From the Kitchen of Half Truth

by Maria Goodin

  The sky is gray with dark clouds hanging overhead, and my back aches from all the crouching and carrying, but mainly I am just worried about my mother. She has persistently brushed aside Ewan’s claims that he can manage alone and that it is, after all, his job. She insists that she wants to help, that she is perfectly capable of helping, and that although she has been a little under the weather lately, with her chest a little wheezy and her limbs a little achy, she is feeling absolutely fine now and wants to be of use. I know there is no point arguing with her.

  “Let’s go, then,” I say, popping the last of my mint cake into my mouth.

  My mother, who has been sitting on the bench beneath the kitchen window, tries to push herself up from her seat, but she is frail and weak, like an old lady instead of a woman who has yet to see her fortieth birthday. She has overdone it this morning and has no strength left. Her miraculous mint cake may well have energized an entire police force, but it has had little effect on her. She struggles and wheezes, looking embarrassed.

  “Mother, look,” I say. I am about to tell her how ridiculous this is, that she is far too ill to be doing physical work and should surely be resting in bed, but Ewan interrupts.

  “You know what might be a really good idea?” he says hurriedly, placing his hand on my mother’s shoulder to stop her from standing. “If you sort out the stuff we’ve already picked. We’re running out of bowls and pans, and there’s hardly any space left in the kitchen.”

  My mother smiles up at him, looking rather relieved at this suggestion.

  “Well, I suppose there’s no point picking more if we haven’t anywhere to put it, is there? Are you sure you can do without me, though? I’m quite ready to keep going if you need me.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” says Ewan cheerfully. “You can out-pick me any day. You’ve already put me to shame this morning.”

  This, of course, is rubbish. My mother has, despite her best efforts, picked very little and has spent most of the morning wandering wearily in and out of bushes, chatting about all kinds of nonsense to whichever one of us happened to be nearest. Ewan’s praise, however, makes her smile proudly.

  “You might want a coat,” Ewan calls to me as he heads off down the garden. “It’s going to start raining in four minutes.”

  I look up at the sky, which actually seems a little brighter than it has all morning.

  “I don’t think so,” I call.

  He shrugs his shoulders without turning around. “Suit yourself.”

  There are cracks between the clouds, where gray-blue sky is showing through.

  “Four minutes!” I scoff. “How on earth can he say it’s going to rain in four minutes?”

  I turn to my mother for her response, but she has already fallen asleep on the bench, dozing peacefully with her mouth hanging slightly open. I go inside and fetch a blanket.

  “I told you not to overdo it,” I chastise her gently as I tuck the blanket snugly around her. “But you are just so stubborn.”

  She moans softly in her sleep and mumbles something about cabbages.

  “Why can’t you ever listen to anyone else?” I whisper.

  I tuck her cold, bony hands beneath the blanket, pick up my plastic bowl, and head down to the garden, just as it starts to rain.

  ***

  Ewan and I work silently for a while, me crouching down in among the wet strawberry plants and Ewan picking plums from the trees nearby, placing them into a Tesco shopping bag. The best of the strawberries are gone, and the ones I can salvage will be pureed to make jam, ice cream, strawberry sauce…or at least they will if my mother is well enough.

  She is still cooking, but not with the same frenzy as before, and my lessons seem to have fallen by the wayside. Instead, she lies on the couch and flips through books on French cuisine or watches Delia or Ainsley or Jamie, talking to them as if they can hear her through the TV screen, thanking them for their little tips or telling them off for leaving their hot oil unsupervised. The chance of her making use of all this fruit seems negligible, and I imagine opening the freezer a year from now and seeing it all still there, like a strange frozen shrine to her.

  The idea of it makes my stomach lurch, and suddenly I wonder what the point is in any of this. I am kneeling on cold, wet ground, fiddling around among stodgy strawberries with the rain soaking through my sweater and what the hell for? So that all this fruit can go to waste inside the house rather than out here in the garden?

