Little Helper

  Yvette knows how she wants this to look. The table, the food, the accoutrements – candles, napkins, some kind of flourish of colour (Green. Herbs in antique Mason jars, she thinks) – will all come together to form an environment of subtle nuances. If the date doesn't work out at least she knows she has created something, as ephemeral as it is, that itself has been lavished with care and attention.

He doesn't eat meat, so she has discovered, which although not a shock has made her revise her plans and think a little harder about the courses, how they'll be individual meals but also form part of the flavour journey which Yvette is very good at evoking, or so she's been told.

The soup will be a gazpacho. Yvette has heard stories, maybe true, of people sending back the soup – gazpacho - because it was cold. She isn't sure how this will go, but hopes that inner-city types will have at least heard of a gazpacho. The weather has been hot, today being no exception, so something cold and slightly mint flavoured is what she has in mind. Perhaps, she thinks, it could be thought of as a cool drink but served in a bowl and consumed with a spoon. Yes, that will work.

Then, asparagus, lightly sauteed and dressed and placed on a bed, or nest, of egg pasta, cold also. The dressing slightly tart to enliven the salt; some roasted pine nuts as a final flourish.

Scalloped potatoes perhaps for the main course. Rich and creamy, peaks of crisped melted cheese forming a thick sea of parched waves, lashings of garlic, and a dash of nutmeg to be discerned by those with a sensitive palate.

Dessert: definitely carrot cake, moist, and nutty from the walnuts hidden within, a lush cream-cheese frosting that melts at the slightest hint of human proximity. Eaten with forks; spoons are for children.

Yvette devises a shopping list, pops two sedative capsules on her tongue, swallows and makes her way through the foyer of the building, feeling her heartbeat slacken, less fitful as the chemicals disperse into her bloodstream. Outside, the fingers of the glaring sun try to prise their way behind her sunglasses. A blast of stifling wind pulls at her curls and makes her think of her time in the tropics when she lived onboard the little sulking yacht that belonged to a man, a man from the middle-east who had a wife and child and an ability to compartment his life expertly.

She gets the jars and standard things from the supermarket. Yvette hates supermarkets. She goes there first to get it over and done with. She isn't sure why she feels this way but it has always been with her, from the first time when she moved out from her parent's house and had to shop, discovering an unnecessarily vast and bewildering array of items that seem to be in no particular order, everything placed far away from each other so that the walk alone is a drag, let alone finding some tiny jar of something that keeps getting moved around as if part of a power ploy.

Yvette has to brace herself just to get her items and to a checkout, all the time being bombarded with the supermarket's own 'radio station' over the speakers and shrill calls for staff and supervisor assistance, which rides roughshod over everything. She escapes once again, thinking of it akin to being trapped in a huge Tupperware container designed to assault the senses, aware that in less than a week she will need to return.

At the old market, things are much nicer. Yvette relaxes. She scrutinises the vegetables carefully, finding that the carrots are best at Chin's grocery but choosing to get the potatoes and asparagus at Carinelli's. She chats to the proprietor, not realising that he is unrelated to the Carinelli's but bought the business off them seventeen years ago when he emigrated from Lombardi, taking on a huge risk that stretched him to almost breaking point. Today he smiles like a contented Cheshire cat.

Walking back through the market Yvette spies a nice fur-collared coat at a clothing stall; maybe something for when the weather turns cold again. She stops to look up at the coat, swaying slightly. It's up high and a tiny Asian lady who has spotted her standing there comes with a pole from her plastic draped nook and expertly unhooks the coat. Yvette tries speaking to her which catches the lady off guard, she grins but says little. The lady has a lapse in concentration and the coat catches on other garments and falls on Yvette. Darkness envelops her for a moment, her hands are full and she is unable to free herself; the faux-fur smells like glue. Panic rises unreasonably, she struggles. A moment later she hears the pole clatter to the ground and light re-enters her life, the earth rights itself and she is back at the clothing stall. The little lady does her best at 'sorry'. As she walks away Yvette has the sensation that someone was near and grabbed at her while she was smothered in darkness. She tries to re-run the event, concentrate on different parts of her body while the coat had cloaked her, but the details don't reveal themselves.

Maybe it's time to give the sedatives up, she thinks while she walks, bags beginning to make her forearms ache. Yvette knows that a proportion of the adult population is addicted to prescription drugs, simple things that represent the scattergun approach of medicines of the past, and equally scattergun doctors' prescriptions. Is that me, she wonders? Can I give up my two-capsule-a-day 'helpers'? How long has it been now? A year and a half?

She stops and puts the bags down, careful not to clink the jars together so hard that they break. She is in front of a framing studio, prints and portraits in various degrees of preparation, or already displaying their newly defined boundaries. She looks at her reflection in the plate glass - plain but handsome face, long neck, head cocked slightly to one side - and concentrates on the question she asked herself: How long has it been? Yvette tallies up the months. No, she realises .... in fact it's more than eighteen months. It's more like, let's see, March, April, May, June, July... Twenty-three months.

Was it my manipulating mother? Other people I know have mothers like that, perhaps they're quietly on sedatives as well. Maybe it was my old job. It was a claustrophobic environment, true enough. I don't miss those long days staking out a home address, cooped up in nondescript four door sedans, waiting to see if the resident who'd claimed insurance really was an invalid due to a work injury.

Yvette realises that although not talking, she is mouthing the words which form in her head, out in the street in front of the framing shop. Nobody has seen her but she feels a flush: she has seen herself in her mind's eye. She looks down to lift the shopping bags and thinks about cooking the romantic dinner - gazpacho, asparagus, potato au gratin, carrot cake - for the couple who booked through her website. This will make their date memorable; if not for them, then at least for me. I wonder what they look like, she ponders. Her gaze falls on some pet portraits. One of them is a wedding photo, stylised but elegant, only with dogs instead of humans, the bride looking directly at the camera; the groom gazing at the bride. Or maybe it's the other way around.