Robert Mugabe Came To Dinner

The Captain and Mia are back and Archie is trying to start a game.

‘What four people would you invite to a fantasy dinner party?’

‘Oh I love this game,’ says Bea.

We always played that game. But everyone straightens up with excitement.

‘Dead or alive?’
‘Either.’
‘What period of time?’
‘Any.’
‘Geography?’
‘Anywhere.’
‘Wow.’
‘Who starts?’
‘You can. Bea to start.’

Bea nods and makes a show of going into her thoughts, raising her eyes up to the ceiling for inspiration. I know that she will pick Nelson Mandela because she always chooses him.

‘Well. First of all I think I would have to say. Nelson Mandela.’

There is a groan of disappointment from everyone else around the table.

‘Oh I had him.’
‘Me too.’
‘And me.’
‘Can we have the same people?’
‘I suppose so. If we had different reasons for inviting them or different questions for them.’
‘Oh good.’

Bea looks at each of us, seeking our silence so that she can continue.

‘Then I’d have …’

‘Do you know who I wouldn’t invite?’ The Captain suddenly shouts out.

‘That Mugabe character. I wouldn’t want him sitting anywhere near me.’

‘God no.’

‘Actually,’ The Captain muses, ‘Maybe I would have him. He’s the sort of bloke you’d like to give a really bad muscle to.’

Everyone around the table is nodding passionately. I’ve never heard the expression ‘bad muscle’ and I wonder if it’s some sort of arm lock. The Captain is a large man and I’ve no doubt he would easily take the Zimbabwean leader in a fight. But then I realise I’ve misunderstood him because Noah shouts out, ‘Yes or a really bad prawn.’

‘Yes,’ The Captain shouts, ‘A mussel or a prawn. Bad seafood half cooked on a barbecue. Have him squirting it out both ends. That would sort him out. Lay him low. Give some people time to get rid of him.’

‘Well,’ says Bea, ‘You’d need a banquet of bad mussels for that because you’d have to take out all the other people who are helping him stay in power.’

‘Yes. I’d do that then,’ The Captain nods and looks very pleased with himself. He presses his arm down underneath the table and Mia sighs contentedly beside him.

Archie turns to me.
‘Wren. You’ve been very quiet. Who would you have to a dinner party? If you didn’t have the pleasure of entertaining all of us here of course.’

Everyone is looking at me and laughing.

I want to shout out ‘my mother’ and I imagine her sweeping into the room and telling all of them to stop being so ‘up themselves’ and to go home. But I don’t want to offer her as a guest because it’s rather pathetic for a hostess to miss her mother all of the time. And I suppose they might think I’m showing off about her. Actually she was chosen as a fantasy dinner guest by a supermodel in a magazine interview after she died. I remember they’d lifted that quote out of the interview and put it in an eye-catching box inside the feature. It said, ‘Who would I invite to a fantasy dinner? It would have to be Morag Strath ... Her designs inspire me to be beautiful and to be a woman.’ I smiled when I read that because I could hear my mother sighing with exasperation.

I suppose I could reel off The Buddha, Gandhi, the Dalai Lama or one of the Pankhursts just to get it over with. They are popular choices for a woman playing this game in mixed company. Actually, I would like to meet all of them. Who wouldn’t? But not all together and at a dinner party. Men make the same choices but usually substitute the suffragette for the babe who’s monopolising men’s magazines with front page exposures and is papped nightly at the point where she has to open her legs to get in or out of a car.

‘Wren? Come on, come on,’ says Archie very rudely.

I think that he is trying to impersonate Jeremy Paxman on University Challenge. But he may just be impatient.

‘Well. One of the Pankhursts.’

Bea bristles next to me.

‘Which one?’
‘Oh. The one who got killed when she threw herself under that king’s horse?’
‘That was Emily Davison.’
‘Was it?’
‘Yes. She was a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union which Emmeline Pankhurst helped found in 1903.’
‘Oh. Right. So who was Sylvia?’
‘Sylvia was one of Emmeline’s daughters. Honestly, Wren. You of all people should know this.’

And I know that implicit in this reprimand is Bea’s notion of my mother as a guiding light to all women. And this makes me angry. So partly to annoy Bea and possibly because I’ve drunk too much wine to cope with the frustrating boredom of the party I decide to be difficult.

‘Well, whichever Pankhurst, if I had them to dinner I’d like to ask them what’s so wonderful about equal opportunities for women.’

‘Wren!’ Bea gasps in outrage.

‘Time for a bit of live hot feminist babe action’, laughs Archie, anticipating the row, and Noah and The Captain shout out ‘Wah-hay!’

‘Oh shut up Archie,’ shouts Bea whose face has narrowed with anger as it turns back to me.