New Mum
He didn’t lift his eyes from the paper as Carole walked through the front door.
“I got us a new mum,” she said.
“What was wrong with the old one?” he asked, eyes down.
“She got old, wasn’t working properly anymore.”
He nodded his scant approval into the Sports section. “What’s for dinner?”
“I’ll ask new mum,” said Carole.
She stood by the open door, hand on hip, waiting for new mum to make her entrance. “She’s a little slow,” she whispered loud enough for the neighbours to hear. “But she was a good price,” she whispered for Jim’s ears only.
Carole tapped her shoe on the floor, but since it was carpet and new mum’s eyes and ears weren’t what they used to be, it was a useless gesture. Finally new mum stepped over the threshold. Jim lifted his eyes momentarily to see a petite woman in her sixties, laden with shopping bags.
“What’s for dinner new mum?” he asked.
New mum was surveying the room and shaking her head slowly in disapproval. This would not do.
“What is for dinner new mum?” said Carole, loudly anunciating every word.
New mum took a look down at the lumpy shopping bags hanging from every hinge of her stringy arms and said. “Le poulet avec de pomme de terre et la salade verte.”
Jim looked up from his paper at the first word, screwed it up at her fourth word, and had thrown it on the floor and stood by the time she got to salade.
“What the hell have you have gone and done Carole? You got us a foreign one!”
Carole bit her lip and realized why new mum was so cheap.
“But I didn’t… she didn’t…”
Jim was towering over new mum, looking down at her in the same way he might look at something dripping out of his nose, with both disgust and intrigue.
He continued staring down at her as he conversed with his wife. He never looked at his wife when he conversed with her, and he never looked at her when he didn’t converse with her. For all he knew, she still looked exactly the same as when he last looked at her. On their wedding day.
“Why the hell did you get us a foreign one?”
“I didn’t know she was foreign. She was a good price if I traded in old mum and they said she was a good worker, and didn’t say much. ”
“Well of course she doesn’t say much. She speaks another bloody language. A foreign one.”
He tilted his head this way and that, inspecting new mum as one might inspect a bomb. New foreign mum eyed Jim with suspicion, her thick grey eyebrows knotted low in her forehead, almost between her eyes.
Just then, Harry trotted down the stairs, nodding his head to the beat in his headphones. He stopped, a few steps from the bottom, at the sight of his father scrutinizing an old lady carrying shopping bags. She looked like she had just wandered in lost and bewildered from the street.
He took out his headphones. “Who’s that?”
Jim took great pride in answering. “She’s your new Nan. Your mother traded in old Nan.
Harry took the news in his downward stride.
“Good, old Nan stank of piss and wouldn’t let me play Playstation.” He approached new Nan and spoke to her directly. “You know, a recent study has shown that kids, especially, like, boys, who play video games are, like, cleverer, than those who, like, don’t.”
New Nan looked at him blankly.
“Don’t bother son,” said Jim. “Like I said, she’s foreign.”
“Where’s she from?” Harry got closer to new Nan, and sniffed her, happy to find not a trace of piss.
“No idea, somewhere foreign.” Jim liked using the word ‘foreign’, it made him feel very British.
“Take her into the kitchen Harry,” said Carole. “Show her round.”
Harry sighed deeply before leading the old lady into the kitchen. He turned to his parents.
“You know Jenna won’t be happy.”
“Why not?” asked Carole.
He shrugged. “She’s going through one of those, like, vegetarian, humanitarian, recycling, like, phases.”
“Well, then,” said Carole. “She should be very happy, we’ve been recycling.”
*
That night new mum served up chicken, chips and salad.
Jim eyed her from the dining table, beer in hand, as she took the chicken from the oven and drenched it over and over again with its own juices.
“I don’t trust her,” he said.
“Just give her a chance,” said Carole. “If it doesn’t work out, I can probably get old mum back.”
“No way,” said Harry. “Old Nan stank of piss and…”
“The French have a very bad record in terms of humanitarian efforts,” said Jenna. The sincerity of her eyes was magnified through her thick glasses.
“French!” Jim nearly spat out the word. “She French? That’s even worse,” he said, although he had no idea why.
Jenna rolled her magnified eyes. “Yes father, she’s French.”
Carole tutted, “He’s your dad Jenna, not your father.”
Jenna’s eyes continued rolling – like spinning tops that were only halted by the entrance of new mum.
She placed the fat chicken, glistening wet gold, in the middle of the table.
“Et voila,” she said.
