Maria Goodin - Nutmeg

I came out a little underdone. Five more minutes and I would have been as big as the other children, my mother said. She blamed my pale complexion on her cravings for white bread (too much flour) and asked the doctor if I would have risen better had she done more exercise (too little air). The doctor wasn’t sure about this, but he was very concerned about the size of my feet. He suggested that next time my mother was pregnant she should try standing on her head or spinning in circles (spinning in circles on her head would be ideal) as this would aid the mixing process and result in a better proportioned baby.

My father was a French pastry chef with nimble fingers and a gentle touch. On my mother’s sixteenth birthday he led her to a cherry orchard and fed her warm custard tart under a moonlit sky. She knew it would never last, that his passion for short crust would always be greater than his passion for her, but she was intoxicated by his honey skin and cinnamon kisses. When they made love the earth shook and ripe cherries fell to the orchard floor. My father gathered the fallen cherries in a blanket and promised my mother that upon his return to Paris he would create a cherry pastry and name it after her, but he never had the chance. Four days after his return to France he was killed in a tragic pastry-mixing accident. The only part of him still visible above the dough was his right hand, in which he clutched a single, plump red cherry. Finding herself alone with a bun in the oven and no instructions, my mother set the timer on top of her parents’ fridge to nine months and waited patiently for it to ping.

Throughout her pregnancy my mother suffered all manner of complications. She was overcome by hot flushes several times a day which the midwife blamed on a faulty thermostat, and experienced such bad gas that a man from the local gas board had to come and give her a ten-point safety check. Her fingers swelled up like sausages so that every time she walked down the street the local dogs would chase her, snapping at her hands. She consumed a copious amount of eggs, not because she craved them, but because she was convinced the glaze would give me a nice golden glow. Instead, when the midwife slapped me on the back I clucked like a chicken.

I want you to understand that these are all my mother’s words, not mine. I myself am mentally stable and under no illusion that any of this ever actually happened. I have no idea what did happen during the first three years of my life because for some reason I can’t recall a thing. Not a birthday party, not a Christmas, not a trip to the seaside…not a thing. I don’t remember our first house, the toys I played with, the telly I watched. Perhaps people don’t remember much from those first three years, but I’m convinced I should remember something. Anything. Instead, all I have to go on are my mother’s memories, which in fact are not memories at all but ridiculous fantasies that reflect her obsession with food and cooking and deny me any insight into my early years.

Am I annoyed at her? Yes, I am. I want to know how I started out in this world, who my father was, what I was like as a baby, normal things like that. But however much I ask I always get the same old stories: the spaghetti plant that sprouted in our window box on my first birthday; the Christmas turkey that sprung to life and released itself from the oven when I was two; the horseradish sauce that neighed unexpectedly…I mean, what is all this rubbish? I’m a twenty-one-year-old science student and yet my crazy mother still insists on telling me idiotic stories like I’m a baby. She’s told these stories so many times I think she actually believes them. The story of her pregnancy is ridiculous enough, but you should hear the story of my birth.

It was the gasman’s fault I came out under-done. He’d come to deliver my mother’s safety certificate in person after taking a bit of a shine to her, and my mother had felt obliged to offer him a slice of her freshly baked date and almond cake. They were sitting having tea in my grandparents’ kitchen when all of a sudden the gasman started choking. My grandfather, a member of St John’s Ambulance, jumped up and grabbed the gasman around the waist, and with a sharp squeeze freed the offending morsel of cake which flew across the room, knocking the timer off the fridge. At the sound of the ping I thought my time was up and started to push my way into the world.

Between them, my grandparents and the gasman carried my mother upstairs and laid her on my grandparents’ bed.

“The baby can’t come out yet!” my mother kept shouting, “it won’t be properly done!”

But done or not I was coming out, and so efforts began to make the labour as short and painless as possible.

“Go and get some butter, Brenda!” shouted my grandfather to my grandmother, mopping his brow with his handkerchief. “If she eats a pack of butter the baby should slide out.”

But a pack of butter did no good other than to turn my mother’s skin yellow, so my grandmother suggested garlic.

“The baby won’t like it if you eat garlic. He’ll want to come out for air.”

