The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke, Jamie Bulloch

for good. It was very hard for my mother to see her own ideals of harmony and human kindness fall apart; there’s a big difference between silently admiring and worshipping Medea while reading
Effi Briest
, and saying it out loud; and now she had said it. Everything had fallen apart for my mother that evening because my father hadn’t come home at six, as expected, and because at a quarter to ten the mussels were still in their bowl and we’d drunk
Spätlese
and hadn’t switched on the news, which wasn’t normal in our family; it was a quarter to ten when we looked at the clock.
    All that time we hadn’t looked at the clock. But when the telephone rang, the three of us looked at the clock as if by command; we felt panic and in our panic could think of nothing else, and so the first thing we did was to look at the clock, and it read a quarter to ten. Our hearts stopped, for the telephone scythed into our wickedness like God’s retribution; it was the sort of telephone ring which made us think, oh, the Day of Judgement begins at a quarter to ten, we didn’t know that. The ringing heralded the end of the world, at precisely the same time that everything had fallen apart for my mother, because she’d confessed that, like Medea, she’d wanted to poison us all, a thought she’d at least not had to lose much sleep over, because she never imagined she’d ever betray her fantasy, and the telephone would have to ring at that very moment, we thought. We were petrified, each of us gazed at the others’ petrified faces, each one of us saw the others’ bulging eyes, our faces were ashen, and once we were aware that the Day of Judgement had begun at a quarter to ten, we were aware of nothing else; we just continued staring at each other. With the telephone refusing to stop ringing I looked down at my hands and noticed that I’d chewed my nails over the fingertips to the raw skin; my chewed fingernails had red, bloody edges; when I couldn’t look at the red edges any more I balled my chewed fingernails inside my fist and gazed over at my mother. My mother hadn’t noticed the nail-chewing that evening, her fingernails were painted a mother-of-pearl pink and looked very pretty and groomed; she had lacquered them that day. When my father was away on business my mother didn’t have painted nails; the paint flakes off when you do the housework, she said, and she found it a bore to paint her nails every other day. Besides, my mother didn’t think you needed painted nails to look beautiful, even though my father spoke highly of his secretary’s fingernails, painted ox-blood red, he raved about them; take a leaf out of her book, he told my mother; it’s easy for you to say, my mother replied, when your secretary comes home in the evening she’s got all the time in the world to look after herself, because your secretary is young, single and childless, and so has time to groom herself and dye her hair blonde; but then my mother did paint her nails, she painted them mother-of-pearl pink rather than ox-blood red, but hers were hands that were worn from work, and if she’d chosen ox-blood red it would have been more noticeable that my mother’s hands were worn from work. I looked at my brother while the telephone continued ringing, my brother noticed me looking at his hands and at once balled them into a fist so that I couldn’t see the bloody edges on all ten fingers. Now I broke into a sweat; I no longer knew where to look. Amidst the ringing of the Day of Judgement my brother said hoarsely, maybe it’s someone else, but no one felt the need to answer, it was just an attempt; the telephone went on ringing. And then Mum stood up. I thought, she’s going to fall over; swaying, she took a few steps towards the telephone; she swayed so slowly towards the telephone that I thought, maybe she wants to give it one last chance to stop before she gets there; nobody counted but it must have rung twenty times, and none of us believed that