In the Kitchen

by Monica Ali

  It was always the best bit, the coach journey. The windows never opened, they sweated in their coats, flicked snotballs at each other and ate their snacks. Their hands had a wet-dog smell after they’d wiped them on the seats. But they were the Rileys kids, going somewhere, on a treat. The air was thin on oxygen but thick with excitement that began to dilute as soon as they went down the steps. Michael’s dad had got the sack from Rileys, worked a few days at the foundry when he was sober enough to stand, but the other parents must’ve chipped in for Michael, the little poppet, still one of us then, still one of the tribe.

  Yes, they could never live up to their billing, those days out, always went downhill because they started out as perfection and that could never be matched. There was a row at home that night, a big one, and Gabe and Jenny sat hand in hand on the stairs. ‘What they yellin’ about?’ said Jenny. ‘You’re too little to know,’ said Gabriel, who had no idea. ‘You’re too little to understand.’ Jenny pushed the tip of her nose up, splaying her nostrils. ‘Pig,’ she said, ‘pig, pig, pig.’ They thought they heard someone coming and scrambled up and back to their beds. Gabe decided he would creep down without Jenny who always made too much noise and gave them away. He’d have to wait for a while until she was asleep but then he must have drifted off. When he woke, there was Mum sitting by him, saying, ‘I didn’t wake you, did I?’

  ‘No,’ said Gabe, ‘what’s time?’

  ‘I want to show you something. Here’s your dressing gown.’

  They went through the back garden, the frosted grass crunching beneath their feet, and climbed over the fence into the field. They were on a different planet. A few dim lights glowed in the valley and dark life forms stirred up ahead.

  ‘Not scared are you?’ said Mum. ‘It’s only the cows.’

  ‘I know,’ said Gabriel, shivering. Mum was in her skirt and blouse, but didn’t seem to feel the cold.

  ‘I was out here,’ said Mum, standing behind him and holding his shoulders, ‘and I saw a shooting star. There’s going to be another one, I just know there is, any second now. Thought Gabe would love to see that. He’s never seen one before.’

  The cold had his feet in pincers. His slippers weren’t up to much. ‘Where we looking, Mum? Which side will it be?’

  ‘Up. Just look up, you’ll see it. It was lovely, the one I saw. You can wish on them, know that? Make a wish on a shooting star.’ She let him go and moved off, walking deeper into the field. He could hear her singing softly. Catch a falling star.

  ‘Mum,’ he said. ‘Mum.’

  ‘Imagine putting a star in your pocket!’ she called back to him.

  He could barely see her now. ‘Mum.’

  ‘Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t that beautiful? Oh, Gabe, look! Look up. Up, up, right over your head.’

  Gabriel tilted his head as far back as it would go. ‘What? Where? Where?’

  ‘Quick, quick, you’ll miss it.’

  Gabe pushed back until he thought his neck would snap. His jaw hung open and steam poured from his mouth. He twisted left and right.

  ‘There. Up there,’ called Mum.

  All the stars seemed to go off like flashbulbs, making his eyes water at the corners, but none was actually moving. Which was the one? How bright the sky was now, when a moment ago the stars were only pinpricks in the black. He swung round, he stepped back, he swung round again and the ground was treacherous; he slid right off his feet and landed on his bum.

  Mum stamped her platform boots and hooted. ‘Oh, Gabe,’ she said, shaking with laughter, ‘look at you, sat in a cowpat. What are you like?’

  She made two cups of cocoa when he’d washed and got fresh pyjamas on. ‘After all that,’ she said, ‘I think it was only a plane.’

  ‘What about you?’ he said. She’d set their cups in the sink and told him to get himself up them stairs. The kitchen clock said half past four.

  She lit a cigarette and stood with her ankles crossed, like a picture in a magazine. ‘I’m not sleepy. I’ve got loads to do and it’s easier when I’ve got you all out from under my feet.’

  He changed trains at Manchester without calling his sister and sat numbly looking at the floor. As he stepped on to the station platform, beneath the canopy of glass and green iron girders, it began to rain. At once the weight was on him, slumping his shoulders. In Blantwistle, it seemed, he lived in a state of suspended animation, in constant oscillation between unbearable tension and annihilating lethargy. It was the agony of familiarity, the awful inevitability of home.

  His phone began to ring inside his pocket. He snatched it up as if he had been offered a lifeline.

  It was Lena. ‘Hear that,’ he said. ‘That’s how it rains up here.’

