Читать книгу Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger - Nigel Slater - Страница 26

Mother is upstairs, having forty winks, as she calls her afternoon nap. Adrian is standing in the doorway, smiling and swaying back and forth. His eyes flicker open and closed. He stumbles over to the sofa with its white cotton covers with their sprigs of flowers, stands at the end of it then falls backwards on to the sunken cushions. He lies there on his back, his eyes open then close, then he crosses his hands on his chest like Boris Karloff and goes to sleep.

Adrian got Hush Puppies this week, slip-ons the colour of a roe deer. The ones with the black elastic patches at the side. They look great with his narrow black knitted tie and his white button-down shirt. Mum has promised to take me shopping to Beau Brummell’s for a button-down shirt for school. She says I can’t have a tie like his because I will never wear it and suede shoes will last all of five minutes with me. She reckons I grazed my new sandals, horrid red-brown ones with diamonds cut into the toes within two days. She says she doesn’t believe me when I tell her that Maxwell Mallin and Peter Francis jumped on them in the playground at lunchtime. Then, after a pause to get her breath, she snaps, ‘It wouldn’t happen if you’d play with the other boys.’ It is one of our rare icy moments. It occurs to me that if she died I would be allowed to wear a black tie to school.

Josh has come to do the garden but sees my brother asleep and says he has to go back home and will come again on Monday. I follow him out to the drive but he seems distant, cold even. I explain that my brother is a really nice guy but Josh doesn’t want to know, he just revs up and drives off. Distant. ‘I’ll see you then.’

When I come back Adrian is in a different position, and the sofa seems to have mysteriously moved forward a good two feet. The rooms smells of tinned chicken soup and something sour.

There is the sound of a key in the door and my father pops his head round the door. ‘Adrian’s asleep, Mum’s asleep,’ I say, even though it probably doesn’t need saying. Daddy stares intently at my brother, screwing up his eyes like he is trying to work something out. ‘Hmm,’ he grunts.

On the kitchen table is a large, cardboard box with short sides. A large sandwich loaf, a packet of butter, two bags of white sugar, a bunch of red, blue, white and magenta anemones, a blackcurrant pie, a box of Terry’s All Gold and the Radio and TV Times. My father brings more stuff up out of the boot of the Rover and puts it down on the table, grabs the box of All Gold and takes it back to the car and puts it in the glovebox. He then hands me a box of Mackintosh’s Weekend and tells me to take it upstairs to Mum.

By the time I’m back down – she’s asleep – he’s cut each of us a slice of blackcurrant pie, sliding the thin slices on to glass Pyrex plates. This is the pie I think about all week. The pie I lie in bed and dream about before I go to sleep. The fruit is sharp and sweet, the pastry pale and crumbly, like it is only just about cooked. It has no decoration save a small hole like a navel in the middle. Sometimes it isn’t quite in the centre. I don’t understand this, why would you put it off-centre? I eat my pie slowly, pushing my fork down through the sugar crust and into the purple-blue fruit below.

Someone thumps the huge knocker on the door twice. I can hear Warrel, my best friend. ‘Can Nige come out to play?’ My father pokes his head around the door. ‘Well, can he?’ ‘Nigel can’t come out just now, he isn’t feeling well,’ I say, biting my lip. My father smiles and disappears. Play with my best friend or have second portions of pie? No contest.

I take my second slice of pie into the sitting room. Adrian has disappeared upstairs. I sit on the floor, my back resting against the sofa. It slides back on its castors to its original position. There, where the edge the sofa had been, is a pile of my brother’s warm vomit. But pie is pie and I tuck in regardless.