Slice of life

 “This isn’t working,” said Ernest.  He was sitting on the edge of the sofa with an old blanket over his knees staring avidly at his phone.  Outside winter had brought the darkness in already even though it wasn’t yet five o’clock and so the room was mostly illuminated by the light reflected off Ernest’s face.

“What’s not?” asked Barry, his flatmate.  Barry had just arrived home from work and was taking his coat off in the hallway, hanging on a peg, and then taking his shoes off to leave on the doormat.  Barry liked things neat and tidy at all times.

“This relationship,” said Ernest.  He sighed heavily and put the phone down.  “Turn the lights on, will you?  I can’t see anything in here.”

Barry came in to the living room and turned the lights on.  A single 100W bulb without a shade illuminated the room starkly.  The carpet was beige and stained; the coffee table was orange and sticky with something that wouldn’t scrub off; the couch looked like it had been used as a dog-bed for years.  The darkness had been better.

“With Jamela?” he asked.  “Or did you change her already?”

“Hey hey!” Ernest stood up, the blanket falling to the floor and revealing he wasn’t wearing trousers.  His pale, unmuscled legs looked flabby and dead in the light, and his underpants were wrinkled and worn.  “I’m not that bad!”

“You dated Shirley for three days before deciding she wasn’t good enough for you,” said Barry.  He was of the opinion, privately held, that everyone who’d dated Ernest that he knew about was too good for him.  He was saving money to move out and live by himself and nearly there, and there was nothing about Ernest that was making him regret this choice.  Ernest, as though to reinforce this, belched.

“She was a minger,” said Ernest, which was a reflexive reaction to anything that he didn’t like.  He paused, thinking about it.  “Well, she wasn’t that bad,” he conceded to himself.  “I sort of liked her, but she kept wanting to split the bill.”

“And you wanted her to pay all of it,” said Barry.  He left the living room and went into the kitchen.  The fridge was mostly full, so Ernest couldn’t have been up for too long so far today.  The left-over pasta from last night was there, in its pan, and Barry stirred it thoughtfully.  It would do.

“Well, I’m not working, am I?”  That was a familiar whine.  Barry took the pan of pasta out and poured a little milk into it.  Closing up the fridge he set the pan on the stove and turned the heat on.

“You stopped working last year,” said Barry.  “You said you’d had enough and you needed to find what you loved doing.”

“Yeah!”

“Which seems to be sitting around the flat all day mooching off your latest date from that app.”

“Yea— no!”

“And complaining that no-one wants to pay you to do that.”

“Whose side are you on anyway, mate?”  Ernest’s head appeared around the doorframe.  He sneered at the pan of pasta.  “I was going to have that.”

“Lucky I got here before you then,” said Barry.  He stirred the pan, mixing the milk in as the cheese sauce started to melt.  “It’s my pasta, you should eat your own food.”

“Everything in that fridge is yours.”

“True.  Doesn’t stop you though, does it?  Anyway, what’s wrong with Jamela then?  She seen through you already?”

“I don’t know what you bloody mean,” said Ernest morosely.  “Can we share the pasta, mate?”

“No,” said Barry.  “I’ve got a squash game at eight and I’m not messing around trying to keep you happy tonight.  Make your own food, or buy it, I don’t care.”

“Might get a pizza then,” said Ernest.  He disappeared, but a moment later his voice floated back through the doorway.  “You want pizza too, mate?”

“I’ve got pasta,” said Barry patiently.

“Oh yeah, I forgot.”

Barry stirred the pan again, which was starting to bubble now, and decided to make one last try on Jamela’s behalf.  “What’s wrong with Jamela then?”

“She’s not bloody here, is she?”

“So?”

“So I only dated her because I want someone to warm the bed,” said Ernest.  “Yeah, is that Malt Street pizza please?  I want to order a large pepperoni.”

“Warm the bed?” said Barry, half under his breath.  “What the hell?”

After a rancorous exchange with the pizza shop Ernest hung the phone up.  “Yeah, she’s fine and that, but really I was just cold and needed someone in the bed with me, but she’s acting like she’s entitled to see me now when she feels like it.”

Barry tipped the pasta out on to a plate.  “And that’s bad?”

“Yeah mate.  She’s not keeping the bed warm and she expects me to go out and see her.  In places.”

“You could just get a hot water bottle,” said Barry sighing to himself.  “That’ll keep the bed warm.”

