Toast (9 page)

Not everything ended up on Digestive Biscuit boy's plate. Nothing would have got me to part with jam tart with its thick crumbly pastry and thin layer of raspberry jam, or rhubarb sponge, or for that matter shepherd's pie, fish pie, cheese pie, cottage pie, faggots, fish and chips, sausage hotpot, Irish stew or anything remotely connected to potatoes. The real treasure, though, was the treacle tart that came in a shallow aluminium tray, its golden layer of breadcrumbs and golden syrup criss-crossed with ribbons of curly pastry with a jug of custard at its side.

For all its golden syrup school treacle tart wasn't that sweet. It was slightly dry and stuck to your spoon so hard you had to scrape it off your teeth. What appealed was the pastry, not so much the taste but the feel of it. Pale pastry that crumbled in your mouth then coated it with crumbs
and fat. Together with the crumbs and syrup, this was the most sublime texture I had ever had in my mouth. Better, even, than Mother's flapjacks, Father's trifle. Almost as sublime as toast.

‘Come on, put your shoes on, we're going for a walk.'

We never go for a walk.

Penn Common is a rolling meadow of tall bracken, moss and the odd thicket of birch trees. In spring there are primroses and in autumn mushrooms. Right now there is just a cold east wind and fine needles of rain. My ears are pink. My mother keeps clapping her hands over hers. We never do anything like this.

I am dawdling twenty feet behind them, catching the odd word here and there. ‘Not in hospital, at home…' ‘Please, please let me be at home…', ‘…be able to cope…', ‘If he was only tougher…'

My father bends his head. ‘If the worst comes to the worst…','…taken into care, it's not like it used to be.'

I guess my mother is pregnant, that she doesn't want to have the baby in hospital and that for some reason it may have to go into care. I rather fancy the idea of a little brother or perhaps a sister.

We walk on, my face getting so cold and numb I can barely feel my tongue. We keep walking, and now both of
them have their heads bent down against the stinging rain. My father puts his arm around my mother. He has never done this before. Perhaps she's cold. I think they are crying. Not once do they look back at me.

At home my father tears open a packet of crumpets and toasts them on the Aga. He puts so much butter on them that it runs through the holes and down our arms as we pull at the soft, warm dough with our teeth. We all run our fingers round our plates and lick the stray butter off them. Everyone is so quiet. Both of them have red eyes like white rabbits. I thought everyone was happy when you were having a baby.

Lunch was a turnstile you went through to get your pocket money. ‘Can I get down now?' was followed by a coy smile, head cocked to my left, my right leg scuffing gently at the black linoleum of the kitchen floor. If this offensive didn't work, ‘Daddy,' long pause, ‘haven't you forgotten something?' was usually enough to extract a sixpenny piece from his trouser pocket.

A sixpence meant bubblegum. To be more precise it meant three packets of Beatlecards or two packets of Beatlecards and a Sherbet Fountain. I am not sure if the card photographs of John, Paul, George and Ringo smelled of bubblegum, or if the bubblegum smelled of cardboard. I
was never an avid collector and used them as cash at school. What mattered was the flat, rose-pink piece of bubblegum and its smooth surface, the art of unwrapping the thin paper round it and my ability to put the entire sheet of gum in my mouth in one go.

My ability to fart was matched only by my expertise in blowing ‘Beatlegum' into pink balloons the size of a tennis ball. Balloons whose only point was to burst and stick to your top lip and right cheek. The day I got the hang of bubble-blowing I raced home armed with three sheets of gum. My mother was sitting on a chair, her right hand clutching her chest and looking down at her lap. I burst in and kneeled down in front of her, taking huge breaths and blowing my bubblegum into a transparent pink globe less than six inches from her face. Her eyes were closed and she had a white lace-edged handkerchief in her left hand.

My father walked in just as my bubble burst. ‘Sometimes you are so thoughtless. Now leave her in peace,' he snapped while my mother sat, motionless except for a heaving chest, gasping for breath.

There were only two breakfast cereals I would eat: Sugar Puffs and Cap'n Crunch. Weetabix, Alpen, Shredded Wheat, Rice Krispies, Corn Flakes and Coco Pops all fell
at the first post because they needed milk on them. Eating a Shredded Wheat without a soaking of milk is like one of those party games you play when you're drunk. Sugar Puffs and Cap'n Crunch were quite palatable eaten dry and so that was breakfast. Every single day. It didn't occur to me that those cereals were only edible without milk because they were so sweet. You can swallow pretty much anything if it comes with a dose of sugar.

