‘Oh, no thanks, I’m vegetarian,’ I tell him, as Melissa pulls a face.
‘But it’s chicken?’ He looks quizzical.
‘Yes.’
‘Does that count?’ Otto appeals around the table.
Inge shrugs.
It’s my turn to look around the table, in case I’m missing something here. No? Just me then?
‘Chicken is definitely still meat,’ I clarify for anyone who may be in doubt.
‘Oh. OK.’ Otto shrugs in an ‘it’s your loss’ sort of way, before adding, ‘But it’s dead anyway.’ He picks up the dish and jiggles it to demonstrate its contents are unlikely to fly off any time soon. ‘So, you know … might as well eat it.’
‘We don’t get too many vegetarian Vikings,’ Inge explains. ‘Though of course you’re welcome to eat what you like.’
Otto moves to set down the dish and I’m about to say, ‘Thanks, I will,’ when I catch a whiff of warm, succulent, bird.
Sweet Jesus, that smells good …
‘Fill your boots,’ Melissa adds mid-mouthful, boots decidedly full.
‘Would it help if we all looked the other way?’ Tricia asks. She does, just in case it would, while Melissa seizes a drumstick and drops it on my plate.
Childish, I think. But also … well, it’s there now …
I eat it. And it’s divine.
I am a very bad vegetarian indeed, I reprimand myself, looking around for a distraction to stave off the low-rent Greek chorus of ‘you suck, Alice Ray …’
Despite having set the table beautifully and behaved like alarmingly perfect Viking-angels, I’m gratified to see Inge’s children go to eat the chicken with their hands.
Ha! At least they haven’t got impeccable table manners, too!
But then our Viking leader catches me looking (aka ‘judging’) and nods at the scene ahead.
‘Viking etiquette,’ she explains mid-poultry. ‘Anything that flies can be eaten with your fingers.’ With faultless timing, the children take up their cutlery to skewer vegetables … and my ‘smug-parent’ bubble is burst, too.
Mette, Villum and Freja eat well, with no complaints and no requests for fish fingers or ketchup.
Magic, I think. Definitely magic.
Melissa tucks in appreciatively before coming back for more.
‘Seconds? Thirds?’ I note. She fixes me with a stony look.
‘I’m in training,’ she tells me through a mouthful of chicken, ‘for the berserking.’ My face clearly isn’t buying this. ‘What? I’m skinny in Texas,’ she adds, tearing flesh from a drumstick. I half expect her to throw it over her shoulder so am relieved (or am I disappointed?) when she places it neatly on the side of her plate.
‘Right. Good …’
After supper, Otto offers to supervise children’s teeth brushing and see them off to bed before taking his leave, enabling the rest of us to, as Tricia puts it, ‘get stuck in to the lady petrol’.
‘I thought you said that was gin?’ Margot asks innocently.
‘Gin, cava, beer – they all work,’ Tricia clarifies.
‘Oh.’
By my third bottle of locally brewed pilsner, I’m a little light-headed and find myself asking Inge, very seriously, ‘how she does it’.
This is a lie.
What I actually slur is something along the lines of, ‘I mean, I’m jus’ so tired ! All the time! And I complain. A lot. And you manage to do all the stay-at-home parenting and the PhD and all the animals and the cooking and the sword-forging and axe-throwing and animal rearing and the being so pretty all the time …’
Inge is modest enough to ignore the last observation and merely looks at me intently, asking, ‘Are you crazy?’
Yes! Very probably! I want to tell her: You should have seen me last month at the Premier Inn with the hands-free wine! I eat Big Macs in my Renault Espace and tell myself it’s not a ‘drive thru’, it’s a ‘car picnic’! Of course I’m crazy!
Fortunately, Inge’s question proves rhetorical.
‘The kids are only home because day care’s closed this week,’ Inge explains. ‘Some religious festival no one celebrates any more when everything shuts and we eat special cakes. We have a lot of those – days off and cakes. I wouldn’t want them here all the time!’ Then she adds as an afterthought, ‘Plus it’s good for them to socialise. School doesn’t start for ages so they learn through playing with other kids. Other than that … I like animals, I don’t mind cooking, and I do the PhD just for me. That’s the important thing. We have a saying here: you have to put your own oxygen mask on first.’
