Description Of A Kitchen Event

First published 'The Bibliofantastic' 1999



Will and Murphy sensed their kitchen had ghosts. Many confirmed it after the Event.

In hindsight, ‘Event’ was a strange word to call it. In the old days, there were ‘happenings’ which students, in the name of art, wrote, painted or enacted with crazy abandon. Will and Murphy had been such sixties swingers when flower power and drugs were all the rage - And, it was with some rage that, today, they found themselves owning a house which was virtually unsaleable because of its kitchen’s gradually inferred reputation as a hive of ghosts ... unless, of course, they found two equally gullible mugs to buy it off them.

Will was a sturdy, six-foot sixty year old, still bearing the good looks of his youth. Greying at the temples. Murphy was not Murphy’s real name. It was the pet name Will had for her. Murphy’s Law - known to some as Sod’s - was a well tried and tested rule of thumb which implied if you were going to drop some toast with marmalade on, it would sure damn well drop marmalade downwards - and any such variation on a theme of always buying electrical goods that were faulty or being the only one near enough to a car that sprayed past in a rainstorm to get a big dollopful over one’s stockings. If Murphy’s law had a patron saint it was Murphy, née Jessica, someone’s daughter, someone’s mother and Will’s wife.

So, of course, Will blamed Murphy for the state of the kitchen.

“You’re a right old jinx, Murff,” he exclaimed one day, after dropping a bottle of milk fast followed by food cindered by what he called the poltergeist in the grill.

“I can’t help it if I set these things off. 1 didn’t bring them here. They were already here.” Murphy’s voice was on the brink of tears.

Both had forgotten how to apportion blame. Was the kitchen really haunted, as the recent rumours seemed to imply? Or were Will and Murphy just plain clumsy? Or did they give a false significance to the things that went wrong and to the meaningful coincidences and to the inexplicable bumps in the night, all of which were commonplace and un-noteworthy to every other couple in the country?

They shrugged everything off and decided just to flow with the tide, each good thing balancing out each bad thing, until they died or fell in with a better sense of serendipity or decided to sell the house to anybody else of a similar frame of mind or simply forgot to notice and drifted on till the universal boredom that infected other people set in with Will and Murphy, too.

Until the happening of the Event in the kitchen.

One day, when Will was out working out his worries, Murphy decided to put into words what she felt about the kitchen, just finally to get the whole thing out of her system. A purge, a catharsis, whatever. Anyway, she found an old school exercise book - a red glossy one with old-fashioned weights and measures listed on the back cover, one which had long since suffered her childish scribble at the beginning - and, with painstaking neatness, she wrote out the title on the first clean page -


DESCRIPTION OF A KITCHEN
by Jessica Johnson


The rest is history. Or was. Will came home, sweaty from some indeterminate physical activity, to find Murphy slumped at the kitchen table, pen still pressed to the tail-end of the word “Event” written in huge infantile scrawl under the title.

The fridge-freezer was found to have juddered to a halt with the food inside already rank with decay. The washing-machine churned with loud clanking noises, the clothes inside torn to ribbons. The unfit grill was fast gassing the room...

It was a remarkable tableau which, if encapsulated, would have made a remarkable ending to this story. A true artistic Happening. But, as for Will, he realised that the law of averages was not an average law which either made sense of there now being a reliable ghost added to those who finally told him the kitchen was haunted or it didn’t.