Toast (10 page)

Mrs Muggeridge was a short, solid, black woman. It wasn't her skin that was black, it was her soul. In the six weeks she spent as our cleaner she never smiled once. She would
shoo me away like a pesky fly. A woman steeped in vinegar. A hairy mole on her chin did her no favours.

Mrs Muggeridge was more than a cleaner. When my mother was in bed, too weak to cook, she would make lunch for me. If ever there was a meal seasoned with hatred this was it. Hatred for a life that saw her scrubbing people's lavatories for a living; hatred for having to feed a fussy little boy when she could have none of her own; hatred for the sirloin steak she grilled for my Monday lunches while she would go home to boiled neck of fatty lamb and carrots.

We never found out her Christian name. I'm not sure she even had one. It wouldn't surprise me if she had been christened Mrs Muggeridge. For all this, her cooking had a spring in its step. Her peas were green not grey, her pork chops were not brown and dry like Mother's but salty outside and juicy within. Her flapjacks were soft and crumbly not brittle. On Fridays she would make a fruit flan – tinned peaches and a cocktail cherry on a yellow sponge base.

One morning when I was off school with one of the bilious attacks that came so conveniently before maths tests, she showed me how to make the peach flan. The sponge base came from a packet, the peaches from a tin. But she let me arrange the slices in the sponge case, neatly overlapping one on another. She produced the cherry from a tissue in her apron pocket. I put it exactly in the centre. We opened a sachet of Quick-Gel and mixed it with hot water. As soon as the red gunge started to cool I spooned
it over the fruit. It set in seconds. There it was, a great orange and red wheel. I wanted to take it upstairs to show my mother but Mrs Muggeridge wouldn't let me. The wait for my father to come home for lunch was interminable. I wanted to see his face when he saw what I'd made.

‘Don't be nosy,' she snapped when I asked her what her husband did, trying to fill a silence. ‘He isn't around any more. I've had to do without him for a year now. Just like you are going to have to do without your mother.'

That night, as he was tucking me into bed, I asked my father what she meant by ‘just like you are going to have to'.

I never saw Mrs Muggeridge or her peach flan again.

‘Isn't it a bit early?' I say, quizzing Mum over her plan to make the mince pies ten days before Christmas.

‘No, I'm going to put them in the freezer so they are ready for you to pop in the oven whenever you want one.' It's about time we had something in the freezer.

Mum is getting shorter, her back seems arched now, as if she's carrying coal and her eyes are tired, spent. Two years ago she was tall, willowy, upright; now it seems like an effort for her to stand. ‘Get the rolling pin out, let's get them done.'

The patty tins are rusty, with a faint layer of grease in
the bottom of each hollow. I wipe them out with a piece of kitchen paper. I love making pastry, bringing my hands high up in the air as I rub the tiny cubes of cold butter and soft lard into the flour. It's an exaggerated action, but one that gets the air into the pastry and makes it light. We add water, but no sugar, no egg, and pull the ingredients into a small boulder. ‘I thought we were supposed to let it rest, Mum,' I chime in, a trick I had read in a magazine of hers.

Mum starts to roll the pastry out, concentrating hard, like every push is a piece of mathematics. ‘Here, you have a go, darling.' She hands me the wooden pin with its red handles and goes to the top drawer for one of her Ventolin inhalers. There seem to be more than ever lately. I found one in the map pocket of the car yesterday. She sits down on a kitchen stool, the one with the leg that wobbles, and puts the inhaler to her mouth. She closes her eyes and presses the top down. She calls it her ‘puffer'. Every time she presses it down, she seems to jump, like she has been punched in the chest.

I continue rolling the pastry, a wiggly-edged rectangle that looks like a map of Australia. A piece falls off. New Zealand, I suppose. We have a set of red plastic tart cutters with crinkle edges, but only ever use one of them. I cut out almost two dozen over the next ten minutes, rolling and stretching where I must, patching a hole, a tear, a crack. I push the pastry down loosely into the patty tins. I don't want the pastry to stick. Mum walks over to the larder
and there is much clanking and banging, I hear tins being pushed along the shelves, even the Christmas puddings being moved.

‘Sorry, honeypie, I could have sworn I had some mincemeat, we'll have to put it all away in the fridge till tomorrow.'

‘But Mummy, you PROMISED!'

‘Darling, I'm sorry, I forgot to get it when I went to the shops.'

‘You're HOPELESS, I hope you DIE.' I run up the stairs to my room, slam the door and lie face down on the bed. I knew she'd forget. I just KNEW it.

