Stuck to his dewlap, his boils and his blisters.
Encrusted as such he looked up at the crowd,
Who’d gathered around him, some silent, some loud,
Some angry, some praying to the god of all knowledge,
But most just stared at this man who’d had porridge.
‘What are you reading?’ asked Grandad, arching his head back to look at his ten-year-old granddaughter.
‘The book you found.’
‘What book?’
Instead of explaining all over again how the book had got into their house, Milk decided to read out loud. She continued from where she had left off, where Jim, covered in porridge, was confronted by the angry villagers …
‘Jim grinned at the mob, his mind all ablaze
With fear and confusion and wine-addled haze.
And tried to look sorry, forced tears to his eyes,
And begged for forgiveness with whimpering cries,
“’Twas only some porridge to soak up my wine.
What’s the world come to if hunger’s a crime?”’
Milk stopped. Grandad was snoring loudly and somehow he’d managed to completely cover himself in freshly doodled newspaper. She fetched a blanket and laid it over him, removing the one sheet of newspaper that covered his bald head. He really was totally bald. Not a single hair grew anywhere on his head apart from the wiry strands that dangled out of his nose as if two tiny brooms had been shoved up his nostrils with the brush ends sticking out. Thankfully, Milk was the opposite. No hairs hung out of her nose, and on top of her head grew a thick mop of chocolate-brown hair, cut into an unruly bob. She liked having a ‘bob’. It made her think that she had a friend called Bob, who was always hanging out with her.
Only occasionally did she wonder if she looked like her real mother, the one who abandoned her on the milk float. But she never let it trouble her. In fact, nothing gave her greater pleasure than when people told her that she looked like Grandad.
‘Aren’t you getting tall, just like your grandad,’ nice Mrs Farley would say.
Or Mrs Fozz might remark, ‘You’ve got your grandad’s ears. Nice and flappy.’
Of course everyone in Slopp knew that Milk was adopted and that any similarities to Grandad were just a coincidence, but still, to be told she looked like him was the best compliment she could ever wish for.
It took her less than an hour to read the rest of The Porridge of Knowledge. As you might expect, the roguish Jim got his comeuppance. Because he had eaten far too much porridge far too quickly, his head expanded and then exploded, splattering splodges of porridge from one side of the village to the other. Gruesome really, but no more so than some of the old fairy tales that Grandma had read to her when she was little.
She closed the book and stretched with the satisfied feeling that washes over you when you finish a good story. Not a great story by any means – she preferred her comics, with their slap-bang-wallop daftness – but it had happily taken her away from her homework for a while. She pushed the remaining logs together in the fire and tucked the blanket around Grandad. It wasn’t unusual for him to sleep all night in his armchair; in fact, he slept comfortably in any number of places. Not so long ago, Milk found him on the bathroom floor, curled up on a large cushion that the cat sometimes used. He was still there the next morning, except the cat had joined him, her furry body draped over his bald head, like a mother chicken protecting her egg.
Milk decided to do her homework in the morning before school. She stacked her schoolbooks into a pile at the end of the table, putting The Porridge of Knowledge on top. But books, like most things, don’t always do what they’re told. The little red book slid off the pile and landed, with a flutter of pages, on the kitchen floor. As Milk bent down to retrieve it, she noticed there were some handwritten words scrawled on the inside back cover.
It was a list of ingredients.
3 pints of water
6 oz of oatmeal
3 teaspoons of salt
Of course, Milk knew these were the three basic ingredients needed to make porridge. Most winter mornings she made two steaming bowls of the stuff for Grandad and herself. But the recipe didn’t stop there. In fact, it became decidedly weird …
8 slices of burnt toast (without crusts)
1 small pig’s kidney
14 limp limpets
1 bar of cabbage soap
2 grapes
33 white blackberries
1 pea, quartered
6 tablespoons of dandruff
Milk smiled. Six tablespoons of dandruff! As if! Someone must have written the recipe in the back of the book as a joke. Very funny, she said to herself, rolling her eyes, because it wasn’t very funny at all.
Without any further thought she put the book back on the table, kissed Grandad on his forehead and went up to bed.
