Supper Club Page 2

  My aunt blew kisses as I stood in the damp landing of what was now my home. I heard the van’s engine start, turned to go back upstairs. There was a tap at the door, and I looked back to see my mum on the other side of the glass, holding her coat: a thick waterproof affair she took everywhere. I let her in. “Here,” she said, handing me the impossibly middle-aged item, two sizes too big. “Because you don’t have anything decent for when it gets cold.” She kissed my forehead and left.

  I went back to my room, threw the coat I knew I would never wear on to my bed. I lay beside it and cried.

  * * *

  I thought leaving home would be a liberation. I thought university would be a dance party. I thought I would live in a room vined with fairy lights; hang arabesque tapestries up on the wall. I thought scattered beneath my bed would be a combination of Kafka, coffee grounds, and a lover’s old boxer shorts. I thought I would spend my evenings drinking cheap red wine and talking about the Middle East. I thought on weekends we might go to Cassavetes marathons at the independent cinema. I thought I would know all the good Korean places in town. I thought I would know a person who was into healing crystals and another person who could teach me how to sew. I thought I might get into yoga. I thought going for frozen yogurt was something you would just do. I thought there would be red cups at parties.

  And I thought I would be different. I thought it would be like coming home, circling back to my essential and inevitable self. I imagined myself more relaxed—less hung up on things. I thought I would find it easy to speak to strangers. I thought I would be funny, even, make people laugh with my warm, wry, and only slightly self-deprecating sense of humor. I thought I would develop the easy confidence of a head girl, the light patter of an artist. I imagined myself dancing in a smoky nightclub, spinning slackly while my arms floated like laundry loose on the breeze. I imagined others watching me, thinking, Wow, she is so free.

  I’d had friends before. I had a group to check in with at lunch. We’d go on cinema trips and talk about boys at sleepovers. We’d go to bars and horrible clubs, and on birthdays we’d go bowling. But we never really connected; standing side by side like soldiers, we were just marching through. It was sort of understood we wouldn’t stay in touch beyond the last summer of school. We were stand-ins for the people we were eventually supposed to meet. They would meet their sporty friends, their religious friends, their studious friends; I would meet my arty friends, my pleasingly weird friends. In those first few weeks, I would meet people, thinking, Is it you? Are you the person I am supposed to find? But most people didn’t fit that frame. These were not the sorts of people I’d left home for. And if they were, I couldn’t quite recalibrate myself to be the sort of person they would want to spend time with. No matter how much I shifted and shrugged, I was still right there.

  The first night at university, someone told me everyone congregated in this one pub. I went down alone. Grating techno blared from the speakers, and the whole room smelled of perfume and sugar. But there was a thick sense of anticipation in the air, a sense of the invisible membrane that separated us from our future selves. If you could just worm your way through it, a plentiful and rewarding existence awaited. I ordered a drink at the bar, my heart rattling at my throat. I looked around. The girls were all tanned, hair grazing the curves of their bottoms. The boys wore open shirts buttoned down far below their sternums. I felt the bloom of a hand on my shoulder.

  “My name’s Natasha,” the girl said. “But everyone calls me Nidz.”

  I stared up into her eyes, unable to make my mouth into the shape it needed to be, to say my name.

  “This is Becca.” She gestured toward the tall blonde by her side. “But everyone calls her Becks.”

  I extended my hand to shake theirs. They looked down at it: my damp, floppy palm.

  “Okay, well, nice to meet you!” she said, then hurried her friend on, giggling. I finished my drink and went home.

  When class started, our tutor asked us to turn to the person next to us and talk to them about our favorite writers. I watched as the room naturally turned inward—looking first to the girl to my right, whose back was to me, and then to the boy to my left.

  “No,” he said, reaching for his iPod and headphones, listening to music while staring straight ahead.