  ‘I want to ask –’ said Lena. ‘You can do something for me?’

  ‘I have to see my father. It may be the last time.’

  ‘If you can do this thing. Please.’

  He wanted to tell her, don’t worry. He wanted to say, I’ll take care of you. Could he say those things, did he mean them? What would they mean to her? The connection was poor, her voice flickered, he pressed the phone to his ear. It wasn’t raining. That was sleet pounding on the roof above. An announcement on the loudspeaker, Lena’s broken voice, a boy running past, sorry, mate. He was at the station entrance and in a moment he’d have to go out and get wet. He told her that he would help her. She couldn’t hear him. He told her again. The signal was weak. Repeat for me, she said.

  ‘Yes,’ Gabriel shouted. ‘I’ll do it. Of course I’ll do that for you.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  NANA, IN THE FRONT PORCH, CLUNG TO THE FROSTED-GLASS door like a shipwreck, sleetwater bogging her slippers.

  ‘You’ll never guess,’ she called up the garden path. ‘Go on,’ she urged, tottering off the step and clutching the window ledge. ‘Have a guess. You’ll never guess what’s happened.’

  Gabriel kissed her and took her arm. ‘Hello, Nana. Let’s get out of the wet.’

  ‘Gladys died,’ trilled Nana, unable to contain herself any longer. ‘It’s Gladys. Fit as a fiddle, me, she’d say. Well, that’s how she was. Loved to blow her own trumpet, that one.’

  ‘I’ll just take my shoes off and leave them in the porch. Can you manage? Grab on to that door handle there.’

  ‘Last week it was,’ said Nana. ‘Or do I mean last month? Poor Gladys.’ She sagged. Her top lip, her honest-to-God moustache, began to twitch.

  ‘Gladys. I’m not sure I know—’

  ‘Gladys,’ cried Nana. ‘You know. You do. Gladys.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Gabe, to calm her. ‘Oh. If you hold on to me now and I get the door …’ He manoeuvred them into the hall.

  Ted, planted firm in the kitchen doorway, nodded at Gabe. ‘Kettle’s on,’ he said.

  They sat in the lounge in the strange, brief afterglow of the storm, the UFO light in the sky. Nana, deeply entrenched in the wingback chair with her feet up on a stool, sucked on a tea-soaked Hobnob with both eyes firmly closed. Ted cracked his knuckles and laced his fingers together on his lap. The teapot, the good blue one, stood on the coffee table with the milk jug and biscuit tin. The carriage clock ticked on the mantelpiece, the Victorian lady in the framed print peeped from under her parasol. The leaves of the rubber plant were covered in dust.

  ‘Nice send-off,’ said Ted. ‘Gladys – Mrs Haddock – you remember her, Gabe.’

  Mrs Haddock, of course he remembered her. Nana’s old sparring partner, her best friend and enemy rolled into one.

  ‘Never the same after they stuck her in that home,’ Ted continued, ‘but they saw her right in the end. Lovely bash, eh, Nana? Fine spread for Gladys, eh?’

  Nana swallowed her biscuit and dabbed her eye with a piece of kitchen roll. ‘Cradle to grave, me and Gladys. There’s not many friends as can say that. Come over closer, Gabriel, my eyes are not what they were. Gone and left me, she has. Mind you, I’ll not be long behind.’

  Gabe patted Nana’s hand. Ted rolled his
eyes and said, ‘Have another biscuit. Go on.’

  ‘Well,’ said Nana, seized by a sudden coquettishness, ‘there’s nobody watching my figure now.’ She had, over the last decade, grown a barrel chest on which her chin could comfortably rest for a snooze. Gabriel handed her the biscuit tin.

  The clock said quarter past four. Maybe it had stopped. Had it really been only twenty minutes since he’d arrived?

  ‘Mahogany,’ said Nana. ‘With brass handles. What do you make of that?’

  ‘Nana,’ said Ted. ‘Come on, now.’

  ‘Fancy,’ said Nana. ‘What a waste.’

  Gabriel looked at Ted, who shrugged. ‘Coffin,’ he explained. He stood up and switched on the lamps. Gabe looked at the way his trousers hung from the waist, nothing filling the seat.

  ‘Your programme’s on soon, Nana. I’ll pull the curtains to.’

