Francesca Franklyn

The Macedonian Anti-Gourmet

This is a section from my novel, working title: The Macedonian Anti-Gourmet, in which Jimmy creates a mess in his mother's kitchen, and his mother receives an important letter from a reality TV programme

I love thee like puddings; if thou wert pie I'd eat thee.
John Ray, 1627-1705

    Mother’s wedding cake had exploded.  On the kitchen ceiling, swaying precariously, above Jimmy’s head were several stalactites of cake mixture.  Slumped in an armchair, he stared forlornly at the fruit detritus littering the oven’s insides.  The duct of his eye, damaged years ago by a school bully’s punch, released a tear which travelled down his flushed cheek.  A dollop of glutinous mixture landed on his bulging midriff and he grunted.  He spooned it up with his fingers and pushed it into his mouth, some of it lodged in his beard, facial hair grown to give definition to his chin line and delineate where his face ended and plump neck began.  The warmth of the mixture and the dried fruit, softened by alcohol, reached his tongue in one sweet hit; cakes were always more delicious as mixture somehow more sensual. This experience ruined only by the taste of acrid smoke in his mouth and a delayed reaction from the smoke alarm, now emitting piercing wails. 
    He grabbed a recipe book from the table beside him, ‘The Encyclopaedia of Country Cake Cooking’ and threw it at the alarm.  A direct hit - the plastic casing fell to the floor and a battery spewed forth, dangling on wires. The recipe book was a favourite of his mother’s; miraculously it had survived the trajectory with only a dent etched into the face of the woman on the cover. She stood behind a layered chocolate cake, her homely face now deformed.  In some ways she was more appealing with this deformity, and he liked her more for it.
    Jimmy was having one of those half-awake dreams about his own wedding, when the oven door burst open, the type you can manoeuvre towards a pleasant outcome, often sexual in nature and usually resulting in a semi hard-on.  Dressed in a grey corduroy suit with a spotted cummerbund, he was about to say, “I do” to Meena, his friend Gary’s sister, when the explosion sent her running, screaming, from the church, rounded bottom bouncing under her red sari, silken fabric floating to the floor.  It was distressing to be dragged from his own marriage to attend an exploding wedding cake, particularly as the nuptial night was yet to be enjoyed. 
    Grains of burnt cake swirled in the air.  Sleeping in the armchair had probably saved his life because if he'd checked the cake when he was meant to, he might have suffered burns, or some other trauma.  His mother was on her way back from Burlington’s cash and carry, bags full of dried fruit, butter and balloons, and when she saw what he’d done to her kitchen, to her new catering oven, she would explode too. He attempted to coax the cake out of his hair but it stiffened into a spiky mess. 
     “Bugger this!” he said irritably.  Mocked by his prodigious stomach reflected in the oven door, a familiar gloom descended and the cake mixture no longer seemed so alluring.
    The problem with cleaning was that it involved effort and so he didn’t want to do it.  The Formica coffee table used by his mother to store bags of flour upon wasn’t high enough to reach the ceiling, so he waddled, knees buckling, towards the store cupboard to find something more supportive. He opened the door, to what once was the pantry, and there, hanging on a peg next to the mop, was his father’s ladder.  Breathing out heavily, he wiped the sweat from under his chin.    The ladder was thin but deceptively sturdy, one of two things left that belonged to his father, that and a bag, resembling those carried by old-fashioned doctors, in battered brown leather.  She had kept the ladder, because it was functional and could be used.  Nothing else his father had done, she once said to him, was of use.  He suddenly felt, as the winter sunlight made his eyes squint, that he wanted to see the bag.  It was in his loft, last looked at when he was a teenager, but he could no longer fit through the hatch.  He wanted to ask Gary to help him get it down, but at the same time he wasn’t sure if he wanted him to see the bag, to know what it contained. 
