A thermos, of all things

or, a very short story

“… and oh Tom, you’ll laugh. Do you know what he did?”

“What?” I asked, unsure of whether I’d actually been listening. Jodie was sat next to me on a rock. A curl of black hair had escaped the side of her beanie and it flicked in the wind like the tail of some small animal.

“He—” she stopped, her hand moving to her mouth, stifling laughter. “He—” she tried again, her whole body shaking as she giggled.

“He what? What did he do?” I asked, unable to stop smiling. I wasn’t entirely sure how I’d found myself on this walk, but I kept having to remind myself that I was with her. Actually with her. Alone.

“It’s stupid,” she went on, pulling me back. “I don’t know why it bothered me and why I found it so funny.”

“What?” I repeated, feeling impatience laced with the slightest relief. The jealousy of last weekend still lingered. “Are you going to tell me?”

“OK, OK,” she said, still laughing. “Well, you know, we got there, sat down under this huge oak, picnic blanket out, it was all very proper and nice.” She made a sort of I was impressed shape with her mouth and tilted her head to one side. I felt my jealousy rise again. “And he even made sandwiches. Well, I’m pretty sure he bought them, but he’d at least taken them out of the packet and put them in containers so it looked like he’d made them.”

“Impressive,” I said, thinking that was precisely what Nick would do.

“And he put them out on cheap serviettes instead of paper plates.”

Less so, but also very Nick. In any case, I nodded along, doing my best to listen and not be distracted by her eyes.

“Plus, he’d bought a bottle of wine. Some trash shit, probably five pounds or less. But whatever, wine is wine.”

Wine is wine, I thought. Nick and I only ever drank beer, so I had no idea and I doubt he did either, but I mentally filed away a ten pound note for when it would be me purchasing the wine.

She continued, saying, “And so then, even though we had wine, he pulled out a thermos, and so I said to him, ‘We have wine and you’ve brought a thermos?’ and he looked at me with that stupid I’m confused face.”

I laughed. She was right. When Nick was confused, he would frown, a deep double crease emerging between his eyes, his mouth pouting along with it. It made him look idiotic. He’d done it all through university, earning him the title FuddleNick. He still did it now. Probably more so.

“OK, so big deal, he had a thermos,” I said, eyeing the one that was protruding from my unzipped backpack. I shifted my leg to block it from Jodie’s view.

“Yeah, which is fine, right? But then he opened it and—” she burst into laughter again, except this time her hand alighted on my knee. It stayed there for the briefest moment, then it was gone, like a bee finding a flower devoid of any nectar.

“Jodie, you’re killing me,” I said, even though I knew. I knew what she was about to say.

“OK, OK,” she said, trying to convince herself she could continue without laughing. “So he opened the thermos and tipped out… sausages! Like, canned sausages. He’d been cooking canned sausages inside a thermos and he’d brought them with him. To our picnic, Tom. He’d brought canned sausages inside a thermos, of all things!” And that was when she lost it, rolling back and erupting in laughter.

I waited for it to subside, watching her, so carefree and beautiful. Then I said, “It’d keep them hot, I suppose.” That earned me a smile, one as warm as the hand that had briefly touched my leg.

“Anyway.” She sat up again, the laughter exhausted. “He poured them out, pushed them into some of the sandwiches and ate them, saying it was a habit from uni, a bit like how some people did the same with crisps.”

“Did you eat any?” I ventured.

“God no. Disgusting!”

“Yeah. Right. Really disgusting…” I trailed off.

“Come on,” she said, standing. “Let’s walk a bit more before we stop again for lunch.”

“OK, you’re the boss.” I winced, tried to undo my words. Jodie laughed, flicked me a wink that made me die inside, and began to set off along the path.

I pushed my thermos back into my bag, zipped it up and made to follow. The sausages cooking within could wait for later.

Photo by Aleksei Zaitcev on Unsplash

---

OK so this is about as raw and rushed as my writing can get. This post is late. Very late. It’s been a hell of a week and so I’ve just scrambled this out in the space of a couple of hours. I hope you’ll forgive the rough edges.

I think it was Neil Gaiman (it could well have been someone else…?) who said that a writer should collect all kinds of observations and throw them on a compost heap of the mind to ferment away. A snippet of this story came from such an observation: Jo and I were on a train into the city and we overheard a group of lads on the way to the footy. They were laughing about the fact that one of their friends cooked his sausages inside a thermos and had them for lunch. We both found ourselves smirking whilst overhearing that story and I thought to myself, “I’ll have that, thank you,” and threw it onto the compost. Turns out it didn’t need to ferment for very long.