Bryony Damage

V and Me get to The Bear and Avocado first, as usual, and without delay order a bottle of Campo Viejo and get the fags out. We are the only ones left who smoke. We are puffing and chatting, enjoying the calm before the babykrieg.

On the other side of the bar, the staff are hooking up blackboards displaying today's lunch menu. I wonder out loud whether I should have the turbot – a schoolboy error, it transpires, as this enables V to initiate The Pet Conversation.

"Oh yeah," she says casually, "I meant to tell you. Amy at work just got an aquarium for her flat. She's filled it with tropical fish."

"Really? Mmm, the belly of pork sounds good."

"Yeah, she was showing us some photos of it yesterday. It's in her living room. The little things are beautiful, just perfect. So colourful. Amy said she gazes at them for hours. Well, not hours, but you get the idea."

I know what's coming next.

"Yes, it all sounded lovely. Perhaps we should get one and put it in the spare room. What do you think?"

"It's a lot of responsibility," I say. "Cleaning, feeding, filtering and stuff. What happens when we want to go away? We'll be tied to the aquarium."

"My mum could help out. We could redecorate the room and turn it into a chill-out zone. Get some bean bags, subtle lighting - it would be brilliant. No-one we know has anything like it."

I mention money and V takes on the demeanour of a furious puffer fish. She pretends to study the menus across the room. I know this is a ruse to conceal the high levels of seething fury she is at present experiencing, mainly because she doesn't have her glasses on. I tentatively offer to help her read the menu. This does not go down well.

"I mean it's not as if we're going to be using the bloody spare room for anything else in a hurry, is it?" she hisses.

Ian and Jody arrive. They ram the swing doors open with their stupidly expensive pram, which as it happens is about the size of our spare room. Sitting in it is their daughter Molly.

"Jesus! Did we really used to live in this city?" asks Jody, an old newspaper colleague of mine, rhetorically. She does this every time they come up to town from their new place in deepest Suffolk.

"How do, my luvverly!" roars Ian in his one-size-fits-all country bumpkin accent. For all his mocking, he is today sporting one of those quilted blue jackets more commonly seen on minor royalty than minor celebrity chefs. He has also, regrettably, taken to wearing red cords.

He claps me hard on the shoulder, causing me to drop my fag, and asks how life in London is. Before I get the chance to make the point that he surely must secretly agree with - that is to say how brain-meltingly gash living in the countryside is - he announces that he is 'just nipping into the scullery to see Luke.' Luke is the chef and owner of The Boar and Avocado, and is something of a local culinary star on account of having turned this place from a swirly-carpeted theatre of violence into an award-winning organic gastropub.

V has Molly in her arms. I watch as she plays with her little feet through his designer romper suit. She looks at him with affection, glances up and gives me the baby look. Oh-oh.

Jody comes bounding over from the bar like she's spotted an incorrectly priced Balenciaga bag in an Aldeburgh boutique.

"Have I told you about all the new friends I've made in Dunwell?" she asks.

"Nope," I reply, honest to a fault.

"Phil, Cherry and Hazel. And of course Willow."

"Good for you. Do they live nearby?"

"Yes, they do! They're trees. It's for the column. Maria wants 'quirky'."

"I see. Have you met any humans?"

Jody snorts derisively.

"They're so beautiful, my trees. I don't know how you can possibly bear to live without trees, in a concrete hellhole like this."

I look out the window at the handsome, dappled plane trees and ask myself the same question. Jody half-drains her wine glass and segues into a diatribe about the unfriendly neighbours, pollution and murderers that so blight the nation's capital. She brushes aside my (admittedly baseless) theory about how sex criminals on the news seem to come predominantly from East Anglia and Lincolnshire and fails to laugh when I explain that I can see all the wildlife I need at Clapton Pond.

Molly has decided that today is the day she will unleash some sort of hellish revenge upon the world, so she starts screaming, apropos of nothing. V offloads her like she's radioactive. It transpires that she did, in fact, have something with a half-life of 300 years within her. Now, it is very much outwith her.