  “Why are we doing this?” I suddenly shout, flinging a moldy strawberry across the garden. Digger, who has been lying obediently by Ewan’s feet, leaps up and runs after it excitedly.

  “What do you mean?” asks Ewan, examining a plum for maggot holes.

  “What’s going to happen to all this fruit? My mother hasn’t got the energy to make use of all this. What are we freezing it for? She’s not going to defrost it in a few months’ time like she keeps saying she will. She’s not even going to be here, for God’s sake!”

  Ewan looks at me, raindrops dripping from his hair. “Do you want to go and tell her that?”

  “Well, someone should! This is madness. There’s no point in it.”

  He gently places the plum in his bag. “There you go again,” he sighs, “always needing everything to have a point.”

  “I just don’t understand what she can be thinking. She’s not going to be making strawberry ice cream with these strawberries next summer, or using those plums in the Christmas stuffing, or any of the other things she’s been twittering on about all morning. Why is she pretending she is? And you’re not helping, making out like she’s champion fruit picker. I saw you earlier, adding blackberries to her basket when she wasn’t looking.”

  “She’s not pretending. Pretending means you’re doing something on purpose. I don’t think that’s what your mother’s doing. It’s not a conscious decision. She’s not deliberately lying to you. I think she honestly believes she’ll still be around to do all these things. She’s convinced herself of it. Her mind is just trying to find a way of making her illness manageable.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Freud,” I mutter, hurling another rotten strawberry across the garden for Digger to chase. “And since when do gardeners have degrees in psychology?”

  “It’s not rocket science,” says Ewan, pulling the hood of his sweater up over his head as the rain begins to beat down harder. “People have been telling themselves stories ever since time began in order to make some sort of sense of the world they live in. Like those myths you think are so stupid. They’re just another way of understanding the world. Remember your friend Prometheus, who gave fire to man and then was punished by having his liver eaten every night?”

  “Both impossible and ridiculous.”

  “To you, maybe, but to people of the time, it explained the existence of fire. Other myths explain death, the seasons, how we came to be here…”

  “Oh, don’t tell me,” I say, sighing irritably. “We’re here because of something to do with a dragon and an apple.”

  Ewan smiles and shakes his head. “No, but why not? It could be anything that makes sense to you. In Egyptian mythology, man was fashioned out of clay. In Chinese mythology, Pangu grew out of an egg.”

  “Pang who?”

  “Pangu.”

  Ewan gazes up at the sky, letting the rain fall against his face. He is the only person I have ever met who could possibly look so content picking plums in the rain on a gray, miserable day. I am cold and fed up and want to go indoors.

  “In the beginning,” he says, “there was nothing but darkness and chaos. But in the darkness formed an egg, and inside the egg grew the giant, Pangu. For millions of years Pangu grew and slept, until one day he stretched and his huge limbs broke out of the egg. The lighter parts of the egg floated upward to make the heavens, and the denser parts sank downward to make the earth. Pangu liked this new arran
gement, but he was worried the earth and the sky might meld together again, so he placed himself between them with his feet on the earth and his head holding up the sky.

  “When Pangu died, his breath formed the wind and the clouds, and his voice formed the thunder and lightning. His eyes became the sun and the moon, and his arms and legs became the four directions of the compass. His flesh became the soil, and his blood became the rivers, while stones and minerals were formed from his bones.”

  Ewan takes a bite from one of the plums. “Creation myths are just another way of trying to make sense of our world. Really, they’re just trying to do the same thing science does, but in a different way.”

  I shake my head and am about to tell him he’s talking rubbish and that the story of Pingu or Pongu or whatever his name is has nothing scientific about it. But as I turn a strawberry over in my fingers, I find myself pondering the way the cracking open of the egg bears some resemblance to the Big Bang theory and how the shape of the egg seems to have something in common with Einstein’s theory of curved space.