  They had the gas fire on and the television with the sound turned low while they waited for the programme to begin. Nana closed her eyes. Gabriel struggled to keep his open. The hiss of the fire, the babble of voices, the blanketing heat. This house was never the way he remembered it. The ceilings were too low. Everything had a cardboard feel. When they’d moved in it felt like a palace; it felt like an overgrown Wendy house now. All the colours were faded, the sofa covers had slipped from maroon to dusty brown, the walls from cheery yellow to a life-sapping shade of cream. The whole place was heartbreakingly tidy, as if nothing much ever happened, which probably it never did.

  Gabriel tried to formulate a question for Ted. He wanted to ask in a way that would get Ted to open up. ‘How are you?’ was all he could think of.

  ‘Can’t complain.’ He was thinner, definitely thinner, but he was strong and straight. His face perhaps was pulled a little tighter across the steely cut of his nose, and at the edges of his no-nonsense mouth, but you could still read his character there.

  Shaking off his irritation, Gabriel tried again. ‘You’ve lost some weight.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Ted. ‘Part of the process.’ His shirt, Gabe noticed, was frayed at the collar and there was a stain on his sweater sleeve.

  ‘Dad,’ said Gabe.

  Ted shuffled his feet. ‘I’m not doing so bad. Bit tired. It don’t take you too bad ’til the end.’

  ‘What did the doctor …’

  ‘Nana’s took it hard. When she remembers, that is.’

  ‘Her memory’s going?’ Gabriel looked at Nana, a strand of drool on her lip, the sheet of kitchen roll tucked into the neck of her blouse. Her hair, short grey wisps, stood up on either side of her head, making her look vaguely shocked or lightly electrocuted, sprawled across stool and chair.

  ‘Comes and goes,’ said Ted. ‘Still finding new ways to drive me mad. How’s work?’

  ‘I’ll be leaving soon,’ said Gabe. He leaned forward. ‘Dad, I’m setting up my own place.’

  Ted snorted. ‘Leaving? You’ve only been there five minutes.’

  ‘Five months. Six. But it was never meant to be for long.’ Gabriel sighed. There was no point arguing now.

  ‘Your own place,’ said Ted. ‘Good for you. That’s grand, it really is.’

  ‘Have I missed it?’ said Nana, waking. ‘Turn it up. Ted, are you having a sherry? Because I’ll have a small one myself.’ She slid her feet off the stool and levered herself a little more upright.

  ‘That’s right, Phyllis,’ said Ted, winking at Gabriel, ‘I’ve been at your sherry again.’

  Gabe got up and loaded the tea tray. ‘I’ll get it, Nana. Dad, any beers in the fridge?’

  When he returned they were watching the television, one of those chat-cum-freak shows, where the host talked about ‘healing’ and hoped one of the guests would throw a punch.

  ‘Can’t cope,’ said Ted, ‘that’s all you hear on this show. He can’t cope. She can’t cope.’

  ‘Shush,’ said Nana. ‘Six kids, this one’s got by, what is it, seven different fathers? In’t it shocking, Gabe?’

  Gabriel laughed as he poured her sherry. ‘I demand a recount,’ he said.

  Ted smoothed the arms of his chair, that old familiar gesture. ‘In my day,’ he said, ‘that’s what we did. We coped. That’s what we had to do.’

  Nana, on her third sherry, grew sufficiently animated to sit up straight in her chair. The loose, soft skin of her face trembled with words that sought to escape while her mouth prepared itself slowly for action, warming up with a few mouldings and partings of the lips. Gabe studied her closely, trying to remember how she used to look when he was a boy. The years, it seemed, had robbed her of the singular, all her features melting into a generality of old age. No matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t really see her, just the lines and folds and wrinkles, a second caul at the other end of life.

  ‘Listen to this, Gabriel,’ she said finally. ‘It’s Edith who told me and you can’t say truer than that. Happened to a neighbour of hers. Well, she lives down the beaches, doesn’t she, been there since … well, you’re going back a long time now.’ Nana hesitated, floundering for a moment. She plunged on. ‘Anyway, this chap’s sat there of an evening, in bed, minding his own, when he hears a noise. From up there,’ said Nana, pointing to the ceiling with a finger turned querulous by arthritis and an incipient sense of outrage. ‘That’s queer, he thinks. Sounds like there’s a rat got into the attic. A big one.’

  ‘Nana,’ said Gabriel, beginning to suspect where this might be going.

  ‘Prince Street, it was,’ said Nana, dabbing her left eye, which appeared to suffer some continual low-grade seepage. ‘Down the beaches, you remember, Gabe.’

