Tasting Menu by Trahearne Falvey

First published in Lunate vol. 3

He told her she would have no choice in what was put in front of her, and she would have to eat it. As a child, he said, I’d sit at the table for hours until I learnt that I had to finish or it would be waiting for me the next morning. Just, please, whatever it is, eat it.

So, here, now: the erect necks of waiters, legs tracing lines across the room, the slush of wine into glasses, fingernails ticking stems, piano bubbling up from under the froth of voices as the last of the light falls across tablecloths. She smiles, shakes hands, sits.

Ready.

FIRST

Two cream-grey globules with the opalescent shimmer of sickness, and na- ked except for a thin slick of green oil. If asked to make a guess she’d start with oyster, but speaking is not the demand being placed upon her mouth. Feeling at first that she’s been had, she scans the table to find the same sorry situation playing out on each of the four plates. He picks up a tiny fork, sloshing the thing around so it seems as if it is trying to slouch its loose form away from his mouth, hesitating now at the lip of the rugged shell to say: My favourite. Not true, surely, just being a good boy for his mother, who is claw- ing a lemon wedge between a thumb and a finger, reddening a little as the fruit’s rigid fibres resist, a frown flickering at her brow, until it bursts out of her hand and across the table, landing on the floor. His mother looks up and she thinks that maybe, after all, she’s the kind of late-middle aged woman to fizz prosecco up her nose and laugh it around, but there’s nothing except the shellfish at her mouth, a slight sucking sound, and her long pale throat tilt- ing back like a strange-veined offering. Not a remnant of a sense of humour, he had warned her, shrugging his shoulders, and she still can’t believe it but knows that here, where the walls are painted what might be called Drowned Flint, is not the best place to test. Smile.

Are you not feeling well? his father asks from across the table, two feral eyebrows lowering on a creased forehead, and by now she knows how it goes. Embody gratitude at all times by building into every movement an awareness that you do not belong here: take controlled sips from the glass in front of you, for instance, and sit with tensed calves so that you are not so much on the chair as hovering above it, to demonstrate that you are ready to leave when it is clear some mistake has been made. When the father pays, look as though you were not expecting this, maybe, even, move a hand in the direction of your bag. She knows this, knows it all, and yet, is there a softening of care in his question?

She returns to the task at hand and finds them still there, radiating a tang of old sea like something rotting and brown-green draped over stones after a hot storm, an echo of that day on the California coast when the boy had asked her to move in with him. I should meet your parents, I guess, she’d said, almost stepping on the stinking remains of a sea lion’s head, wondering what it is that means she thinks a boy’s a good one if he forms a shiny assem- blage with his mother. Or, maybe, a bad one. Either way, she has to know, even though he had asked, Are you sure you want to do that? So, here, now, staring at the two off-white eyes of a monster, saying, enjoying the way they look, that’s all. The boy picks up at last, takes again his tiny fork, twists it under the muscle and moves the shell towards her mouth, whispering: You might love it.

Is this what love entails? Is it even the case that she loves him? There is not so much a fine line between love and not-love as the shifting of a shore, lapping and licking, leaving white scum and a dark shape as evidence of what had been and what will be again, and again. Will it always be like this, though, or will the sea dry to sediment in the increasing heat, or will the waves overwhelm the sand and suck it all into a mucky, bloated ocean? What will be left of her? No time to ask questions; something is being asked: his blue eyes, and the salt-water nudging against her lip. She closes her eyes, and the sea floods her throat.

Wine rinses clear, wincing; she did not love it. He moves the second crus- tacean from its shell to his own mouth and his parents don’t suspect a thing. At that moment, yes, sure, she loves him.

SECOND

This time, there is no way of guessing. A collection of green things and yel- low flowers, which is strange but fine, all fine — the mystery comes from the two golden, bulbous nuggets nestled on top. Anything breadcrumbed poses a question, of course, but at least the orange foods her mother rescued from the oven were recognisable as rings or animals or the alphabet, and then, usually, underneath, there was only that old friend, reconstituted potato, remembering the time smilies and hash browns and a lump of yesterday’s mash were placed on a plate and that was it, that was the dinner, and it was delicious. I had no idea, her mother had cackled, drowning it all in Bisto.

Sweetbreads, his father says, in a full, declarative bass, as though welcom- ing a celebrity to the stage. A pin-striped woman on the table to the right of them glances over, alarmed. This exclamation makes nothing clearer. The boy asks, she suspects solely for her benefit, And what part of the animal is that again?

Well, his father says, growing larger and redder, the question you should ask first is what animal? Typically...

