Not for the first time in life’s wretched hinterland of the twenty-something young professional, Rachel found herself alone in her kitchen at midnight, staring into the refrigerator. Comforted by the machine’s pale glow; its low, somnolent buzzing. The half-finished bottle of Gavi de Gavi shone like a lava lamp in some faraway student bedroom. In the background: the faint smell of cheese, long since eaten or thrown away.
What a tragic evening.
She’d been on a date, like an actual, real-life date. With a guy. From the office. Gavin. He’d literally stood at her desk and asked her out on a date like it wasn’t the cringiest thing ever. Like, oh hey I was wondering if you wanted to go out for dinner with me. She couldn’t say no, because that would’ve made it even worse! So she’d agreed and then this guy, Gavin, had literally booked a table and sent a fucking Uber to collect her.
And it hadn’t been that bad, really.
He’d said some cringey stuff about sushi: something about don’t put the ginger on the fish just eat the ginger after the fish the fish isn’t called sushi the rice is called sushi. Something like that.
She couldn’t really tell if he was a sexist, racist asshole. Most boys were these days. They started talking about crypto currency and from there it was a short hop to boats and flags and once they’d had a couple more drinks they’d share what they believed were genuinely novel ideas about pivoting back to ‘traditional’ gender roles as it was ‘better for society’ and what was also ‘better for society’ was to send all the brown people back to where they came from, even though they (the boys) weren’t exactly sure where that was.
But he didn’t do any of that. He asked her questions: Are you close with your family? Do you have brothers or sisters? What are your life goals? What’s your love language? (cringe). Innocent enough—it was just obvious he’d done all this before, recently—like he was going through a mental checklist covering all the required questions so that later on she, Rachel, his date, would agree, if questioned, that he had asked her about herself and shown genuine interest in her answers.
She couldn’t care less about her answers though, was the thing. He could’ve asked, what cheese does your fridge smell like? and it would’ve made a far more interesting conversation.
Regardless, she decided she was going to let him kiss her. She’d come this far. Might as well answer the only question that mattered—would he be nice to kiss?
But the absolute wanker didn’t even try! Just thanked her for a ‘pleasant evening’ as he stuck her back in an Uber, slightly unsteady from the warm sake he’d performatively ordered which tasted like alcoholic bathwater. And (she might just be imagining this now) she was fairly sure he’d literally patted her on the head as he put her in the car. Like a small child. Or a dog.
What the fuck was she supposed to do now? Back in the office everyone would be like OooOOOooooHHHhhh how Was YOur DaTE WiTh Gav!n? And she’d be like, patted me on the head like a dog, it was so cringe.
“You could stab him in the leg with a cheese fork,” said the fridge.
The fridge had never spoken to Rachel before, so this was new, although it didn’t strike her as particularly surprising. The voice suited the fridge—being, as it was, cool, relaxed, slightly monotone. The voice of a middle-aged woman who wasn’t afraid to drop some truth bombs. Mildly indifferent, though not without empathy.
“What?”
“I said you could stab him in the leg, with a cheese fork.”
“What’s a cheese fork?”
“I’m confident you can figure that out. Have a look on amazon dot com. I bet you could get one by tomorrow.”
“I’m not going to stab him in the leg with a cheese fork,” said Rachel, reaching into her bag for her phone.
#
Two days later, in the office, there was quite the kerfuffle. Someone had apparently stabbed the new guy, Gavin, in the leg, with a cheese fork. An ambulance had been called. It could’ve struck his femoral artery. It hadn’t actually struck his femoral artery, but if it had, he might’ve bled to death and died. So an ambulance had been called as a precaution.
Shortly after hearing the news, Rachel received an email from HR, saying that a complaint had been made against her, the nature of which was confidential, and that she should attend a meeting with Beryl, the director of HR, that afternoon. She could bring along a union representative if she so wished, or just someone else to accompany her, but she chose not to, reasoning that this was all, surely, just a big mistake and would certainly blow over.
Beryl was a person of indeterminate age and provenance. A chalky woman sandwiched between a beehive hairdo and a suit of mauve. Her face, at intervals, pinched itself together in the way a face does when its ears hear the unbearable squeaky sound an inflated balloon makes when its exit hole is forcefully stretched apart. As if the world, to Beryl, was just a continuous barrage of unexpected high-pitched noise.
The nature of the confidential complaint was, Beryl explained, basically along the lines that she, Rachel, had stabbed the new guy, Gavin, in the leg, with a cheese fork.
“I absolutely did not do that,” Rachel replied.
