It was a Monday night. We were sat around a dinner table and outside was a downpour. The rain had been incessant lately. I couldn’t remember a time when the rain was so constant in England, but then I had a terrible memory. However, indoors it was very nice. Emma had cooked delicious chicken stewed with segments of orange – but she didn’t serve herself any of the citrus because she said she had a difficult relationship with fruit. Today was in fact Halloween and the roasted vegetables and soft cherry tomatoes in the dish were meant to give an autumnal vibe. We questioned whether it was more of a Halloween spread because it contained pumpkin? Emma didn’t think so. She reminisced that when she was a child during this holiday ex-pats from America would give the children ghoulish foods like eyeballs made of lychees, which coincidentally was where her suspicion of fruit stemmed from.
The delicious vapours from the kitchen wafted out of the patio doors, which were open a crack and at its base sat my little brown dog who was looking mournfully out at the sodden garden. She was afraid of everything: at the commuter trains passing by upon raised train tracks, at the fireworks going off for Divali, and at the prospect of getting wet. I asked whether the house got any trick-or-treaters? Another guest said they overheard a dad outside warning his children not to knock on this door because, ‘Emma wouldn’t like it.’ Last year her partner had appendicitis on Halloween, and so Emma had to go to the hospital and left a pile of sweets outside the front door with a passive aggressive note saying, ‘Don’t knock sick person inside but help yourself to sweets’. This probably gave her the reputation of being someone cantankerous.
The rain was not letting up. We were now on to desserts of freshly oven-baked chocolate chip cookies (crunchy on the outside, chewy at its centre). We tried to remember what our first ever Halloween costumes were. Annina and I were obviously vampires; unoriginal yet very in keeping with ye olde traditions of All Hallow’s Eve. Char who heralds from the States went as Mickey Mouse aged four. Emma dressed as something not as good as her younger sister and remembers feeling petulant about it. Aidan had a costume made of leaves to dress as the literary version of Peter Pan. The last guest remembered how he went to a church gathering instead called a “Hallelujah Happening” where they were discouraged from dressing up as anything to do with the devil, so he wore an orange t-shirt.