“You got a tenner for the pizza, mate?”

“No,” said Barry with feeling.  “No I bloody haven’t.”

Jeshwald pizza

June sighed.  She looked at the counter-top: everything she needed to make a pizza was laid out in a neat arrangement, her mise-en-place was perfect.  But it was boring.  She hardly ever made pizza these days, because of the new edicts from the council.  To preserve authenticity, people were only allowed to make pizza with three hundred grams of cheese, distributed so that one quarter of the pizza was barely cheesy at all; two hundred grams of pre-cooked ground beef, and eight three-inch red chili peppers.  Anything else was a prosecutable offence, and even the girls at the supermarket were tasked with checking your ingredients and raising an alarm if they saw that you might have pizza making capabilities that put some other topping on.
"Authentic Jeshwald pizza!" was part of the council's tourism marketing strategy.  They'd obtained a protected status for the pizza, banning anyone else from making that exact pizza, and they sent out mystery shoppers to make sure that the ban was having an effect.  June had even been a mystery shopper for them when it had all started, excited and enthused that Jeshwald now had something definitively its own.  She gave it up after three weeks though, feeling bloated and tired from eating three pizzas a day.
Did she want to risk it?  Should she slip a couple of slices of pepperoni onto the pizza as well as the ground beef? Or even risk more by replacing the ground beef completely with pepperoni, and make a different pizza altogether.  A non-Jeshwald pizza.
She'd just convinced herself that she could do this, that she could be radical for once, break out on her own and make a non-Jeshwald pizza, when someone knocked at the front door.  She started, feeling herself flush, and realised that not being authentic with her pizza had bothered her more than she'd realised.  She scanned the counter, checking that she'd not actually got any pepperoni out, that there was nothing to give away that she'd considered being inauthentic.  Then she hurried to the door, aware that if she took too long it would look suspicious as well.
"June!"  June's heart sank, it was her neighboor Maureen.  Maureen had started the mystery shopper at the same time as June and had really got into it, checking out up to six restaurants a day now.  She had gained weight, naturally enough, and seemed to revel in it.  Her calves had merged into her ankles, and all her clothes had been replaced by muu-muus, which June tried hard not to think of as marquee tents.
"Maureen!  Come in, I was just making pizza," she said.  "Perhaps you'd like to stay and have some?  You could tell me how authentically I make them."
"Oh well," said Maureen, her little eyes lighting up.  "You know how I like a small slice of pizza!  Is it cooking already?"  She sniffed the air as she waddled through the front door, her dress rubbing against the door-frame.
"Oh no, I was just getting started," said June.  "Come in, come in to the kitchen.  How's work?"
"Oh you know," said Maureen easily, though she was already wheezing slightly.  "There's always more to do than you can get round to; I had eight restaurants to check out yesterday, and three of them didn't open for lunch.  And, can you believe it?  Two of them were serving Jeshwald pizza!  I've never had to call out the boys twice in one night before!"
"Were they calling it Jeshwald pizza?" asked June, picking up the rolling pin and eyeing up the pizza dough.
"Oh no, they never do," said Maureen.  Her eyes gleamed again.  "But you can tell from the ingredients list and the way they hide it at the bottom of the menu.  What are you doing?"
June paused, her rolling pin pressed into the dough.
"Rolling out the pizza dough," she said.
"Not like that!  Authentic Jeshwald pizza is rolled with two strokes north, then south, then east, then west, and then repeat."
"...what?"  June was poised to start rolling the dough away from her.
"North, South, East then West.  You're not facing north, dear.  You need to find out what way north is, and then you can start."
"When did we define how you roll the dough out?" asked June, wondering if she actually had a compass anywhere in the house.  It didn't seem like the kind of thing anyone but a keen hiker might own.
"A month ago," said Maureen.  "I'm on the standards council now, and we meet monthly to keep the standard up to date."
"Monthly updates?"  June stared helplessly at her mise-en-place, her reluctant enthusiasm for making Jeshwald pizza at a new ebb.
"Fortnightly soon," said Maureen.  "They're all published online you know, at the Jeshwald pizza standards page."
"Really?" said June, feeling weak.
"Oh yes, and as of next month it'll be mandatory for all residents of Jeshwald to make a Jeshwald pizza once a week.  We're considering renaming Wednesday to Pizzaday, which is both easier to say and spell."
"Oh," said June.  "Oh dear.  Have I told you that I'm thinking of moving house?"