Chicken in a Basket

26 Mar 2010

Anna Towers

I’m onto my third cup of coffee. Penny still hasn’t decided what she’s going to have.

‘The Prawn Cocktail jacket potato filling,’ she says, licking her lips and biting her thumbnail, ‘will be at least four Weight Watcher’s points.’

I ate at home. A tuna and sweetcorn baguette. I’m still hungry now. But I shouldn’t have two lunches. It would be greedy.

I rip the top off another tubular packet of brown raw cane sugar.

‘Forget bloody Weight Watchers,’ I say, then close my mouth around the hole in the top of the sugar packet and tip my head back, the granules hitting my palate and epiglottis and sticking there, beginning to slowly dissolve. I don’t swallow, talk or move as they disintegrate.

‘You’ll ruin your teeth,’ says Penny, without looking up from her menu. I take a swig of coffee to wash down the remaining sugar.

‘It never touched my teeth,’ I say. ‘Have you decided yet?’ This is infuriating. She always does this. It’s bad enough at posh restaurants, where there’s actually a choice. But we’re only at Tesco’s.

‘It’s difficult,’ she says. ‘I’m discerning.’

It’s true. She is pretty discerning. My Penny knows how to choose the best of everything. The best clothes, the best sofa covers, the best tinned tuna (the new drain-less kind that contains no water, so that it’s tasty tuna without the mess and hassle). Her furniture is from Ilva. She also has excellent taste in women, if I do say so myself.

The Formica table top is tacky, in both senses of the word. I’ve been running my fingertips across it, pretending to play the piano, and now the pads of my fingers are sticky. I wipe them on my jeans. I forgot napkins.

I look over at the illuminated chiller cabinet that stretches along the wall to our right. The array of cakes. Huge slabs of dense chocolate sponge. Triple-chocolate muffins, dark chocolate with milk and white chocolate chips. Modest squares of carrot cake with tiny sugar carrots nestled in the butter icing.

‘Have a cake,’ I suggest to Penny.

‘Sometimes,’ she says, her dark eyes glittering with a coating of anger, ‘I think you’re just taking the piss.’

I’ve said the wrong thing again. This is a frequent problem. I seem unable to predict what will make Penny happy, and what will make her sad. What will make her angry, and what will make her cry. What will make her blush, and what will make her kiss me. It’s like negotiating a minefield in a blindfold.

It’s taking its toll on me.

Penny is skinny. Bordering on seriously underweight. It makes her eyes look huge and round. Her mouth stands out – a wide slash of thin lips that she slathers with cocoa-coloured lipstick. I am an acceptable weight. I have curves where I should have, and perhaps a few where I shouldn’t. It’s not that I eat ridiculous amounts. But I’m not averse to necking the odd packet of sugar, just for the heck of it. Penny shows me up. Sometimes I want to hold her down and force feed her.

She stands up, carefully propping up her menu in the stand on the end of the table.

‘I’m having the chicken in a basket,’ she says, then negotiates her way through the tables to grab a tray. I watch her join the queue and place the tray on the metal sliders that bear the sign,

‘DO NOT SIT CHILDREN ON THIS SURFACE.’

Every few seconds she shuffles closer to the till. She looks longingly at the cakes as she passes them. Then she looks longingly back at the ‘DO NOT SIT CHILDREN ON THIS SURFACE’ sign. That’s slightly disconcerting to me.

I wait impatiently, curling up my nose at the damp-cloth smell of the place. No matter how many times they wipe these surfaces down, they must never be clean. I’d hate to work here.

When Penny returns, she sets a little red plastic flag down on the table. The flag is ‘flying’ from a thin stainless-steel pole six-inches high, and bears the number ‘29.’

‘It’s coming,’ she says.

I know she won’t eat it, when it arrives. She might peel the batter off one or two pieces and eat the chicken inside. But she’ll leave the rest. How she can live like that, I don’t know.

I tear the top off another sugar packet.

‘You are not going to eat that,’ says Penny. ‘It’s disgusting.’

I defiantly close my lips around the end of the tube and tip my head back.

Penny shoots her hand out and knocks the sugar packet away from my mouth. Granules spray across the table and floor. She leaves her hand hovering in the air between us, and for a moment I think she is going to slap me. I leave my mouth open to signify shock.

