Читать книгу Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger - Nigel Slater - Страница 31

The most forbidden of places was my father’s bedside drawer. I had never been told not to go there; I just knew it was out of bounds. A secret place. An ivory-coloured drawer set in a glossy black table, gold handle, its perfect patina interupted only by a ring burned in the top by a hot mug. My mother’s, on the other hand, was an open book. A jumble of tissues and hairpins, powder compacts and violet cachous. Home to one of the many Ventolin inhalers tucked discreetly around the house.

His drawer was neat, and smelled of the cortisone cream he smoothed into his hands in the autumn when each year a weird rash would flare up. There were several opened tubes of Setlers, a little blue Masonic book with dashes where some of the words should be and a fat grey-and-maroon packet of Durex. There were several menus from dinners he had been to, often with the signatures of those who attended on the inside and some strange badges that I guessed were something to do with his Masonic uniform.

Setlers were as much a part of my father’s DNA as his pipe and his Daily Telegraph. The chalky white tablets went everywhere with him; half and quarter packets were in every jacket pocket, including the one in his suede waistcoat, and in the glovebox of the car. Ten times a day he would rub his sternum and tear another strip of wrapper off his indigestion pills. He would nibble them when he drove and when he watched television. I have even known him take one after supper, ‘just in case’. Setlers were my dad’s worry beads.

If indigestion presented itself as a side effect of worry, it might also be taken as a symptom for coldness, short temper, impatience and deceit. He suffered all of these, as did we.

The filthiest of Dad’s stomach medicines was kaolin and morphine. A thick and creamy white crust that floated on a thin transparent liquid, he called it K et Morph. He would shake the glass bottle for a good two minutes, holding the cork in place with his thumb before he tweaked it out and took a swig, sometimes two, from the bottle. He shuddered as he swallowed during what had become a daily ritual. He always had something disgusting in his mouth, a Setler, a glug of kaolin and morphine, his pipe. When it wasn’t one of those it would be Senior Service or a Mannekin. I flinched on the rare occasion he kissed me, even though I wanted him to.