Free Christopher Brookmyre by Fun All, v1.0 Games Page A

what she'd like to make if she wasn't going home to cook for Tom, who thought that alternating between Indian and Chinese for his Friday-night takeaway meant he had an adventurous appetite. Tom's favourite home-cooked dish was stovies, though ideally it would have been cooked in his previous home by his mother, whose culinary expertise had inexplicably failed to grant her international acclaim and whose secret recipe for her signature dish had gone with her to the grave, along with close to a hundredweight of rosary beads. It said a great deal about why Scotland was perennially referred to as the Sick Man of Europe that Tom considered home-made stovies a healthy and wholesome option, as opposed to, say, a deep-fried pizza supper or an intravenous injection of lukewarm, but rapidly congealing, pork-fat. Consisting of reheated Lorne sausage swimming in a watery stew of boiled carrots and disintegrating spuds, Tom's-Mammy-recipe stovies looked like what you might find swilling at the bottom if a butcher, a greengrocer and a pet-store shared the same wheelie bin. Jane was of the belief that Lorne sausage was something people would get into trouble for feeding to animals in ten years'
    time, and was pretty sure that in other countries, they wouldn't even let you store stovies in the same wheelie bin as normal domestic waste. So, it being Thursday and her not having cooked it so far this week, guess what was on the menu tonight? A fillet of that tempting-looking sea bass on a bed of wasabi mash, with a spinach-and-coriander salsa? Some of that Gresham duck breast nestling on crisp salad leaves and drizzled with an orange-and-mango reduction? Or . . .
    'Half a pound of square sausage, please.'
    'Square? Right you are, missus.'
    Jane's efforts at tempting Tom with more exotic fare had long since been abandoned. Minor variations on familiar dishes were met with queries as to whether she'd not been able to get the standard ingredients, and more ambitious undertakings had frequently been forsaken at the preparatory stage; Tom suspecting experimentation was afoot and venturing into the kitchen to inform her: 'I'll just have my steak/chicken/fish plain, with a few totties. Save you all that bother.'
    She should have spotted it from the start, and looking back, the evidence was all there, but when you're young you sometimes project more than you actually see. The teen magazines of her youth should have offered less advice on make-up and period pain if it allowed space to pass on more useful wisdom, such as a warning that you were kidding yourself if you thought your young suitor's less desirable traits would fade with time, while allowing the fairer ones to bloom. An old-fashioned streak in an adolescent can seem endearing, single-mindedness a sign of character. Add twenty years and the effect is considerably less charming.
    It wasn't that he was cantankerous or miserable with his stone-set ways: what truly alienated Jane was that he was so satisfied by them. 'Philistine'
    was a term people used too freely to describe individuals they considered less cultured than themselves, even just people who didn't share their tastes. (The supreme irony of this, she had learned, was that the original Philistines were about five hundred years more culturally advanced than the Israelites.) If Tom preferred stovies to a Nick Nairn creation, that was his shout. It wasn't his taste that made him a Philistine. It was that he seemed, as one of her favourite books put it, content to live in a wholly unexplored world. The book, The Lyre of Orpheus , was about staging a new opera, from conception through to opening night. She'd read it no fewer than five times, savouring every word, its pleasures, like all of the best novels, bittersweet that it was a fiction. What wouldn't she give to be part of something like that?
    Any part: a seamstress working on the costumes; a line-prompt; the librettist's assistant, transcribing his flights of idea. To be working in