  “Even if you’re right,” I concede reluctantly, “and people do make up these silly tales to help make sense of the world, I can’t see what that’s got to do with my mother. She’s not just trying to make sense of her illness. She’s been making up ridiculous fantasies ever since I can remember, way before she got sick. All these ludicrous tales about my childhood, what are they possibly helping to make sense of, Dr. Freud?”

  Ewan shrugs. “Perhaps that’s the question,” he says through a mouthful of plum.

  I turn a squishy strawberry over and over in my fingers. Perhaps that’s the question.

  For someone who questions the purpose of everything, I am surprised to realize that there is one thing I never wondered about my mother’s stories: what purpose do they serve? If Ewan is right, if stories help to make the world a more manageable place, then what is it that my mother is trying to manage?

  I hear Ewan calling something to me, but I don’t hear what he says, so lost am I in this new wave of thought.

  Perhaps I have always been too caught up in the frustration, the anger, the battle to find out the truth, to ever ask the question that really counts: Why?

  I am vaguely aware of the rain beating harder and harder on the strawberry plants, hitting the wet soil around me.

  What purpose do these stories serve?

  Perhaps that’s the question.

  Suddenly my mind is whirring.

  What if there is a purpose to all these lies, and what if I never find out what it is? How will I ever make sense of my own life? How will I ever find a meaning to all this? What happens when you don’t know the truth but you can’t believe the lies, when you can’t find a way—through fact or fiction—to give meaning to your own existence? Without a narrative for your own life, do you ever really exist at all?

  Do you go mad without meaning? Is that what will happen to me? Will I go madder than my mother? After all, her life has a story to it. It might be crazy and ridiculous and a lie, but it’s something, at least, to provide explanations and reasons and meaning. Whereas what do I have? Nothing. I have no explanation for anything, nothing I can cling to, nothing that makes sense.

  Is that enough to drive someone crazy?

  “Meg!” Ewan shouts, trying to get my attention.

  I look up at him, a strand of wet hair plastered to my face.

  “Go inside,” he says, raindrops dripping from his hood. “You’re getting soaked.”

  What day is it today? Friday. And what’s the date? The twenty-eighth.

  The last Friday of the month.

  I stand up quickly, my joints clicking, pins and needles shooting up my legs.

  “I’m going to London,” I suddenly announce.

  Ewan frowns at me as I quickly make my way out of the strawberry patch, hopping over rows of bedraggled-looking plants.

  “Now?” I hear him ask.

  But I am already jogging up the garden path, my feet squelching inside my trainers, and don’t stop to turn back.

  “I’ve just remembered,” I call over my shoulder. “I have a gig to go to!”

  chapter thirteen

  When I burst through the door of the Frog and Whistle, dripping wet and out of breath from my sprint down Euston Road in the middle of a thunderstorm, for a second I think I must have the wrong pub. This evening there are people leaning on the bar, slouching at the tables, hovering around the ancient slot machines, standing in little huddles nursing their pints, all enjoying the rowdy, high-spirited atmosphere. If it weren’t for the familiar stench of stale beer and urinals, and the sight of Hot Stuff shrieking with laughter and spilling lager all over herself, I could easily think I was in the wrong place. I am surprised to realize that the aging rock band Chlorine is obviously quite a crowd puller. And when I hear them play, this surprises me even more.

  As I linger uncertainly in the doorway, from the back of the pub a noise suddenly erupts that sounds like a car being mangled and someone screaming in pain. It is some time before I can make out a tune, but eventually I recognize the banging and wailing as a horrendous rendition of “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones. The customers, however, seem to love it. A group of shaven-headed men start shouting the words and punching their fists in the air while Hot Stuff gyrates her large, tracksuit-clad bottom for their entertainment. I stand on tiptoes, trying to see the band, but all I get is the odd glimpse of a guitar, then the sleeve of a leather jacket, then a microphone stand being waved in the air.

  What if one of them looks like me? I wonder, my heart starting to thump nervously. What if I recognize my own face in one of theirs? Will our eyes instantly connect across the crowded room? Will the music suddenly stop, one of them gazing at me in awe and amazement, recognizing his long-lost daughter?

