Read by Jo Widdowson
If she doesn’t find the right cheese, her marriage will be over.
Claire is on a pilgrimage, a shopping trip to win back her husband with a taste that will prove to him that she loves him and persuade him to stay. It is twenty-seven years since she last slept alone, and she has no idea what colour she would decorate her bedroom, or whether she would sleep with the light on.
Claire is tired from a sleepless night. She usually buys her cheese from a supermarket, but this is different, this is important, and she tries to remember his description clearly. She hopes that the person in the cheese shop is used to this sort of request, because it is her only hope. Nutty, he definitely said nutty, and firm without being rubbery, and she remembers that he was very keen on the colour. It would make a good TV game show, she thinks, possibly with the husbands dressed as mice and the wives who want them back dressed as cats and carrying cheese boards. Maybe she will tell Owen that later, if things turn out ok, and maybe they will laugh about it together.
She looks in the 99p shop window as she passes to see if anything is the particular yellow he described, the yellow that reminds him of early crocuses in Scotland. The window is a mass of loud colours and metallic labels and Claire is relieved not to catch even a flash of primrose. It’s a rarer colour, she thinks, he will be impressed that she managed to find it.
If you would like to read the rest of this story, please check out Lovers' Lies, the Arachne Press anthology in which it, and many other sexy and lovable stories from the League archives, appears.
Claire moves on, focusing on her task, trying to obscure Owen’s words with a wedge of cheese big enough to fill the doorway he stood in last night.
‘You don’t even know me, Claire,’ he says, over and over on a loop.
I do, she wanted to shout, I know everything about you. I know that you cried when your first boss died, and that your favourite names are Alistair and Lucy. I know that you get vertigo just looking at tall buildings. She could tell from the way he held his mouth that he would not hear her, and that it would take more than words to steer him. It would take cheese.
‘The right cheese,’ she says as she marches along a winter street in search of a dairy miracle.
The van outside the shop says ‘Monsieur Fromage’ in the same lettering as the sign above the door – fat yellow letters like tulips on a background the blue of the night sky. The door is heavy and inviting, and Claire pushes it open with a surge of hope. The cheese will be here, and everything will be as it was.
The cheese shop is small and dark, and Claire feels the weight shift from her shoulders. She is surrounded by cheese, lit gently under a glass counter on three sides of the shop like an exhibition of small nocturnal animals she saw once at the zoo. Claire remembers this so clearly she is surprised not to see eyes blinking from the slabs.
Claire remembers asking Owen if they could adopt a child. She thinks it was at the zoo, because she remembers the famous lecture on blood and genetics that he had delivered by the ice cream stand. She had tried to listen, but she couldn’t help watching two little girls, twins she supposed, in matching summer dresses. They had just been to see the penguins and they were trying to waddle, arms against their sides and hands held out like flippers. Everyone stopped to smile at them but Claire wanted to cry.
She is thinking so hard that she doesn’t see the man come from the back of the shop until he is standing right behind the counter, one massive hand on the glass top as if he is the father of the cheese.
‘They’re beautiful, aren’t they,’ he says in an accent Claire recognises as Northern Irish. The laughter of the children at the zoo fades away and she looks at him. He is a giant, at least a foot taller than her and a foot or two wider as well. He has almost no hair on his head, as if it had packed its bags and moved to more fertile lands on his chin.
‘There are so many different ones,’ says Claire, and then wishes that she had thought of something much more interesting say.
‘I’m Fisher,’ he says, and slices off the tiniest sliver of a pale cheese with blue speckles like exotic decorations. He cuts it in half and hands her one piece, putting the other in his huge mouth. Claire copies him and puts it on her tongue without even thinking about whether he has washed his hands. The taste is a noise in her head and she remembers that she hasn’t eaten since yesterday’s breakfast.
‘You look like you need to sit down,’ says Fisher, appearing from behind the cheese with a chair, ‘that cheese can tire you out. It’s from Australia.’
‘I’m not sure if I have ever had Australian cheese before,’ says Claire.
‘It’s a bit of a secret of mine,’ he says, ‘they’re loud, the cheeses, but you certainly can’t ignore them. There’s something different going on over there.’
Claire wonders what to say. The noise in her mouth has died down, leaving behind a quiet that makes her think of bedtime in a country cottage with wind whistling round the windows.
‘I need to find a cheese,’ she says.
‘Of course you do.’ Fisher looks at her with such kindness that she thinks that she might cry.
‘We were on holiday, years ago,’ she says, grating each word out when all she wants to do is lie down. Fisher’s huge belly is level with her eyes as she sits in the chair he brought her and she imagines how restful it would be to put her head on it.
