Service by Sarah Gilmartin

Author:Sarah Gilmartin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ONE
Published: 2023-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

DANIEL

This morning I wake with such love in my heart. I’ve been dreaming about my boys when they were young. Duffel coats on winter days. Oscar’s milk teeth disappearing, his gappy smile. Kevin’s hair, mysteriously fair until it seemed to darken overnight. By nine, he was the tallest in his class and I taught him to be proud of this, to straighten up and own it, for there was no shame in being ahead of his peers.

Back when we lived in Arbutus Place, I used to walk the boys to school on Mondays. We’d leave early and stop at the Jewish bakery in Portobello for a treat. It was our secret. Year after year, they never let slip. I felt it was important to have something of my own; their mother saw so much more of them than me. Kevin always chose the sugar cookie, no matter how I coaxed him, but Oscar, my brave little boy, tried everything that counter had to offer. Cinnamon buns. Sesame bagels. The rye bread. Daddy, he would say when he was finished, I think I like it. His small freckled face, so pleased with the new knowledge. Both my boys, carefree and sated, as all boys should be.

Instantly, I remember. Like a bullet. An arrow through a crenel. Like death.

Tomorrow the farce begins in earnest. Tomorrow I’ll see that ungrateful wench in person for the first time since she sat at her computer and pressed destroy. The prosecution will call their witnesses over the course of the week, starting with her, or as Roland said to me over lunch: We’ll give her all the rope she needs. Between himself and Claire, I am thoroughly briefed on the legalities and procedures, scrupulously prepared. I feel almost as if I’ve been through it already.

I lie prone on the king-size, anticipating the alarm, forgetting that I no longer set it, in the hope that one day soon I might sleep in and chop a few hours off this bleak existence. Forty years of getting up at the same time isn’t easily broken. My body still thinks we are at work. The skin on my hands is callused, the tightness in my shoulder remains, my nose follows the humdrum scents of family life, dirty kits and lemon diffusers and the muck that passes for coffee from Julie’s pod machine. One can’t teach an old nose new tricks. A chef without a restaurant is still a chef.

I close my eyes again and in the shallow half-sleep, the prep begins, butter boiling, garlic blanched in milk, brunoise on the board. I wait to get out of bed until I hear Julie leave for her morning run—the only thing that gives her pleasure these days. I put on the striped dressing gown she gave me last Christmas, fiddle with the cumbersome belt. By the wardrobes, I stand in profile at the huge antique mirror she unearthed in some scrapyard, which seems these days to be nothing more than a marker of the useless shape of man, the emptiness behind him.

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