The House is Quiet Without Her

“Do you have to scream like that? Screaming like a bitch!”
She hates it when she calls at the foot of the stairs and you tell her you’re coming and then you don’t come. She hates it when the food goes cold. Sometimes I tell her not to worry - that it’s our fault if we have to eat a cold supper. Sometimes she’ll listen agree pouting and sit down to eat. More often she’ll huffily snatch the plate off the table when the latecomer arrives and slam it in the microwave.

She had called twice. We had absently yelled, “coming!” and promptly hadn’t. Eventually she called again and she sounded annoyed so I put down what I was doing and padded down stairs. There was supper on the table – it looked delicious. She was glowing with post-culinary effort. I don’t remember what it was. It may have been some delicious steamed white fish with spring onions and ginger. It could have been crispy fried tofu sitting in a rich, dark, salty broth heaped with grated radish. It may have been English food: something sophisticated and complicated that she had cut out of the Saturday supplement. It could have been one of her signature weekday dishes fish pie, seafood pasta, chicken pie, lentil burgers. She has a real repertoire.

Whatever it was looked good and I had a guilty pang we had let it spoil. So I sat down, avoiding her gaze. Within seconds the same irritation was creeping over me as I knocked my knees under the table and inhaled and salivated with no gratification . I poured myself some water to keep myself busy and fidgeted in my seat. She was huffing and stamping about. Eventually she went to the door. “CAN YOU COME? WE ARE WAITING!” That’s maybe what she said – she said it really loud, with guttural rage, with all the vehemence those ticking minutes had amassed. There was the dull-carpeted thump of feet upstairs, the flushing of the loo almost in explanation. She turned on her heel stalked off to the kitchen to re-heat the vegetables. I watched at the table licking my finger clean from a sneaky dip into what was waiting in front of me. I paused, listened. There was the quick thump of footsteps. He was coming, and unusually there was something direct about his step. He came into the dining room straight, no fiddling about in the hall, no meander past the bookshelf to look something up, no shuffling back and forth going to fetch a clean wine glass, bottle, napkin. No. He came straight into the room, and leaning over the back of his chair, shouted above the sounds of the kitchen, the fan of the oven, the tap, the tinkle of crockery,
“WHY DO YOU HAVE TO SCREAM LIKE THAT? SCREAMING LIKE A BITCH!”
She stopped dead in her tracks her back to us.

“Dad!” I croaked , “don’t speak to her like that!”
He turned but didn’t look at me. He was nasty. That was his vicious streak, I thought, but then recognised it. I own it too. The fury in the white heat of the moment you blindly half mean it, apologies can happen later…
“You shouldn’t speak to her like that” I contested, but it was weak and meant nothing. She came in and said quietly that the food was now cold, that she had called four times. She sat down and served. We ate in silence hunched over plates eyes fixed before us. It was good; her cooking is always reliably good. He was saying nothing, eating with muted appreciation, that angry frown crumpling his brow. I looked up. She was sitting straight backed, the corners of her mouth were pointing down and she was eating slowly and reluctantly. Her brown eyes looked sad and drawn: she was deeply hurt. The food tasted good but it stuck around the prickle in my throat.

I wondered how they would go to sleep tonight. There didn’t seem to be any tender apology on the horizon. He simmers for days. He had never spoken to her or even me like that before. I wondered how she would go to sleep imagined her saying nothing, but turning over on her back facing the wall, turning out the light. Both of them steeped in humiliation unable to face each other. She grimly staring at the wall.