Blue China

Things began as they always did. 

Laini should have known not to make pancakes — things always went wrong when pancakes were involved. It was in the week before her father disappeared that Laini had got a pancake stuck to the ceiling of their old home. “I can’t, I just can’t with this family,” he’d said, waving his hands like he’d invented a new dance. That had been decades ago and yet Laini still remembered watching from under the table and fighting the bizarre urge to laugh. 

When she came to think of it, it had been a pancake that had killed her immunodeficient dog Beryl too. And not to mention, King Leopold the Second had died on pancake day. The relationship between these events was undeniable, she had triumphantly told Esther, her best friend, when expounding her theory. 

“So, don’t make him pancakes then,” had been Esther’s droll response when Laini had called her late last night. Esther had told her she should do nothing, wait it out, not speak to him for a change. Laini had “mmm”ed and “uh huh”ed at all the right places so that Esther felt her position as best friend was valued, all while making a mental inventory of the food cupboard. Flour, check. Eggs, check. Milk, check. Cooking was the only way Laini knew to make David happy and so, Laini had made pancakes. 

Three each, placed burnt side down and arranged like poppy petals to cover up the holes. Hers were the littlest and the most pitiful victims of the spatula, but with a dollop of cool whip and artful placing of tinned fruit, you could hardly tell. She’d thought about spelling out ‘sorry’ in syrup across the top of David’s, but David liked doing his own.

The doorbell rang as she sat, tapping her feet against the linoleum. “I’ll get it!” she called upstairs, but before she could reach the door, she heard the tick of a wonky suitcase being dragged across the landing. Pausing, with her hand reaching for the latch, she called up again, “I said I’d get it!” 

David’s face appeared before the rest of him, poking over the bannisters, his mouth a thin ruler line in his face. “No point. It’s for me.”

The rest of David appeared, leaning forward against the weight of one very large, very full four-wheeler suitcase.

“Wha— David, what are you doing?”

David adjusted his collar uncomfortably.

“I’m leaving, Lain. God’s sake, don’t look at me like that. I told you, I can’t take all your —“ he waved a hand in a vague gesture that seemed to encompass the entirety of Laini and a good chunk of the macramèd front hallway. 

“But… David, it was just an argument,” Laini stuttered, with a horrible, hulking, sinking kind of feeling rising within her. “We argue all the time! I — I told you I was sorry!” Laini could hear the note of desperation in her own voice. “Besides,” she trailed off. “I made pancakes.”

“What the hell did you do that for?” David made an exasperated grunting sound, not unlike that of a warthog that Laini had once seen in an episode of Survival. He pointed his finger at her fixedly. “Look, it’s not my fault you don’t see the signs. There’s only so much a man can bloody take.” He began hefting the suitcase down the stairs, one step at a time. “I said I was leaving. So. I’m. Leaving.” He stomped the last few steps as he said this, as if to drive the point home. The narrow birchwood stairs were not all that conducive to stomping, however, and David lurched forward as the case toppled down the last two stairs at once, catching himself just in time to avoid smashing any of the blue china plates which hung on the wall. 

For a moment, his eye lingered on the one nearest his elbow and something like repulsion crossed his face before a second ring on the doorbell re-focused his attention.

He dusted his jacket and cleared his throat. “I’ve packed all my stuff and I’ll be back next week to pick up my gear.” He cast another glance at the plate to his right and blinked hard. 

Laini tried to wrap her head around what he was saying, look at him, nod, but all she could look at was the wheels of his suitcase and that one, wonky number among them which pointed stubbornly in her direction, as if mocking her with the promise of returning home. 

It was all happening so quickly.

Her gaze followed David’s to the trail of china patterned plates which led up the wall. There were ten in total, evenly spaced, all the exact same shade of blue as her checked curtains and homemade rugs. They matched the blue figurines on the mantelpiece, the bluebirds painted above the pegs and blue patterned wallpaper which the style guides called ‘psychedelic’ and David called kitsch.

“Can’t say I’ll miss your taste in decorations,” he muttered to himself, but he sounded almost unsettled.

Laini tried to distract him.

“Where will you —“

“I’ve already thought of that,” said David, his gaze wrenched back to Laini. “But you’re not going to try to track me down or send letters or any of that crap.” He pointed a finger at her threateningly. “It’s a done deal, this. It’s been fun, Lain, and… I’ve really tried with us. You know I have. A man’s just got to stand his ground sometimes and you’re….” His eyes drifted over to the blue statues on the mantelpiece and he shuddered. “Have those blue gnome people always looked so freaked out?”

Bing bong interjected the doorbell for the third time.

Saved by the bell, thought Laini.

“Alright, alright, I’m coming!” yelled David. He shook his head as if to clear it. 

He wrenched open the door, waved at the taxi driver outside and seemed relieved to cross the threshold. There was a new sheen of sweat on his face that hadn’t been there before. 

He cast a final look over his shoulder at the plates on the wall. “Damned prescription,” she heard him mutter. “Must be messing with my head.”

