Exclusive extract from Listen by Kate Veitch (published by Viking/Penguin).
They were plump, meaty birds, Rosemarie admitted grudgingly as she shoved in handfuls of stuffing. The rich creamy-yellow colour of the plucked skin was testament to their short but happy lives, in a generous yard with good food and plenty of it, and they would be succulent and tender. Her mother would’ve given her eye teeth to have two chickens like these — fowls, she’d have called them — to roast for Christmas dinner. But the few feathers her husband had missed revolted Rosemarie. Lips curled back, she tried to pull out one of the nubby white shafts but the skin lifted toward her, resisting, and she gave up. Oh, she wished she could give up on the whole damn thing, just go and lie down on her bed with the curtains drawn and a wet flannel on her forehead.
Why, for heaven’s sake, must he call them ‘chooks’? And why must she turn the oven on tomorrow and heat the whole place up when the temperature was like an oven outside anyway? Cooking a baked dinner made perfect sense back home. On Christmas Day in England the sun barely peeked above the horizon, and both the cooking of the meal and the eating were so welcomely warming, like a red coat in a crowd of grey. Feasting and cheer to keep the dark and the cold at bay. Here, where the sun was still glaring onto the patio at seven o’clock in the evening, slicing at her eyes like a bayonet when she glanced out, a meal like this was just…stupid. More stupid work for her.
The back door opened and closed again. She heard Alex toeing his gardening boots off, thud-thud (which she’d have to put away later) and washing his hands at the laundry trough. Singing, he was! That moronic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
‘That’s not even a proper carol!’ she shouted, but he only called back ‘What’s that, love?’ over the sound of water running. From further back in the house she heard Meredith’s wail start up, piercing as an air-raid siren, and Deborah’s ringing tones of command.
The door from the kitchen to the laundry swung open. Her husband’s thinning hair was plastered flat to his head in patches, where he’d damped it carelessly as he washed; he was beaming. ‘Sweetheart!’ he cried heartily, though she was only an arm’s length from him. ‘There’s just enough of the new beans for Christmas dinner tomorrow! First thing in the morning I’ll get out there and pick ’em. While the dew’s still on ’em!’
She snorted. ‘As if there’ll be any dew, in this weather.’
‘Metaphorically speaking.’ Alex leaned in to kiss her cheek; he smelled of earth and plants and sweat, and she didn’t like it one bit. And he was stubbly, it prickled her and he knew that she hated that. She turned to admonish him, eyes fixed on his chin, but his face was lit by a shaft of lowering light and she saw for the first time that his reddish chin now had patches of white. His jaw seemed huge, suddenly, and the white stubble stuck out of his chin like the shafts of the fowl’s feathers. She stared in dismay. Oh, what have I done? she thought. Why am I here with this old man and his grey beard?
Alex was staring fixedly too, at her hands, the chickens, the almost empty bowl.
‘You’re stuffing the chooks.’
‘Yes, I am stuffing the chooks,’ she said, facing him square on with dropped shoulders and an expression that she hoped said, Talk about state the bleeding obvious!
‘The night before?’
‘Yes, Alex it is the night before. The night before Christmas. That’s right.’
‘You should never stuff a chook till just before you put it in the oven.’
‘Why not? Why bloody not?’ Her voice had risen; she sounded like a child, petulant and protesting. He heard it too, and looked at her with cautious pity, and she hated that even more.
‘That’s what my mother always said.’
‘Well your mother’s not here to get woken up at six in the morning and then slave away in a boiling hot kitchen for the rest of the day, is she? And if I want to stuff the chickens now I’ll jolly well stuff them now! My mother always stuffed the chickens the night before.’ Actually, Rosemarie couldn’t remember even having chicken for Christmas dinner as home: it had usually been a joint of rather tough mutton, and never quite enough of it. But Alex wasn’t to know that, was he?
‘The kids won’t squabble, love. Not when they see what we’ve got them.’
‘Oh won’t they! They’ve started already, can’t you hear them?’
And Alex could, now that she mentioned it, going at it hammer and tongs, the two oldest shouting at each other and the little one bawling again, poor poppet.
‘I tell you what,’ he said, backing away a little from his wife. ‘How about I settle those ratbags down and have a quick shower, and then I’ll take a couple of ’em with me and go and buy fish and chips for tea. What do you think? Sweet girl?’
He bent a little, placating, to look into her lowered face. She nodded fiercely.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘No! I’ll sort out the children, you have your shower. Quicker.’
Because he would jolly them into a good humour and that would take half an hour, whereas she — ‘I’ve got the wooden spoon!’ Rosemarie yelled, thwacking the closed door of the girls’ bedroom with the flat of her hand. On the door was a neatly hand-lettered sign: PRIVATE. SECRET. NO PARENTS. Inside, the arguing and crying suddenly stopped.
‘Don’t come in! You can’t come in!’
‘I am so coming in! I’m counting to five: one, two, three…’
There was a desperate ‘Wait! WAIT! on five and then Robert opened the door, eyes darting first to check her hands. No wooden spoon. Deborah and James were standing side by side, guarding the secrecy of whatever was under a very lumpy bedspread. The rolls of wrapping paper, the scissors and ribbon and sticky tape, were all heaped in disarray on the second bed. Meredith, the youngest, came forward to stand beside Robert, her plump six-year-old cheeks flushed and wet with tears. Rosemarie raised one hand like a traffic policeman.
‘I don’t want to know what you were fighting about, I just want you all to stop.’
‘I wasn’t fighting, Mummy,’ said James mildly.
‘I know, James.’ He never did.
There they were, aligned as always like two opposing sets of salt and pepper shakers. These two pairs, odds and evens: the first-born with the third child, the second-born with the fourth. Deborah the eldest, almost thirteen now and almost not a child, watchful and well-organised, and her dreamy tractable brother James, four years younger. Both with their mother’s willowy build, her glossy jet hair and olive skin, though only James had Rosemarie’s blue eyes. Deborah’s were her father’s odd streaky mix of green and brown. And the other two: Robert, such a middle child, doomed to be forever stuck between the eldest and the most likeable, ever protesting ‘That’s not fair!’ as Deborah bossed them all around, and little thumb-sucking Meredith his self-appointed charge, like a chick under the hen’s wing. This pair looked alike too, with tawny red-brown hair and hazel eyes and scatterings of light brown freckles. It was the foxy Scottish colouring you saw in Alex’s extended family.
These parts should go together to form a neat whole: two times two equals four: her children. But Rosemarie had never felt quite convinced that they were really hers. Yes, yes of course, she knew that they were, she could remember being pregnant and waking up after their births, those strange groggy meetings — though she had been awake for the last birth and that had hardly been an improvement. And she’d been with them every unremitting moment since; could describe (if, god forbid, she ever had to) every single unremarkable day of each of their lives.
But…how could that be? When she still felt just a girl herself? And that was how she looked, too: the mirror confirmed that she was still more dewy maid than thick-waisted matron. Though turning thirty a few months ago had been an awful jolt.
When other mothers — real mothers — discussed their babies and their growing children, their voices, even in complaint, seemed full of passionate engagement which made Rosemarie feel like someone from another planet. An imposter.
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