Making A Meal Of It By Louise Mumford
This is probably our last meal together. He’s leaving me. After thirty-five years he’s leaving me. I would laugh, but my mouth won’t oblige.
I’m damn well going to enjoy this meal. Despite him.
I’ve spent my life trying to enjoy things despite him. My fault. My choice. I was young and pretty enough back then that I had options, lots of options: he forgets – it wasn’t just him. He put on a good show though, at the time. Charm, expensive shoes and a glint in his eye that promised something exciting. I thought I’d hit jackpot. But it was just a show. A front. A façade. A glitzy theatre curtain hiding an empty dust-covered stage.
He hasn’t told me he’s leaving me. Yet. That would take guts. But I’ve heard him on the phone, to her, making his plans, hiding out in the garage and thinking he couldn’t be heard.
“Friday,” he’d said. “Friday night, I’ll do it then.”
So I’ve carefully prepared this meal. All my favourites, for once, because I’ve spent years eating what he likes and tonight should be different. I eat a buttery parsnip and allow the silence between us to curdle.
He clears his throat.
“So. How was your day?” he offers. It’s one of our tried and trusted opening gambits.
I finish the parsnip, shrug, then take a big gulp of the wine he’s poured for me. He brought it home with him and, for once, it doesn’t look as if it’s come from the special offers shelf. Doesn’t taste like it either, it’s smooth with just a hint of something bitter – the way I like it. Maybe it’s an offering, this wine.
Is this how he’s going to play it? Small talk through the whole meal then sucker punch me at dessert? Does he think he’s lulling me into a false sense of security? I am as far from lulled as it is possible to be without my nerves snapping like cheap knicker elastic – the kind of knickers she probably wears.
“Oh, you know – the usual,” I reply.
He hasn’t been cruel. He hasn’t been anything much. He has a decent enough job, something that keeps him out of the house for a respectable amount of time, but he’s never aimed higher. We have been on decent little holidays – weekends on the coast shivering in matching raincoats and picking sand out of our ham while our friends took up cheap deals of cocktails in the sun. He doesn’t like the sun. It makes him peel. He has always taken a decent enough interest in me: once a week, Saturday nights, going through the well-rehearsed motions before rolling over to sleep.
So. Bloody. Decent.
When I first began to suspect about the affair, the rage blind-sided me, I must admit, but now I rather like it. I am no longer a woman; I am merely a badly stitched skin-bag of lava and every time I look at his face the stitches strain just a little more.
I think of them drinking wine and spooning dessert into each other’s mouths, knowing they are only thinking of other things to do with their lips, and I almost feel sorry for him, because he’s not a young man now and it takes effort to keep up that kind of show, that glitzy theatre curtain. He must be exhausted.
She must think he’s charming.
“Heard from David?” He tries again, another of our old reliables.
I look at him and unroll the bacon from the sausage with my fork, so I can savour it on its own. The gravy jug is by my elbow, but I don’t pour myself any. He’s still handsome enough. Got his own hair and teeth. But then, I’m no slouch, either. Thirty-five years watching my weight like it was a nervous horse that could suddenly spook. I don’t blame myself. I’m not just saying that – I really don’t. Why would I? I did nothing wrong. What’s the phrase that people use when they break up with someone? “It’s not me, it’s you.”
It is most definitely you, darling.
He still hasn’t said anything. He’s running out of time: he’s cleared half of his plate already.
I sit back in my seat and hold my wine glass by its stem, swirl the ruby liquid like the way I’ve seen actresses do in films. Thoughtfully. I take a sniff, it has a nutty smell to it, something almond-like almost, like toasted almonds… no, not toasted… burnt – burnt almonds. It’s definitely not our usual kind.
Say it, damn you! Tell me. Sit there, and eat your roast beef and tell me that you’ve been screwing another woman, that you think you’ve found an improvement on me, that you can do this better, this marriage thing – that you won’t, after a few months, ossify back to the fossil you are and she’ll sit here (not here, actually – I’m keeping the house) and wonder where the man she met went.
Oh, she’ll wonder, alright.
His hand goes to his throat again.
Good.
