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

brilliant idea of driving to this beautiful spot with plenty of fresh air. On Sundays my mother switched to wifey mode more than ever, and we found her intolerable, but we didn’t dare mention Star Trek again; in fact, on one Sunday afternoon, purely by chance we managed to slip outside and tried to play Star Trek with the other children, but the other children didn’t want to play Star Trek with us. We’d never played Star Trek with them before, and if you’ve never played Star Trek you can’t just come along and start playing it when the others are in the middle of their game; my father said that those weren’t proper families, they had no sense of family life, only indifference, and so their children play on the street. I wished at once that we had a little more indifference in our family, at least enough to allow us to go to our rooms while my father whistled
Rigoletto
; that was more togetherness than I found appropriate, and anyway when we went out in the afternoons to get some fresh air we generally strolled through the countryside separately, because Sunday was already over, and I thought we could just as easily have stayed at home. My father talked to my mother about his week at the office, whereas my mother didn’t talk to my father about her week at school, because the office was important and worth more than school; sometimes they planned our holidays and decided that we’d go to the sea next year, to Italy, Yugoslavia, Spain or Turkey; over time the distance from home increased. My mother loved the mountains, too, and said, Austria is closer and only half the price; she went on and on about the mountain lakes she’d heard about, and flower meadows appeared before her eyes; she pictured herself carrying armfuls of flowers into a wooden hut, for my mother often longed for village life; and the holiday resorts we always went to in the south looked very un-village-like, nor were there any flower meadows, but instead we had meals in huge dining halls. Although my mother was pleased that she didn’t have to cook on holiday, she pointed out that she’d rather cook on holiday than lie in bed sleeplessly above the discotheque again, because in Yugoslavia our bedroom was situated directly above the discotheque, but my father said, if we go to Austria it might rain the entire holiday, and immediately my mother agreed that we should go to the south again, because my father really needed the sun on his holidays. Once, when we were in Turkey, the sun shone only periodically rather than uninterruptedly in the first week, and then we counted ourselves lucky that it shone uninterruptedly in the second week. My mother can’t take the sun; she instantly turns red in the sun, whereas my father after being burned goes pretty dark. My mother doesn’t like sunburn, she always said, I can’t imagine it’s healthy to suffer like that, but my father said, you have to get through it, without the sunburn you don’t go brown; he drizzled lemon juice over all our sore spots and we were never able to decide whether sunburn was worse with lemon juice or without. My mother said, forget the martyrdom, this is absolute purgatory, but my father said, it helps, and he laughed at us when we fussed; stop making such a fuss, he’d say, and, pain is relative; that, in fact, was true, because my father had hardly any sensitivity to the sun; it’s all about strength of character, he said, and my mother seemed not to have much strength of character, indeed she seemed rather weak. Her sensitive skin instantly turned red in the sun, and she spent her holiday in the shade, only because she was such a fusspot, whereas gritting our teeth in our attempts to impress our father, we went into the sun. It didn’t work because after the sunburn we turned nowhere near as brown as my father, but at least he couldn’t call us fusspots like my mother, who had holed up in the shade; it’s always so hot in the south, she moaned, so hot that you don’t