‘Is that a traditional Viking saying?’ my mouth asks before my brain can get in gear.
‘No: traditional Vikings didn’t have much use for oxygen masks. In fact they rarely flew anywhere,’ she replies patiently as I facepalm. ‘It’s a modern Viking saying. It means you have to look after yourself before you can look after anyone else.’
There is a strange, fleeting stillness all around as I take this in.
‘That’s it?’ I ask, finally, sceptical. ‘That’s the key to all … all this?’
‘That’s it,’ she tells me.
‘You’re not perfect … ?’ I slur. Like an idiot.
‘I’m not perfect. No one is, in the real world.’ She takes another swig of beer, sizing me up. ‘Listen, I’m not going to tell you that it’s easy – but I can tell you that it’s worth it. Really living, I mean.’ At this, she stands and pulls down the side of her Lycra leggings. ‘Look.’
Oh my! I wasn’t expecting this.
‘See? Here?’ She points to a filigree of silver-white lines festooning her upper thigh.
‘Wow, you have stretch marks …’
‘No, I have battle scars,’ she corrects me, running her fingers affectionately over the intricate birch tree patterns she carries with her always. ‘Battle scars from living. That’s what it’s all about.’
I think I love her …
I worry that I might not remember all this by morning in my current state. I wonder if she could put it all in an email for me …
The candle in front of us starts spitting and Inge, without breaking my gaze, reaches out a hand, snuffs out the errant flame with a flat palm.
She’s like a badass Viking pegacorn …fn3
Then she pulls up her trousers, pours the rest of her beer into a glass and downs the lot, adding with a nod to the bottle, ‘Remember: put your own oxygen mask on first.’
I want to. I do. But as a woman exhausted from producing a version of herself for other people for the past quarter of a century, I’m not entirely sure how to look after myself.
But I might just be in the best place to learn …
I decide, there and then, that I am going to soak up every pearl of wisdom this woman has to offer.
‘Who’s for dessert?’ she asks next.
Remembering Magnus and the berries, the four of us squirm slightly at the thought of our last foray into ‘afters’, until Inge reassures us that no berries have been plucked in the making of this pudding. ‘Otto made a tart!’
‘He bakes, too?’ Tricia claps a hand to her décolletage and then adds, ‘I’ll just let the hairs on my arms settle …’
‘It’s got a sea salt and chocolate on top and he’s experimenting with some orange zest in there too,’ Inge adds, setting it down on the table.
The results are good. Really good. And only slightly remind me of the whole Terry’s Chocolate Orange I ate to myself, through sobs, in the loo one Christmas. I have a sense memory of a combination of salty tears, cheap chocolate and synthetic orange. Mum had just told me that this would be her last Christmas but that I had to be strong – that we were to carry on as normal and I wasn’t to tell Melissa anything. So I communed with confectionary instead.
Ding-dong merrily on high …
I remember the incident vividly, in a way that I don’t often remember anything from this period. Or before. Or after, usually.
I was sad, I
realise, really, really sad. And I had no one to talk to.
If Charlotte had to go through that in a few years’ time, I would want to scoop her up in my arms and tell her that everything was going to be OK. That I would make it OK. But back then, no one did. No one came.
On the plus side, I think, as I swallow a lump in my throat, taking the last of the Proustian tart with it, half an hour’s hardcore crying and a solid 175 gram orb of chocolate mean that, technically, I invented the whole salted chocolate thing a good twenty years before anyone else …
There is a lull in conversation as we all digest, so Tricia, with an allergy to silence, starts giving Inge potted biographies of the assembled party.
‘Melissa and Alice are sisters,’ she’s telling Inge as I do some blinking in an attempt to compose myself. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry … ‘So what were the two of you like growing up?’ Tricia is asking me.
‘Oh, you know,’ I mumble so as not to catch my throat.
‘No, I don’t … ?’
‘Do you know?’ Melissa looks at me closely. ‘Alice has a mental block up until the age of eighteen,’ she tells the rest of the group.