The family stared at the chicken in silence as new mum surrounded it with chips, and two types of salad, first a red one and then a green one. Stop and Go. The family accelerated at the meal as though they hadn’t eaten in weeks. Jim carved fat chunks of meat from the bird, taking every opportunity to pick up the scrag ends (that no-one wanted, surely) and to lick his fingers. Jenna seriously reconsidered her recent decision to be a vegetarian, and Harry and Carole attacked the pile of chips with their fingers.
“These are, like, the best chips ever,” said Harry, between mouthfuls. “No wonder, they call them, like, French.”
Carole looked at Jim, to gauge his opinion.
He was trying to look unimpressed, but was shoveling food into his mouth like Oliver Twist, though he was far from a starving orphan.
Jenna tucked into her salad and chips but kept her eyes firmly on the ever-decreasing bird in front of her, staring at it with the same longing reserved for the life size Justin Bieber in her room.
Carole enjoyed her food, but took the greatest satisfaction from observing her family, made happy through food, through a decision she had made herself. Perhaps, at last, she had done something right.
*
As promised by Jacko at the Mega Store, new mum worked hard and said very little. She also prepared dinners that looked like they had come straight from a TV commercial, and tasted like they had come straight from heaven. Soon, Jim was teasing new mum at breakfast, trying to get his favourite meals prepared for dinner.
“Bonjour, new maman,” he’d say, giving her a nudge. “Did you hear, the local pond is full of ducks, too many in fact. The council are planning to kill them all. BANG BANG BANG. Perhaps we could save a few. Till dinner at least?”
He’d nudge her till she smiled, a hesitation that was becoming smaller and smaller with every tease. She would normally acquiesce to his request and his favoured duck a l’orange was served at least twice a week.
*
Jenna lasted two weeks as a vegetarian with her new French Nan.
She was reading a gossip magazine on the sofa one day, next to Carole who was watching Coronation Street.
“So, mum I was thinking that those ducks, those chickens, and those pigs…”
She left the animals hanging in the air, pigs flying, till Carole took notice.
“Yes honey.”
“Well, all those animals that get cooked every night by new Nan, they are destined for the table anyway. I mean, me refusing to eat meat isn’t going to change their destiny is it? They will still be eaten.”
Carole was no longer paying attention to Coronation Street, but she kept her eyes cemented to the TV as her heart sped. “No dear, I guess you’re right.”
“So, I think it’s about time I fully engaged in dinner, you know, the family ritual.”
“Of course honey.”
“So, tonight, I’ll maybe try some of that slow roasted pork new Nan is preparing.”
The smell of roasting pig had been soaking into walls and pores for hours.
“Sure,” said Carole. “I’ll let new Nan know.”
Carole felt great. The thing you need to know about Carole is that her family hardly ever took notice of her. She was a cobweb in the corner of a room. Occasionally, a member of her family would realize she was there and want to get rid of her, but for the most part, she was tolerated, or more accurately not even noticed. And now she had made a decision that had changed the dynamic of the family, had changed the whole feeling ritual in the house, for the better. Carole was overjoyed to have done something her family noticed.
That night, new Nan wiped a tear from her eye, as Jenna finished her pork feast by chewing on a crispy piece of pigskin. Being vegetarian, in her eyes, was like having an eating disorder, tantamount to starving yourself. Her uncle, an obstinate man she never liked, had gone on hunger strike for unknown reasons (something to do with the rising price of something important to him, no-one remembers what) in 67 and it had killed him. She wouldn’t want anyone to die under this roof. She liked it here, and if someone died through malnutrition, she would probably be kicked out, put out next to the bins to be collected, or worse still, taken back to the Mega Store, where Jacko would prod and promote her.
“That was delicious,” said Jenna, wiping pig grease from her chin with the back of her hand, and then licking it off. The picture of a reformed vegetarian.
“C’est me plaisir,” said new Nan, smiling at Jenna.
Everyone was beginning to like the sing-song quality of new Nan’s words, whatever the hell she was saying.
*
One evening, about seven weeks after new mum’s arrival, the family was watching a silly game show where a silly host gets a silly contestant to do silly things to win silly money. The whole family, even Jim and Jenna who didn’t consider themselves silly in the slightest, loved the show, and other than dinnertimes it was the only time they all sat together; Carole and Jim on the sofa, Jenna on the old armchair, and Harry on the floor with his feet under the coffee table and back against the sofa. Towards the beginning of that week’s show, the silly contestant had to do a cartwheel through a huge tank of tomatoes, because she loved turning cartwheels and hated tomatoes. It was a very unseemly performance and the contestant, who was Janet from Hull, showed her lacy green knickers to the Nation. Jim, Carole, Harry and Jenna all had a good laugh at this silly woman, and when their laughter subsided, they all turned at the strange noise coming from behind them.
