Читать книгу Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger - Nigel Slater - Страница 30

Nobody tells me anything. They talk in whispers over my head; in hushed tones when I’m sitting drawing my usual pictures of Scottish hills or gluing model planes together. (I’m very good at shading heather and frankly draw nothing else, inspired no doubt by our last holiday, when we drove back from Loch Lomond with a sprig of the stuff tucked in the radiator of the car.)

Friday afternoon is when the pop man comes. During the summer holidays I wait around for him to arrive so that I can get at the dandelion and burdock before my brothers do. The bottles are heavily embossed and have screw caps that are almost impossible to undo. Favourite: D & B; second favourite: cream soda; least fave is plain lemonade which I leave for everyone else. I think my dad drinks it.

I like dandelion and burdock because it makes me burp really loudly, but the best flavour is actually cream soda. I don’t know how they get something clear and pale green to taste creamy but they do.

‘I don’t know how you can drink that stuff,’ says our daily, Mrs Poole, grimacing like a haddock eating mustard. Mrs Poole has long grey hair tied in a plait round her head. Bits of hair, dry and floaty, splay out at all angles so that her plait looks like a viper in a nest. She is fat with a big bottom, actually a vast, flat bottom that sways as she hoovers the sitting room and seems to have a life of its own. You always knew when Mrs P. had been, the house smelled of lavender polish and stale Hoover bags and there was the faintest whiff of armpits. I don’t know what my mother would do without her, even though she does smell of tinned tomato soup.

‘That stuff’ll give you wind,’ huffs Mrs P.

‘Actually, everything gives me wind.’

‘Like you needed to tell me that. I hear you aburpin’ an’ ablowin’ all the time. If your father was to hear those noises you make he’d ban you from drinking all that pop. Sometimes, I’m surprised you don’t go bang.’

‘Well, if I do, then you’ll just have to mop me up, won’t you.’

Cream soda never seems as cold as the other drinks. The bubbles are softer, and don’t get up your nose and make your sinuses burn like dandelion and burdock or orangeade. Cream soda looks as if it is going to taste of lime but is instead rather more fleeting, vanilla perhaps. Whatever flavourings they use it is rather like drinking a sponge cake.