“Do you want to talk about your ill dad right now?”
“Not really,” I replied, bristling at his pettiness.
“Good,” he said, turning off the lamp on his side of the bed. “Let’s talk about it another time then.”
“Fine,” I said, turning the lamp on my side off.
“You didn’t seem yourself tonight,” he said, turning me on to my side and wrapping his arms around my stomach. “You seemed very eager to please.”
“Is that not who I normally am?”
“You never seem keen to please, no, it’s what I like about you.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t give me a subtle warning that I’ve got to behave exactly as you’d like me to otherwise you’ll go off me.”
“Nina, come on, I’m not saying that.”
“It was an awkward situation for everyone.”
“No, I know, I know,” he whispered, lifting my hair to kiss the back of my neck. “As long as you’re fine.”
“I am fine,” I said, touching his feet with mine.
* * *
—
I couldn’t sleep that night. I stared at the magnolia paint of my bedroom wall and felt the heavy weight of Max’s body holding on to me. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the gaps I’d seen over the course of the evening. Between Joe and Max. Between who Max was with me and who he was with other people. Between the cottage in Somerset where I thought Max’s dad lived and the flat in Australia where he actually lived. Between who I was with Joe and who I was with Max. As I tried and failed to get to sleep, I imagined all the gaps filling up with dark, sticky, tar-like liquid and it made me feel inexplicably ashamed. I wondered if Joe and Max had thought of all the gaps in their lives and relationships and selves as they had fallen asleep that night. I wondered it as Max snored, peacefully and loudly, in my ear.
Dad answered the door. He was wearing a pale-blue shirt underneath the navy cable-knit cardigan with brown buttons that I bought him for his seventieth. He only wore two jumpers on rotation per decade. His face was pale and the skin under his eyes looked thinner and lightly marbled with berry-coloured capillaries. Or maybe they’d always been there, I was just studying his face harder these days, looking for the tiniest marks of deterioration.
“Dad!” I said, giving him a big hug.
“Oh, Bean,” he said, sighing into my hair as he hugged me. “It’s been quite a week here.”
“Where’s Mum?”
“She’s out,” he said, walking towards the kitchen. “She’s not speaking to me.”
“Have you two had an argument?”
“I’m afraid so,” he said. “This morning. A right barney.”
“What happened?”
Dad stood over the dining table, which was covered in the silverware that was only taken out for Christmas. There was an open bottle of polish.
“Why are you doing all this? Have you got people coming over?”
“No, we’re meant to be going away,” he said, rubbing the prongs of a fork with the cloth. “That’s what the argument was about this morning.”
“Where are you going?”
“An opportunity has come up to go to Guinea.”
“Guinea?” I said, dismayed that Mum hadn’t brought this up on one of our many weekly phone calls in which she would list everything she had bought from Sainsbury’s and how she intended to use it all.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“We are meant to be setting sail through the seas next week, but Mum has other ideas.”
“Is it, like, a cruise?”
“Yes.”
“Is it the same company you guys and Gloria and Brian used when you went to the Canary Islands?”
“No, no, Gloria and Brian aren’t coming,” he said. “God, that’d be a sight. No, just your mother and I. It’s me they want really, I’d be happy to go on my own.”
“But Mum doesn’t want to go?”
“No, she thinks it’s too dangerous and she’s worried about the weather.”
“Well, that’s a fair enough concern,” I said. “Maybe you can go at a later date.”
“No, it has to be next week, even if there’s a storm.”
“What are you doing with the silver?”
“We’ll need it,” he said. “For the trip.”
“I’m sure they have their own cutlery on board.”
“No, no, not for eating,” he said, laughing at my suggestion. “For selling! Why pass up the chance for your mother and I to be merchants at last?”
Why pass up the chance for your mother and I to be merchants at last? Only Dad could come out with a sentence like that and it be unclear whether it was factual or fantastical. Nearly everything about my dad was still utterly recognizable to me—the East End edges of his vowels, the softness of his voice, his laugh, his vocabulary voluminous with the low-key language of chit-chat-with-the-neighbour (“a right barney”) and poetic meanderings (“setting sail through the seas”). I had read over and over again when researching Dad’s condition that what loved ones of sufferers experience is a sense of living grief—that the person you knew fades into an unrecognizable state. But I, so far, had found the opposite to be true in his case. It’s what made the reality of his eventual fate even more difficult to process. His illness was making his personality more technicolour—more eccentric and exaggerated—than it had been before, rather than giving him an entirely different one. He was Dad concentrated—like a human stock cube—stronger, undiluted, boiled down, less filtered. He was harder to have a relationship or even a conversation with, but he was definitely still there. At times it felt like the trueness of his self was emerging more than it ever had.
I heard a car pull up outside the house and I went to the front door. Mum was getting out of Gloria’s silver Toyota (every car in the North London suburbs was this shade—the roads looking down from outer space would be gilded with silver). Gloria saw me standing at the door and waved. I waved back. Mum was carrying a rolled-up yoga mat and wearing a lilac tracksuit.
