D= Bivalves, mussels, cigarettes

"Bivalves, mussels, cigarettes"

(with a nod to Raymond Carver's "Bicycle, Muscles, Cigarettes")

Donald's wife left him while he was opening a bottle of wine. That's
how quick the thing was. One moment she was pulling lipstick around her
mouth, the next the cork was easing from the bottle and she was telling
him it was all over. She used some words she'd obviously shaped for
this moment, but they didn't mean a thing to him.

He stood there, foolish, with his arm bent, frozen in the action of
corkscrewing. She didn't say much and she took nothing at all. Donald
had no idea how he felt when the door closed behind her. She didn't
slam it and the noise was drowned by the squeezed popping of the
cork.

The butter burnt in the pan, leaving a slightly sour greasy smell in
the air. He moved the pan from the heat but let the flames dance there
in a circle. He still had the corkscrew with its speared prize in his
hand. He set it down on the counter, a grey speckled marble he had
never liked, and tipped some of the white wine into a glass.

Donald didn't gulp the wine, he tasted it and moved it around in his
mouth. It tasted pretty good, dry and tart, an Argentinian that had
flavours of tangerine and ginger. He would have to wash the pan with
its burned slick of butter, turning gray and black at the bottom of the
pan.

The mussels.

He had bought them for her, he didn't much care for them. He had not
cleaned the beards off them yet, nor tapped them to urge them to close.
He wasn't going to cook them for himself, but it seemed wrong somehow
to throw them away, and besides, cats would only tear at the dustbin
bag to get at them.

What else was there to do ?

Donald picked up the bag and hesitated. He wasn't a person for
hesitation, which is not to say that he was a decisive man of action;
more that things had to be done and there was no sense giving them more
thought than they needed. Behind him, the extractor fan roared, pulling
the smells out of the kitchen. He could feel the weight of the bag,
feel how the individual mussels moved and made the bag sag in different
places. It felt to him like pockets full of marbles from years ago,
spiders, glass alleys, chinas.

He was running water into the avocado bath before he really knew what
he was doing, kneeling beside the bath, one hand on the cold tap, the
other placed tenderly by the bag of mussels. He would need salt, they
had a box of sea salt downstairs.

Donald didn't know how much to add, how salty was the sea ? In the end,
he settled for four handfuls, scattering them across the cool water. He
tore at the bag, but before he began to scoop the mussels out he began
to fear. He didn't want to drown them, the whole thing was to save
them.

In the garage, he had a bag of sand, intended to be made into cement
and laying a patio. He would never have to do that now. The sand would
do for something much better.

Before he carried the bag upstairs, he felt for the soft packet of
cigarettes, Marlboroughs brought back from France. He slid one out and
lit it. No need to worry about being discovered, being lectured. It
didn't taste any better or any worse.

He knew that his wife leaving him was something important, something he
would need to consider, but it didn't feel like it. When Donald had had
a cavity, earlier in the year, his tongue hadn't been able to leave it
alone, constantly touching it, defining the new shapes. This wasn't the
same at all. He should have been thinking of what it might be like not
to wake up with her, not to have her near, but his mind just kept going
back to the mussels.

Her leaving had all the emotional punch for him of the postman being
late. He couldn't understand why he felt so little. Perhaps she was
like the salt and pepper pots that she always set down on the table,
although neither of them had ever shaken them over a meal. It may be
that she felt exactly the same about him.

Donald put the sand into the bath, firstly spreading a thin layer
across the bottom and then scooped handfuls in at the end farthest from
the taps, building up a bank that he was able to shape and pat with the
flat of his hands until it felt suitable. It was like a beach
now.

Once the mussels were in, he rinsed the sand off his hands and dried
them on a mint-coloured towel which he dropped to the floor. He felt
something when he looked at his mussels, something that was at once
pride and regret.

The next morning, the post was on time and an electricity bill in his
wife's name was amongst the post. He looked at it hard, hoping for it
to hurt him, but seeing her name there made no difference at all to
him. There were two possibilities he could identify. Either he was a
stronger person than he had believed, or she had meant less to him than
he had suspected.

He ate his toast deep with butter, dropped the knife into the sink. He
had smoked while he ate, a sensation he had never experienced before,
with mixed results.

Afterwards, he went upstairs to the bathroom to shave, running the hot
tap until the mirror fogged, then wiping a space in the mirror with a
squeak.

While he shaved, he turned from time to time to look at the mussels
whose life he had saved, who would live with him now. The bathtub was
full of black smiles.