As Mum clatters around, managing to locate a frying pan in a jam-packed cupboard, I scrunch up the diet into a tight ball in my fist. I know I’m being churlish but I can’t help it.
‘I hear your father’s taking a holiday soon,’ Mum is telling me now. ‘An Easter holiday, like one a year isn’t good enough for him.’ She extracts a clear plastic carton of burgers from the fridge.
‘Really? I hadn’t heard. Where are they going?’
‘Penzance!’ she exclaims, in a voice more suited to ‘the Maldives’.
‘Well,’ I say carefully, ‘maybe you should have a holiday too. A change of scene might be good for you.’
She frowns, assessing my apparently ballooning figure. ‘Who would I go with?’
‘Mum, you have plenty of friends. I’m sure Penny or Joan would love to go away with you.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she says crossly.
A small silence descends as she lights the gas ring with a dented silver wand and sloshes yellow oil from a large unlabelled bottle into the pan.
‘When are we going home?’ Fergus mouths at me.
‘Never,’ I hiss, prompting him to mime a throat-cutting motion.
‘Please, Mum,’ he mouths back.
I shake my head and whisper, ‘You will die here.’
Mum turns back to us from the cooker. ‘I’m afraid I’m not doing chips, boys. Can’t be doing with all that fat.’
‘That’s fine, Grandma,’ Logan mutters.
‘Oh, I brought you these,’ I say in an overly perky voice, lifting the tin of meringues from my bag and removing the lid. ‘I’ve been testing new flavours. You can give me your verdict if you like.’
‘That’s kind of you,’ she says, wincing as if I might have expelled them out of my bottom.
‘I thought you might like the chocolate ones. I made them specially.’
She forces a tight smile. ‘So, as I was saying, it’s all right for your father and his fancy woman to swan off here, there and everywhere at the drop of a hat …’
‘Uh-huh,’ I murmur, unwilling to be drawn into a character assassination of Dad right now. Okay, he left Mum for another woman – Brenda McPhail who, with her reedy ex-husband, ran a dump of a pub on the moors called The Last Gasp (we are not talking gastro-pub, although they do stock a fine range of pork scratchings). Understandably, Mum was horrified; she’d had not an inkling that anything had been going on. In his holey sweaters and faded jumbo cords, Dad – an academic like Mum – hardly seemed capable of sparking a scandal among the sparse community in this blasted landscape. But eight months ago, he and Brenda hotfooted it to Devon, where they now keep chickens and goats. Although he’s rarely in touch, I can’t bring myself to hate him for it. After decades of Mum pointing out his failings, perhaps Brenda made him realise he didn’t have to live out the rest of his years feeling like a colossal disappointment after all.
Mum slices open four rolls on the cluttered worktop. ‘Can I help you with anything?’ I ask, conscious of hovering ineffectually.
‘No, it’s fine.’
A tense silence descends, and I glance at my boys, both of whom are slumped on the sofa as if awaiting an unpleasant medical procedure. At times like this, I’d give anything for a sibling to share some of this. As it is, I feel guilty if we don’t visit, and guilty when we do – for dragging my boys here and because, in truth, I’d dearly love to be somewhere else too. In fact, coming here is more guilt-making than staying at home.
Plus, I’m annoyed with myself for not having the gumption to say, Please stop badmouthing the boys’ granddad in front of them. It’s really not what we came here for.
‘Logan’s exams are coming up,’ I remark, sensing myself ageing rapidly, like a speeded-up film of the lifecycle of a rose. By the time we leave, I’ll be entirely withered.
‘I’m sure you’ll do well,’ Mum remarks. ‘You’ve always been a very bright boy.’
‘Thanks, Grandma,’ Logan mumbles.
‘You’ll be studying hard in the holidays, I’d imagine?’
‘Well, um, Dad’s taking us to the Highlands …’
‘But you’ll take all your books with you—’
‘Of course I will,’ he says quickly, flushing a little. I see a flicker of tension in his jaw, and am seized by an urge to hug him and say I’m so sorry it’s always like this, and I wish you had a storybook granny with an endless supply of cuddles and cakes and, actually, she does care about you. She just wants you and your brother to have successful lives, perhaps to compensate for me not having risen to the dizzy heights of academia … I start extracting plates from the cupboard and cutlery from the drawer, wondering if it would be so terrible to stop off to buy cigarettes on the way home, plus strong drink like vodka or gin.
‘How are you getting along at school, Fergus?’ Mum asks.
‘Great,’ he says brightly. ‘It’s loads better than primary school …’
‘Why’s that?’
‘’Cause we’re allowed to go up the street and get chips.’
She throws him a disappointed look, then turns to rip the cellophane lid off the carton of burgers, allowing a pungent odour to escape. Dear God, they stink. She’s planning to poison us all with rotten beef. Adopting the nonchalant air of someone planning to shoplift, I stroll around the kitchen table, bending to stroke Brian, her malevolent ginger tom, who hisses sharply from behind the propped-up ironing board. Working my way towards the cooker now, I casually peer into the pan where the slimy burgers have landed with feeble sizzle.
‘Um … are you sure they’re okay, Mum?’ I venture.
‘Of course they are. Why wouldn’t they be?’
‘Er, don’t you think they look a bit … peaky?’ What is wrong with me, an almost-forty-year-old woman, terrified of crossing my mother?
‘They’re fine,’ she declares as the remainder of our weekend flashes before me: of the boys puking copiously during the car journey home, culminating in twenty-four hours spent in bed. I can handle her cooking – I’ll stuff my burger in my shoe or something, as a sort of grease-soaked insole – but my boys won’t know unless I alert them. ‘I tried that diet myself,’ Mum informs me.
‘Did you? Well, you look great. Very trim.’ It’s true: she could spear someone’s eye out with those collarbones. Her moss-green scoop-necked sweater and dog-tooth-checked trousers are probably a size eight. Defeated now, I perch on the edge of the table and survey my poor sons who are about to ingest a swarm of seething bacteria. I’m their mother, for crying out loud; I can’t allow that to happen.
‘Don’t-eat-the-burgers,’ I mouth as Mum turns back to the stove.
‘Eh?’ Fergus says loudly.
‘The meat’s off. It’ll kill you.’
‘What?’ Logan barks as Mum heads for the fridge to rummage for her pre-war ketchup.
‘Don’t eat the meat!’ I mouth again, more forcefully this time.
‘Mum, what are you on about?’ Fergus asks.
I make a petrified face, indicating the pan on the hob, then poke two fingers into my mouth to mime vomiting. Logan bursts out laughing and Fergus stares at me uncomprehendingly.
‘She’s