‘Sssh,’ Fisher puts his finger to his lips and looks at her with his head on one side as if something important depends on what he decides. The shop becomes very still, and Claire wonders whether it would be inappropriate to slip off her shoes and tuck her feet up underneath her.
‘Yes,’ Fisher shouts and punches the air.
‘I know the cheese you need,’ he says, ‘I know it, it’s as clear as the hair on your pretty wee head.’
He pats her head with such a light touch she can hardly feel it.
‘Tell me three things about the holiday, so that I can be sure I am right. Don’t give away too much now,’ he says and he does a little victory dance around her, moving lightly on his toes like a boxer.
Claire thinks, and immediately she is back there. August 1999 in the apartment overlooking the harbour at St Ives. Claire can almost hear the waves now as she sits in the cheese shop in South London.
‘Seagulls,’ she says, ‘there were always seagulls shouting and screaming and waiting to see if anyone dropped any food.’
Fisher claps, looking smug.
‘Two more,’ he says.
Claire wants to tell him about the gallery on the beach, the gallery where the windows and the light outshone anything on canvas but she doesn’t want to make it too easy for him. She doesn’t want him to be a quack or a cheesy conman, she needs the real thing. And if she is truthful, the gallery is a bad old memory anyway. Owen laughed at her, called her pretentious and refused to come inside. Something else happened in the gallery, but Claire doesn’t want to think about that now.
‘I ate the most amazing fish,’ she says, and Fisher stops dancing. He goes back behind the counter, spreads something on a tiny cracker and moves forward to place it in Claire’s hand.
‘There,’ he says, as if they had been arguing and the cracker was the winning point, ‘you don’t need to eat fish when you could have Snowdonia soft cheese and plum chutney wafers. Fish should swim in the sea,’ and his arms make swimming gestures.
Claire feels ashamed of all the fish that have swum through her instead of in the ocean. Maybe it is possible to live on cheese this good, she thinks.
‘Number three?’ says Fisher, looking excited again, ‘something you saw maybe?’
Claire is back in the gallery, surrounded by mums and dads explaining the paintings to their children, self-conscious and proud to be spending part of their summer in such a cultural way. The children, as far as Claire could see, would rather be on the beach. They had probably been bribed in here with the promise of an ice cream afterwards, or maybe a water pistol from the beach shop. Claire touched her tummy and smiled at a hugely pregnant woman. ‘Maybe this time,’ she thought, ‘maybe this time it’s worked,’ and she stared at a picture with red and black swirls as if something important might be hidden in there.
‘Come on,’ says Fisher, kneeling in front of her chair so that their faces are almost level, ‘tell me what you want to tell me.’
Claire remembers the toilets in the gallery, light pouring through high windows and children’s voices bouncing off the sinks and blood, red swirls of blood when she stood up.
‘It was the last time,’ she whispers now, ‘the last time I thought I was pregnant, the last time in my life.’
Fisher holds both of her hands in one of his, and strokes her hair.
‘I know,’ he says, ‘it’s so sad. I have no children either.’
‘I’m sorry,’ says Claire, ‘I only came in for some cheese. I need to find it, I’m not sure what to do,’ and she cries, all the tears she didn’t use the night before trickling down like a mountain thaw.
Fisher stands up, wincing as his knees unfold. He goes to the door and locks it, turning the sign around to ‘closed’. By the time Claire looks up from her sadness he has pulled up another chair next to her. In between them is a little table, set with a bottle of wine, two glasses and wedge of lemon coloured cheese wrapped in green leaves on a silver plate.
‘I think that this is it,’ he says, and pours them both a glass of wine like a darker shade of blood.
‘Cornish Yarg, wrapped in nettles to keep it fresh. You can eat the nettles.’
‘That’s it,’ says Claire, ‘I remember, Owen said that yarg was an ancient Cornish name. How on earth did you know?’ she asks.
Fisher laughs, a full, mature laugh that starts somewhere under his belly.
‘I’ve been in this cheese shop for a long time,’ he says, ‘and yarg is just the maker’s name backwards, Mr. Gray.’
He cuts a little piece off and hands it to her. Claire remembers Owen enthusing over it, talking about the real Cornwall.
Claire eats it now, while Fisher watches, and the taste triggers nothing. No explosion, no part of her brain wired to remember.
‘It’s a bit like Edam, only crumblier,’ she says and both of them laugh so much that they have to put the wine down.
Their hands brush and Claire looks up and sees a future in his eyes.
‘I don’t want to buy the cheese,’ she says.
Fisher leans over and touches her lips with one finger; a soft touch, but enough for Claire to taste something; something she hadn't known she was looking for.
(c) Rosalind Stopps, 2009
Rosalind Stopps writes fiction, mostly about people from the mean streets of South London, where she was born. She has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Lewisham bus routes and a particular fondness for cheese.
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