Toast

by Nigel Slater

  One Tuesday visit had included two slices of particularly wonderful coffee cake, and I figured there would be still be some left the following day. I knocked at the door but it was already open. I called her name, then peered inside. A neat hallway, a kitchen sink, clearly visible, full of cake tins and mixing bowls. Suddenly something hit me from behind and I fell forward on to my hands and knees. Before I could call out a single word two huge paws slipped around my shoulders, two hind legs tucked behind mine, and the smooth chest of Miss Jones’s pet Alsatian pushed down on my back. I froze, waiting for his teeth to sink into my neck. Instead, I just felt something cold and wet against the top of my bare leg.

  The humping – frantic, breathy, his wet tongue lolloping against my ear – seemed to last for ever. Part of me wanted Miss Jones to come round the corner and rescue me, but another part didn’t. I would rather no one, least of all a sixty-year-old spinster with a tea tray in her hand, witnessed a sex-starved Alsatian pumping away at me like a sailor on leave. Especially when I was wearing short trousers.

  I loved that cake dearly, as I do to this day, but never again did I visit that dear old lady or eat coffee and walnut cake to the sound of a ticking grandfather clock.

  Candyfloss

  Joan wants to go on holiday but doesn’t fancy Bournemouth. She says it’s la-di-da. Dad suggests Tenby but she doesn’t fancy that either. I’m not allowed to suggest anywhere.

  Joan has talked Dad into going to Blackpool. She has been before and thinks he might like it. I don’t like to point out to her that that is rather like thinking he might take to pigeon-fancying or drinking milk stout. As we start the long drive towards our summer holiday on the golden mile the look on my father’s face is as sour as the sherbet lemons Joan keeps passing over to him. I think he’s embarrassed. At one point there is silence in the car for over two hours. It is broken only because Dad wants to stop to go to the loo. Or, as he puts it, ‘to go and see a man about a dog’.

  Blackpool turns out to be fun, but only if you enjoy hearing Scott McKenzie singing ‘If you’re going to San…Fran…cisco’ blaring from every shop from dawn to dusk.

  Which I did. Joan permanently looks like she’s about to say sorry I brought you here, though she never actually does. Dad spends the entire week looking like he’d rather be somewhere, anywhere, else. ‘They must all be on drugs,’ he mutters when a bare-chested guy with long blond hair and orange flares dances along the front pinging a pair of finger-cymbals in people’s ears.

  I can’t remember ever having such a good time. Dad’s pissed off with Joan for dragging him to somewhere that sells kiss-me-quick hats and saucy postcards, she’s caked in guilt because she knows he’s hating every second of it. I’m wondering what it would be like to be stoned and wishing I could have a flowery shirt like every other male in Blackpool. (Except my dad, of course, who is wearing a check shirt, brown brogues, a tie and a sort of waistcoat with a suede front.) ‘Don’t be so stupid,’ snaps Dad when I ask if I can have a flowery shirt from one of the shops on the front. ‘Everyone will think you’re a fairy.’

  We have two rooms at a bed and breakfast just off the main drag. ‘It will be quieter here.’ There is one room for Joan and another for Dad and me. After dinner (ham salad, tinned peaches and cream), I lie there in the dark wondering if I nag them enough they’ll let me have a flowery shirt tomorrow. I must be the only boy in Blackpool to be wearing grey shorts and a school pullover. Dad kneels by his bed and says his prayers as he always does. It amazes me that a man who can be so strict, fierce and cold actually thinks he has a right to speak to God. I thought people who prayed were gentle, meek and generous like Miss Martineau, the RE teacher at school, who once gave me a lift in the rain, or the giraffe-like Mr Gutteridge who took the daily service at Woodfield and sang hymns louder than I have ever heard anyone sing before or since. How can a man who puts the fear of God into his own child dare to get down on his knees and whisper sweet nothings into his hands? We both snuggle down and Dad puts the bedside light out with a loud click.

  An hour later I’m still not asleep. If they won’t let me have a paisley-patterned shirt, then I might buy the sea urchin bedside lamp that I saw in the lava lamp shop. I can’t quite tell if Dad is still awake, but I guess he must be asleep because he hasn’t moved an inch for the last fifteen minutes. The muffled giggles from the next room give way to the sound of not-so-muffled humping. The room is so dark that I can’t see Dad, so he certainly can’t see me. My hand wanders down the bedclothes and through the fly of my pyjama trousers. The humping gets louder, harder, and I try not to make the sheets rustle.

