He hadn’t meant to raise his voice. She had had a hard day, he knew that, even if he had to make an effort to remember, like he had to remember to speak slowly to the new girl at work, Irina, the girl who made him nervous with her long brown hair, flawless complexion and that hourglass figure that made him feel her time and tolerance was running out as she stood there smiling effortlessly at him as she did; he didn’t want her, at least, didn’t think he did, but all those adolescent traits of tender tongued awkwardness came back to haunt him. Still, even then he could only hold back his impatience for a moment. He was patient, gentle, calm, but a perfectionist in the kitchen and once his creation was plated up, bums should be on seats. He flicked the landing lights a few times. She was listening to Harry Potter over her hairdryer again. He only hoped she had her door open.
He caught himself thinking that if she had not, he would not go up there but simply shout the louder, possibly act all mardy. He noted that that thought that once would have followed that could be summed up as “is this what things have got to?” didn’t, possibly hadn’t for some time.
He sat down with his dinner, setting hers down besides, lit her new fancy candle with his no longer contraband lighter, took a mouthful, and then jumped up again, grabbing at her plate, first with his hand, and then more angrily with the tea towel he had brought in, the one with the charred corner she always joked about - first, as he had noted once again on its presentation to his hand as the first neatly folded towel in an ever-rotating stack, hilariously, then endearingly, then once again invidiously as the drawn out joke seemed to . Red in her Eeyore dressing gown she caught him storming out to the oven and smiled, jokingly blocking his exit. He walked back and placed the plate on the table, taking his seat.
“One day I’ll come up and put vinegar in that bath and give it a good stir before you jump in. You’ll poach yourself you have it that hot.”
She had caught him on the hop. Her nonchalant manner always made him feel like a fool when he overdramatised his efforts. He always realised in retrospect. Every time. Not once had he stopped himself from going through the motions once again. And then, as he always realised in that same regretful sigh of a sequence of thoughts, he was always late for dinner at his mum & Dad’s, talking over the cricket, the Formula One or the golf, talking about work with his dad, with whom he would roll his eyes at the constant bangs on the wall and the shouts. And then that dusty old comment, not even a joke.
They ate in silence. It had come out well. The bacon had firmed up nicely with the little blowtorch she had bought him because “he liked his kitchen gadgets.” he had resented that, but had always eyed them up in the shops though he felt the need to mock them on the television. (He had worried once or twice that if she could pick that out, how much more easy would it be to pick out that peculiar timbre in his voice that he could feel inside his throat when he intoned that Irina just wasn’t up to the job with these pedantic e-mails she took so long to send, and that Karen just loved to bitch, that she wore only the latest label goods, revelling in the fact that they were ephemeral, and listened to that Ministry of Sound album or whatever that she got free on her MP3 player.) The chicken was deliciously soft - and didn’t look undercooked through all that Gorgonzola. The anya potatoes were a revelation, the broccoli just so.
He enjoyed the food for a while with not a thought in his head. Bliss. He then realised they weren’t talking. He chewed on.
“I used that little blowtorch on the parma ham,” he said. He always wanted to demonstrate that her present was a good choice, that he was grateful.
“snice,” she said.
He chewed on.
She carried on eating.
He still had to work on presentation. They make a big thing of that.
She hadn’t said a thing about it. Any of it!
And there was something desultory about the way she was holding her fork. And her wrists were limp.
It has always struck him as token of his being genuine that his anger burst up too quickly to think of something pointed to say. She would never get angry like that, whereas he was rarely shitty and incisive with it, something she could be so much of the time. He put down his fork and knife noisily beside his half-full plate.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” He said. She looked up at him in what seemed like mock surprise. “Is it still about this sixty fucking four?”
She looked at him, her brow knotted. He wasn’t sure she had understood: it hadn’t come out too clearly.
“What?” she said eventually, and, he was sure, disingenuously.
“This whole fucking thing.”
He was aware he wasn’t being too specific.
“What thing? There is no thing, I’m eating my dinner.”
“In silence.”
“Well, look, it was you who was storming off to the bloody oven two minutes after you called me with this look on your face. I’ve just had a bath. I’ve had a long day. I’m relaxed. I’m eating. Is that ok?”
He didn’t answer. He picked up his cutlery again.