Consuming an entire bulb of garlic didn’t force me out either, so my mother shouted:

“Get some of that cake up here! We’ll lure the baby out with the delicious smell. ”

And so half a freshly baked date and almond cake was held between my mothers’ thighs and lo and behold I started to move.

“It’s coming fast!” screamed my mother.

“Quickly Brenda, get something to catch it in!” cried my grandfather.

In the end it was the gasman who caught me in a heavy-based frying pan. By the time the midwife arrived it was all over, although she insisted on poking me gently with a fork and plonking me on the kitchen scales. She smelled me and confirmed I was under-ripe, but as soon as she put me on the windowsill my mother took me down again.

“She’s my baby and she’ll ripen when she wants!” snapped my mother. Holding me close to her chest she kissed the top of my head and proclaimed I tasted like nutmeg. And so that’s what I was called. Meg.

I’m travelling home for Easter, if you can call it home. When my grandfather died four years ago my mother moved into the two-bedroom cottage where she grew up, the one where I was supposedly born, although I don’t even know if that’s true. She’s dug a vegetable plot with tomatoes, carrots, beans and lettuces. She’s also made a herb garden. She spends her time cooking, boiling things up in big metal saucepans, frying, stewing, roasting. She’s a flamboyant, reckless cook, throwing things around, chucking bits here and there. By the end of the day the kitchen looks like a bomb’s exploded, but I’m used to it.

My mother raised me amongst culinary chaos in a small North London flat. Because the ventilation was poor and my mother was constantly cooking we survived in a haze of steam which once got so dense that my mother lost me for forty-eight hours. She finally tracked me down in the lounge with the aid of a special fog lamp. Apparently.

Because we had no TV or radio the soundtrack to my childhood was compiled of saucepan lids banging, knives chopping, mixers whirring and liquids bubbling. I went to school with clothes that smelled of spice and a lunchbox packed with elaborate sandwiches and homemade delicacies. The other kids thought we must be posh, but in fact we survived on a meagre income. My mother was never too proud to take the squishy fruit or bruised vegetables that were left at the end of market day. Nothing made her happier than baking. Nothing other than me, that is.

I can’t hide my shock when my mother meets me off the train. She’s so thin and pale, a shadow of her former flame-haired, curvaceous self. When she hugs me I feel her bones through the wool of her jumper and it makes me want to cry.

“Meggy!” she squeals, ignoring the look of horror on my face. She doesn’t want me to say anything about her appearance, doesn’t even want me to acknowledge that she’s wasting away. But I’m not like my mother. I’m not a fantasist.

“My God, you look dreadful!”

She forces a little laugh and brushes some flour off her sleeve.

“Oh, I know! I was baking a treacle tart and I suddenly realised what the time was.”

“Mother, you should have stayed at home!” I snap, annoyed at her, “I could have got the bus.”

“Don’t be silly, darling. Why would you do that?”

“Because you look like you should be in bed!”

“I’ve made lamb stew for dinner. Is that all right?” she says, walking off towards the car park.

I stay rooted to the spot, waiting for her to stop and turn around, waiting for her to acknowledge the unsaid, but when she doesn’t I pick up my bag and follow her.

The house smells sweet and sugary. My mother has been making Easter eggs and twelve egg moulds are lined up on the worktop, each filled with glossy dark chocolate. Over dinner she whitters on about the vegetable patch and Rick Stein and sea bass and turnips, anything to prevent me from questioning her about her illness. She’s going to take the Easter eggs to the local cancer hospice. “Those poor people,” she says mournfully, as if she’s not one of them.

“Mother,” I finally interrupt. “How are you feeling?”

“Wonderful,” she says cheerfully, standing up and clearing the table. “I made treacle tart or chocolate mousse. 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 Barbie doll duvet, hugging my old blue rabbit, I imagine I’m a little girl again in our North London flat. I can feel the warmth of the Easter sunshine stealing through the gap in the curtains, and I imagine running through the daffodils in the park, mother holding her arms wide open ready to catch me.

