Six at the Table

by Sheila Maher

  Offal

  As most of the meat we ate was well done and required a lot of chewing, kidneys and liver provided a welcome alternative – for me at least. A smooth, soft piece of kidney was often much tastier and more tender than the stewing beef it was cooked with. Only Dad and I liked the kidney pieces that went into Mum’s steak and kidney pie, and we happily took donations of kidney bits from the others. Pieces were flung onto our plates from every direction. When someone came across an unwanted piece in their own slice of pie, they’d shout, ‘Here’s another one – which of you wants it?’ Even Mum didn’t like kidney, which made me wonder, given her position of control, why she added it to our stews at all. Was it to stretch the meat a little further in order to feed six large stomachs? Was it to please those of us who liked it? Or was it simply to add variety to our dinners?

  Similar manoeuvres took place when we had liver. Mum steeped thin slices of lamb’s liver in milk for a few hours before dusting each piece lightly with flour and flash frying it in oil. Cooked properly, it was moist with a strong metallic taste and a texture like pâté. Liver and chips was frequently on the midweek menu. Kevin and Lucy piled chips high on their plates, soggy with Heinz Tomato Ketchup. They slipped most of their liver to Catherine and me when Mum was occupied getting more chips from the fryer. Dad loved liver and to keep him quiet, they used to give him some extra too.

  There came a day when Dad sat in the midst of our daily dinner shenanigans, very pale and very still. We were having liver, but he had only a small side plate of mashed potato in front of him. A fork rested loosely in his hand, and he looked vacant and disinterested in his food. He’d been to the dentist and had all his back teeth taken out. Through rolls of cotton wool, jammed into each side of his mouth and encrusted with blood, he told me that he could only eat ‘mush’ for the next few days. He was getting new teeth like Grandma, he said. Then he’d be as right as rain. I was fascinated in a ghoulish way by false teeth, having vague memories of Grandad’s in a glass of water by his bedside, and seeing Grandma’s slip out onto her chin while she dozed on the sofa with her mouth open. I couldn’t wait to see Dad’s. In the meantime, I had to make do with staring at his swollen face and neck whenever he looked the other way or slept on the couch.

  His mashed potato remained untouched, and silently Mum removed it – its absence less disturbing than its presence. Out of confusion or possibly fear, I’d decided never to question Dad’s not eating. I was afraid of Mum’s tears if I asked the question out loud, and I was fairly certain I wouldn’t want to know the answer anyway. Instead, when he stood up from the table before dessert, I said ‘Good night, Dad’ in as cheerful a manner as I could – without sounding too happy. It was a tightrope I was walking and I wasn’t sure why I was doing it and if I was getting ‘it’ right.

  A momentary silence hung over the table after he closed the door behind him. I listened to him slowly mount the stairs. Maybe someone coughed. Mum surely said something in her best mock-cheerful voice: ‘Finish up your dinners now, before I get the dessert.’ We conspired silently to ignore Dad’s leaving.

  Tray-bakes

  On Fridays I liked to hang out with Maeve, in her house or mine. It was the start of the weekend, there was no school for two whole days, so we could stay a bit longer in each other’s company. These days I preferred being in her house. It was good to escape the hushed atmosphere that had settled over everything at home, despite Mum’s efforts at good cheer. ‘This is nice, isn’t it?’ she’ d say brightly after we’d watched a film together or had a nice meal. ‘Lovely.’ ‘Yeah.’ Our answers would fake a levity we no longer felt. Then gloom returned. Dad was spending a lot of time in bed. We had to be quiet around the house in the middle of the day. If he was not in bed, he was dozing by the fire, wrapped up in his thick maroon dressing gown, his white hairless feet stuck into slippers. Mum said he was recovering from the dentist and that he would be better soon.

  In Maeve’s house they had cardboard boxes filled with broken biscuits to eat. In what seemed like part of a Roald Dahl plot to me, her uncle worked in a biscuit factory and the O’Reillys were the lucky beneficiaries of many of the rejects from the production line. Sometimes I picked a damaged chocolate ring from the box, only to find there was no biscuit in it at all, just pure chocolate all the way through. Biscuits in our house were kept under lock and key, Mum doling them out as and when she saw fit. These cardboard boxes floated around Maeve’s house casually, hands dipping in and out with regularity. There was an amazing freedom and autonomy with treats that I was not used to.

