The Mussel Feast Read Free Page A

soon, and I thought, I can’t stand all this switching. When my father was away on business I used to have more respect for Mum; although she tried to be strict then, too, we basically got on well when there wasn’t any switching. Most importantly, she couldn’t spend the evenings telling my father about what we’d done wrong, so we had more respect for her. Sometimes she said, isn’t this nice, children, just the three of us, probably because she found switching modes strenuous too. But when I asked, why do you bother conforming and switching to wifey mode, she replied, that’s what it’s like when you’re married and have a job, you’ll see. I’m pretty sure I won’t switch to wifey mode, I said; she just laughed at me, saying, you won’t find a husband anyway. She was seriously worried that nobody would ever marry me, unlikeable as I was, and unappealingly stubborn since early childhood. Luckily I never regarded my ultimate aim in life as being to switch to wifey mode at half past five every evening. I didn’t like it when Mum switched; I found it embarrassing, and when we did it, too. I preferred us when my father was away on business. You see we all had to switch for my father, to become a proper family, as he called it, because he hadn’t had a family, but he had developed the most detailed notions of what a proper family should be like, and he could be extremely sensitive if you undermined these notions.
    But now, as it was already seven o’clock and he still hadn’t arrived, my father was undermining his own notions. Mum’s after-work face seemed a complete waste of time, and the mussels started making that noise in the pot again. My brother was the only one of us who was still looking forward to his mussels and chips. Mum and I had lost our appetites and were both edgy. It was the waiting. If my father had come back at six we wouldn’t have noticed how silly and pointless it was for us to switch, Mum to wifey mode, we to child mode. Shortly after seven Mum said, I do hope nothing’s happened; and out of pure spite I retorted, what if it has, because all of a sudden my father was a spoilsport in my eyes, or, to be more precise, a mood-wrecker. Suddenly I no longer wanted him to come home, even though an hour earlier, as I said, we all were prepared for him to walk through the door and ask, so, what do you have to say, because he’d been successful. Mum looked at me, not as horrified as I’d expected, but with her head to one side, and then she smiled and said, well, we’ll see, and she didn’t sound as if she’d find it surprising or even terrible if he didn’t come home. And gradually we stopped thinking that he’d arrive at any moment. Only we didn’t know what to do with the mussels, which were still rattling away quietly in the pot because we’d thought my father would be at the door at six on the dot, his promotion virtually in the bag, and that would have been good reason to celebrate with a mussel feast. My brother’s mood also turned, and although it was not yet eight o’clock we all knew that this day was special, unexpectedly so. Only we couldn’t decide what to do. So my mother went and cooked the mussels. We couldn’t just leave them to die, so she cooked them quickly and I thought, who can eat mussels now; in fact none of us ate any mussels, although my brother did eat some chips, which Mum made while the mussels were cooking; later the mussels sat in a huge bowl on the table and nobody touched them. As if they’d gone off and were poisonous, my mother said, but my brother said, toxic, not poisonous, because we didn’t say poisonous in our family any more; for some time now we’d been saying toxic, my mother had said poisonous by accident. Our family used different expressions now; for example, when we burned our mouths on potatoes that were too hot we no longer shouted, Christ that’s hot; sometimes we still said it by accident, because we hadn’t switched modes, but