Tutor called to say she’s sick, again, we should look for someone... healthi- er, the pinstriped woman says, fingers glistening with butter as she wrenches back the head of a cartoonishly large prawn, dark with bad matter and two ridiculous eyes, across from her husband who crushes a crab with a vice, plucking blush-pink meat with fingers and pulling out white strands with his teeth. She has never seen anyone do this, and is absorbed for a moment in the man’s fatalistic hammering and twisting. I like the tutor, the husband says, she’s sweet. A shard of shell flicks off his plate and lands close to his wife, who is pulling legs off her giant prawn and peeling the shell until a baby’s limb is left, drooping. Happy, at least, that the objects in front of her, whatever part of whatever animal they come from, do not look anywhere near as nude, she drags a knife through one, pushes in a fork, and chews —

The thymus, usually, his father is still talking, a lymphoid, or sometimes the pancreas, or the salivary gland, and the lump in her mouth is turning sour, not a chance she can swallow. Or, of course, he continues, the testicles or ovaries. This makes nothing better. She lifts her napkin to her mouth and tries to be subtle with the disposal, then thrusts a forkful of peas in her mouth while the waitress, around her age, fills their glasses, smiling, back straight, knowing how it goes.

Very important to use all of the animal, his father says, and she can get on board with this hatred of waste in theory, sure, even, to some extent in practice: that night before the end of the big house, for example, when they boiled all the pasta that was left, snaps and stubs of spaghetti, bows and half- bows, little ears and cracked slabs of lasagne, covered the table with cling- film and poured it straight on to eat like cows from a trough. And she was never too bad as a child, was she? Ate most of what she was given? Only that afternoon at the end of a winter term, when her mother was called into school because of the stinking mush of sandwiches pushed into the gap be- tween the wall and the radiator. I don’t like tuna! she’d shouted, finally, five months too late.

The phrase: the testicles or ovaries. There is a difference, she thinks, be- tween not seeing the next meal and this stoic posturing, birthed, she suppos- es, from second-hand memories of war-time banana sandwiches made from mashed parsnip and synthetic essence. Hilarious, really, when his parents must have enjoyed the war’s aftermath as a boom of fattening promises, to which the way they eat is a testament: slowly, not so much savouring the food as living with it for a while. His mother spears a single pea on a tine and lets it hover near her mouth, before putting the fork down again and taking a sip of wine. She interrupts her droning husband to tell of a historical nov- el she’s reading, all plague, probably, and eroticised rape in dim, candlelit barns, and this is almost enough distraction from the ongoing presence of the pancreas or salivary gland or ovary on her plate.

Almost, not quite. Before the waitress takes the plate away his father’s eyebrows swoop down again, and she could script it to the word: We have become, he says, a very wasteful society. She stares at her patch of table cloth, blushing and giggling — can’t help it, this too has been scripted — as silence settles on the table before being invaded by the caffeinated chatter of sisters, somewhere. Won’t the boy say anything?

She straightens her spine and readies for the next course. Smile, she thinks. Please, whatever it is, just eat it.

THIRD

All time now is waiting to eat or eating. She chews and drinks, chews and drinks — is this what salsify is? — then walks to the bathroom to splash water on her face. She has only herself to blame. Next round.

FOURTH

A tiny bird has been beheaded and plucked, bronzed and sliced through its spine, and now rests, bone poking out from a leg in the air, on a smudge of — yes! — potato, possessing the kind of shimmer that suggests enough butter to get a person through winter, a technique of saturation she perfect- ed in the early days of bedsitting: adding more and more and beating with a wooden spoon then piling into a bowl to cradle on her belly. She moves the bird to the side to get at it, ignoring the boy’s chuckle.

The bird’s scrawny ankle reminds her of the scavengers they watched that day on the beach, wrestling over scraps of blubber, blood on their beaks. Aside from the rotting head there were four fat sea lions, sleeping, but the telescope revealed an island full of them: huddling horizontal around the derelict house and, she liked to think, lazing on the settees and armchairs inside it, rolling in the bathtub, dressed in the deceased owner’s old plaid shirts, his one special blazer. The guide told them how they had been hunted to near extinction — when a scientific explorer was sent to observe the last colony he returned with four heads to mount on his wall — but they came back, and now, in high season, there were thousands. She imagined them repopulating the whole coastline, long after humanity: the beach shacks and doughnut stores they had driven past, the strip malls further in, and, further still, the sprawling houses with garages and lawns and pools — sea lion ter- ritory, all.

