The doorbell jangled at thirteen minutes to seven. ‘Christ,’ she sighed. ‘Don’t let it be Harry.’
She wiped her fingers in the apron, cast a reproving eye at the cooker, cast an approving eye about the living-room, consulted the mirror, pushed a stray lock behind an ear, click-clacked down the hallway, watched with dismay Harry’s head distend and distort like a ball of India-rubber through the door’s frosted glass. Why could he not realise, when you said seven, you meant half-past at the earliest?
Serena took a moment, manufactured a smile. ‘Harry!’ Anorak dandruffed with snow. Hair combed across the dome of his scalp. The pinched red nose. The lopsided smirk, as from behind his back he bungled a bunch of blue.
‘Oh how lovely!’ Where to stick them? ‘I’ll…,’ she gestured intransitively.
He snuffled. ‘Am I a tad early?’
She guffawed. Harry Baggot was making a slow show of wiping his feet. The first time he’d been to her flat he’d trailed half a dog-turd through the lambs-wool carpet, and this wry display had become something of a ritual. ‘Doesn’t matter how much I try not to be,’ he orchestrated his eyebrows into twin inverted commas as though framing an epigram, ‘I always seem to be the first to arrive!’ ‘Well,’ she began. But an aspirated, furious rattle from the direction of the kitchenette made her drop the search for a platitude and all but drop the hyacinths. ‘Make yourself at home!’ she remembered to call over her shoulder.
It was the bouillabaisse that was foaming over, a tide of ale-coloured froth already festering on the rims of all four rings. She stared exasperated at the fat green stems splaying in her hand. Where to…? Sink! But a blancmange cowered in the sink. Suddenly all the surfaces were cluttered. So she backed into the living-room, winced apologetically to where Harry Baggot, still in his anorak, had occupied the sofa and was readying the launch of one of those unfunny anecdotes he’d of course have prepared in advance – he’d have exhausted the repertoire long before anyone arrived, and for the rest of the soirée would smile inanely or violate inanely the order of books and dvds. She took in in an instant how perilously close he was to the arrays of canapés, had no time to articulate a prohibition, dropped the stems ineptly across the armchair, cascaded back through the bead-strings into the galley-kitchen.
Riding the spitting surf were prawns’ antennae and fragments of mussel-shell. No time to pussy-foot. Between tee-towelled forearms she lifted the heavy pot. She almost dropped it as the ballast shifted. At once she was faced with the same problem. Every surface was occupied. If she’d just had the time to set out the delft, before the doorbell… But of course,… Or if she could just trust that eejit to remove one solitary tower of plates out onto the living-room table?
She heard him bark a voluminous sneeze. Had he perpetually that head-cold? And of course never a hanky in sight.
Her eye lit upon the pedal-bin. Would it take the weight? A sputter from the cooker prompted that it’d bloody-well have to. She hunkered, and was manoeuvring the copper-bottom across the spring-loaded lid when ‘Anything I can do to he-elp?’ yoo-hooed in through the beads.
‘Not a thi-ing!’ she sing-sang, removing her arms the barest millimetre to gauge if the support would hold. It didn’t budge, but didn’t convince.
Her eyes surveyed the lack of options. Within the tiny galley every surface was full to teetering. ‘Hi Serena, did Trev tell you…,’ began the voice from the other room. Something muffled the sentence, putting it on hold. A canapé, she’d swear it! And after the devastation he’d wrought last time?! Could he not… ‘You heard of course about poor ole Lacey up in Accounts…’
The floor! Like a giant crustacean she clamped the seething pot between her forearms and made to set it by the fridge but just then her mobile, which was on the microwave, decided to bicker. The keel of the pot bumped the linoleum, the bouillabaisse swilled, a scald shocked her left arm which winced away and, skidding over a crescent of brown flotsam, the lid clattered into a corner. ‘Shit! Shit!’ she hissed.
‘Say something?’ She froze, as though hiding. The phone continued its wrangle. One eye to the beads she lifted it, saw the name, whispered ‘Yep?’
‘Ree-na. Dar-ling. Tre-vor.’ A pause. A long sigh. ‘Look I’m sooo sorry, hun. This is such ridiculously short notice. Unfortunately, blah blah blah blah…’ She held it at arm’s length, a creature that had just bitten. The voice continued to witter on. She set it back live atop the microwave. Trish and Dave had already had to cancel. Couldn’t find a replacement babysitter. That left just the Crowleys from upstairs, a dull couple, though she’d talk for Ireland. And Romana, if she could make it across the city.
The scald on her arm smarted. Through the bead-strings a wheezy laugh. Evidently an anecdote had climaxed. ‘Right!’ she called. ‘That’s too funny!’ Another outrageous sneeze. Christ sake, would he be at that lark all night?
From its squat on the floor the bouillabaisse sulked. She’d have to lift it before it scummed over. With the tail-end of the towel she smeared the brown dribbles about the stainless cylinder, located and replaced the lid, hoisted it back onto the ring. Reena? squeaked the phone. Hello? Hello? The screen gave up, went dark. Behind her the beads shucked apart. ‘You’re sure I can’t help?’
‘No. really. Please.’ She bundled him out. ‘Make yourself entirely… Honest. I’m just…’ The irony of course being she’d only invited him on account of Trevor Dunne; that, and to have four and four. Inadvertently, incompetently, it was Harry who’d introduced them. A work do. And now he’d cancelled, just like that! When the whole point of the evening…
19:10. Ok. ‘Tell you what,’ she called, brightly. ‘Open the wine. Would you do that for me?’
