From the Kitchen of Half Truth Read online

  ***

  The cottage is filled with a sweet, sugary scent. My mother has been making cupcakes, and twelve of them are lined up on the kitchen work surface, each decorated with pink icing and colored sprinkles.

  “This one’s for you,” she says, pointing at a cake that’s twice as big as the others, “and I’m going to top it with all of your favorite decorations.”

  I look at the bowl of rainbow-colored jelly sweets sitting near the cakes and secretly tally up the number of calories that will be contained in this well-meant gift, not to mention the amount of additives and colorings. I never eat sweets these days, not after researching what’s in them.

  “Fantastic,” I say with a smile. “And the other eleven are for…?”

  “I’m taking those to the local cancer hospice.” She shakes her head mournfully. “Those poor people,” she sighs, as if she’s not one of them.

  ***

  I always find it strange walking into “my” room. It’s like revisiting my childhood in a feverish dream where everything is distorted and the wrong way around. All my childhood things are here—my pink flowery duvet, my framed photo of two little bunnies eating dandelions, my music box, my little plastic handheld mirror—but this was never actually my bedroom. It wasn’t here in this cottage where I bounced on the bed or played with my toys or read my books; and yet here is the bed I bounced on, the toys I played with, and the books I read. My mother keeps it like a shrine to me, albeit a shrine that has been relocated from Tottenham to Cambridge. My school certificates and prizes are lined up on one shelf; my first science set sits on another. She has even kept all my old exercise books in a box at the bottom of the wardrobe. Feeling nostalgic, I delve in and pull one out—English Literature, Year 9, Mr. Hamble—and flick through the pages, recalling the pains I took to write in such small, neat letters. Everything is beautifully presented, with the dates in the margin and the headings underlined, but the pages are half blank.

  I read the assignment title at the top of one page: “Write your own myth of 500 words explaining how penguins lost the ability to fly.”

  In immaculate handwriting I have written: “I object to this assignment on the basis that it is fundamentally flawed. The Natural History Museum has told me there is no evolutionary evidence that penguins could ever fly.”

  Mr. Hamble has written “See Me” in big red letters at the bottom of the page.

  After my disgrace in Red Class, I hated English, all those silly stories and poems that were full of fictional characters and unrealistic scenarios. I greatly objected to being forced to read fiction and told Mr. Hamble it would certainly rot my mind.

  “It’s completely unrealistic,” I told him, “that Romeo would think Juliet was dead and then kill himself, and then that she would wake up, see Romeo was dead, and kill herself. What are the chances of that actually happening? I don’t think that has ever happened to anyone. Ever.”

  At parents’ evening Mr. Hamble told my mother that I was “a strange girl with an extremely underdeveloped imagination” and that I might benefit from some extra exposure to stories of a fictional nature. Huh! If only he knew!

  On the shelf next to my science kit, my old reading books are lined up neatly and hemmed in by two wooden bookends made to resemble caterpillars. I scan through the titles: Who Am I?—A Journey Around the Human Body; 101 Interesting Facts You Probably Didn’t Know; A Beginner’s Guide to Keeping Hamsters; Let’s Explore the Solar System; A Frog with Your Tea?—Strange Customs from Around the World; The Tale of the Jiggly-Wop. I pull this last one out and study the aged cover, wondering what a work of fiction is doing in there with all my educational books. This had been my mother’s favorite book when she was a little girl, and I recall her reading it to me when I was about six years old. It was my favorite, too, back then, but I could have sworn I had thrown it out along with every other storybook I owned. It was the silliest of fairy tales, full of talking animals and other ludicrous products of the imagination that could only serve to pollute my mind and lead me astray. I thought I had dumped it in the bin along with Alice in Wonderland, The Hobbit, and every other piece of nonsense my mother had subjected me to in a bid to rot my common sense, but obviously it managed to escape my mission of destruction. I had listened to this story so many times that I can still remember the words.

  “In a land far away, there lived a creature that didn’t know quite what it was…”

  I run my fingers over the front cover, tracing the outlines of the strange Jiggly-Wop beast: his elephant ears, his feathery cheeks, his flowing mane, his zebra-striped body, his webbed feet. For a moment, a smile plays at the edges of my mouth before I pull myself together and chuck the book into the wastepaper basket.

  “No wonder children are so stupid,” I mutter.

  ***

  Over a dinner of lasagna with fresh salad straight from the garden, my mother twitters on about her vegetable patch and Rick Stein and sea bass and turnips, anything to prevent me from questioning her about her illness.

  “Mother,” I finally interrupt, “how are you feeling?”

  “Wonderful,” she says cheerfully, quickly standing up and clearing the table.

  “Really?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ve lost a bit of weight, haven’t you?” I suggest in what must be the understatement of the year.

  “You know, I do seem to have lost a few pounds,” she says, tugging at the gaping waistband of her long, purple skirt. “I’ve had to tighten the elastic on this a couple of times now.” She bunches the waistband together in her fist, shakes her head, and looks genuinely baffled. “I did need to lose a few pounds, though,” she says, more cheerfully. “Too many puddings. You know what I’m like.”