‘That’s not quite true …’ I object.
‘Really? Prove it!’
I’d like to. I’d like to find a way to tell my sister everything I could never say before. But I don’t know how.
It’s been so long and it feels so alien and I don’t have the words … and it’s likely that I’m only feeling this way because of the beer … I look at the bottle in my hand and try to keep my brain from becoming woolly. Or at least, woollier. So I … just … can’t … Instead, I attempt to wrestle back control of the situation by reciting the physiological processes currently taking place in my body (because dentists = medics. Fact …).
… the beer is now travelling to my stomach and the alcohol is hitting my bloodstream – more quickly than usual because of the bubbles, increasing the pressure in my stomach …
I take another swig as Melissa offers up her version of our childhood.
‘And then there was the time I found a stray cat and brought it home, but Alice told Mum and I had to let it go again …’ Melissa says, looking at me like I’m some sort of child-catcher. So I drink again, automatically.
Damnit!
… my liver’s now converting the alcohol into different chemicals to break down the poison … with … with … I can’t quite remember. Oh great, now I’m losing my adult memory too … then I light on it. ‘Enzymes!’ I say out loud, delighted. ‘Sorry …’
‘I wouldn’t mind so much but she’d already said I couldn’t keep the stoat because of her “allergies”,’ Melissa goes on. This, I remember. ‘I asked Mum if Alice could move out instead, but she said no.’ My sister sniffs at the recollection. ‘I cried for days.’
‘Yeah, Daddy shot my first pony,’ Margot slurs. Tricia and Melissa look horrified. ‘By accident,’ she clarifies. ‘He got out of his field during grouse season. The pony, not my father …’
‘Whoa there, Nelly!’ Melissa slams down her beer and extends an arm to Margot. ‘Were you OK?’
‘Sad, of course.’ She nods, thanking my sister for her support. ‘But he got me another one.’
Inge looks bemused, but then becomes distracted by the lamb emerging sleepily from its cupboard. He nuzzles to get up on her lap and she acquiesces.
‘Yeah, I killed a cow once,’ Tricia adds.
‘What?’ Melissa turns on her. ‘How?’
‘Well, what it was, was, as you may or may not know, the Range Rover Sport has a fridge between the driver and passenger seat,’ Tricia says this as though fridges and Friesians are inextricably linked. ‘Glorious four by four, that one.’ She shakes her head.
‘So … ?’ Melissa attempts to bring her back on point.
‘Oh, well, I like to go fast,’ says Tricia. ‘Or rather, I liked to go fast. And I was just getting something out of the fridge. I only looked down for a millisecond – but then I went through a five-bar gate. And I didn’t open it. That was the main problem,’ she clarifies. ‘I don’t drive any more.’
‘Wow. No …’ Melissa is wide-eyed as I try to refocus my swimming mind.
My liver’s now using an enzyme called … called … I rifle through the filing cabinets in my head but I can’t find the word … using something to convert the alcohol into … something beginning with an ‘a’? Or perhaps it’s an ‘e’ … Bugger it! I draw a blank so go to have another swig of beer and am surprised to find the bottle empty. Inge, who has been observing the scene with some amusement, now pushes back her chair and makes to retrieve milk for the lamb and more beer for us. She throws a bottle of the latter at me and I catch it. Just.
‘What about you?’ Tricia is asking me now.
‘What about me?’
‘Well, Vikings are all about honesty and sharing, aren’t they?’ She looks to Inge for approval, who nods, ever so slightly. ‘So, tell us something no one else knows about!’
‘Well, that’ll be easy. We only met a few days ago.’ Melissa laughs. ‘And this is my sister “Closed-Book Alice” that we’re talking about!’
‘Just ’cos you’re a massive oversharer!’ I say this in an attempt to match my sister’s jocular tone but it comes out awkwardly and a tremor of hurt emanates from across the stretch of oak.
Tricia, apparently, doesn’t notice and perseveres. ‘But you two have known each other since birth!’
‘Barely!’ my sister snorts.
‘Come on then, spill! It’ll be fun!’ Tricia claps her hands.
It won’t, I feel with a degree of certainty.
