JESUS DU PAIN

“Madeline! One can’t expect to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. You and you sister go to the shop and get me some new bags of flour, there is something wrong with these ones, the bread isn’t rising high enough.”

I’m almost certain that my mother has completely lost her mind; those were the bags that I collected yesterday, they can’t possibly have deteriorated overnight. Lilly and I looked at each other as if to silently agree that it wasn’t worth arguing with her over the small details and we left the kitchen.

Our mother is called Elizabeth Callows and she almost solely speaks in idioms. I’m sure it would be extremely difficult for any ordinary person to understand a single word she said but I guess that doesn’t really matter because there is a serious shortage of ordinary people who come to our house, in fact there is a shortage of any people. Apart from our house keeper there is only the occasional visit from a crazy old shepherdess with wiry hair and cracked hands. She buys about 10 loaves of mother’s bread and then goes on her way. She must be making her sheep sandwiches! Anyone else who comes down our drive is rectifying a wrong turn into a dead end. When I hear the pebbles outside the house crack under car tyres I rush to the window only ever to see a few dents in the shingle and the faint, lingering fog of exhaust fumes. No one has ever got out of their cars to ask for directions. I wish someone would.

Perhaps they don’t like the look of the house. It’s huge, and crumbling and the type of house you’d expect a witch with silver hair and glass eyeballs to live in. The inside is in no better repair either. There are gaping cracks in the plaster, mice under the floorboards, clutter everywhere, newspaper cuttings, heirlooms, dusty china, dried flowers, but its cosy and its home. The surrounding land is beautiful, there’s a lake, birds singing all around, and a decaying oak tree covered in vines. There are tiny details about the building that I love also. I like the smiling face on the kitchen wall comprised out of a crack for a mouth and two chips in the paint for eyes; sometimes I look at it and smile back. I like the sound that one of the steps down to the wine cellar makes when you tread on it, like you have trodden on a toad or the chest of an old man with smoker’s lungs.

Of course there are things I don’t like about the house as well. I don’t like the draughts that rush through the corridors in the winter, or the door that you can never quite shut and is constantly banging, or the rotting Elm tree outside my window which at night looks like a hand clawing at the sky trying to grab the moon.

Occasionally our mother teaches us Geography, History and Grammar but that is only when she can sandwich us into her vigorous bread making routine and that means we only have a lesson once or twice a week. She just bakes, bakes, bakes, in fact the kitchen has developed a permanent fog of flour that makes me cough when I walk in. She bakes more than a dozen loaves a day and that’s not counting the loaves she discards for being “deformed” or “ill balanced.” I’ve never understood why she makes so many, there is no way we can eat them all before they go stale. Lilly and I must have eaten every possible food that can have breadcrumbs put on it.

When I was about 5 years old I remember mother drew a face on one of the stale baguettes, wrapped it in a tea-towel and told me that it was Jesus and if I cared for him for a week we would be saved. I took it everywhere with me, he even slept in my bed. But then, I was outside playing princesses and horses with Jesus one day and it started pouring with cold, piercing rain and by the time I had ran back to the house I was holding white mush with a distorted, face. I had nightmares for a long time after that. I had killed Jesus and we weren’t going to be saved.