Food Fight
© Anne Penketh 2015
Anne Penketh has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published by Garstang Press in 2015.
This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
This novel is a work of fiction. With the exception of historical events, all characters and organisations are the products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The last time Susan saw her daughter it didn’t end well.
“I don’t like American comedies,” Mimi had announced outside the cinema in Leicester Square.
“Oh. Do you want to see something else?”
“Don’t bother.”
Then came Mimi’s assessment of the ‘rip-off’ blockbuster merchandising on the way in. That was followed by Oscar-worthy throat clearing and a phone call during the trailers which had the people behind ‘shushing’ while Susan cringed.
“Well, that was side-splitting,” Mimi said afterwards. “God, I hate the West End.” It was pointless asking her if she wanted to go for a Chinese. Mimi was already heading towards her bus stop without saying goodbye, stranding Susan with her mouth open like a goldfish.
That was five months ago. But now Mimi had been persuaded to come round for dinner.
Susan rushed out of the tube to help Serge with the shopping. They hugged outside the supermarket but she was so anxious she could barely look at him. She couldn’t express her misgivings – Serge had been the one to reach out to Mimi in the first place.
He tried to steer her towards the meat counter. She tugged his sleeve. “We don’t want to provoke her unnecessarily. Not again. Just pretend you’re a vegan for the night.”
They stocked up on lettuce, carrots and beetroot. It would have to be salad. Serge was sent in search of chickpeas and returned with two sirloin steaks which he dropped into the trolley. “For tomorrow,
chérie
.”
On the way past the dairy section, she paused in front of the ice cream freezers.
“Your empire,” said Serge with pride, placing his arm round his wife’s shoulder. She nodded towards the biscuits and cereals aisle.
“Not only mine, it’s the DeKripps’ empire.” Even after a year as Marketing Director for the London branch of DeKripps Foods Inc., she still had to pinch herself.
It was dark and chilly. They adjusted their scarves and set off for home in Serge’s car. He had some marking to do before Mimi arrived.
“What, on a Saturday?”
“Look who’s talking, Madame workaholic.”
The Christmas lights along Essex Road on their way back to Hackney reminded her that soon they’d be needing a tree. Serge loved the English rituals.
“Don’t forget fire crackers for the table,” he said.
“
Christmas
crackers.” He banged his hand on the steering wheel in mock frustration. Despite more than a decade in London his attempts to master the English language never failed to amuse her.
Serge parked and went straight upstairs to his study, while she tidied the living room and banked up the fire. She lit a couple of nightlights on the coffee table.
Mimi had a key but refused to use it. When the doorbell rang, Susan started and glanced nervously at Serge, who dropped his half-smoked cigarette in the garden and closed the French windows.
“You’re the one who invited her,” she said.
“Seasoning of goodwill,” he smiled. “Be nice. She’s come all the way from Wandsworth.”
Mimi had moved across town to be as far from her mother as possible, after dropping out of a media studies course.
“You know she’s hated me and everything I stand for since I joined DeKripps,” said Susan. “But she also forgets that Big Food is paying her rent on that flat. It wasn’t all that long ago that she had the comfort of this four-bedroom home.”
Serge’s parted lips revealed his gap-toothed smile as he went to open the door. Mimi had always got on better with him than with her mother, even though he’d only come on the scene when she was a headstrong five year old. Mimi used to say she’d been ‘abandoned’ to child minders while Susan was on the road organising focus groups.
She heard her hanging up her coat in the cloakroom and the clunk of vegan Doc Martens on the parquet floor.
Her daughter appeared in the kitchen, holding out a bottle of wine like a weapon.
“Hi Ma,” she said. Susan examined her matted strawberry blonde hair, her elfin face upstaged by a metallic stud poking through her left nostril.
“I think I preferred it when you called me Mum,” she said. They didn’t kiss. Susan busied herself setting the kitchen table for supper, salad bowl at the centre.
They chewed in silence for a while. Serge opened the wine and began pouring, but Mimi stuck with tap water.
“How’s work?”
She only knew that Mimi was an activist with a non-governmental organisation where she was supposed to be doing ‘consciousness raising’.
“Fine.” Mimi turned to Serge. “What about school? The youth of Camden enjoying their Molière?”
“Less and less. They prefer to do car maintenance at A level, not French. Soon, I will have no job.” Mimi smiled at his joke. The two of them began discussing
L’Avare
, which had been one of her set texts at school. Susan noticed the eye contact, and felt an inexplicable stab of jealousy.
