Botched Cod Loin

It’s a Saturday morning not long before Christmas and I’m sat cross-legged on the living room floor wondering why there are no good road trip movies set in England. The reason, I wager, boils down simply to a geographical limitation. It’s hard to explore the depths of the human condition at a steady 75 mph on the M4. No one in the history of mankind has ever had a life changing epiphany in the three and a half hours between Basingstoke and Wakefield. This thought stays with me as I watch Johnny Depp swat imaginary bats from the driver’s seat of a red Cadillac Eldorado driving through the desert towards Vegas.

 

We were somewhere outside Barstow when the drugs kicked in. Now that’s a cool fucking way to start a story.

 

I’m watching Fear and Loathing. It’s part of my latest four-day thing. It was a friend of mine, Joe, who noticed that I tend to get hooked on something – be that an object, person, subject matter or whatever – and enjoy it to the point of excess for roughly 96 hours before callously discarding it. It was Joe who coined the phrase.

 

Road trip movies are my current four-day thing. There’s a pile of discs stacked next to the DVD player: Thelma & Louise, From Dusk Till Dawn, Midnight Run and the Mexican film Y Tu Mama Tambien which means ‘And Your Mum Also’ which I took as a green light to invite my own mother to watch. The opening ten minutes features two young people fucking solidly and I swiftly regretted my decision to invite her. So did she about accepting.

 

I’m enjoying these films and feel bad that I’ll soon lose interest.

 

We’ve got a chunky old box telly in the front room. With other films I might moan about the fact I have to squint like an indignant Robert De Niro to see what’s going on up there on the tiny screen but with this one it works with the whole aesthetic. Mum, who only has a passing interest in film, has often criticized my habit of explaining the world through half-baked film references.

 

We were somewhere outside Stanstead when the drugs kicked in…

 

It doesn’t sound as good. 

 

I’m getting updates from the WhatsApp group about the Masterchef re-run on BBC 2. Amber’s delighted because one guy’s soufflé rose perfectly. Joe isn’t impressed with another’s poached cod loin.

 

HE FUCKED UP THE BASIL FOAM THE SILLY TWAT reads his message.

 

Normally I’d be watching and shaking my head at the sheer incompetence of a chef who can’t make a simple basil foam but a four-day thing really is all-encompassing and right now, Masterchef isn’t it.

 

Amber disagrees with Joe about the overall quality of the cod loin despite the basil foam debacle and claims vindication after Greg Wallace apparently agrees. Joe goes silent on the chat. He’s likely thinking of a smart response. Moments pass. I wait expectantly. And then he reappears with a GIF of Greg Wallace pulling an ejaculation face after eating a spoonful of peach sorbet. He’s won this battle.

 

I’m eating a chocolate mousse which I’ve mixed so vigorously with a spoon it not longer has any air bubbles, which is really it’s defining feature. I wonder if I’m still at liberty to even call it a mousse. I look down on this mud-sludge mess of ambiguous pudding. It’s flatter than Dayna Drew’s chest. She’s a girl at my school who’s had the audacity to make it all the way to sixth form with tits that belong back in year seven. I only bring this up because she publicly announced one morning before first period that she ‘doesn’t get short guys’.
“Why don’t they just stop fucking around and grow a bit?” I’m quite short and like most short guys I took this as a personal attack. We don’t like each other anyway because I told her her name sounds like a character from a Jacqueline Wilson book and she said mine sounds like I murder prostitutes. My name’s Ian Palmer. I can’t argue with her assessment.

 

I take umbrage with my mother over my naming for the simple fact that she had full jurisdiction of it and chose to settle on the name Ian. I thought for a very long time that the only reason to choose such an ungainly title for a newborn baby was that my mum felt duty-bound to name me after my mysterious, non-existent father. But mum insists she has no idea who the man who gave his sperm (she doesn’t ever use the word father) is because he was an anonymous donor and at the time they didn’t disclose that information at the clinic. After doing my own investigation into the matter I’m inclined, now, to believe her.  

 

My investigation threw up the following results:

 

• One. Had I been born after 2005 I would be well within my rights to get the name and address of my donor once I turned 18. However, having been born in December 2003 I missed out on the legislation change by a mere thirteen months.

 

• Two. IVF Clinics, or ‘fertility centers’ as they often like to call them, smell like all other medical establishments. This is not a compliment.

 

• Three. The effort this man went to not to be discovered suggests to me that I should leave well enough alone and I will continue to do so.

 

Just to be clear this story has nothing to do with him.

