I look down at my dessert and wonder when Chinese gooseberries became kiwifruit. I can’t remember it happening. Is it the passing of time or my Swiss cheese memory?
The kiwifruit is sliced thinly and fanned attractively atop a mini-pavlova, swathed in cream and dripping with passionfruit pulp. I am not a dessert kind of guy, but my date ordered one, and my late wife Mary hated eating pudding alone. She said it made her feel fat.
My dinner companion, Deloris, a vibrant sixty something, is talking in strident tones about her problematic family. I don’t know how to react. It’s our first date.
Her dessert is half a blood peach poached in wine and drizzled with toffee. She asked for a tiny dollop of yoghurt on the side instead of cream; I don’t understand why anyone would do that.
I want to eat my pudding, but she is ignoring hers, and waving her spoon around, talking faster now, piling sin after sin on her eldest son’s shoulders. I wish she’d stop. I feel it’s impolite to eat when she hasn’t started yet and I am dying to demolish my pav.
It seems unfair she’s moaning about her boy when he’s not there to defend himself. My wife used to do that with our daughter. The poor girl could do nothing right in her mother’s eyes, unlike our son, her favourite. He shot rainbows out of all orifices, as far as she was concerned.
I was always stuck in the middle like the jam in a Victoria sponge. Any time I tried to defend our girl or chastise our boy, my wife would punish me with bleak, brooding silences, which could roll on for weeks.
None of it mattered in the end. It was our daughter who moved home to help care for her mother for the two years Mary fought the cancer to stay on this earth. Our son buggered off overseas to ‘find himself’.
Deloris’s voice is becoming a monotone and my stomach is getting exasperated. I give in, pick up my spoon and cut through the crunch into the gooey centre of the pav. It is delicious. In moments, I have inhaled the entire thing.
Reluctantly I tune back into Deloris’s tirade. ‘How is your dessert?’ I interrupt.
She stops mid-word, blinks and looks down at her bowl as if it’s just materialised in front of her. She looks disconcerted. ‘Ah …’
‘Would you like some tea, coffee?’ I ask. ‘Or a drink?’
‘Are you having one?’ she asks. ‘A drink, I mean?’
Did I want to drink?
I am not a big drinker. I used to be in the olden days when I was a young buck and always up for a party. Before my wife came along and ‘straightened me out’. She limited me to a small glass of wine if we were out for dinner and a six pack of beers on New Year’s Eve.
Annoyance wells up in me. Thirty-four years of being grateful for a six pack at New Years. What the hell. I am a grown man for Christ’s sake. I can make my own decisions. I can have a drink if I want. More than one. Beer wasn’t even my drink, I’m a bourbon guy. I always have been.
It’s Friday night and we’re ‘uber-ing’. There are plenty of places we can ‘go on’ to, if we want. This night is crammed with promise. I feel great. I am finally out of the house, engaging in social connection and about to have a drink or two with a very pretty woman.
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘What would you like?’
She nods. ‘Gin and tonic please.’
I put my hand up to summon the drinks person. ‘So set ’em up Joe,’ I sing.
The server’s brows slide up and she frowns. ‘Sorry, sir?’
I flush. She wasn’t even born when Frank Sinatra sang that lyric, her parents probably hadn’t been born yet either. ‘Can we have a G and T and a double bourbon and Coke please.’
*
Three drinks down and my dinner companion has improved exponentially. She is hilarious and flirty, with a deep, dirty laugh that peels the years off me. I’m very attracted to her.
I like her hair; it’s short and fluffy, poking out from her head like a salt and pepper halo.
I like her eyes; they are hooded and deep greeny-grey, the colour of a stormy ocean.
I like her mouth; I watch it move, pink, glossy and animated, opening wide when she laughs to show off teeth, way too perfect to be real.
I like her sharply pointed chin and the jiggle of flesh behind it.
I like the way she is looking at me, like … like women used to before I became rheumatic, white haired and thick around the middle.
Everything in me tightens like an over-tuned ukulele string, and things are stirring that haven’t for a long time.
I knock back another double and the room tilts sideways.
‘Is something wrong?’ Deloris asks, frowning at me.
‘Um, no.’ The room is spinning or am I the one who is spinning, I don’t know. ‘Not at all, I’m just fine …’ As the words come out of my mouth, I realise they are all stuck together, end to end, like a chain of paper dolls. My stomach lurches and I have a horrible feeling I’m about to pass out. ‘I …’
*
I wake up in my own bed, roll over and vomit into a very handy bucket which is on the floor beside me. I’m sure an axe is imbedded in the top of my head. I groan and pat around me but can’t find my glasses, rendering the face staring down at me blurry.
‘Are you okay?’ My wife’s voice asks.
Oh God no, I’m dead and she’s come to get me.
My glasses are shoved up the bridge of my nose by gentle hands and I see a beautiful and very familiar face laughing down at me.
‘Dad, you idiot.’