Milk couldn’t sleep.
Outside, the rain hammered against her bedroom window and the wind whistled over the roof like a tone-deaf ghost. However hard she tried not to, she could only think about the little red book. She had porridge on the brain.
She imagined the awful Jim guzzling down all the porridge. She pictured him as a small, weaselly man, with an abundance of dried snot caked beneath his nose. She wondered about the other children who might have read the same book, cheering at Jim’s explosive end. Ka-boom! Serves him right, the greedy guts.
And then there was the recipe, handwritten on the back cover. It was a joke; of course it was. Limpets and dandruff in porridge? Ridiculous!
But despite all this, Milk already knew she wanted to try it out. Why not! Cook it up and see what happens. She would ask her friend Jarvis C. Carp to help. It’d be fun.
What possible harm could come of it?
CHAPTER 3
JARVIS C. CARP
The following morning, Milk left for school early. It was still raining and giant waves gushed and frothed onto the pebbled beach. She hurried along the promenade. The clouds were so low she could see only the vaguest outline of the pier. It looked like an unfinished drawing, without colour or detail, abandoned after just a few sketchy lines.
Carp’s Café was the only shop on the seafront with its lights on. Milk peered in through the steamed-up windows. Already, Jarvis had written the day’s menu on the blackboard above the counter. It read (and please note, Jarvis C. Carp’s spelling was as bad as his cooking):
CARP’S STARTERS
Pienapple soup with garlick bred
Pienapple chunks with chese
* * * * *
CARP’S MAINS
Eel and spicy pienapple pie with mushed potatoe
Smoked lettice salad with pienapple chips
* * * * *
CARP’S PUDDOING
Happy pienapple surprise with chesey custard
Milk opened the café door. Immediately she was overcome by a sickly smell of burnt fruit.
‘Jarvis?’ she called out into the empty café.
‘Is that you, Milk?’ came Jarvis’s voice from the kitchen. ‘Come on through.’
The nicest thing you could say about Carp’s Café was that the tea tasted only vaguely fishy and that the lettuce salad was quite, erm, lettucey. Other than that, the food was terrible. Atrocious! The omelettes tasted of rubber bands and the chips had been known to damage teeth. Even cockroaches thought twice about eating in Carp’s Café.
Jarvis C. Carp, the chef and owner, tried to make good food, he really did. Every evening he watched cookery shows on television and his bookshelves were full of cookery books. But despite all this, his food remained revolting. The trouble was that Jarvis C. Carp had no taste buds. He was born that way. He couldn’t taste a thing. Zilch! And when you’re a chef, that’s a pretty serious drawback. As the old saying goes, a chef without taste buds is like a toilet without a flush.
To make matters worse, he had no sense of smell either, though this misfortune was entirely his fault. Aged nine, in a playground dare, Jarvis had shoved sixtee
n peanuts up each nostril – it was the school record! The doctor tried removing them with tweezers, but they just wouldn’t budge. ‘Give it a month and I’m sure they’ll fall out of their own accord,’ advised the doctor, adding, with a chuckle, ‘Failing that, we can always use a pair of nutcrackers!’ But they never did fall out and since that day, Jarvis hadn’t smelt a thing. Not a whiff! As the old saying goes, a chef who can’t smell is like a bath without a plug.
Milk crossed the café and parted the beaded curtain that divided the seating area from the kitchen.
‘What do you think?’ asked Jarvis proudly.
Milk didn’t know what to think. Pineapples! Hundreds of them. Everywhere! On the surfaces, the shelves, in boxes on the floor and one in each of Jarvis’s outstretched hands.
‘They were going cheap at the market this morning, so I bought the lot. Don’t you love pineapples? Doesn’t everybody love pineapples?’
‘Yes, but …’
‘I made up some of the recipes all by myself. Look!’ His fat little legs skipped over to the cooker, on which sat a large saucepan full of a gloopy, bubbling yellow liquid. ‘Pineapple soup! And in here,’ he pointed to another saucepan, ‘is spicy pineapple sauce, to go in the eel pie. It’s going to be incredible!’ He plunged a spoon into the soup and held it out towards Milk. ‘Try it. I’m sure it’s delicious!’
