Sushi for Tea

 

Looking at the supermarket competition form, I hesitate.  Will I use my own name?    Apart from my best friend Tammy nobody uses my name anymore. Letters that come through the letterbox are addressed to Mr and Mrs Sean Lynch.  I am Mrs Sean Lynch.  On the form, you have to answer a question about oranges and the first prize is a cruise to the Mediterranean. Fourteen days for two, with full board on a luxury cruise liner, calling at ports in Italy, Spain, Malta and Greece.  Imagine….

The nearest I ever got to a cruise was the ferry from Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead, when we were going to a guesthouse in Blackpool on our honeymoon.  We felt very excited going abroad, even if it was only England.  For most of the journey we stood at the railing, holding hands.  When the boat had docked, we took a train to Blackpool, eating sandwiches and drinking from little bottles of juice that Sean bought in a kiosk.  I had never bought ready-made sandwiches before and it made me feel pampered. A sandwich in my family was a slab of brown bread with a chunk of cheese, wrapped in grease-proof paper. 

The train journey went far too quick for my liking.  Blackpool was magic.  Our guesthouse was tucked away in a side street but close to the beach.  The smell of kippers for breakfast hung in the reception area. 

I felt thrilled by entering our name in the guest book: Mr and Mrs Sean Lynch.  My new name: Mrs Sean Lynch.  I could not stop giggling.  Our landlady for the week looked at us over her glasses and I began to blush.

‘We’re just married,’ said Sean and I blushed even deeper.

 ‘High tea will be at five thirty sharp.  I hope you enjoy your stay here, Mr and Mrs Lynch.’ 

 Sean now calls me: ‘y’rself’, or ‘y’r ma’, but in those days he would call me ‘my Rose’, and ‘my love’.  Or other names, when we lay cuddling on the big double bed.  Then the children came along and the big bed became a place where stories were read, tears were dried and noses blown.  I became a mother with my firstborn; I became ‘ma’ in the years to follow.

 Halfway down the aisle, between the cheeses and the meats, I hear a woman speaking to the manager.  She wears a lovely coat that must have cost a few bob.  She has the figure for it.  Unlike me.

‘Have you got any sushi?’ she asks. 

I look at the meats and wonder what to get for tea.  Macaroni cheese, perhaps, or a fry-up.  Sushi…, I had sushi once.  Last summer there was an international food festival in the market square in the Temple Bar area.  There were stalls with foods from all over the world.  I went early, on my own of course.  Sean is more the bacon-and-eggs type of man.  The children are not at all interested in anything remotely more exotic then pizza but I read the magazines at the hairdressers, and I know about foreign foods.  I tasted tapas from Spain and duck from China and cheese from France that smelled like the laundry basket on Friday.

Sushi were little fishy bites made with sticky sour rice rolled in something that tasted like black rice paper.  Nothing much to it, but it seems to be very fashionable nowadays. 

Why does she want sushi?  It is Friday; perhaps she’s having a couple of friends over for drinks and nibbles.  They will drink cold white wine from long stemmed glasses and eat little bites: fancy nuts, savoury biscuits, olives and sushi.  They will have conversations about books they’ve read and music they have heard.  I will sit on the settee, watching telly and eating a packet of cheese-and-onion crisps, washed away with a can of lager.  Himself may or may not join me. 

We used to have friends over when we were just married.  Sean would invite Kevin, a mate from work, and his wife Tammy. The men used to drink stout; Tammy and I preferred a cider.  I’d made a nice spread, with cocktail sausages and tiny sandwiches. We would talk, about the cost of living, the situation in the North and watch Gay Burn in the ‘Late Late Show’.  Tammy and I were pregnant with our first babies at the same time.  Together we pushed our trolleys through this supermarket, laden with nappies and baby food.  Tammy doesn’t come as often anymore; not since she and Kevin were divorced.

 The sausages are on special offer so I settle for a nice fry-up with a few rashers, sausages and an egg.  Sean can go to the chippy to pick up fries.  I’ll buy a couple of cans of beer - perhaps he’ll stay at home and watch telly with me instead of going to his local.  There is a film on and then after that it is Pat Kenny, though the ‘Late Late Show’ is not the same since Gay Burn quit.

The doctor told me I should be eating salads and low-fat foods.  During the week I try, but not in the weekend.  I don’t get many treats nowadays.  The sausages look rather pale and limp.  Perhaps sushi is good for your love life.  God knows we can use a bit of help in that direction.  All those years ago, in Blackpool, we could not get enough of each other.  After a walk on the beach we’d tiptoe up the stairs to our small bedroom, then turned up for meals slightly late and very flushed.  I know all about flushes now.  I usually get one between the detergents and the pet food, must be something that triggers it off in the soap smells.

 ‘Oh!  Excuse me please!’

My trolley has collided with another.  It is the sushi woman.

‘I can be such an eejit when I’m in a hurry,’ she says.  We disentangle our shopping bags and cause a little traffic jam in the aisle. 

‘Sorry for that!’

She smiles.  A nice smile.  I don’t know what to say, really.

‘No harm done.  Friday is always a lousy day for shopping anyway.’ 

 From close up, the woman looks frazzled and her hair is a mess.  Perhaps she has hot flushes too.  In her trolley I spot a packet of green lettuce (‘rabbit’s food’, himself would call it), chicken, a packet of sushi and a bottle of white wine, along with a tub of olives. The kind of food you eat when you have a representative job.  I never had a job, let alone a representative one.  The kids and the house, that was my work and I did it with pride and joy.  She has no children.  No one with that kind of food in a supermarket trolley has children. 

My children are growing up fast.  Ailish, the eldest, is walking out with a very nice young man.  Sean and I expect an announcement any day now.  Ailish has a university degree and is very bright.  She will have babies and a job.  Then there is Tony.  He has just started college and still lives at home.  He is the son every mother wants.  Mary is the baby in the house.  Cheeky and pretty, she winds her dad around her finger.  He calls her ‘Princess’ and never refuses her anything. 

In between Ailish and Mary I had three more babies.  I lost two and one died within an hour after birth.  Every time I walk past the baby food and the nappies, I feel those babies.  Sean has never forgotten about them either.  Every year around this time he lights a candle in church and without saying anything, he buys me a bunch of flowers.  Gerald would have been seventeen this very day.  Still, we have been blessed with two fine and healthy children, what is more than a lot of folk can hope for.  We went through a rough patch then, Sean and me, blaming something, somebody, God, each other.  In the end we stuck together, mainly for the children.  And then Mary came along.

 Time to hurry, the queues at the checkout are getting longer.  I put a six-pack of beer, two cans of cider and a large packet of crisps, plus all the ingredients for a fry-up in my trolley, adding a cucumber and some tomatoes for a salad and tub of ice cream for the children.  After all, it is the weekend.  In the queue, I get to stand behind the sushi woman.  She has succumbed to a very large chocolate bar.  She sees me looking and smiles her nice but tired smile.  I smile back.  She has probably her own things to worry about.  I don’t envy her really, with her fancy job and her trim figure.  I’d rather have sausages than sushi, and a night on the settee with Sean.

 (Published in 2015 in Writers Abroad Anthology