Kishore Singh: Peek-a-booze

This morning, while leaving for work, my son pinched a bottle of white wine – “for after”, he said – weekends being when he heads off from office to be with his friends, though my wife insists that any wine bottles are intended for a girlfriend, while the whiskies are for keeping his stag friends in scotch spirits. Going by the depleting stock at home, he’s been seeing the significant person almost as much as his buddies, though the lack of supply at least in the bar could be on account of my wife — not because she’s taken to tippling like my mother-in-law used to, but because she’s hiding away bottles from our son and daughter who must think their parents own a brewery.

“I’ll take a vodka,” my daughter will furnish her list, “and maybe a bottle of champagne,” when going out after work, which is often, “how can I show up empty-handed?” “All we do is subsidise their friends,” my wife muttered darkly to me, searching all over the house for a cache of Jamaican rums that she’d secreted away somewhere and forgotten. They weren’t to be found behind the books in the library (though I did glimpse two bottles of single malt there), nor behind the towels in the linen cupboard in the guest bathroom (where she’d tucked away the Pernod), nor in the flour bin (“there’s only gin here”, she muttered), nor even in the box bed (where two cases of beer we found had expired past their consume-by date, and which our son then refused to carry for his buddies).

The last time we had friends over, there was the usual alcohol available, but no two labels were the same because my wife could no longer remember where the whisky had been spirited away. I checked the kitchen and bedroom lofts with little luck (there was Old Monk in the former, and Goan port that no one I know drinks in the latter), but we needn’t have worried, for our guests seemed well informed of her hiding places, having previously hunted and pegged down her favourite hideaway for single malts in the jewellery safe (the jewellery, in turn, wrapped in crumpled newspapers and stuffed into shoes that, then, were kept in boxes among the gifts to be given away).

It’s a wonder that our son found any wine at all, at least considering I’d been unable to when wanting to stock the fridge for casual guests, a mixed case of reds and whites having mysteriously vanished from the apartment. It wasn’t among the party dishes or the party clothes, nor rolled up with the spare carpet, nor, indeed, where the emergency rations were stored. When a second case similarly self-depleted, it was clear that our son was seeing more of his wine-drinking friend than was good for the supply line, and the tap seemed in danger of being turned off.

“You want wine, you pay for it,” my wife laid down the law, which seemed to me fair, since I appeared to be running a pub for non-paying customers, but which immediately caused the children to protest about our lack of gratefulness given how they could have chosen to live away on their own. “Some hope,” grunted my wife, after I’d soothed ruffled feathers, “and now if you’ll fetch me the tequila from the laundry basket, I think I’ll have a margarita.”