  Next door finishes suddenly. In the unexpected silence that follows, my breathing becomes as piercing and clear as the smell of the little bar of Palmolive soap on the washbasin in the corner. Without warning, and as crisp as a bullet from a gun, Dad snaps, ‘Stop it.’

  We have breakfast in a neat room with stiff chairs, the white nets at the windows tied back with coloured ribbons. Bacon and sausage for Joan and me, a kipper for Dad. I love the toast, which is cold and bendy and comes in a bent silver rack, just like it always does on holiday. The butter is hard and cold too. This is what I call hotel toast, very different from the hot, melting-butter stuff we get at home, but in its way just as good. There are plastic roses on the table in a thick, moulded glass vase. Dad says they are the ones you used to get free with Daz.

  He seems more cheerful today, and lets me have my photograph taken with a monkey on my shoulder. He even cracks a joke about not being sure which one of us is which. I make several attempts at talking them into buying me something, anything, that might make me look like a hippie, but I get nowhere. In desperation I spend my pocket money on a small brass bell on a chain and hang it around my neck. We have lunch in a restaurant opposite the beach – battered haddock, chips and peas, followed by ice cream and tinned fruit cocktail. Dad has apple pie and custard. ‘I think we’d better go home tomorrow,’ he announces suddenly. ‘I’m worried about leaving the greenhouse so long.’

  Dad’s usual obsession with people being ‘one of them’ had now turned to people being ‘on drugs’. The signs, according to my father, were anyone whose hair touched their collar or who failed to wear socks with their sandals. Though the real clincher was a shoulder bag. By my reckoning this meant pretty much everyone in Blackpool. Except, of course, us.

  Late in the afternoon, Joan suddenly appears with a stick of vivid pink candyfloss. ‘He’s got to try it, Tony, everyone eats it here.’ We take a last embarrassed walk along the front, my father three paces ahead of me, pretending to be nothing to do with the young son trailing behind him. The one in the beige V-neck and tinkling hippie bell, tucking into a vast nest of shocking-pink candyfloss.

  The Man in the Woods

  The school bus drops me at the bottom of the hill and I walk up, rain or shine. Sometimes I stop to pick primroses or to piss in the woods. Sometimes I scuff my shoes kicking the great piles of horse chestnut leaves that are pushed to the side of the road by the speeding cars, other times I just trudge up to the top.

  I often dawdle, making up a story about how the coach broke down if Joan says anything about my being late. Today I walk parallel with the road but quite deep into the woods. There are a few last bluebells and the odd catkin, there are bright green leaves on the cobnuts and there are ramsons – wild garlic – underfoot. Even with all this new young growth, there is something slightly sinister about the woods. It’s like someone is always watching you.

  There are often crackles as you walk. Rabbits usually and sometimes squirrels. My father tells me it’s probably a yeti or a one-armed man like the Fugitive. The crackling twigs are heavier than usual today, but they’ve gone quiet now. I don’t normally come this deep into the woods. Suddenly I catch a glimpse of a man, a tall man with long hair, about twenty or twenty-five, with tight faded jeans and a tweed jacket with elbow patches. He’s just standing there by the trunk of a tree, partly covered by the thin branches o
f a young cobnut bush, looking down at the ground. He’s got his dick out, like he is having a pee.

  But he’s not peeing. He’s wanking, slowly sliding his hand back and forth, his jacket pulled right back with his other hand, allowing me a perfect view. I am not sure whether I should run or stay. I want to watch what he’s doing but my breathing is so loud and I’m starting to tremble. He seems oblivious to me, though I must be only ten feet away. There are prickles on the back of my neck, just under my hairline.