“Bye, Glor!” she shouted as she walked away from the car. “I’ll see you at Mingle and Mindfulness.”
“Bye, Mandy!”
Mum approached me and gave me an exacting and prissy kiss on the cheek.
“Is that really catching on?”
“Yes.”
“Everyone is fine with suddenly calling you Mandy?”
“No one has a problem with it other than you.”
“What’s Mingle and Mindfulness?”
“Exactly what it sounds like,” she said, walking past me and going upstairs. I followed her to her bedroom. “Take the mickey all you like, Nina,” she said, sitting on the edge of her bed and taking off her trainers as I stood by the wall watching her. “It’s not going to embarrass me.”
“Sorry, I’m not taking the mickey.”
“Where’s Dad?”
“Downstairs. He said you had an argument.”
“Oh, it wasn’t an argument, it was just a tiff,” she said, moving to her vanity table, where she reapplied her gold jewellery.
“About a cruise or something?”
“A cruise?” she said, her face contorting in confusion.
“What was it about?” I asked.
“All I asked was for him to be a little less abrasive when we’re out and about at social occasions.”
“He’s the least abrasive man alive, what do you mean?”
“We went for lunch at Gloria and Brian’s last weekend and halfway through the meal he stood up to go to the loo, then just didn’t come back.”
“Where did he go?”
“We found him walking around their cul-de-sac half an hour later.”
“Right, and what else?”
“We were at a drinks party last night and he was rude to
an acquaintance of ours in conversation, then sat in the hallway on a chair with his coat on for the rest of the night, making it obvious he wanted to go home. I was mortified.”
“Okay,” I said. “Do you remember what triggered it?”
“It was just normal conversation.”
“Yes, but do you remember exactly what was being spoken about in both instances?” Mum thought for a moment with a frown—once again annoyed that I was using interrogation rather than tirade to try to solve the problem.
“At lunch, we were talking about Picasso, I think,” she said. “Yes, that’s right, Brian had been watching a programme the night before about Picasso.”
“And what about at the party last night?”
“The man asked Bill what his favourite texts on the syllabus were when he was an English teacher.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said, ‘Mind your own bloody business,’ and walked off.”
“Right,” I said, trying hard not to laugh at the thought of Dad the social anarchist in a cream-carpeted living room—the Punk of Pinner. “It’s completely obvious to me what’s happening here. Dad loves talking about art and he loves talking about books—he’s so well informed on both of those subjects, but—”
“Nina—”
“Mum, please. Just listen to me, I’m not having a go at you, I’m trying to understand him.” Her mouth tightened and she turned from the mirror to speak to me rather than my reflection. “I think Dad is at a stage where he’s aware that something isn’t right in himself, but he doesn’t know what it is. He’s pushing people away and isolating himself as self-protection. Think about who he is—he would prefer people to think he’s rude rather than stupid.” Mum stayed quiet, fiddling with the rings stacked on her wedding finger. “He’s currently downstairs polishing all the silver, by the way.”
She laughed weakly and closed her eyes in an expression that looked something like tiredness. It was the first small, visible sign of defeat I had seen in her for months. “A perk at last.”
“You know, there are so many ways we can get some support,” I said. “I’ve already started looking at how we could get a bit of help or advice—”
“I can’t think about this now,” she said brightly and suddenly, turning back towards the mirror. “Tell me how you are.”
“I’m great,” I replied, knowing not to push her any further today. “I’ve got proofs of my new book for you in my bag.”
“Oh, I can’t wait to see them!”
“And I’m in a relationship.”
“NO!” she said, turning back to face me. “With who?”
“A lovely man called Max.”
“What does he do?!”
“He’s an accountant,” I said. “But he sort of hates it.”
“Accountant, that’s a good job, very decent job,” she said, assessing everything I said out loud that should be assessed in her head. “Where did you meet?”
“On a dating app.”
“Sarah’s daughter met her husband on a dating app. He’s a personal trainer, runs marathons. No shame in it.”
“I didn’t say there was any shame in it.”
“We’ve got to meet him. When are we all having dinner?”
“Would you like to?”
“Yes!” she squeaked. “Of course!”
“You don’t think Dad might find a new person a bit overwhelming?”
“No, no, he’ll be fine, leave him to me.”
“Great,” I said. “Right, do you like condensed milk?”
“Why?”
“I’ve got a load of it going spare, so I’ve brought a few tins here on the off-chance you’d like some.”
“Is this for one of your blogs?”
“Mum,” I said, already hating myself for the fragility of my ego, “I haven’t written blogs since I was in my mid-twenties. I’m working directly with the brand to come up with recipe ideas and help advertise the product.”
“All right, all right. No thank you, I won’t eat it. Your dad will. I remember Grandma Nelly saying that condensed milk on bananas was his favourite thing to eat when he was a kid.”