 

“Then why?” I quizzed her one morning. “Why Ian?” I was following her round the house. “Ian Fleming? Ian Botham? Oh god is it Ian Dury? Did you name me after a blockhead?”
“It was Ian Dury and the Blockheads petal. He wasn’t one himself.”
“Well…” I pressed, fully aware that wasn’t any sort of answer. She made an exaggerated sigh.

“What’s with the Spanish inquisition Ian?” She asked as she busied herself with menial chores as an excuse to avoid giving me an actual answer. This was an answer my mother gave a lot.

 

“What’s for tea?
“What’s with the Spanish inquisition?”

 

“Do you really need to buy another house plant?”
“What’s with the Spanish inquisition?”

 

“What are some of the finest examples of religious persecution in 15^th century Europe?”
“Christ, Ian, what’s with the Spanish inquisition?”

 

I find it mildly amusing that we, as a society, have taken to comparing the simple act of asking a question to the vicious persecution of Jews and Muslims that resulted in the torture and frequent death of potentially millions.

 

She never did reply to my question so I’ve filed it away under the section ‘As Of Yet Unanswered’; an old metal filing cabinet tucked away in a dimly-lit recess of my mind filled with all the questions I’ve asked that never got a satisfactory response. Many of them are old case files that I’ve given up on or answered myself: Why doesn’t Santa just use the front door? How long before a baby realises it’s alive? If Buzz Lightyear thought he was real why did he go still like the others when Andy walked in? And then there’s the biggest file of the lot with just two words scribbled in child’s scrawl: But why?

 

The origin of my name is a question I make sure I’ll return to.

 

In the WhatsApp group Amber has sent a picture of Joe eating a cheese sandwich in the school cafeteria that she took on the sly. I think she’s trying to imply that Joe has the same ejaculation face as Greg Wallace but the punchline doesn’t really land and I wouldn’t be surprised if Joe considers it unworthy of a reply. I send a single ‘crying laughter emoji’ out of politeness and diplomacy. The emoji could be in response to either picture. 

 

The doorbell rings, which is immediate cause for fucking concern because the doorbell never rings. I pause Fear and Loathing just at the point Raoul Duke is on a really bad trip in a casino bar.

 

I was right in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo! And somebody was giving booze to these goddamn things.

 

I sit in silent anticipation of the doorbell ringing again. It does. I stand up and make sure my dressing gown is pulled tightly together in case the caller is a criminally insane cougar with an insatiable appetite for hairless adolescents. Satisfied I’m well covered, I go to the door. 

 

I open the door and find myself face to face with my gran. I think the cougar would have been less surprising.

 

She looks just as surprised to see me although this is where I live so I think my reaction is more justified.

 

“Ian,” she says lamely.
“Gran,” I say just as lamely.

 

I’m in my dressing grown with the pot of mousse in one hand and a spoon halfway out of my mouth in the other. She’s immaculately dressed with a full face of makeup but underneath it all she doesn’t look well. She looks sad too.

 

“Is your mother in?” she asks pseudo-casually and I’m immediately suspicious. Or perhaps it’s curiosity, I can’t really tell. I don’t really know how I feel about gran.  
“She’s at work.” I say.
“It’s Saturday.”

I shrug. “I dunno, something about a PhD project. It couldn’t wait.”

 

She nods to herself like she accepts this explanation, which is just as well as it’s the truth. Mum’s a university lecturer – a biologist by subject. She works down at Solent and at the moment she’s busting a gut to get a massive project to the next stage before everyone disappears for Christmas. I’ve barely seen her.

 

“Is everything okay?” I ask. She smiles weakly. It’s strange. I’ve never seen her do that much, weakly or otherwise.

“Fine. I’ll just, er…” she turns from the door and starts to leave. “It’s nothing.”

 

Fuck. This is a moment that I should probably, morally, not let play out the way it’s going. My eighty-year-old gran, visibly distressed, shuffling down the path in the cold December air whilst I watch her go without comment. It doesn’t matter that she’s never wanted anything to do with me. I think about what Don Corleone said in The Godfather because right now it feels vaguely appropriate.

 

A man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.

 

What about a grandmother who doesn’t spend time with her grandson? It’s a legitimate question under the circumstances but not the time to ask it. I rifle through my mental library of facile platitudes and settle on, “Two wrongs don’t make a right”. It has the desired effect.

“I’m putting the kettle on.” I call after her, stirred by a Sicilian sense of honour and duty She stops and turns. She looks reluctant. I suddenly think, I don’t even know if she likes tea. So I ask her:

“Do you like tea?” I blush at how lame my question sounds once out in the open; the spirit of Brando has deserted me. Yet gran considers it and nods politely. To my surprise she comes inside.