Everything in the kitchenette was mocking or malicious. The blancmange wobbled don’t look at me pal. On the draining-board, the eight Cheshire grins of the melon she’d begun to partition. The cooker was tight as a drum battery, rattling, bubbling, snaring. Sensing it was being watched, the ring under the rice-pot rasped once, twice. She grabbed it up, Christ! And her elbow must have nudged a champagne-flute, because it reeled drunkenly, bowed, and took a plunge into the sink, shivering with the jangle of wind-chimes being slapped. ‘Whoops!’ called Harry, hilariously. ‘Don’t wash that one!’
The rice-pot, where? On top of the…?
Smell of burn. The filo!
She made to put the pot in the sink. No go. Pedal-bin. Fast.
It threatened to slide off. Her hand vacillated by the handle. Through the bead-curtain, the drone of another anecdote paused. ‘Yeah?’ she called. Reassured, the drone resumed. The pot was still. She turned and tugged open the oven door, pulled out an acrid billow of smoke. An electric shriek protested. Her tee-towel walloped the air under the smoke-alarm. ‘WHICK!’ it hacked, just once more. For the moment it was pacified. ‘Something smells good!’ sang Harry, nasally.
Eyes asquint, head averted, she sidled out the tray. The pastry wings were singed. Could they be saved? Poss-ibly. But where to put…? A volcanic burble eructed through the bouillabaisse. She’d forgotten to turn down the bloody knob! She needed her hands. Could she balance the pastry tray across her knee? Diagonally across the sink? She turned, and turning, stepped on the toes of the pedal-bin.
The lid tried to laugh open. The rice-pot slid. She raised a leg to hold it. Insolently it teetered, pivoting by tiny degrees until it was ready to tip over, did so, bounced once, and disgorged its load, like semolina, across the floor. The lid clamped shut. It was a surface, temporarily, where she could set down her tray of singed fledglings. She’d no sooner done so than the bouillabaisse seethed over for the second time. ‘WHICK!’ warned the smoke-alarm. ‘Ah-RAFF!’ sneezed Harry. ‘Fuck it!’ Serena cried and, not finding an alternative, she swung the great pot back onto the floor inside the brown-flecked crescent beside the fridge just as the phone pinked.
Edel Crowley. Big surprise, they were “running late”.
‘Everything ok in there?’ chimed Harry.
‘Ha ha ha!’ she telegraphed.
Ok. All right. Another survey. The blancmange could be saved – only one triangular shard lay upon its nudity, so far as she could see. The rice could be scooped back in, provided he didn’t see her do it. So she thrust a smile through the beads.
The smile froze. Harry Baggot, the anorak clumsy as a sleeping-bag beside him, canapé in hand, had wrought havoc on the lovely symmetry of all three plates she’d so painstakingly prepared. It was precisely how he’d desecrated the array of hors d’oeuvre the previous soirée before a single guest had arrived.
‘Put. That. Down!’
His face would have been comical if she hadn’t been so close to strangling him at that moment. She marched across to the vol-au-vent suspended before the astonished mouth and took it from him. ‘Why don’t you,’ she began, and her other hand found in a bowl of cashews the remainder of the sentence, ‘try one of these?’ She looked about. ‘Or a crisp, maybe?’
She turned to go. She’d walked as far as the bead curtains. But something held her from pushing through. Something she’d glanced. She turned back. There, on the coffee table… Was that her bottle of Nuit St George? The guilty corkscrew squirmed beside it. The only gift she still had from… How in the hell…? Where had…?
She looked to the dining-table. The two bottles of cab-sauv were untouched, standing sentry to the eight immaculate wineglasses. She blinked. Beside Harry, her Waterford glass tumbler, all but filled with sinful burgundy. ‘Ah-RAFF!’’ he roared, into his hands.
Her mouth began working silent words. But instead of voicing them, she submerged beneath the beads. For a few moments, as the cutlery drawer was ransacked, they shivered and shucked.
‘Harry,’ she called. ‘Come in here a minute, would you?’
19:40. Still no sign of the Crowleys. And Romana was stuck on a train that was stuck somewhere north-side.
Serena walked over to the mirror, tidied the mutinous lock behind her ear. She surveyed the reflected room, turned back into the real room. She adjusted the volume of the music, prodded the repaired symmetry of the three plates of hors d’oeuvre, pink and beige and green. His bloody anorak she’d stuffed into the pedal-bin.
She examined her surprisingly steady fingers, the left hand, the right hand. She interrogated the bead curtains, made sure nothing was emanating from beneath them. She then picked up the tumbler of Nuit St George that Harry Baggot had poured. She tipped it into a wineglass, and strolled as far as the armchair. Well, he wouldn’t be doing that again, would he?
At last, the tubular doorbell bonged its jolly two-tone. The Crowleys.
‘Come in! Come in!’ she called, knowing full well the front-door was closed.
Then she toasted the galley-kitchen and deflated into the armchair, demolishing as she did so the misaligned spray of hyacinths.
© David Butler
David Butler is an Irish novelist and short story writer, his story ‘Bouillabaisse’ has been shortlisted in the Cork Library’s competition 2017 and published in their print anthology ‘Smoke in the Rain’ (2017). His recent novel ‘City of Dis’ (New Island) was shortlisted for the Irish Novel of the Year, 2015. To contact and read more of his work visit:
Website: www.davidbutlerauthor.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DavidButlerBray
