Saturday Fry Up.

Mushroom. That’s a silly word. Mushroom. A room full of Mush. Imagine that. Grey oozing snot filling a whole room. Seeping through the doorframe. Coating the carpet. Smudging up the windows like... like. Mushroom. How would you get in? How did it get there? All sticky and gloopy and stuck in the lightbulb. Like a foam party, like the ones Susan goes to on holiday, but viscous and not see through. Mush. Room.

“You want mushrooms with that, little lady?” she says and I nearly puke, feeling my own mush race up my throat from the depths of my insides.

“No thanks,” I reply with my hand covering my mouth just in case and it doesn´t really matter what I want now. I´m not going to eat. Not when everything’s going to taste and feel like mush in my mouth. Terry always says that´s the best way not to get fat. Think of icky things before dinner. But I didn’t mean to. It just happened. That word. And granddad bringing me out for this special treat and me not being able to even look at the plate without being able to think, mushroom. Mushroom. Mushroom. Mushroom. Mushroom. There´s even a big picture of the blooming things on the wall. With faces! Fancy that. A room full of mush that is happy. A long line of mushrooms marching into the room, my living room,  and mushing themselves up with big smiles on their faces. Stamping on each others fat inflated heads and popping their mush like zits into every corner of my living room. Make room.

“What´s the matter, pet?”

I stifle a giggle. Silliness. The silliness of certain words. “Nothing granddad.” I say, opening my eyes wide in that puppy look that he likes so much. So mush. So muchroom. He nods in that way he does, as though he understands but doesn´t really because he can’t do and I love him just that little bit more.

“Not the same these days, you know, all extra virgin olive oil and fancy hash browns,” he says, looking around him for the table with the unused copy of the red top daily newspaper. “Lard. Now that’s what I remember as a kid your age. Lard and dripping and finest butchers sausages. None of this la-di-dah food.” He shakes his head and then spots a paper, scraping his chair back against the grimy floor and leaving me for just a few seconds with lard, dripping and la-di-dah, which is enough really. When all is said and done. I´ll have la-di-dah mushrooms please with my dripping eggs and cows’ udder juice. Oh and hold the olive oil, pet, and the hash browns. They´re too fancy, and we´re not doing fancy today. No Siree. We´re not into lahdidah.

She brings the plate as he reseats himself again, opening and shaking the paper in one fluid movement like a ballerina with rickets. She slides his plate in front of him and first thing he does is break the still wobbling yellow yoke with the bottom of the paper, coating some footballers face in egg. I smile. My plate is here too and it has no mushrooms. Thank god. But it does have one of those tinned tomatoes that doesn´t even look like a tomato but more like placenta. Pluh-sen-tah, an organ that forms in the womb of a pregnant mammal and which supplies blood and nourishment to the fetus through the umbilical chord. Quote unquote. We learnt about it in a biology class one day and I went home and told Susan she was full of it and she hit me round the head and told me to piss off. There´s reddy coloured water forming a moat around a mound of congealed scrambled egg that was made before I was born and I´m looking at the plate thinking, coco pops and honey coated monsters which are in the cupboard at home in the kitchen. But I can´t say anything because this is a treat. My treat. Well, granddads treat really which he invites me along to and calls it my treat because it means he´s spoiling me in his own little way. I should be grateful. And I suppose I am deep down. At least I´m out of the house. Away from the monster that lives and breathes under my bed, still, to this day, even when “you really should have grown out of such nonsense by now”. But I know it’s there and it’s not covered in honey and although I know I´m safe out of the house and here with Granddad, who fought in a real war, I reckon thinking about it, the monster probably likes mushrooms too. And pluh-sen-tah. I should have sent it instead today, instead of me.