  Keen to escape my home, I ran up the road and rang her doorbell to see if she wanted to play. Her Mum opened the door and told me she was out, with Sharon, one of the ‘O’s from 3B. Kindly she suggested that I go and join them. I knew where Sharon lived, I could have called over but I felt the rejection bitterly. Maeve had moved on, she had done what Sister Joseph had suggested and made new friends. I had not. It was a Friday afternoon and I’d no one to play with. I walked home slowly, an afternoon of colouring and Kevin lying ahead of me. While ordinarily that prospect was not so bad, it felt bleak now that I knew Maeve was having a good time – with someone else.

  ‘Maeve not in?’ Mum asked on my return.

  ‘No. What’ll I do now?’ I mumbled.

  ‘Kevin’s inside with his colouring books, why don’t you join him?’ Mum’s response was predictable.

  Reluctantly I did as she asked. Kevin was great, but he was just a bit small and he didn’t like to play with dolls much. But he’d have to do for now.

  Luckily Friday was also Crackerjack day and we were allowed put the television on to watch it before the six o’ clock news. After a long week at school, this was our little treat. Friday was also the day Mum made a tray-bake. Even with Dad sick, this tradition didn’t stop. Perhaps it was because he was sick, that she felt the need to keep at least some treats coming our way.

  From the sitting room, I heard the rattle of the weighing scales and the clink of presses being opened and shut. I turned my back on the on-screen chaos, in favour of the kitchen. There I found Mum with one of her many well- used recipes, speckled with yellow smudges and dried-in splashes, spread out on the countertop beside a big bowl, all the ingredients collected and ready.

  Mum proudly called me her ‘right-hand woman’ to neighbours and relatives. I enjoyed the praise and admiration. Unless there were other children present. Then I just wished Mum would shut up and stop making me sound like such a goody two-shoes, a lick and a swot. But I couldn’t disguise the fact that I liked working in the kitchen. Scraping carrots, stirring gravy and setting the table were okay jobs to do. But the best job was acting as Mum’s assistant during cake-making, or when she was making one of her many tray-bakes. Maeve didn’t know what a tray-bake was. She thought it was a stupid word. They were either cakes or biscuits. What’s a tray got to do with it? Her mammy didn’t make cakes, so what did she know? I didn’t let this get in the way of my enjoyment of such delights as chocolate toffee slices, flapjacks, almond slices, apple slices, melting moments, florentines, chocolate biscuit cake, shortbread. Mum even made her own Jaffa cakes, ginger biscuits and chocolate-chip cookies.

  I sidled in, sneaked a look in the bowl and at the scattered ingredients and made a mental assessment of the type of finger-licking and bowl-scraping I would be doing. I asked if I could help.

  ‘Oh would you grease that tin, love, please?’ Mum replied.

  Yuck! The worst job! I couldn’t complain. I couldn’t always get the nice jobs. So I spread slimy margarine all over the inside of the blackened tray, even right into the corners with my fingertips, trying not to get them too greasy.

  Sometimes Mum let me crack eggs into bowls of half-made Madeira mixture and each time she turned to put the shells in the bin, I dipped my finger deep into the centre of the raw mixture and pulled out as large a dollop as it would hold. If I arrived too late in the kitchen, the only help I could offer was to spread the mixture i
nto the tin. This often worked in my favour, as the amount of wooden-spoon-sucking I got to do was totally disproportionate to the amount of assistance provided.

  From my place at her elbow I watched Mum’s hands work skilfully with each different mixture: gentle folding with a metal spoon for one; vigorous pounding with a wooden spoon for another; delicately transforming a lump of butter and flour into the finest crumbs for pastry with her fingertips. Her hands were remarkable.

  ‘I’ve awful old hands,’ she said when she saw me looking at them. ‘I didn’t want anyone to look at them when I was playing piano or typing.’ She held them in front of her and looked at them in disgust.

