by Rick Wood
“Gerald!” he says, extending the vowels of my name—this means he’s pleased to see me. He’s wearing his chef outfit and chef hat and he’s podgy and has a huge bit of waddle beneath his chin that shakes when he talks but damn I like this guy. There are very few people I tolerate but Carluccio is the guy. Not only does he serve the best fucking salmon I ever allowed into my mouth, he is always pleased to see me and tells all his waitresses to treat me well.
I stand and I pretend to kiss one cheek then the other but I don’t actually put my face on his because I like him but I don’t want to smudge my cheek and have to keep washing it until I feel clean again.
“How are we today?”
By we he means me, but for some reason he likes to use an inclusive plural. I suspect this is to create some sort of unification, or perhaps a feeling of empathy.
“I am well, Carluccio, I am well,” I tell him, doing that thing when I repeat the answer twice either side of his name, like a sandwich where my answer is the bread and his name is the big wad of ham.
“I am delighted to hear this!”
He always speaks with an Italian accent that I can’t quite tell whether is fake or not.
“What are you drinking today?” he asks.
“I am having some of the lovely Bordeaux wine.”
“Excellent!” He turns behind him and claps his hands together to get the waitress's attention. “Where is that Pavillion Blanc, my dear girl?”
She frowns like she’s being condescended to and how dare she frown at such a wonderful boss as Carluccio. There is a blender behind her and I wonder how quickly I could remove her hand if I shove it in there and grind it off.
“And how is the family?”
Carluccio doesn’t know my family, but he always seems to ask this.
“They are well,” I say, never wanting to reveal what family I have. I adamantly keep these two lives separate.
“I am glad to hear this!”
He is always so glad and enthusiastic and happy and I really do like this chap.
“I would recommend the linguine today,” he says. “I have just made it fresh. It is exquisite.”
“Then I will have the linguine.”
This is where I fill up on real food before I go home and pretend to like the shit Lisa makes. Sometimes she asks me to make tea but I won’t because, what, you think I will make tea when I never actually eat home-cooked food? This way I can scrape most of her preposterous culinary disaster into the bin and I will never go hungry.
“I must get back to the kitchen,” says Carluccio, and I am saddened to hear this. “But I do hope you enjoy your pasta. Let me know what you think!”
“Thank you, I will, thank you, Carluccio.”
He leaves. The waitress who gave Carluccio the grimace brings over my wine and I give her the same look she gave him.
“Hey,” I say.
“Can I help you?” she asks with a voice that sounds like she’s trying to be friendly but a face that says she would rather be anywhere than doing this job, serving me.
“I didn’t like that.”
“Didn’t like what?”
The stink-eye you stupid fuck.
“You know what.”
She looks confused. Pretends she doesn’t understand.
“Okay…” she says and tries backing away.
But I grab her wrist and she is not going anywhere.
“Do it again and I will rip your trachea up through your larynx, out your trap, then shove it back in knowing it’s still not the filthiest thing that’s been in there.”
I look at her so she knows I mean it. She looks confused and terrified and intimidated all at the same time and that little spark of fear that makes the arm I grab shake gives me a little tingle.
“Now fuck off.”
She shuffles away and I can hear her crying but she covers it up so no one sees and she will never fuck with Carluccio again.
I let it go and sip my wine and wow that is good wine.
Bordeaux do good wines.
6
It’s the time of day where everyone has their lights on without their curtains closed.
As if early evening is a time to give voyeurs permission to do what they do.
I return home at eighteen minutes to seven. Lisa is sat at the table waiting for me. She is wearing the same business suit she was wearing this morning. This means she hasn’t showered or changed. This means when she peels away the sweaty layers of clothing later I am going to have to suffer that push of odour that wafts from her once appealing naked body toward my always suffering nostrils.
Flora is next to her.
She has changed out of her school uniform, which is a shame, but then again, it isn’t. I can’t spend the evening imagining raking up that wafting skirt. Luckily, she has chosen to wear trousers. The kind that young people wear that are practically sewn onto their legs. You can make out all the curves but not in a flattering way. It will help to keep my attentions curbed throughout the monotony of this evening.
“Where have you been?” Lisa asks. She tries to sound authoritative, which would make me angry if she didn’t instead come across as intensely whiny.
“What’s the problem?” I ask. “Parent’s evening is at seven.”
“It’s quarter to seven now!”
Actually, it has just turned seventeen minutes to seven. No need to exaggerate, you insufferable wretch.
“Well, that gives us plenty of time to get to a school which is, by my last reckoning, eight minutes away.”
“But I want to be there before it starts to make sure we’re on time.”
