Stories We Could Tell Read Free Page B

about the glories of the Raj and something Kipling had written about the correct way to cook chicken tikka masala. Terry’s parents smiled politely as she babbled on. His father took her photographers bag. Terry noticed that she had unclipped her pink fake mink handcuffs, and stuffed them in the bag. It was her first visit to his home and everyone was making an effort. Misty had turned the charm up to ten and Terry’s dad had put his shirt on. Terry’s mum had prepared a special menu and Terry hadn’t brought any of his laundry home.
    They entered the front room where an old film was blaring from the telly in the corner. For a moment it commanded all their attention. Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier were runaways from a chain gang, a white racist and a proud black man, still handcuffed together.
    ‘The
Defiant Ones,’
said Terry’s mum. ‘He was lovely, Tony Curtis.’
    ‘I’ll turn that thing off,’ said Terry’s dad. That was a sure sign that royalty was visiting. They never turned the TV off until it told them to go to bed.
    ‘What was it that Truffaut said about life before television?’ Misty said, her lovely face frowning with concentration.
    ‘I don’t quite recall, dear,’ said Terry’s mum, as if she had been asked the name of Des O’Connor’s last single, and it was on the tip of her tongue.
    ‘Truffaut said that before television was invented, people stared at the fire.’ Misty looked very serious, as she always did when relating the thoughts of one of her heroes. ‘He said that there has always been this need for moving pictures.’
    They all thought about it for a while.
    ‘Cocktail sausage?’ said Terry’s mum, holding out a plate of shrivelled chipolatas bristling with little sticks. ‘Take two, love. They’re only small.’
    Terry thought it was so strange to see Misty parked on thebrown three-piece suite in the front room of the pebbledash semi where he had grown up. When Terry was small, his father had worked at three jobs to get them out of rented accommodation above the butcher’s shop and into a place of their own, but he knew that what was a dream home to his mum and dad must have seemed very modest to a girl like Misty.
    There was flock wallpaper and an upright piano in the corner and a wall-to-wall orange carpet that looked like the aftermath of some terrible car crash. There were matching pouffes for them to put their feet up on while they were reading
Reveille
(Mum) and
Reader’s Digest
(Dad). Misty perched on the middle cushion of what they called the settee in what they called the front room about to eat what they called their tea.
    Strange for all of them. Front room, settee, tea – it even felt like his parents spoke a different language to Misty.
    Terry’s dad stared bleary-eyed at the dead TV, a cocktail sausage on a stick forgotten in his hand. He had just woken up, and was getting ready for another night shift at Smithfield meat market. Even if he had been more awake, small talk wasn’t really his thing, unless he was around people he had known for years, like the men at the market. But Terry’s mum could have small talked for England. She busied herself in the kitchen, conversing with Misty through the serving hatch, like a sailor peering through a porthole.
    ‘I do like your frock,’ Terry’s mum said, her eyes running over the white dress and down to Misty’s biker boots. ‘It’s a lovely frock.’ She passed no comment on the biker’s boots. ‘Would you like chicken or beef curry, love?’
    Misty almost squealed with delight. ‘I can’t believe that you’ve gone to all this trouble!’
    But Terry knew that the curry was no trouble at all. His mum would just drop the bag of Birds Eye curry in boiling water for fifteen minutes. He knew that wasn’t the kind of curry that hisgirlfriend was expecting. He knew she was used to real Indian take-aways.
    Waiting for tea, Terry had the same sinking feeling, that preparation for humiliation, that he had