Whelks
It’s been a while since I had a man for dinner.
I’ll let that sink in: the possibilities hidden in the humble verb had (modal? past perfective? active? passive aggressive?); the vagueness of the qualitative a while; the ambiguity of the preposition for. It’s too soon to read between the lines, so I’ll just carry on with my story.
It has been some time since I had a man for dinner, and I find I have an appetite for cockles. They are in short supply at the fishmongers, but I am eyeing the terrine in my boudoir, the one in which I keep my whelks. My terrine is in rude health. Two dozen slow-moving youngsters nosing about the empty egg cases I have yet to clear out. I like to leave the nursery an untidy simulacrum of the wild.
My own environment, on the other hand, I have given a full terrestrial bougiefication. I re-decorated in muted beige and gray and invested in candles and cantilever lamps (no phosphorescent nonsense in my quarters, which incidentally, is called a loft). In my kitchen is a full set of Le Creuset and a machine that makes coffee from pods. (Not egg pods — I did try that once and it was unsuccessful.) My bed is a bit of a throw-back, but some dates have embraced it with enthusiasm — others with nostalgia. I put a lava-lamp bedside that, coincidentally, I find helps the occasional disorientation I sometimes feel on waking to a summer squall.
My own appearances, too, have seen a real upgrade! I regularly exfoliate and I have taken up a gym membership to re-align my natural curves to a more homo-aesthetic physique. I am a picture of assimilation in progress!
I feel it is working. The suitors are taking notice. Wide-eyed and blustering, I see them catch their breath. Before long they are rubbing their hands along my spirals, sucking a bit too hard on my soft bits. The problem is, they tend to leave before I, myself, am sated. And very few of them call the next day.
But I have been dating this bloke Dan now for two weeks. Well, ‘talking to’ him, as they say on the apps. He was one of the first guys to respond to my new profile pic, and I sort of threw caution to the winds. I had had to delete my old photo — a majestic, confident creature with toned alabaster arms and flowing alabaster hair and perky alabaster nipples — because some lawyered-up whiskey company threatened to sue for intellectual property infringement. I argued that there was nothing mellow or smooth about the image I was attempting to project but the cease and dismiss letters were cluttering up my inbox and, if I’m honest, the profile pic was drawing the wrong sort anyway — the vast majority of men who responded to it were either a) drunkards or b) not men at all. Pretty sure it was the Cutty Sark Nan (she’s a witch, mind you, that alabaster figurehead) that Van Der Decken, that waste of desiccated flesh, responded to. Enough said about him the better except to repeat: it has been some time since I’ve had a man for dinner.
So, Dan. He gave my new profile Irene de la Mer: put me in your pocket and take me home five bubbles straight off and commented: “did I pass you at high-tide in my dreams?”
Clever, no? I feel that Dan really gets me. Or, he gets the one-with-nature-vibe that this new avatar (which is, indeed, a portrait/still life made of sea detritus that I stole from Instagram, but I think it’s safe to assume it has long been washed away and will not plague me with copyright infringement) conveys. In this new pic, my hair is a fetching tangle of seaweed, my eyebrows are fire (feathers actually-slightly mismatched with a hint of unhinged fun), my mouth a cute little opalescent half-shell that mewls with ingenue innocence. Irene de la Mer is less Rule Britannia and more Craft like you mean it. Not as forward as my 2016 profile (Renie on tap: Fuck me good and I take your ass to Red Lobster) but still quite direct — gazing straight at you with intriguingly pupil-less eyes.
This is the Irene Dan has been ‘chatting with’ for two weeks until Irene, put me in your pocket and take me home, got tired of waiting and invited Dan to her home. He is going to be here in a few hours. I am preparing a meal that I hope will compensate for any disappointment that my profile pic is a portrait of my inner self only. That I have neither pupils nor eyes. A seafood dinner, of course. A feast to warm his cockles.