And then I feel the hand at my throat, fingers rough and calloused against my soft skin, squeezing, constricting. I can’t breathe and someone’s shouting at me, “Shut up! Shut up, shut up! ”

I sit up with a start, gasping for air, clutching at my throat ready to prise 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.

“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 pyjamas.

“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 and notice the sharp points of her elbows jutting our beneath her sweater. How much must she weigh right now? Seven stones? Not even?

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

“Mother? Are you alright?”

No reply.

“Mother?”

“I’m fine,” she says breathlessly.

“Let me do that.”

I stand up and approach the hob.

“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.

The doctor confirms what I already know: that she has less time than we originally thought. Much less time. I ask for details of what to expect and take down notes as if I’m at a lecture. The doctor looks a little taken back by my frankness, but at the end of the day I’m a scientist, practical in every sense. I like order, rules, knowledge, facts. I’m not an escapist like my mother, I don’t live in a world of make believe.

“It’s like she’s in complete denial,” I tell the doctor.

“Denial’s a great defence mechanism,” he says, “a coping strategy. People find all kinds of ways to deal with the things life throws at them.”

He glances at my notebook where I have drawn a chart dividing my mother’s illness into categories: symptoms, medication, hospital dates…

“What do we do about it?” I ask.

He peers at me over the top of his spectacles, raising his bushy white eyebrows as if they risk hindering his vision. “My dear girl, we don’t do anything about it. It’s probably the only thing keeping her sane.”

I don’t believe the doctor. I don’t believe deluding yourself can be healthy in any way, but in spite of this I play my mother’s game for most of the weekend. I pretend to be interested as she teaches me how to make baked apples with cranberry filling, talks me through the inns and outs of her vegetable garden and babbles on about the new state-of-the-art food processor she’s seen on TV.

“Maybe next year I’ll get one,” she muses.

I ignore the fact that she barely eats anything, that she’s wrapped in two jumpers even though the sun is shining, and that she is so weak she barley walk down the garden without wheezing. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, I can’t ignore it anymore.

“What time is your train this evening?” she asks innocently as we watch a programme on Nigela Lawson.

“I’m not going back this evening!” I snap. “What’s the matter with you? Of course I’m not bloody going back this evening! I’m not going back at all. I’m staying here with you!”

She looks genuinely shocked by my outburst.

“Why on earth aren’t you going back?” she asks with a frown.

“Mother, look at yourself! You’re sick. How in God’s name can you go on pretending like this? Like nothing’s wrong? How do you do this? How do you make up these incredible lies and convince yourself they’re the truth?”

She shakes her head slowly. “Lies? I have no idea…”

“You’re always lying! You never tell me truth about anything!” I shout. “You’ve been doing it since I was tiny, telling me those ridiculous stories. How my first tooth was so sharp you used me as a can opener. How I drank so much milk you bought a cow and kept it by my cot. We lived in a flat, Mother! As if the council would have allowed us a cow! You turned my whole infancy into a lie just like you’re turning your illness into a lie!”

My mother’s cheeks have turned pink and her eyes are wide, full of hurt. She looks so fragile and childlike curled up on the big red sofa that I immediately regret my outburst.

“I… I don’t know what to say,” she says meekly.

“The truth,” I plead, “just say the truth.”

She runs her fingers through her brittle hair and looks contemplative.

“You’re right,” she says, sadly. “I haven’t been very honest with you.”

When she draws her hand away six or seven dull auburn hairs are caught between her fingers. She examines them closely.

“There was no cow,” she sighs. “Keeping a cow next to your cot would have been ludicrous. I don’t know why I told you that. I suppose I thought it sounded more interesting than the truth. ”

I lean closer, longing to hear her tell me something, anything about my infancy that’s real.

“You were lactose intolerant, so drinking cow’s milk was never an option,” she explains, “so I bought a goat and kept her next to your cot. You were just so thirty all the time that I couldn’t keep up. You would guzzle goats’ milk like there was no tomorrow, and it seemed the prefect solution until you began bleating and growing tiny horns out of your head…”

I get up, walk out and slam the door behind me.

The next day my mother can’t get out of bed. She lies with the curtains drawn, unable to move. She complains about the cold. No matter how many blankets I pile on top of her she still shivers. The doctor comes. He gives her blue tablets to stop the pain and white tablets to stop the nausea caused by the blue tablets. I offer her soup, toast, stewed fruit, ice cream, tea, juice, but she doesn’t want anything.