  My flatmates were equally resistant. There were five of them. Across the hall a girl called June: Home Counties, law, embarrassed by her obvious wealth, every bit as fussy and rigid as the obsolescence of her name implied. Next door was a boy called Samuel, a little snarky and vague, though I very much liked his boyfriend, Robert, for his soft-faced handsomeness and manner of gently closing the door. Next door to June was Mei-Ling, spirited and friendly, though with a habit of looking right through you. She’d ask you questions about your day, but you got the impression she wasn’t listening to a word you were saying, just formulating an agreeably benign response: “That sounds bad” or “Is it really?” At the end of the hall, two boys, Adnan and Nadeem, on the same course cluster. Adnan was confident and a flirt, even with me, though I suspected mostly out of kindness. One morning I got up to pour a bowl of cereal, the bloated blush of my stomach protruding above my pajama bottoms, my hair a slick mess. Adnan was at the kitchen table, tinkering on his laptop. “How am I supposed to get any work done with beautiful girls slinking about . . . ?” he began, then, looking up from his laptop, corpsed, and carried on typing. Nadeem was skinny and shy unless drunk, in which case he was an absolute nuisance: inviting his seemingly masses of friends around, playing dance music until the early hours of the morning.

  Other flats had formed rowdy gangs, mutually supportive units. Everyone I lived with seemed to have a vivacious social life, complete with emotionally cohesive bonds, strictly outside the confines of our flat. June knocked around with other posh girls who had impossibly voluminous hair and lax personal hygiene. Samuel hung out exclusively with Robert. They had a decidedly domestic arrangement for two nineteen-year-olds, but they seemed happy: washing up side by side, getting takeaways. Mei-Ling’s friends were mostly from her fashion marketing course, aloof but essentially nice. They’d go to a Vietnamese noodle place just off campus, then out dancing dressed in immaculately conceptual outfits: crinoline skirts and heels like works of art. Adnan hung out with an eclectic bunch of varying ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, and gender; the only thing they all seemed to have in common was being exceptionally good-looking. Nadeem’s friends were a large group of boys who liked playing sports. I’d not met anyone. I sipped tea and stared out of my grimy window, my heart winding tentacles around the city, clutching blindly in the dark.

  * * *

  My room was reassuringly small, a modest unit of space. I’d spent a lot of time harmonizing the light. The issued lampshade produced a pallid glow that looked like the color of depression, so I purchased a brass reading lamp and lined LED candles along the floor. I wasn’t allowed to hang pictures, but I could Blu-Tack postcards to the walls. I found a crocheted throw to put on top of my bed and began a small collection of vintage ashtrays. And although it wasn’t the space I imagined—one in which friends would drop by to see me, in which I would entertain slim-shouldered theater grads—it was my space: my first snug space.

  In lieu of a life, I settled on an existence. I spent most of my time in bed, eating noodles and doodling crosswords, listening to music. Sometimes I’d just lie there with the window open, breathing in the steel smell of the rain. I’d blow huge chunks of my student loan buying clothes no one would ever see me in or hop from web page to web page, researching conspiracy theories, reading about serial killers. Occasionally I would write an essay or attempt some required reading.

  I’d started smoking roll-ups because they were cheaper and killed more time. I’d take myself out on trips to art galleries because they were free, go on walks around town. I’d check out films from the library. One morning it occurred to me that a good way to spend the day might be cooking. My days were punctuated only by meals, with so little in the spaces between them. People could spend hours in the kitchen: thickening risotto or browning meat. It was something to do.

  My mum had already taught me the basics: how to cook rice, scramble eggs, how to boil pasta. But that was eating to survive. The more I experimented, the more I wanted to discover flavor, texture, scent. Gently toasting spices. Mixing herbs.

