Chinese Modesty

She knew her way around ingredients, and her herb-garden had a well-trodden path. He enjoyed watching her cook, appreciated the artistry behind her knife skills. There were no recipe books here, no measuring cups or scales. Just Muniko and her catalogue of smells, colours and flavours.

The rollers in her hair were held in place by a scarf which seemed to have been chosen at random in the dark. Her blue checked overall had lost buttons over many years of use, and clothes pegs now took their place. She balanced a cigarette on her lower lip and squinted against the smoke and the fumes from the burner. She punctuated her sentences with expletives and every time she waved her arms she flashed a bit of coarse, damp armpit hair. To Raymar, she was a fallen angel captured in the silhouette of a silver harvest moon.

"No mutton for me today" he said.
"You could have phoned, you good-for-nothing fuck!" came the prompt reply.

He zoned out as she started to work, a dervish of blue checked polyester and steel. In a ceramic bowl, she wisked an egg, and added to it freshly grated coconut along with its milk. She added a spoonful of reddish paste which looked like it contained chilli seeds. This was followed by mussels, prawns, a few basil leaves and a bruised lemongrass stalk. The bowl was placed in a bamboo steamer perched over a wok of bubbling water.

"You don't appreciate me, you think you can just walk in here when you like" she spat.

He was transfixed by the length of the ash she managed to balance on the end of her clove cigarette. The crackling of the burning tobacco was an accompaniment to the scherzo of her stirring spoons.

"You don't even have a car to take me out"

He watched as a droplet of perspiration swelled in her neck and then trickled down her cleavage.

"I don't even know what work you do"

He breathed in slowly, trying to separate her smell from that of the spices and herbs in the kitchen. The noisome met the cooking incense in silent clash, but it was the lemongrass that took victory.

She glared at him, then suddenly spun round and grabbed the bowl from the steamer and plonked it unceremoniously in front of him, along with a bowl of fragrant jasmine rice. Yes, she was very good at creating something from nothing.

With a grimace which could with some stretch of the imagination be construed as a smile, just enough to give a glimpse of a gold tooth, she nodded to him, then the bowl.

"Eat. The salt is probably less, neh?"