The New Romantic

All she knows is that she has made a start, from the peel of the first diaphanous deep purple skin to the slicing of its hairy head, to the satisfying thunk on the chopping board. She has a slight headache and looks at the time. If that is the start, what is the end?

She has an hour. She has wine in the fridge. A bag of Doritos on the kitchen counter. She has all this and an empty house in Fulham and an American lover. Life is perfect as an apple. It should be, dammit.

Nan-see will not make what she’s always made for her mother. She’s not cooking for her. She opens the fridge and pours a glass of wine. When she sips it, she relaxes and reminds herself that this is a meal that is at once far less and more important than any she’s made. She is lost. Without her mother, she has no idea what to cook, what to look at when she opens the fridge, what aisles to push a trolley down in Sainsbury’s.

Her special guest is her internet lover. She has never met him. His name is Smith. She loves that across the Atlantic, using the surname as a first name is common, even decades ago. He is younger than her. Happier, more eligible, more attractive. She hates him for coming over to London. She never thought he would. The lockdown was a great excuse for her to put him off. She has told herself it is her only chance at real love. True love. The real shebang. The one and only. The one. Those are the cliches. We are all given chances at every turn. We throw them away. Not because we wanted to but because we didn’t know they were chances.

From the moment she woke up that Friday, she has been checking herself every hour in the full-length £34.99 IKEA mirror that her mother said was a waste of money. The day passes so slow when all you have to do is to look at the mirror and buy food.

She sees someone in mouse-coloured clothes. Who can possibly be interested in her? When her mother was at her illest, she could still find strength to say turn that YouTube racket off. What are you doing? Have you been on the phone for 2 hours? It was like Nan-see was a teenager again. Except that she was already a 45-year-old woman carer. Anybody ever noticed that the word parent was like patient? Sometimes she got mixed up herself to the amusement of the NHS staff.

She finds a tight red dress. It is from when she worked in the West End. Probably an office Christmas event. She looks like an alien wearing a chilli costume for a Tex Mex themed party. That will do. It still fits, because she is malnourished. If you have been eating nothing for a year, you’ll squeeze into anything like you’re a paste. She watches YouTube on her phone and follows the instructions on putting on makeup for a first date, pressing pause when she needs to. They say there is a YouTube for every situation, problem, scenario, age, application, question. There is no solution for makeup that is many years old. Flaked, caked and raked. It disintegrates at the slightest touch, like a sandcastle on a beach when she was a child with her parents when they made their annual trips back to Malaysia. She does not look like a beach now. She looks powdery and dusty. But made-up.

She had sent Smith app-filtered selfies. Sending photos is the only escape from the cage of care. She has sent him photos of her hair, heels, her breasts. Her vagina. Her full portrait. Even those have been filtered to look tanned, slim and the best. He had sent her photos of his chest, his erections, his ejaculations. All of life. Laid out like a documentary. Is she pretty? She has no idea. This is modern romance. Love is what you give, can give and will give. If that is not love, then she doesn’t know what is. Online, in real life, whatever. She had given everything to her mother, who had said Nan-see was pretty when she was 8. On her death bed, her mother had said to her, get some rest, you really look awful. It was true, she looked awful, she had no rest and she had spent five of her best years on her mother.

She cares what Smith thinks, since she had deceived yet not deceived him. Her selfies are figments of their combined imagination. Raw but filtered. What he wants to see. The camera does not lie but it is so much better these days. She is the total expert on photography and pornography. Could she put that on LinkedIn? She needs a job soon. She has inherited a pittance. Her mother had invested in schemes that were poor deals. She knew what men wanted almost as well as she knew what ageing terminal patients want.

Her mother’s illness has made a reticent chef of her. Medicinal soups, brews, herbal remedies. She dislikes cooking. The instant her mother was carried out, she stops cooking. She can live on salads, bread, wine, ham and cheese. Just like being a student, travelling through France, without a care in the world except where the next salad, bread, wine, ham and cheese is coming from. Occasionally she has treated herself to Chinese food but that only reminds her of her mother and how “rubbish” Chinese food here was.

Meeting someone online is the nearest you’d get to having an orgasm. There are only kind words exchanged. Who has the time to type up abusive language, full-on domestic rows about money and housework to press send?

Their relationship has been polite, fictional and literally distant since he was 3,300 miles away. Cutting an onion brought not only tears to her eyes but a new child-like fascination. People find this fun, and people do it for love. The hardness in her stare broke like a pencil. Why did she even suggest that she’d cook for him? A traditional Malaysian meal and all that? Because that was part of the filter.

She knows nothing about “food from back home” as her mother liked to say, for she was born in this country. Her mother’s illness had brought them closer yet the distance between them widened. No homemade food can make us last forever, said her mother finally. The doctors said about 2 years. She lasted 5.

