Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger. Nigel Slater
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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.
There was a brief time when I was the coolest kid at school. My brother had bought Rubber Soul and I listened to it, lights low, when he was out for the evening with his girlfriend who had long blonde hair and eyes so heavy with mascara