Half a cup of rolled oats, three quarters of water and one of milk, a pinch of salt in my palm. I cook porridge like I did as a boy, after Dickie had gone and Leonie had come. I’d light the potbelly stove and make slow porridge for my mother. Sometimes she didn’t get up, especially on Saturdays. I’d stir the mixture around a burnt-out saucepan, wait for it to get gluggy. I took tastes from the wooden spoon, blew on it to make it cool. I liked the furry taste of the wood.
My mother drifted in, wrapped in her long white robe, her hair still down and undone. She stared at the walls like I wasn’t there. I poured her porridge from the pot; it looked like pale boiling mud.
“Where was I born?” I asked her.
She looked as though she was surprised that someone was attached to the pot; she searched my face before she answered.
“Somewhere off Mauritius, out in the Indian Ocean,” she said with a halfhearted throw of her chin towards the window, as though it might be in that direction.
I pretended it was my birthday, 12 November, even though I knew it was in June. It was the day Dickie had his. I took gingernut snaps and lemon cordial in a Mason jar, passion fruit ripe from the vine. I climbed the cypress tree, made a table on four short boards laid across the branches, put a gingham napkin down as cloth. In the Bracken Paddock I could see Leonie and my father. He stalked her like a border collie tails a sheep, pressed her up against the pumpshed wall. I ate as I watched them.
Through the veil of branches below me I saw my mother come outside, barefoot in the garden, hands pushed out in the pockets of a long-stretched woollen cardigan she’d put on over her nightgown. Each day she looked more odd, her hair stuck out, no hat or parasol. She’d started burying things. She knelt and dug with her hands, got up and walked again. Back on her knees, she covered something up in among the hydrangeas and then went back inside.
I climbed down the trunk, careful not to be seen, dug it up to see what it was. A small silver box, with a scroll of script rolled up inside it. The writing on the parchment was funny looking, the letters inside out, nothing I could read.
“What’s in your hand?” my father asked. He was standing over me. He seemed tall when I was kneeling.
“Found it in the garden,” I told him. I didn’t hear him come. He narrowed his eyes and took the silver from me.
“Do your skulking elsewhere,” he said and disappeared.
My mother spent the remains of the morning locked in the bath, filling it deep even though we didn’t have enough water. I went back up the tree.
Leonie came in for lunch, all cleaned up, short red hair and freckles, sat by my father like she’d been there fifteen years. My mother had tried to get herself together, but her cardigan was misbuttoned, her hair unravelled from its braid as she sat. She didn’t seem to notice it collapsing about her shoulders. She used to look pretty when Dickie was around. Now her hair was the colour of string.
Her eyes locked onto the silver filigreed box. My father had placed it in the middle of the table between the shakers of salt and pepper. Stony-faced, he watched the tears that gathered in her eyes and ran across the tired skin around the high bones of her cheeks. She got up and left the room. She only had one shoe on.
She never ate at the table again. I left plates of porridge steaming on a bed tray at her door; she stayed in her room for a week.
My father comes in the kitchen from lighting the boiler so the water will be hot for my shower. He puts his hat on the table beside him. The porridge I’m cooking is thick enough to serve. I guide it from the pot into his plate with the wooden spoon until the Peter Rabbit pattern is all but covered.
“That was Mother’s breakfast plate,” I tell him. He doesn’t seem fussed.
“Was it so bad that she was a Jew?” I ask him.
“She should have told me,” he says.