I taste people. Where others form first impressions with their eyes, I see in flavours. The man on the bus is chicken fried in oil. Our neighbour, Julie, is a doughnut. Sometimes taste is obvious like the liquorice boy everyone fancies and sometimes it creeps up on you like a Mint Imperial at the bottom of a pocket.
My mother says we are all born with one specific talent. Hers is to be saccharine. Mine is to taste her disappointment. My mother is melon. You can scoop her up, but you never get past her blandness. My psychologist Suzie would say this shows no empathy. Apparently, as a family, we are avoiding issues. We’ve turned avoidance into art.
Suzie changes flavours like others change their clothing. This is a problem, as I cannot reach her core. Yesterday, she was lemon curd smooth with slight acidic wit. Last week, she was dry toast scratchy. I’ve been seeing her since my father was last caught in flagrante with his secretary, but we have had a disappointing lack of progress. Her words, not mine. She tried to convince my mother that family sessions could help us confront our triggers but instead of facing her problems, my mother likes to run. Metaphorically. Those heels won’t get her much further than Waitrose. She takes me to the café there, after my sessions and we look at each other over cups of tea that neither of us drinks.
She likes to pretend we are the perfect, share handbag and shoes mother and daughter. I don’t like cafés; they mess with my palette. My father is garlic; sometimes over- powering in his intensity; the kind of man people stand up for when he enters a room. It’s a front. If I were Suzie, I’d say that he sleeps around to compensate for something. The hush hush phone calls have gone on for as long as I can remember, along with whispered threats from my mother that she never follows through. Melon is slippery.
The women change, according to my cousin Veronica, who arches her eyebrows for effect when she tells me it’s about the sex. My father: adulterer. So predictable. Suzie says I should air my feelings, but I need to be careful not to let my father’s shortcomings obscure my emotional responses.
The garlic one turns his guilt into gifts for my mother and me. She wears his trinkets like plasters over the wounds of their marriage. I take mine back and bank the returns. Suzie says I have control issues. She says if I accept my parents as people, we can begin to address my condition. Suzie has a weak palette. I’ve seen the evidence in her bin, the one with the blossom design filled with other people’s tissues. You could make a pattern with her sweet wrappers. A moment on the lips is what I want to say, but Suzie doesn’t like criticism. Ironic, given her profession. When she asked me where I saw myself in the future, I told her anywhere but here, where everything tastes of crusts. Suzie thinks I need to focus on the positives; I’m a bright girl who should consider her prospects. She says I hold myself back. We made a list once, of typical teen activities and I had to rank them in order of preference, as if choosing movies over hanging out with friends would give her some insight into my psyche.
She gave me homework that week. Veronica and I were packed off to the cinema with popcorn for a chick flick. Veronica was happy enough. I was bored. I would’ve chosen something darker, but my candy floss cousin enjoys life in pink packaging. Chalk/Cheese. I can feel the disappointment in my mother’s gaze as she glances from Veronica’s slick and perfumed loveliness to her own dark spawn.
Veronica is inoffensive, the semolina our grandma used to make when we were little. She digs boys. They really are boys from what she tells me. She’s all Snapchat Luke and what do you think to Aiden? as she thrusts their profiles at me. My mother approves of course. Despite where romance has led her, she is in favour of girls who do boys. I prefer men.
Fact: my father, who thinks of himself as quite the connoisseur, hates to eat in public. I imagine this holds challenge for the serial adulterer. He once told me that scraping a plate does to him what others experience scratching their nails down a blackboard. So, it doesn’t surprise me when receipts for sushi chains drop out of his pockets. Avoidance, encore. I caught him once, with one of his sashimi girls standing like a teenager at a bus stop. The chill was over- powering. “My daughter,” he’d said as I approached them hands in pockets. Sashimi girl blinked too fast for my liking, flinching when he called her “my colleague.” They never last long, his sushi dates. Best consumed raw.
