He paused, as if waiting for Mabel to have a heart attack. “Where was I? I was saying how happy I was to have discovered my darling daughter. See, I’ve made her laugh, and what man can want more than that? Yesterday I thought there was no romance left in my life. It was one of those increasingly rare moments when I imagined I was dying, either by cancer or my own hand — which is much the same thing. Fact is, I fall in love every few days, usually with a young woman passing along the street. I see her for only a few seconds, and sometimes she’s even older than Mabel, but I can be won over by a beautiful face.”
“You eternally randy bastard,” I broke in, seeing how Sophie was enjoying his spiel so much that he would go on forever if not stopped. But my remark had no effect.
“How can I live like that, when Mabel leaves me every full moon? She always comes back though, bless her, and sits in her room for a day playing the ‘Dead March’ from Saul, until she can bear to look at me again. She’s really a man in disguise, but she’s got a nice solid bosom, and loves other men. Maybe she had a transplant before birth, then set out to get me. If I hadn’t had all kinds of women I would begin to doubt the pleasure principle.”
Mabel fell with a great rumble onto the carpet.
“She might have had the decency to cook our lunch first,” Blaskin scowled.
“Poor woman.” Sophie joined me in getting her into the bedroom, though no sooner had we laid her down than she snapped free and ran for the toilet.
“Serve her right for getting mixed up with a writer,” Blaskin said, who would have fallen too, except that he lowered himself in time onto the settee. “What a wedding breakfast for me and my new found daughter. Can you cook, my love?”
“I’ve been known to,” Sophie said, “if there are pizzas in the freezer, and a dozen eggs. Otherwise I can’t boil water without burning it. My husband was glad to see the back of me because I’m no good in the kitchen.”
“Come and live here, then,” Blaskin slobbered.
“Oh no, I have a perfectly good house in Golders Green.”
He lay back, and closed his eyes. Sophie in the kitchen pulled a pack of lamb chops and some eggs from the fridge. “It’s marvellous, having you for a sister,” I said.
She was in my arms, breasts pressing against me, soft and hot, her lips warm on mine. “Oh, Michael darling, I’ve done nothing since I last saw you except think about us being on that train, and now that you’re my brother I want to go to bed with you more than ever.”
My knee was between her thighs. “Sweetheart, I can’t wait. We’re only half brother and sister, after all.”
“If we were full brother and sister,” she murmured, “it would blow the top of my head off. I’d never stop coming. Oh I love you. Don’t ever give me up.”
About to explode in a cloud of sperm, I eased her away. “We should sell the situation as an aphrodisiac, print false birth certificates to prove people are brother and sister. The birth rate would go up no end. We’ll call our firm Incest Incorporated.”
“You always have such good ideas.” Stopped in mid laugh, her eyes glazed as if she was about to die, then she also rushed for the bathroom, to be spectacularly sick. After what she’d drunk I was not surprised. I had taken care to put back less than anybody else, and now that hunger gnawed I didn’t expect to follow her.
Eggs went into an omelette pan, and chops laid under the grill. Slicing cucumber caused me to salivate, and I salted and quartered a tomato to put into my mouth. Blaskin was snoring like an engine on a Rolls Royce testbed, Mabel lay in an alabaster pose as if she would never get up again, and Sophie sat on the lidded toilet waiting for the next attack. A stint of cooking I was more than willing to do.
I’d picked up the notion from my mother that food would cure everything. If you had a gut ache she would say, eat. Likewise if you were dizzy. Belly pains needed something to grind on, otherwise you were letting yourself in for a more intense bout later. If you couldn’t stop coughing, eat. The tickles in your throat would go away. You had diarrhea? Eat. Constipation? Think nothing of it. Eat, because you’d need the padding soon enough. Illness of any sort could only be due to a lack of fodder.
So we must scoff plenty to soak up the alcohol, and make recovery certain. I stripped fat from a chop and reinforced more tomato with a slice of rye bread, feeling better by the time Sophie stood pale faced in the doorway: “I think I’m all right at last.”
I took in now that she must indeed be my sister, no longer hoped it was a dream, and gave her a glass of water. Pointing to a stain of sick on her blouse, I passed a paper towel. I’d do it for anybody, but how was she to know? Best not to tell her. “What a caring brother,” she smiled, as if we should start living together.
“Set the table next door. We’ll be eating soon.”
She picked up a bundle of knives and forks. “We’ll meet often, won’t we?”
“I’ll never be able to leave you alone.” Always say what a woman wants to hear, because she invariably needs the consolation, though I couldn’t help thinking that Sophie already had everything.
“Kiss me, then.”
I did, hands around her backside, but she couldn’t do anything with her hands full of cutlery. She broke away to lay the table, came back for plates. “They’re in the stove getting warm,” I told her.
“You think of everything. How did you learn to cook?”
“I watched my mother,” though I couldn’t remember. I had catered for Bridget while she was in the signal box giving birth. I’ll never know why she insisted on having her babies there, only that Almanack Jack and I had a right struggle getting a double bed up the wooden steps. I flipped the omelette. “There’s nothing to it but common sense.”
“My husband’s a real chauvinist pig. He doesn’t even come into the kitchen.”
“Can you blame him? I’d like to be one except it just isn’t in me. I suppose you’d be a female chauvinist sow if you could get away with it. I’d expect no less from a sister of mine.” When I pulled her to me she put a hand between my legs, only stopped undoing my buttons on seeing Mabel’s face of sour disapproval in the doorway. She had been about to witness a real live Rocky Horror incest sex show on the floor of her pristine scrubbed kitchen, and I could only smile. “See if you can bring Gilbert round,” I told her, “because we’ll be eating any minute. Take this platter with you, and these napkins.”
She came back. “I won’t put up with it. It’s downright wicked, what you were about to do. I saw you. I saw you.”