#fridayflash – Pizza Night

Friday night was pizza night in our house, from when I started school until Mum went away. After school, Rachael and Lily and I had chores. We had to clean out the rabbits, weed the flowerbeds, and tidy our bedrooms. Meanwhile, Mum would make the pizzas.

She used three different toppings each week, and never the same one twice. This was exciting to begin with, while there were still palatable toppings to choose from. We even won a prize once, when Giovanni’s Italian Restaurant had a competition for the best new pizza. Who would have thought that cherries, jalapeno peppers and cashew nuts would taste so delicious in combination? We called it ‘Sarah’s Hot and Crunchy’ because the cashew nuts were my suggestion.

After a couple of years, Mum was really struggling for inspiration, and we began to dread Fridays. To make things worse, after a while she would only use foods that started with the same letter of the alphabet, a different letter each week chosen at random from a Scrabble bag. I think Dad must have taken out some of the letters after the first time she drew a Z. Zucchini, zabaglione and zinc tablets do not go together very well.

Most weeks, stress levels in our household rose steadily from breakfast time on Monday morning, when the letter was chosen, to the moment that the new pizza was presented to us on Friday evening. Then, if the combination wasn’t a success, Mum was miserable for the whole weekend. I think the worst time, before they took Mum away, was when she drew an L. Our bathroom was in use all of Friday night and Saturday, as lentils, liver and lime pickle didn’t agree with our digestive systems.

The final pizza night was different from all the others. R was the letter for the week, and Mum had been feverishly leafing through recipe books and dictionaries in search of ingredients since Monday. On Thursday evening we didn’t get a bed-time story, as Dad was too busy consoling Mum, who’d only managed to come up with one potential topping – rowan berries – and Dad had told her they were probably poisonous. At breakfast on Friday, Rachael asked if she could stay with her friend Charlotte overnight. She’d been doing that a lot lately, but never on a Friday before. Mum didn’t mind though.

After school, Lily weeded the flower beds and I cleaned out the rabbits. Then we crept through the kitchen, where Mum was sitting with her head in her hands. Our bedrooms were somehow more untidy than usual, so it took a while to straighten things out. I got into a fight with Lily because some of my books turned up in her bedroom. Dad came home from work and pulled us apart just as Mum was serving up.
The four of us sat around the table, staring at our slices of pizza. Mum was grinning widely.

‘Guess what it is this week!’ she said, and then she burst into laughter so loud I had to cling onto Dad’s arm. She started rocking backwards and forwards, and when she tilted her head and her hair fell back I noticed there was a smudge of red on the tip of her ear. Probably tomato sauce.

Lily said, ‘I don’t know. It looks like bits of meat.’

‘Well, just eat it. I’m not going to tell you what it is. You have to guess.’

Dad put on his brave face, the one he was wearing more and more that year. He cut a piece and lifted it to his mouth. We watched him chew as though strings tied our eyes to his lips. Then he smiled.

‘Actually, it’s not bad. I’ve no idea what it is though, it tastes like liver and kidney and maybe chicken drumsticks. Can’t be that, can it? Unless…’ He smiled again, and touched Mum’s hand. ‘You are clever. It’s different parts of the same animal, isn’t it? An animal whose name begins with R?’

‘That’s exactly right! Come on girls, eat up!’ Mum watched us as avidly as we’d watched Dad. It wasn’t bad at all. We finished every crumb, although none of us could guess what the animal was.

Then we had the best evening ever. Dad put on the DVD of ‘Finding Nero’, and we all snuggled up on the sofa together with a bowl of popcorn. Mum kept tickling me until I kicked Lily accidentally, then we had to pause the DVD while we all had a tickle fight and cleared up the popcorn, which ended up all over the floor.

Later that night, when the house was dark, I was having trouble sleeping. I guess I was hyped up after the wonderful time we’d had. I wondered what the mystery animal was, the one that had been sacrificed for our pizza night.

Suddenly, I had a horrible thought. I crept into Lily’s bedroom. She was still awake too, and her wide frightened eyes told me she had exactly the same thought.

We both spoke together, ‘Rachael’s name begins with R.’

And then I said, ‘That wasn’t tomato sauce on her ear.’

That was a very long night. Neither of us said any more. We curled up together in Lily’s bed and cried and cried until we fell asleep. I dreamed of Mum suffocating Rachael with a pillow, and then I thought I woke up and went downstairs, but I was still dreaming, and I saw Mum cutting Rachael’s liver out on the kitchen table.

Next morning Dad made pancakes for breakfast, which would normally have been great, except I thought I’d never be able to eat again. Lily’s face was as white as the lilies-of-the-valley she’d weeded around the day before.

The front door opened. Dad looked up.

‘Ah, Rachael, maybe you’ll eat some of these pancakes. These two don’t seem to be hungry.’

‘Thanks Dad, that’d be great. By the way, what happened to the rabbits?’

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