  “Have you seen Dr. Bloomberg lately?”

  “Yes, just last week,” she says, plonking the dishes into a sink full of lemon-scented suds.

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Oh, nothing much. You know how he waffles on. Now, I made treacle tart and chocolate mousse for dessert. Which would you like?”

  I shake my head slowly, incredulously, but she refuses to look at me. “Whatever,” I mumble.

  ***

  The next morning I awake to the smell of sausages and bacon. For one dreamy moment, tucked up under my old pink sheets in the narrow bed with the sinking mattress, I imagine I’m a little girl again in our North London flat. I can feel the warmth of the morning sunshine stealing through the gap in the curtains, and I imagine I am running across Hampstead Heath, my mother holding her arms wide open, ready to catch me.

  But suddenly I feel the hand at my throat, fingers rough and calloused against my soft skin, squeezing, constricting, pressing against my windpipe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe! And someone is shouting at me, words I can’t decipher.

  I sit up with a start, gasping for air, clutching at my throat ready to pry away the hands that are choking me. It’s always the same, this horrible dream. I can’t see anyone. There’s no face, just this voice—deep and angry—and this feeling of suffocation. And the smell. The sweet, stomach-churning smell of raw meat. I almost told Mark about it the other day, such was my desire to share it with someone, but no doubt he would have thought me strange and perhaps even a little unstable. I flop back against my pillow, sweat cooling against my back and my heart pounding in my chest.

  ***

  “Morning! I’m making pancakes. There’s fresh coffee on the table, and the sausages and bacon are nearly ready. Now, how about eggs? Fried? Scrambled? Do you want some toast? It’s fresh bread; I made it this morning.”

  “Mother, I can’t eat all this,” I say, slumping down at the kitchen table in my pajamas.

  “I want to feed you up while you’re here,” she says, pouring batter mixture into a sizzling frying pan. “You
’re looking rather thin.”

  I watch her straining to lift the frying pan with both hands. How much must she weigh right now? A hundred pounds? Not even?

  As she tips the frying pan from side to side, spreading the batter around the pan, I see her body sway slightly. She places the pan back on the stove with a heavy clatter and stands motionless, gripping the handle as if for support.

  “Mother? Are you all right?”

  No reply.

  “Mother?”

  “I’m fine,” she says breathlessly.

  “Let me do that.” I stand up and approach the stove.

  “Absolutely not!”

  She turns and glares at me as if I’ve attempted to assault her. By suggesting she may not be capable of cooking, I have threatened her very way of life. She forces a little smile and takes a deep breath.

  “Do you want syrup or sugar with your pancakes?” she asks sweetly.

  ***

  Despite my protestations, my mother insists on getting out into the garden after breakfast and beginning her tidying up. For the first twenty minutes I am surprised and encouraged to find that she appears to have more energy than I do. She is a whirlwind of pruning, snipping, and trimming. As I work alongside her, stumbling through the tangle of roots and leaves, gathering the cuttings into a black plastic sack, I am foolish enough to allow a tiny ember of hope to catch alight inside me. Maybe her earlier weakness was just a momentary lapse. Surely she can’t be that sick when she seems so full of beans, can she? She chatters away while she works and hums tunes from the Beach Boys, David Bowie, and Abba.

  She picks various herbs and shoves them under my nose for me to sniff.

  “Isn’t that just delicious!” she says, beaming.

  The morning is warm and bright, and the rich, earthy smell of the soil mingles with the scent of rosemary, mint, and lemon balm. The birds twitter in the trees, and for a while it’s easy to forget that things aren’t perfect, that this isn’t just another summer like all the others we’ve had before. That this may, in fact, be one of our last. But despite her zealous start, it’s not long before my mother starts to wane. She drags her feet and rubs her back, gazing forlornly at the overgrown garden as if overwhelmed by the prospect of having to contend with so much work. The light fades from her eyes, gradually replaced by fatigue.

  “Mother,” I say tentatively, pulling weeds out from between a row of lettuce plants and deliberately avoiding her eye. “I was wondering, do you think perhaps it might be a good idea to get someone in to help you with the garden? Just for a couple of hours a week?” I hold my breath, waiting for her to snap at me like she did this morning.

  “Why would I want to do that?” she asks, tying an unruly bunch of runner beans onto a pole with a piece of frayed green string.

  Immediately I go from being worried about upsetting her to wanting to slap her face. Her denial is starting to grate. I try to breathe deeply, but I feel like I am nearing the end of my tether.

  “Because,” I say as calmly as possible, “it’s an awful lot for one person to manage.”

  “But I’m perfectly capable—”

  “I know you’re perfectly capable,” I say, clenching my teeth, “but this garden is really a lot to cope with on your own.”

  “Meg May,” she says, placing her hands on her bony hips and looking at me sternly. “I have been coping on my own since the day you were born. I have cooked, cleaned, scrubbed, tidied, washed, and ironed. I have sewn your dresses, done the shopping, and paid all the bills. I have fixed ovens, plastered ceilings, laid flooring, and put up shelves. Do not tell me that I cannot cope on my own. I’ve managed to grow vegetables in the past with not a minute left in the day and you clinging to the hem of my skirt, so if I could manage then, I can certainly manage now when I’ve got all the time in the world and no one else to worry about.”

