The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke, Jamie Bulloch

feel like doing anything during the day. My mother would have loved a nap after lunch, that’s what they do here, she said, have a siesta, and get up again when it’s cooler; my father thought a nap a waste of holiday, they can enjoy the sun all year round, he said, we don’t come all this way south not to take advantage of the sun. And before booking the holidays, my father looked in the brochures and compared the average hours of sunshine per country and per year, and then worked out the probability of enjoying uninterrupted sunshine throughout our stay; that’s why he would never go to the mountains, where it can be overcast, and frankly a rainy holiday with my father would have been no fun, which is why on Sunday afternoons, when they were making holiday plans, they always decided to go south to the sea. And my mother secretly brought back a few twigs and grass stalks from our outings, sometimes daisies and bellflowers, too; when my father caught her he just shook his head at this ingrained nostalgia for the countryside, your incurable romanticism, he said; but the twigs and grasses and bunches of flowers rarely survived the journey home because of the traffic, and by the time we arrived home they’d dried out. We always got back in time for the sports programme, though, and it was usually better for my brother and me if our Sunday was already over, otherwise it would be over in dramatic fashion during the sports programme, for my brother and I were intractable in our failure to remember the rules of football or the names of the footballers; I could only remember Uwe Seeler, my brother wasn’t much better – he only knew Beckenbauer – and my father despaired; that borders on sabotage, he repeated again and again, and then usually one of us would stammer hopefully, Müller, and the other would stammer speculatively, Mayer; and if Müller or Mayer was not playing in that game then Sunday was definitively over. I remembered Uwe Seeler only because he was the one bald player and easy to spot; the others had hair and all looked the same on television, but my father was able to identify them accurately and he knew who was sitting on the subs bench, too, as well as having a detailed knowledge of the league table. Once, to oblige him, I asked, what’s a corner, when he shouted, corner, but he threw me out of the room; actually I was quite happy about this as I was in the middle of reading
Pole Poppenspäler
, and now I had some free time until supper; we didn’t play skat that day either, so I had even more time for
Pole Poppenspäler
. When my father was away on business I was allowed to read as much as I wanted, I was also allowed to practise the piano for longer than an hour, or less, even; I could practise the piano as and when I liked, which wasn’t the case with my father around, and this fact alone saddened me upon his return, and my mother was sad because my brother had to dash downstairs with the rubbish, including all the flowers and twigs and grasses, so that my father wouldn’t catch her wallowing in her ingrained nostalgia for the countryside. My brother had more secrets than ever, the entire basement where we kept the bikes was full of them, but when my father was away on business there were scarcely any secrets between us. Of course we didn’t do everything together as in a proper family, we only dealt with the shopping, washing, tidying and those sorts of things more or less together, the things my mother usually did on her own when my father was home, because he despised menial work, and my brother and I went to great pains to ensure that he didn’t despise us. Without my father around we often did the menial work together, it was quicker that way and we could talk to each other while doing the chores; for hours we told each other stories, either made up or not, or somewhere in between, which wasn’t usual in our family because there were important things and unimportant things, and my father said