2nd Prize

Kim Fleet With:

Unicorn Breath

The man in the Tuileries garden holds a hand-written sign: j’ai faim. I’m hungry. He’s the fattest man Sarah has ever seen.

She turns to Paul, a quip already forming on her lips. It evaporates when she sees the grim concentration on his face. David would have seen the irony, she thinks, then instantly regrets the betrayal.

This is a make-up or break-up holiday and they’re both trying too hard. The stress of it crackles between them. Thoughts of David don’t help, not when her mind flies to him every few minutes. The guilt of it curdles her insides.

What is David doing now, she wonders, conjuring up an image of him alone in his flat, a tray on his lap while he watches Saturday evening TV, the curtains closed against the evening gloom, waiting for her to return to him. If she chooses to return.

‘I owe Paul this,’ she’d explained. ‘All the years we were together. If we give it one last try and it still doesn’t work, then I can walk away and know I tried everything.’ She swallowed. ‘I’m sorry.’

David kissed her forehead. ‘Go. Go and find out once and for all, and then come back to me with a clean conscience and we’ll scoff cheese on toast in bed and I promise I won’t complain about the crumbs.’

So here she is with Paul. A long weekend away together, to see if they can mend their fractured relationship. In Paris, obviously, because if you can’t rekindle a dying love in Paris then there is no hope.

Paul tugs her hand, dragging her past the lake with its cymbals and tourists chucking stones to make them chime; past the boys roasting chestnuts in an old wire shopping trolley. She scurries to keep up with him; high heels no match for Paul’s long, scissoring strides.

‘We should toss a stone at the cymbals and make a wish,’ she says.

Paul shoves back his sleeve and checks his watch again. ‘Maybe, on the way back to the hotel.’

‘That would be nice,’ she says, remembering to be polite.

‘We’ve got to hurry.’ Paul flashes a tight little smile of apology. ‘They won’t hold the reservation if we’re late.’

They’re breathless and sticky when they arrive at the restaurant. Paul gives his name, a self-conscious flicker at the ‘Doctor’, and they’re steered to their table.

The restaurant is a checkerboard: black and white tiles on the floor and walls, white linen cloths, black leather chairs. Black and white candles glow on each table, the wax twisting into gargoyles.

It’s wrong. Sarah knows it as soon as the chair hits the backs of her knees. The menu has a one-page introduction to the chef’s philosophy of food. It talks about subverting expectations, about stripping back food to its basic state, about unusual combinations to wrong-foot the diners.

‘Shepherd’s pie and custard,’ she says. ‘Yummy.’

A pause button pleats the skin between Paul’s eyebrows. ‘It doesn’t say that.’

‘I know; it’s that bit about unusual combinations.’ She dries. Paul is still frowning at her. David would laugh, tossing back his head, his fillings glinting. He’d think up outrageous menus – snail crumble, chocolate brownie soup, broccoli ice-cream – until they were both sniggering so hard they couldn’t speak.

Her mind zooms to him. What’s he eating in front of the TV? Sausage and mash, yellow and creamy with butter. Baked apples fragrant with cinnamon.

‘I’ve wanted to come here for ages,’ Paul says, breaking in on her thoughts.

‘Have you?’

‘It’s had great reviews. We were lucky to get in.’ He looks up from the menu as the waiter coughs beside him.

‘Shall I order for you?’

‘Sure.’ She snaps her menu closed and silence yawns between them.

‘Paul, I should tell you,’ Sarah starts at last, wanting to be honest about David. She’s rehearsed this speech over and over. When we broke up, I started seeing someone. A friend of mine. David. We’ve known each other since school, and something just clicked. He’s really easy to be with. He makes me laugh. He’s kind.

And I don’t know what went wrong between us, Paul, except we’ve been going out, off and on, for years and haven’t even mentioned living together. And now I’m thirty-six and I want a baby, and I can’t see how that will happen unless things change. And part of me thinks if that’s what we both wanted it would have happened by now.

She sucks in a deep breath and prepares to launch the speech, then the waiter minces over and places a wooden box in front of her with a flourish.

‘What’s this?’

‘The starter.’

She opens the lid. Inside are two slices of raw tomato and a squirt of pale goo.

Paul laughs with delight. ‘It’s just what the critics said.’ He chuckles to himself. ‘The impudence.’

‘Impudence?’

‘A deconstructed salad. Saffron mayonnaise and tomato au naturel.’ He forks a tiny amount into his mouth. ‘Delicious.’

Sarah scratches her fork through the goo and prongs a slice of tomato; chews; swallows; tastes only raw tomato.

‘Well, I’m starving,’ she says, when the wooden boxes are removed. ‘I hope you ordered steak and ale pie and lots of potatoes.’

‘What’s the best meal you’ve ever eaten?’ Paul asks.

‘Tomato soup, when I was eleven and had some teeth out at the dentist.’

‘Tomato soup? Tinned tomato soup?’

‘Of course it was tinned. Thick and that deep orange colour you only get with tinned. And Mum let me float dough balls in it, because I was poorly.’

‘Dough balls?’

Pinches of white bread, rolled and dunked into the soup to swell.

‘Bits of bread,’ Sarah says. ‘Mum thought it was common to drop bread into the soup. We weren’t allowed to unless we were ill.’

‘I meant, what’s the best proper food you’ve ever had.’