    Jimmy always mentioned his one lasting memory of his father to Lena, his sister, when he saw her at Christmas. He talked about it, when their mother was out of the room, because he felt if he didn’t it would disappear, and it seemed too precious to lose.  She humoured him: guilt around her limited contact, ill thought out gifts, and general disinterest.  And sometimes, he wondered if the memory was real or if he had created it, adding layer upon layer as each Christmas came and went. 
    Lena was six and he a few years younger.  They were playing with an old-fashioned pram with a curved hood and rust coated wheels.  Lena pushed it around the garden, struggling up the steep back slope with wheels churning up the grass.  Jimmy rode in it like a prince in a carriage, shafts of sun sneaking through a tear in the blue fabric hood.  They juddered to a stop and he watched his father swing his ladder, turning it around in wide circles close to the ground.  The ladder made a swishing noise as his father called out, “Jump Lena. Jump!”  Lena flew over it, arms flapping in a syncopated rhythm. The print of her brown-orange coloured dress with its yellow flowers was still so clear that Jimmy knew, if he sat down with some coloured pencils, he could recreate the patterns exactly.  Mother’s voice shouted at father too stop because the ladder was too dangerous to play with and his father’s face was a pixelated blur, unreadable, unmemorable. There were no photographs of his father left.  His mother burnt them all after he had died.
    Beads of moisture lay on Jimmy’s forehead and the room hot and airless - he sweltered in his suit of podge.   He opened the kitchen window to get rid of the burnt smell, grabbed a fly spray from the sill and squirted it into the air. Scented with mountain pine, it reminded him of toilet cleaner.  After spraying it around until he almost couldn’t smell burnt cake anymore, he dragged the ladder to the centre of the room, its legs scraping on the wooden floor boards.  He propped it up against the wooden table, tested his weight on the first rung, it seemed firm, and lifted himself up on to the first step, cleaning cloth tucked neatly into his elasticised waistband. 
    The front door slammed and he heard his mother, singing out to him, her heeled boots tapping on the tiled hallway, “Jimm-ee-ee.”
     “Jimmy, your letter has come.  Your letter it’s here.” 
    “What letter Mam?” said Jimmy, deftly placing the incriminating ladder on the floor and slipping it under the table with his foot.
    “The Letter from Waist Away,” she said, beginning to laugh and unbuttoning her brown velvet coat.  “Ah Jimmy this is the start, this is the beginning of something new for you.” 
    “Yer haven’t opened it yet,” said Jimmy. “You don’t know what’s in it. Open it first.”  His head was swimming with tiredness.  He needed to eat.  He thought he might know what the letter was about, but he would not give her the satisfaction.  It was of such importance to her, and she was so agitated, that she did not notice the mess.  One delicately booted foot was planted in cake mixture.  The air hung heavy with the vile spray and perhaps an odour of gas.  Jimmy sniffed and gave the oven a concerned look.
    “OK, OK, I open it and then we just see.” 
    She slid into the green armchair and tore at the top of the letter with her fingers.  A shiny red EBTV logo was printed on the envelope which bulged at the seams.  In Jimmy’s experience, thin letters contained welcome benefit cheques, but the fat ones were onerous, full of forms and demands for information.  Waist Awayprobably wanted him after all and he would appear on television, ridiculed by the nation as he struggled with the weekly weigh-ins.  Jimmy curled his hand into a fist and imagined his hand connecting with Dane Jordan’s oh-so-white toothed mouth.  The permatanned presenter of Waist Away - a muscular ex-army fitness instructor who’d made his name hurling abuse at plump arses, shoving them over assault courses, on a stream of fitness-deranged reality TV programmes.
    Jimmy was drawn to watching puffing fat people on TV, bewailing their lack of happiness.  Everything that was or wasn’t wrong in their lives was blamed on excess adipose tissue.  Slimness had graced Jimmy as a young boy and in his early teens, but he couldn’t remember being very happy then either, in fact, he couldn’t remember being much of anything at all.  He needed a biscuit. 