Lisa thinks she has some profound concept of timekeeping, something that seems to make her fail to realise that out of the two of us I am the one who always keeps an appointment. I detest lateness, finding it to be the rudest of gestures; as if an individual expects everyone else to get there on time whilst this hypothetical imbecile—who owns a watch yet makes little use of it—can simply waltz in three minutes after the scheduled o’clock and expect instant redemption. It is not to be forgiven and is immensely deplorable and this is why it incenses me so that this drooping cow thinks she can ever ridicule my standards at timekeeping. If I ever plan to partake in an activity that involves her—something that would happen far more rarely should I have my way—I always provide her with an estimated time of arrival that is at least ten minutes before my desirable estimated time of arrival, knowing that she will believe that ten minutes is nothing really so don’t get so bent out of shape about it we can just go when we want there’s no real time we have to arrive in which case what is the fucking point of choosing a time that we will arrive in advance anyway.
“Shall we go?” I ask. “Or would you like to delay us further by debating the merits of timekeeping and who has the superior ability to look at a watch?”
“Really, Gerald,” she says as she stands up and shoves the chair under the table with a gesture she probably thinks makes her seem scary but only marks the floor that I had to pay for. “I don’t know why you–”
“Shut up,” I tell her. “I am not interested.”
She huffs and I turn away from her to avoid any further entanglement in words flung one way then the other. I open the door for her and let her pass through, which she does without a thank you or you’re so kind or I’m so sorry for being such a foul wife. I hold it open for Flora too, who gives me a strange look, a shifty one, as if she’s upset with me or so it seems. I give a cheeky grin and a little wink, and she just smiles.
I walk out to find Lisa standing beside my Mercedes.
“No,” I say.
“Oh, come on, Gerald, we don’t have time to argue about this.”
I do not want her in my car.
It’s just…
I do not want her in my car.
She will put her grubby little fingers on the dashboard and the sweat from her buttocks in the suit she’s worn all day will seep through the seat, and no one will admit they
can smell it but no end of fragrances I can acquire would ever remove it.
“Let’s go in your car,” I say.
“Gerald, please, would you just drive us there.”
Oh and look who’s getting her way again! I would recount the last time it was me who had things go their way in this marriage, but I would be here for far too long trying to recollect such an incident.
I slide into the driver’s seat, watching through the generosity of my mirror as my glorious little minx slides into the seat behind me. Her hair falls down her shoulders and springs politely back up.
“Come on then, let’s get a–”
I press on and a compact disc of some loud music starts at the high volume with which I was listening to it earlier, immediately interrupting her. The silence, albeit a silence obscured by heavy metal and screaming and distorted guitars, is a good one.
She presses the on button once more and the music turns off.
The driver is in charge of the car, and that includes the music. One should not overstep their boundaries and change the music without first gaining permission. This incenses me and I want to grab the back of her greasy mound and pound her head into the dashboard repeatedly, but would regret doing so as it would just create more mess from her facetious body that I would have to clean up, along with the sweat stains that are already beginning to form below her once-delectable buttocks.
We drive in silence to the school. At least, I do. Lisa turns around and starts nagging Flora about something. It’s annoying, yes, but at least it is not me her irritating attention is now focussed on. I am quite content driving my car, trying to pretend she has not somehow found her way into it against my wishes.
Ten minutes later—meaning we get there a whole six minutes ahead of schedule, how’s that for timekeeping you vapid, decrepit, little whore—we remove ourselves from the car and I intentionally do so without looking at the poor seat that had just suffered the perspiration of her anal pores.
The teachers are arranged across a few rooms. The first is called the grand hall but is barely a moderate hall. The second is a tiny library that stocks books like Twilight, providing all the reasons why literature should not be attempted by just anyone. The third and final room is a cafeteria that still smells like stale chips. The whole place stinks of lifeless children and tastes like lost dreams, and this is it, this is where ambition goes to die.
The first teacher is a man with a large moustache that resembles that of one Albert Einstein. He is her science teacher and introduces himself as Mr Albert and I scoff loudly at the irony.
I love irony. It is one of the few tacits of human nature that I seem to be able to understand. Unfortunately, that does not always stretch to sarcasm, and I often find myself confused in conversation with one who claims to have a wonderful sense of humour. To me, most people who think they have a wonderful sense of humour are the same as those people who say they are bubbly to disguise having to describe themselves as obese. After all, what person would not claim to have a wonderful sense of humour? It is a trait most believe they have acquired, yet very few actually have.
All the tables are set out with the teacher on one side and three chairs prepared on the other. Flora sits in the middle one, of course, Lisa sits to her left, and I sit on the right. I ignore Mr Albert and subtly peer through the corner of my eye at a teacher sat at the adjacent table. She is an overbearingly enthusiastic drama teacher who has pigtails I would just love to pull as I grind my crotch against her cheeks.
“Flora is a lovely girl,” the man says, and she is not a girl she is a woman. She has breasts, does she not? Pubic hair, albeit that she removes upon my request? Childbearing hips and armpit hair that requires shaving?
Yes, she is not a girl; she is glorious sixteen, so don’t speak of my Flora with such patronising language.
“She really excels at biology,” he says, and I agree, particularly the part involving reproductive glands. “She enjoys chemistry, and physics is something she needs to work on.”
