Toast (20 page)

My father had started to look tired and white when he came in from the garden, a faint clamminess to his skin, like wet dough. Things he had always wanted to grow – scented wigwams of sweet peas, rows of broad beans held up with string, soldierly lines of carrots neatly labelled with their varieties – filled every bed, he even grew his own tobacco and dried the long leaves over the bedroom storage heaters. He became obsessed with his orchids, turning one half of the greenhouse into a small rainforest and hanging baskets of miniature variegated orchids from the roof, tiny, like yellow and blood-splattered bees. When he was in a good mood the old man would summon me to look at his latest success, an arching branch of white blossom, edged pink and mauve like the wings of rare butterflies, or a stiff spire of green and maroon buds that had opened to reveal exquisite, explicit blooms.

The new warmth he had given off since his marriage, like a freshly baked loaf, had cooled of late, and he would talk less than he used to. Questions were answered gruffly, or sometimes not at all, and patience, other than with his beloved garden, had worn thin. He took to snapping at me for no particular reason. Fifteen, moodily hormonal and
laden with work for my exams, I became an easy target. The air between us became tight and tender, like the skin round an erupting spot.

Once or twice I saw him from the bathroom window clutching at his chest when he was digging the parsnip bed. He would stop, stone still, then rub his chest like he did when he had indigestion. Except that this time he didn't take one of the Setlers he always carried in his trouser pocket. I heard him asking my stepmother why we had to have three courses at every meal now, and why there always had to be a pudding, even on weekdays. One Sunday lunchtime, when we started our roast dinner with soup and finished it with raspberry tart decorated with swirls of buttercream, I remember him saying, ‘It's all very nice, Joan, but I really don't need all this.'

When I wasn't working I would spend most of my time in my bedroom, listening to albums –
Madman Across the Water, Aladdin Sane, Tea for the Tillerman
– in darkness but for the underwater light of the lava lamp. I invented homework projects too, anything really to get out of having to sit with the newly-weds, a gooseberry in front of the television. ‘I don't know what you do in your room all the time,' Joan would moan, accusingly. I am not sure Dad minded what I did, but once she had let her dissatisfaction be known he would be obliged to join in, telling me it wasn't normal for a fifteen-year-old to spend so much time alone in his room. On other occasions she would talk about me as if I wasn't there: ‘He's been in his room all afternoon
again,' she would say to him, folding her arms tightly across her chest, with me sitting less than six feet away. It wouldn't have mattered if her hostility, so much more open now, hadn't been quite so infectious.

Dad was still a sweetie man, rarely without a Murray Mint, a humbug, a toffee eclair or a Payne's Poppet. There were Toffos in his greenhouse, Liquorice Allsorts in his bedside drawer and a bag of Fox's Glacier Fruits in the glovebox of the car. At weekends he brought in boxes of pastel-coloured fondants or Clarnico Mint Creams, Ruffle bars with their pink coconut filling, and at Christmas liqueur chocolates in amber-, green- and gold-coloured foil. It was then we had crystallised figs too, sticky dates in long boxes, the fruit stuck to the paper lining, and shallow, round packets of sugar-coated orange and lemon slices.

More to my taste were chocolate bars such as Peppermint Aero and Curly Wurlys, the ill-fated Summit bar and Cadbury's sickly Aztec. Dad treated chocolate bars (except for Fruit and Nut and, for some reason, Caramac) as something from a lower order. For him the nadir of sweetie life was a box of chocolate Brazils or the coffee creams in Black Magic.

Sometimes, for no reason at all, he would arrive home with proper boxes of chocolates, Newberry Fruits, Dairy Box or perhaps a long, slender pack of Matchmakers. On special occasions there would be Terry's All Gold. The two of them would tuck in as they sat watching
Des O'Connor,
occasionally, reluctantly, passing the box over to me. ‘Did
he take two?' Joan would say quietly, no doubt furious that I had nicked the orange cream.