I cut up a banana and put it into a bowl along with half a tin of condensed milk and took it in to Dad, who was still happily clattering about as he polished the silverware.
“Here you go,” I said. “Unorthodox elevenses.”
He put down the polish and cloth and examined the bowl. He took a spoon from me and cautiously ate a mouthful. As he chewed, his face animated with recognition.
“I ate this with Uncle Nick when we were kids. Mum would give it to us as a treat, she used it as a bribe to make us do chores around the house. Once, I drank a whole tin thinking she wouldn’t notice. I got walloped,” he said. “Christ, it’s delicious. I’m amazed I have any teeth left in my mouth.”
“Good!” I said, delighted that he was speaking of coherent, verifiable memories. “I’ve left a load of tins for you to get through.”
I walked into the living room and saw, splayed on his armchair, a copy of Robinson Crusoe opened in its middle. The earlier conversation we’d had suddenly made sense, and I felt both unsettled and relieved. I was glad that, of all the books on his shelf, he had chosen to read that one that morning. I was glad he was about to set sail to Guinea on a swashbuckling adventure. If I were him, that’s exactly where I’d like to be as well. I’d want to go as far away as possible.
* * *
—
When I got home, I knocked on Angelo’s door, like I had fruitlessly every day since our argument from my bedroom window in the middle of the night. This time, however, he answered. His hair and face looked creased and turned over, like an unmade bed. He squinted and rubbed his eyes, adjusting to the hallway light. The lamps were off in his flat and the curtains were drawn. It was four o’clock in the afternoon.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi?” he said.
“I wanted to talk about the other night.” He stared at me—sand-specks of sleep in his eyes, his full lips even poutier than usual from just-awoken dehydration. I waited for him to speak before relenting. “Right, I’ll start then. How you behaved the other night was not cool.” Not cool. There I was again, in the interest of neighbourly diplomacy, employing parlance I had only ever used when I was a teacher who’d lost control of a GCSE classroom.
“When you shout at me like an animal?” he said, picking the yellow crumbs from his tear ducts.
“I didn’t shout at you, I very politely asked you a good few times to stop talking so loudly at half twelve on a weeknight.”
“If you wanted us to be quiet, you should have come down and knock on the door.”
“You never answer your door.”
“Do not shout at me.”
My long-contained frustration was seeping out of me and making my skin tingle. “Stop saying that, it doesn’t make any sense. You were the one who was shouting.”
“No I wasn’t.”
“Can you not just apologize? That’s all I need. Then we can move on.”
“No,” he said, his face expressionless.
“What?”
“No,” he bleated as he closed his front door.
* * *
—
Max and I went for dinner that night—I was reviewing a newly opened pub and I took him with me. Now, more than ever, I needed the secret door of his company to take me to the fantastical place it had been taking me from our very first date.
“Let me look at that cover again,” he said at the bottom of our second bottle of wine, reaching for my phone and bringing up the photo of The Tiny Kitchen’s book jacket. “I can’t wait to see it on the shelves. You clever, clever thing.” I felt myself lean towards his praise like it was the warmth of sunlight. I realized how much I had wanted Dad to s
ay the same thing—I had decided to keep the proofs in my bag earlier that day and give him a copy another time. I hadn’t wanted to cause any more confusion.
“I’ve had an idea,” I said, placing my glass on the bar. “For my next book. I haven’t told anyone yet and I wanted to tell you first because I know you’ll tell me if it’s bad or not.”
Max straightened his spine and shook his face to sober himself up. “I’m here. Pitch.”
“So, I saw my dad today, who was in a pretty disorientated mood. Getting things confused, imagining conversations, mixing up things that had happened with things that he’d read. I made him something to eat because I had a bunch of condensed milk with me—you know I’m doing that weird job with the condensed milk company?” He nodded. “So I made him condensed milk and bananas, because Mum said it was his favourite when he was a kid. And honestly, when he ate it, it was like a switch to his old self had been flicked back on. It was brief, but so immediate.”
“How interesting.”
“It made me think about food and memory. How much our eating habits are dictated by nostalgia. Looking into what it is about taste and smell that sparks involuntary memory. It would be a book of recipes, stories and science. Viv wanted me to write something human. I can’t think of a more human way into food than talking about how it connects us to our past. What do you think?”
He pushed my wayward fringe wings to the side of my face. “I think it’s great.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. I love it. Proustian Cooking with Nina Dean,” he said. “No, that needs work.”
“And I’ll interview psychologists about why exactly certain tastes are linked to certain feelings.”
“And you should research what the comfort foods are of every generation.”
“Exactly—the historical context of why post-rationing war babies love bananas. And why our generation love hamburgers.”
“Free toy with a Happy Meal.”
“Free toy with a Happy Meal,” I agreed.
“It’s brilliant,” he said, leaning into me like something he wanted a bite of. “You’re brilliant.”
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