  He carries on, a little faster now. Then suddenly he glances my way, for a second, maybe even less, then carries on. I think he’s seen me. I’m not sure. I want to cough, my mouth is so dry. I wet my lips with my tongue. My mouth tastes furry. Slowly, the man turns his head towards me and looks straight at me. Then he turns his whole body to face me, still wanking. He motions to me, impatiently with his head, his eyebrows furrowed. His face is young, like the guy in the Small Faces, but his skin is darker, like he spends more time out of doors. I give a tiny smile, a quivering smile, and start to walk away. I’m shaking properly now and my tummy’s turning over and over and there’s a bitter taste in my mouth. I take big steps over the mossy logs and into the brambles, clutching my satchel to my side to stop it catching on the twigs. The man is about six feet behind me and taking huge strides towards me. The twigs snap loudly. I’m almost at the road but there’s a wide wet patch, like a shallow pool, in the way and the ground is getting boggy. I’m trying to walk on tiptoe. Suddenly my left foot comes out of its shoe. I sort of hop-leap the last bit of water and slip, but only slightly, on the dry bank, then right myself. I’m on the road now and there’s the sound of a lorry whining weakly in the distance. My foot touches the tarmac and I suddenly feel safe. I glance behind me without stopping. The man has gone. I walk on, hot and red and itchy, wondering how I am going to explain to Joan about the shoe.

  Walnut Whip 1

  Some chocolate bars were considered adult territory. They were not labelled as such and whether the chocolate was dark or light didn’t really come into it. The distinction was more subliminal. After Eights, Terry’s Chocolate Orange, Toblerone, Dark Chocolate Bounty (the one with the red wrapper), Bournville, Black Magic, Fry’s Peppermint Cream, even Matchmakers were all considered as unsuitable for a young boy as watching an episode of ITV’s raunchy Armchair Theatre.

  Even kids’ stuff had its limitations. Mars Bars and Topics were shrouded in some mysterious etiquette. My father used to cut his into slices, put them on a plate in a neat line and eat each piece like it was an expensive chocolate. That way, he could make a bar last through a whole episode of The Avengers. Putting any chocolate bar straight into my mouth was forbidden. Except, for some mysterious reason, a Milky Way. Obviously it was a size thing. I had to break off each piece of Mars with my fingers and pop it into my mouth. Biting it straight from the bar was probably enough to get me sent to my room. I am not quite sure what he would have done if I had sucked the chocolate off a Mars the way Joan did – wiggling the bar from side to side as she came to the end of each long, deeply explicit suck. There was something fascinating about watching the way the milky chocolate dissolved on her tongue and left little brown stains in the corner of her mouth.

  When no one was looking I would take a Mars into the woods and suck off every last little bit of chocolate. Sometimes it would be a Fry’s Crunchie instead, in which case I would bite off the end then worm away at the honeycomb centre with the tip of my tongue, seeing how much of the amber sugar filling I could get to dissolve before the chocolate around it collapsed. The sticky joy of the sugar and chocolate extended tenfold by the fact that I was eating in a manner quite acceptable to any normal parent.

  One day my father brought home a handful of Walnut Whips. I preferred the coffee flavour, Joan the plain chocolate one. While sucking a Flake was not permitted, sticking my tongue deep inside a Walnut Whip was. Not only was it allowed, it was considered a game for all the family. Each of us snapping off the walnut with our teeth, then breaking into the cone of chocolate and poking our tongues deep into the hollow. On a good day you could gouge out every scrap of sweet coffee-flavoured foam. You had to curl the edges of your tongue up to get it in, but you could happily get to the bottom. So thick was the chocolate shell on a Walnut Whip that there was no danger of it collapsing.

  Friday night became Walnut Whip night. He would bring them out during the second commercial break in The Persuaders. So we’d all sit round watching Tony Curtis and Roger Moore, our tongues ferreting around inside our Walnut Whips. Quite why I was encouraged to practise this particular form of culinary cunnilingus, yet was barred from sucking a Mars bar, was something my father chose not to expand upon.

  I learned to love the woods. Not ours with its neat rows of carefully pruned Christmas trees, but the woods further up the road, which were less dense and had chaotic mounds of brambles with more blackberries than you could eat. I would walk for hours at the weekends, coming back with Tupperware bowls of berries which Joan made into pies with Bramley apples from the old tree in the garden.