He pauses, leaving his mouth open with an elongated verbal filler stuttering out of it, as if he is struggling to decide how to articulate his next sentence. I never understand why people do this. Just speak. Why create this amateur dramatic show where you feign hesitance to make it seem like you care about the effect of the words you are about to deliver?
“Flora can, however, er…” There he goes again, stretching out another er as if he will keep it going all evening. “Can, er… Well… She can er… Be a bit childish.”
“Childish?” Lisa replies. Evidently, she was not expecting this. Neither was I.
“Yes,” Mr Albert says, with a slow but large nod.
“In what way?” Lisa asks.
“She can often giggle at things she shouldn’t giggle at. She says things that are inappropriate. Sexual things. And this is the back of her book.”
He shuffled through some pages of a worn-out exercise book and I feel Flora shrink down in her seat as Mr Albert reveals a page of well-drawn cocks. They are of varying sizes, some are coloured in black and are larger than the others, which amuses me I have to say (although I get the feeling I’m not supposed to display that reaction), and a few lines have been used to draw pubic hair on the scrotal region. I try to identify my own penis among the drawings and wonder how Flora knows how so many penises look when she is so very used to just my own.
“Well, this is very immature,” says Lisa. She glances at me as if she wishes for me to concur. I say nothing.
I glance at Flora. I want to snigger with her, but Lisa’s glare tells me not to. Flora doesn’t look at me.
The next teacher is a French teacher who is actually from France and has some surname I can’t pronounce and didn’t particularly care enough to remember. She gives the usual niceties and encouragement and praise and then ends up saying something very similar. She even presents another page in Flora’s exercise book with more penises, now with a few additional breasts and arses. One of the penises has a very well outlined beret on, and I can’t see why the French teacher would be so annoyed about that when she is clearly adapting her phallic drawings for the subject in which she is studying.
We go onto PE who say that she says wildly inappropriate things in the dressing room and talks openly and grandly about sex, and then English say something similar about references to period blood in a Shakespeare play they are studying—regretfully, I failed to hear the name of the play, which is a shame as I like the eloquence of old William’s language—and so maths also report similar grievances, claiming she was using the ruler to point out the average size of a man’s genitals, which again is adapting her focus to the subject she is learning and I don’t know what’s so bad about that if it means it’s relevant. History say the same thing and Geography and all the others and so forth, until we are done, and I am fed up and me and Lisa are stood alone outside the bathroom waiting for Flora to finish urinating.
“I don’t understand,” says Lisa.
“Don’t understand what?” I ask, because that’s what I’m supposed to do, isn’t it? Pretend to care?
“Why she’s so obsessed with sex.”
“It is odd,” I muse, gazing out at the window as I see that teacher with pigtails again.
“Do you think she’s sexually active?” Lisa says, and she turns to me with a face I have come to assume is concern.
I say nothing.
“I mean, I know she’s sixteen, and she’s starting to like boys, and I know she must have kissed a boy or two, of course—but do you think she’s doing more than that?”
“More than what?”
She seems to ignore the question, probably thinking it wasn’t genuine.
“Maybe we should have a conversation with her.”
We? It’s your daughter.
“About what?” I ask.
“About sex. Contraception, relationships, that kind of stuff. What do you think?”
I shrug.
“What if we take her fo
r a burger now? What if we go somewhere, congratulate her for so much positivity, and then we can ask her about all those doodles? It’s not too late is it? I mean, it’s Friday after all?”
She asks all these many questions then looks at me as if I’m supposed to know which one she wants answering.
“Yes,” I say, hoping this will cover it.
“Wonderful!”
Flora comes out of the bathroom and Lisa tells her we’re going to get a burger and I realise this will be at a greasy fast-food restaurant where the meal costs less than a small glass of sparkling water does at the kind of place I would wish to go to. What’s more, we have to drive to the middle of nowhere surrounded by nothing but forest to get to her favourite fast food establishment.
Fuck.
I should have listened to those questions.
7
We are sat in one of the most repulsive locations I have ever entertained, surrounded by people who look like they should be bedbound or covered up. Greasy skin, obesity and mouths full of processed food surround me like a horde of zombies readying themselves to attack. They stuff their mouths with cheeseburgers and chicken nuggets which probably contain less meat than a vegetarian’s shit. Their slomping mouths create the background ambience of this godforsaken hellhole, drowned out only by the tuneless electronic beat of something vaguely resembling music quietly pulsating out of poor-quality speakers.
Flora devours her burger like she has never eaten and it pains me to think I have entered that mouth. Lisa chew on hers with the daintiness of a mouse and I sit there, looking at the burger she has acquired for me, wondering how I can sneak it into the bin without being noticed.
“So,” Lisa begins, and she already has her mother voice on. “We are both so proud of you for how well you’ve done, on the effort you are putting into your work. Aren’t we?”
She looks to me and it takes me a while until I realise I am supposed to say something. In truth, I’m still distracted by the barely dead animal sandwiched between two poorly defrosted pieces of bread.
“Yes,” I say, and look back to the deplorably poorly slain beast that constitutes one’s dinner.