Cockles. See what I did there? They’re real, of course. Mollusks just like us. As far as I know Dan, who is from East Anglia, is a real live full-blooded male with a penchant for sea creatures. Just like I am a sea creature from London with a taste for testicles. As far as I know, Dan doesn’t have any real cockles. But it’s been an inside joke ever since Francine, who is studying marine biology explained to the other girls about whelk insemination — about the acid foot and the proboscis and all that. They all squealed with delight and the dumb jokes came fast and furious — horny mussels, rapey winkles, etc. Cockle jokes too. Francine doesn’t know a cockle from a cochlae cordis. Even my mother, who is to this day floating out in the channel somewhere, used to say the key to a man’s cochlae cordis has nothing to do with his acid foot.
What are you looking for? Dan had asked when I mentioned (sad face, green face) that I had been disappointed in love. I had immediately written testicles before I caught myself. Strong hands, I tried again. I deleted that too and typed, very slowly: someone to warm my cockles (winky face). I thought it over. Cute? Flirty? Wholesome — ish? I hit send. Disingenuous, I know. I have no cockles at all — neither Francine’s sort nor the cardiac sort. But I swear to God, he came back with:
them! With mustard!
So here we are. 7pm. I’ve strewn samphire across the credenza and tossed olives about as an homage to the shingle beaches of our shared childhoods. The sea bream is in the oven. The mousse is in the frig. But the cockles? My bet is, Dan also does not know a cockle from a whelk. A snail is a snail for most blokes. They don’t, most of them, know that cockles are carnivorous. They don’t know about the radula proboscis and the drill-foot. They don’t know whelks are the soviet assassins of the seabed.
The buzzer rings — last minute check in the mirror — my skirt is smooth, no need for an iron, my nails are polished like sea-glass (my best asset IRL. And here he is at the door, a bottle of bubbles in hand! I don’t note the vintage, I’m too busy inspecting the hand. It is a hand. Not a claw. We’re off to a good start.
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When we have polished off a glass each, he plucks an olive pit from his pearly whites. He smiles, sheepish, and says my profile pic doesn’t do me justice.
“I know,” I cackle, “I am three dimensional!”
He looks puzzled. Did I say cackle? Did I say cockle? He busies himself with the salad bowl, while I debone the fish. It’s grown dark outside, and we are dimly reflected in the window, silhouetted by all the candlelight. It’s homey, our heads bent close. His features are muted in the glass; mine are always muted. But better to have no face than no body, am I right? He looks puzzled again. I must have said it out loud, so I go for broke: “Especially this body!” I do a sexy twerk of my twists and dangle the fisheye suggestively, like a cherry.
We’ve polished off the bottle and I can feel Dan do all these contradictory things: loosening, fixating, softening and hardening. I pour a slug of amaretto into his coffee.
“So, what is it You are looking for, Dan,” I say coquettishly. “Is it fame and fortune? Friends and fun?” A line from a bad movie, but we’re kicking it, me and Dan. I figure he will chuckle and reach for the amaretto.
Instead, Dan from East Anglia surprises me.
He leans forward, puts his hand on my mantle skirt, and says, “I would like to have children, actually.”
Holy chicken of the sea!
My tentacles are vibrating and my hypobranchal gland nearly goes into a spasm. I’m dumbfounded, speechless. He wants children!
I see him flush. He pulls his hand back and stammers: “Oh gosh. Was that too… I just meant … I mean not if you… I’m sorry. Do you… do you want to have children?”
I think, Do I? Of course I don’t want to have children, but I have them all the damn time.
And then I think, that disingenuous little tart of a verb — to have.
“Can I answer that in two shakes?” I ask as I grab the pepper grinder and dash to the kitchen. In a frenzy I line up condiments — moutarde, poivre, hot sauce in my bag left over from my 2016 Renie on tap days. I fill a pot, salt it well, and turn the flame on high. I hustle to my bedroom and gather my children, all thirty-nine of them. By the time I have ferried them to the kitchen the water is boiling, and their fate is sealed.
“I’ll be with you in a minute,” I holler with my mewling opal mouth. “I swear it will be worth the wait!”
And now I am back at the table, plucking snails from their shells with my teflon-tough-as nails polished radula and dropping them into the hot-as-Beyonce marinade. “Yes, Dan,” I say. “I do want to have children. The mousse can wait.”
He smiles, spears a whelk on his fork and extends it towards me. I imagine the warmth of his cockles as I lick the sauce. I am all these contradictory things: hot and bothered, cool and collected, having children and having a man.
In the kitchen, my children’s empty shells are turning alabaster white.
