Читать книгу William Walker’s First Year of Marriage: A Horror Story - Matt Rudd - Страница 49

‘Red snapper? Not in our day. Sounds like a fancy fish. Cod, hake, John Dory—whatever happened to them?’

‘Yes, good honest fish, they were.’

‘Halibut.’

‘Tuna.’

Then her mum changes the subject to sphincters. Her colleague had a patient in the other day with a bleeding bottom. His wife had attempted to pleasure him with her Prada stiletto but the point had been worn down into something too sharp for the sphincter wall to tolerate.

Why does she tell us these things? Why is it always when we’re eating? What is it with doctors, anal adventures and clinical storytelling?

My dad changes the subject.

‘Are you still working for that charity?’

‘Yes, she is. And they’re still not paying her properly,’ says her dad, because children are never allowed to answer for themselves. ‘I keep telling her, just because they’re saving the whole of Africa doesn’t mean they can’t pay you a living wage.’

Isabel regresses into a teenager: short-tempered, impatient, tutting, crossing arms aggressively. I do the same when they move on to my time at Cat World, even though it’s in the past and I shouldn’t care.

Minutes before they are all strangled, they all head off together, making jokes about getting stabbed on the way to the Tube and going off to the fish ’n’ chip shop for a nice bit of marlin.

‘I’ve changed my mind. We should move,’ says Isabel as we stand exhausted in the doorway. ‘The rent boys and plantain-sellers of north London shouldn’t have to put up with our parents.’