The fish had been poached perfectly and Rachel turned from her atlas to scrutinise its potential eatability. Bill had prepared it for her - and had sprinkled several herbs and whole peppercorns over it. Bill was currently her Ex. But they were still fast friends
. Bill was a geography teacher and Rachel’s worst subject at school -- but she enjoyed the shape of maps more for their aesthetic quality than their representation of reality.
The atlas she had been browsing through was one of Fantasy Worlds, where all literary maps had been collected together. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. James Hilton’s Shangri-La. Cervantes’ La Manche. And so on. Rachel adored poring over them with studious grins – lovingly tracing their margins, imagining herself in the various purlieus of mindscape.
“You want to read a real atlas one day, Rachel,” announced Bill as he carved the fish: thick-slivering fillet after fillet upon each of their plates.
The reason for them falling out as soulmates had been caused by their lack of sympathy regarding these very maps. Bill was fascinated by the salt-of-the-earth disciplines of physical geography. Political, too. Brown contours that swirled around outlandishly tall peaks. The bright primary colours dividing chance nations. The pastel ones depicting exports, customs, geological features or striations, irrigation projects, hydroelectric dams, forestry conservation preoccupations…
Rachel loved nothing better than the more nebulous worlds that occupied her precincts of thought.
She grabbed the fish knife and, in a desultory fashion, prodded her share of the mutual meal.
Bill, by now, had taken a whip from his wide-mouthed briefcase. It was a snaky, quirky terrier of a whip. It snapped and coruscated. It almost had a life of its own.
Bill positioned it on the table in the shape of the country whence the fish had come. In this case, a country not a million miles dissimilar from France. This had been a tradition at their dinner parties. And Rachel smiled as she recalled that their differences over mere atlases were not the only reason for their love affair foundering.
There were also Bill’s habits to contend with.
He seemed to smile back at her as he watched a rather different habit that inhabited Rachel’s own reflexes: the one of beating the fish at its own game.
She was evidently not steaming to France. But quite another place.
