With her hand over her mouth.
“What’s wrong with her?” says Ronan, attempting his fifth mouthful.
“She’s not feeling great today,” I explain, quickly breaking some baguette and clumsily applying butter. “You shouldn’t be so harsh on her.”
“Oh, Sylvana and I – we understand each other.”
I’ve got bat ears, but I swear to God I honestly cannot tell whether that heightened acoustic noise in the bathroom is Sylvana laughing her heart out or puking her guts up.
Mother, returning to the table with a cup of tea and some cream crackers on a plate: “Well, guess what I did today?”
“What?” asks Ronan.
“I went to see my friend. She lives just down the road.”
She smiles brightly, as if she’s just announced she’s won a trip for two to Lanzarote.
“Really?” Ronan is doing his best to be polite and discover an interesting angle on old ladies who meet their friends in the afternoon. I mean, what do old ladies do when they’re together? Plan tax dodges? Plot bank robberies? Hardly likely. “Did you go for a walk?” he wonders, trying to chew his sixth mouthful.
Well, that’s true, you do see them out walking on occasion.
“No,” she answers. “We chatted for a while over afternoon tea.”
Ronan nods – no surprises there. That’s an image he can connect with. They probably did a spot of knitting too, but of course he’s too polite to ask.
Sylvana returns now, big wide grin on her face.
“And then,” Mother goes on, “I returned and watched a video.”
Ronan is impressed. Like he regards technology in the hands of the aged as something of a good omen. “You watched a video,” he repeats, nodding.
“You could say that.”
“Anything interesting?”
“You want to know the plot?” says Mother drily. “Well, it didn’t take me long to grasp it: it was the story of a man and a woman dead keen to show the world the uses to which greenhouses can be put. Apart from watering the tomatoes.”
Ronan asks Mother to be more specific.
“It was about a man and a woman doing things to each other, things they didn’t need clothes to do them with. You know the sort of thing. A film dedicated to grunting and naked bodies.”
Ronan chokes on something. An escaped fish fin, probably.
“Mother,” says I, frowning, “are you saying you went down to the video store and rented a porn movie?”
“It’s a free country,” says Sylvana.
“Is that what you both think of me? Do you really think I went into the video store and walked up to the counter and said, “Excuse me, young man, I like the look of that video on the shelf entitled Whip Chick and is there a reduction for old-age pensioners?””
Sylvana cackles with delight.
“Then where did you get that video?” I insist.
She gets up, goes over to the cooker, grabs the bowl of mousseline, returns to the table and ladles another large spoonful over my husband’s spaghetti.
“No, really, Gertrude, I…”
“I insist, Ronan. It’s nourishing.”
He succumbs.
She offers Sylvana a final half-spoon of the fish sauce, saying that she doesn’t want any leftovers tonight.
“Thanks awfully, Gertrude, but I seem to have lost my appetite.”
“Mother! Tell me where you got that video.”
Mother to Ronan, as she sits down: “Will I tell her?”
I turn to my husband who I suddenly realize is blushing like a cooked crushed tomato. “Don’t tell me it’s yours?” I gasp.
Deafening silence.
“In actual fact,” continues Mother, “I felt something sharp sticking into my back the first night I slept here.”
Sylvana is laughing out loud now. And she’s not stopping.
“What were you thinking of, Ronan?”
He tries to shrug it off. I glare at him, but he’s begun to eat his meal very quickly now, trying not to look too discomfited.
“You’ve gone all red, Ronan,” observes Sylvana once she’s ceased giggling.
“What’s it to you?”
“Is it fun, watching steamy video sex?”
“Steamy sex is nothing to be ashamed of,” he says in that utterly reasonable tone of voice.
“Then why do you look so ashamed?” inquires Sylvana. “Do you make a habit of indulging in it?”
He laughs. “I happen to be married.”
He’s weakening.
“All the more reason to be ashamed,” she replies.
This is getting good.
“I’m not ashamed of being married, are you, Julie?”
“Ask me next week.”
Just think: me and the two closest people in the world to me have embarked on this joint venture to crucify my husband to the dinner table.
And Mother, simultaneously, is in the process of poisoning the poor bastard.
It’s a most unexpected bonus.
35
When Mother leaves the room to get ready for bed, Ronan is enduring the last remnants of his fish pasta.
Sylvana and I glance at one another.
And we let rip.
“Did you enjoy your fish puree, Ronan?” says I.
“Tell your mother it was excellent.”
“You’re a brave man,” observes Sylvana.
He hesitates for a second, then continues his fork motions. “It’s not that bad.”
“You don’t have to be polite,” I tell him.
Suddenly Sylvana reaches over to Ronan and pretends to pluck something from his jacket. “A hair,” she announces, making a flicking motion with her ringers over the floor.
“A hair?” I echo.
“It’s blonde.” She grins.
“What’s her name, Ronan?”
I rest my chin on my knuckles and turn to face him, with an air of infuriatingly suggestive expectation.
“That hair strand could belong to anyone,” he says, unruffled.
