Well, this is unexpected.
‘Get it?’ Will adds after six long seconds of me staring silently at him. ‘Because you’re all fluffy like a baby chicken? And also you’re a woman, so it’s a playful nod towards an outdated and misogynist terminology I would never use in earnest?’
I open my mouth.
Admittedly, I’ve never had a real long-term relationship before – at four months, Will is my Personal Best – but is it standard practice to turn up at your ex’s house on the evening you dumped them and comment on their loungewear?
‘Did work run late?’ Will glances at the time on his phone. ‘Are you dressed underneath, Cass? Because we need to leave now if we want to make it.’
In shock, I peel open my yellow dressing gown to reveal a dark navy jumpsuit like the world’s least sexy poultry-themed stripper. Another bolt of confusion: Wednesday’s work jumpsuit is black. I must have been so upset by our break-up this morning I went ahead and donned the wrong one.
‘You look perfect,’ Will grins. ‘Grab your trainers.’
And I know at this point I should probably ask a few pertinent questions – any questions at all would be good – but Will just said I look perfect, which is nice to hear, so I nod and obediently grab my trainers.
Maybe he’s here for a debrief.
Maybe this is what happens after twenty-six dates: you don’t just end a relationship one morning with a kiss and a series of compliments and then never speak again. You come back later for a formal termination meeting so you can discuss it all in-depth, break it down into bullet points and make a list of exactly where it all went wrong. Because I have to be honest: I thought about it all morning and I have no bloody idea.
‘Hi.’ Will smiles as I step out of the front door, leaning forwards and gently pecking my cheek.
I stare at him. ‘Hi.’
That feels inappropriate too: surely he gave up the right to casually put his lips on me this morning? A familiar whiff of too-strong black coffee – I miss him already and he’s literally touching me – and Will strides down the path with me following, still staring. His walk was one of the first things I noticed when we met. It’s both intrepid and jaunty, like Odysseus in charge of his ship. There’s something generally solid and dauntless about Will – he’s an oak tree of a man – and that’s a very attractive quality for someone who feels flimsy and daunted ninety per cent of the time.
What the hell is going on? In fairness, I didn’t check my emails at all today: maybe the missing contextual information I need is sitting in my inbox.
I’m also desperately trying to identify any colours or emotions, but there’s nothing there. Whatever Will is feeling, it’s either not very strong or he’s hiding it from me. He’s very, very good at that. It’s one of the reasons our break-up came out of nowhere. I didn’t see anything at all until the last minute.
‘Remind me where we’re going?’ I ask.
A tiny burst of hope: maybe he’s not here for an End of Relationship Interview after all. Maybe he’s here for Constructive Feedback we can dissect, process and work on together. Maybe I can convince him to re-contract despite his doubts about me, like a desperate mobile-phone salesperson.
Will lifts his eyebrows. ‘If It Ain’t Baroque.’
‘What?’ I abruptly stop walking. ‘Why?’
‘Because it’s an excellent pun, Cassandra. And a unique culinary experience. It’s a three-minute walk away and I’m starving. Also, I booked it weeks ago. It’s in the diary.’
Will constantly travels the world for work, so what we lack in employment−life synergy, we make up for with very clearly outlined weekly schedules and emailed itineraries I send him every Sunday evening.
‘OK, it’s just …’ I frown. ‘Never mind.’
It just seems a little cruel, that’s all. Will is normally so thoughtful and sensitive … Unless this is all part of a plan? A romantic gesture, designed to smooth things over so we can seamlessly recommence date twenty-seven?
And frankly, I can’t wait that long.
I’m not going to sit down in an eighteenth-century-themed pop-up restaurant and pretend to read a menu I already know by heart and fake-smile at a waitress with lipstick on her lace collar just to find out if I’m single or not.
‘Will,’ I say, grabbing for his hand and awkwardly clutching his fingertips instead. ‘About this morning—’
‘Shit.’ One colour flickers, but it’s too faint and too fast for me to tell what it is. ‘I totally forgot about that. I was just stressed, waiting for my next assignment to come through. Work’s been a bit thin on the ground recently. I’m so sorry, Cass. I can be such a grumpy asshole.’
And there it is: everything I’ve ever wanted since approximately ten past eight this morning.
