Belinda Missen - A Recipe for Disaster

‘I mean, anyone who was halfway serious about her life would have sorted that shit out years ago, but no, not you, Lucy. No. I’m just the doorstop it seems. Just the toy. Well, you know what? Couldn’t care. Not bothered. He can keep you, poncing around all night like he owns the place. Gordon Fucking Ramsay.’

During a brief, pin-dropping silence, a small scuffle broke out, sound-tracked by a collective gasp. Despite efforts, Seamus was still standing on the bridal table, swaying like a flag in a breeze. One foot between a hurricane lamp and a bouquet of flowers, the other pushing a plate out of the way. Barry enlisted a small rabble and, when Seamus wasn’t looking, too busy flipping me the bird, they pulled him to the ground.

‘They’re probably still shagging … arsehole.’ His voice was muffled, but still loud enough for everyone to hear exactly what he’d said. ‘Urgh. Bitch.’

I was numb.

It had taken less than ten minutes for my life to turn on its head. Again. Seamus had always been a bit of a loose cannon. I could forgive the missed calls and unanswered text messages. The family dinners he skipped because he ‘forgot’ could even be overlooked. Life was busy, after all. We weren’t living together, and we all slip up from time to time. Swearing at my friend, her husband, and their kids was the start of the decline. This? This wasn’t just the straw that broke the camel’s back. This was an out of control dumpster fire.

Edith sat by the bridal table, looking mortified. Barry and his group of friends shoved Seamus unceremoniously out the back door with little more than a glass of water and zero sympathy. I couldn’t blame them.

The moment the volume rose again, I stood and slipped through the front door. As I rounded the side of the building and made for the car park, the opening beats of Queen’s ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ thumped from the speakers at each end of the dance floor. I wasn’t sure if it was clapping I heard as I walked away, or my brain farting in relief at the night being over.

‘Lucy.’ Seamus jumped up from a wooden log by the car.

I scurried past, feet crunching on gravel. ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you.’

‘Oh, no, Luce, I’m sorry.’

His words held no weight, likely as empty as every other garbage promise that had come from him in the last six months. Wind blew hair about my face, and I tried desperately to stop it sticking to my lip gloss. Clock that up to another fail.

‘You can collect your things tomorrow.’ I unlocked only the driver’s side while Seamus reefed on the passenger’s door. ‘If you’re not there by midday, whatever is yours is going in the bin.’

‘But I didn’t mean it, Lucy.’ He pouted. The cheek! ‘Come on, Sweetie, open up and let me in.’

The only thing I opened was my handbag, his wallet and phone still placed haphazardly atop of everything else. Aside from being a girlfriend, I’d become part-time carer when he couldn’t be bothered looking after his own belongings. The longer I sat in the car and thought, even as his tapping at the window grew louder, the quicker the cons outweighed the pros. I wound the window down, tossed his phone, keys, and wallet away, and drove off into the night.

The next morning brought with it light drizzle and shreds of clarity. The damage from Seamus’s outburst wasn’t nearly as bad as it seemed in the heat of the moment. At least not for me. I’d readied myself for the fallout, perhaps an epic dressing-down, or a mass defriending. But, a nervous call to a hungover Edith, complete with grovelling apology, sanded over the bristly edges. Perhaps it was the offer of a free christening cake that sealed the deal and had her laughing by the time we hung up.

I peered at my phone through barely parted fingers, but I needn’t have worried. Social media confirmed more of the same: I would be remembered more for my cake than Tropical Cyclone Seamus who, by all accounts, was now ex-communicated, Romeo on his way to Verona. By midday, there were even two voicemails on my phone from people wanting their own cakes made. Safe in that knowledge, I scribbled down their details and ploughed headfirst into the new day, which included coffee with an anxious Zoe as afternoon made its way to evening.

We’d met on the first day of high school, both of us standing around nervously. We were pulled together by the sheer horror of having our mothers there to make an embarrassing fuss over us. To make a quick getaway, Zoe had pretended we knew each other from “the streets”, as she termed it. While my mum wasn’t excited by that prospect, Zoe’s had smiled, nodded, and let us go on our way.

We’d been thick as thieves ever since. It had been on Zoe’s suggestion that Oliver and I looked for a property in Inverleigh. She moved here first, and found it a nice thirty-minute drive from her parents. Close enough if she needed help, and far enough for a bit of privacy.

She hoisted herself up onto a rickety cane stool by my bench and switched on the kettle. My kitchen looked like it had seen better days. Cupboards were open where coffee cups and bowls had been reclaimed, a mixing bowl still needed a run through the dishwasher, knives and spatulas were crusted over, and I had another cake to start. Let’s not even talk about the dusty pink tiles and paint job that would have been better placed in the 1970s.

‘So?’ she asked.

I smiled conspiratorially. ‘So?’

‘What happened? Are we wearing radiation suits, or are the hills alive with the sound of changed locks and cleansing ceremonies?’ She picked at a bowl of chocolates I’d been working my way through in post-breakup bliss.

When I arrived home last night, I piled Seamus’s belongings onto the couch for him to collect. Stained coffee cups, over-watched movies, and a decrepit VHS player that had found its way into my already cramped lounge room. I fished dirty underwear from the laundry floor, and wet clothes from where they’d been left in the washing machine yesterday morning. And then I enjoyed a glass of wine in the shower, and didn’t feel an ounce of regret over it.

I bent over into the dishwasher and rearranged the stack. ‘The hills are alive with the sound of singledom. A rather unwell Seamus presented at eight o’clock this morning. He came, he saw, he collected his junk, and left.’

‘Tail between legs?’ Zoe took the two coffee cups offered and started our hackneyed routine.

‘Up between his legs and curled around his middle,’ I said. ‘There’s not a lot to add, really – you’ve seen the photos and heard the stories.’

‘Definitely.’

‘He was sorry, he loves me, he promises he’ll do better, he knows he hasn’t been the best, but I was like … no, bye.’

‘Good.’ She shoved a fun-sized Mars bar in her mouth. ‘How do you feel?’

‘I feel really positive, which might seem silly, I know. I thought I’d be heartbroken, but I’m okay. I mean, when he came over, he wanted to talk and go out for lunch, and he was all: can we please work this out because I really love you.’

Zoe rolled her eyes. ‘I call bullshit.’

‘You know that look he gets, all frown lines? It’s almost like he’s scandalised, and oh so hard done by.’

‘I do,’ Zoe said. ‘It was the same look he gave us when we caught him out at that bar in Geelong.’

After turning me down for a date, citing a long day on the job at the butcher’s, Zoe had instead taken up my offer to head down the highway to Geelong for dinner. We ate, we drank, we laughed and, on our way back to the car, we spotted Seamus through the grubby windows of a pub. A group of friends circled him as they backslapped, laid money on the horses, and sloshed glasses of beer around their heads in celebration.