It’s Saturday afternoon. My wife is on the phone, the cat is in the tortoise’s box, the tortoise is in the dog’s bed, and the dog is standing in the middle of the kitchen, looking at me as if I were a potential source of redress.
“Everyone else is happy,” I say. When we first moved, the animals were so perplexed by the change that for a month the dog and the cat would eat only each other’s food. Now they’ve finally reached some weird behavioural equilibrium which I am not going to disturb just because it’s unnatural.
“OK, now we’re 10 for lunch tomorrow,” my wife says, putting down her phone.
“Ten?” I say. “We can’t have 10 people.”
“Ten adults,” she says. “I don’t know how many children.”
“We have, like, seven chairs,” I say.
“It’ll be fine,” my wife says.
“There won’t be enough food,” I say.
“Stop being so negative,” she says. “Why can’t you look forward to things?”
“I don’t have the knack,” I say. “Do we even own 10 forks?”
“How dare you, you bastard!” my wife shouts. She leaps up and rushes towards me, fists clenched. Then she rushes past me, towards the window over the sink. Directly outside the window, a parakeet is hanging from one of the bird feeders, helping himself. My wife has strong feelings about which birds are allowed seed: native species only.
“What do you think you’re doing?” my wife shouts. “Get off!” The first few times she yelled at him, the parakeet flew away. Now it pauses to watch her for a moment, then calmly carries on eating.
“He doesn’t fear you,” I say.
“Don’t worry,” my wife says. “I’m training him.”
“Really?” I say. “I think he’s training you.”
“He’s like a pet,” she says. “An evil pet.”
“He’s not coming in the house, is he?” I say. “I can’t be in a room with a bird.”
The next morning I am back at the kitchen table, patiently poking holes in a leg of lamb with a knife, and stuffing each hole with a sliver of garlic, a sprig of rosemary and an anchovy, in a manner prescribed by Simon Hopkinson. There are 10 chairs round the table, some of which are technically lawn furniture. The dog and the cat are lying flat on the floor, while the tortoise does brisk circuits round the room. Out of the corner of my eye I see a grey blur drift by, like a depressed cloud. When I look up from my work, two black, embarrassed eyes are staring at me from behind a table leg.
“Billy,” I say. “What’s up?” Billy is a lurcher with a shy and permanently apologetic bearing. He’s not our dog – he belongs to the youngest one’s friend – but he’s a familiar fixture, wandering from room to room in a perpetual state of mortification.
Billy watches the tortoise stride past him with concern.
“Underfloor heating,” I say. “For an hour every morning he thinks it’s summer.” Billy studies the array of mismatched chairs spanning the gap between us with a regretful expression that seems to say: you’ve got guests coming; I had no idea.
“Relax, Billy,” I say. “Try the floor.” Billy takes a few tentative steps in my direction, before fixing me with a look that clearly means: is that lamb?
My wife walks in. “That looks good,” she says.
“Serves six to eight,” I say. This is a lie. Simon Hopkinson has nothing to say about numbers.
“We’re 12 now,” my wife says. “Hi Billy.”
“Twelve?” I say. “What’s happening? Am I dying or something?”
“Get out of it, you prick!” my wife shouts. The parakeet on the other side of the window appraises her with a cold eye.
“This is done,” I say, pushing back my chair. “It doesn’t need to go in for another 20 minutes, so I’m gonna have a bath.”
Billy walks over and rests his head on my lap. He glances up toward the leg of lamb, and then looks back at me with a face that seems to say: if I were you, I wouldn’t leave me alone in here with that.