The Japanese understand the palette far better than us. This is something I discuss with Suzie, though I can tell that she is trying to steer me away from ginger or sorbet and back to the shit storm of my life. Suzie is more Japanese than she knows. Her office, with its lucky bamboo and minimalist walls helps evoke her Zen but inside she’s a ninja. I feel it in her gaze sometimes. One day, she’ll strike. Until that moment, I digest her silence.
My mother diets. She can drop a dress size like the sashimi girls drop their knickers. She’s done low carb, high protein, power shakes, the Atkins. Suzie asked me once if my mother’s mental state affected my condition, but I told her she’s all melon and has no tangible centre. My father can be peeled and dropped into situations. My mother is Switzerland: cool and neutral. She has a wardrobe to suit my father’s lies; tiny, tailored pieces for the times he’s banging his latest crush and roomier, airy numbers for in between days. Garlic is a tricky taste to shift.
I read something once, called what love can taste like, where couples compared each other to different dishes. It was a predictable mix of sugar rush puddings and iron rich meat. But to those who see in flavours, it isn’t that simple. Love is wasabi, sending shock waves to your brain via your nasal cavity. It is popping candy, crackling, dissolving on your tongue and when it is lost, it is heavy: gravy boat islands of mashed potato.
He would not call it love, of course. I see that now. Hindsight is an aftertaste. I loved him for a while, savouring nothing but his salt licked skin. Oh Suzie, I can see you lifting your plucked brows at this, all those leading questions and not a mention of him. I’d do it again in a flash but don’t think I’ll share it with you. In the meantime, I’ll erase myself.
It is surprisingly easy to make yourself disappear. Basically, discipline and will power. Like a Samurai, I follow a code. My mother watches me silently and I feel her jealousy as she catches a glimpse of my bones. My father tries to ply with me chocolate. It is never enough.
They put me in hospital from time to time. It isn’t pretty but it takes more than a glucose drip and feeding tube to break me. I watch the other girls wail like victims as they pin them down but fighting back does nothing. Feign compliance, fatten up and start again. I walk the wards for penance until they set the date for my release. It won’t take long to lose me. I taste nothing in those wards, the faintest tinge of lettuce or an apple peel. It placates me.
The Japanese understand human will better than we do. It’s no coincidence a samurai, when faced with death, would commit seppuku rather than be defeated by the enemy. Japan has a low crime rate but when they murder, it’s grisly. Think brutally dismembered corpses in tiny, flat pack apartments. Wake up and smell the body. They aren’t big on garlic in Japan, but melon is commonplace. My mother should move there.
I wonder what they will do when I succeed. Statistically, they’ll split. He will likely marry again, begin the cycle once more. She will possibly quit. I imagine her sometimes in a different place, her flavour changed to coffee or even Amaretto. I will succeed. When Suzie fixes me with her no-nonsense look, I outstare her. As I told my lover, who, by his own admission is best left anonymous, I am nothing if not tenacious. Vampire material. He was old enough to be my father. They hired him to help me catch up on missed learning. I seduced him. It wasn’t planned. No one told me the power of wasabi. That it is compelling, almost addictive. It could never last. But Suzie, he got me to talk. No doubt I told him some of what you hope to uncover. If he was honey; I was Queen Bee. Someday, he lied, we would go to Japan.
Now I watch the cherry blossom painted on Suzie’s bin. It is the ultimate symbol of beauty, ever fleeting, like human existence. I’m ready to vanish.
Emma Phillips is a teacher, poet, short fiction writer and mum of a tween boy. She lives by the M5 in Devon, which sometimes lures her away in search of adventure. Her words have been placed in the Bath Flash Fiction Award, Best Microfiction 2022 and Frome Festival Short Story Competition. Her flash collection Not Visiting the SS Great Britain is available from Alien Buddha Press. She is currently Tiverton Museum’s Writer-in-Residence, where she can often be found drinking coffee between the wool trade gallery and the stocks.