  My immediate instincts were toward anything like comfort food, the hallmarks of which were a moderate warmth and a sloppy, squelching quality: soups, stews, casseroles, tagines, goulashes. I glazed cauliflower with honey and mustard, roasted it alongside garlic and onions to a sweet gold crisp, then whizzed it up in a blender. I graduated to more complicated soups: Cuban black bean required slow cooking with a full leg of ham, the meat falling almost erotically away from the bone, swirled up in a thick, savory goo. Italian wedding soup was a favorite, because it looked so fundamentally wrong—the egg stringy and half cooked, swimming alongside thoughtlessly tossed-in stale bread and not-quite-melted strips of Parmesan. But it was delicious, the peculiar consistency and salty heartiness of it. Casseroles were an exercise in patience. I’d season with sprigs of herbs and leave them ticking over, checking up every half hour or so, thrilled by the steamy waves of roasting tomatoes and stewed celery when I opened up the oven. Seafood excited me, but I felt I had too much to learn. The proximity of Polish stores resulted in a weeklong obsession with bigos—a hunter’s stew made with cabbage and meat and garnished with anything from caraway seeds to juniper berries.

  I started baking bread. My first was an unadventurous granary loaf, which came out sort of armadillo-shaped and a little too brown in the crust but had a gorgeous graininess and was definitely tasty. I’d never thought bread could have any sort of complexity or depth of flavor, but now I found there were so many notes to be savored: yeast, sea salt, pepper, rosemary, charcoal, butter, olive oil. I was mad on bread. I baked rolls before class, leaving them to cool, then cracking them open for lunch, dunking them into beer and cheese stews, curried lentils. The space beneath my bed, next to the radiator, became the perfect proving spot, and I took particular comfort in taking a nap above whatever dough was lethargically rising at the time.

  I’d match meals to books and films. Requisite reading for my Southern Gothic seminar was accompanied by waffles and grits. New French Extreme called for steak tartare (I threw up for hours). Hot dogs and curly fries for a Friday beneath the duvet with National Lampoon’s. Earl Grey and scones during a late-Wednesday-night rewatch of Brief Encounter. One especially bleak Saturday afternoon, Kiki’s Delivery Service and some unmemorable Pixar: ramen and diet lemonade. It needed work.

  I never made anything sweet. No cakes or desserts. Pies were filled with kidneys and game. Loaves were picnic, zucchini. Though I liked the idea of creating my own ice creams or pastries, it seemed sort of frivolous. What I need was sustenance. Fortification.

  The act of cooking imposed a kind of dignity on hunger, which had become terrifying. I couldn’t remember how I had managed hunger, the animal wildness of it, before. At home we gobbled, we were a family who ate. You could sit in front of the television and shove handfuls of crisps into your mouth, you could smother ripped-up pieces of bread with margarine over the kitchen sink. There was a bravado in it: leftovers were for losers, and if you didn’t have a hearty appetite, there was something wrong with you. But the eating always had a kind of context: in my mum’s house, with its flotsam of dressing gowns and stupid shows on the television, it felt reasonable and normal and right. Now my eating, my bottomless, yearning hunger, was a horror. I felt monstrous, shoveling in the amount of food I wanted to, more anxious with every bite. Cooking became the buffer: an act of civility before the carnage ensued.

  And more importantly, it was a singular respite from academic life. Lectures and seminars were charged with nervous energy. Class felt like sitting at the bottom of a well: I could never raise my voice loud enough to be heard. On the rare occasions that tutors would try to engage me, their almost immediate regret was plain: registering wild panic in my eyes, beating a hasty retreat. I was terrified of being asked for my opinion, and yet I also longed to be—staring hard at the text in front of me, trying to conceive an original thought. When we took turns reading aloud, some piece of short fiction or theory, I’d restlessly anticipate which bit would be mine, running and rerunning the numbers, making sure I didn’t mess it up. Once, when the moment finally came, my section was only a paragraph long, seven sentences at that, before our lecturer instructed “Next” and the guy to my left, some scruffy doofus in a baseball cap and a ROCK AGAINST RACISM shirt, took over. I had the feeling I might cry. Another tile in the mosaic of tiny injustices that had become my life.

  When I didn’t have any classes or seminars, I could sometimes go up to forty-eight hours without using my voice. I’d contrive ways of saying things just to make sure I still could. “This bloody thing,” I’d announce, booting up my laptop. “Ouch,” if I tripped. The actual word of it. Ouch.

  I still spoke to my mum once a week, usually on Mondays. “I’m busy,” I’d tell her. “I’ve got so much going on.”

