Twenty-One Night Stand ✓

10 / food for thought

In her twenty years, Maddie couldn't recall a time she and her father had ever properly argued. Her earliest memories began around the age of four, her recollection not quite reaching the years she had shared with her mother, and as far as she knew, she and her father had always existed in peaceful harmony. There had been the occasional disparity of opinion, and Maddie wasn't nearly as level-headed as her father, but for the most part they were a perfectly matched father daughter team.

A Hugh Grant film was about to start playing on BBC 2. Maddie couldn't always remember which was which, the plots and characters melting into, but she loved them all. Rather, she loved Hugh Grant and would watch anything he was in, and though her father wasn't much of a fan, he would always just go with the flow if only to keep the peace.

"Supper's ready," Jung-min called from the kitchen, holding up an empty plate to beckon Maddie away from the comfort of the sofa. She padded into the room in overstretched socks that sagged around her ankles, worn out after years of use and washing.

As the evening drew on, the air cooled and though it was still light outside, dark rainclouds loomed on the horizon. Maddie wrapped her cardigan tighter around herself and pulled the sleeves down over the heels of her palms.

"What's this?" she asked absent-mindedly as her father spooned rice onto two deep plates.

"Doenjang jjigae," he said, ladling the stew onto the rice. Whenever possible, if he had the time and energy, he cooked the food he had grown up with to keep hold of that heritage for Maddie. He was by no means a natural chef but he had a good grip of several dishes, recipes his wife had excelled at and insisted he learned. Maddie watched him as he served, and she poured herself a glass of water when her father topped up his glass of wine.

"Perfect," she murmured, finishing half of her water before she took her plate through to the sitting room to eat in front of the TV. The two of them often did: unless they had company, the dining room table never got much use as anything more than a study spot, where Maddie hunkered down with her laptop, or her father continued working once he got home. Settling into her usual corner of the sofa, she pulled a pillow onto her lap and laid out the remote controls beside her.

"What's on?" Jung-min asked when he came through. He sat down with a sigh of appreciation that it was finally time to relax and let the weary Wednesday roll off his shoulders. Maddie hit the information button and the screen filled with the summary of About a Boy.

"I love this one," Maddie said as she steadied her meal on her lap and turned the volume up a couple of notches. Her father glanced at the screen, a slight frown gracing his features.

"What's this one about?" he asked, though he had probably seen it in bits and pieces a hundred times over the years, and Maddie gave him a fond roll of her eyes.

"The guy's a bit of a knob who pretends to have a son to hook up with single mothers and he ends up friends with one of the kids."

Jung-min's frown relaxed a little and he shook his head to himself as though despairing of the character's situation. "You know," he said, "these films of yours never seem to be on the television while you're at university. I think you must have some kind of an effect on the scheduling."

Maddie chuckled and continued to eat, absorbing herself in the scenes she knew so well. There was something so comforting about watching films she had known since she was young, relishing in those snapshots of her childhood.

*

Twenty minutes into the film, as Maddie set the plate down on the coffee table to wash up in the next advert break, the phone rang. Her father looked at his watch and sighed. Half past seven. After it rang twice more, he stood and brushed down his trousers before taking the landline out of its cradle. Maddie was sure she and her father were the only people who still owned a corded landline telephone, or probably any kind of landline.