Laini shuffled backwards to avoid having her toes run over and stared very hard at the suitcase as it trundled after him and out the door. There was a cord around the middle of the suitcase which made it bulge over the top and underneath. It resembled, bizarrely, David’s own large midriff, asphyxiated by the belt she’d brought him last Christmas.

She was struck by a sense of almost overwhelming tragedy. Here she was again, always in the same space, the same conversations playing over and over. It’s all of this. All of you. It’s the people in the plates. 

She felt herself drift up and out of her body, preparing to watch the inevitable play out and finding herself already missing David, even as he shuffled on the doorstep in front of her. 

What is it that had first attracted me to him in the first place, she asked herself. She was sure it couldn’t be his face. Maybe his laugh? His liking for cheese and pineapple hedgehogs which matched hers? He was very good at asking for his money back when they were short-changed and Laini never had been good at that. Yes, maybe that was it. 

Laini felt the lump in her throat rise to the size of a mountain. Pathetic, she knew. Her dependence on a soft word, the trail of fingers on her skin, the implicit promise that she had been chosen by someone who saw her and loved her and wrote their names one after the other, linked with a swirling ampersand on Christmas cards. It was all pathetic.

“Why do you even call me if you’re not going to listen?” Esther had said once.

It was hard to explain to somebody else, but while you were in the middle of it all, it just felt worth it. Worth the way things fell apart and worth the abruptness with which they ended. 

David’s face appeared before her again, his hair still rumpled with sleep. He hovered there, caught like a fly in a single beautiful moment between lover and acquaintance. 

“Goodbye, Lain.”

“Goodbye,” she heard herself saying. Then, stupidly, “Be seeing you.” 

“God’s sake Laini, that’s the whole point — you won’t!” 

And then he turned away from her, and just like that, like every David before him, he was gone.

Quite literally in fact. Vanished. Poof. Evaporated into the air, like he’d never been there at all. 

The taxi driver craned out of his window in disbelief. The suitcase which had been resting against David’s leg wobbled and tipped sideways into the rhododendrons. Laini kept her eyes fixed straight ahead where she’d last seen his face and tried to keep it fresh and perfect in her memory just as it had looked to her seconds before. 

She should have been accustomed to it by now, she supposed. She’d lost count of the times it had happened, after all. But it was still terribly upsetting when it came down to it though, and Laini couldn’t begrudge herself a tear as she fumbled in her pocket for a handkerchief.

There was a screech of tires as the taxi reversed and then shot off down the cul de sac, and Laini had just enough presence of mind to register that she should probably report the driver for breaking the speed limit.

Slowly, determinedly avoiding looking at the plates along the wall, Laini trailed back to the breakfast table and sunk into her chair. The pancakes were glossy with syrup, the cream yellowed with the tinned cubes of fruit which had melded into a sickly puddle round the edges of the plate. They were far too sweet, but Laini ate them anyway, thinking about how this much sugar was probably not a good idea this early in the day, about how it was probably more chemical than maple anyway, about how the men she loved always threatened to leave her and how she’d never quite believe them.

“It’s just crazy how blokes always leave you in the most dramatic way possible,” Esther had observed years ago, as they talked down the phone. “It’s like they get wiped from the face of the earth for all I hear of them again.” 

“I know,” said Laini dolefully, twisting the wire around her finger like a ring. “It is my greatest curse.” 

“Hardly,” snorted Esther. “I wish my exes were so kind.”

So this was it then. Laini alone. The wheel had come full circle.

She knew she would end up calling Esther again, as she always did. Wait for the reassuring crackle that told her that her friend was on the other side of the line. “Hellooo! I’m still here, you know! Stop wasting your time with these Neanderthals and take me out for a drink!”

Laini’s gaze drifted slowly up from the tablecloth to the patterns on the wall. It took an observant person to notice the discrepancies. The gaps in the whorls where eyes could be made out, and below them, the gaping ‘O’ of a mouth. There was a reason she could never invite Esther round for all her nagging. Her friend was more perceptive than David had been. More discerning than Cameron. And Paul. And James before him. The faces in the wallpaper were too obvious.

“Take a risk, Laini. I dare you,” came Esther’s voice again, always in her ear. 

The bluebirds only took a second glance to realise. The figurines needed no close inspection. Most telling of all were the people in the china plates which stretched all the way down the hall.

Laini didn’t take risks, not where Esther was concerned.

Because the faces in the wallpaper didn’t look happy. And the bluebirds were contorted in pain. The figurines on the mantelpiece were screaming. And amongst the tortured creatures trapped in the blue china, Laini knew she’d find a warthog that hadn’t been there before. 

It was silly, really, how much she let these things affect her. The world kept turning. The years turned up new men like fresh worms out of the soil, and, for the meantime, for the time being, she had Esther.

Laini would learn to cook Bourguignon. And keep the house even better than before. She would savour the laughter to be found in the margins of her life and in the meantime wait for the next somebody-better to take the place that was already set aside for him. 

From across the room, through a chink in the door, a plump warthog looked out at her from a china plate. He’d had a name once. And a finger he liked to point. There wasn’t much space in his china brain, but he knew that if his mouth had not been painted shut, he would have liked to scream.