Smith lives in New York. Caring for her mother has made it impossible for Nan-see to date anyone. Could you wait for lockdown to be over? became Could you wait for her…? to potential "dates". She did not complete the question and it seemed far less rhetorical without the verb. To die.

Since her mother departed a year ago, Phoebe has been spending time with her ghost, which is exactly the same as having her mother around, but without the hospital visits or any cooking. Nan-see has not been able to cook since. Nor has she gone into the Marie Celeste of her mother’s room. She enters it today. She cannot face all the bric-a-brac, keepsakes, letters, trinkets her mother had kept when she moved to this country from her native Malaysia. A jade bracelet, a handwritten collection of recipes in a large jotter in Chinese, a broken sandalwood comb. Even a Chinese calendar, from the year of her immigration, 1972. Year of the Rat. It was supposed to be a great year for change, because the Rat was the first animal of the twelve, the fastest, and was known for being able to work hard and save money in any new environment.

All the cooking she had done for her mother was only decoration. She knew that it was not her cooking but modern medicine and the NHS that could save her mother. And they couldn’t. The body cannot fight what the body cannot fight.

When she goes into her mother’s room that morning, it is only to retrieve the red dress. The room is also her store room for things she does not want to see. That red dress is one of those things. She wants to impress Smith. She sits on the bed for a long time, studying the dust that has settled, like a light grey film that a fairy has come in to spray on every surface. She does not touch the walking frame or the dressing table. When she opens the recipe book she finds that it is in Chinese. She cannot read Chinese as she was educated in a regular Fulham school with graffiti and weeds on the external expansive brick walls.

Nan-see was born in 1975, Year of the Rabbit. Like her sign, she is quiet and caring, though she does not know which comes first, being rabbity because she is quiet and caring, or being quiet and caring making her rabbity. Simply, it is her duty to care for her mother. Children are insurance, said her mother. You are here to call 999 for me when I can’t do it myself.

They waited through all the lockdowns.

She gave up her job in the last five years. That is when the only people she talked to were the NHS, her mother, and Smith. She looked at the oven timer. She sat the alarm. She would make steak. She wasted enough time. Easy peasy. Cheesy greasy. Her heart swelled with a thrill that someone had travelled 3,300 miles to see her, the mouse-covered suburbanite.

He arrives, wearing a backpack and casual clothes.

I chopped up the onions, she says. But I am all dressed. So let’s go out instead. I would prefer you to have English food in an English Pub. I want to take you to the White Horse in Parson’s Green. Can you walk?

It all comes out in one. Like she hasn’t spoken for years. She hasn’t.

At least he says yes, of course, that is a much better idea. They embrace. It is their first meeting after all, but it does not seem like it, since he has seen her in the nude. He studies her and she burns with shame that she looks dusty, flaky, covered in antique makeup. She squeezes her eyes shut, feels the pain of her mother’s voice, and the crusty mascara on her eyelids like tar on asphalt roofing. Look at you, her mother would have said. Are you really wearing that out?

Let me get my jacket. She goes to the back of the hall cupboard. But it is full of her mother’s coats and not hers, from all those hospital appointments they went to. She cannot believe she has left them hanging here, and reluctantly fishes out an unworn smart black one she bought for her mother before the final months.

They embrace again when she is wearing the coat. She wants to burst into tears but he kisses her on the cheek and forehead, maybe out of pity. She can sense that she is not what he thinks she is but then no one is who you think they are. She wants to push through with the evening. This must be how she has to act to “get over it” as the bereavement counsellor had once said, in a humorous slang slapped with a reality check.

At the pub, he pulls out of his backpack a framed photo.

What’s this, she says.

It's a photo showing the backs of a married couple on their wedding day in front of an altar. Their faces are turned to each other, in silhouette. It is in black and white and Nan-see could hardly tell how old it was. The bride is in a veil, full length, and has a good figure as all brides do with those corseted whale-boned bridal gowns designed to enhance any waistless figure. Nan-see has been a bridesmaid at a good friend’s wedding several years ago, and even then the dresses were structural. Flattering and steel-framed to the point of onerously misleading.

She does not have her glasses with her. Is it some vintage photo of his parents?

I am married, he says.

What? She whispers, not believing her ears.

I got married a month ago. I am only here for work as no one has been able to travel for more than half a year due to lockdown in London. I am here to see you. And I want to tell you in person.

She waits. She stares at him, sipping her wine. She shakes her head slowly, considering the news. He anticipates, nervous, in pieces. Incredulously, her face breaks into a wide grin. Her grey, dusty, makeup and thoughts fall off her like a shroud. She feels fresh, with tight skin, like an orange.

I want to celebrate with you, she says. Thank you for bringing the photograph.

It is the best thing that has happened to me in years, she thinks. But does not say it. She does not want to ruin that moment.

Waiter, another bottle. Make it the South African. Sparkling. Two flutes.