At five foot ten and nine stone it hardly mattered what I ate. ‘Hollow legs' was the knee-jerk explanation, though my aunt used to say I had ‘worms'. Adrian called me a streak of piss, though not within earshot of Dad. My aunt reckoned my father was the same build as me when he was my age and only started putting on weight at forty. Coming along when he was almost fifty, I had never known him skinny, but one thing was for sure, I had certainly never seen him as big as he was now.

The school bus pulls up outside the pub and I look out of the window for Dad's blue Japanese thingy. It's there but Dad isn't driving. The car window is rolled down and Joan's son-in-law Martin is sitting at the wheel, his elbow sticking out of the window. He looks like he has a great weight on his mind.

I open the passenger door, throw my satchel in the back and flop into the seat. Flopping was the way you sat down at sixteen. I know, without a word from Martin, that something is wrong. He asks me how I am, what I did at school today. We drive up the hill towards the house, me feeling that I must answer his banal, slightly embarrassed questions calmly and politely because somehow
I know there is something terribly, horribly wrong.

As the car pulls up on the drive I can see Joan, walking quickly out to meet me. Her eyes are wet and black and darting left and right, like she's panicking over something. ‘I've got something to tell you,' says Martin, in a tone that suggests he has been rehearsing it for the past few hours. He shifts awkwardly in his seat and looks down into his lap. ‘Your dad was playing tennis this morning and…' Joan gets to the car and pulls the door open and flings her arms round me.

‘We are on our own now, son,' she blurts out the words, her voice cracking on the word ‘son', and breaks down in tears. I cannot explain why, but I knew, from the second I saw Martin in the car, that Dad was dead. I feel lightheaded yet at the same time strangely strong and calm. As my stepmother squeezes me tightly I say nothing (I honestly do not know what to say) and pull away from her, slowly, firmly, though I am careful not to be rude. Martin is out of the car and holding her now. She's sobbing. I take my school bag off the back seat and walk towards the house. I walk in to find a kind, normally rather jolly neighbour talking, grim-faced, on the telephone and his wife, usually so full of laughter, grabs me, hugs me tightly to her and says, to no one in particular, ‘Will someone please tell me what I am supposed to say to this boy?'

I walk upstairs, close my bedroom door and sit on my bed. I get the feeling I should be crying. Yet no tears come. There are excited butterflies in my stomach and I can feel something
welling up inside me that isn't tears. I feel tingly and warm, like something wonderful is happening. Like I have pins and needles in my limbs. I bite my bottom lip hard, not to stop the tears, but to check that this is really happening.

The flowers were lovely, as you could only hope for a man for whom the joys of gardening were on a par with that of sexual intercourse. The weather had been kind, the onlookers from the village respectful and the vicar as generous as he could be about someone he had known only as a corpse.

As funerals went it was unexpectedly beautiful, romantic even, in a little church nestled at the bottom of the hill, the sun streaming on to the coffin through stained-glass windows. The coffin was walnut like Dad's pipe and had heavy brass handles, the hearse as shiny and black as Dad's Brylcreemed hair had been to the day he died. It all went quite well really, at least until the hearse swung slowly past us. You could almost hear the family's collective intake of breath as they spotted the discreet sign ‘Co-operative Funeral Service' next to the coffin. Everyone knew Dad would rather have been put out for the dustmen than be buried by the Co-op.

The burial was in a pretty, hillside graveyard in a village called Suckley, a place he had been to only once before,
when we got lost on the way to Hereford. I was extremely happy with the venue Joan chose, with its cascading dog roses and lichen-covered gravestones, but there were grumbles from other quarters. His sister wanted him to be put to rest next to their mother in a niche off the Walsall Road in Birmingham, though some might say that no one could possibly rest in a niche just off the Walsall Road in Birmingham. Then someone pointed out that they had never got on terribly well, so it seemed a little unkind to lump them together now, just for the sake of tidiness.

The congregation's rendition of ‘The Lord is my Shepherd' made me cry, as did the splendid array of bobbing white lilies on the coffin. The emotions were no more than I would get on any occasion where organ music was involved. To be honest I'd have burst into tears if someone played the Hokey Cokey on a church organ.

