Читать книгу Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger - Nigel Slater - Страница 14

‘We…are…going to have…spaghetti, no, SPAGHETTI…just try a bit of it. You don’t have to eat it if you DON’T LIKE it.’ Mum is yelling into Auntie Fanny’s ‘good’ ear. Quite why she thinks there is a good one and a bad one is a mystery. Everyone knows the old bat is deaf as a post in both.

Neither Fanny nor Mum has eaten spaghetti before, and come to think of it neither have I. Dad is waiting for the water to boil on the Aga. The sauce is already warm, having been poured from its tin a good half-hour ago and is sitting on the cool plate of the Aga, giving just the occasional blip-blop.

When the water finally boils my father shakes the strands of pasta out of the blue sugar paper that looks for all the world like a great long firework, and stands them in the bubbling water. They splay out like one of those fibre-optic lights we saw at the Ideal Home Exhibition on the BBC. As the water comes back to the boil he tries to push the spikes under the water. ‘They’ll never all go in,’ he snaps, trying to read the packet, which, even when read with bifocals, is in Italian. Some of the brittle sticks break in half and clatter over the hotplate.

‘Will I like it, Daddy?’ I ask, half hoping he’ll change his mind and Mum will cook us all some chops.

‘Just try it,’ he says, a somewhat exasperated tone creeping in to his voice. ‘Just try it.’

‘I think you should put some salt in,’ chirps in Mum.

Auntie Fanny is looking down at her lap. ‘Do I have to have some?’ I think she is going to cry.

‘I think it must be done now,’ says my father twenty minutes later. He drains the slithery lengths of spaghetti in a colander in the sink. Some are escaping through the holes and curling up in the sink like nests of worms. ‘Quick, get the plates, they’re getting away.’

We all sit there staring at our tumbling piles of pasta on our glass Pyrex plates. ‘Oh, Kathleen, I don’t think I can,’ sobs Auntie Fanny, who then picks up a long sticky strand with her fingers and pops it into her mouth from which it hangs all the way down to her lap.

‘No, wait for the sauce, Fanny,’ Mother sighs, and then quite out of character, ‘Come on, Daddy, hurry up.’ Dad spoons the sauce, a slurry of reddy-brown mince that smells ‘foreign’, over the knots and twirls of pasta. Suddenly it all seems so grown-up, so sophisticated.

Mum wraps the strands round her fork, ‘like this, do it like this,’ then shovels it towards Fanny’s wet, pink little lips. Most of the pasta falls down Fanny’s skirt, a little of the sauce gets caught on her bottom lip. She licks it off and shudders. ‘It’s horrible, it’s horrible. He’s trying to poison me,’ she wails. We all know she would have said the same even if it had been the most delectable thing she had ever eaten.

Ignoring Fanny’s little tantrum, I do as Mother bids, twirling the pasta round my fork while shovelling the escaping pieces back on with my spoon. I rather like it, the feel of the softly slippery noodles, the rich sauce which is hot, salty and tastes partly of tomato, partly of Bovril. I wouldn’t mind eating this every day. Unexpectedly, my father takes out a cardboard drum of grated Parmesan cheese and passes it to me to open.

‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ asks Mum.

‘It’s grated cheese, Percy Salt said you have to sprinkle it over the top, it doesn’t work if you don’t.’ Now we’re talking. I peel away the piece of paper that is covering the holes and shake the white powder over my sauce. I pass it to my father who does the same. Mum declines as she usually does with anything unusual. There is no point in asking Auntie Fanny, who is by now quietly wetting her pants.

Dad shakes the last of the cheese over his pasta and suddenly everyone goes quiet. I’m looking down but I can see my father out of the corner of my right eye; he has stopped, his fork in mid-air, a short strand of spaghetti hanging loose. His eyes have gone glassy and he puts his fork back down on his plate.

‘Daddy, this cheese smells like sick,’ I tell him.

‘I know it does, son, don’t eat it. I think it must be off.’

We never had spaghetti bolognese or Parmesan cheese again. Or for that matter, ever even talked about it.