Piglet

by Lottie Hazell

woman wearing Birkenstocks and ecru-coloured linen pushed past Piglet, reaching for a pecorino.

Alliteration

her fiancé, Kit, would be unpacking their house. Those words—still a novelty, like the stairs, the garden, the mortgage.

It was too hot for a roast chicken, but Piglet had once heard Nigella say something about a house only being home once a chicken was in the oven.

Piglet’s dinner would not be like her mother’s or her future in-laws’. There would be jazz music, cigarettes smoked on the patio, and a dessert made from one of the new cookbooks she was editing: an espresso semifreddo with warm caramel sauce and glinting shards of praline. There were easier recipes she could have made—she could have bought dessert, pudding, even—but she did not pass up an opportunity to mention one of her authors by name on the off chance someone might ask for the recipe.

Piglet positioned herself to receive her groceries and compliments on her choice of food. The cashier looked up at her, smiling, inclining her head. “Boys,” she said, before she pushed the chicken through the till.

Ironic. Relatable . Love

It looked how she had imagined it would.

When she had been growing up in Derby, this life, this man, had been beyond her imagination.

When they had met, and Piglet had described her job as an assistant editor at Fork House, Seb had said stridently how Sophie loved to cook too, and how they batch-cooked a chilli made with turkey mince every Sunday.

“It’s a gorgeous house, Kit,” Sasha said. “Fresh air,” Piglet excused as she stood. Kit reached for her, brushing her waist, but his eyes remained fixed on Sasha. His voice rose, excited.

“Where did you find her, anyway?” Margot asked. “She and Seb got engaged at Christmas.” “Tacky.”

Margot lifted her hand as she reversed her rusting Ford Focus out of the driveway, and Sasha, next to her, raised a long middle finger to Kit, who blew a kiss in return.

her mother and Cecelia were expert at ignoring their husband’s venting and any offence it caused.

“Excuse me,” he said. She didn’t move. She imagined opening the door, smashing it into his face. “Excuse me,” he repeated, louder, and she stepped aside.

In just over two months, there would be far fewer boozy dinner parties and a lot more posseting, more picnics eaten in the park, Piglet averting her eyes from Margot’s exposed, dark nipple. She was annoyed at Kit. She might be annoyed at Margot.

After the plates were empty, and they turned to leave, hands entwined, Margot mouthing “thank you” over Sasha’s shoulder, Piglet felt bereft: the beam of her friend’s attention turning from her.

“I’ve always wanted a baby,” Margot would say, a dreamy smile drifting onto her face as if they were high. That surety: Margot had always had it.

She looked at her friend, perched on the edge of the armchair, and she couldn’t help her eyes wandering to Margot’s belly. It protruded from her now, balloon-like, almost cartoonish. Each time Piglet saw her, Margot’s body had changed. After the first month of her pregnancy being visible, Piglet had forced herself to stop asking questions. Margot would answer, but Piglet had always felt little-girlish, naïve, in her marvelling.

“They’re not organised people, though, are they?” Kit said, his mouth full of bean sprouts and green mango. He didn’t look up from the television. “Not like us.”

When she felt the echo of her own flesh, reverberating as she moved, she intensified her efforts until her legs burned, her chest heaved, and sweat poured into her eyes.

When she took him to meet her parents on an Easter weekend, it was not only her old bedroom—now inhabited by her sister, Franny, and her boyfriend, Darren—that felt small. It was the house, the town, the minds of the neighbours, the minds of her parents.

She found herself muttering apologies to Kit, making unkind asides about her parents’ conversation when he did not respond, and, when he laid his hand over hers and told her, “Enough,” her insides had withered: paper burning, curling into ash. In the space where she was both at once her parents’ daughter and Kit’s fiancée, she did not know how to be.

she had found herself telling her mother to talk properly when she described Franny as mardy. She had meant to joke, trying to balance the dichotomy of her life—herself with her family, herself with Kit—but her voice was loud, the edges of her syllables sharp with steel, and the conversation at the table faltered. In the quiet, Piglet’s neck prickled, and her mother excused herself to get the simnel cake even though they were still eating. Her father said, “Well now,” and Piglet cut her lamb into smaller and smaller pieces.

“Shall we talk about this tomorrow?” “Friday?” Piglet asked. Sandra, who was in her mid-forties, had two girls of around ten and didn’t work in the office on Mondays or Fridays because she was a parent and needed to be with them. Piglet wasn’t sure what they did on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

“I want you to put yourself forward for the job.” Piglet looked up. “Really?” “Yes.” Sandra smiled, her thin lips stretching. “I like your taste. And you’re a hard worker. You’re not afraid to ask for what you want, and I appreciate that. If you get the job, I want you to take this forward as its primary editor.”