  The woods were quiet; sometimes I would see no one all afternoon. It was here I would sit and read Cordon Bleu magazine or the cookery pages I tore out of Joan’s Woman’s Journal, and where I would masturbate, sometimes two or three times in an afternoon. Occasionally, I’d find pages torn from porn magazines that others had left there, pictures of big-breasted women with beehive hairdos and men with moustaches and medallions round their necks.

  Dad continued buying us sweets to eat in the evenings. A Cadbury’s Flake for Joan, a Toffee Crisp or Walnut Whip for me. He would usually just have an Aero and his pipe. My bedtime was at nine, even during the school holidays, and before that I had to take the dog out for his nightly walk. The road was narrow and the cars would come hurtling round the bends, often just missing me and the dog on his long lead. It seemed daft to take the dangerous route when it would be much safer to walk in the other direction, but I was forbidden from going up to the reservoir. ‘It’s not safe up there, the cars come at a hell of a pelt’ was the old man’s stern warning. In truth, the cars had a much clearer view of any pedestrian and the chances of being run down were much slimmer than the way I had been told to take.

  I had no idea about the lay-by near the reservoir. I knew it existed, of course, and that at night cars would line up to look at the twinkling lights scattered round the Malvern Hills like diamonds in a necklace. On a frosty night you could see even further, each light sparkling in the cold night air that made your face feel like a peeled grapefruit. Tucked up watching the news, neither Dad nor Joan were likely to leave their chairs and no one would know if I took the reservoir route. And anyway, I could let the dog off his lead in the lay-by.

  Once the lead was off I curled it up and stuffed it in my pocket, pulled apart the cellophane bag of Walnut Whip and bit off the walnut. I could see a row of cars all facing the glittering lights of the hamlets and villages below. The river shone like an abandoned silk scarf in the moonlight. People were sitting in their cars talking, some with their arms around each other. One car, a pale green-and-white Ford Capri, appeared to have no one in it, yet was swaying violently back and forth. A foot or two closer and I could see a pair of knees, wide apart, and then a slim, bare back. Within a foot of the car I got a view of a mechanically thrusting bottom.

  I must have stayed there seven or eight minutes, heart pounding, mouth parched, licking the filling from my Walnut Whip, wishing it was an ice lolly and praying the dog would stay away. Then a car door opened on the other side of the lay-by and I ducked down by the driver’s door of the Capri. A guy was standing with his back to me, peeing into the hedge. I couldn’t believe how he couldn’t hear my heart thumping. He got back into his car. The dog spotted me crouching and came scuttling towards me. I pushed him away then stopped when I could see he thought this was the start of some new game. The Capri suddenly stopped moving, I twisted my head round and looked gingerly up. Slowly, the driver’s windo
w opened an inch or two and a hand pushed something wet and glistening out of the window. It landed on my back, then, a second or two afterwards, a tissue followed. I shook myself, grabbed the dog by his collar and half ran, half walked, back down the hill, my heart hitting my ribcage, dropping the last bite of chocolate, the bit with the second walnut in it, behind me.

  I was still panting when I pulled back the curtain that acted as the door to the cloakroom. ‘All done then?’ asked Dad as he walked over and I hoicked my jacket up on to an empty peg. Then, as the light from the kitchen door flashed into the dark world of coats and wellington boots, he peered over the top of his bifocals and asked, ‘What’s THAT on the back of your jacket?’

  ‘Oh, that ruddy dog,’ I said, my stomach doing a sick-making somersault. ‘He’s been slobbering everywhere again,’ and I discreetly wiped a thick, shining line of semen off the back of my school blazer.

  The Hostess Trolley

  My aunt and uncle are coming for Christmas. Dad has decided to buy a hostess trolley so we can have Boxing Day tea in the sitting room. Not one of the dinky variety that is actually no more than three tin trays with wheels and a pram handle, but the full bells and whistles number, about six feet long with a middle shelf that glides up on a spring to form a table with the top shelf. It weighs a ton. With its walnut veneer it is the sort of hostess trolley for which one needs an HGV licence.

  After much debate, it is decided that the hostess trolley is to live for the rest of the year in the dining room. This will necessitate lifting it up the step from the dining room into the hall, down the step to the sitting room, down another step to the kitchen then, this time fully laden, back up to the sitting room. As labour-saving devices go this is not one of Dad’s better ideas.