Book One – Chapter 19

Instead, Bubs got off the stool. He made it more than obvious that he avoided every smear on the floor. He waddled around the workbench and halted in front of the sink.

Yu stayed where he was, and how he was, choked by a rigid ruff of irritation and indignity. Though, his eyes followed Bubs. The sink was a ruin, a mess of bowls piled in a collapsing tower. It grew worse the longer Yu looked at it. He had used far more bowls than there had been people. All the spoons, and two of the three ill-chosen mugs lay buried among them. A landslide of seven dish towels, each stiffened, soaked, splotched, or otherwise compromised beyond redemption, was wedged in between, slumped over the rim like casualties. Everything had been thrown in without order, stacked at random and way too high, some things the right way up and others overturned, with the rugs swimming in their own filth. Basically, Yu had tossed each thing just as it came, the instant he no longer needed it. That had accumulated chaos until the sink was unusable. There was no room to do the washing up. It was physically impossible to open the water pipe without straight-up flooding the sink. And all around were the million drops and dribbles that Yu had either missed or merely smeared into more disgusting shapes.

Yu was suddenly very aware of the places that he had not touched — the immaculate cupboards lined in martial symmetry with pots, bowls and plates; the shelves with their disciplined array of cutlery, all sorted in meticulous rows, the walls hung with tools that were all arranged by shape, aligned by size and placed in their designated niches. Everything knew its place. It all was just too neat.

From the sink, Bubs continued around the workbench. He circled the room, his huge eyes absorbing every detail left and right. He took in all the bottles that Yu had fetched, examined, poured, and served, as well as the ones he had mislabelled, misjudged, and ultimately abandoned; the wrong spirits, the not-quite-drinks and the absolutely-not-for-consumption-liquids that had seemed promising until he had pulled them out.

And then, in the shadowed recess of the table beside the kitchen entry, there was that mug; the culinary shipwreck with a shimmer of Dundinway floating above a sunken reef of stew.

And the Sharran Vey.