The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke, Jamie Bulloch Read Free Book Online Page A

for the very first time in her life. Besides, she pointed out, although Verdi may have been necessary to ensure a happy Sunday, he certainly wasn’t good enough; we thought about her bold statement for a while and among all the many requirements necessary to ensure a happy Sunday, we couldn’t find a single one which was good enough. We felt the difference between necessary and good enough was as fuzzy as the beauty question; none of us could remember a single Sunday which was even halfway good enough. On Sundays in particular my father loved to expound his notions about a proper family and he began his expounding at breakfast, saying, today we’re going to take a drive to here or there; sometimes my brother whined, not again, but then his Sunday would come to a very abrupt end; for my mother it sometimes came to an end at lunch, if she had let the roast dry out – once she even let it burn; on that occasion, however, my father put mercy before justice – but quite often the roast was dry, and then, my father said, his generosity dried up, too. Especially when it was the Christmas goose, then his generosity dried up completely; it was a Hungarian one, that Christmas goose, which my mother had bought cheaply, and because it was cheap it couldn’t have been anything other than dry. My father repeatedly tried to explain to my mother that, unlike the Hungarian ones, Polish Christmas geese wouldn’t be dry. That didn’t make sense to my mother: after all, the Poles were a poor people, so how come their geese wouldn’t be dry and tough. My mother didn’t really understand how currency exchange worked, she fancied a Polish goose would be leaner than a Hungarian one, because she didn’t think the Hungarians looked as hungry; but the cheaply bought Hungarian Christmas goose failed to oblige her by being a fat and meaty goose; on the contrary, it was pathetically dry, bony and tough; that’s where the generosity dried up, and with this Hungarian carcass my mother’s Christmas was over, just as her Sundays frequently came to an end at lunchtime when she served a dry roast. Occasionally we made it through the afternoon, but generally not much beyond, for one of my father’s notions about a proper family dictated that all of us should do something together; mostly we would take a drive somewhere in the car and then go for a walk together, because my father had spent the whole week in the office and was dying for some fresh air at the weekend; but we always had to drive far to find the right fresh air, and when we finally reached our destination, the car park was often full. And my father spent the journey whistling
Rigoletto
and smoking, and that made me feel sick; I always asked him to stop the car, and sometimes he did stop so I could get out and throw up; but he couldn’t stop just anywhere, and I still had to be sick, which meant of course that my Sunday was over. It was also over when I said I felt sick because of the smoke and his fast driving; of course I didn’t say that
Rigoletto
made me feel sick, too, it was enough to have mentioned the smoke and his fast driving. I only pointed it out once and never again; in any case, by the time we started looking for a parking space Sunday was definitively over, because my mother said that there was also fresh air to be had behind our house, plenty of fresh air, and sometimes we said that behind our house the other children were playing Star Trek; we hardly ever played Star Trek with the other children, because we had to go together as a family to find fresh air in places with full car parks, while behind our house there was not only plenty of car-parking space, but also plenty of fresh air. My father became furious; we had no sense of spending time together as a family, and my mother swiftly demonstrated her good sense by admiring the scenery; behind our house the scenery wasn’t as beautiful, besides, we looked at our back garden every day, while my father had the