“Well, he’s claiming you did,” Beryl countered, undeterred. “He’s very distressed.”
“Is he actually, you know, hurt?” Rachel asked.
Beryl fiddled with her mouse, giving the impression she was checking some important piece of information on her computer.
“He has some bruising,” she said, still squinting at whatever was on the screen, “and two small divots in the upper portion of his leg.”
“Divots?”
“Two small divots, yes.”
“Beryl,” said Rachel, leaning in now, offering Beryl her sincerest smile, her biggest eyes. “I have never, nor would I ever, nor could I ever, stab someone in the leg with a cheese fork.”
“Well, he’s saying you did.”
“He alleges I did.”
Rachel watched Beryl try to write the word ‘allegedly’ in her notebook. She had two attempts, thwarted each time by the letter d, before crossing out both and placing her pen on her desk and letting out a long sigh.
“Look,” said Rachel, her tone firmer now, businesslike, “is there any actual evidence of me having stabbed Gavin in the leg with a cheese fork? Like any video or witnesses or anything like that?”
“We have to take complaints of this nature seriously,” said Beryl who was, Rachel realised, very much on the back foot.
They had nothing. And in that moment Rachel fancied herself a high-powered barrister in a gritty crime drama—tall and leggy and sexy, with a pencil skirt and a bob haircut and a complicated personal life and no time for shit-eating bent coppers like Beryl. You and I both know you have no hard evidence, so either charge my client or let her go, she would say, before finishing with, this interview is over and flouncing out with her briefcase and skirt.
“This interview is over,” said Rachel.
“It’s not a….”
“I said, good day.”
#
Later, after her post-work shower, Rachel sat on the edge of her bed, wrapped in a wet towel, drying herself for a very long time with the hairdryer. Her hair was already fried to sub-Saharan levels of dryness, but the warmth and the white noise of the hairdryer felt too good, and so she continued wafting it around herself in great arcs. It felt like being baked in an oven.
She lay back on the bed—brain-fogged and exhausted from the day’s events, folding herself into the duvet, luxuriating in the residual hairdryer warmth trapped between the cotton sheets and the damp towel just beneath her thighs.
She thought of Gavin, Gavin’s thigh—pale and meaty. Pictured the sharp tips of the cheese fork pressing into it. The way the skin’s natural elasticity would hold firm for a second—like when you try to cut into a grape—before giving way to the irresistible pressure, letting the tines slide easily into the flesh. Then the blood—Gavin’s blood, the blood of Gavin, would flow forth. Gently at first—shiny, dark rivulets trickling down the silver stub of the cheese fork’s handle, and over the fingers which held it. And then, plunging. Deeper still—probing—eventually hitting just the right spot (femoral artery?) causing an eruption. Thunderous and violent and disturbing. Also, yes, satisfying, as the blood gushed forth and spurted everywhere in a frenzied and shattering and forbidden climax.
#
“Crikey,” said the fridge, later that evening when Rachel was searching for a yoghurt she was pretty sure she’d purchased but which was evidently no longer present.
“You were getting a bit spicy thinking about old Gavin. I thought you didn’t even like him?”
“I don’t.”
“You also said you didn’t stab him in the leg with a cheese fork.”
“I never.”
“Well, just you be careful. We could be in a lot of trouble thanks to your shenanigans.”
“My shenanigans? You were the one who suggested stabbing him in the leg with a cheese fork to begin with.”
“Look, just be careful, that’s all I’m saying.”
“That’s not all you’re saying though, is it?”
#
The next day at work, there was another, even bigger kerfuffle. Someone (they weren’t saying who, they were always very careful not to say who) had snuck up behind Beryl from HR, who was working alone at her desk, and startled her with an airhorn, of the type used by clowns to startle one another.
The word around the office was that Beryl had been extremely startled, and remained so. So startled was she in fact, that she had taken an immediate and indeterminate leave of absence, to go and stay with her sister, who lived in a quiet place quite far away where the chances of being startled were significantly reduced.
As a result, all HR operations, including but not limited to: investigations into alleged cheese fork stabbings, were suspended until further notice.
#
It had all worked out, Rachel thought. Sitting in her dim kitchen, in the chair that was an occasional chair—not really comfortable enough to sit on for very long—drinking the remains of a bottle of Viognier she’d thought was half full when she left it in the fridge but was actually about two-thirds gone.