“It’s nice,” she said. He looked at her. “It is nice,” she said, laughing a little, inscrutably. She took a bite.
“And the bacon is crispier.”
He said nothing and took another bite before shaking a little more salt on his potatoes.
She stood up and walked off. He ate uncomfortably. She didn’t come back. Was she crying? Should he go after her? Wouldn’t that be admitting fault? He wasn’t at fault, was he?
He had a little broccoli on his plate when she came back with a bottle of wine. He always cooked too much. And there was some left over. The cauliflower cheese had been too much. Maybe she picked up on these kinds of things. She had two glasses. She poured them. There was a little piece of cork floating in his. These things annoyed him, but it would be churlish to pick it out.
She carried on eating.
“That Ragi Omar thing’s on tonight,” she said eventually.
“That one you wanted to see,” she added, redundantly. If there was nothing wrong as she was maintaining she would never have said that, he noted. He began a sigh and tried to turn it into a normal breath, losing his natural rhythm of breathing as a result and trying consciously to bring it back down as he finished off his last piece. That and the subject. He knew she wasn’t interested. He felt a reverberant low timpani drum beat of dread. She would perhaps force herself to watch it only to break later in the night into some long held-back complaint. The tension would stretch out the whole evening and continue then into one of those DMCs, deep and meaningful conversations such that Ollie, the mature student at uni he used to look up to with the longest relationship of any of them, used to talk sardonically about as he swung across jungle ropes on his irony dial TV with the rock band stickers transplanted from his ‘pawned’ Les Paul copy, the kind she dragged him into just as he was falling asleep so he had to talk while treading water.
” Yeah,” he said. “I don’t know, though, maybe it’s too depressing.”
Sometimes he talked automatically, he realised, no doubt for the umpteenth time. All these defensive strokes, never just letting fly with what he thought.
“We could watch a film,” he said. He wanted to distract her.
“Yeah,” she said, “if you want.” The reply, and its tone, dismayed him. It was clear she wasn’t that keen, that she was trying to go along with what he wanted. He resented the idea all the more now, and it was clear he wouldn’t enjoy any film they chose, and especially if they decided to go out for one. He had registered for this film club with DVDs being posted to his door. Roped in by all the canny advertising over the urinals at the shopping mall, calculated no doubt to catch all the men in their lowest level of cerebral immune defense. She was never in the mood to see the films he chose. And there was no backing away from it now. Thinking he wanted to watch a film, she would insist, and it would only postpone any potential argument for later.
He really wanted to see that Ragi Omar thing.
“I’ve got one,” she said, finally lying her fork and knife on her plate beside a hillock of cauliflower cheese and the mound of Waitrose’s finest gorgonzola she’s managed to surreptitiously squeeze out of her chicken breast and draining her glass of sharp wine. She walked out taking both plates with her.
Why did he have to suggest it.
He turned the TV on as she got ready. He flicked around the channels, news, a woman of indeterminate attractiveness walking in the Lakes (he remembered walking around campus with Ollie talking about this and that and commenting on the endless girls walking by, picking out those like this and going over their originally improvised routine of asking one another whether she was “unconventionally attractive” and responding that, being “conventionally unattractive,” she was half way there: it seemed funny at the time, but then, everything did), and settling on the One Show, a magazine show with the Baggies fan who used to live down Hagley with a piece about a pig farmer making lard. He resolved, as lazily as he could in the few remaining moments of laziness available to him, to use it more often.
He sipped at his wine and felt a tension rise to his head as he heard her come down the stairs, walk straight round to the kitchen and turn on the kettle. A peculiar thought struck him. He should have bought Ollie’s guitar when he had the chance. He had considered it. He had never thought of that before and it unsettled him.
He heard the spoons go into the mug and heard her as she clicked off the kettle manually, poured the still-bubbling water and opened the freezer for her favourite ice cream. She came in. There was a fist sized corner of ice cream left in the tub she sat on his lap. She put the mug of hot water on the table in front of them and rested her knees on his leg, taking out two hot dessert spoons for them both. Putting her right arm slackly around his neck, she took her spoon in her left and dug the tub into his legs and crotch digging out a good mouthful. She had changed into her newest sexy outfit (she always had one) and