Dawn
Dawn made her speciality that evening: eight fish-fingers
resting on a bed of penne pasta, garnished with a generous helping of mature
cheddar cheese, sometimes accompanied by a random sprinkling of
slightly-overcooked-sweet-corn. There was a pleasing yellowness to the dish
that gave the meal a summery feel; it was an inspiring flurry of brightness, a
harmony of flavours that by all accounts should not work and yet, for some
unknown reason – possibly the presence of later-added dollops of ketchup – the
combination was an unmitigated success every time. That is, until the sixth
fish finger, when the boredom would set in and the general dryness of the dish
would begin to test an already over-patient tongue wondering why exactly no
pasta sauce was added to provide adequate lubrication for the little chunks of
sunshine it was so graciously rolling down the throat.
It wasn’t that Dawn couldn’t cook, or that she didn’t
want to. In fact, only last week she had covered every inch of the kitchen’s
work surface with spills, sprays and splatters, as a shepherd’s pie – well, a cottage pie, to be perfectly accurate –
was formed out of the endeavours of a full afternoon’s culinary labour. Sure,
shepherd’s pie could be cooked every night if necessary, or at least on
alternate nights, with the fish-finger feast offering the perfect
counterbalance, but that was not how the
single-white-female-marketing-graduate-trainee was supposed to do it, was it?
The life she had chosen made the microwave her closest mate, the take-away her
chosen companion, the dinner-for-one her enforced option.
Food was an undesirable necessity, whilst cooking was an
unnecessary distraction from one’s personal and professional development. Well,
so she had been told on induction day by a trim-suited manager whose sandwich
box was less likely to carry chunky meat-filled sandwiches than it was a pile
of dog biscuits. Either she had a mother who trimmed the crusts and used a set
square to slice perfectly triangular sandwiches, filled with a low-fat spread
of humous, or something like that, or there was little more than a few lettuce
leaves, and perhaps a sprinkle of grated carrot, contained within the narrow
plastic tub inconceivably slotted down the side of a slim-line leather laptop
bag. For Dawn the message was clear: no-one ever came up with the winning idea
whilst eating a tuna baguette and so food was to be eaten swiftly, with as
little preparation as possible, thus freeing the mind to wander and wade
through the words that would shape the future.
This evening, Dawn did not want to think, let alone wade.
A friend, a colleague, someone from work was due any second and she had
abandoned her plan to hover on the landing for a furtive glance the moment the
clock had ticked to 7.40. Food might be an undesirable necessity but it was
still a necessity and, with a little care, she could face whatever, or whoever,
stood behind that door without a gnawing hunger rumbling away within.
Jarrod, meanwhile, had redecorated the living room with
bowls of crisps and dips, whilst the couch had been aligned slightly to
guarantee optimum reaching-distance for the glasses that would no doubt soon
grace the coasters he had placed with perpendicular precision on the edge of
the coffee table. It had been a full hour since Dawn had last stepped inside
the room that Jarrod was carefully manufacturing for whatever lay ahead, and it
was with some trepidation that she took a seat, pasta dish in hand, to catch a
few minutes of The Whole Nine Yards
before it was too late.
Barely had the first pile of penne been brutally shoved
into her over-eager mouth when Jarrod appeared in the doorway.
‘Um. What are you doing?’
For somebody so observant, Dawn thought, this was a
remarkably stupid comment.
‘I’m hungry,’ she finally replied, returning her fork to
the pile below, edging off a third of a fish-finger with expert precision
before plunging her fork into the orange skin.
‘Dawn. She’ll be here in twenty minutes. Things still
aren’t ready. Can’t you eat upstairs or something?’ he said with clear
agitation in his voice, willing her to leave.
‘Jarrod, I’m eating. It’ll take me five minutes. Seven
tops. You’ll have plenty of time. Just go and read for a bit or something,’ she
responded, her mouth half-full, while echoing his pronoun-slip over and over
inside her head. Her suspicions had been correct. The friend, a colleague,
someone from work, was indeed a she,
which served to further explain the flutter in his voice as he continued to
urge her to ‘stop interfering’ and leave him to ‘get things ready’.
Dawn’s eyes circled the perfectly prepared room. Never
before had her living room looked so much like a manufactured film set, with
every detail checked and corrected to suit the purpose of the scene ahead. Even
her Twilight poster had been taken
down – she was surprised she hadn’t noticed earlier – and been replaced by a
beach scene on which was printed an Oscar Wilde quotation she remembered as the
exact same phrase that had been plastered across her father’s mouse mat in her
parents’ home:
We are all in the
gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
‘My house mate?’ Jarrod would surely reflect with his
far-superior female guest later that evening, ‘yes, I would say that she is one
of those people who’s in the gutter but all she sees is the dirty water
streaming by. Not like you, Meryl. You see stars everywhere you look. You and I
are stargazers, Meryl. People who aspire to be something more, to know
something more. And we will be that something, Meryl,’ he would no doubt
continue, as Dawn became increasingly convinced that, in fact, outside of
Hollywood, Meryls were more likely to be found in retirement homes than gulping
down sweet chilli crisps, with a mild salsa dressing, whilst wallowing in
Woolf, or whatever literary dish the distinguished host would be serving
tonight.
Perhaps she would be a Mary or a Maddy - he would try to
no avail to call her Madeleine – and would wear a little flower in her hair,
while her cleanly-shaven legs waltzed effortlessly through the house, carefully
avoiding the creak-zones he would no doubt have warned her about. She would
wear a flowing white skirt and a blouse that promised much but offered little,
perfectly enticing further interest without jeopardising the maintenance of
modesty and sophistication.
‘Dawn? I’m serious. I really need this. Please. I can’t
risk you getting some of that on the
carpet,’ Jarrod interjected, moving away from the doorway as if to signal the
exit was now clear for her to use, whilst displaying utter disdain for her meal
by failing to name a single item on her plate.
‘It’s all dry stuff. There’s no sauce or anything,’ she
insisted, the meal’s weakness now becoming its main strength. ‘Look. Give me 5
minutes. If I still haven’t finished, I’ll finish off in the kitchen or
something. You’ll be fine. You’ve got time.’ She had been perfectly reasonable,
her tone of voice concealing her desire to continue analysing just how
different Matthew Perry was in this film to his usual role in Friends; with the current verdict
standing at ‘undecided’, a few extra minutes were crucial and would reveal
whether it was worth retreating upstairs to watch the rest when she could
withstand Jarrod’s protestations no longer.
It
could be worse, she continued to remind herself. There are numerous ways in
which this evening could be worse. She wasn't yet prepared to be grateful for
the way in which she’d be spending the remaining few hours before sleep signalled
the end of another disappointing day, but she could at least acknowledge that
things could be worse. It was all she had and no-one, not even Jarrod, could
take that away from her.
---------
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