She swilled her wine around the glass and scrolled absentmindedly on Instagram—Winter Fashion Do’s and Don’ts, Zara haul pending…, Twenty-four hours in Krakow, until she came to a post from her sister, Alice and, as usual felt her heart-rate quicken at the sight of her, plunging into fight or flight mode in anticipation of whatever horror she was about to witness.
Alice was so annoying. Relentlessly posting all her carefully curated images which were just like everyone else’s on this stupid vanity-fest of an app which Rachel could never avoid because she never stopped opening it.
All the tropes were present—doing yoga, walking around with a small dog, sunset yoga, holding a massive iced-coffee with a caption like, just a girl who loves yoga and her coffee xoxo, her flat stomach in the gym, cocktails, sunset cocktails, sunset dogs. All the things she was constantly doing and posting on the internet in lieu of having an actual personality.
Today it was: picture of Alice on park bench, cuddling Pomeranian dog (Betty). Drenched in late autumn sunshine. Head flung back in gregarious cackle of laughter. Wearing ridiculous, oversized sunglasses (Alice not the dog). It could almost pass for a candid moment—spontaneous mirth, captured by chance. But, the thing was, (and Rachel knew this for a fact), whoever had taken that photo had been set the specific task of taking it, by Alice. Could’ve been her current boyfriend (foreign guy—Scandinavian? What was his name again, something to do with bread? Loaf? No that wasn’t it), or could just as likely have been some random passer-by. Either way, that person would’ve been made to suffer the ignominy of multiple failed attempts and rejected angles. God she was irritating.
The caption was truly agonising. Almost unbearable to read. It began:
Today was the day I became a warrior, a protector. Today I learnt what it means to lay down your life for someone you love more than yourself….
It was the dog, obviously, she was talking about the dog. She rambled on for several paragraphs, recounting a traumatic incident which had occurred that very day in which her diminutive Pomeranian had been attacked by a much bigger dog (Doberman) out of nowhere and she (Alice) had jumped in to protect poor little helpless Betty from being savaged to death right there in the park. How she’d miraculously fought and bested the rabid beast and then sat down to have a big laugh about it on a bench was unclear. What was clear was that every word was complete and utter bollocks.
As Rachel stared in consternation at the screen, rage seething within her, a new comment appeared on the post. Actually, it didn’t just ‘appear’ she could see it being typed, letter by letter. Whoever or whatever was typing kept stopping and deleting the words and starting again, struggling to put the letters in the right order. The screen name didn’t change though:
@rachelsfridgeinherhouse
Rachel watched in mild horror as it typed the words—
OM God your a litteral nazi and that never happened!
“What the fuck!?” said Rachel to the fridge.
“She was lying,” the fridge replied. “Making stuff up to get attention.”
“I know!” Rachel shouted back. “But you’re not supposed to say that! And you didn’t have to call her a Nazi for fuck’s sake.”
“It needed to be said. And you weren’t going to say it, so I did. That’s why I’m here, Rachel. I know what’s best for us.”
“Us? There is no ‘Us’. You’re just my fridge. God, I wish I’d never told you about that stupid date with Gavin. Now I’m probably going to lose my fucking job and my sister’s going to be freaking out thinking I’m trolling her from a sock puppet account that’s clearly fucking ME!”
“I don’t know what any of that means,” said the fridge.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Rachel, the will to argue having suddenly and completely abandoned her.
“Listen,” said the fridge, in its kind, neutral voice. “You’re clearly not yourself. Why don’t you climb in with me for a bit? There’s a jar of pickles at the back here, you could use that. It’s full of brine.”
Yes, Rachel thought, brine. That sounded nice. Like the lapping waves of the sea on a bright, sunny morning. She was standing on a beach then, the sound of gulls circling in the air—following the early morning trawlers back to shore with their catch. She felt the sun on her neck, tasted the salt on her tongue and in her hair, which for some reason was in her mouth.
As she was thinking these thoughts, of the sun and sea and salt and hair, Rachel climbed inside the fridge. Into its cool, plasticky interior. It was less like a beach in here and more like a hospital, but a nice one. There was some sort of coating on its walls (antimicrobial?) the smell of cheese stronger inside. Fromage, the French called it. That wasn’t important now. What mattered was the brine, the pickle jar.
She would make a home of it. Suspended in liquid. Encased in glass. Safe at the back of the fridge to wait out the long winter that was to come, to take the voyage she must now take.
And later, when the time was right, she would emerge. Fully restored. Better equipped to deal with all of life’s rich fuckery. Capable of making decisions. More photogenic.
Seasoned.
Infinitely more piquant than any of those selfish assholes could possibly imagine.