It is a fine day and the party will go well. Or: can it be a party, and where does the size of the guest list dwindle into a dinner? If there will be five people at the table, or four who do not own that table and clean it before they put down the food they’ve cooked, is that a party? A party can be a group so, well yes, they are a party after all. And there can be such thing as a dinner party, in fact that is what it must be; two things at once.
The flowers go into the milk jug on the table with the plates and the cutlery and the carafe with cut up pieces of cucumber and lemon peel and there is ice in the freezer to be decanted at the last moment.
The forecast says fair, which is to say it will be mild but bearable; which is to say she probably won’t have to take any coats into her bedroom, though she’s already cleaned it to hospital standard— just in case. You never know when somebody might look under your bed just to see if you remembered to throw away that collection of used tissues and takeaway containers and dirty socks. She even went into the bathroom cupboard and cleared out all the cheapest soaps, leaving herself with a collection developed mainly through hotel stays. The Molton Brown sits at the front. Templetree, whatever that actually is. From her cousin’s wedding, which was four years ago now, and she can’t believe that was the only wedding she’s ever been to. She’s almost thirty now and everyone she bumps into when she visits home brings up the apparently shared joke of having a wedding on every Saturday and a baby shower every Sunday.
Last weekend she went to the garden centre and spent eleven minutes weighing up the best fertiliser to use on her seven houseplants, all of whom she has named after people she wanted to be once, a very long time ago. Going into winter, they have all started to die, so she has moved them all into the cupboard with the boiler to keep them out of sight. Cleopatra the ficus has lost four leaves already and Nell the fern is browning over.
People always seem to be suffering over the politics of a guest list, of ‘who has invited me somewhere?’ and ‘if we invite her, we have to invite him’ and ‘he left us off the list for New Year’s, or then didn’t he bring that nice bottle of wine to your birthday, so we might as well, I think we owe him.’
But no, the guest list was the easy part because she has very few friends. Laughably few. Nothing is owed to anybody. If one decides not to come, the others will graciously bow out in sympathy. In fact this is the third scheduling of a dinner which has been set to happen for two weeks now. She has been out to buy bottles of wine three times, but at least there are five bottles in the fridge. The sixth she drank in the space of an hour after the second cancellation because there seemed to be no other way to use her mouth if it couldn’t be telling all the stories and making all the jokes she had organised in her head. It took that much wine anyway to realise none of the jokes were funny. She has workshopped them since then.
The first few drops of rain attempt the windowpane. It’s as if the clouds are spitting at her, shaking down the image she had of standing outside to await her guests. Now she will have to put wet coats on her bed. Now she will have to sleep on damp sheets.
When she dips the first piece of fish into the oil, crumbs disperse from the edges and slide aimlessly about the pan, destined now for the drain.
Carefully— she has practised this three times now— she turns the fish at just the right moment, to give it a good strong outer layer, but leave it soft and vulnerable inside. These are going to be served cold as a starter so the texture has to be perfect. Just one of the perks of having so much time to herself is that she has to come up with ways of filling it. In the last six months alone she has mastered the making of: filo pastry, this crispy fish, stonefruit liqueur, blue steak, soda bread, madeleines, lemon posset, dandelion tea.
She imagines herself at forty-eight, a woman in a larger kitchen than this who can afford slightly better bread than this with a slightly tougher crust and wine that has a cork rather than a screwtop. And the people who come will be impressed but unsurprised. She’ll let them in by a front door that leads them straight into the house, no abrasive buzzers to interrupt the Hollywood classics crooned by an expensive speaker system; and they’ll all kiss cheeks, both cheeks like the French. They will greet each other with ‘darling’ and ‘gorgeous’ and ‘love’.
As they eat, they’ll discuss shared experiences; she will not have to put the smile on her cheeks and slot gentle noises into the conversation as it winds around people she doesn’t know, names she has only ever heard in passing, because somehow she has never become caught in the currents of their life. Their circles, now, are a television show she hasn’t watched. A band she hasn’t listened to. A book she read when she was very small and can’t remember.
The rain hardens and now they will have to come inside. They will have to want to come inside. They will have to want to stay inside.
At last, the tremble of excitement lifts her stomach. She is going to enjoy the evening. It’s been a while in coming and she needs to enjoy it three times over now to make up for the two failed attempts. She loves her friends. They are not bad friends. Isn’t it a miracle in the first place she has been able to invite people to see her? The last time she had a birthday party of her own she had not yet hit double digits, back when mothers invited the whole class and everybody went home with a slice of supermarket cake and a party bag.
Funny that she keeps giving things away now. As if in exchange; she is buying time, but the time of others, their presence at her kitchen table and in return she proffers books and sweaters and food and wine and once she even gave away a ring she inherited from her grandmother. Every time she thinks about it she gets the same sense of nausea as drinking coffee on an empty stomach. But she would gut her house if they asked. She would hand over her own spleen, peel the skin from her face, drain herself of her blood. And they would let her. Smile and loosen the ribbon from the package and tell her she is so thoughtful, and somehow make it a fault in her to be so thoughtful; this is too much, they will say, and somehow it will mean never enough.
It’s not sadness that she feels, nor really disappointment. More a tiredness that has been building up underneath her.
She eyes her phone like a dog in a garden watches passers-by.
Hi, I’m so sorry…
Such is the way it begins, and ends. Oh well. Oh well, there will always be other days, other bottles of wine, other excuses to bear. Oh well, she tells herself, demonstrative, in her mother’s voice. Not the end of the world. Now is the time when she should pick up that clamouring child, her own small self, and hold it in her arms: there, there, nothing to cry over, you’re not killed.
This is the love she has allowed. Staring at the perfectly crisped fish, the piles and piles of rocket she has washed and dried and fluffed up in bowls and drizzled with the last of the balsamic; at the expensive candles her aunt bought her which she has burned to the base, at the diffuser with only a film of oil left; at the playlist she has queued with a meticulous selection of light jazz interspersed with bossa nova for when the evening draws in; at the napkins she has bleached white and folded into elegant shapes; at the wine glasses she has polished to chrome; at the New York Times, paper copy, she has left open on the sideboard; at the cupboard to which she has condemned her plants.
Stupid girl. Stupid, stupid girl. To want love like this. To beg. To need.
We’ll reschedule, don’t worry.
You don’t mind?
It’s honestly fine! see you all soon <3
Pollyanna Jackson is an MA English Literature student based in Edinburgh, soon-to-be making the move to the Lake District to start work as an Editor. She was shortlisted for the 2022 Bridport Prize, selected for Mark Gatiss’ writing programme with the Dartington Trust, and won the University of Edinburgh’s Lewis Edwards Memorial Prize in 2023 and 2024. She enjoys writing fiction and short essays, and is always working on a novel.