Peter always had problems getting at that last bit of jam. The manufacturers loved to conceal it cleverly just beneath the ridge, which meant it was impossible to get at it with anything but the most astutely angled teaspoon, and certainly impossible to access by stubby-fingered perfectionists.
Peter was a stubby-fingered perfectionist. He took pride in his wooden carvings that littered the house. His father (an accountant) had always said Peter would never be able to do anything useful in life with stubby fingers. They were clumsy. They were ugly. They were useless fingers.
Following a number of experiments with washing-up, all of which had ended in yowls of dismay when he found that his stubby fingers wouldn’t allow him to reach the bottom of a glass with a dish-cloth, he repented his God-given calamities, and turned his attention to accountancy.
Of course, nowadays he used a long-handled brush to get at those difficult spots of washing-up, and his disastrous efforts in wood-working at school had sown the seeds for his rebellious craftsmanship of today.
Three years ago, he had met Lisa, an arts student. She had dyed auburn hair then. But now that she was a pregnant housewife, she had tousled auburn hair.
Lisa was not only an arts student, but an artist. She could paint! And so she brought alive all his old wooden animals and toys and shelves and bobbins and chairs to a vibrancy that he not only admired, but fell in love with.
Timmy, their boy, would sit upon those exquisitely-varnished chairs with all their intricate carvings, and play with brightly-coloured, impressively durable toys, and read books from multicoloured shelves – shelves that would smile down upon him when he opened his eyes in the morning. When he was born.
Peter put the jar aside, and started on the washing up. He separated cutlery of various sizes and varieties into various mugs so that he could wash them up and then lay them out on the draining board in neat little groups. When he was finished, he would then put them away in the cupboards and containers and sections-of-containers where they belonged.
He finally had the hot water before him, the soap-suds popping faintly to welcome first the cutlery, and then the cups, and then the saucers. More would follow. He inspected the neat clean piles and stacks upon the draining board, and smiled to himself as rivulets of bubbles made their way from the crockery to their source. A nice reversal of nature.
Lisa farted from the adjoining room. The living-room.
“Sorry, dear. It’s all this chocolate I’ve been eating.”
Peter noticed he had left a carving knife on the side. They had been hidden underneath some oven gloves, which should have been hung up.
“That’s okay. Wouldn’t be so bad if you had milk chocolate, you know.”
Lisa sniffed, and then as an afterthought, picked a crumpled tissue from a gap between two settee-cushions. She unravelled it, flexed it to remove the starchy texture, and then blew a hole right through it. She’d never actually seen a globule of snot fly through the air before. It seemed to change in shape as it danced around itself to land in a neat little dappled pool upon the carpet. She spread her duvet out from her to allow it to cover the little pool.
“We need some more tissues, Peter.”
Peter scrubbed at the bottom of a glass trying to dislodge the remains of week-old Guiness-dregs. They stayed resolute.
“I really think you ought to go to the doctor’s. It could be damaging to the baby, having a cold. It might even be ‘flu. Best be safe, you know.”
He jabbed at the brown stain with the tip of the brush. He was beginning to lose the flavour for this.
“Love you, dear. I told you it’ll make the baby healthy. It’ll get a good immune system. You know. Everything I have passes to it.”
Peter looked up over his glasses at the fuzzy garden. A blob darted through the air to the top of the shed, proffering itself provocatively to a large ginger blob sitting a few feet away. The large ginger blob didn’t seem to be moving.
His attention moved back to the glass in hand once more. He wondered if he could get the stain off with his fingernails. Placing the brush carefully aside, he tried stretching first his index, and then his middle finger to the bottom of the glass, but they both stopped more than an inch short. He tried with his other hand, a little more vigorously, pressing down quite hard, so that he could feel something approaching pain between his fingers.
Placing the glass squarely back into the sink, he saw the water and remaining bubble slop over the rim and into the glass.
With three great breaths, he finally rested his elbows on the edge of the sink, put his hair in his hands, and allowed tears to sully the spent dish-water.
- Simon Huggins, 26th October 1992