Roast, all the trimmings

I wake to a phone call. I don't know who from. It's the landline. Only my Mum ever rings on the landline. It must be my Mum. She's also the only person who rings this early. So far, so logical, I open an eye, it's at floor-level.

The first thing I need to do is find the phone. It doesn't stop.

I say "the first thing I need to do is find the phone" as though it'll be a difficult task, as though there are drifts of crap silting up my house and the landline, long forgotten, is lurking at the bottom of one of the more fetid piles.

There aren't any fetid piles, my house is pretty tidy. I, for all my faults, am pretty tidy. And I actually use the landline quite a lot. People don't, and I don't know why. It's really quite cheap to do so and you don't have to keep stopping and starting and saying "sorry, are you there?". But I can't quite remember where I left it. It's still ringing, an insistent four bars of "Ode to Joy" that were the default when I bought it and I have never quite got round to changing.

The back room. Occasionally referred to somewhat grandly as the study. That's where I was last time I used it. I phoned for a pizza and stood looking out of the window as I did so, contemplating the advanced stage of rewilding of the garden. We're at scrubland, now, primary succession of pioneer tree species any day now, I reckon. I climb the stairs, having awoken on the living room floor, using slightly more balustrade than should be necessary in a man of my vintage, which, without wishing to go into too much detail, is older than Millenial, younger than Boomer. The ones that get caught in the crossfire of the culture wars.

(I'm not saying Generation X, only wankers say Generation X)

It's still ringing. It must be Mum, she's the only one that's this persistent. I find it perched jauntily on the back bedroom windowsill and answer, as much to stop the ringing as anything else.

"Hi Mum"

"Urgh, Freudian much?" The voice is female, but it's a few decades south of mother. It takes me a beat to work out who it is.

"Rachel, a pleasant surprise, well, you do always say I can't look after myself" Nicely done, situation rescued. Not bad for a bloke with a pounding head who only woke up thirty seconds ago.

She's phoning to see if I want to go out to lunch, which, whilst a pleasant suggestion, is quite a surprising one. I don't think I've ever regarded Rachel and I as being quite on a lunch footing before. I'm reasonably confident that she's never regarded us as being on a lunch footing before. The subject of lunch has rarely come up. Breakfast, occasionally, but not lunch.

Whilst I couldn't attest to it one hundred percent, I'm sure that most of us have, at some point, had a friend along these lines. The hermano, the compadre, the partner in mischief but not much else, whose lives drift in and out of each others orbits. She is normally spoken for, generally by wealthy young men called things like Toby or Marcus who wear their sunglasses on top of their heads. I, as I'm sure you've gathered by now, am rarely spoken for.

What does she mean by lunch? Is lunch a thing? I ponder the meaning of lunch as I shower and make myself, if not presentable, then at least slightly less hideous. A decent suit goes a long way at a time like this. The next surprise, when she turns up, is that she's driving.

“Not a liquid lunch, then?” I say and she gives me this disappointed look as if she’d expected better. I rather feel that I've fallen at the first hurdle.

"You're overdressed" she says.

"Not I" I reply, "everybody else is under-dressed." This is untrue, in her case at least. She is simply, but expensively, dressed and looks, what's the word I'm looking for? Glossy.

We head out of town a little way, to low slung, sprawling sort of country pub which looks vaguely familiar, though I have as much to do with the countryside as I do with learning Basque, so I’m confident I’ve not been here before. She says something about them doing a good roast, and I surprise myself by following this suggestion and ordering one from our friendly waitress who, it transpires, is called Belinda. Bit naff, the Sunday roast, I’ve always thought. A bit too redolent of well-fed chaps who refer to “the good lady wife” and call the barman “stout yeoman of the bar”, it’s always had a whiff of the golf club to it, for me, of the sort of people who care about lawns; or maybe that’s because on a Sunday I normally can’t bear to look at any food that isn’t a bacon sandwich until past seven pm, possibly some crisps if I’m particularly delicate.

So we sit there, she and I, eating our roasts , and I find myself starting to enjoy the experience. I'm not a connoisseur of the roast dinner by any means, but I'd hazard a guess that this is an exemplar of the form, moist pork, a cracking bit of crackling, crisp, golden potatoes, veg which hasn't been boiled into submission and, best of all, the sort of gravy which speaks of a monomaniac in charge of the stock-pot, not the floury effluvial cack I'd been fearing.

It is.…normal, it's normal. This, I realise, is what people do. They come out to acceptable country pubs and eat acceptable foods in rooms painted an acceptable shade of light green. I looked across at Rachel and she is smiling at me in an amused manner, inclining her glass of whatever vile mixed fruit thing it was towards me, a spear of asparagus impaled on the fork in her other hand. I clink my glass with hers, it's an acceptable Kiwi Pinot, since you ask. Reasonably priced, nothing life-changing.

“Nice this, isn’t it?” She says, and it is. It's nice.

I am instantly seized with horror. This is too suburban for words. This, my friends, will not end well. I see myself strolling around, surveying my lawn, nodding approvingly. I see myself taking regular exercise. I see myself shopping for furniture. One doesn't shop for furniture. Furniture just sort of happens. But she's still smiling and in that smile I see my doom, my utter annihilation, the ablation of my soul, the strata of the self ripped away by the unstoppable tide of the future. She's still smiling and in that smile I think I can perceive absolute damnation. She knows. She's reading my thoughts. The fix is in.

The fix is in. She is reading my thoughts, because her smile is widening, it's the smile of one who knows that they are the only one in on the joke. It's angelic and it's diabolical. She stands, and makes for the Ladies, pausing only to lean down and murmur into my ear.

"It's just lunch, Matt, get over yourself."