the bearded lady

All men have their faults. My father refused to eat anything that hadn’t been squeezed through a sock. Steak au poivre, jam pudding, cauliflower cheese: it all came to table in a small silver bowl, pureed, pushed through one of mother’s pop socks. He ate it in small silver spoonfuls, crossly eyeing our solid plates of food, setting the spoon down with a contemptuous tink when he was finished.

Father’s dinners made my mother miserable. I remember one Christmas, the last we all spent together, begging her to feed my father a simple bowl of soup. She was wringing a full Christmas dinner and all the trimmings through a stocking, the scalding gravy turning her hands pink. It looked obscene, biological, like she was milking a haggis. Mother, please, feed him soup, I said, but she set her face against me. That’s not what marriage is all about. One day you’ll understand. You’ll see.

Father grew thin and grey, like a mangy old whippet. He became so brief and greasy-slippy that you often wouldn’t know he had come into the room until you heard the tink of his little spoon, signalling his hunger to my mother, who startled. She grew thin and mean, paying out pennies for the soft vegetables at the bottom of the greengrocer’s cardboard boxes, testing for fruit that was about to turn. She tutted at the muscly meat in the butcher’s window, asking him for soft kidneys and tripe to take home instead. She boiled potatoes for hours until they drifted apart in the thickening salty water.

I stopped eating dinner at home. I hung around friends’ houses at dinnertime, looking hungry. At weekends, I walked the city streets, stopping to run my hands over the heaps of roadside vegetables, to sniff the curries, tagine, chicken pie smells of cooking that wafted from open windows, or to linger around the backs of restaurants, standing near the ventilation shafts, breathing in fried oil. Eventually I got a job in a chicken restaurant, and moved out of my parents’ house.

When Father could no longer get himself about, and mother was too weak to lift him on and off the toilet or into and out of the bath, and I wouldn’t move back home to help, despite my mother’s imprecations, we put him in a home. Every time we visited, mother told the girl who showed us to his room: no solids, and the girl made a special note of it. But father said the food puree was too thick and lumpy and mother was outraged at the slapdash of girls who couldn’t even make something wet and thin enough for my father to sip from a spoon. So she sat by his bed each day and expertly kneaded his food through a Pretty Polly knee high, while he turned his narrow face to the cold wall.

After his funeral I stood over his grave, imagining his bones crumbling, his body liquefying. I promised my mother then, though it was too late for her to mind, that I would never get married or eat soup.