Toast (4 page)

Mother was desperate to be a homemaker, a woman capable of sewing on a button, darning a sock or icing a fairy cake. In the early evening, sitting under the standard lamp
in the lounge, head tilted and the tip of her tongue pinched between her lips, she spent what seemed like hours trying to thread white cotton through the eye of a needle. ‘Let me do it' was met with a sigh and ‘I've nearly done it now'. Try as she might, buttons popped off within a day or two, toes poked through neat but ineffective repairs, icing pooled into the craters in her cakes or, on the rare occasion they rose, ran down the sides in rivulets and stuck the flowery paper cases to the plate.

Mrs Poole made the beds, fed the winceyette sheets through the ironing machine with its long cotton-covered roller, and would sew a stray button on to my school shirt. Mother made up for this humiliation by making rice pudding. Warm, milky rice. Rice that never thickened the sweet liquid it floated in, so what should have been a creamy spoonful the texture of risotto had to be sipped, like broth. The skin browned and puffed into a black-and-gilt dome. The kitchen smelled like a kitchen should.

The skin was removed in one perfect scoop and deposited in my father's bowl. ‘It's the best bit,' he used say. Then the round rice was fished up from the depths and divided between us all. Then she would pick up the enamel tin and spoon out the milk. ‘Anyone for jam?' she would say, passing round the Hartley's strawberry. I was the only taker, stirring the sweet glop into the milk then regretting it when it stayed in blobs and sank to the bottom of the dish.

Milky milky rice is considered a failure by rice-pudding
aficionados, yet I preferred it to her occasional successes. Warm sweet milk was what a mother should smell of.

BUTTERSCOTCH FLAVOUR:
Sugar, Modified Starch, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, Emulsifiers (Propane-1, 2-diol esters of fatty acids, Soya Lecithin), Gelling Agents (Disodium phosphate, Diphosphates), Milk Protein, Lactose, Colours (Plain Caramel, Annatto, Betanin), Whey Powder, Flavourings, Salt.

Emptying a sachet of Angel Delight into half a pint of milk and whisking it for a minute and a half was as near as my mother ever got to making modern desserts. She remembered which flavour – Strawberry, Butterscotch, Chocolate or Banana – she had served last, and never risked boring us with the same flavour twice in a row. Butterscotch and Banana were the only truly acceptable flavours to us. We ate the others to humour her.

Butterscotch Angel Delight was magic. Magic in the way that if you stood over it for five minutes you could actually watch the powder and milk thicken into a creamy dessert. Magic in the way it seemed to thicken further once you put it in your mouth. Magic in what seemed like a mean portion in the bowl became almost too much of a good thing in the mouth. Magic in the way that it
managed to taste of both sugar and soap at the same time.

At least twice a week my mother would make mashed potato and pile it in great, buttery, cloud-like mounds next to boiled gammon or lamb chops. It was the one thing my mother couldn't get wrong. But then, good mash isn't about cooking. It's about the ability to beat lumps out of a cooked potato. Anyone could do that. Except, apparently, a school dinner lady. Mash was the only truly glorious thing Mum ever made.

There was no moment so perfect as when you squished her mashed potato into warm parsley sauce or hot gravy with your fork. The soft potato pushing up in wavy lines through the gaps between the prongs, curling over on itself, stained with dark drops of gravy. No roast potato stuck to its roasting tin; no crinkle-cut chip; no new potato with chopped mint could ever get the better of a dollop of creamy mash. I looked forward to it like I looked forward to nothing else.

One day I came home from school to find my mother sitting there at the kitchen table, her head bent down towards her lap, her eyes closed, her chest heaving slowly and deeply. She had started to do this rather a lot recently. It was as if there was something that she had to concentrate
on, something she could only do by closing out the rest of her senses.

Today the potatoes were grainy and salty, wet but possessed of a dry, almost powdery feel in the mouth. ‘The mash tastes funny, Mummy.' Quietly and firmly, in a tone heavy with total and utter exasperation, and with a distant rasp after the first word, she said, ‘Nigel…Just eat it.'

As soon as she went upstairs, I climbed down from the table to scrape the offending spud into the bin. Tucked under the packet that once held the frozen peas was a maroon-and-black packet I had never seen before. In large creamy-white letters were the words Cadbury's Smash.