Jody must be inured to the almost cruelly putrid bouquet issuing from Molly's undercrackers, as she shows literally no alacrity in getting the child away from me and V. It must be a parent thing. Eventually she carts him off, presumably to some kind of decontamination unit.

As if by magic, Glen and Candy appear at the table. Their stealth attack catches me and V unawares and within seconds I am on the wrong end of Glenn's power handshake.

Because he is a vegan, has a small penis (according to Ian) and is not so much under Candy’s thumb as ground into the dirt then flicked casually away by it, Glen feels he has to emphasise his manly credentials by attempting to shatter my hand each time we greet. He also has a disagreeable habit of flagging up the fact that some of his sperm has produced another living human. An Alfalfa Male, if you will.

Glenn sits down, stretches his legs out and accidentally touches my shin with a bare toe. V describes Glen's feet as 'medieval'. I am filled with such revulsion that I have to have another cigarette and ponder whether or not I have some kind of obsessive disorder.

"Not given up yet?" says Glen. "I don’t miss it you know. Stopped just like that - no gum, no hypnosis. None of that rubbish."

Glen says a lot of stuff like this.

Ian reappears from the kitchen and spots Glen at the table.

"Hey Glen, how goes it, you fuck?" he bellows across the dining room. A well-heeled couple sitting nearby look up and frown.

Ian is swearing because he has just been in a Proper Kitchen. Chefs think making a red wine reduction is as cool, dangerous and important as capping a blazing oil well and thus swear a lot. Ian likes to think he is still a Proper Chef, despite the fact that he spends his time farting around in his red cords filming The Gould Life for Lifestyle Plus (channel 923). Hence the swearing.

"How's the book? How’s the farm? And Molly? How's life? God, it's all go innit," splutters Glen.

"Pretty fucking good as it goes," says Ian. "The telly twats are basically paying for the renovation of the farmhouse. Result."

"Superb," says Glen, accidentally touching my leg again.

"Yeah, and I sorted out the book deal this week. Should keep us in scrumpy for the next few years, might even pay for Molly to go to a decent school. We're thinking of going private."

"So, what’s the series about?" I ask.

"The pitch is 'the trials and tribulations of a cook from the Smoke who sets up in the sticks from scratch with literally nothing'. House is a wreck, no crops, no animals, neighbours from hell, financial crises, all that stuff."

"But how can you have a financial crises when you're getting all this cash from the telly people?" asks V, suppressing a smile.

"Yeah, that's valid but, well, we have to practically build a house from scratch, and a farm, and turn a profit and support Molly, so it's gonna be tough."

"You're hardly in danger of going bust though, are you?" I venture. "I mean, Jody's writing a column in the magazine about all this as well isn't she? How many people read Joy? Half a million? All free publicity."

"Well, yeah, but I'm going to have to fork out serious moolah on the house and so on. Anyway, no-one's claiming it's fucking real life, are they?"

"But it calls it a reality show in the Radio Times," says V, not entirely innocently. Ian sighs and looks longingly at my fag packet. He rolls up his sleeves, handily displaying his old burn scars, the ghosts of kitchens past.

"Look. It's. Just. A Bit. Of. Fun. No-one's forcing you to watch it, or to read Jody's column for that matter."

V raises her eyebrows but says nothing. Candy appears, waving a sheaf of menus above her head.

"Menus menus menus," she declaims, thrusting them briskly towards us like a croupier. "Why don't we start with the big sharing platter of antipasti? Ok?"

"Oh," says V. "I was going to have the scallop and black pudding salad."

Glen is looking at the menu and screwing his face up. "Parma ham, salami, pepperoni - I can’t eat any of this."

Candy pulls a face. Glen visibly shrinks. I feel a rare pang of sympathy for the sandal-wearing berk.

"Yeah, actually, I was going to have the rabbit terrine to start," I say.

"Well, y'know I’ve ordered it already, someone had to or we’d be here all day," snaps Candy. "Glen, you can have some of the hummus and a tomato or something. If anyone wants anyone else they’ll just have to speak to the waiter. Themselves."

