at the same time he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the tiny dark-red specks. It was as if his imagination was a microscope, was the way he thought of it. And after that the whole trouble with eggs got serious, was what happened, was how he recalls it happening.
It’s the anticipation which gets him. Even just thinking about it. Even nowhere near a cooking situation or an eating situation, just thinking about it at some other moment. The anticipation is what really does the damage. If he does happen to find himself in an unavoidable egg-breaking scenario, the tension is almost literally palpable. His stomach clenches, and his face more or less prepares to express disgust. He’ll stand there with the egg held out at arm’s length, like what it might do is explode. He’ll close his eyes, and brace himself, and crack it into the bowl or the pan, and then once his eyes are shut what he has to do is brace himself all over again to open his eyes and look.
If it could just happen, is what he’s started to think. If he could get it over and done with. Then he wouldn’t be all worked up with the anticipation. The reality of it might not even be all that bad, considering. Considering all the things he’s imagined.
Sometimes he’s imagined it happening with a hard-boiled egg. Picking off the shell, getting the salt and pepper ready, and then cutting through the firm white of the egg and making the discovery. On a picnic. On a train. At a business meeting. Or even worse, having served the hard-boiled eggs to a guest. In a salad, such as perhaps a salad of cos lettuce and rocket, with a dusting of paprika across the eggs, some quarters of very ripe tomato, parmesan shavings, an olive-oil dressing. The eggs still just warm enough to release the fragrance of the olive oil. The guest being the first to cut into the egg.
Or also he’s imagined it happening whilst preparing a fried-egg sandwich. The oil heating in the cast-iron pan. The thick slices of white bread lightly toasted, buttered, and dressed with tomato ketchup. The tea brewing in the pot. Breaking the egg into the pan, looking away for one moment to grab the salt and pepper and then turning back to find it there just as the white begins crackling at the edges. And what would happen then would be the heat having the effect of making the foetal chicken turn over in the pan, or just twitch slightly. It would create an illusion, is what he thinks.
And, yes, he under
stands there are effective treatments available for phobias. He has made some discreet enquiries, is how he knows this, and how he knows these treatments to be mostly based around a programme of gradually increasing exposure and reassurance. But then what it comes down to is he can’t imagine how this would be any help at all. In his particular situation. Which isn’t something he likes to discuss, to be fair. He has cracked open plenty of eggs in the course of his life, so whatever it is he needs to do it’s not increasing his exposure, gradually or otherwise. Reassurance would be another thing. All these eggs he’s cracked over the years and if anything the phobia is only getting worse. What he thinks is this is only logical. If the odds of it actually happening are one-in-a-million or one-in-a-billion or however high they are, then what follows is that with every egg he safely cracks open the probability actually increases. He’s not sure if the statistical reasoning of this is entirely sound. But he still can’t help feeling that every egg brings him closer to the thing he dreads.
So he did tell his wife about all this, eventually. He had to tell someone, was the conclusion he came to. It didn’t help matters, as it turned out. She was what he would call notably unsympathetic. It could be said to have brought things to a head between them. There was some mockery. There was a poorly executed hoax involving a child’s toy. Also, a man with whom he was vaguely acquainted at work, a man who was later identified as a co-respondent in the subsequent divorce proceedings, made a barely audible clucking noise as they stood together in the canteen line.
He hasn’t actually discussed it with anyone else since then, to be fair. He’s not at all sure it would help.
New York
New York
Okay. So there are these guys, these two guys, and they’re standing by the side of the road, waiting for something. What are they waiting for? We don’t know what they’re waiting for. Not yet. That’s part of the suspense, okay? Okay. So they’re standing there, they’re looking kinda tired, kinda downbeat, y’know? Yeah. Regular-looking, I guess. The one guy, he’s older, he’s sorta late-forties, early-fifties, getting a little thin on top. Big mustache. No, forget the mustache. But he hasn’t had, like, a shave, not in a while. Okay. And the other guy, he’s a bit younger, he’s in his twenties, he’s kinda good-looking but rough around the edges with it, y’know? Also, they’ve both got this kinda old European look about them, nothing obvious, not the mustache or anything but just enough that when they start talking we ain’t surprised to hear they got these sorta like thick Polish accents, y’know? You with me? Right. Only they can’t both have the Polish accents, otherwise how come they’d be talking in English at all, right? So let’s say the younger guy it’s more of a Slovak accent or something. I don’t know. They got to have different enough accents that we accept them talking English when it’s obvious they don’t talk all that much English, y’know what I’m saying?
I told you already, New York. It’s set in New York. Right.
So these two guys, they’re standing by the side of the road and they’re waiting for something. We don’t know what they’re waiting for but they’re waiting. That’s the fucken suspense right there. They both got bags with them, these little plastic dime-store bags, with like a lunch-sack and a flask of coffee and maybe some work-clothes in them. So they look like working men, okay? They look like they’ve been working all day. So we think maybe they’ve finished work and they’re waiting for a ride home. And the camera pulls back a bit and we see a bunch of people waiting with them, same type of people, same clothes, bags, whatever, so we get a little context. But it’s clear that these two guys are, y’know, the guys. And it’s clear they’ve been waiting a while, because as the camera pulls back a bit more and we see the fields and farmhouses in the background we can see it’s getting near that kinda summertime dusk that comes real late in the evening, like nine or ten in the evening. Five to ten, whatever. Fucken magic hour.