It's a Saturday in mid-August and we have dragged the picnic table on to the lawn. My mother likes it to sit between the apple trees so she doesn't have to squint in the sunshine. She is wearing Scholl sandals and a duck-egg blue dress with sprigs of daisies. It has buttons up the front. She and my father bring the food out from the kitchen while I just sit at the table looking at my lap. There's a bowl of pale lettuce, some slices of beetroot in vinegar, cucumber cut so thin you could read the Bible through it and a sauce boat of Heinz Salad Cream. We must be the only family in Britain to put salad cream in a sauce boat.

My mother puts a tomato on my plate and cuts it in quarters, then a few giant curls of lettuce, two slices of beetroot and tells me, ‘You don't have to have salad cream if you don't want to.' I know what's coming. My father is eyeing my plate, searching for the slice of ham that will turn his puny son into a Viking warrior.

Without a word he stabs his fork into a slice of ham and slaps it on my plate. A hot wave of hate goes through my body. Hate ham, hate him.

Actually, I rather like ham. What I don't like is this ham. The sort of ham that comes from an oval green tin and is surrounded by golden-brown jelly. The sort of ham it takes an age to prise from its aluminium coffin. The sort of ham that my father carves very thinly with the same knife he uses for the Sunday roast. Pretty-pink ham, evil jelly.

It is amazing how long it can take to scrape every morsel of jelly from a slice of cold boiled meat. I spend a good fifteen minutes separating good from bad, pushing the jelly towards the edge of my plate. A scientist exhuming a mummified corpse wouldn't have been as patient as I am. Meanwhile, my father is glaring at me with a mixture of anger and disgust. Disgust at what I am not quite sure. Could it be the waste of valuable protein or the waste of valuable time? Could it be simply that it looks ungrateful? Perhaps it is the way I am doing it, like someone has put poo on my plate.

Mother is silent, Father is silently fuming. If he were a cartoon you'd see the smoke coming out of his ears.

Suddenly, he reaches across the table, picks up my plate with its ham, salad and painstakingly removed jelly and chucks it across the lawn. Mother pulls her lips into a thin, straight line. Ham, beetroot, lettuce and cucumber are spread out on the lawn. I get down from table and run in through the kitchen and upstairs to my bedroom. I close the door, lie face down on the bed and wait.

If you opened a sachet of the original Space Dust and poured it into your mouth, the little citrus and chemical beads crackled and hissed like you had put your tongue on a battery. If you poured three packets in at once, it was like putting your tongue on an electric fence. This is probably why they changed the formula.

Auntie Fanny looks so bored sitting in her chair, the one with the rubber liner for when she wets her long winceyette pants. The ones that come down to her knees. You feel you want to brighten her day. Sometimes I sit and talk to her even though I know she can't hear a word I am saying. I can say rude words to her like willy and bum and she just smiles at me and hums. Sometimes we swap sweets. She gets my chocolate buttons, I get her Parma Violets. I once gave her a Toffo but it stuck her dentures together. Mum said that sometimes I can be a little thoughtless.

She looks so bored sitting there, humming to herself. I'm sure Auntie Fanny would enjoy a sachet of Space Dust. Maybe even two. Or even three.

‘Mum…Mum…Auntie Fanny's doing it AGAIN.'

Not only has my brother got
A Hard Day's Night,
a pair of desert boots and a donkey jacket with leather patches on the elbows, he's even been to an Indian restaurant. It is easy to hate someone like that. He thinks it's time I experienced the scented delights of chicken biryani and lamb vindaloo and takes me, together with our other brother John, to the Kohinoor, a small flock-wallpapered Indian restaurant tucked behind the rollerdrome in Wolverhampton.

The restaurant is almost empty and smells of armpits. ‘I'm going to have a Bombay duck and a chicken biryani,' says Adrian as soon as we're seated. John goes for the chicken vindaloo, then they start laughing about something called the Ring of Fire, which doesn't seem to be on my menu. It must one of the ‘specials'. The menu is terrifying, though not half so much as the man in a turban standing at the kitchen doorway, his arms folded in front of him. It is like he is daring us to set foot in the kitchen.

‘I can't manage both, I'll just have the Bombay duck,' I say timidly. It sounds exotic, even more so than chicken
Madras. Adrian asks me if I know what Bombay duck is and I assure him I do. He and John seem to find something funny. Adrian then orders a biryani for me too, despite my pleading, and insists I will manage both.

We get a pile of giant crisps as big as a plate and some spicy gunk to dip them in that makes my nose run and my ears sting. They order beers and I drink my first ever shandy. My brothers say it's only like drinking pop, but even so not to mention it to Dad. The Bombay duck arrives – a wizened bit of grey bark smelling like something that has been dead a very long time. Putrid. ‘It's not like I had it last time,' I say rather grandly, without thinking the fib through thoroughly.