New mum stood in the doorway of the kitchen, her abode, sniggering at the TV set. Jim got up immediately and went to new mum who stopped laughing and looked up at him with trepidation. He stepped behind her, put both hands on her shoulders and guided her into the lounge, the family territory.
“Budge up Carole,” said Jim. “New mum’s going to join us.”
“Oh, OK,” said Carole, squeezing into the corner of the sofa.
New mum settled into the middle of the sofa and Jim took his seat again. Harry shuffled along on the floor, between new mum’s stockings and Carole’s jeans.
“Et voila,” said Jim.
New mum smiled up at him and he looked very proud of himself.
From that evening onwards, the family and new mum sniggered and grunted through the silly game show together every Thursday night.
*
After a few months with the family, new mum had to return to France for a funeral for a few days. There was nothing for it but for Carole to face the challenge of preparing dinner. When the kids were in school, and Jim safely tucked away under the stairs (where he worked from his ‘office’ which was actually a cupboard, in fact two of his chair legs could always be seen in the hallway when he was ‘at work’), Carole surveyed the kitchen. Purple garlic hung in plaits from each end of the kitchen blind, a little garden of unknown leaves and grass sat in jam jars by the window, and the fridge overflowed with pots and tubs of unknown substances that looked more fit for DIY than for cooking. Carole was completely out of her depth.
*
She avoided Jacko, and kept her head bowed as she wandered up and down the aisles of Mega Store. She walked quickly past the four aisles of fresh produce, what the hell was she to do with that? It terrified her. Eventually she came to an aisle of cartons and tubs that bore pictures, resembling the food new mum cooked for them. She breathed a sigh of relief and her pulse slowed, she could do this, she could cook a family meal. She picked four boxes that most resembled new mum’s coq au vin, and promised ‘nutrition for all the family’ at ‘great value’, checked out and left.
That night the whole family, including Carole, prodded at the collection of shapes floating in a grey swamp on their plates.
“It’s called chicken supreme,” said Carole, by way of explanation.
Jim sighed. “There is nothing supreme about this Carole, in fact there is nothing chicken about it either.”
“Dad, what are we going to do without new Nan?” asked Jenna.
“I’m not eating this shit,” said Harry, putting his fork down heavily and spraying Carole with some of the grey unknown.
Jim shook his head slowly and pursed his lips.
Carole bit her lip. She had two indentations in her bottom lip from years of the same gesture. She liked putting her two front teeth snugly into the dimples, it made her feel that there was a part of Carole that fitted perfectly somewhere, even if it was in her own body.
Jenna pushed her chair back from the table. “I’m having cereal,” she said heading for the kitchen.
Harry put his head in his hands. No dinner was a disaster unknown to him. He took a few deep breaths and then raised his head with a brainwave.
“Dad, can we get pizza?”
Now it was Jim’s turn to scrape his chair back. “How could you even suggest such a thing!” he scolded. “Has new Nan taught you nothing about good quality nutritious food? What do you think she would say to your suggestion of pizza?”
Harry shrugged. “No idea, I have, like, no idea what she says.”
“She would think your idea was mierde,” said Jim. No-one knew what this word meant, or where Jim had learnt it from, but he said it with an aggression that suggested it wasn’t a good thing. “Jenna, bring in the box of cereal and bowls, we’ll have breakfast for dinner.”
Carole bit her lip hard as she cleared away the ‘nutrition for all the family’. In the kitchen she poured the lumpy mix into Timmy’s bowl and he raced in from the garden. It was about this time every day when new cook filled his bowl with bones and leftovers. He rammed his snout into the bowl assured of something delicious, but as soon as he stick his nose in, he pulled it out and whimpered. He wiped the soggy mess off his nose and onto the mat beneath his bowl, then he looked up with large indignant eyes. What had he done wrong? He sloped off into the garden once more, to consider what this punishment was for.
When Carole returned to the dinner table, she realized that no-one had thought to bring a bowl for her. She didn’t want to draw attention to the fact, so she just got back in her chair and listened to the scrapes and slurps of her family.