My joy feels visceral, like an egg breaking.
It wasn’t a break-up, it was a misunderstanding – conflicting views, a normal part of a healthy relationship! – and I massively overreacted. (‘Cassandra has an unpleasant tendency to catastrophise.’) The fact that I still don’t understand what happened seems largely irrelevant as long as it’s fixed.
‘Don’t apologise,’ I beam, squeezing his hand. ‘I’m sure it was my fault too, whatever it was. I’m sorry. It’s forgotten. Never to be mentioned again.’
Overwhelmed with happiness, I’m unsure what comes next. On one level, this is an epic romantic reunion that requires unbridled passion, and on another, we’re standing in the middle of the road being beeped at by a white van. I lean up to kiss Will on the lips. He jerks his head towards me like a turkey, then tugs me across the road.
‘Let’s not get run over this evening, hey?’ His voice is buoyant but stiff at the same time, like a floating log. ‘I really want the Chicken Fricassee with Goosed-berries and Giblets, which is another reason I’m glad you took off that yellow fluff. I’d have felt like I was sitting opposite an ingredient.’
Brixton at night is busy and loud, but there’s an appealing Dionysian quality to it. A richness to the colours, a thickness to the air. It’s raw meat and incense and chiffon and bin juice and purple and cinnamon and lamb and cigarettes, which often suffocates me, but tonight – feeling like this, holding Will’s hand – it’s warm and enveloping, like marinating in something delicious.
‘Again?’ I carefully adjust our entwined fingers so mine are on top. ‘Wasn’t it gross enough the first time? Just how good are inner organs, anyway?’
We stand behind another couple outside the refitted metal cargo container as a girl wearing a long red velvet skirt from Whistles and a brocade apron ticks off names on a clipboard. (I recognise the skirt from the Christmas season three years ago.)
‘No idea,’ Will says. ‘Never had it.’
‘Welcome to If It Ain’t Baroque!’ The girl smiles at us with red lipstick and she’s wearing the same shirt as yesterday too: there’s a tiny smudge of pale pink lipstick on the elaborate collar. What else isn’t she keeping clean? ‘We hope to give you an unforgettable comestible experience tonight. Name?’
‘Cassandra Dankworth.’
‘Baker.’
‘Oh,’ I say with a small snort. ‘You mean for the booking. I thought maybe you just meant generally.’
Luckily nobody heard: Will is looking at his phone and the girl with the historically inauthentic costume is already leading us through the twenty-foot box to our round mahogany stools. It’s a very strange place. Combining corrugated steel with flocked wallpaper, fake duck heads and carved gold chairs is a courageous – and, some might argue, unsuccessful – decision.
But Will clearly likes it, so I’m happy.
On the upside, it isn’t often you hear the word comestible two nights running.
‘Didn’t you have the fricassee last night?’ We delicately perch like sparrows, facing the wall, and look at the menus. ‘Remember? We talked about how mace the spice comes from the outer shell of the nutmeg, but mace the weapon is capsaicinoid-based and named after the bludgeoning stick from ancient Greece, and only one of them should be sprinkled on chicken?’
Admittedly, all of that conversation came from me.
Will nods, still staring at his phone screen, so I take another look around the restaurant while I wait for him to re-engage. I wonder what was shipped in here originally. Cereal? Soap? Books? If the latter, I would argue that turning it into this place was a downgrade.
‘What are you talking about, Cass?’ My boyfriend finally looks up. ‘We didn’t come here last night.’
‘Umm.’ I blink. ‘Yes, we did.’
‘No, we didn’t.’ Will sweetly pours me water from the jug before I knock it over both of us again. ‘I was in the studio all night, panic-editing some film.’
‘Wrong.’ I look around and point. ‘We sat right there. You ordered the Fricassee with Goosed-berries and I ordered the Beet Root Pan Cakes – four words – and then I got upset because you put your spoon in my cream puff.’
‘Nope.’ Will laughs. ‘Although that does sound a lot like something you’d do.’
‘You’d licked it! You put your saliva in my pudding!’
‘We have sex, Cass.’ He smiles and looks down at the menu. ‘I frequently put my spoon in your cream p—’
‘Will,’ I interrupt quickly before the waitress hears and assumes we are something casual and short-term, which we are demonstrably not. ‘They are tangibly different situations. We also kiss, but it doesn’t mean I get to spit in your mouth while you’re asleep.’