  “I know,” she would reply wearily. “I know.”

  Isolation was a strange thing. Sometimes the lack felt like a blank page, like a possibility. I’d spend a lot of time daydreaming. Long, convoluted narratives—picking at my dreams like I was choosing a movie. Lying on top of my duvet staring at the small expanse of my ceiling, I’d relay the humble fantasy of my choosing. What about the one where I meet that guy from Critical Theory, we hit it off, and he goes down on me in the library? Or the one where I buddy up with Mei-Ling? Do we go to the Vietnamese place and gossip? Or out meeting boys? But I was always tripping up. My fantasies were rooted in a tangible reality. Mei-Ling works at Bella Italia on Thursdays! We’d have to rearrange! And as for the sex in the library—would he be able to tell I hadn’t done it before? Would there need to be a conversation about that?

  My virginity was an issue. It had never bothered me before. Back home, sleeping next to Joan of Arc, my mother’s faint snores just audible in the next room, I almost never had sex on my mind. Now it was everywhere. Nadeem’s pouting poster girls on the kitchen walls. The squeaky groans from June and whichever anti-Israel guerrilla club promoter she was hooking up with that week. Almost all the books and films I studied. NHS posters pasted across the union walls. Even Mei-Ling had occasionally been known to take two cups of coffee back to her room. I’d always thought she’d have been above it. I came to imagine my own genitals as unusable and impenetrable—as smooth as a doll’s.

  Like sex, friendship seemed at once possible and impossible. Tiny rivulets intermittently seeped through. Sometimes I’d be washing up late and make conversation with whoever was in the kitchen past twelve, gathering scraps by veil of night. “Can I make you a cup of tea?” I’d offer, say, June, her silk halter tear-stained and sweaty from deep house and an ecstasy comedown. I’d produce stew and soft rolls. We’d chat about workloads, homesickness. I’d pretend to understand what it was like to be called back by a boy. Sometimes I’d talk about my dad, listen to stories of bickering or divorced parents in return. We were still so close to the child part of our timeline. But those conversations were just a small space of intimacy in the pale blue dim of the communal area, always dissolved come daylight.

  A Vacant Space

  Sourdough begins with a starter, which is also known as a leaven, a chief, a head, a pre-ferment, or my favorite—a mother. There are several different types of starter, depending on the ratio of water to flour, so you may have a loose and sticky starter or a stiff and heavy starter. What I am trying to say is: there is more than one way to begin.

  If you’re planning to make sourdough, you are going to need some time—anywhere between one week and six months, depending on your patience. And you are going to need a lot of patience. Begin by identifying a time of day when you will be consistently free. Many people choose first thing in the morning or last thing at night. You also need to be available twelve hours after this time, so do take that into account. To create the starter, combine flour and water—roughly half as much water as flour—and stir until they have become a single sticky ball. Seal the ball in an airtight container and leave it somewhere warm. Twelve hours later the feeding begins.

  Feeding the starter involves adding more of the mixture to the mixture. And so you make another ball of flour and water and stir it into the existing ball of flour and water, which at this point should be crusty and a little lackluster. You will do this again twelve hours later, this time increasing the volume of water, and then twelve hours later again. At the third feeding, start throwing away some of the starter. It is alive, and it is growing, and half of it needs to go. Carry on like this for two more days.

  Now we need to talk about bubbles. A few days into nurturing your starter, you should notice bubbles and perhaps a funny smell. It is only going to get worse. Bacteria have invaded your starter, and they are releasing gas. Keep to the twelve-hour feeds. When the starter starts to smell sour and double in size between feeds, you are ready for the next step. Begin by clearing some space in your refrigerator.

  You should now feed the sourdough only once a week, each time halving it and throwing one half away. When you retrieve your sourdough from its new home in the fridge, it may be topped by a thin, brown fluid. This is called hooch. It is alcoholic, but you cannot drink it. If you have a lot of hooch, pour it off. If you have only a little, stir it into the starter. Remember, the starter determines the flavor.