While pulling the greasy tendons of the bird apart, the mother asks about the trip. The boy had called it a holiday, and he’d been right, of course, they’d returned, but part of her wanted to follow the salty line of the Pacific to its very end, to the penguins at the tail of Chile, or just live motel to motel wearing the same denim shorts every day, eating eggs from the farm with the animatronic-chicken show, and talking, if talk was needed, to each other, or the man at the museum who collected Sasquatch sightings and claimed owning an anthropology professor. She’d had a tax rebate, he came from money and he could drive — that was it, she told herself, that, and the fact of his tallness, stretched into being by two-hour three-course private-school lunches. You were supposed to have soup or pudding, he’d said to her once, but I always took both.

FIFTH

His father is frowning again, saying something to the waitress about the se- quencing of cheese and dessert, and she realises that the boy had been seri- ous when he’d said six courses, and they weren’t at the end at all.

SIXTH

Night makes its inky presence known through the floor-to-ceiling windows and the room has air and space now, so that when the silence of their table is absorbed again by the shrieking sisters they are visible in the corner of the restaurant, four bottles down and spilling with the kind of red laughter that comes from release. Husbands, she assumes, or ex-husbands, but, no, or at least, not only that. They are talking about their mother.

The time she mistook a jug of chicken stock for orange squash! one sister howls. When she put Dad’s shaving cream on our toothbrushes! Another. All three are lost together in the lines of exclamation marks and it seems they will never get to the full stop. The waitress’s smile is slipping, polishing the silver in the corner with light from dying candles glinting off knives, alone now with the pastry chef and a kitchen porter racing towards the end of a night he can’t see. The time she didn’t come home! It has been so long now that memories of other people’s mothers get mixed up with her own, and when she thinks the word, sometimes all she sees is a composite of processed hair and lipstick, stretched lobes, cracked knuckles.

It is increasingly difficult to predict how dinners will end. As a child, there would either be a scoop of Neapolitan ice cream she would scramble into a grey sludge, or nothing, but as she has grown, her life has accumulated pos- sibilities: coffee, or something creamy and sweet in a bowl, or a pear perhaps, either green and acorn-hard or collapsing in its rough skin, or, under certain circumstances, a shot of tequila or grappa or sambuca, or, under others, a joint. Often, there would be an argument. It put her on edge, the unknow- ability of it all, and here was the sharpest of edges, not having even seen the menu, not knowing what out of all that was available for human consump- tion might be deemed innovative by the chef, as well as right and proper by his father.

New wine falls into new, tiny glasses.

She taps the stem, willing that the argument be left for the sisters, but somehow his father has veered into an assertion that, when he bought his first home, expectations were lower than now. This is the main difference. The mother hums her agreement while taking a sip of dessert wine: you wouldn’t live in the places we lived. Hmmm, she wants to add with a radical- ly different intonation, hmmm, remembering opening a bedroom cupboard to a colony of mushrooms and discovering that the wall behind a shower was made of cardboard when it crumbled away from her hand, but she takes a huge gulp of the sweet wine instead, and then is so distracted by the plates the waitress places before them — chocolate in so many forms it is as though they multiply on the plate, wafers and rubbles and dusts, domes and little oblongs of cake — that she almost misses the boy nodding: absolutely, he says, you worked so hard. The tide has crept out now and she doesn’t care if he is just being a good boy, she has never seen him look so much like some- thing scrabbling the ocean floor, and it’s this more than anything that makes her put the wine glass down, take a breath and say, because someone’s got to, because she has learnt from the tuna incident: That’s rubbish, really, don’t you think?

She can feel her face getting hotter, her voice louder, is sick of people thinking that she does not work hard, that her mother did not work hard, even that hard work is the holy code for unlocking the mystery of why some people can spend an evening cracking open a crustacean, and others have to pick the shards from the tablecloth afterwards. What a joke. What an old, sad joke.

His father does not laugh. His mother, though, a smear of brown at the corner of her pursed lip, does. A contained squeal at first, concealed by the napkin she holds up to her chin, but, as the air fills with the crackles and snaps of popping candy and the mother’s mouth gapes open to reveal a sludge of chocolate clinging to its insides, the laugh widens to a huge, hic- cuping giggle, and soon the boy is laughing too, and even the father joins in, guffawing and wheezing like a wounded animal. She realises then that she has a choice: she can join this ship of fools — eat the dessert, partake in a di- gestif, move in with the boy and all his solid furniture, until marriage, until children, until death — or she can do what her mother had taught her to do when she’d had enough: place her knife and her fork across each other on the plate, so that they balance in a precarious X, and leave.

Trahearne Falvey is a writer and teacher in South London. His criticism has appeared in 3AM Magazine, Review31, and Lunate, while his fiction has appeared in Molotov Cocktail, Mycelia and Necessary Fiction, among other places, and won the Writing East Midlands’ Aurora Prize and the Short Fiction/University of Essex International Story Prize.

Twitter: @TrahearneF