Shoes Off

The room that was two rooms was warm, and it smelled of frying.

He had been in it forty-eight times. He knew it the way you know a room you have eaten in: where the table was, under the light, with the oilcloth with the lemons on it; where the stove was, and the sink under the window that looked down over the depot, and the fridge with the calendar on it in green biro and the old green telephone on the wall beside it on its curly cord. He knew which chair was Mr Hartigan’s, by the window, and which was Theo’s, and that you did not sit in either. He knew where the bowls were.

He did not know the other half.

He had never needed to. The other half of the room was the sitting room, at the end away from the kitchen, and he had only ever seen it from the table, past Mr Hartigan’s chair: a television on a cabinet, a rug, a lamp with a fringed shade that had come from Milwaukee, a bookcase with paperbacks in two languages and a row of football annuals with green and gold spines. And the sofa.

He looked at the sofa now properly, from the door, in his socks, with the bag on his shoulder and two towels under his arm.

It was brown. Corduroy, the wide kind, worn smooth on the arms and pale along the front edge of the seat where people had sat for years. Three cushions on the seat and three along the back, not matching, and a crocheted blanket folded over one arm in squares of orange and brown and green that had certainly also come from Milwaukee. It was about six feet long. He was six feet one.

The left-hand seat cushion, he saw, sat very slightly higher than the other two, as if something underneath it were pushing up.

---

“You can put your bag there,” said Theo, from the table, without looking up from his chemistry. “In the corner. By the radiator. That’s yours. That corner’s yours till Monday.”

He put it there. The radiator banged once, as if in welcome, and then hissed.

“It does that,” said Theo.

“At two o’clock. You said.”

“It does it at two o’clock and whenever it feels like it. At two o’clock it does it properly.” Theo turned a page. “You’ll know.”

Kate had put the box marked TEXTBOOKS on the rug in front of the television and was kneeling beside it with the lid off. Inside, on a layer of newspaper and hay, there was a rabbit.

It was large and grey and brown, with long ears that lay flat along its back and very round dark eyes, and it was sitting perfectly still in the middle of the box, looking straight ahead at the television, which was off, with an expression of profound intellectual disdain.

“Don’t look at him,” said Kate.

“I’m not.”

“You are. I can see you are.” She did not look up. “He’s had a terrible day. Bethany’s mother came to fetch Bethany at two and Bethany cried and he had to watch, and then the twenty-two was full and a man sat on the box.” She put a lettuce leaf into the box. Professor did not look at it. “He’ll come round. He came round to me in about six weeks.”

“Six weeks?”

“He’s a very serious rabbit,” said Kate. “That’s why he’s called Professor.”

---

Mrs Hartigan was at the stove.

She had been on the early shift, seven till three, and had come home on the bus and changed out of her uniform into a grey jumper and an apron, and she had two pans going, both of them spitting, and she did not turn round.

“Frederick.”

“Mrs Hartigan.”

“Plates. Five. And the big dish from the bottom, for the fish. And the little dishes, three, for the things.” She turned something in one of the pans with a fork. “And then you can do the bread.”

He found the plates. Five. The big dish was at the bottom of the cupboard under a pile of baking tins, and he got it out without bringing the baking tins down, nearly. The little dishes were in the cupboard above the sink, three of them, glass, the colour of weak tea, with ridges round the outside.

“The bread knife’s in the drawer,” said Mrs Hartigan. “On the left. The rye’s on the board.”

He had never cut bread.

He realised this with the knife in his hand and the loaf in front of him on the board, dark brown, almost black, round, with seeds on the crust. He had watched it done a thousand times. Bridget did it every morning, without looking, while she talked, in thin even slices that fell over on the board one after another like dominoes. He had never once done it himself, because there had never once been a reason to, because there had always been bread on the table already cut when he came to it.

He put the knife on the loaf.

“Not like that,” said Kate, from the rug, without looking round. “You’ll squash it.”

He took the knife off the loaf.

“Saw,” said Kate. “Don’t push. It’s rye. If you push it, it just sits there and laughs at you.”

He sawed. The first slice was thick at one end and thin at the other, like a door wedge. The second was better. By the sixth they were very nearly the same thickness all the way across, and Mrs Hartigan, passing behind him with a pan, looked down at the board and said nothing, which was what she said when a thing was all right.

---

Mr Hartigan came in at five.

He had been on the early shift too, five till one, and then had gone to the depot office for something to do with rotas, and had walked home, and he came in at the door in his bus driver’s jacket with the transit authority’s badge on the breast, and took his shoes off on the mat without looking at them, the way you do a thing you have done ten thousand times, and hung the jacket on the hook behind the door, and saw Frederick at the bread board with the knife.

He looked at the bread.

He looked at Frederick.

“That’s not bad,” said Mr Hartigan, and went and sat in his chair by the window and unfolded the newspaper at the crossword.

It was the second complete sentence in three days. Theo, at the table, very quietly wrote something on the back of his hand.

---

It was Friday, so it was fish.