He laughs. ‘Do you spit in my mouth when I’m asleep?’
‘No,’ I say hotly, ‘because it’s about consent.’
I did memorise the menu of this place in detail and google photos of it in preparation and ring the restaurant to ask for vegetarian options and do a dry run of the location on the way to work and peer through the window, so there’s a very solid chance I’ve researched myself into a bunch of fake memories again.
Plus we have arguments about Will’s disgusting hygiene habits a lot: he has zero food boundaries.
‘Fine,’ I relent, picking up a roll of ‘wite bred’ even though I’m pretty sure that’s not how it was spelled in the eighteenth century either. ‘You win. I think maybe I’m just really tired. It’s been a very … confusing day.’
Under the bar top, Will gently puts a hand on my thigh. Not for the sexy reason you might think: my right foot is repeatedly kicking the corrugated wall so hard it sounds like a tin drum and our neighbours keep glaring at us.
With effort, I squeeze my hands together and focus on that pressure instead.
Will’s eyes are soft. Too soft. ‘What happened?’
I flush and look away. ‘Well …’
‘Hello, our valued patrons!’ Lipstick and Lace Girl is back. ‘Are you ready to Baroque and Roll? Drinks? Can I suggest a couple of glasses of Puss and Mew?’
‘Just regular red wine, please,’ Will says with the kind of authority that comes right from the base of your soul, like the garlic and onions in a home-made soup. ‘The chicken for me, and … did you say you wanted the beetroot pancakes, Cass?’
‘I didn’t say I wanted it,’ I mumble, hungrily stuffing a bread roll into my mouth and suddenly realising I forgot to eat today. ‘I said it’s the only thing on the entire menu that doesn’t contain internal organs.’
‘You’re funny!’ The waitress scribbles in her notepad and I’m not sure if she’s written that down too, like a therapist. ‘Have you guys had a good day so far?’
And they’re off: chatting about the weather, which inexplicably leads to how long the restaurant has been open and what profits are like around here and whether they’re thinking of eventually setting up a permanent base, while I study the menu as if it’s The Iliad. How do people do this? How do total strangers weave conversation back and forth like this without tying themselves up in knots? How do they know what to say next? More importantly, why? It’s like watching a musical where they all break into the same dance without rehearsing it first: totally inexplicable.
The waitress finally leaves with our order and I feel Will assessing me.
‘Cassie,’ he says quietly.
I look up. ‘Yes?’
‘You realise we were just talking, right?’
Now I’m really confused. ‘Yes.’
‘So what’s with the face?’
‘The face? Which face? My face?’ I pick up a knife and hold it up but it’s too deliberately tarnished to see anything. Embarrassed, I start frantically rubbing at the dried fake blood from the protest. ‘Will, why didn’t you say something?’
‘Why didn’t I say something about what?’ Will puts his hand on my bouncing leg again. ‘What’s going on? Talk to me, Cass. You’re all over the place this evening.’
I breathe out slowly. Oh, not much going on, Will. Just dumped myself, went into unnecessary mourning, got fired, stole a plant, had the plant taken back off me again, cried over a muffin, got covered in blood and imploded in the doorway of a Dickens pun. None of which makes me sound like a woman you want to hold on to permanently and I’ve only just got you back.
‘I’m fine,’ I say, smiling widely. ‘Thank you for asking. How are you?’
‘I’m excellent.’ Will looks up as our food arrives looking – a very real bolt of confusion – exactly like I knew it would, despite the lack of photographic evidence. ‘I’m brilliant, actually. I just got some great news, but …’
My boyfriend looks at his maced chicken, then back at me, then back at his chicken. I suddenly sense a torrent of colours: a strange mix I can’t untangle, like a ball of different-coloured wools. There’s something new in his eyes too, but I can’t read that either.
‘So I just got offered an assignment in India.’ Will reaches for his wine and takes a way too big mouthful. ‘To shoot a documentary on pangolins. I’m leaving on Saturday, for a month.’
What in the love of basic narrative continuity is going on?
‘Yes,’ I frown, putting my fork down. ‘I know.’