    His mother’s long fingered hands quivered as she pulled the letter from the envelope.   She held it up to the light from the bay window, lifted the glasses on the chain around her neck and started to read quietly in her accented English.
    “Dear Muss Georgiev, Thank you for writing to Early Bird Television.  In brackets it says EBTV. And for your application on behalf of your son, Mister Jimmy Georgiev, regarding, Waist Away, an EBTV trademark. We felt that your covering letter and application were both heartrending ‘un.”
    “Mam, what the hell did you write?” said a dejected Jimmy, “What did you tell ‘em?”
    “I told them the truth Jimmy,” she said, dabbing her purple mouth with her sleeve.
    “What truth?”
    His mother looked at him.  Her eyes shone.
    “That you is my son, but I’m not so proud of you.  You’ll not getta girl with a body like an elephant. Told them you were breaking your poor mamma’s heart.  I’m sad to walk down the street with you - I’m frightened you’ll have to have new hips.  I said to them that you have to go through wide aisle at ASDA.  I told them you’d lost your Pappa and that you was a virgin.”  His mother was breathing quickly after this litany of his faults, her face paler than ordinary.
    “You what!  You told ‘em what?   Chuffin’ Hell!”   Jimmy marched over to the cake-decorating table and squeezed into one of the wooden chairs.  His mind was flying with hot irritation. It felt as if she never left him alone and he wished he had not agreed to watch the cake.  His breathing was heavy and his chest hurt.
    “Let me finish reading it.”  There was no point uttering another word.  Working for Gary at Sharma Stores was far easier.  There was a peace to be found in checking invoices, and adding up numbers, a peace you did not find in watching a cake cook.  
    “…both heartrending and fascinating.  As a result of your letter we have decided to offer Jimmy a place on Waist Away, which this year will take place in Norway.  EBTV will cover all costs including accommodation, flights and business class seats for larger frames where necessary, allowed foods, exercise sessions, life coaching and clothing.”
    That’s just great, thought Jimmy. The last time he watched it they were in Hawaii.  It would be freezing in Norway, a fish obsessed place and they would probably make them wade though icy fjords on empty stomachs, carrying ice picks like the trolls of old. 
    “I won’t do it!” hissed Jimmy, face reddening.  “No way!”
    His mother, choosing to ignore this outburst, carried on, “We greatly look forward to seein’ Jimmy in Waist Away and assure him that if he fully commits to the programme he will achieve g-r-r-reatresults.”   She trilled out the r’s with a final flourish.
    “Shittin' hell,” he mumbled. He had his own weight loss plan which did not include a trip to Norway.  He wished she was fat too so she could understand exactly how it felt.  Jimmy saw that his mother was peering at his stomach from over the top of the letter, sizing him up to see if he was any larger than when she last saw him yesterday morning.
    “There’s more Jimmy!” There will be some preliminary publicity and we would be grateful if you could keep the details of this letter away from yer son to enable the surprise element of Waist Away filming to take place with in-teg-rety for our viewers.” 
    Disconcerted her face fell.  “Oh.” she said quietly.
    “Well you’ve blown that then, haven’t you?  When a camera crew surprise me in me underpants, scoffing the contents of me fridge and send it out across national TV, you’re gonna look a reet one aren’t you?”
    “No Jimmy, I’ve not blown it, you have, you’re wasting your life away.” 
    She flicked her blue-black dyed hair, her hazel eyes looked straight at him with a mix of unconditional motherly tenderness and despair, which always made him feel odd, and then she smiled at him.  She didn’t look forty-seven, she looked years younger.  She probably looked younger than him and he was only twenty-five.  Jimmy wanted to smile back, but his lips felt tight wouldn’t rise to the occasion. 
    She folded the letter up carefully and put it back in its envelope and placed it on the table beside her.   He knew she would tell her friends, soon everyone would know and he would be discussed as he had been for many years as the incompetent son with the weight problem.
