Blog 3 - Tuesday, 2 January - Boiling Eggs

I wake up in the real world for the first time since I left Leigh on Boxing Day. I lie in a real bed and stare at the trees through the transparent black blinds which give just the right light to the dawn. They are waving good morning to the neighbour’s lonely flagpole, which stands right in the middle of our view of Rangitoto.

Mum glides in at 7:20am carrying tea in a white cup with a silver rim and matching saucer, as well as three fingers of buttered toast and Vegemite. The tea is just the right colour, and the first sip is perfect. I make an ooh sound of appreciation.

‘The first sip is always the nicest,’ Mum says, looking pleased. ‘Now drink it while it’s hot.’

She then goes away and comes back with cornflakes and fruit, which I eat sitting up in bed while she, sitting perched on a little chair eating muesli and fruit, says, “I lay awake last night, thinking muesli is not for Ash. Muesli is not suitable for a low-fibre diet.” I imagine my new little bowel facing the navigational needs of a walnut or pumpkin seed through its freshly plumbed terrain.

When we have finished our breakfast, Mum disappears to shower, and I snuggle down. A little later she is back outside my door with her makeup on, dressed in a slip just above the knees and little black court shoes: ‘Darling, just before I put on my dress, I remembered something important. Don’t forget to ring Gus.’

I am supposed to ring and remind my youngest son to get the key from our neighbour, Jenny, so he can feed Solomon while Jenny is on holiday. Solomon is a ginger cat with half a tail and one eye. We rescued him from the SPCA after he had been returned twice for extremely antisocial behaviour, and was the only cat left in the cattery.

However, when Bella, a very damaged Springer Spaniel, arrived to live with us, Solomon sensed a threat to his feline right to relax. He artfully drove Jenny’s timid cat Tubby, a diabetic, to a premature demise and then moved in with her. All that remains of poor Tubby are some old faded photos that flap sadly in the corner of Jenny’s garden.

I look at Mum adoringly: ‘I will be a very tidy guest in your very tidy house. Oh Mum, I am so lucky to be here.’

She picks up my water glass and leaves the room, returning a moment later, ‘All this praise is making me super-efficient,’ she says as she puts my water glass back.

She goes away again, returning fully dressed, carrying a little cane basket. ‘I am off to get your porridge,’ she says.

I suggest we listen to the French news on demand when she comes back. She looks at her watch and enquires, ‘What time?’

I feel this surge of affection — she and I travel in different times. In her life, radio shows and programmes on television only appear when they are scheduled. Appointments, once entered in her diary, are as immutable as tattoos.

As she flies around gathering food for her stricken chick, like every good mother she is preoccupied with what else her little bird might be needing.

Aha, bathing!

‘Darling,’ she says, returning with my porridge, ‘I have decided it’s totally impossible for you to use your shower as the ledge is too high and if you trip headfirst into the shower this will slow your recovery. Let me introduce you to your new bathroom.’ This is actually her bathroom, adapted so my poor old Dad could be showered when he couldn’t walk unaided.

I shower.

Back in my bedroom I start to write about my time with Mum, as she is a unique creature from the pre-computer and pre-globalisation era. I want to bottle her up in words so she stays with me. Three of my closest friends lost their mothers before they were thirty, and this has undeniably made their lives different to mine.

Evelyn Waugh wrote that it is the duty of a good parent to die young, but when I look at these friends they seem to be forever looking for that arrow that points north.

After writing furiously in peace and tranquillity, for the first time in my life, I go to the kitchen to see what Mum might be making for my lunch.

‘I’ll show you what I bought, as we don’t pay enough attention to what we eat,’ she says, and there in her hands is a sweet little loaf of bread with three golden-crusted mounds. ‘This,’ she says proudly, ‘was the only bread on the shelf with any personality.’

She produces a six-pack of large brown free-range eggs. ‘I don’t usually buy large eggs, but I chose these because they are from Matakana.’

