Simmer

Simmer text over cast iron skillets with steam rising above them, author name and Unapologetic logo overlap

By Tabitha Bast

Along with evacuation, the loss of their home, and enforced stay at Dan’s ever

sacrificial parent’s residence, would be the enormous irritation that Dan had been

right and Connor had been wrong.

Connor had been declaring it would be alright, which he always did, as had all the

men in his family back for generations. It was the women of the old country that

would worry and when Dan worried it disgusted Connor. Women worried in swarms -

agitated, difficult, anxiously assessing every possible catastrophe in order to impose

their fearfulness on their children and their menfolk. Not that Connor admired the

men, they ranged from indifferent to brutal. But still. There was something familial

and feminine about Dan when he fretted that turned Connor’s stomach.

Fretting was not how Dan saw it, with his increasing frustration at Connor’s

pathological ignorance even as the sky lit up with red and orange and smoke, like a

Pride flag on fire. Dan would point out the blindingly obvious - “look, it’s coming, let’s

pack up and get out.” He said it first on Tuesday morning but by Friday evening they

were still in the house. The excuses were now as thin as the restaurant options in

the town they somehow loved living in.

Dan held his breath at a breakthrough on Thursday, 9pm, when the radio pips were

quaintly announcing the hour. Chloe had Whatsapped from her workshop 3 streets

away to say she was wrapping up all her ceramics and shoving them in her van right

now. She wasn’t asking for help, just letting them know. Dan showed Connor the

message and Connor looked suitably shocked. They leaned against the obsessively

cleaned surfaces of their kitchen, by the kettle that would be better somewhere else

if they’d had more plugs.

“Chloe’s leaving?” Connor questioned, unbelieving.

“ Even Chloe.” Dan got a dig in, unable to resist.

Chloe had Connor’s respect in a way Dan felt he increasingly didn’t, and Chloe was

being used unabashedly as ammunition. ‘If Chloe was out, we should get out’. ‘Let’s

all be Chloe.’ Dan kept holding the phone out to Connor as if it was that which would

transmit his silent messages. Chloe who could lift not only boxes of her delectable,

award winning pottery into her truck but her kilns too, without help, because even

hard-as-nails Chloe knew an encroaching disaster when she saw it.

“It’s just advice, not an order.” Connor threw the gauntlet down. And, more literally,

his emptied beer bottle, checked twice that it was finished. Then, casually: “But you

can go.”

Connor started picking nuts out of a bowl Chloe had given them three Christmases

ago. He could never sit still, always putting something in his mouth or picking at his

eyelashes. That had been a good Christmas, the last great one. Snow, tinsel,

laughter. A sense of raucous belonging. On that day Connor had felt how he

imagined Dan always felt - at ease. It must have been in that period between then

and New Year they went ice skating on the pond. Dan had held Connor upright

enough the whole way round because he was laughing so much he couldn’t stand.

Later, at the bar, as snow melted off jackets and cheeks reddened with the blissful

glow of warmth after cold, Connor confessed it was like a romcom he’d never watch

but always - secretly - wished he was in. Yet mere months after that, Connor started

balding and resenting Dan. The receding came from the front hairline at least, not a

monk-esque patch at the back. But it was still difficult. The anxiety about his hair and

the annoyance at Dan were not related, but they arose at the same time. It wasn’t a

tit for tat jealousy because Dan had lost his hair in his twenties. But also, Dan looked

great with it, easy lean muscle, unendingly enthusiastic with his outdoor sports,

easily fit, easily fine, easily happy.

Not Connor. Connor was once a short, fat kid and was now a short, skinny man,

there had been no era he was comfortable in his own body. But much as he disliked

his physical self it was his mind he mostly despised, an incessant, ranting, analytical

intellectualism that made him brilliantly successful, an ideal guest at dinner parties.

And a dreadful life partner. The same mind that could win any theoretical row was

engaged in one of life and death with Dan over when they leave.

The wildfires were not part of these discussions, they just came. Relentless,

persistent, untamed.

Connor filmed the fire, wide angle shots from the attic window, shorter ones from the

front gate. Thursday afternoon he’d briefly driven up to the no go zone where the

firefighters would get cancer one by one as they battled the blaze. He was driven

back by their soft Canadian annoyance at his being there. He would remember the

moment and none of them would, they had greater concerns. The stark difference in

temperature between 100 feet and 10 feet away from the front line wasn’t significant

on Connors’; shots and this too made him angry. He needed it to be. He wanted to

convey the horrific heat showing up as a few drops of sweat on a firefighter’s

forehead, the flicks of flames and smoke appeared too distanced.

Impotently he couldn’t get the shot.

It was all too late.

Connor wanted to step into the nightmare that everyone else was fleeing from. He

envisioned himself moving toward not away from the tragedy, stepping into the

intolerable, catastrophic heat. Not to defeat it but to be part of it. Except he didn’t

because he was neither allowed by First Responders and nor would any part of his

feeble human body allow it. He was repelled by the fire. Like everyone else.

He went home, sulking and furious.

