2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie (27 page)

But she still doesn’t get it.

She’s shrugging, nodding, having figured out the part about Ronan eating fish. But their precise origin still eludes her. This is incredibly frustrating for me: I want her to share in the sheer pleasure, which has now begun in earnest to spread like creamy Mitchelstown butter all over my being, as I observe Ronan placing the first squiggly mouthful of spaghetti and fish mousse-line in his mouth.

The kitchen is in perfect silence. So silent that you can hear the sound of Ronan’s horse-like chomping as he eats. Sylvana’s eyes are flickering like an iguana from Ronan to me and back to him. Mother is bemusedly observing the proceedings from the sink, drying plates with a dish towel.

Ronan looks up suddenly. “Is something the matter?” he wonders.

Sylvana and I simultaneously avert our eyes.

Mother turns back round and starts making a real racket cleaning pots and pans in the sink. “How is your dinner, Ronan?” she asks.

“It’s…”

“No complaints, Ronan. Mother made it specially.”

He screws up his mouth, looks over at me as if I’ve just committed an act of sabotage against him, then he lowers his head again to study the contents of his plate. After a while he decides to twirl another load of gooey spaghetti around his fork.

I can’t bear Sylvana not to know what’s happening. I pick up the nearby
TV Times
and open it at the crossword page.

“Right, Sylvana. Test out your brainpower. Two across: ‘Walks softly’. Five letters.”

“Treads,” says Sylvana.

“Creeps,” offers Ronan.

“Crawls,” suggests Mother, still crashing away at the sink.

“It depends on two down: ‘Receptacle for fish’. Eight letters.”

“Fish tank,” says Mother.

“Aquarium,” offers Ronan.

“
That’s it
!” I shout.

“Although,” he volunteers, “it could be both.”

“Try three down then: ‘Moulinex’. Five letters.”

“Moulinex?” says Ronan, entwining a further load of spaghetti on to his fork. “That’s a brand name, isn’t it?”

“Hm…”

He chews away at this mouthful too, with a slight grimace. Mother is still making a lot of noise with the pots and pans.

“Don’t they do mixers?” suggests Sylvana, slightly frustrated by my abstruse references.

“Mixer. Yes. That’s five letters.”

I pretend to write in ‘mixer’.

When Ronan descends for his fourth mouthful I make all manner of faces at Sylvana while repeating the word ‘mixer’ out loud several times, as if absent-mindedly, and all the while I am pointing at Ronan’s dish. She clearly thinks I’m crazy. She looks again at me. I am gleaming meaningfully back at her. Then she studies Ronan’s dish and looks back at me again, and I do a quick breaststroke motion, and now there seems to be a slight alteration in her countenance and she suddenly gets up and leaves the room through the door to the hall behind Ronan.

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.

W
hen 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 strange 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.”

T
en 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.