Fields and farmhouses, right. Yeah, like I said already: New York, Lincolnshire. Right. Lincolnshire, England. They got the original New York right there. Little two-bit place. Coupla houses and a shop and a long straight road that goes all the way through to Boston. Right, Boston, Lincolnshire. I told you this already. Flat fields. Bitter wind. Crows and shit in the trees. The works.
So. Anyway. We got these establishing shots: our two guys, the wider group, the empty fields, the skies and all that, right? So then we give it some of that testing-the-audience’s-patience European-style time-passing, y’know what I mean, all that with the first he scratches his eyebrow, then he sniffs, then a tractor goes past real slow. All that. To establish the mood! To make sure the audience knows these guys are tired as all shit, and get them wondering what’s with the waiting. Okay? And then we’re into the dialogue. This piece is all about the dialogue, you with me? So first up the one guy goes, ‘It’s cold.’ Right? And we just had a location caption saying, ‘New York,’ so we’re kinda making the connection ourselves and hearing it as ‘New York, it’s cold.’ Right. You with me? That ring any bells for you? Okay, so then they talk about the weather a little bit, and what time it is, and then they start bitching about how the supervisor or whoever is taking so long coming back with the mini-van to pick them all up and take them back to their place of residence. And the one guy says something about him never being early. And the other guy says how he’s always late. You getting this yet? No? They’re waiting for their van, right? Van, man, whatever. We get right into the dialogue and they’re all talking about how hard the day’s been, like picking whatever it is they’ve been picking in the field all day long, like cabbages or something, I don’t know, onions and celery and all that, some real back-breaking dawn-till-dusk shit and now the supervisor has left them stranded while he’s all off down in the village or whatever. The village. Right. Exactly. You’re with me now. So they’re talking about how they’re sick of it, the working conditions, the money, all that. And the audience get to wondering about the dialogue, like how come it sounds so awkward and disjointed, and like, all right already so these guys are foreign but that don’t really explain it, there’s something else going on, something kinda funny, and some of these lines sound kinda familiar. All right. So the younger guy’s doing most of the bitching, but the older guy, he’s the wise one, he’s giving it all that you-do-what-you-gotta-do, and the younger guy’s not having it so he gets to saying that’s it, that’s enough already, he’s out of there, he’s leaving today. And then the audience are like, right, now we get it. Okay? You with me? They don’t got no words of their own, they’re just saying all this second-hand shit they heard on the radio, and they’re making us think of the new New York, the one we all know about, the one which is, like, built on immigration and exploitation and the hard fucken labour of the huddled masses like our two friends right here.
Fucken I don’t know, Wiktor and Andrej. Whatever. Right.
So they keep talking, and we’re still with the Euro-style fucken longueurs and like meaningful glances and shit. Y’know. Old man rides past on a bike, real slow. Birds rise up from the trees and circle round and settle back in the trees. All these long pauses, like, signifying the passing of time. Because they’re waiting for this ride back to their residence, right? And the one guy, he’s still talking about how he’s sick of this work and the money and everything and he’d rather be back home, and the older guy’s all, like: there’s no work back home! What would you do? You’d be walking the streets drinking knock-off vodka and getting ripped off by the cops! Y’know, basically the same shit migrant workers have always talked about. But still, everything they’re saying is like lines we’ve heard before, y’know? One of them says he’s going if he has to walk, the other one says something about it not being that far, the one of them goes he came looking for a job. All that. And we’re taking it like a game now, this is we the audience I mean, like trying to recognise shit. But then we’re thinking, well, hold up now, this don’t make no sense. How come these guys don’t got their own words for these th
ings? How come they’re talking all this borrowed shit? Right? So then we get to thinking, wait a minute now, so maybe the joke’s on us. Maybe we’re hearing all this second-hand clichéd stuff because we can’t really hear what these guys are saying. We see them standing at the side of the road and we’re like, right, yeah, we know this one, migrant labourers, tired and weary, getting paid shit, getting ripped off, taking it in turns to sleep in the same bed, sending money home, the engine room of the modern economy, all that headline crap. But we don’t know shit. We really don’t know. So if we were to stop and listen to them talking for a minute, we wouldn’t even hear what they were saying anyhow. This is the fucken point which is being elaborated before the audience’s very eyes, y’know?
I mean, talk to me about appropriation, right? The city don’t even got its own name! And here are these two guys standing in the original New York! Y’know?
Right. Anyway. So. Meanwhile it’s pretty much dark, and our two guys are still standing there. They smoke a cigarette, they drink a bit of coffee from the flask, some kids drive past and shout some kinda nasty shit at them. All that. And while we’re getting the hang of all this the-joke’s-on-us kinda stuff, we don’t hardly notice that they’ve started talking about some friend of theirs, this other migrant guy who’s died in a like tragic fire at some other place of residence, and how are they going to get to the funeral, and what clothes can they wear, and does anyone even know how to get word to his family. Right? And by the time we do notice, they’ve quit talking about it anyway. So that’s another twist for the audience right there: how is it we were too busy thinking about the meaning of what’s going on with the dialogue to even notice that these two guys were having some individualistic shitty fucken narrative in their own lives? Which just goes to prove the point, right? Well, it do, don’t it?