  I work my way through the groups of people, narrowly avoiding being elbowed by one of the singing men, trying not to stare at Hot Stuff’s distasteful dancing, until I reach the front of the pub. Standing before the band, I watch them—four men in their mid-forties with receding hairlines, haggard faces, too-tight jeans, out-of-tune voices—and can’t help feeling slightly disappointed. Just like my first surreal encounter with the infamous Dr. Bloomberg, I somehow expected that this band, who might have some tenuous but genuine connection to my mother’s past, would seem different, special, in some way magical. But instead they just look like four men in a state of midlife crisis.

  Each of them catches my eye at some point, but none of them lingers there for more than a second. If one of them spies something familiar in my face, a memory from long ago, a ghost from his past, then it doesn’t show. Not one of them looks like me, and it suddenly seems ridiculous that I ever wanted, or expected, them to.

  Not knowing what else to do, and suddenly feeling rather self-conscious standing on my own, I find a stool at the corner of the bar and order a bottle of orange juice from the same flabby, lethargic barman I met before. I have no intention of drinking it for fear of catching something, but at least I don’t feel so conspicuous with a glass in my hand. All I can do now is wait for the band to take a break.

  ***

  After almost two hours of listening to Chlorine wailing and groaning with no break in sight, I am starting to get frustrated. My ears feel like they have suffered irreparable damage, and from the other side of the pub a man with a mermaid tattoo on his forearm keeps winking at me. Each time the music stops, I get ready to collar one of the band, but they only ever pause to swig their beer and exchange banter with the customers, who after the first thirty minutes started to dwindle considerably in number. The ones who remain seem to be on first-name terms with the band, and I imagine these are the faithful followers—friends, relatives, and a handful of loyal, tone-deaf fans. The lead singer—I guess this must be Wizz—is so drunk that he keeps forgetting the lyrics, and the lyrics he does remember are increasi
ngly out of tune. Hot Stuff is even drunker than he is, and at various points in the evening she has flashed her breasts at the band, tried to start a fight with the barman, and attempted to commandeer the microphone for a karaoke-style sing-along.

  And then, finally, I hear the sound I have been longing for…

  “Ladies and gentlemen, you have been wondervul,” Wizz drawls drunkenly into the microphone, “a wondervul crowd of…of ladies and…and of gentlemen. And we apprece it…appreciate it. We will be back next week. No, next month.”

  “Don’t bother!” someone shouts.

  During a mixture of booing, halfhearted clapping, whistling, and some screaming from Hot Stuff, I tentatively make my way forward. The list of questions I so carefully prepared on the train suddenly vanishes from my mind, and when I find myself standing in front of the tall, skinny drummer, who is the first to start making a beeline for the bar, I don’t quite know what to say.

  “Hello. Erm…can I talk to you? I have some questions. I…sorry, this probably sounds a bit strange, but I was wondering—”

  “I love you!”

  Hot Stuff suddenly pushes me out of the way and throws her arms around the shocked-looking drummer.

  “Take me into the back alley and pretend I’m a groupie!” she shouts, licking her lips and pulling at the poor man’s clothes.

  “Can’t we just go home?” asks the drummer, looking disgruntled. “I’ve got to work tomorrow. And it’s probably still raining anyway.”

  “Oh, you’re meant to be wild and crazy!” moans Hot Stuff, shoving the drummer angrily so that he almost loses his balance. “It’s part of your job!”

  “I work at B&Q,” he says meekly, straightening his T-shirt, which she has half pulled off his bony shoulder. “You didn’t marry Noel Gallagher, you know. I can’t go doing my back in by getting up to no good in a back alley. I’ve got eighteen boxes of ceiling tiles to move tomorrow.”

  As Hot Stuff stomps off, ranting about how what a catch she is and how she could have married anyone she wanted, the drummer follows her, leaving me staring after them.