Mum boils a large brown egg for each of us with the confidence of one who has been boiling eggs for nearly a hundred years; into the boiling water for five minutes exactly.

I start to tell Mum about how I realised I wanted to live even when the pain was so great I thought I wanted to die.

‘All I could see in my mind, Mum, was the still blue sky and the dancing water and Gus swimming with the dolphins. There was only me and him on the boat.’

‘We were the only ones on the boat,’ Mum corrects me.

‘Yes,’ I reply, ‘but grammatically it would be me and him.’

‘I will not change my mind on this,’ Mum says, as confident about grammar as she is about boiling an egg.

‘Your house, your grammar,’ I say.

She is momentarily caught off guard by the unwelcome intrusion of bad grammar into boiling eggs. ‘Oh, the eggs are ready, I haven’t got the egg cups out. You’ll be the death of good cooking.’

She then finds her old chicken and a rooster egg cups, pops the eggs in and places them on the table beside two little patterned china plates already at the table with soft buttered soldiers waiting to be dipped in yolk.

When there is just one last soldier standing, Mum asks, ‘Jam or cheese, darling?’ and produces a slice of cheese which she unwraps from Glad Wrap, saying, ‘It is simply undignified to wrap a cheese such as this in this.’

Mum and I decide we will read a book in French together called Only the Tender Moments Last. It’s a series of short stories about a divorced woman trying to find meaning in her life after her husband and children have left home.

I stumble over the word ‘août’, the ooh sound always eluding me.

‘Aoooot,’ Mum wails, ‘it means August.’ I wonder for the umpteenth time if Mum really thinks I don’t know that août is August.

I find her a difficult teacher, as she leaps in with answers and explanations like one of those adults who run full tilt in a race with a three-year-old. We discuss how the French purr their language like smug cats, as if they’re holding down a piano key. Mum doesn’t seem to mind criticism of her maternal race; she blames them for her lack of a sense of humour, which is probably just an earnestness that belongs to Europeans who carry a weight of history we have escaped. She does admire the ceremony of their eating, however, and says eating alone is sad and bad for the digestion.

Charline, one of the characters in the book we’re reading, has chosen to paint her room a colour called parme. Mum doesn’t know this word. She gets up using the arms of her chair, which she has been told time and again not to do, but at 90 the worship of the core has quite passed her by. She returns with her great friend, the not-condensed Oxford Dictionary, and starts looking up the word parme.

Meanwhile, I am Googling parme.

She scolds me. ‘Look what you’re doing, reading while you eat, which is not good for digestion,’ as books are welcome companions at the table but phones intruders.

It takes Mum quite a little while to work out that parme is a violet colour named after the violet flowers found in Parma in Italy. I, cheating on Google, had found parme immediately but don’t want to spoil Mum’s lifelong love affair with her not-condensed version of the Oxford Dictionary. I smile happily when she, smiling happily, says, ‘That really was worthwhile. My ultimate source did not fail me.’

We finish lunch and I return to my room to look at my wasted muscles. My legs look like those sad chicken legs in a package at the bottom of a supermarket freezer marked ‘reduced’.

Moley, my younger sister, comes over for dinner. Her exuberant black Labrador, Tika, bounds in, and I am immediately on my defensive, rolling into a ball. I scowl at Tika, who sidles up to me, and I caress her dense coat and imagine burying my face in the deepness of the forest floor.

Moley asks if I am to have my wine in a thimble again.

Mum replies, ‘She can have a proper glass, but a small one.’ (I have three.)

Moley is wearing flared jeans, a satin shirt and makeup. She looks like a spacewoman. I stare at her like a prisoner from behind bars.

I ask if Tika has water, and Moley says she didn’t want any, but goes and gets her bowl from the laundry. She puts it down in front of us all, and Tika drinks like she’s at the six o’clock swill.

‘Ha,’ I say, ‘You see, she just wanted an occasion.’

‘I don’t go along with that,’ says Mum, who takes our nonsense seriously.