Serge ensured that conversational reefs were avoided for the rest of the meal. He announced that he’d agreed to sacrifice his usual cheese course. Susan got up and came back to the table with a packet of DeKripps biscuits.
“Biccy? They’re new.”
“Your mother invented the name,” said Serge. “Crumblies.”
“Congratulations.” Mimi grabbed the packet and began to read the list of ingredients out loud, swinging back in her chair.
“Look at all the sugars. Are you trying to kill us all? I can’t believe you’re selling this junk.”
“Not selling, Mimi. Marketing. Creative stuff. And excuse me” – she couldn’t help herself – “people actually like the
junk
as you call it.”
“You’ve sold out to Big Food, that’s what you’ve done,” said Mimi, her face reddening.
Serge stretched out his hand as though to quieten her, but she flicked it away, glowering at Susan from across the pine table.
A moment later she looked at the enormous watch on her delicate wrist, and stood up.
“Better go,” she said, and disappeared down the hall without a backward glance. A ladder snaked up the back of her black tights.
Susan waited for the sound of the front door before throwing the biscuit packet at the kitchen wall. A stream of crumbs dropped to the floor.
“Why do we bother? Honestly, why do we bother? I’ve done my best for her and this is what I get in return!”
Serge embraced her in silence.
“It’ll take time. She’s changed. She’s had a political awakening that’s all. It happens to everyone,” he said.
“Does it? I don’t remember treating my mother like this for years on end. I’m sorry, but it just gets to me.”
In bed, later that evening, Serge said: “It’s painful for me too, you know.”
She snuggled up to him. She would always be grateful to him for treating Mimi like his own. She thought of their first cramped flat in Kentish Town, and how he’d agreed to try teaching in London so they could be together.
The day they met, she was on a flight to Paris for a meeting with French dairy reps and found him sitting in her seat.
He stood up straight away, brushing his dark fringe from his eyes, and apologized in broken English. As he smiled, she noticed his slightly chipped front tooth, a childhood fall from a bicycle, she would discover.
She guessed he was a few years older, couldn’t quite put her finger on why she found him so attractive. He wasn’t handsome in the classical sense – was it the way he looked at her, his head tilted, his deep voice enveloping her like dark chocolate? They’d chatted about nothing in particular as the Airbus idled at the stand. There seemed to be some sort of problem and their flight was running late.
Then Serge turned to her and said in English, “I want damage!”
“What?”
He tapped his watch and said again, “I want damage.”
“Oh,
damages
. Yes, from Air France.”
She’d asked in schoolgirl French why he’d been in London. He’d been at an international conference on Albert Camus, the writer.
He was a French teacher in Paris, he said, though he was hoping for a transfer to his native Brittany.
Didn’t Camus write
The
Outsider
? That’s right, he said.
L’Etranger
. Any man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral will eventually be sentenced to death. Camus is saying that’s what happens if you don’t play the game. It’s a little masterpiece. Written half a century ago and more relevant every day.
As the plane surged forward, engines screeching like missiles, Susan’s heart raced. At that terrifying moment after take-off when the plane dips slightly, she was convinced they were going to plunge back to earth.
Without asking, she’d grabbed Serge’s hand. He’d held onto hers for the rest of the flight.
Susan slid away from Serge to look at his face. He was tense. “Don’t let Mimi get to you too. I shouldn’t have flown off the handle,” she said, raising a hand to ruffle his hair. She pretended to do a double take.
“Is that a grey hair I see?”
“If you don’t want to see it, you can switch out the light,
chérie
.”
“Night.” She turned over to switch off the bedside lamp, before giving him a kiss. He pulled her close. The next day, he was dead.
“Serge that’s the door,” she called out. He’d taken the car to pick up the Sunday paper while she lingered in bed with the radio, and she presumed he was lazing downstairs. Neither of them had slept well.
“Can you get that?” She shouted when the bell rang again. The house was silent. She grabbed her dressing gown and ran downstairs. Two policemen were at the door. She knew what they were going to say as soon as she saw the expression on their faces, but couldn’t take it in.
They said he’d been driving on the wrong side of the road and had crashed head-on with a Subaru estate, whose driver was unhurt. But Serge was dead. There was an investigation to find out what had happened. The car may have skidded on black ice. Mortuary, post-mortem, coroner, would you like to sit down, Miss, it was all swirling around her head and making her dizzy. She was digging her fingernails into the door as she tried to steady herself.
They left after promising she could view the body later.
