‘Peas’ll do,’ she said, not looking up. ‘And potatoes.’
‘It’s got potatoes on the top,’ I said. ‘It’s a shepherd’s pie.’
She didn’t answer. I sighed and put a pan of water on the hob to boil, got a big potato from the vegetable drawer of the fridge and stood there peeling it, wondering why the whole process made me want to weep.
By the time I’d cooked the potato and the peas the shepherd’s pie was done, the top of it crispy and golden brown, the gravy bubbling up through the mash. I dished it up on a plate and put it on a tray with a knife and a fork and a piece of kitchen towel for a serviette, because all her napkins were put away somewhere in a box, covered with parcel tape which had lost its stickiness years before and now hung loosely around it.
She started eating without a word, blowing in short puffs across the top of her steaming fork, then cast a glance across to me, and at that I got up again and went to the kitchen to get her a drink. When I put the glass of water down on the tray she looked at me with an expression of disgust. ‘What’s that?’
I had no energy for this battle tonight. Sometimes I fought and won, more often than not, but tonight I gave in straight away and went back into the kitchen. In the fridge was a bottle of white wine, unopened. I unscrewed the top and brought it back with a wine glass for her. There was no point pouring just one glass. Once the top was unscrewed, she would finish it anyway. If she got drunk and fell over it would be her own fault.
That was the end of it. I said goodnight, put my coat on and went back out into the night.
The cat at least was comically pleased to see me, meowing at my feet and jumping up as though it would help, purring loudly when the bowl suddenly appeared in her line of sight. And, once she’d eaten, she cried at the door to be let out. I opened the door and she was gone, off into the night to do whatever it was that she spent hours doing after dark. And the house was quiet, and I was alone again.
Colin
I should have been reading about critical submodalities before this evening’s tutorial but instead I found myself distracted by last year’s biology text books. I recall learning about decay – such a beautiful, perfect process: designed by Nature, tarnished and distorted by human activity. So many variables, predictables, the whole system governed by Nature, which is beyond human control.
I went online to look up Active Decay, my favourite stage of Putrefaction. Active Decay, technically, starts after Bloat, Nature’s announcement – the soft tissues reduce rapidly during this period, especially if, during the Bloat phase, the skin has stretched so far that it has ruptured. As well as activity by detritivores, internal processes (natural ones) accelerate the decomposition, including the endlessly fascinating autolysis, which is the destruction of cells by the body’s own enzymes. The pancreas, which is full of digestive enzymes, is one of the first organs to go. At the end of the Active Decay phase there is very little left – not even skin. The molecules that once made up a living, breathing, sentient being, transformed into atoms to feed the soil and encourage new life. The ultimate in recycling.
Eventually I had to leave my computer behind. On the way to college I called in at a house in Catswood. Just a brief visit. Not very enlightening.
The Wilson building was grey in the rain, a concrete block that others find hideous and I find interesting. The structure of it, so uniform, but the closer you get to it the more you notice the cracks, the lichen invading, the textures changing as the weather corrodes it.
There were five at the tutorial: Darren, Lisa, Alison, Roger and I. Nigel, the tutor, was late as usual, and we hung around outside the locked tutorial room with our machine coffees, standing there in a grim sort of silence. I wondered if they were also trying to think of something intelligent to say. That’s the trouble with this course – it puts you under real pressure to come up with something good when you do manage to speak to one another.