Kitchen

We are standing in the kitchen at the old house. J is thirsty and I pour him a little apple juice into one of the blue dotty Bakelite cups which I wipe first with my sleeve. He puts it on the side and potters off to read or at least pull the flaps out of more of my lift-the-flap books.

I feel bad that Mum saved them so carefully and I have let J tear them up.

Dad is looking around the kitchen scratching his head. At this point, he wants to take the cabinets down. I am not sure why. He dismisses the idea for now and decided that instead we should pack up the contents of the big cupboards. Dad takes the cupboard with the white sliding doors and the colony of spiders and I take the corner cupboard with the colony of spiders.

I would prefer the opportunity to remove the spiders first but this doesn't occur to Dad. I suspect he just eats any that walk onto his hand.

Dad decants ancient Amway cleaning products into plastic boxes. There is rust on most of them. There are also unidentified jars and tins which are also placed uncritically in the box for the new house.

I take a bin bag. Almost everything in the corner cupboard that was originally food is years out of date. I find a dusty jumbo pack of plastic plates, probably from one of my birthday parties as a kid, and ditch that too.

Dad comes over to see what I'm doing. He removes from the bin bag some out-of-date oats, some out-of-date moulding icing, a crusted-shut bottle of milkshake syrup and the plastic plates and puts them into another plastic box for the new house.

He pours some unidentified clear liquid into one of the Bakelite cups and sniffs it. He is unsure what it is but to me it smells strongly of turps. I think there must be something up with his nose.

Eventually we have several grubby plastic boxes and two bin bags to take. We load them into the car and go back into the kitchen. J potters in carrying brightly coloured flaps from my old lift-the-flap books. I pick him up for a second and then put him down again and he goes to take a sip of his apple juice.

Immediately his face twists into a grimace and he cries. I realise that he drank from the wrong cup and has taken a sip of the turps. J is crying and there is no sink in the kitchen. I try to carry him to the bathroom sink but Dad is standing in the way. I ask Dad to call a doctor but he refuses. He has to get the trailer back to the hire centre by 5pm or will be charged for an extra day.

Finally in the bathroom I splash J's mouth with water and he's calming down a little. Dad is shouting at me that I want to waste his money by preventing him taking the trailer back on time. I ask him to drop J and I off at Casualty.

He tells me he's had just about enough of me and that I can get myself home. He's not interested, he's not interested.

I walk up to the village pharmacy with J. One of my old primary school friends is working there and we pretend not to recognise each other. I speak to the chemist who reassures me and says that it seems as if J spat out the turps and any residue has been rinsed away.

We need to get a bus home. It has been years since I have taken a bus from the village into town. We wait forten minutes and one arrives. I am 3p short of the fare, and I begin to cry. This is all the money I have until next Tuesday. The driver takes what I have and lets us on.