‘Mum’s toad-in-the-hole.’

A sofa of Yorkshire pudding with a thick pork sausage snoozing under a duvet of dark brown gravy.

‘Right.’

There’s a pause, and she realises she’s supposed to bat the question back to him, but the moment passes, taking with it her chance to learn what Paul’s best ever meal was.

The fish course arrives on lumps of grey stone, the fish draped over the top, bound in seaweed and shrouded with a white cloud.

‘What’s the froth?’ She panics, unsure what’s edible and what’s just garnish.

‘Foam. It’s sardine foam.’

It takes about ten seconds to clear the rock of fish, foam and seaweed. Sarah puts down her cutlery and gazes outside.

The window is black with night and she sees herself reflected back: a small, unhappy woman, fingers twisted in her lap. A sudden squall of rain against the pane makes her jump, and she wonders about the fat man in the gardens, unable to remember now whether or not he wore an overcoat. Is he still there, alone on the bench in the cold and rain, or does he go to a hostel each night for a sleep and hot shower, and a bowl of broth thick with barley, onions, beef and carrots, cobbled with herb dumplings.

Her mouth twitches. He could be leaning back in his chair right now, rubbing his gut and declaring, ‘I’m stuffed.’

Her stomach rumbles and she’s pleased to see two huge white plates coming their way. When they land, her joy dissolves. Her plate bears a cube of red meat surrounded by a puddle of scarlet sauce. Three blobs – one green, one red, one orange – dot the plate’s rim.

‘What is it?’ she asks.

‘Beef pickled in wine vinegar with raspberry jus and pureed pea, carrot and turnip,’ Paul explains.

Sarah was raised to clear her plate. ‘If you can’t manage it all, then at least eat your meat.’ The meat on her plate now is consumed in one mouthful.

She squints across the table. Paul has his eyes closed while he chews. She used to have to remind him to close his eyes when he kissed her. It’s not a proper kiss if your eyes are open, she told him, often. Seeing his eyelids fluttering with ecstasy drives a spurt of anger through her and she fights the urge to jab her fork into hishand.

‘Paul,’ she begins, when his plate is clean and his knife and fork lined up side by side. ‘This place – it’s theemperor’s new clothes, isn’t it?’

‘What do you mean?’

She waves her hand at the empty plates. ‘Raw tomato in a box? A sliver of fish on a rock? Froth?’

‘Foam. Do you know how much it costs to eat here?’

‘I’ll happily pay my half,’ she says, ‘but it’s … unicorn breath and rocking horse pie.’

‘I thought you’d like it. It’s meant to be a new start for us.’ For a moment he’s a little boy, thrusting a picturemade from macaroni and cotton wool into her hands. ‘It’s meant to be special.’

Guilt ratchets up another notch.

‘Sarah.’ Paul stretches his hands across the table and grasps hers, rubbing his thumbs over her knuckles in the way she used to love. ‘These past two months without you, I’ve done a lot of thinking. And there’s something I want to ask you.’

He signals to the waiter, who hurries over with a champagne flute. It sits on the table between them. Champagne jelly, pale and clear, and inside it, something gold that flashes in the candlelight.

‘Will you …?’ Paul starts, and as he drops from his chair and onto one knee, she’s on her feet, running from the restaurant, tears boiling as the chill night air slaps her face.

She clips through rain-washed streets, her chest heaving. A diamond solitaire in a teaspoon of champagne jelly. Her mind skims back over the years to childhood parties, and the goldfish jelly her mother always made. Tangerine segments in lemon jelly.

‘Are they real goldfish, mummy?’

‘Yes, I got them from the fishmonger specially.’

David would adore that story, would beg her to make goldfish jelly for him, so he would know the slither of the tangerine segments for himself.

Her high heels scrape the skin from her ankles and she hobbles to a bench, easing off her shoe and examining the damage. Her stockings are shredded and bloody; the shoe’s lining is ruined. Licking her handkerchief, she mops her raw skin.

She shouldn’t have run. She should have calmly explained that she couldn’t marry Paul, that living together would never work. That sometimes, in the evening after a long day, she mixes cocoa and sugar together in a mug and spoons the dry powder into her mouth. Or that she dips her forefinger into the Marmite jar and sucks it. That David shares these pleasures Paul will never understand.

She glances round, aware she has wound up in the Tuileries garden, hoping the fat man isn’t there, but warm and safe and well-fed inside. Three benches down from hers, a hulking dark mass rises and falls. There’s a sign tied to the armrest. J’ai faim. As she watches, the sign snaps loose in the breeze and flaps across the gardens and into the lake.

Sarah slips her shoe back on with a grimace and leaves the park. At a bakery, she buys a Styrofoam cup of onion soup and a baguette filled with roast beef. These she carries back to the Tuileries, to the figure on thebench.

‘Monsieur?’ she calls. ‘Monsieur?’

He wakes with a snort and she holds out the soup and baguette in their brown paper bag. The meat scents theair and her stomach clenches. ‘Pour vous.’

He takes the bag from her, dips his nose to it, and snuffs deeply. ‘Merci,’ he says, in a voice like cracked leather.

‘Bon appetit,’ she says and walks away, realising as she goes, ‘I’m hungry.’

'I'm absolutely thrilled to be placed in this competition, and am excited to start my course with the Writers Bureau. Thank you!'
Kim Fleet