Her first reaction was to run back upstairs to the bedroom and burrow under the duvet where his smell lingered. When she eventually forced herself downstairs, still wearing her dressing gown, she half expected to see him unlacing his shoes and grumbling about the price of the newspaper. She wandered into the kitchen, her slippers knocking on the floorboards of the empty room. She breathed in the aroma of his morning coffee.
She stood at the sink, stirring tea with a trembling hand and staring out of the window. With a sigh, she switched on the tap and let swirls of cold water gurgle down the plughole. Holding the tap for support, she ran the other hand under until it began to ache and whiten and her freckles began to fade, just like she’d done as a child. Then she pressed it against her burning face.
She opened the fridge, where the two steaks mocked her solitude. She grabbed them and pushed them into the freezer, out of sight.
Walking into the living room, she collapsed onto the sofa with the phone.
She noticed the invitation cards to Christmas parties on the mantelpiece addressed to Serge and Susie, Susie and Serge. Another slap in the face.
She rang Mimi, who hung up immediately, and found herself howling into the empty phone. She dialled the number again. Engaged. She tried again. “Answer, will you?” she said. Her palm dampened on the receiver. Her next call was to her mother.
Pick up, pick up. “Oh, it’s you, dear. I was half way through Your Money.” What, she’s spending my inheritance? Then she remembered her mother’s obsession with the stock market since the big crash a couple of months earlier. She must be checking the paper. There was a long silence, then a sigh. She imagined her mother wiping away tears. Finally, she heard: “Are you alright, darling?”
“Of course not.” Her throat tightened and hot tears dripped onto her lap.
“I know what you’re going through.” Susan’s own father had been killed in a motorway pileup only months after her parents divorced. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
Then she had to find the strength to call Serge’s younger brother in Brittany.
A frantic search produced Serge’s address book on the phone table in the hall. He and Jean-Louis weren’t close, particularly after his marriage to Marie-Christine, an upwardly mobile blonde with a taste for designer scarves. She dreaded having to make the call in French, but mercifully, Jean-Louis, and not his wife, answered the phone. Speaking through a dense fog she heard herself agreeing to organise the transport of Serge’s body to Brittany for the funeral.
After trying Mimi again, she rang her assistant, Martin, and summoned enough composure to tell him she wouldn’t be back at work for a few days. “Take all the time you need,” he said. “I’ll let Frank know. That’s such a shock, I can only imagine how you must feel. Let me know about the funeral arrangements, and if there’s anything we can do.”
She knew he was sincere. But how could he even imagine how she felt? And how could she ask DeKripps for help, when she didn’t know herself what she needed?
Her closest friend from university days, Lily, showed up within hours, carrying her battered flute case. She provided a comforting mix of compassion and firmness. She made sure Susan got up in the mornings, that she ate at mealtimes. And they talked, endlessly, about Serge.
Susan just wanted to know that he hadn’t suffered. Her doctor went through the post-mortem results with her and reassured her that he’d been killed instantly.
“Look, here it says that there was no evidence that he braked -” she gasped inwardly, “and with those kinds of injuries death would have been instantaneous. The fact that he wasn’t wearing a safety belt, I’m afraid, was a contributory factor to the gravity of the injuries.”
“Oh God, not again,” she said. He looked at her quizzically over his reading glasses but said nothing.
“So no black ice?”
“No black ice.” With the timing of years of experience, he pushed a box of paper tissues across the desk just as she began to sob. He handed her a leaflet on bereavement as she left the surgery.
“What do you mean, he wasn’t wearing a safety belt?” Lily said when she got home. The two friends were curled up on the sofa holding mugs of tea with the television on mute.
“He didn’t like wearing them. It was part of his Gallic charm. He used to say rules are for fools. Stupid, stupid.” Susan shook her head.
“But why was he on the wrong side of the road?”
“He did that sometimes. But usually in an unfamiliar place. He’d just set off on the right on auto pilot.”
“So maybe he had something on his mind, and wasn’t thinking properly.”
Susan didn’t dare mention the unspeakable: The row with Mimi the night before he died.
“But do you know the worst thing? I never said goodbye. I never told him I loved him. He just walked out of the house and never came back.”
There was so much to do before the funeral. Lily offered help in notifying people as the condolences began dropping through the letterbox. One was from a colleague in Washington offering to help if she needed a change of scene.
“Thanks, but I’ll do it,” she said with a sigh. “I’m going to have to get used to it. From now on, I’m on my own.”