  They were large, it was true, with big knuckles that meant she had to have her wedding and engagement rings specially sized to fit. Her poor circulation left them purple a lot of the time. She suffered from deep, sore cracks around her fingertips when the weather turned bad. In fact, she could predict a change in the weather when her fingertips started to split. I didn’t care what they looked like. What she did with them was pure magic. They were as defining a part of her as her striking grey hair and her loud witchy laugh.

  Together we worked to finish the tray-bake, see it safely into the oven. And out of a sense of fair play, I helped with the washing-up too, before returning to the television. Watching the remainder of Crackerjack with Kevin, I listened out for the rattle of the oven-timer. When it sounded, I dashed into the kitchen and watched in awe as Mum took the tray-bake out of the oven. I’d an agonising wait while it cooled in its tin, was cut into slices, and was lifted one piece at a time onto the wire rack to let cool a little more. It was sheer torture.

  Mum felt pity for me and relented. She took a small slice and cut it in two. ‘It’s a bit broken anyway,’ she whispered, passing one half to me and popping the other half into her mouth.

  In silence we shared the delicious, still-warm tray-bake, standing by the kitchen countertop, too impatient to be seated.

  Mould

  There was something brave about the way Grandma appraised a block of cheese that had lingered for too long in her fridge. She held it firmly in her gnarled, arthritic hands and examined it thoroughly on all sides. Then she took her sharpest knife and cut only the thinnest of slices off each side to remove all of the mould yet spare as much of the cheese as possible. She’ d eat the rest of the block with abandon. She treated fuzzy bread, pots of mouldy jam, and rotten fruit in the same casual manner. Cut, scoop or chop off the offending mould and enjoy what’s left. ‘What won’t kill you will only make you stronger’ was her attitude. This she also declared as she picked dropped food off the floor before popping it into her mouth.

  Mum inherited this devil-may-care approach to mould. She never minded having the slice of bread where the blue bit had to be cut off; she kept the half-rotten apple for herself and gave me the firm one. But it was when mould passed from Grandma’s house into ours that Mum got annoyed. This happened when Grandma was going on her annual visit to London to see her daughter, Aunty Mary.

  When Mum and I arrived at Grandma’s house to drive her to the airport, she was packed and ready to go, standing by the open front door. Her small suitcase contained, alongside the usual, a few well-wrapped bags of rashers, sausages and tea bags, and a tea-brack she had made herself. Resting against her suitcase was a white plastic bag. As Mum loaded her case into the car, Grandma handed me the plastic bag. ‘Make sure you put those in the fridge when you get home,’ she said.

  Saying goodbye at the departure gates, Grandma squeezed my face between the palms of her trembling hands and looked at me so closely I could smell her old-lady funk and see the dusting of face-powder clinging to the large pores of her nose. Then she hugged her daughter to her tightly as they both sniffled into each other’s collars. Carefully, with both Mum and I helping, Grandma got onto the little airport golf cart. Back to back with the driver she sat. As the cart pulled away she placed her handbag safely on her lap and waved goodbye to us until we could no longer see her. We saw the funny side of this scene and shared a giggle as Grandma shrank in the distance.

  When we got home, I emptied the contents of the bag onto the kitchen table:

  An opened packet of Philadelphia Cream Cheese – under the tinfoil was a thick growth of green fuzz.

  A few rashers wrapped in cling film – their colour a little pallid and when lifted and sniffed, the smell sent Mum reeling.

  A Yoplait yoghurt almost two weeks beyond its sell-by date. Even so, I couldn’t resist sticking a teaspoon in and giving it a try. The fizzy sensation that hopped off my tongue told me all was not right with it.

  Two black bananas, soft and very pungent. There was no way I was going to eat either of them.

  In an old glacé cherry carton were some Bachelors Beans – we were a ‘Beanz Meanz Heinz’ household – that had turned dark brown and a hard crust had formed on them.

  Mum sighed heavily as she inspected Grandma’s fridge contents. ‘As if I don’t have enough on my plate!’ she said.

  Clunk, thump, thud – each item landed heavily in our kitchen bin.

