The Flavours of Love Read Online Free Page B

probably learnt it from him – or maybe it’s a genetic thing, something they were both predisposed to.
    ‘Have you told the father?’ I ask.
    She shakes her head, staring at that piece of gnocchi as it continues its round-plate journey. I stare at it, too, a plump, creamy oval of potato and wheat flour and milk solids and all the other things the manufacturers add. Joel made gnocchi once. He’d used egg, though, and cream, I think. Or was it parmesan? Or was it both? He never made it again, because the effort-to-gain ratio was all wrong for him. Every week, whenever Joel made pesto, Phoebe and Zane would try to convince him that he wanted to make gnocchi, too. That nothing would be better. He held firm, though, unmoved by their appeals to his better nature.
    ‘Is he your boyfriend?’ I ask Phoebe, snapping myself back to the present. I keep falling through those potholes in time, finding myself back there, with him, with them, with us, how we used to be. This isn’t the moment for that, though. I need to stay focused, I need to stay now .
    Phoebe pauses, then nods once. Stops. Shakes her head four times.Nods five times. Then ‘shrug’. The ubiquitous shrug. I could scream the house down because of those shrugs.
    ‘Are you in love with him?’ I ask. I need to know what this pregnancy means to her. I need to know if she is thinking of this as something that will become her love child, something she possibly did on purpose so she could bind herself to this boy without a name or if it was a huge mistake that she is horrified as well as terrified by.
    Phoebe doesn’t reply, or even look at me, because we both know that is a stupid question. Fourteen-year-olds are always in love. They are made up of the fizzy, popping, spinning feeling of falling in love. Love is something that happens for them with every in and out breath.
    I want to tell her that this isn’t ‘love’. That ‘love’ doesn’t stay the same, it changes like we do, it is shaped by our experiences, by what we do, who we meet, what we learn. I’d like to explain that falling in love now is not how it’ll be for ever, and even if you stay with the same boy for the rest of your life, this incarnation of love won’t stay the same, it never does.
    Apparently, in relation to the teenager in front of me, it’s a stupid question for different reasons: ‘Everyone hooks up, Mum,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean love or anything like that.’
    ‘What do you mean “hooks up”?’ I reply. I’m not thick, I simply need to clarify that I’ve understood her properly.
    ‘You know, hooks up .’
    I really don’t. Or, rather, I don’t want to . ‘So you’re pregnant as a result of “hooking up”?’
    She says nothing because her food is suddenly very interesting, and it’s absolutely necessary to put two pieces of gnocchi into her mouth at once and chew very slowly, rendering her incapable of speech.
    I lower my head to my food, too, and we eat in silence. After five minutes I look up at her. Her childish afro-puff pigtails, her grey, turquoise-trimmed school uniform, her friendship bracelet on her left wrist that is studded with pink, clear plastic butterflies. Hooking up? This girl in front of me has been hooking up?
    ‘You’re fourteen,’ I remind her. ‘Who “hooks up” at fourteen?’
    I can’t see her abdomen, the place where the answer to my question is growing, because of the wood of our table. Who hooks up? Everyone ‘hooks up’ apparently.
    5 months before That Day (May, 2011)
    ‘For the love of … Why are you doing this to me, Joel? What Earthly reason could you have for trying to scrape away the inside of my head like this?’
    ‘I’m only making porridge,’ he laughed. His laughs always filled the room like the divine scent of freshly baked bread, slipped through me like syrup to remind me of all the good things in my world.
    ‘No, you are making porridge in a metal saucepan with a metal