Today Dad makes my breakfast. Hot Ribena and porridge with sugar.

‘Where's Mum?'

‘She's upstairs, she's getting up late today.'

Mum never gets up late. Must be something to do with her being pregnant. Don't know why no one has told me about it yet. I mean, this is going to make a big difference to my life. Having a brother or sister could turn my world upside down. Especially if I don't like them.

I don't want porridge. You can't eat it because it's so hot. Then you can't eat it because it's so cold. The difference between the two is barely three minutes. When you catch porridge at the right moment it is like being wrapped in a cashmere blanket. A food so comforting and soul-warming you imagine there is no problem on earth it could not solve. And then, when you are halfway through the bowl, it cools. The last two or three spoonfuls make me gag. If I put enough sugar on it I can just about get it down, though one day I swear the whole lot will come back up through my nose.

My father interferes with what I eat more than anyone else. The rule is simple: for breakfast I have dry cereal and Tree Top orange squash. Yet he makes me eat this pap called porridge and insists I have a glass of Ribena. Then he tries to get me to drink tea. Nothing, but nothing will get me to drink tea. Even with sugar in it.

Every time my dad feeds me he goes quiet, thoughtful, distant even. This big man bites his bottom lip and gazes intently at my skinny arms and spindly legs. He watches, silently, at the way I pick at my food, pushing it round the plate when I don't like it. Pulling a face. My father's disappointment in his youngest son is so obvious you could put it on a plate and eat it.

The one man to whom I wasn't a disappointment was Josh. I loved every moment he was around and would stand at his side as he cleaned the pond of its green duckweed, tugged dandelions from the lawn and snipped the deadheads off Dad's prized dahlias. He didn't do the lawn. Mowing the lawn in wide, green stripes was Dad's job, marching up and down its great length with the smell of oil and cut grass trailing behind him. The gardening equivalent of carving the turkey. It said, ‘I'm in charge.'

Where my father was cold, Josh was warm. Where Dad would tell me to get down, Josh would pick me up. He
would sit me on his lap, bounce me on his shoulders, and sit and talk to me in the garage long after he had finished tying up the honeysuckle or raking the leaves from the lawn. Sometimes I would paint pictures for him, my much practised wishy-washy watercolours of heather-covered hills and window ledges with potted plants on them. He would put them away carefully in his empty lunch box, like they were fragile, ancient parchments and take them home.

If I walked in when Josh was getting changed he'd instantly stop and talk to me, sometimes wearing nothing at all. He started bringing magazines, the two of us straddling the wide seat of his motorbike, him sitting behind me with his arms hugged around me, slowly turning the pages for me. He said it was probably best not to tell anyone about the magazines.

One day I ran into Mum and Dad's bedroom to ask Dad if I could go out and play. Dad hadn't got any clothes on and got cross and told me to knock on the door next time. I told him that Josh never minded when I saw him naked. Mum and Dad glanced across at one another, then Dad looked back down at the floor.

The following week I ran home from school to see Josh as usual. His motorbike wasn't there, and in the garden was a wiry old man bending over the rose beds, a wheelbarrow full of weeds at his side. ‘Who are you?' I demanded, glaring at him, my bottom lip starting to quiver.

‘Be away with you,' he snapped. ‘Can't you see I'm busy?'

Nine years old and I still cannot swim without a rubber ring. There are four of us, all boys, who occupy the nonswimmers' end of the pool each Wednesday afternoon. As if this isn't humiliation enough, the rubber rings are pink and yellow.

The changing rooms are an ordeal. Mr Staley allows us barely five minutes to get dried and back into our white pants, grey shirts and black trousers. We are allowed to put our ties on in the coach. The changing cubicles are freezing and so crowded it is impossible to dry yourself thoroughly. We all dry one another's backs. Even though there is no room to stretch a towel I brace myself for the crack of a wet one being flicked at my matchstick legs. Sometimes you get your pants thrown out on to the wet deck, necessitating a mad, naked dash to retrieve them. We flick each other's cold, wet ears, wring our sodden trunks in one another's shoes, make grabs at each other's cocks. On the bus back our wet hair drips down our backs, and the carpet-covered seats make us itch all the way home.

Before we board the coach, we meet up with the girls in the concourse. The tall echoing room smells of bleach and hot chocolate. No one gets tea or coffee from the machine,
only chocolate, which is thin and hot with a swirl of pinky-brown froth on top. We clutch at the plastic cups to warm our hands. Even in summer my teeth chatter.