*
When new mum returned home, the family couldn’t be happier. Jenna raced down the stairs to welcome her with two kisses and Jim pushed all four chair legs into the hallway and left his computer to help carry her little holdall up to the spare room. She hobbled up behind him and after a few minutes came down with treats. There was a sticky substance filled with nuts for the kids. New Nan called it “Nougat,” and Jenna claimed it was the best “nougat” she had ever tasted. Carole thought this was a bit over the top, since Jenna had never tasted nougat. For Jim she had bought something called ‘Foie Gras.” It sat solidly in a glass jar with a layer of yellow slime over the top. No-one liked the look of it. For Carole, she bought some cheese that stunk to high heaven and filled the house with the heavy aroma of old shoes.
They all thanked new mum, and led her through to the kitchen, desperate for her to start work on dinner. She needed no encouragement and within twenty minutes the house was restored to order with the fragrance of garlic and butter filling every square inch of the house, and filling everyone in it with a sense of calm.
It’s difficult to find an adjective for the feast that was served up that night. Every meal new mum cooked was out of the ordinary, and so extraordinary won’t do. Nobody could believe the tastes that new mum was able to coax out of a slab of meat every night, and so unbelievable won’t do it justice. Let’s just say it was unbelievably extraordinary. And the fact they had eaten cereal for dinner two nights in a row, just added to the enormity of what their mouths experienced. That night new mum served up soupe a l’oignon, followed by Steak Hache with sauce au poivre. The meal and life was complete with a chocolate mousse that could have been made by angels using clouds.
At the end of the meal, after the family had sipped their coffees (they all drank short black coffees after dinner now), Jim called new mum into the dining room. As ever, she stood in the doorway, feeling safest with one foot in her territory. Jim then stood and left the room with an “Excusez-moi,” on the way out.
Carole heard him open the door to his cupboard office and root around inside. She had no idea what he was doing, and looking from her children to new mum, she could see they were equally baffled. She bit her lip.
After a minute or so had passed he returned to the room and, with a flourish, presented a bottle of champagne, holding it against his arm.
“Et voila,” he said proudly, walking to new mum.
Carole, Jenna and Harry continued to look puzzled by Jim’s behaviour, but new mum let out a yelp and clapped both hands either side of her gaping mouth. After a few seconds of gaping, her mouth started blabbering excitedly in French. No-one had any idea what she was saying, but Jim’s head nodded as fast as her mouth moved, reveling in her exhilaration. With his eyes wide, and still nodding his head, he turned to his seated family.
“It’s from the vineyard her father used to pick for.”
He turned back to new mum to let her know he was still listening, then back to his family.
“He worked there as a young boy, happiest times of his life.”
Jim stopped talking because new mum was reaching up to him. She grabbed him by the sides of his head, his sizable ears in fact, and dragged his face to hers. She planted her lips on his and kissed him passionately.
Carole almost bit through her lip, and Jenna and Harry looked on in astonishment.
After a few seconds Jim wrenched his mouth from hers and stood looking down on her, wide-eyed and red faced. Eventually he turned to his audience.
“How very French!” he said. “Now let’s get this bottle open.”
The act of clearing the table, finding champagne flutes (unused since their wedding day) and popping the cork distracted from the tension in the room, but Carole eyed new mum with suspicion as they passed in the doorway, and she was pretty sure the look was reciprocated. Finally the family and new mum stood around the dining table, each with a dusty glass of champagne.
Jim cleared his throat. “I propose a toast,” he said. “To new mum.” He looked at the little lady to his side. “We all love you very much.”
New mum’s face crumpled into a big toothy smile and they all raised a glass to her.
“To new mum.”
*
The next day, when Carole got home from work she was surprised to see Jim’s car was gone. Although he worked from home, he was always meticulous in his timekeeping and would remain under the stairs until the hall clock chimed half past five. She turned her key in the lock and heard feet pounding down the stairs.
It was Jenna.
“Mum, mum,” she panted. “Dad’s gone.”
“I can see he’s gone, his car’s not here,” said Carole, placing her handbag on the sofa, and keys in the bowl.
“No, I mean, he’s gone for good. Packed a suitcase and left…” Jenna bites her lip, the younger mirror image of her mother who is looking at her, “With new Nan.”
Carole gulps and her voice comes out weak and squeaky. “Where to?”
“To France.”
Carole looks slowly from her daughter to the kitchen door and then to the closed cupboard under the stairs. She takes a deep breath and picks up her handbag and keys. She turns to the door.
“Where are you going?” asks Jenna.
“To the Mega-Store,” says Carole, already out the door.
“What for?” shouts Jenna after her.
Carole opens the car door and looks back at the house. “We need more cereal.”