She flounces into a seat and cracks open the sparkling water.

V is on the verge of offering out Candy when the table is cast into darkness. A black 4x4 the size and approximate shape of a Rutland county town has parked outside our window. This signifies the arrival of Richard and Rachael, and their improbably Welsh-sounding twin children Gethin and Cerys.

Soon enough the family appear at the table, with a school friend of Rachael's, a blonde woman called Bryony, in tow. Bryony has dazzlingly white teeth and looks like she is test driving the Boden catalogue. Richard stands unnoticed in the corner of the room with the twins while Rachael, who makes Audrey Hepburn look like a pre-menstrual Nancy Spungen, zips around kissing everyone on both cheeks and cooing at the other babies. I break off from Glen's monologue about biofuels to attempt conversation with Richard.

Ninety seconds in, the talk turns to fund management and I find myself at the bar, unnecessarily purchasing a white wine spritzer.

Once babies have been fed, the big sharing plate has come and gone and the main courses have arrived, our old Uni friends chat about house prices (as is obligatory under the London House Prices Conversation Act of 1994), their sprogs, schools, breast feeding (not doing it puts you on a par with Rose West, as far as I can tell) pensions, savings accounts, mortgages and so on.

V and me ask polite questions about all of these topics but of course bring no experience or expertise to the table. Less expertise than the babies, in fact. However, we have our trump card, our joker, and Richard plays it for me, as a reward for attempting earlier to engage him in conversation.

"Of course, you guys are so lucky not having all these financial millstones round your neck," he says. His look of benevolent amazement at our good fortune is tempered slightly by the fact that I know Richard’s latest bonus could probably fund the creation of a new Atlantis, let alone buy a small aquarium full of exotic fish for V. Lovely Rachael joins in too.

"And the freedom! God, when was the last time we went out for a meal or to the cinema Rich?"

Soon, the others are joining in. Apparently they have all been held hostage by their children for months on end. We're back on an even keel. V and me may not have any material or familial assets, but we are truly FREE, having refused to give into the tyranny of houses and offspring. It makes me want to do something crazy, like go out drinking all night with Ian or offer Glen a foot massage.

Then, over pudding, it happens.

As a newcomer to the group, Bryony has thus far been operating within safe conversational parameters - quizzing the others about their children, work, holidays and so on. Unaccountably, she is now pouring petrol on those parameters and gleefully setting them ablaze. During a brief lull in the chat, she turns her attention to V. Smiling sunnily, she tilts her head very slightly to her left and says: "So, no kids yet for you guys?"

To the layman, V looks calm. But years of experience tell me  that an epic feat of containment is taking place.

"No," she replies evenly. "We don't have kids yet."

"Now leave it," I mentally urge Bryony. "We could all walk away from this unscathed if you just leave it."

Regrettably, Bryony is neither psychic nor in possession of a functioning tact gland.

"Wow, I'd love to have the freedom you guys have," she says, wide-eyed. "So is there any particular reason for not having kids? Was it like a lifestyle choice or...something else? I mean, time marches on, doesn't it?”

Curiously, time seems to have slowed almost to a halt for me. V is behaving like a dormant volcano, emitting early but scientifically measurable signs that an eruption is due. Desperate times call for desperate actions. Like a conversational paratrooper, I jump in with the first thing that comes into my head.

"Tell me Bryony. Those are great teeth you've got there. Have you had them whitened?"

Bryony looks taken aback, and mildly outraged.

"Do you always asks strangers such personal questions?" she asks, before storming off to the toilet. As she walks away, V mimes a multiple stabbing.

It's going to be a long, long journey home.

Comments

[Jamie]

Dear MQ. Thank you! More will appear shortly. J.

[Jamie]

Dear MQ. Thank you! More will appear shortly. J.

[MQ]

Just stumbled onto your blog via Crinklybee and haven't read anything so entertaining since... well, I suppose since reading Crinklybee himself. Consider yourself added to my RSS feed. Keep it up!