Joan fussed over me all week, making steak for my tea and calling me ‘son'. A sign, some said cruelly, that Dad's will had yet to be read. But then she needn't have worried, for, as anyone knows, there is nothing that quite turns an old man's attention in your direction like an offer of sex and home-made cake.

‘Right, make five apple pies,' said Jim, his sour, beery breath coming as a shock so early in the morning. No
mention of a recipe, or where to find the flour, the butter, the apples, the sugar or even where the tap was for the water. I almost walked out then and there, red-faced and panicking.

The Sun Hotel was a rather typical three-star county town hotel, with net curtains that had seen better days and a dining room that smelled like the duster bag on a Hoover. The carpets were tired green wool with pink and gold rococo swirls and the chairs dark blue leatherette. It was the tables that you noticed, though, crisp white cloths starched to snapping point, shining silver cutlery and glass jugs of iced water. There were butter pats on tiny silver dishes filled with ice, immaculate napkins that crackled when you unfolded them and typewritten menus which were slotted into blue leatherette menu holders to match the chairs.

The menu was typical of any other county hotel that thought enough of itself to banish men without a tie, and women would not be permitted to dine in trousers. Anyone unsuitably attired could eat in the ‘buttery': melon ‘au porto', consommé, pâté maison, choice of fruit juices, or hors d'œuvres from the trolley. And then the main courses: fillets of sole Véronique, deep-fried haddock or plaice with tartare sauce, gammon and pineapple, roast lamb and mint sauce. Plus the standard note at the bottom that all main courses are served with ‘vegetables of the day'. The à la carte menu, a vast list of dishes Escoffier might have recognised but which now came from a tin, rarely saw light of day.

This was hardly a job for life, just a way to earn more money than the Talbot could offer before catering college started in the autumn, a way to escape the packing up of the house, the giving away of the plants from Dad's greenhouse and hearing Joan refer to everything as hers instead of ours.

Stiff with panic, I tried to remember the recipe for sweet shortcrust pastry. I couldn't even remember the ingredients, let alone the ratio of butter to flour. It didn't help that I had never made an apple pie in my life. ‘Stores are along the corridor, you'll find pie dishes in the wash-up,' snapped Jim, slapping his beer belly like he was proud of it. ‘And get a fuckin' move on, you've the hors d'œuvre trolley to do yet.' Head down, I marched along to the storeroom to find, thankfully, several open sacks of flour.

I weighed the flour and cut up the margarine I found in the walk-in fridge into chunks the size of dice. I tipped the whole lot into a big aluminium bowl I found on the slatted shelf under the table and started to rub the butter into the flour with my fingertips, like we had at school, like Joan had, like Diane had. ‘Use the Hobart, we'll be all fuckin' day else,' choked Jim, returning from the storeroom, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

It was only by chance I clocked the word Hobart, a label attached to a giant version of a Kenwood Chef, the machine caked in congealed food and badly leaking oil. ‘Oh, give it here,' he pounced, snatching the bowl out of my hand and tipping the flour and butter into the grubby bowl of the
Hobart. He turned it on from a switch so covered in flyblow you didn't know what colour it was. Flour shot out at all angles. He threw a cup of water in and kept turning the beater till it was mixed. ‘Now, roll that out and line the bottom of them dishes.'

The apples, now peeled and cut into thick slices, Jim told me to put on to boil with a few spoonfuls of water and some sugar. I stood watching the yellow fruit intently, not wanting to catch the eye of two other chefs, Frank, a grey-haired man in his fifties who had no teeth and shuffled and held on to things like he was losing his balance, and Tony, who spoke with an Irish accent so strong I couldn't understand a word he said. Suddenly Jim squatted down and picked up a tired apple pie from the bottom tier of the wooden sweet trolley. He brought it over to the simmering apples and crumbled the whole thing, pastry and fruit into the simmering apples. He turned away without a word.