  Grandma, on the other hand, who hated waste, had left for England with an easy conscience, knowing her leftovers had found a new home. She never discovered where they ended up. Instead, when she phoned that night from England to say she had arrived safely, she was thanked for her bounty. When she returned a few days later, Mum had stocked her fridge and pantry with fresh fruit, milk, bread, eggs; enough essentials to ‘get her started’. Grandma, I thought, did very well out of this exchange.

  Cadbury’s Miniatures

  In England they had things that we didn’t have in Ireland. They had chocolate bars called Double Deckers; their Cadbury’s bars came in chunkier, longer shapes that were much nicer to bite into; there were Battenburg cakes, Foxes biscuits, orange- and mint-flavoured Club Milks. There was plenty for Grandma to choose from when deciding what to bring home as presents.

  Top of my list was the wallet-sized purple box of Cadbury’s Miniatures. Inside the cardboard box were individually wrapped squares of heavenly milk chocolate. It was thrilling to eat an entire chocolate bar in a single bite. A normal bar of chunky chocolate may have provided more in the way of chocolate, but I wanted the added experience of being Gulliver, a giant girl making a chocolate bar look minuscule in the palm of her hand. I liked to put one in Sindy’s plastic hand too, it was the perfect size for her. I ate them one by one until my lap was littered with purple and silver wrappers.

  Grandma brought home a five-pack of Double Deckers just for Dad – they were his favourite. Mum took them quietly from her and put them up high in the sitting room unit, in a press only she could reach. She was keeping them until Dad’s appetite returned.

  After Grandma left for the evening and all my chocolate was gone, I needed a little reassurance about Dad. The last time he received such bounty from England, he went into the kitchen and took the carving knife out and cut one of his bars into four equal pieces, one for each of us to savour, while he had a whole bar all to himself. This time he showed no interest in them. He smiled wanly at Grandma in thanks. I wanted some answers. I wanted it explained to me about his moods and his visit to the dentist and whether false teeth would cure him or not. But who could I ask? Mum was far too emotional. When she told me about Dad, it made me uncomfortable; her sniffles and too-tight hugs were not what I needed. She had embarrassed me in front of an empty kitchen. I couldn’t risk that again.

  I had no choice but to turn to my big sisters. They had been allowed go into town on the bus without Mum. Catherine had been to a disco in school. They giggled about boys. I assumed that their greater experience of the world gave them a head-start on me. They were bound to have superior knowledge of medical matters and some insight into Dad’s condition. So on my way to bed that night I tapped lightly on their bedroom door and went inside. They were both stretched out with their heads at the foot of their beds, reading books. They looked up and stared blankly at me, unsure
of how to react to my perplexing presence within their sanctuary.

  ‘Lucy?’ Always more approachable than Catherine.

  ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘What’s wrong with Dad? He looks old. He doesn’t eat or go to work any more. Do you know?’

  ‘It’s his teeth, silly,’ she said, tutting at me and throwing her eyes up to heaven for Catherine’s amusement.

  They both shrugged their shoulders at my ignorance. I didn’t care about being ridiculed; I wanted to get to the bottom of the problem and would suffer their condescension if I had to.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I persisted. ‘He still hasn’t eaten in ages and it’s only mash he gets.’

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ Lucy said. ‘That’s what Mum told us. It’ll take time for his mouth to get better and then he’ll get his falsies so he can eat and talk and stuff. Now go to bed and stop annoying us.’

  She returned to reading her book. I was dismissed. I was not reassured. But there was no one else I could turn to.

  Campbell’s Meatballs

  Aunty Teresa took Kevin and me back to Cashel with her for a weekend. She told us in the car on the drive down that our mum needed a break. We liked Aunty Teresa. Not only was she generous with the bags of boiled sweets she kept in her handbag and the chocolate bars she stored in her kitchen, but she was the best tickler ever. She made me scream and cry all at once with the pain and joy of the tickles she inflicted on my tummy, my ribs, my arms and my back. I wriggled and screamed under her hands; her fingers instruments of delicious torture. No one else tickled like Aunty Teresa. So it was without reluctance that I got into her tiny green Mini and let her take us to Cashel.