The lone waiter in evening dress brings the biryanis and John's vindaloo. I am not at all sure about this. The room smells of mildew and beer and the aforementioned armpits and the man on the kitchen door hasn't smiled once since we arrived. The waiter smells funny too and his suit is shiny round the collar. The chicken is dark and strongly flavoured, browner than I have ever known chicken to be. Adrian tells me not to play with my food and just eat it. ‘Are you sure this chicken's all right?' I ask, poking at the hedgehog-coloured meat like it was poisoned.

‘Yes, it's the spices that make it that colour,' assures John, who seems to know quite a bit about Indian food.

I gingerly swallow a few mouthfuls. Actually, I probably could eat more but there is something I don't like about
this place. Something sinister, something a little ‘grubby'. Adrian suddenly snaps, ‘You little sod, you've hardly eaten anything.'

A couple of weeks later I gleefully cut a piece out of the
Express and Star
(usually pronounced in its catchment area as the Expressenstar) and leave it on the kitchen table. It is story about health inspectors finding skinned cats hanging up in the fridges of Indian restaurants.

Mother is upstairs, having forty winks, as she calls her afternoon nap. Adrian is standing in the doorway, smiling and swaying back and forth. His eyes flicker open and closed. He stumbles over to the sofa with its white cotton covers with their sprigs of flowers, stands at the end of it then falls backwards on to the sunken cushions. He lies there on his back, his eyes open then close, then he crosses his hands on his chest like Boris Karloff and goes to sleep.

Adrian got Hush Puppies this week, slip-ons the colour of a roe deer. The ones with the black elastic patches at the side. They look great with his narrow black knitted tie and his white button-down shirt. Mum has promised to take me shopping to Beau Brummell's for a button-down shirt for school. She says I can't have a tie like his because I will never wear it and suede shoes will last all of five minutes
with me. She reckons I grazed my new sandals, horrid red-brown ones with diamonds cut into the toes within two days. She says she doesn't believe me when I tell her that Maxwell Mallin and Peter Francis jumped on them in the playground at lunchtime. Then, after a pause to get her breath, she snaps, ‘It wouldn't happen if you'd play with the other boys.' It is one of our rare icy moments. It occurs to me that if she died I would be allowed to wear a black tie to school.

Josh has come to do the garden but sees my brother asleep and says he has to go back home and will come again on Monday. I follow him out to the drive but he seems distant, cold even. I explain that my brother is a really nice guy but Josh doesn't want to know, he just revs up and drives off. Distant. ‘I'll see you then.'

When I come back Adrian is in a different position, and the sofa seems to have mysteriously moved forward a good two feet. The rooms smells of tinned chicken soup and something sour.

There is the sound of a key in the door and my father pops his head round the door. ‘Adrian's asleep, Mum's asleep,' I say, even though it probably doesn't need saying. Daddy stares intently at my brother, screwing up his eyes like he is trying to work something out. ‘Hmm,' he grunts.

On the kitchen table is a large, cardboard box with short sides. A large sandwich loaf, a packet of butter, two bags of white sugar, a bunch of red, blue, white and magenta
anemones, a blackcurrant pie, a box of Terry's All Gold and the
Radio
and
TV Times.
My father brings more stuff up out of the boot of the Rover and puts it down on the table, grabs the box of All Gold and takes it back to the car and puts it in the glovebox. He then hands me a box of Mackintosh's Weekend and tells me to take it upstairs to Mum.

By the time I'm back down – she's asleep – he's cut each of us a slice of blackcurrant pie, sliding the thin slices on to glass Pyrex plates. This is the pie I think about all week. The pie I lie in bed and dream about before I go to sleep. The fruit is sharp and sweet, the pastry pale and crumbly, like it is only just about cooked. It has no decoration save a small hole like a navel in the middle. Sometimes it isn't quite in the centre. I don't understand this, why would you put it off-centre? I eat my pie slowly, pushing my fork down through the sugar crust and into the purple-blue fruit below.

Someone thumps the huge knocker on the door twice. I can hear Warrel, my best friend. ‘Can Nige come out to play?' My father pokes his head around the door. ‘Well, can he?' ‘Nigel can't come out just now, he isn't feeling well,' I say, biting my lip. My father smiles and disappears. Play with my best friend or have second portions of pie? No contest.

I take my second slice of pie into the sitting room. Adrian has disappeared upstairs. I sit on the floor, my back resting against the sofa. It slides back on its castors to its original
position. There, where the edge the sofa had been, is a pile of my brother's warm vomit. But pie is pie and I tuck in regardless.