It is a couple of nights before Christmas, about five-thirty in the morning, and I'm snuggled down under the sheets. I'm warm in my striped winceyette pyjamas and soft cotton bedding, my bedspread pulled up tight around my ears. Toasty. Outside, the thick frost still twinkles under the street lights. Deep silence. There are flakes of frost around the edges of the glass in the bedroom window. I can feel my warm breath on the back of my hand.

If I stretch my feet out, right down to the bottom of the bed, I can, with pointy toes, feel a heavy weight. Something told me Santa Claus would come early this year. What with Mummy so desperately poorly – I heard the doctor say something about oxygen tanks last night and my father kept holding his forehead in his hand, his thumb pressing on his right temple – and everyone looking so miserable, he knew we all needed cheering up. This means I get my presents before anyone else, and the ones under the tree can wait till after Christmas lunch.

My Christmas stocking is actually a cotton pillowcase. Father Christmas always leaves it at the bottom of the bed. Last year there was a cuckoo clock and a sort of glass globe with metal paddles inside that went round in the sun but stopped as soon as it got dark. There was a Spirograph, a green MG convertible for my Scalextrics track, more Lego and Meccano pieces, a string frog puppet, a set of short coloured chalks which I loved and a pair of football boots which I didn't. The boots had blue plastic studs. No one else at school had boots with blue plastic studs. Just me. They sounded like high heels when you walked in them. David Woodford laughed at them. Maxwell Mallin laughed at them. This year I'm hoping for my own copy of
A Hard Day's Night
and a pair of Hush Puppies. The brown suede ones with the black elastic on the side like Adrian's.

I push back the bedspread and the warm cocoon of brushed cotton sheets. There is no bulging sack and casual scattering of beribboned boxes. No round lump of clementine
in the far corner of the pillowcase, no Cadbury's Selection box in the shape of a sock. Just Daddy, kneeling, his elbows resting on the bed, his head in his hands. Sobbing. He climbs further on to the bed and wraps his arms tightly round me. I bury my face in his soft Viyella check shirt.

I didn't go to the funeral. I didn't even know it was happening. My brother drove me to Birmingham in his minivan to stay with my aunt and uncle and that was that.

My aunt's house was neat, formal, always quiet, and now, with the curtains drawn, exceptionally so. Everyone, my uncle, visiting neighbours, the doctor's family who lived next door, would creep around, speaking in voices so low as to be almost a whisper. Meals – tinned tomato soup, lamb chops with mint sauce, Bisto gravy and sliced green beans – were eaten in silence. Not a word. When I said ‘thank you' or ‘yes, please' in a cheery voice, everyone looked down at the floor like I was committing some terrible
faux pas.

Two days later my brother collected me and we drove back home. My aunt held a lace-edged hanky to her mouth as she waved goodbye. My father took me upstairs and left me to get ready for bed. ‘I'll be up soon to tuck you in.' Apart from those last few nights before she died, this
was to be the first time in a year or more that my mother had failed to come in and kiss me good night.

As I snuggled down deep into my bed I saw two white marshmallows on my bedside table. I had never been allowed to eat in bed and when my father came upstairs I asked if they were for me. ‘Of course they are, I know they're your favourites.' They weren't, and he knew it, but I had, in a school essay written shortly before my mother's death, described them as being the nearest food to a kiss. Soft, sweet, tender, pink. True, I had said I didn't like the pink ones but I didn't really mean it. They all tasted the same anyway.

Each night for the next two years I found two, sometimes three fluffy, sugary marshmallows on my bedside table. It was the good night kiss I missed more than anything, more than her hugs, her cuddles, her whispered ‘Night-night, sleep tight.' No Walnut Whip, no Cadbury's Flake, no sugared almond could ever replace that kiss. I'm not sure a marshmallow really came that close.

My father had never read Proust, but he did have a collection of mock-leather-bound classics he bought from an advertisement in the
Daily Telegraph.
His pipe and his subscription to the
Reader's Digest
and
National Geographic
gave him the air of man who was well read. He knew things.
So when he clicked that he had a sporty son who ate eggs and a spotty one who didn't he knew exactly what to think.

It was quite obvious that to turn an nine-year-old nancy boy (his phrase) into a strapping son-to-be-proud-of you simply added an egg. Boiled, fried, scrambled, poached it mattered not. Neither did it matter that the nancy boy had thrown up every egg he had ever tried to swallow. Eggs, according to my father, maketh the man.