“Oo!” squeals Sylvana. “He gets around.”
He’s now gobbling the remainder of his meal like there’s an invisible finish line, like he can’t get it down him quickly enough.
“Do you both mind if I eat this delicious meal in peace?”
Sylvana winks at me.
Me: “It’s rude to speak with your mouth full.”
“At least I speak through my mouth.”
He jerks his head towards Sylvana.
“Is that what you call it?” is Sylvana’s deft reply, which sends me into a sudden spasm of giggles.
“Don’t mind him, Sylvana, he’s just annoyed because you found a blonde hair on his shoulder.”
“Your implication is a little extravagant, Julie.”
“Then why do you look so pissed-off, honey?”
“It suits him.”
“And speaking of extravagant implications, what is a porn video entitled Whip Chick doing underneath my mother’s mattress?”
“More to the point: what’s your mother doing on top of it?”
“Sleeping, like most people do on mattresses.”
Sylvana, grinning: “Don’t be naive, Julie.”
Ronan: “Well, she can sleep somewhere else.”
“Sylvana, is there a Society for the Protection of Old Folk?”
“He’ll be old himself some day.”
“But not overweight,” he cuts in.
“And bald,” Sylvana adds, ignoring the slur. “Soon he’ll be buying hats to keep the draught out. And impotent, too. Can you imagine the freedom, Julie? In a mere thirty to forty years’ time most of our male peers will be failing miserably in that area. Not even Whip Chick will be enough to bring it back.”
It’s not easy to maintain one’s composure when Sylvana gets going like this.
“But why the video, Ronan? Was it to spice up our sex life?”
He just looks at me.
“It’s not such a str
ange question, Ronan. After all, your whole horizon is sex.”
“Is that a problem?” he tries to joke.
“You’ll start making mistakes.”
“Like what? Leaving porn videos underneath mattresses?”
“No. I mean real mistakes…”
Like the kind of mistake I’d hoped he might make with me.
Sylvana: “Don’t worry, Julie; no man travels without a condom these days. It’s called estate planning.”
“This is pathetic,” he says, rising suddenly to his feet.
Sylvana is roasting him over the fire. Before last Thursday I wouldn’t have allowed her. Now I don’t give a damn. It’s great.
He brings his bowl over to the sink and just leaves it there. He expects Mother to pay for her keep by washing his dirty dishes. He glares, I mean furiously, at poor Max who has never lifted so much as a paw against him.
He exits the room without another word.
Sylvana and I light up and congratulate ourselves on a job well done.
“He actually finished his meal too,” I observe after a while. “It can’t have been that bad.”
“Then again,” muses Sylvana, “there’s no objective reason why fish cooked straight from the sea should be any tastier than fish cooked straight from your aquarium.”
She has a point. Sylvana can be so balanced and judicious at times.
“I agree. I mean, fish is fish, isn’t it?”
“Can I ask you one thing, Julie?”
“Feel free,” I reply, exhaling cigarette smoke.
“Does your mother know where the mousseline originated?”
“That’s what’s worrying me, Sylv.”
“Perhaps she imagines you purchased it at the deli.”
“Yes, but why on earth would I buy raw fish guts at the deli? Besides, they don’t sell raw fish guts at delis.”
“This is true,” she replies, sinking into a smoker’s pose, nodding as if I’ve just made an interesting point, say, about foreign-exchange rates.
“Mother must guess where it came from. I just can’t believe she did that, Sylvana.”
“Although you’re the one who actually went ahead and liquidized them in the first place.”
“Yes. So?”
“With the intention of feeding it to him in any case.”
“So?”
“I think you’re brilliant.”
We burst out laughing and she sits back in her chair.
“I only wish you’d let him know what he’s just eaten.”
And in a way, it does seem a crying shame that Ronan gets to leave the kitchen without so much as a clue that there is cargo of tropical marine life presently swimming through his intestinal corridors, in a rather devolved form.
Hers is an attractive proposition. But how would I break the news to him? How does one explain such a thing? How does one choose the words? How does one convey the images? I couldn’t keep a straight face.
“No, Sylvana…”
I take a drag of my fag before I add: “Always allow a decent delay before the punchline.”
36
Ten minutes later I go into the lounge. I’m expecting Ronan to be in fairly poor spirits after our joint whipping session.
He is.
He’s standing with his back to me, arms crossed, glaring through the french windows at heavy, purple-streaked rain clouds, black fumes visibly smoking from his body.
For the first time I notice that Ronan is wearing a wine jacket with his mustard-coloured polo-neck sweater and trousers. An unusual blunder for him: wine and mustard definitely don’t mix.
“What,” he says calmly, “the hell was that all about?”
He doesn’t even bother turning round.
To avoid illuminating my husband as to what the hell that was all about, I continue past the couch until I hit the aquarium. I then lean over and start counting our slightly depleted fish stocks. Just watching them would make you dreamy. My remaining swimmering darlings – the originals – are gleamering loverly and lappily in the gleen, brubbily watertight.
