‘You dip your bread in the curry,’ I instructed.
‘Dip it? What with?’
‘With your fingers.’ I broke a corner off a slice of bread, and pinching it into a scoop I gathered up some curry and put it into my mouth.
‘Hot,’ Maley observed after his first mouthful, blowing out repeatedly. Again the redness began to creep up his pale, acne-littered neck.
Despite the apparent hotness of the mild curry, Maley ate eleven slices of bread and two bowls of curry, containing what must have been half a chicken. By the time he had finished he was pinker than I had ever seen him. I managed only two and a half slices and half a bowl of curry. The gora way he ate — taking huge mouthfuls, one after the other in quick succession, the next one going in before he’d swallowed the first, licking his fingers, and also the way he slurped and dropped crumbs and curry drips with almost each bite — put me off my food. Halfway through, as I watched his unwashed fingers grasping the bread, I remembered the grubby slow-worm and turned away.
‘You were right,’ he said, ‘it is better than pasta, although if you mixed spaghetti with curry I think that might be the perfect meal.’
‘I’ll tell my mum,’ I said seriously, hoping that would please him.
‘I always have tea to settle my food,’ he said eventually. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Tea has always confused me.’
Maley looked up, his mouth furiously working, but didn’t reply. To me, tea was something Mum boiled in a pan with an equal volume of water and milk and heaps of sugar, but sometimes kids at school said Going home for my tea, and I hadn’t fully worked that out. I imagined fish fingers, Yorkshire puddings, gravy, roast chicken, Vestas and boiled potatoes fluffy on the surface. Sometimes as I walked home from school I could smell tea coming from the English houses: pies, steaming carrots and Cadbury’s Smash. I’d seen it too, at the supermarket: trolleys loaded with shiny colourful packets of ready-made food and bottles of condiments, green peas, sausages, crispy pancakes, ravioli, corned beef, tomato ketchup.
I found a pan for Maley, and when I told him how Mum would apportion the milk and water he didn’t believe me. ‘A drop of milk, that’s all it takes,’ he said proudly, ‘a drop.’
He put two china teacups filled with pale brown liquid on the table. To his own he added six sugars.
‘We have biscuits,’ I offered.
His eyebrows arched high into his forehead. ‘What sort?’
‘All sorts.’
‘Let’s have a look then.’
The tin on the shelf was empty, so I reluctantly went and got the two unopened packets that were kept in the pantry. ‘Only custard creams and chocolate bourbons today.’ I slipped them onto the table.
‘I like both,’ he said, his eyes now loose in their sockets.
I shrugged my shoulders and he took that as a sign that he could have whatever he wanted. I was okay when he opened the first packet and crunched through four chocolate bourbons, but I felt a clench in my stomach as he tore open the second. I was thinking that perhaps if I went to my dad’s shop at home time and while no one was looking put two identical packets of biscuits in my bag, then I could sneak them home and replace the ones we had opened. It was stealing, but only sort of. In a way all I would be doing was moving things that belonged to us from one place to another. And another thing, we would have to tidy up and leave things exactly as we had found them. Exactly. Mum wouldn’t notice the eaten curry, would she? The pot seemed big enough to last for days.
Maley ate four Custard Creams — to even up the numbers, he said, crumbs dropping from his lips — and his happy face reminded me of my mother’s refrain, Hunger is the very worst thing.
For a moment he looked up at me, deep in thought. He licked his fingers, although there was no need to when eating biscuits. He hadn’t even dipped them in his tea; ‘Soaks up too much,’ he had said. He looked down again, his eyes lining up the remainder of the biscuits, giving them a quizzical smile. ‘I was right, you’re rich.’
I slid the open packets across the table. ‘Take them home for your dad.’
Maley stared at me, a scowl gradually forming on his face, and his fingertips rapped nervously on the tabletop. ‘We don’t want no charity.’
*
Grace whistles at the beginning of each exhalation and at the same time her eyelids seem to contract ever so slightly. I smile to myself. I am conscious of the time; in my trouser pocket is a watch, but my trousers are out of reach, draped over a chair, and next to them sit my boots, solid and incongruous on the peach-coloured carpet. I dare not move, in case I wake her, but more importantly, as I gaze at the half-moons of her flickering eyelids, I sense a serenity I have never before known. She murmurs something, her lips barely moving; it sounds like sleep, perhaps an instruction to me, or to herself? Looking at the bedside table, I consider the round face of the baby, pale and bald with eyes cutting a horizontal exactly halfway down her face. Grace sleeps soundly, as though she is cheating on the child in the picture.
Resting my palms on the mattress, I ease myself up to a sitting position, my back against the headboard. From here it is as though I am watching over Grace, observing protectively as the fine tendrils of her brown hair fall across her forehead and the whistle emanates from her broken mouth. Suddenly incredulous that Grace would shape silver foil for a tooth, I am reminded of what she said, I am in need of it, as though the gap is a talisman she carries.
Without opening her eyes, Grace slowly composes her mouth. ‘It’s just life. When your mate went on about nature, what he means is it’s just life.’ After that statement she raises the curtains of her eyelids and considers me with a kind frown. She catches her lower lip between her teeth and bites gently, the colour draining as the pink flesh stretches. I recall the moment she had pulled me into her and said I could fuck her. I had twitched all over like a greyhound primed with the scent of the rabbit.
My thoughts conduct a forceful arousal and I feel hot and sweaty with a rising panic and want her to ask me again. I look for her nearest hand, which is tucked into the small of her back. If I could only reach for it. I offer vacant eyes, hoping she will draw closer, but she doesn’t sense my desire. Then, disappointingly, I watch as slowly her hand moves out from behind her back, but not towards me, instead pinching lightly at her own cheek. She has small fingers, the nails painted a golden colour, painted some time ago and now grown so that the paint starts halfway up each nail.
I turn away, speaking once more to the window. It seems safer somehow not to address her directly, as though, distracted, I might catch sight of her eyes or breasts, or painted fingernails or feet riding out from beneath the sheet, and I might urgently want something she does not want to give.
7
It was a Friday a few weeks after the death of Maley’s mum. He had not attended the cremation — another Tuesday pasta day — but he and his father had collected the ashes, and Maley offered to show them to me, an invitation I had declined. At lunchtime, I retreated as usual to a stony step at the side of the school, shielded partly from Adrian and other bullies like him. I peered lazily into the playground. The bottoms of my trousers flapped lightly in the breeze, and out of boredom I scuffed my shoes on the wet tarmac.
Maley appeared, laughing. He swiped the air with an imaginary sword as he looked across the playground, empty except for a few scurrying late to lunch. ‘Now taste ye my wrath and my warning!’