If he had any doubts about his diagnosis, the Egg Marketing Board settled them. Their television campaign showed a sweet, cheeky blond boy cracking open his breakfast egg to the pleasure of his Aunt Het. Just the sort of lad my father would have loved me to be.

For years my mother had been lying for me. Easy when I had my tea before her husband arrived home. According to her, I had wolfed two boiled eggs or a pair of poached eggs on toast. I had asked for seconds of scrambled eggs and even tackled, though not quite finished, a fried egg. He never doubted her for one second. Or, more likely, he never considered her capable of lying to him.

It would sit there quivering; the food from hell. The white to make you gag. The yolk to make you retch. As the minutes ticked away the skin on the yolk would thicken then shrink. By the time the bacon and sausage had been eaten (slowly, anything to delay the inevitable) a dimple had started to form in the centre of the yolk. If you pressed your fork in it, the hardening yellow stuck to it like fudge.

Leaving the egg till last gave several windows of opportunity. The end of the world; the dog jumping on my lap and wolfing the offending item from my plate; or my father having a change of heart, taking pity on his poor struggling son and allowing him to get down from the table. There was also the possibility of my prayers being answered – the most usual one being that he might drop dead.

What actually happened was that the egg simply congealed and became even harder to swallow. I would slouch over the table as if I was about to collapse, pushing at the fried egg with my fork, slowly putting pressure on the dome of yolk with the prongs of the fork, just stopping short of breaking the skin and revealing the thickening ovum.

The horror of eggs for breakfast started a good hour or more before getting to the table. It started the second I woke on a Sunday morning to the smell of wet bacon spitting in the charred black frying pan and the sharp sting of grilled tomatoes coming up the stairs. By lying in bed until I heard his footsteps on the treads I could work myself up into a right state, so that by the time I was told ‘put your dressing gown on, I've made you some breakfast' I would be feeling ill, queasy, angry, frustrated, sick all at the same time. By the time I had come down the stairs one by one I had worked myself up into one of my notorious bilious attacks.

‘You can't eat nothing for breakfast, you'll faint.' I tried, for the hundredth time, to tell him I didn't like eggs, they made me feel poorly. ‘Of course you like eggs, everyone
likes eggs. You always ate them before.' His ‘before' meaning not so much when my mother was alive but before he had to cook, wash up and look after me. ‘And if you won't eat them on your own, I'll make you eat them,' he threatened. Cold, dry, unyielding.

Smelling it and hearing it sputter in the pan was bad enough. Setting eyes on the one-eyed yellow monster was a moment of deep anxiety, like seeing a squashed hedgehog on the road. Except that this time I didn't want to look even for a second.

Something worried my father about the Sunday ritual of feeding eggs to his egg-hating son. His brow wrinkled and his eyes narrowed as if what he was doing to his son truly pained him. My mother had never forced me to eat anything in her life. He cut the egg into small pieces, now as hard as toffee. He held me by the shoulder. He told me to open my mouth or he would hit me. He shook almost as much as I did. The sulphurous smell of the egg made me gag. I shuddered and shook my head from side to side. As the egg on the fork got near to my closed lips I threw my head fast from left to right. The fork went flying. The egg hit first the table then the floor. I was crying. Snot hit my top lip. I felt something coming up into my mouth from my stomach. Something burning and vile. I pushed my chair back and ran upstairs to the bathroom, my face smeared with tears and egg and snot and vomit.

I am not sure the cooking is any worse since Mum died. But it isn't much better either. Dad does at least make cheese on toast for me. Weird the way he does it, though, grating the Cracker Barrel into a small pan of melted butter, stirring it round until it melts, then pouring it over the hot toast. It's pretty good, apart from when he overcooks it and it goes chewy, like cheese-flavoured bubblegum. I once told him I could mend my bike tyres with it and he went very quiet. I wish I hadn't said it really.

What I like about it now is how moist it is, juicier than when Mum used to slice cheese and put it under the grill. She didn't use Cracker Barrel for that, though. Mum bought her cheese from Percy Salt, and would ask to taste it before he cut off a hunk from the great fat cheese on the shelf behind him. He used to wrap it in greaseproof and would always give me a little piece to taste. Sometimes it was really strong and all the veins on the roof of my mouth used to stand out. I don't think my Dad likes asking for things in the shop, he always picks food up ready-packed, even the bacon and the tea. And he buys tins of ham all the time now, instead of letting Mr Salt slice pieces off the big leg he keeps in the fridge. But his cheese on toast is better. Sometimes I think it's the best dinner in the world.