There were some things that you could not tell your family. She knew that truths, once spoken, had the power to return her to them.

These notes are so ominous and come when good things are happening!

Piglet, light with Pimm’s, had hugged Cecelia before opening the card. Their jewellery clinked as Piglet inhaled a mouthful of Cecelia’s blond hair, bitter with perfume.

“Marriage is…” Cecelia trailed off, head back. “A blessing?” Piglet offered, unsure of where Cecelia was going with her train of thought. “A commitment,” Cecelia said, lifting her head. “Of course,” Piglet said, meeting her eyes. “I know.” “You don’t,” Cecelia said, lowering her head again, “but you’ll make a good wife.”

Margot had kept glancing in her direction, but Piglet did not know how to look at her, her friend, who seemed to belong to her less and less: someone else’s wife, someone else’s mother.

fork?” “There are no prices on this menu,” he had murmured as they stood outside. “I don’t like all that MSG, myself,” her mother had said. “It’s not clean.” When they turned a corner onto Leicester Square, her father’s face had lit up. “Now there’s somewhere we all know,” he said, pointing to a Pizza Hut. “Oh no, Dad,” Piglet had said, grimacing. “Too good for pizza now, are you?” he said, his chest thrown forward, square in his raincoat.

Painfully Real

Piglet had felt as if she might melt into the floor: fat rendering into liquid.

“We can go out in town with my parents,” Kit had said. Piglet nodded.

With his help, she had made a feast of her life. Sit, she encouraged their loved ones. Look at what I have made.

:(

“Can I help?” he asked, and Piglet smiled, imagining what they must look like.

“Can you go and say hello, please?” Franny’s eyes slid between them, her hands clutched around a glass of wine. “It’s alright,” Kit whispered as he walked past, laying a hand on her arm. A second round of cheek-kissing started in the hallway. As Piglet listened to shoes being removed—“We’ve brought our slippers”—

“You’d pay half the price for this house in Derby,” Franny said, looking out of the window in the back bedroom. Behind her, Piglet pulled a face.

When they were younger, Piglet had thought Franny, two years her junior, would eventually match her size, but where Piglet’s body had filled, Franny’s had not. As teenagers, they would stand together in front of the bathroom mirror in their underwear, noting the faults of their bodies. Piglet would look at her sister—shorter, smaller—and feel ashamed at the sight of her own skin.

“Thank you,” she said to Kit, her hand on his arm. He kissed her, and Piglet felt the eyes of her father, her mother, her sister.

Omg

Amid the chaos—their bunk bed in the middle of the room, mouldering suppers among their stationery—Franny had told her. She confided what she had been doing in crumbs: scraps of information that had scared Piglet. When Piglet had told her she should at least tell Mum, Franny had cried. When Piglet had told her she couldn’t keep doing this, Franny had begun to shake, her breathing jagged. So, Piglet had bargained: “Promise me you’ll eat at least a quarter at teatime, and I’ll take care of the rest.”

They cleaned the kitchen together: her transferring leftovers to plastic containers and him washing the wineglasses at the sink. Once they had finished, they would migrate to the living room, wrap themselves in blankets, and find something to watch on the television.

<3

She heard him talking, saw him grasping, and noticed how her flesh puckered beneath his fingers. In between the creases of their sheets, he told her what he had done. She lay broken. Her body, naked, looked as if it had been spilled. Do you still want to get married? he asked, and she could not bring herself to shrug.

When she came to towel herself dry, her skin glowed like a cooked lobster. She had not eaten lobster until she had met him.

Will she not say his name now?

At the train station, she was shocked to find everything as it should be: commuters, coffee cups, the 7:20 on time.

“From the boy?” she asked, removing her leather jacket. “Yes,” Piglet said. “He knows what he’s doing, doesn’t he?” Toni said as she sat down at her computer. “Yes,” Piglet said again.

He paused, leaving a space for her that she did not fill.

She had built her life so carefully around him. To say something, to do something, to feel something, would be to self-destruct. “Be angry with me,” he pleaded, and she could hear the crumple in his face, the stoop in his body. “No,” she replied. “I’m not going to punish you.” “Please,” he said, his voice rising. “No,” she said and hung up the call.

After this weekend, she wanted to be out of the house.

He had wanted her to demand he stay in a hotel, sleep on Seb’s sofa. She hadn’t, but he might have done so anyway—fled after he heard her on the drive, desperate for a doghouse.

How many years had it been since she had stood there, apron on, him pouring wine for her family?

She heard the shower turn on overhead, and she reached for his bowl. She stood at the sink, her running clothes stiff with dried sweat, picked up his fork, and ate until the bowl was clean.

She wondered—if they were to continue as if nothing had ever happened—if it was his betrayal, or herself, that meant so little, that it could be so easily brushed aside.