  I know not to push this matter any further. I am defeated. There is no making her see sense. Getting her to face reality is, and always has been, like swimming against the tide. No matter how hard you struggle to reach dry land, a huge wave always comes and washes you back to where you started.

  This is what Mark doesn’t understand. It’s all very well asking me why I put up with my mother’s ridiculous delusions, but he doesn’t know how exhausting it is trying to reach the distant shores of reality. Somehow it is just easier to float alongside her in a sea of make-believe.

  “Fine,” I say, raising my hands in surrender, “it was just an idea. I’m going inside to make us some coffee.”

  Chastened, I throw my gardening gloves on the ground and follow the little brick path between the sprawling vegetable patches back toward the house. But before I reach the back door I stop, racking my brain to try to throw some light on my mother’s words.

  “When did you grow vegetables before?” I ask, turning around.

  My mother shields her eyes against the sunlight and squints at me, a trowel dangling from her hand.

  “What?”

  “You said you managed to grow vegetables with me clinging to the hem of your skirt. When? We moved from here when I was six months old and went to live in our flat in Tottenham. We didn’t even have a garden.”

  My mother stares at me like she can’t understand what I’m saying, as if she’s trying to process the words into some sort of logical order.

  “We had a window box,” she says quickly.

  “You grew vegetables in a window box?”

  “Of course. Just small ones, obviously. Little carrots, a few radishes…”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Well, of course you don’t remember,” she says tersely, “but that doesn’t mean it never happened.”

  Rosy red patches have formed on her cheeks, and she is anxiously picking little pieces of dried mud off her trowel.

  I shake my head, too hot and tired to think about whether there could be any truth in this, and turn to go inside, feeling that I have overstepped an invisible boundary once again.

  ***

  As the coffee brews, I open the front door and pick up the single pint of milk that has been left on the step. There is something comforting about villages where milk bottles still appear during the night as if by magic. It’s so much nicer than having to fight your way through the chaos of a twenty-four-hour Tesco, and I’m glad my mother is being spared that one stressful chore.

  The little lane where she lives is quiet and peaceful. The cottages are small and modest, spaced just far enough apart to afford privacy without isolation. This is perfect for my mother, who, despite her talkative energy and eccentricity, is very much a loner. She is happy with her pots, pans, and vegetable garden, chattering away to the plants and animals or even to herself. She goes out only when it is essential, scurrying to and from the shops with her head down. I don’t think she’s ever spoken to any of the neighbors, insisting that all the people who lived in the lane when she was growing up have long died or moved away and that she can see no point in getting to know anybody new.

  “Why would I want to talk to people?” she always says. “I already have everything I need.”

  Back in Tottenham, she used to connect loosely with people through food, leaving casserole dishes or baskets of muffins on our neighbors’ doorsteps, but what they took for an invitation to friendship was no such thing; it was merely a desire to see others eat well. Comforting, nutritious soups were left for Mr. Ginsberg, who had lost his wife and also his teeth. Reheatable curries were left for the medical student from India who pored over his books late into the night. Healthy vegetable stews were left for Mrs. Wallace, who needed to lose weight so she could undergo a hip replacement but who had no idea about calorie control. Cakes and cookies were left for the painfully thin girl in the flat below, who my mother assumed had an eating disorder but who was in fact a heroin addict.

  Yet when any of these peo
ple tried to engage my mother in conversation, she always had an excuse at the ready, some reason why she had to dash away and couldn’t possibly stop. I think it made them feel awkward at first, not to mention confused. They weren’t sure what my mother wanted if it wasn’t their friendship, and their efforts at paying her back in some way were always rebuked. But after a while my mother’s ways were simply accepted. Freshly washed dishes would appear on our doorstep every other day, sometimes with a thank-you note and sometimes without. If ever anybody ventured to knock on our door, my mother would open it with a warm smile on her face, chatter and laugh energetically for a few minutes, and then shut herself away again without inviting them in. I heard her being described as “lovely,” “wonderful,” “peculiar,” and even “mad,” but generally people learned to accept her dishes without a fuss and offer nothing in return. She wouldn’t have it any other way.

  As I take the milk into the house, I absentmindedly give the bottle a quick shake and examine the contents, just to make sure there are no fairies trapped inside, before I realize what I am doing and curse myself for being so stupid. When I was small, my mother and I often used to try to catch fairies in the park, tiptoeing softly around the bushes in the early morning, empty milk bottles at the ready. But logic soon taught me that this, too, was nothing but make-believe, and the next time my mother asked me to go hunting for fairies I snapped, “Stop being silly! I’m not a baby!” I thought she was doing it for my entertainment, but in fact she still went without me. And it’s not just fairies she believes in; it’s all things otherworldly. She’s fascinated by spirits and crystals and leprechauns and aliens…anything that sparks her wild and unruly imagination.