At lunchtimes the revolving hors d'œuvre trolley was wheeled around the tables, offering diners a choice of cucumber in vinegar, thinly sliced tomatoes with chopped chives on top, egg mayonnaise with a cross of anchovy fillets and capers, a dusting of paprika on each egg. There was Russian salad – diced carrot, potato, onions and peas in a snow-white mayonnaise – sliced beetroot in vinegar and rollmop herrings. You could have as much or as little as you wanted, which was probably its only appeal. The grated carrot salad was fresh enough.

Frank walked like his shoes belonged to a bigger man.
The backs of his shoes were squashed flat, the edges frayed, and his fat belly only drew attention to his filthy apron. He smelled more than slightly of pee. ‘Has he done the fish yet?' Frank asked of no one in particular, jerking his head in my direction. ‘Doing the fish' turned out to be a weekly job of washing the batter off fillets of haddock and plaice under the tap in the still room then rebattering them with new stuff. ‘It's the batter that goes off, not the fish, isn't it, Jim?'

Just before twelve-thirty the waitresses came into the kitchen, all black dresses and little white aprons, and stood in a gaggle, gossiping around the hotplate. ‘Come on, girls, get your tits out,' said Frank as he started putting battered silver dishes of vegetables in the hot cupboard. He grabbed the thigh of a blonde waitress, mid-twenties, hair in a bun. ‘Cor, I'd like to fuck you, darlin',' Frank said as he ran his hand up her skirt. Unfazed, she pushed him off without a word, like nothing more than a fly that had landed on her.

Jim sat at a small table by the deep-freeze, a half-drunk pint by his elbow. ‘Right, ladies, don't forget to bring in all your dirty panties tomorrow. I need them to make the fish stock,' he announced. Dipping hunks of bread into cups of tomato soup, none of the waitresses missed a beat of their conversation. It was as if he hadn't spoken. Jim looked pleased with himself like he'd just said the funniest thing ever. I smiled weakly at him. It wasn't so much what he said that was disgusting. It was the lecherous way the
unshaven, greasy-haired beer-breath had said the word ‘panties'.

‘Two soup of day, two fried fish, Jim,' announced Molly, a waitress so old and bent her eyes looked permanently down at the floor.

‘Frank…Frank…there's an order in,' yelled Jim, who didn't budge from his seat.

‘He's gone for a shite,' muttered back Tony. The only words I had heard him say that I could understand. ‘More like he's gone for a fucking wank.'

Frank shuffled back into the kitchen, wiping his hands on his encrusted apron. He snatched two pieces of newly rebattered fish and dropped them into the deep-fat fryer, then two handfuls of pre-cooked chips into another. ‘Ask the old cow if they're havin' any veg, will you?' Frank asked a young waitress with blue eyeshadow, then followed on, ‘I bet you were shaggin' again last night, weren't you, you filthy little bitch?'

She smiled back, mock warmly, the corner of her lip curling into a snarl. ‘Yeah, in your dreams, Frank sweetie, in your fucking dreams.'

I hung around waiting for someone to order pâté maison, grapefruit, scampi tartare or anything off what Jim called the ‘ally cart' menu. No one did, so I grabbed a cloth and started wiping some of the tea stains and flyblow off the work surfaces. ‘What are you, a fuckin poof?' snapped Jim. ‘Go and get some fresh rolls, they're running out. And stop cleaning like a woman.' Fresh rolls turned out to be
yesterday's that were dunked in a sink of cold water then rebaked in a very hot oven.

Tony and Jim both disappeared at different points during ‘service'. I suspected they had snuck off to the pub till Tony announced something about ‘havin' the squits'.

The staff toilets were down a short corridor at the rear of the kitchen on the way to the bins. The floor was dotted with cockroaches that someone seemed to have stamped on. The stench of stale pee was enough to make your eyes water. In the week I stuck it out at the Sun Hotel the solitary bar of green soap in the men's toilets remained untouched, as dry and cracked as the batter on my rebattered fish.