After a second or so, she drops her hand, and I close my mouth. I use the sides of my hands to shepherd wayward raw cane sugar granules into a neat pile in front of me. Raw. Cane. Together with the recent threat of Penny’s hand, it makes me think of spanking.

Sometimes I feel like a child to Penny’s mother. A naughty pupil to her sexy teacher. Though she’s actually thirteen months younger than me. I crunch a sugar granule between my front teeth.

‘I might get a cake,’ I say.

I try to push my chair back, then remember it is attached to the floor. All of the chairs here are attached to the floor. What a stupid state of affairs.

My thighs begin to ache with wanting to get away. I’m well and truly stuck. My fingertips welded to the tacky tabletop, the legs of my chair screwed firmly to the ground. My backside is heavy as lead. Too much sweet stuff. I can’t lift it an inch. I decide to forget the cake.

The waitress brings Penny’s chicken.

‘Here you go,’ she says, setting the plate down on the table top, along with a knife and fork neatly wrapped in a plain white napkin.

Penny stares at the plate in mute astonishment. Then she finds her voice.

‘What’s that?’ she asks.

The waitress sniffs and swallows.

‘It’s your chicken.’

The plate is thick and heavy, rimmed by a wide band of silver. Penny pushes it away from her a little, then jerks her hand back. It must be hot.

‘Where’s the basket?’ she asks.

The waitress looks at her blankly. Then she looks at me. I remain silent.

‘The basket?’ asks the waitress. There is sweat along her upper lip, shining and silvery as the edge of the plate. Like a line left by a slug.

‘On the menu,’ says Penny, ‘It said “Chicken in a Basket.” I ask you – where’s the basket?’

‘Surely it tastes the same whether it’s in or out of a basket?’ says the waitress. I can tell she means it diplomatically, but it comes out as a mite unpleasant.

‘That’s not the point.’ Penny purses her lips. ‘It’s the principle of it.’

‘But…’ says the waitress, wiping her upper lip with a forefinger, ‘The chicken’s there.’

I make eyes at the waitress. Trying to communicate to her on some level that this is not the correct argument. But what do I know? I’m blindfolded in a minefield myself.

‘I’ve ordered the “Chicken in a Basket,” says Penny. She points to her meal. ‘This is what I would term “Chicken on a Plate.”’

The waitress looks nonplussed.

‘What I’m saying, is that this is false advertising.’ She pierces the waitress with a steely gaze. ‘When I order a meal in a basket,’ she raises her chin, ‘I expect it to be in a basket.’

The waitress snatches up the plate from the table. From her sharp intake of breath, I know that she’s forgotten the plate is hot. But she stoically refuses to release it.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she says in a pained voice, and stalks away.

I look at Penny. The colour is high in her cheeks. She’s flushed with defiance and her hands are trembling with the energy of righteous complaint. She’s never looked more beautiful.

Gazing at her with all the devotion I can muster, I say,

‘You’re amazing.’ And for once, I know I’ve said the right thing.

The waitress is back in no time. She’s carrying something.

‘There we are, Madam,’ she says. ‘Is this satisfactory?’

She holds it out so that Penny and I can see. It’s chicken and salad in a large wicker paper bin.

‘Most satisfactory,’ says Penny. ‘Thank you.’

The waitress deposits the wicker bin on the table, and disappears to somewhere out of sight and mind.

The bin is too tall to eat from when set on the table, so Penny pulls it down into her lap. She stares down at the chicken nestled at the bottom, then uncaps the vinegar and sprinkles a liberal amount of it over the meal. I hope it doesn’t leak through the holes. She pauses, screws up her nose and gently picks out a screwed-up, vinegar-soaked waitress’s order slip from beneath the lettuce.

‘You’re going to eat all of that,’ I say, tugging at the point of the napkin wrapped around the cutlery until the knife and fork clatter out onto the table top.

She takes up the fork, spears a piece of chicken and pops it into her mouth, batter and all. I tear off the top of another sugar packet and neck it. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the baby in the highchair at the next table looking at me curiously. I turn and grin at him, sugar granules glittering in my teeth.

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Read another story by Anna Towers here.