“I might get up and make myself something later,” she murmurs, but she never does.

For three days she lies in bed. On the third afternoon she calls me into her bedroom, her voice weak and husky. The room is stuffy but when she takes my hand her bony fingers feel like ice. She presses a small bronze key into my palm.

“In the dresser drawer…” she says quietly.

I wait for her to finish, but she just closes her eyes and appears to fall asleep. I tuck her cold hands under the blankets and in the dimness of her bedroom I fumble with the dressing table, trying to get the key into the tiny lock. When it finally clicks I pull open the drawer and there, hidden away for twenty-one years, I find my infancy.

It takes me until midnight to finish reading all my mother’s diaries, and when I have finished I know who I am. I know who my father was and how I was born, and I know everything that happened during the first three years of my life.

I wish I could go back to not knowing.

My father was not a French pastry chef who stole my mother’s heart, but a distant cousin who forced himself upon her in the vilest fashion a family gathering. The scene of my conception was not a cherry orchard under the stars but a cold bathroom floor where my mother listened to the sounds of laughter below, too afraid to cry for help.

It’s true that I was born in this house, upstairs in the room where my mother now lies dying, but my grandfather wasn’t present. He refused to speak to my mother from the moment she revealed she was pregnant until the day I was born, when he told her she had disgraced him.

The gasman didn’t catch me in a frying pan, but oddly enough he did arrive at the house a few hours after my birth. My mother bumped into him as she made her way unsteadily down the hallway to the toilet. He looked her up and down greedily, smirked, and told her to give him a call next time she fancied getting flat on her back. She locked herself in the toilet and sobbed, humiliated and afraid.

It was on a short trip to the shops that my mother met Robert Scott. He was the nephew of the local butcher, an awkward man with pot-marked skin and a stutter. He was attentive to my mother who mistook his shyness for gentleness, and when, after a few months, he asked her to marry him she said yes. She was not attracted to him, but she was grateful and that was enough.

The beatings started only days after their cheap, hasty wedding. Robert would frequently fly into drunken rages, hitting my mother about the head, pushing her against walls and furniture, once even breaking her wrist. It wasn’t just her, but also me. He would yell at me when I cried, and the louder I cried the more he would yell. He would grab my little arms so tightly that he would leave bruises, and once he shook me so hard that my eyes rolled back in my head. Despite all this I called him ‘dadda’.

My mother finally summoned the courage to leave him on the day of my third birthday, the day he grabbed me by the throat and tried to strangle me.

So this was my life until the age of three, the life I wanted to know all about. A life of abuse, shouting and violence. I remember the words the doctor used yesterday: “Denial’s a great defence mechanism.” It’s amazing what we can forget.

I wish I could go back to this morning when I knew nothing of my infancy. I wish I had been conceived amongst falling cherries and caught in a frying pan. I close my eyes tightly and try to remember the spaghetti plant that spouted in our window box. If I try hard enough I think I can see it there, stringy spaghetti dangling between green leaves.

I carry my mother’s diaries into the kitchen where I light an open fire. Then, one by one, I feed our past into the flames.

My mother’s breathing is wheezy and laboured. I switch on the little light by the side of her bed and settle gently next to her on the blankets. In the dim yellow glow of the room I look around and try to imagine her, young, plump and flame haired, lying on this bed eating a pack of butter. I imagine my grandparents fussing around her, and the gasman hovering uncertainly nearby, frying pan at the ready. She opens her eyelids half way and looks up at me.

“What will it be like,” she whispers, “where I’m going?”

I tuck the blankets snugly around her shoulders.

“Close your eyes,” I say softly, “and I’ll tell you.”

Her eyelids close and she nestles her head into the pillow, like a child ready to hear a bedtime story. I reach out and stroke her limp hair, just as she stroked mine when I was a little girl. I swallow the lump in my throat, and then I tell her the truth. Our truth.

“There are clouds made of marsh mellow and rivers of wine, baked apples grow in the fields and the air is scented with spice…”