By dinner time the scent of smoking spruce was in the kitchen, fragrancing the trout

and new potatoes that Dan was serving up. Dan was wearing an apron, as usual,

because he cared about his clothes, but sensed Connor’s curled disapproving lip as

he stood in the doorway. It was like this since Connor had gone to that funeral back

in his old country, since seeing his parents and a cousin had died or some such

drama. Connor’s rare visits home inevitably made him surly and moody for a few

days but this had been months. And there was no winning him round, everything

Dan attempted was met with the same snide sneer. It was as if Connor packed his

Dad’s attitudes into his flight bag each time, and brought it back to Canada. And

Dan, always understanding, gave him that reprieve til he’d slept off the attitudes, the

old ways, the old country. But this time Connor wasn’t letting go.

“Can you smell that?” Said Dan, unwisely.

“Yeah, fish reeking out our kitchen. I don’t know why you love it so much.”

‘Literally’, thought Dan, ‘like a moody teenager’. Connor was trying everything for a

fight. ‘It’s my kitchen, not ours’, a malicious whisper of ownership rose in Dan. But

there wasn’t room for both of them to be divas. Not in a crisis.

“I meant the burning forest, Connor.” He said kindly and gently, irritating Connor all

the more.

And the more Dan insisted they go the more Connor wanted to stay. Better to burn

to death than give in. A stubbornness born of both his resistant ancestry and

resisting his ancestry. He could smell the fire though, and in the back room if he

opened the window he started coughing. Everyone in town had gone, the roads now

clear of the slow procession from this morning when families with over packed cars

began descending down the mountain. Careful, prepared, objects of comfort and

familiarity strapped down suggestively on hot. metal roofs. Windows down with

children and dogs panting out of them. Parents unfathomably cheerful talking to their

offspring then steely eyed when they switched focus to the road. An exodus.

Connor wanted to cry watching. It took memories of his most vicious baggage to

stop the tears falling. He imagined his old Maths teacher - that cruel, sadistic fuck -

with his hand on Connor’s gaunt shoulder, murmuring homophobic slurs into his ear.

That helped. He imagined his Grandfather, bedridden and incontinent, screaming

threats at his wife to bring his whisky, like some embarrassing trope never to be

admitted to, certainly never put on screen. That helped. He imagined his first

boyfriend, that secret one at school, outing him to the class with a sultry sneer. This

was the sneer that Connor was copying now. That helped. This all helped, as if it

could keep him invulnerable on this mountain and not part of the pathetic flight to

safety.

What didn’t help was Dan serving dinner with unconquerable compassion. Like his

Ma ironing out the troubles - small t troubles she called them - between family

members and neighbours, listening, nodding, sneaky, manipulative, weak,

considerate, kind.

Like a woman.

“I kissed someone. At the funeral.” Connor shot desperately to make Dan go. A blow

to the soft organs, making eye contact at last, knife in deep.

“Okay.” Dan nodded. “Well, we’re allowed to. You were meant to tell me, but, okay.”

Connor couldn’t bear this stealth, the sneakiness, as Dan dived out of shot,

lubricated by his easy-going liberal parents and generous upbringing, his fine with

everything, his vile optimism.

“It was a woman.” A gut punch.

“Well.” Said Dan, slowly, putting his fork down.The smell of pine was growing

stronger, like Chloe putting tea tree on her gnat bites, or a locker room full of

schoolboys with cheap deodorant. Connor felt triumphant, he’d won. The grand old

prize of Dan leaving him to burn on the mountain at last.

“So it’s no different to me if it’s a man or a woman or whoever, Connor, but it seems

like you’ve come back with a whole load of issues about something. You’ve been an

absolute prick since. So maybe it’s you that has issues with kissing a woman. Which

in some mad, messed up way makes sense. From what you’ve said - and what I’ve

seen - of your family. But many apologies, I don’t have an issue with women. I do

have an issue with dying in a wildfire though.”

The cooling, dead, relentless eye of a trout stared up from the plate. Connor wept.

Every shrug of his shaking shoulder loosened the grip of his Grandfather, his

teacher, his bully of a first love. Most of the ghosts cleared the room with a flood of

tears. Dan, with brutal practicality, took the half empty plates, scrapped them into the

bin, and then washed them up so Connor could sob in something like privacy.

“She was the one that died. Just after.” Connor tremored, gutturally.

Dan took the place of old ghosts behind Connor and held him, those strong practical

arms around his flailing shoulders.

“Connor, you’re an idiot. I wish you’d told me. But it wasn’t your fault she died. And if

you think it was, we can talk about it in the car on the way out of town. If I’m driving I

can always kick you out on some sidewalk. What do you say?”

Connor mumbled something unintelligible.

“What?”

“I said ‘pavement’.”

Dan slapped him lightly over the head, relieved at this thawing.

“Sidewalk. “

They left within the hour, most of the Go-bags had already been packed. Connor

threw a half bottle of whisky he’d brought back in the passenger seat of the car at the

last minute, and Dan winced inwardly that this was where their journey was going.

But he understood it, the horror of no home again, and when Connor caught Dan’s

expression he said “The drink makes us and the drink breaks us.”

Dan asked what that meant.

“Something my friend said, my sort of cousin. I’ll tell you about it en route, now.”

And Connor would.