Theo had told him on the coach to Los Angeles in May that in Wisconsin it was always fish on Friday, everywhere, in every house and every bar and every church hall, and that it was not a religious thing any more, or not only, it was just what Friday was, the way Sunday was church and Monday was laundry. A fish fry. In Milwaukee every bar in the city had one, Theo said, and you went to the same one every week your whole life, and his grandfather had gone to the same one for sixty years and had been carried out of it in the end by the men who had sat at the next table for all sixty, and they had put his chair in the window and nobody sat in it for a year.

The fish was cod, in batter, very crisp, in long pieces on the big dish. There were potato pancakes, flat and brown and crisp at the edges, in a pile. There was a bowl of apple sauce for the pancakes. There was the rye bread, in slices nearly all the same thickness. There was a dish of coleslaw. There was a jar of tartar sauce, which Mrs Hartigan had made and put in a jar so that it looked as if it had been bought.

And in the third of the little glass dishes the colour of weak tea, there was something purple.

He looked at it.

It was dark purple, nearly black, in slices, glistening, in a little pool of its own purple liquid, which had already begun to creep up the ridges on the inside of the glass dish, and there were thin rings of white onion in among it, gone pink, and it smelled sharp and sweet at once, of vinegar and earth.

Beetroot.

Pickled.

He had not eaten beetroot since he was six. He had eaten it once at Solliden at six, at a long table on the terrace, because it was in front of him and he had been told it was polite, and he had been, about ten minutes later, quietly and comprehensively sick on the terrace, in front of the Swedish Minister of Culture, who had been very kind about it. He had not eaten it since. Nobody had put it in front of him since. Bridget, who had been told about the terrace, had banned it from the kitchen at the Palace in 2019 and it had not been seen there since.

It was on the table.

---

They sat down. Mr Hartigan at the end by the window. Mrs Hartigan at the end by the stove. Kate on the side by the wall. Theo on the side by the room. Frederick beside Theo, in the chair he had sat in forty-eight times, with the beetroot directly in front of him, because the little dishes went down the middle of the table and the middle of the table was in front of the middle chair.

Nobody said grace. The Hartigans did not. Mrs Hartigan picked up the big dish and held it out to her husband, and he took two pieces, and she held it out to Kate, and so on round, and the pancakes went round, and the apple sauce, and the bread, and the coleslaw.

And then the beetroot.

Theo picked up the little purple dish and took two slices with the fork in it and put them on his plate, very precisely, side by side, next to his fish, and then passed the dish to Frederick, and did not look at him, and the corner of his mouth went in.

Frederick held the dish.

EAT WHAT’S ON IT.

He had agreed to all of them.

He took one slice. He put it on his plate, beside the potato pancake, where it immediately began to bleed purple into the apple sauce.

“One,” said Kate, from across the table.

“One’s on it,” said Frederick.

“One’s on it,” agreed Mrs Hartigan, from the end, without looking up from her fish, in a voice that settled the matter. “On it is on it.” She reached for the tartar sauce. “Kate.”

---

He ate the fish first, and it was very good. He ate the pancakes, which were better. He ate the bread, which he had cut, and which he thought, privately, was some of the best bread he had ever eaten in his life, though he suspected this had more to do with the cutting than the bread.

The beetroot sat on his plate.

It was getting larger. That was not possible, and it was happening. The purple had reached the edge of the coleslaw and was moving into it in a slow pink tide. He moved the coleslaw. The purple followed.

Across the table, Kate was watching him with her chin on her hand and an expression of absolute and scientific interest, the way she had watched the rabbit.

He cut the slice of beetroot in half.

Then in quarters.

Then he put a quarter on his fork, and put it in his mouth, and ate it.

It was sharp and sweet and earthy and soft and tasted, very exactly, of a terrace at Solliden at six years old in front of the Swedish Minister of Culture. He chewed it. He swallowed it. He did not look at anybody. He ate the second quarter, and the third, and the fourth, one after another, quickly, with a piece of bread after each one, and then he put his knife and fork together on his plate, which was empty except for a purple stain shaped like Lake Michigan.

Nobody said anything.

Then Mr Hartigan, at the end of the table by the window, without lowering the fork he was eating with or looking up from his plate, said:

“Good for the blood.”

---

Theo laughed so suddenly that a piece of potato pancake went the wrong way, and Kate had to hit him on the back, hard, twice, and Mrs Hartigan said something in Wisconsindeutsch that Frederick followed all of, because it was the word for idiot and he had heard it at this table perhaps forty times, always about Theo.

On the rug in front of the television, the box marked TEXTBOOKS was empty.

Kate saw it first. She stopped hitting Theo and stood up so fast her chair went over.

“Where’s Professor?”

They looked at the box. The lettuce leaf lay in the hay, untouched.

Then all five of them, at the same moment, looked at the sofa.

Under the sofa, at the left-hand end, below the place where the spring was, in the dark gap between the bottom of the brown corduroy and the rug, two very round dark eyes looked back at them, absolutely still, with an expression of profound intellectual disdain.

“Nobody move,” said Kate.

Nobody moved.

“Frederick,” said Mrs Hartigan, calmly, from the end of the table, picking up her tea. “Clear your plate to the sink. And then I think you had better get down on the floor. It’s your sofa.”