I pick up my fork and stab it right into the middle of the yellow clot on the plate and it´s able to stand up. All on it´s own. It can´t walk, because it´s a fork, but standing up on it´s first attempt is pretty damn blooming amazing. I watch to see if Granddads noticed and he just folds the paper in half and holding it in his left hand, reaches down with his right hand, feels along the sticky plastic table cloth, just like a magician and picks up his fork and finds a sausage. Without even looking. And then he bayonet’s it, thrust in, thrust up, just like he did to those “nasty little bastards in Burma”, brings it up whole to his wavering whiskered mouth and munches away like a giant panda eating a bamboo cane. Sucking the fat between his gums and chewing with the stronger teeth he has at the back of his mouth and gulping too soon so that you can even see it wave goodbye as it passes his Adams apple. I look down with a guilty flicker of disgust.  I find my toast. Cold chipboard. I get my knife and spread it with the still frozen butter from the little foil packet, just like Uncle Roger does with his trowel when he plasters the walls in those big fancy red brick houses on the new estate. Swish swash back and forth and the toasts so hard and so cold that the butter simply falls off onto my plate into the red watery stuff that’s seeping out of the plus-sen-tah.

 I sigh. In silence. And am about to give up when I spot it on another table and getting up from my plastic school type chair for a split second, I reach for my last salvation. Heinz tomato Ketchup. 57 Varieties – like Mrs Rogers mongrel mutt that attacked my bike. I look up to see if granddad is watching, and keeping my open puppy eyes trained on him, I squirt the stuff all over the plate, covering everything so that the yellow mound now looks like a volcano exploded and I´m a god who wields heavenly powers over the universe. Richard Attenborough eat your heart out. This is what it feels like to be on top of the world, holding the tip of my fork and rocking it backwards and forwards so that the hot molten lava gets sucked back into where it came from.

Today is Saturday. Play day. And it’s raining outside. Like on most days. But I’ve still got my tan. My all over body, 365 days of the year, come rain or shine tan that mum gave me before she knew any better and kicked Dad out of the house for being a “lazy, good for nothing, gutless, up your own arse, waster”. Which happened yesterday. Oh and about the same time last year and the year before that as well. So that’s why Granddad isn’t taking it too seriously and invited me to come for this lovely breakfast with him. Dad’s staying at his house which is on an old people’s territory just like the Indians have in America, made out of grey pebble dash, stainless steel tubing and red geraniums. Which means Granddad can’t invite his creaking lady companion round for tea and a bit of crumpet until his son has gone away again and one of the many reasons he always stays friends with my mum. To try and sell his “lazy, good for nothing, gutless, up your own arse, waster” son back to her. By hook or by crook.  Even though he doesn’t have a walking stick.  Yet. Because he thought he’d got rid of him over 40 years ago and it “just isn’t right to be living at home with me when you’re a father in your Fifties”. So this is scoring brownie points in the whole scheme of things. Dad needs some time to be alone, because he can’t handle having “to pretend to be happy in front of the kid”, so he’s gone down the pub and mum needed me taking out from under her feet so that she’s got time to think, which entails ringing Margaret and telling her all about what a rotten man my dad is again and how it all happened again and who said what again and how lonely and betrayed she feels again, and what she’s going to do to about it all. Again. And during all of this, the only real tragedy is that I’m not sat at home in front of the TV eating a massive bowl of coco pops and watching the reruns of Big Brother that are on too late during the week for me to watch without being told off. Granddad could be there too, because I’m not ungrateful and I think he’d probably like it too, but really, I beg you, when all is said and done, and looking down at the disaster movie I’ve just constructed on my plate, even if there are no mushrooms and no monster, what is it that possesses him to bring me here to this deep fat fried vision of hell? Oh and Plah-sen-tah.

I bide my time. Like a good girl. And I needn’t have worried about not eating the food, because he doesn’t notice anyway because there’s something happening in the paper today that is far more important than conversation. When he’s mopped the last smear of heart attack food juice up off the plate with a folded piece of white sliced loaf in that magically blind performance that he does, he finally puts the paper down on top of my plate, pulls his little money purse out of his pocket and counts out the 4 pounds and 30 pence that this meal always costs in silver and copper change, leaving it on the table before pushing his chair back and belching at the same time.