The Ascendant

Chapter Thirty-Five

Iain walked in to the kitchen, coughing and spluttering as he came.

‘Jeez, Ben,’ he said. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’

‘I don’t fucking know. I was putting another layer of gunk into the baking tray and the cheese sauce must have overflowed, and now there’s bastarding smoke everywhere. It’s like running air traffic control in here; I thought I had it all worked out and then BOOM! I’ve got a fucking mid-air collision! It’s a fucking nightmare!’

‘It’s just a cheese sauce, man,’ said Iain, carrying the saucepan out to the garden.

The others arrived with similar questions and while the tone was light hearted, it was also tinged with scarcely concealed concern for their well-being. I couldn’t keep up the act any longer. I wanted to cry. Coping with the pressures of work had proved difficult enough; additional and unneeded stress at home had brought me to the verge of a breakdown. I took a long sip of wine, a deep lung full of nuked cheese sauce and tried to gather my thoughts.

‘I think I’ve burnt the sauce,’ I confessed. ‘Just a minor mishap. It’s all under control really.’ Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth. My only saving grace was that the smoke had concealed the vast pile of lasagne filling that looked barely fit for human consumption. The vegetarian bacon slices were a particularly horrific sight, half charred, half pink and curling out of the mix despite my best efforts to flatten them down with a few slaps from a wooden spoon. ‘I just need to make some more sauce. The soup’s all prepared and the pudding shouldn’t take too long. Really, it’s not as bad as it looks.’

Iain came back inside. ‘Fuck me, my asthma’s playing up again.’

‘Sorry to cause such an alarm, folks. Here, take a bottle of wine through to the living room and open a few windows. Dinner will be served in about an hour, an hour and a half at the most.’

‘We can order a take-away if you’d prefer Ben, it’s no problem,’ said Joe. I wasn’t about to let him off the hook so easily, and ushered them all back into the living room with a second bottle of wine as an incentive. They would probably need it anyway to calm their nerves. I think that by this time we all knew the meal was going to be every bit as bad as each of us could ever have feared.

I dropped the chopped vegetables into the boiling water and added a stock cube. Was soup really that easy to make? We’d all find out soon enough, I thought, and started grating some more cheese as I set about mixing a spare sachet of sauce.

The meal was ready on time. The smoke had cleared, the soup was in the bowls and the lasagne was waiting aggressively in the oven. It didn’t look much like the one in the cookbook, but I figured that was the sly reason they'd used sketches instead of photographs.

Everyone was fairly tipsy by the time we all sat down to eat, and Iain was in an upbeat mood following a win that afternoon for his beloved Glasgow Rangers. After all the stress of the afternoon it had been an encouraging start to the evening. All that could go wrong now was some spontaneous projectile vomiting and the odd dose of dysentery, but hopefully nothing worse than that.

We all took tentative sips of the soup, me first. There was no danger of anyone diving straight in: the soup had taken on a murky, gooey appearance that I hadn’t foreseen. The vegetables had melded into one another, but although the texture was not pleasing and there was no distinctive taste, everyone seemed to be up for the challenge ... although the bread rolls did seem unusually popular.

‘What’s in the soup, Ben?’, asked Greek. Her consumption of the contents of her bowl had slowed to a worrying level with the others losing a similar amount of momentum. A couple of rolls were being bobbed around over the soup but there appeared to be a profound lack of dunking going on.

‘Macaroni, broccoli, tomato, celery, onions, um… butter beans, garlic and a few other bits and bobs. Do you like it?’ I dipped my roll deep into the soup before biting off the soggy bit. ‘Mmmmm.’

They all looked at me in wonderment and I held their stare. The bread sat on my tongue but as I tried to swallow my throat rejected it.

‘Are you all right Ben?’, asked Dawn.

I inhaled deeply through my nose and gave it another go, but again my larynx refused to drop and the soggy bread began to get soggier.

All eyes were on me, waiting for my next word or movement. I held a finger in the air and sprinted for the toilet.

I made it in time, but only just. I suppose it was fair and just that I was the only casualty of the evening; I would have felt awfully guilty if I had put someone else through such an abhorant experience.

When I returned to the kitchen the atmosphere was considerably jollier than it had been prior to my hasty departure, although everyone was at great pains to show their concern for my welfare. ‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ I assured them, and they continued to prod the main course with skewers.

‘What’s it supposed to be again?’, asked Joe excitedly.

‘Vegetarian lasagne.’ More laughter. I decided not to confess that the horns which were still sticking out of it’s skin were strips of vegetarian bacon.

‘Here you go,’ said Dawn, handing me a glass of wine. ‘Get that down your gullet, master chef.’ I took the glass from her and sat down, relieved it was all obviously over.

‘Anyone for pizza?’, asked Iain. The response was unanimous.