Utterly by Laura Yash

They still call me Mrs Jenkins, but Mr Jenkins and I no longer share a bed, or a roof, or anything like that. It’s just my married name was already on the sign, and it seemed like such a faff to take it down, and get a new one painted. Everyone knew me as Mrs Simm already, so it didn’t feel right to make them all learn a whole new name. Some of my customers are very old and they only have so much space left in their heads for new bits and pieces before they die. Didn’t feel right to demand they give any of that space up just so I could be Miss Brown again. It’s not even a nice name, so it’s certainly not worth all that fuss.

We got a divorce, me and Mr Jenkins. But we didn’t just rush into that, like we rushed into our marriage. We’re not like all these modern young men and women, splitting up for a laugh or for a spilt bottle of milk or any old thing. Half of weddings are doomed to fail these days, they say. And I don’t think that’s right. Young people need to try harder at things, after all. They say there’s this housing crisis and certain generations have been cheated by certain, older generations, but I wonder if people just got out of the habit of trying to make things work.

My granddaughter thinks I’m being “purposefully dense” when I say things like that. “Baby-boomers divorce, nan,” she tells me, “but they’ve got freeholds and leaseholds and I’ve got £650 a month rent for a room with mould.” To her credit, Nina is - and has always been - a real tryer. Got a first in History from the University of Bristol, which is more than I could say for her dad. Or her grandfather, for that instance. But that is really all by-the-by.

I wouldn’t say Mr Jenkins and I had exactly been happy with each other since Nathan was born. Not that I’m blaming Nathan for that - he was just a baby at the time, couldn’t have mucked up anything if he wanted to. All his purposeful mucking-up came later in life.

I think the birth of our first child marked the first anniversary of our wedding and that was that. You see, there was only ever so much happiness we could have ever had together, and we used it up in that year. Sometimes, when I’ve been out with the ladies from choir and had one too many glasses of red wine, I wish that we had been more careful with it. Stretched the happiness out, like we used to stretch meat out in a stew. Mixed the happiness with lots of carrots and onions and things. But then I wake up the next morning, take a paracetamol and think: “Well, never mind.” Maybe it was better that way, after all. If I could have a dozen yoghurt pots, or one knickerbocker glory, I’d go for the ice cream still.

What was I saying? Oh, yes. I’ll tell you what happened in the end. We were at the kitchen table with our cereal, and the shop hadn’t opened yet, so we were just there with the newspapers. Mr Jenkins had a subscription to The Times, and I had one to The Guardian, so we had lots to choose from. I liked having all the pages spread out between us. It gave us so much to talk about and made breakfast go easier. This particular morning there was a story about Last Tango in Paris.

I had never seen the film, but it didn’t really matter. I must have made a little noise as I was reading, because Mr Jenkins said: “What now?”

“They say this director Berto- Bertolu- ” I struggled sometimes with foreign names, I hadn’t been to grammar school like my husband.

“Bertolucci.”

“Him and Marlon Brando-”

“He was in Apocalypse Now.”

He was also in Streetcar Named Desire, I felt like saying, but I didn’t. “In this film, which they did with this 19-year-old girl called Maria Schneider, there is this scene where Brando - well, rapes her,” I glanced up from the print, saw Mr Jenkins face, and looked down again. “And he uses butter to- ”

“To what?” He asked. All ears.

“Lubricate her.” What other word could I use?

Mr Jenkins mulled this over for a moment. “Brando is dead.”

“It’s an old film, it was released in 1972.”

“But what’s it doing in the news, then?”

“The director said the butter bit was real.”

“What do you mean?”

I looked back at the paper. “He said: ‘In the sequence of the butter it was an idea I had with Marlon in the morning before shooting it,’” my mouth felt strange, so I tried swallowing to make it better. It did not. “‘But I had been in a way horrible to Maria because I didn’t tell her what was going on because I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress.’”

Mr Jenkins contemplated his muesli.

“Isn’t that awful?” I looked at him, but he just looked at his spoon.

“What a waste of butter,” he said. “They should have used margarine.”

He stood up. The shop had to be opened.

I didn’t rush to the lawyer then and there, you know. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Mr Jenkins’ words, and I started to Google the story. Turns out this girl, Maria, she spoke about the whole thing in 2007:

They only told me about it before we had to film the scene and I was so angry. I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can’t force someone to do something that isn’t in the script but at the time, I didn’t know that.

Of course, she wasn’t a girl in 2007. I don’t know why I said that. She’s dead now, anyway.

I thought about Maria talking to Mr Jenkins, and him saying to her what he said to me. Would she think it was a joke, or just old-fashioned pragmatism, basic economics? Would she gave a damn either way?

I suppose you could call it the straw that broke the camel’s back. After so many mornings of pure silence, pierced only with the clatter of cutlery against wedding china, I wondered how it could be that time was short but life was still very long, even for a grandma.

I didn’t want to be in the house when Mr Jenkins was served the papers - I didn’t want to embarrass the man, I suppose - so I went to visit Nina.

“What’s wrong, nan?”

I suppose I must have looked a bit of a state - my coat was, somehow, inside out - so I told her. She asked me about the divorce, and I told her about the margarine.

“Grandad’s a cunt,” she said. And for once, I didn’t tell her off for using such bad language.

…………

Laura Yash was born on the fourth of July in Chicago (her mum went into labour at a parade). Patriotic birth aside, she moved to the UK aged three months, and is now a Londoner with a confusing accent. Recently, Laura has been spending some time writing flash fiction around the subject of margarine.

Twitter: @yashbangwhallop