Reluctantly, Milk took the spoon and sniffed the steaming liquid. Surprisingly, it didn’t smell too bad. Milk shut her eyes and put the spoon into her mouth …
What a mistake! It was disgusting. More than disgusting. It was revoltingly disgusting. It tasted metallic and meaty, as if the pineapples had grown in tins of dog food.
‘What do you think?’ asked Jarvis. He was so excited his fat little legs twitched with enthusiasm.
Milk held the foul liquid in her mouth. She dared not swallow it. ‘Is this one of your recipes?’ she spluttered.
‘No, no, no. I found this recipe in an old French cookery book. Do you like it? Oh, I’m so happy.’
Jarvis showed Milk the cookery book with a recipe entitled ‘Soupe d’Ananas’. Milk had learnt a little French at school, but only enough to ask where she might find her aunt’s pen.
‘My French is a little rusty,’ admitted Jarvis. ‘I know ananas means pineapple, the rest I guessed, but I got there in the end. It’s delicious, isn’t it!’
As Jarvis happily stirred the soup, Milk quickly spat the meaty-metallic liquid out of her mouth into the sink. She never told him that his food was terrible; Jarvis could be very sensitive and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. For instance, there was the time she suggested his cheesy sausages were a little too cheesy and right away he closed the café for the rest of the day.
It was Milk’s turn to ask a favour. She took the Porridge of Knowledge book out of her schoolbag and showed it to Jarvis. Quickly, for it was almost time to go to school, she explained the story of greedy Jim and how his head exploded after he ate all the porridge.
‘And there’s a recipe in the back,’ she added.
Jarvis’s eyes lit up. ‘A recipe? Well, we must make it. Today!’
Milk had hoped he would say that.
‘Does it need pineapples?’ asked Jarvis, hopefully. ‘Porridge with pineapples would be amazing.’
Milk shook her head. ‘But it needs some pretty strange things.’
Jarvis ran his finger down the list of ingredients, nodding as he read each one.
‘I know where to find limpets,’ said Milk. ‘I can go after school.’
‘Leave the rest to me,’ smiled Jarvis. ‘I think I can get everything else.’
CHAPTER 4
PINEAPPLE BREATH
Ms Cerise moved up and down the classroom collecting homework books off each desk and dropping them into a wire basket she’d once stolen from a supermarket.
‘I trust you’ve all done your homework. Not that I’m expecting much from any of you. Except for you, Reece. I’m sure yours will be excellent.’
An oily smile slicked across Reece Blanket’s face as he handed over his homework. He was the new boy in the class and Ms Cerise had taken an instant shine to him.
‘If only the rest of you could be like Reece, then we might actually achieve something in this classroom.’
Already Reece Blanket had earned the nickname ‘Grease Blanket’, though no one dared say this to his face, as he was by far the biggest boy in the class. Not yet eleven, he already had a trace of a fuzzy moustache sprouting above his top lip. Unfortunately for Milk, Reece sat right next to her at the back of the classroom.
‘Boys like Reece are the reason I became a teacher,’ continued Ms Cerise as she wiped clean the white board. ‘Until he arrived I was beginning to wonder what on earth possessed me to become a teacher in the first place.’
Actually, she knew very well why she had become a teacher. Ms Cerise was a show-off. She loved showing off how much cleverer she was than anyone else. She had no interest in children or education or any of that nonsense; all she wanted was to be the cleverest in the room. Nothing made her happier than a pupil giving her the wrong answer. Then she would sit back in her chair, an awful, smug smile plastered across her face, just to let you know just how stupid she thought you were.
‘Now then. Pie charts,’ began Ms Cerise. ‘Who can tell me what we use pie charts for? How about you, Fenella?’
As usual, Fenella Frat, the silent girl who lived on the same street as Milk, said nothing.
‘What’s that?’ teased Ms Cerise. ‘I didn’t quite catch that. You’ll have to speak up.’
Fenella slid down in her chair and stared at the floor.
‘Hmmm, interesting. Perhaps your brother can help us. He’s always so delightfully loquacious. Tell me about pie charts, Frank Frat.’