Should I tell him how I took all the beta-blockers out of the bottle and ground them up, how long it took to get it so fine that it would mix easily with the gravy? How I worried whether that would be enough, so I put more of it into the white pepper bottle? How I’ve thought this through, his “suicide”? The letter is already printed telling of his guilt over the affair, the wife he has wronged, the overwhelming sense of shame he feels. Afterwards, I will clear the table and clean up, methodically and carefully; I will put the letter next to him and the empty pill bottle and I will then go over and stay with my sister like I have arranged. The next morning I will discover him and I will play the grieving widow as well as I have played the devoted wife all these years.
He coughs and puts his fork down, frowning, his hand now tugging at his shirt collar, tugging hard, hard enough to break the buttons. I watch them strain. Let them break – I won’t have to sew them ever again. He wipes at his eyes and I can see sweat on his temples.
“I feel…” he mumbles but he doesn’t finish the sentence because he is trying to take a deep breath.
There it is, I listen for it gleefully. The wheeze. He fumbles in his jacket pocket, the jacket hanging on the back of his chair but the action of doing so throws him off balance and he half slides, half-clambers down from his seat, ending up in a heap on the floor.
The medication itself won’t kill him straight away; I’ve read up on what happens, and, unless he goes into shock and his heart fails, he’ll be doing this for quite a while, enough for me to make a good inroad into a second bottle of wine. But that wheeze, oh yes, that wheeze will help me finish him off.
He’s still clawing at his jacket pocket and I get up and walk over to him.
“I feel… help me…” he manages.
I smile and gently knock his trembling hand away, taking his inhaler out of the pocket.
“You want this?” I ask, still smiling.
He nods but there’s a flicker there in his eyes, his animal mind is sniffing out the rot in this little scene.
“Sorry,” I say and shrug my shoulders, taking the inhaler back to my seat and laying it next to my glass.
His eyes are wide as he gasps and gurgles for breath.
“You…” he gargles, “You… did this—?”
I smile again. Now it’s happening, now he’s actually there, flailing about on the floor, I don’t feel much like talking to him. I thought I’d want to gloat, to tell him how I knew, I’d known for months, but I find, now I’m finally here, watching him die, I’d rather just… take it all in.
I’d worried that I might relent, that seeing him like this would spark some sort of humanity in me.
It seems I have none left.
He flops back down onto the floor which is inconvenient because I have to move my chair a little to see him. I can feel my heart fluttering. Excitement, I think to myself.
He laughs.
Or at least, he tries to. He hasn’t got much breath left for something like that, he’s gone a weird ashy colour but shiny too, like the skin on hot milk.
But he’s definitely laughing.
I try to take a deep breath.
He’s saying something, there on the floor, propped up against the chair leg, his shirt now half open and the buttons scattered on the tiles. He’s mumbling it, and his eyes aren’t quite focussed on me but he’s definitely saying something. And it’s making him laugh.
What is he saying?
I go closer, my breathing fast and shallow and I can’t seem to get a good deep breath. I end up crouched on the floor next to him, like a supplicating servant at the deathbed of her master.
“The wine,” he says and I can feel the heat coming off him. I see his throat work as he swallows. “The wine… Mandy’s a… a…” the word is a clot clogged on the back of his tongue “… Chemistry teacher…” and he splutters off into another tortured chuckle.
I look over at my wine glass, at my lipstick on it, and my heart starts banging as if it wants out of my stupid body. He doesn’t have it in him, I think, but I feel as if I am being squeezed by something, squeezed so tight my eyeballs might pop.
I can’t get back up again and I don’t know if that’s shock or…something else.
Before the world turns black, I almost smile…
… but my mouth won’t oblige.
Judges Comments
In every crime/thriller competition we receive 'domestic noir' entries where a wronged/cheating spouse attempts to discard their partner, but Louise Mumford's Making A Meal Of It, the runner up in this year's contest, stood out. This wasn't just because of the neat, effective twist she deployed whereby both husband and wife had planned to do away with each other over dinner. It was the voice of the betrayed wife that swung the odds in Louise's favour. Bitter, sardonic, dispassionate and blackly funny, the narrator of Making A Meal Of It creates an impression from the start and then carries on delivering. She's credibly multi-faceted: at once a bored housewife wanting to escape a rut, and an articulate woman furious at being cheated on: a badly-stitched skin-bag of lava.
The domestic setting is well-drawn, and the details of the meal and the intentions behind it are well conveyed. The reader's attention is drawn, several times, to the taste of the wine – perhaps the only instance where this particular pudding is overegged. On the whole, though, this is an excellent story of deadly intentions thwarted only by the husband's own scheming: cleverly put together to create a darkly enjoyable read.