    “Help me with these bags, Jimmy please.” She stood, starting to unload the thin plastic carriers already shredded in places by the edges of the balloon packets. “I’ve got balloons to make up for a wedding tomorrow.  They want the whole family – all eleven of ‘em.  No lungs left, I’ll have.  You can blow up the men balloons.”   
    Blowing was difficult and he carried two inhalers, one in the pocket of his sweatpants, the other in his khaki padded jacket.  He stared at the polished tiles around the kitchen sink.  He needed to check his emails, call in on Gary, and pick up a portion or two of fish and chips.  The chip shop had a special offer on: two portions of chips for the price of one.  He could taste the soft oily batter on his tongue, smell the cooking chips, hear them sizzling in the oil.
    “And what is this?!”  Her quiet voice rose to a higher pitch, “What has happened to my cake?   You only had to watch it.  You’re a moron.  My son’s a moron.  Why should I help you? What do I pay you for?”
    Her nose twitched at the unsuccessfully disguised burnt aroma.  Her face was rigid and she stood regally in her long skirt, lips pressed firmly against each other as her head lifted sharply upwards, eyes alighting on the cake formations and a groan floated from her mouth.
    “Er …. I’ve got a bus to catch, mam.  I better get going, I think, or I will be late.” said Jimmy quickly stumbling over his words.
    She stared at him, “Late for what exactly, Jimmy, eh?”  Smiling slyly, she regained her composure, put on her rubber gloves and waved him off towards the door. 
    He stood outside the kitchen and listened to her moving about, cleaning and getting things right.  Why did she ask him to work for her if she knew he wasn’t up to the job?  Perhaps she hoped one day he would suddenly improve. 
    Other than her cake watching, he blew up the balloons for the figures displayed at wedding feasts. They had stick-on smiling felt mouths and hair made from charity shop wigs. The women had smaller balloons for breasts and he used to enjoy putting the tied rubber ends into nipple position, but even this had become monotonous. Particularly since some of his female figures’ breasts had deflated and ruined someone’s wedding, or so his mother told him. He thought it unlikely the celebrations had been effected to such an extent, but then weddings were tense occasions and so it was feasible.
    The Matlock Echo and the Buxton Gazette had both run the same feature with a picture of Jimmy, his mother and several of her balloon figures.   He visited Doctor Banarjee for his monthly weigh-in, but the doctor had spent more time talking about his mother's balloons and how much he admired her creativity and business acumen, then he did answering the questions Jimmy had about the likelihood of having his stomach stapled on the NHS.  Moon-faced Doctor Banarjee offered him Seroxat, but Jimmy showed him an article about anti-depressants, and the mass numbing of the world, besides people on Seroxat were committing suicides in droves and he didn’t want to become another neuropharmacological casualty.  Doctor Banarjee said, “Well, young man – although you’re not so young now, are you? - it’s your decision.  And please do pass on my most affable regards to your mother.”
    Last week, the local gallery had asked his mother to create an everyday balloon family as an installation piece.  Now she seemed to be about as high as an air filled balloon could go.

* * * * *

Biography

Tamera Howard grew up in a village by the River Trent in Derbyshire. After a degree in English and Biology, she went to Bristol Old Vic Theatre School to train as an actor.
Her novel-in-progress features the adventures of Jimmy Georgiev, a very fat man and would be Internet lothairo, holed up in a weary Derbyshire Peak District village. Jimmy, his friend Gary, porn loving corner shop owner, and Viktor, his magical herbalist father set out across Europe to Lake Ohrid, birthplace of Jimmy’s Macedonian parents in the hope of finding a unique fat-reducing herbal elixir.   Magdalena, Jimmy’s mother, is left alone in the Peak District making wedding cakes and tells the story of her youth, and how she came to raise her two children alone.
tamera_howard@hotmail.com