Frank sniffed and wiped his nose on his sleeve. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, but like his sister, said nothing. At the back, Reece Blanket could barely contain his sniggers.
Ms Cerise was beginning to enjoy herself. Her eyes landed on Melanie Spoons.
‘Ahhh, Melanie. Perhaps I should have come to you first. You look like you’ve eaten a few pies in your time.’ Of course, Ms Cerise was referring to Melanie’s size, which was extra large.
Just then, Reece Blanket raised his hand. ‘Miss?’
‘Yes, Reece?’ asked Ms Cerise, beaming back at him. ‘Do you wish to enlighten your dimwit classmates about pie charts?’
‘I don’t want to sit next to Milk.’
‘Who would?’ cackled Ms Cerise. ‘She’s only got half a brain. Semi-skimmed, I say.’
‘It’s not just that,’ continued Reece. ‘Her breath stinks. I can’t concentrate.’
Milk felt the colour rise up into her face. To be humiliated by Ms Cerise was one thing. But to be humiliated by Grease Blanket, of all people, was almost more than she could tolerate.
‘Is that so!’ said Ms Cerise, licking her lips at the prospect of embarrassing Milk. ‘And tell me, Milk, did you forget to brush your teeth this morning?’
‘No.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘No … Ms Cerise,’ said Milk through gritted teeth.
‘Come up to the front, please.’
Slowly, Milk got up from her chair. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Reece Blanket grinning at her like a wasp at a picnic.
As Milk approached the front, Ms Cerise addressed the class. ‘In my thirty-six years as a teacher I have learnt two things. Firstly, stupid children will always be stupid and though it breaks my heart, there is precious little I can do about it. Secondly, there is no excuse for poor personal hygiene. Reece, will you stand, please.’ Obediently, Reece got to his feet. ‘Everybody, look at this boy. Look at his shiny shoes and his beautifully combed hair. Show us your fingernails, Reece.’ Reece extended his hands towards the class. ‘See how they glisten like jewels. Fingernails are works of art, not tools to excavate nasal passages, Fenella Frat.’
‘I always use a handkerchi
ef, Miss,’ boasted Reece, proudly pulling one out of his jacket pocket. ‘And I brush my teeth four times a day. My daddy owns a toothpaste company.’ Just to prove it, he opened his mouth wide and showed the class his perfect, sparkling gnashers.
‘Thank you, Reece. You may sit down. Of course, I don’t expect you all to be like Reece here. I’m not some kind of tyrant.’ Ms Cerise turned to face Milk. ‘But some of you seem to find it almost impossible to carry out the most basic human functions. Milk, open your mouth please.’
Ms Cerise brought her nose to within an inch of Milk’s mouth. At this proximity Milk could see the thick layers of white make-up that Ms Cerise trowelled across her face and her lipstick, cherry red, exaggerating her thin, cracked lips.
‘I won’t ask you again. Open – your – mouth.’
There was only one thing for it. Milk took the deepest breath imaginable, opened her mouth and exhaled as heavily as she could towards Ms Cerise’s nose.
As if punched by an invisible force, Ms Cerise stumbled backwards and collapsed into Melanie Spoons’s lap.
‘Urgh! Wh-wh-what is it?’ she stuttered, melodramatically resting her hand on her brow like a fainting heroine.
‘Pineapple soup,’ answered Milk defiantly. ‘It’s on special today at Carp’s Café. You should try it, Miss.’
For the first time that day the classroom filled with laughter. Even Frank and Fenella Frat managed a squidgy giggle.
‘Silence!’ squealed Ms Cerise, trying to regain her composure. ‘All of you be quiet!’ With some difficulty, she extracted herself from Melanie Spoons’s lap.
‘Milk! Get out of my class. NOW!’
‘What about the pie charts, Miss?’ asked Milk, innocently.
‘Stuff the pie charts. What do I care about pie charts? GET OUT!’
As she made her way to the door, Milk turned and winked at Reece, the only one in the class without a smile on his face.
CHAPTER 5
The Porridge of Knowledge Page 2