‘Someone else go first,’ is all I can manage.
‘OK then. Inge?’ She turns to our illustrious host.
An unfazed Inge reveals that her firstborn was conceived on a Viking longship, which seems entirely appropriate. She also shares with us that she speaks five languages and is a trained scuba-diving instructor.
Overachiever, I nod, sagely. Must up my Mandarin Duolingo time. And learn Spanish one day – when the kids go to university, maybe …
We also learn that Tricia once had a threesome (a revelation that surprises me not one iota but that sparks a myriad of questions) and that Margot is ‘allergic to ibuprofen’.
That’s it? That’s all she’s got? God, perfect people are boring.
Melissa ‘wins’ by announcing that she was, briefly, the front woman in a pro-monarchist punk band called ‘Regal Gristle’ after her A-Levels (‘We sang ‘God Save The Queen’ non-ironically …’).
I did not know this.
‘But you can’t sing!’ I blurt out, as another tremor undulates through the floor.
‘Well, neither can you, but at least I know it!’ This is a low blow: my own singing career was put on hold when my sister caught me doing my best Whitney Houston in the shower, aged twelve, and told everyone at school that I ‘warbled’. I’d been a regular shower songbird up until this point but I haven’t sung a note since. ‘Anyway, it was punk. No one cared what we sounded like – though, to be fair, it sounded a lot as though someone was building a shed …’ she adds as an aside. ‘But mainly, they let me be the leader because I had this great floor-length black leather coat—’
‘That was my black leather coat!’ I turn on her.
‘You’d already left home! You didn’t miss it!’ This is true. But now she’s reminded me, I’m furious. Melissa glares as if challenging me to a duel. ‘Just because you never did anything fun …’
‘Ouch!’ Tricia feigns outrage, then adds. ‘Sorry – I only had a brother and he was a clod, so this is new for me. Carry on, carry on …’ she ushers.
But I don’t know where to start. Because apart from the sad bits, most of what I recall is me wanting to grow up as fast as I could to get out there. Or rather, get out of there.
Melissa loses patience and speaks for me. ‘Basically, Alice married too young and should have slept with more people first.’ A cutting précis
of my adult life. ‘But her husband’s an idiot and she’s miserable.’
What? This isn’t fair! How does SHE get to share a story about a school band while I get to have my marriage dissected in front of strangers?!
‘Just look at the bags under her eyes,’ Melissa directs her audience’s attention to my dark circles now. ‘He’s taken the best years of her life.’
‘You’re unhappy in your relationship.’ Inge nods before I have the chance to defend myself, as though there’s no point contesting this notion that’s evident for all to see. ‘So why don’t you split up?’
Because it doesn’t work like that! Because our roots are too tangled together by now! Because we’re due to have an extension next year! Because my family is the first thing I’ve ever put all my chips on and I’m afraid of losing. Because that would mean admitting I’d made a mistake …
This is what I think.
What I say, is, ‘It isn’t that bad. It’s just … not like an exciting, new relationship.’
‘What is it then?’ Tricia asks.
I think about this. ‘It’s … the saggy middle bit …’
Tricia nods, knowingly.
‘Do you do anything to keep the romance alive?’ she asks. ‘Send each other sext-messages during the day?’
I look at her as though she is deranged. ‘No, we’re married. We only message each other when we need something from the shops.’
‘Ah, that stage …’ Tricia says nostalgically.
‘How do you feel when you think about your husband?’ Inge addresses me head on.
I hesitate as the alcohol catches up with me before testing my voice with a, ‘Well … I feel …’ I stall to avoid letting slip what I’m really thinking, which is: Trapped! Shackled! Like I want to climb out of a VERY HIGH window!
‘He can be a bit annoying, at times,’ I say finally. ‘You know, when he snores. I hate that. And the way he dribbles toothpaste spit around the sink and just leaves it there. And the way the gap in his teeth makes him sort of whistle sometimes. And I hate the way he chews—’
‘Basically, you hate him?’ Tricia asks as I pause to draw breath.
‘No!’ I don’t hate him. I just fantasise about him dying … regularly.
Gone Viking Page 18