"Can I ask you one thing, Julie?"

"Feel free," I reply, exhaling cigarette smoke.

"Does your mother know where the mousseline originated?"

"That's what's worrying me, Sylv."

"Perhaps she imagines you purchased it at the deli."

"Yes, but why on earth would I buy raw fish guts at the deli? Besides, they don't sell raw fish guts at delis."

"This is true," she replies, sinking into a smoker's pose, nodding as if I've just made an interesting point, say, about foreign-exchange rates.

"Mother must guess where it came from. I just can't believe she did that, Sylvana."

"Although you're the one who actually went ahead and liquidized them in the first place."

"Yes. So?"

"With the intention of feeding it to him in any case."

"So?"

"I think you're brilliant."

We burst out laughing and she sits back in her chair.

"I only wish you'd let him know what he's just eaten."

And in a way, it does seem a crying shame that Ronan gets to leave the kitchen without so much as a clue that there is cargo of tropical marine life presently swimming through his intestinal corridors, in a rather devolved form.

Hers is an attractive proposition. But how would I break the news to him? How does one explain such a thing? How does one choose the words? How does one convey the images? I couldn't keep a straight face.

"No, Sylvana..."

I take a drag of my fag before I add: "Always allow a decent delay before the punchline."

36 36.

Ten minutes later I go into the lounge. I'm expecting Ronan to be in fairly poor spirits after our joint whipping session.

He is.

He's standing with his back to me, arms crossed, glaring through the french windows at heavy, purple-streaked rain clouds, black fumes visibly smoking from his body.

For the first time I notice that Ronan is wearing a wine jacket with his mustard-coloured polo-neck sweater and trousers. An unusual blunder for him: wine and mustard definitely don't mix.

"What," he says calmly, "the hell was that all about?"

He doesn't even bother turning round.

To avoid illuminating my husband as to what the hell that was all about, I continue past the couch until I hit the aquarium. I then lean over and start counting our slightly depleted fish stocks. Just watching them would make you dreamy. My remaining swimmering darlingsthe originalsare gleamering loverly and lappily in the gleen, brubbily watertight.

He repeats the question, using the same word pattern.

"What was all what about, Ronan?"

I can hear him pacing up and down behind me.

"What was all that bullshit, Julie?" he shoots.

"I thought it was fish mousseline."

"Cut the crap. You're still hung up on that affair business, aren't you? You're the lawyer; you present evidence when you make a charge. So where's your evidence?"

Does he really expect me to tell him what I know? Does he truly want me to put his mind at ease? To put him on notice of the evidence against him, to concede him the advantage, to carte blanche my auto-erasure?

Not a chance.

"I'm not hung up on your affair at all," says I into the fish tank.

"What's your problem, then?"

"You want to know what the problem is?"

He waits.

I turn round. "Okay, Ronan. I'll come clean."

Standing in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets, he stares at the floor. He's listening. For once in his life.

"Those colours just don't go," I tell him, striding towards the french windows.

"What?"

"You know very well that mustard and wine don't match. They make you look like a circus clown, Ronan..."

I swear I just heard muffled laughter from the kitchen.

"...and I will not be married to a circus clown."

"This is pathetic."

"Oh, lighten up, Ronan. Debung your arse. We were just having a bit of fun with you over that pathetic video. That's all."

"The two of you were behaving like a couple of witches over a bubbling cauldron."

I laugh out loud at the pinpoint accuracy of his metaphor. Stuff like this puts you in good spirits. I can't wait for him to learn about Chi Chi later on tonight when I return from his surgery. later on tonight when I return from his surgery.

He goes over to the aquarium and leans against it, flushed with annoyance. He stands there for a while. Uh-oh. He seems to have noticed something. Something tells me he's going to begin a discussion about entities, which unbeknown to him are presently digesting in his upper to middle intestines.

He scratches the underside of his chin and straightens himself. "Julie."

"What?"

"Where are the fish?"

"In the aquarium."

"You know what I mean."

"No, Ronan, I don't know what you mean. The fish are in the fish tank. I can see them with my own eyes."

"I'm talking about the fish I bought last Friday."

"You bought fish on a Friday?" I eye him aghast. "You do realize, Ronan, that it's against Canon Law to buy fish on a Friday? Or should that be meat..."

"Julie," he says in the voice of a terminally patient schoolteacher. "What did you do with them?"

"They went missing," I shoot back.

"Where?"

"I don't...really think you want to know."

"Did you return them to the aquarist?"

"All but three of them."

"All but three of them."

"Yes."

When he recovers from this he starts feeling his neck. "What about those three? Where are they?"

"I flushed them down the toilet."

He starts pacing again. He's stroking his chin. He's mulling this over as he walks. "You flushed them...down the toilet?"

"Pre-cise-ly."

"Makes sense," he replies, as if I've just discovered a highly practical method of deblocking the sewage pipes.

"They don't mind," I assure him. "They'll have enjoyed their swim."

"In the excrement?"

"They'll find some clear spaces."

He nods, then bows his head. He looks like he's biting the knuckle of his index finger, concentrating. "It sounds like PMT."

Now he's pacing around like a Hollywood impression of a courtroom lawyer.

"Come on, Ronan, fish don't suffer from PMT."

"You, Julie. You You. You've gone completely...hormonal."

Me? Hormonal? Hardly! What I did was gory, perhaps, but not hormonal. Sociopathic maybe, but certainly not hormonal.

It's time to defend what sanity I have left. "You know as well as I do that adding those extra fish last Friday threatened the existing ones."

"Did you really flush them down the toilet, Julie?"

"Yes."

"I quite liked them, you know."

"You enjoyed them, did you?"

"As a matter of fact I did."

"It gives me great pleasure to hear that, Ronan."

"You killed off aesthetic objects, Julie. Just like that."

"They weren't objects, you idiot. They were alive."

"They were beautiful."

Amazing. He bought them three days ago and already he's nostalgic.

"But of course, when it comes to aesthetic appreciation, you clearly have none."

I think about this for a few seconds. "I agree."

It's game, set and match to Ronan. He is absolutely right. On the scale of aesthetic appreciation I lay claim to pure zero. One only has to remember the art book I bought him and what I did with it.

His arms are straight as buttresses against the aquarium as he peers inside at all the free space. Suddenly I notice something expose itself underneath the edge of his jacket sleeve. I get a huge shock when I realize what it is. It's that gold Raymond Weil watch, the one that managed to cost nearly one grand.

I dart over to him and pull up the sleeve. "Ronan, where did you get that watch?"

He freezes. He glances at his new Raymond Weil. Gold. Simple face.

"I bought it."

"Did you really?"

"Yes. It's second-hand. Not that expensive."