  ‘The beaches, course I do, Nana. Where I learned to ride my bike, remember. Only the other side of the main road from Astley Street. But we’re talking about thirty-odd years ago now, aren’t we, Nana? We’re not talking about today.’ ‘The beaches’ was a stretch of concrete with a mouldering fountain and a bench that lay between the terraces of the old town, where a German bomb had cracked the rows apart. Gabe, in the days when the earth’s circumference could be described in the swing of a conker, had spent many an hour there, perfecting the art of mooching about.

  Nana leaned so far forward Gabe feared she would topple out of the chair. ‘That’s queer, he thinks, this chap.’ Nana’s features might have blurred with time, but her voice was distinct enough. It moved up a register and she began to enunciate more carefully, the better to articulate her disgust. ‘So he goes to fetch a stepladder and he climbs up to the loft. He gets the trapdoor open and he’s got a torch with him, of course …’

  Gabriel knew what she was going to say and fervently wished that she wouldn’t. He looked at Ted, sitting with his hands on the sides of the chair, the snub of the left little finger, its final joint missing, pressing into the fabric.

  ‘Well, you’ll never guess what he saw,’ said Nana. She clamped her lips together.

  ‘Oh,’ said Gabe, ‘I think I will.’

  ‘The whole attic,’ said Nana, in an ecstasy of indignation, ‘was full of Pakistans.’

  ‘No, Nana, not this …’

  ‘Yes, oh, yes. Got their mattresses and whatnot, and there they all are in a line, sleeping between their shifts, and there’s others what come and take their places when this lot go off t’ the mill. The chap got right to the bottom of it, you see, and you know the way all the attics in them terraces are joined, well there’s Pakistans all down the row, right to the end of the street. Bartlett Street, it was. June told me all about it because this chap’s a neighbour and she said to me, Phyllis, what is the world coming to, and I said, June, I just don’t know any more, I really don’t.’

  Nana sat back and dabbed at her eye.

  ‘Nana,’ said Gabriel, ‘have you heard the phrase “urban myth”?’ He must have been nine or ten years old when he first heard that story.

  ‘Best leave it, Gabe,’ said Ted. ‘Clock’s broken, if you know what I mean. A bit confused, now and then.’

  ‘Who’s confused?’ snapped Nana. ‘
And I’m not deaf, neither.’

  Ted smiled. ‘Still the full shilling, that’s right. What was it Albert used to say? If our Phyllis was any sharper she’d cut herself. Isn’t that the truth?’

  Nana’s mouth puckered and twitched. ‘Eee,’ she said in a long, whistling sigh. ‘It’s been a good life. That much I can say. When I married Bert, seventeen years old, that’s all, and he was twenty-one, and we’d never a cross word,’ said Nana, her voice and face aflutter with emotion. ‘Not in all those years.’

  ‘Never a cross word,’ said Ted. ‘That’s right, Phyllis, that’s right.’

  * * *

  Gabriel stood in the kitchen peeling potatoes. Nana wanted egg and chips for her tea. The kitchen, at the back of the house, used to look out to the field but now looked over a housing estate, in which all the houses were ‘individual’ (to increase the price at which they could be marketed) but basically identical, sharing an architectural style – a Tudorbethan mishmash of stone cladding and fake timbering – that found favour with the upwardly mobile.

  Gabriel drew the curtains. The peeler was blunt. He put it down and took a kitchen knife from the drawer. It was blunt as well. He ran his hand along the spice rack that was fixed to the wall, a rickety affair that trapped tall narrow bottles of ancient cumin, paprika and chilli. Mum had bought it long ago. Gabe doubted it had ever been used. The tiles by the sink needed regrouting, all the cupboard handles seemed to be loose, and only two of the spotlights were working, two stabs of unforgiving light over the general shabbiness of it all. But the kitchen was spick and span. The surfaces wiped clean. Why did the walls close in so quickly? How had the place shrunk so?

  He set the chip pan on the stove and lit the ring. He sliced the potatoes, dried them on kitchen towel and loaded them into the basket. If Charlie were here she’d stave it off, this sense of decay, just with a flick of her hair. Her perfume would mask the smell of death. He needed her; he’d thought it before and he knew it now. The test chip sizzled and somersaulted in the hot fat. Gabriel lowered the basket in. What he had to do was tell Charlie about Lena. Not that he’d slept with her, of course, but the rest of it. The sex had to stop. Now that he knew. He had to protect her now.