This may be just colouring and sugar, it may never have seen a cocoa pod, but it is the drink I wait for all week. First sip, too hot; my top lip stings, a pink pimple instantly swells in the centre. I poke my tongue into the thin plastic cup and scoop up a trace of froth. Within a minute, maybe less if the room is icy, though still too hot to drink, the cocoa is cool enough to sip. Each mouthful hurts as it goes down. Like I am swallowing a gobstopper.

My aunt turns the heat off just before the milk boils. She catches it exactly at the point at which the milk will still come to the boil but will stop rising before it goes over the edge of the pan. After thirty years in the same house she has the procedure down to a fine art. I don't, and manage to either make lukewarm cocoa or spend ten minutes mopping up the boiled-over milk. Not that it would matter, if it wasn't for the pervasive smell and for the fact that milk sticks to an electric ring much like airplane glue sticks to balsa wood.

The worst thing about making cocoa for my aunt is having to use her foul sterilised milk. My father calls it buggerised milk. You can tell how nasty this stuff is by the
fact that it doesn't need to go in the fridge – how weird is that? It has been boiled during processing so when you make cocoa it has effectively been boiled twice. No wonder it tastes like old people smell.

Skin. Even the word sends shivers down my spine. This is the stuff that you peel off your chest when you have sunburn; it's the little flap left hanging when you cut yourself that catches on everything; it's the transparent sheath left behind by an emerging snake. Skin is the word I link automatically with grazed shins or something mummified. So what is it doing floating on my cocoa?

You either like the thin layer of wrinkled skin that forms on hot milk or you don't. This is something you cannot not mind about. It has to be love or utter loathing. I hate milk skin most when it is only half formed, so that you can barely see it, so you sip it by mistake and it ends up hanging from your top lip.

Worst of all is when someone ‘stirs it in' so that you get lots of little flakes that catch on your tongue and you have to remove with finger and thumb. If I'm quick enough I catch the layer that forms on cocoa and milky coffee just as it is thick enough to come off in one piece. Then it sticks round the teaspoon like melted cling film.

Minnie Blubb kept a clean house. You took your shoes off at the door and stepped over rather than on the shocking-pink fluffy doormat. You prayed your stockinged feet didn't leave sweatprints on the polished vinyl tiles. At the Blubbs you learned to walk on air. I stopped off there every day on the way back from school with Warrel, the adored son of Minnie and Arthur Blubb.

Warrel was a boy brought up in cotton wool. The house was always warm, his slippers waited patiently by the door for when he came home. His blazer was always brushed. His mother even combed his hair for him. In return he had to wash his hands before he sat at the table. He was smug, arrogant, stubborn, boastful, impatient and ugly. He was my best friend. We walked to school together, sat together, walked back home together for lunch, walked back to school, sat together, walked back home together again. We played together, did our homework together, went to Sunday school together. I couldn't even bear to be away from him while he had his tea. I would sit at the table with him, watching him devour every mouthful.

Minnie Blubb would sit on one side of Warrel, me the other. She hung on her precious son's every word, I hung on his every mouthful. Mrs Blubb never offered me so much as a biscuit. Warrel's teas were a schoolboy's dream. No chops and congealed gravy for this boy; just
spaghetti in tomato sauce, fish fingers or sausages and chips.

Every one of Warrel's teas ended with a plate of biscuits and cake. There were chocolate chip cookies and Cadbury's Fingers, Jammie Dodgers, Bourbon biscuits and Jaffa Cakes, slices of home-made Victoria sponge and chocolate digestives. At Christmas there would be a mince pie. He would pick up each biscuit and roll it over and over, examining it, slowly contemplating its sweet symmetry. Sometimes there was a Tunnock's wafer or (bastard) a chocolate marshmallow teacake in its red-and-silver foil. There was milk shake too, strawberry flavour and with a straw. A straw.

His big, yellow buck teeth nibbled through each plateful like a squirrel at a bag of mixed nuts. He savoured every crumb. He would nibble away the top layer of each Bourbon biscuit, then slowly lick off the rectangle of chocolate cream below. Sometimes he would play airplanes with a Jammie Dodger, flying it within half an inch of my nose and making yyyyyoooowwmm airplane noises before slipping it whole into his mouth. ‘OK, I've finished, we can go out and play now.'