He repeats the question, using the same word pattern.
“What was all what about, Ronan?”
I can hear him pacing up and down behind me.
“What was all that bullshit, Julie?” he shoots.
“I thought it was fish mousseline.”
“Cut the crap. You’re still hung up on that affair business, aren’t you? You’re the lawyer; you present evidence when you make a charge. So where’s your evidence?”
Does he really expect me to tell him what I know? Does he truly want me to put his mind at ease? To put him on notice of the evidence against him, to concede him the advantage, to carte blanche my auto-erasure?
Not a chance.
“I’m not hung up on your affair at all,” says I into the fish tank.
“What’s your problem, then?”
“You want to know what the problem is?”
He waits.
I turn round. “Okay, Ronan. I’ll come clean.”
Standing in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets, he stares at the floor. He’s listening. For once in his life.
“Those colours just don’t go,” I tell him, striding towards the french windows.
“What?”
“You know very well that mustard and wine don’t match. They make you look like a circus clown, Ronan…”
I swear I just heard muffled laughter from the kitchen.
“…and I will not be married to a circus clown.”
“This is pathetic.”
“Oh, lighten up, Ronan. Debung your arse. We were just having a bit of fun with you over that pathetic video. That’s all.”
“The two of you were behaving like a couple of witches over a bubbling cauldron.”
I laugh out loud at the pinpoint accuracy of his metaphor. Stuff like this puts you in good spirits. I can’t wait for him to learn about Chi later on tonight when I return from his surgery.
He goes over to the aquarium and leans against it, flushed with annoyance. He stands there for a while. Uh-oh. He seems to have noticed something. Something tells me he’s going to begin a discussion about entities, which unbeknown to him are presently digesting in his upper to middle intestines.
He scratches the underside of his chin and straightens himself. “Julie.”
“What?”
“Where are the fish?”
“In the aquarium.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, Ronan, I don’t know what you mean. The fish are in the fish tank. I can see them with my own eyes.”
“I’m talking about the fish I bought last Friday.”
“You bought fish on a Friday?” I eye him aghast. “You do realize, Ronan, that it’s against Canon Law to buy fish on a Friday? Or should that be meat…”
“Julie,” he says in the voice of a terminally patient schoolteacher. “What did you do with them?”
“They went missing,” I shoot back.
“Where?”
“I don’t…really think you want to know.”
“Did you return them to the aquarist?”
“All but three of them.”
“All but three of them.”
“Yes.”
When he recovers from this he starts feeling his neck. “What about those three? Where are they?”
“I flushed them down the toilet.”
He starts pacing again. He’s stroking his chin. He’s mulling this over as he walks. “You flushed them…down the toilet?”
“Pre-cise-ly.”
“Makes sense,” he replies, as if I’ve just discovered a highly practical method of deblocking the sewage pipes.
“They don’t mind,” I assure him. “They’ll have enjoyed their swim.”
“In the excrement?”
“They’ll find some clear spaces.”
He nods, then bows his head. He looks like he’s biting the knuckle of his index finger, concent
rating. “It sounds like PMT.”
Now he’s pacing around like a Hollywood impression of a courtroom lawyer.
“Come on, Ronan, fish don’t suffer from PMT.”
“You, Julie. You. You’ve gone completely…hormonal.”
Me? Hormonal? Hardly! What I did was gory, perhaps, but not hormonal. Sociopathic maybe, but certainly not hormonal.
It’s time to defend what sanity I have left. “You know as well as I do that adding those extra fish last Friday threatened the existing ones.”
“Did you really flush them down the toilet, Julie?”
“Yes.”
“I quite liked them, you know.”
“You enjoyed them, did you?”
“As a matter of fact I did.”
“It gives me great pleasure to hear that, Ronan.”
“You killed off aesthetic objects, Julie. Just like that.”
“They weren’t objects, you idiot. They were alive.”
“They were beautiful.”
Amazing. He bought them three days ago and already he’s nostalgic.
“But of course, when it comes to aesthetic appreciation, you clearly have none.”
I think about this for a few seconds. “I agree.”
It’s game, set and match to Ronan. He is absolutely right. On the scale of aesthetic appreciation I lay claim to pure zero. One only has to remember the art book I bought him and what I did with it.
His arms are straight as buttresses against the aquarium as he peers inside at all the free space. Suddenly I notice something expose itself underneath the edge of his jacket sleeve. I get a huge shock when I realize what it is. It’s that gold Raymond Weil watch, the one that managed to cost nearly one grand.
I dart over to him and pull up the sleeve. “Ronan, where did you get that watch?”
He freezes. He glances at his new Raymond Weil. Gold. Simple face.
“I bought it.”
“Did you really?”
“Yes. It’s second-hand. Not that expensive.”
I survey my husband with disgust.
I am staring into the eyes of the man who only two years ago asked me to marry him, who told me he loved me, led me up the aisle, promised to be faithful, found and furnished a wonderful apartment for us to begin our new life together.
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