The Goat Cheese

Mother spring-cleaned my apartment. It wasn't that it was dirty, she explained, or dusty or mouldy or foul. It wasn't even a matter of untidiness. Most things, she had to concede, were clearly in their places. It was just that the places themselves were all wrong:

"Ey, what's this doing here?"

"What? Where?" (I was engaged in a delicate antennabird-drawing operation, and refused to look up. I wasn't about to let the ink dry on my nib while Mother waved a potholder or cheese-grater in my face. I've got a cheese-grater, you know. Well, I didn't know. Mother found it, in amongst the pot lids and Brillie pads.)

"This." Something was being waved. I could feel it being waved. I pretended to look.

"I don't know. What is it?"

"An avocado."

"I...couldn't say."

The fridge door opened. She was putting it in the fridge.

"Don't put it in the fridge."

"Why not?"

"It's softening. If you put it in the fridge, it won't soften. I wanted to have it for lunch tomorrow."

"Any softer, and it'll be a banana." The avocado went in the fridge. I drew a kink in the bird's left antenna. Refrigerate my avocado, will you? Take that!

"Goat cheese," she said, some time later. I could feel goat cheese being held aloft. (It's something to do with subtle changes of light, I think, and minute shifts in air-currents. That's how you know someone's holding something up for your inspection, when they're doing it behind your back. Folks know this is possible, on a subconscious level, and hold stuff up no matter where you're looking. They expect you to turn around. It annoys them if you don't. It--it--where was I?)

Goat cheese was being held aloft. I didn't know what to say. "I like goat cheese," I ventured. "I eat it all the time. I was going to have it in my sandwich, along with the avocado."

"It's funny, you liking goat cheese." I heard the cheese being re-stowed, probably at a slightly more attractive angle vis-a-vis the cheddar. "Do you remember that goat cheese, when you and Clare were wee?"

"No, I don't think so."

"Oh, you went on and on about that thing, the pair of you! I don't know it was even a goat cheese, to be perfectly honest, but you and she had decided it was. Quite adamant, you were. Always on about this goat cheese, and how dreadful it was."

I laughed. "Haa--sounds like us."

"The Stones brought it up from Massachusetts, one summer. It was--oh, I don't know. Some sort of home-made cheese. A big one, a whole wheel of it."

"Oh, God! I do remember that! Ghastly thing."

"Psh! There was nothing wrong with it. You and Clare, though, you wouldn't let up. Aie, what a groaning and greeting there was, whenever that thing made its entrance!"

"Every damn meal, you mean?"

"Ey, we had to get rid of it somehow! And, be fair--there was plenty of variation. Pork and goat cheese; goat cheese tacos; apple slices with goat cheese; goat cheese omelettes, if you'd...."

She paused to scrub at something in the fridge. She'd bought a big bottle of Vim, and seemed determined to use the whole thing. She seemed shocked that I didn't have any of my own. How could I not have Vim? Did I not know it can be used on everything from floors to bathtubs? That it lifts red wine from tabletops and birdshit from glass? That it kills germs and promotes pleasant kitchen odours? Why, everyone knows--

"At any rate, we finally had it eaten just before Christmas. There we were, on our way to the Williamses for the hols, when it occurred to me: the Stones had visited them right before us. So I said to you and Clare, 'Ey, how much you want to bet the Williamses have a goat cheese, as well?' And, wouldn't you know it--"

"--oh, I remember--"

"--right there on the table--"

"--smack bang in the middle--"

"--first thing we saw when we walked in--"

"--all surrounded by crackers and toast, as if they expected us to--"

"--and you and Clare didn't stop laughing for months!"

"Lamenting, more like."

"But now you like goat cheese."

"That thing was not a goat cheese."

I chuckled. Mother spring-cleaned. And shortly after her departure, I went to Saint Paul's for a CAT scan* wearing the horrible sneakers I reserve for taking out the trash, owing to her having tidied away my nicer footwear. (I still haven't found my boots!)

"Nice shoes," said Richard, who'd got stuck with the task of taking me to the hospital.

"Fuck you," I said, smiling pleasantly.

In addition to my shoes, Mother hid my oven mitts, my spare pen-holders, and a small bag of drawings. I might've been angry, but then there was the string I found, carefully knotted round my rat fetus in a bottle. We'd taken off the original string, see, for the carved jade good-luck charm we sent to Gail and David. That charm came with a cheapjack string, of the sort you'd expect to see holding parcels together. We couldn't very well send that. Thus, the rat-fetus string was sacrificed, and I replaced it with a bit of red wool. I didn't do a good job, though. I left it all knotted and sloppy, and sprawled out everywhere. Mother, she must've retied it when I wasn't looking. She did it up all tidy-like, with the ends trimmed and everything. Mother hates rat fetuses in bottles, so that was an awfully kind gesture, right there.

* Ah, yes, the CAT scan. Hey, remember that time I played a giant April Fool's joke on the Internet art community? You know, when I had them all convinced that religious zealots were loudly beshrewing their work? Well, seems a couple of 'em hadn't forgotten about that. So, before I went off for my CAT scan, they regaled me with hospital horror stories, involving being forced to lie still for hours on end, while being bombarded with radioactive goo injections. Despite knowing better, dammit, I completely took the bait, and was well out of sorts by the time I reached Saint Paul's. (At which point, I learned that the procedure took five minutes, and was entirely goo-free.)