Porridge
By Edward Lee
As Jonathan Wyer looks down at the still, and not quite real looking, body of his mother in the coffin, framed by lilac frills of some material he can’t identify, he can’t but help think, vividly, of porridge, causing his stomach to turn and his mouth to flood with syrupy saliva; vomiting all over his dead mother, while undoubtedly horrific, would also feel somewhat appropriate, if even only to himself, and possibly his ex-wife, if she were to remember the story. He swallows hard, willing his stomach to steady itself and his mind to cast the thought, and the colourful memory contained within the thought, away, but fails in both endeavours.
He lifts his eyes from his mother and, without turning his head, looks at where his ex-wife sits, their son sitting beside her. He can’t decide whether or not he is pleased that she came today—she was never very fond of his mother, but then again, not many people were, and his mother was not very fond of her, nor was she shy about being vocal about it—but he is thankful that she is there to tend to their son, who, at nine, they both felt was too young to attend the funeral, but he had been insistent that he come, loving his grandmother, if for no other reason that she had always given him money when he visited her, and let him eat as much sugary foods as he wished, to such an extent that he had already had to have one tooth—a baby one, thankfully—removed, with another two permanent teeth in need of fillings; he did genuinely love her though, Jonathan felt, and her death was a hard blow to him, coming as it did within a year of his other grandmother dying and his parents separating, the latter resulting in him having to adjust to living a life across two houses, Jonathan and his ex-wife in agreement—for the first time in a long while—that their son spend an equal amount of time with each of them, one week with one parent, the next week with the other; Jonathan did not think this would be beneficial to his son in the long run, but neither did he want to reduce the amount of time he saw him either, like some of the other single fathers he knew who only saw their children every second weekend.
Again, without turning his head—and he knows he must move soon, the impatience of people behind him wanting to stare down at the body of his mother as though to confirm that she is in fact dead a palatable presence against his back, like an unforgiving sun slowly burning your bare skin—he looks to his left to where his stepfather sits at the kitchen table, looking confused and lost, the former a too regular expression—a vacancy, almost—over the past year or so, while the latter, containing shades of his confusion around its edges, was a result of the fact that his wife, Jonathan’s mother, had quite unexpectedly died in her sleep as he had slept beside her, and he, against all common sense, had loved her deeply and, as he had said to Jonathan when he rang him to tell him what had happened, ‘felt a part of himself had died along with her’; it was as surprising to Jonathan, his stepfather’s love for his mother, as his own son’s love for her, as though they knew some other woman that bared no resemblance whatsoever to the woman who had raised him with what was at best described as a begrudging indifference, if there was such a thing, which he hoped there was because it was the most apt description he could think of without sounding like some clichèd teenager who’d never asked to be born, who he had never been, having always been glad to have been born and be alive, even if earlier dreams of being a famous musician had come to nothing, hampered as they were by his inability to sing or even master the most simple chords on the guitar.
Jonathan turns his gaze back to his mother—why did dead bodies always look so fake after the undertakers had had their way with them, as though they had coated the body in some clear plastic concoction, like the varnish you’d put on a piece of furniture to make it shine and to protect its surface?—and wonders what he was to do with his stepfather who, at least according to Jonathan’s mother, was a full time job as, again, according to his mother he ‘lost more of his marbles every day’, waking in the middle of the night and wandering the house he had lived in since they married ten years prior to find the toilet, or forgetting to put his underwear and socks on when getting dressed in the morning. She had wanted to put him in a nursing home because she ‘was too old to baby him’ and had she not done ‘all that slaving’ with her first husband, Jonathan’s father, as dementia had eaten through his mind until he was no more than an empty husk who couldn’t remember his own name let alone the names of his wife and only child. Jonathan, feeling more sorry for his stepfather than actually having any strong feelings for him—like you would feel sympathy for someone homeless or an animal in pain but not enough to do anything to help them if it required any effort beyond taking some loose change from your pocket or donating money with a few finger swipes on your phone—had talked her out of it, saying that she would, in the long run, regret sending him to a nursing home, even though he knew that regret, to his mother, was something that happened to other people, because every decision she had ever made in her life was, without fail, always the right decision, while everyone else was wrong; it still surprised Jonathan that she had listened to him and refrained from sending his stepfather into a nursing home, though whether it was because of what he said or that she might have loved her second husband more than she ever showed, he did not know, one option as unlikely as the other.
He, of course, now regretted dissuading his mother from putting his stepfather into a nursing home, and not just because he himself was probably going to have to take those steps, but also, because maybe his stepfather might have in fact preferred to be in nursing home where someone was not always telling him what a burden he was, or berating him for no longer buying her expensive jewellery as he used to do before they married, and other such statements that Jonathan’s mother seemed to level at his stepfather every hour of every day, just as she had done to her first husband, kind words—or even the concept of if you had nothing good to say about someone then say nothing or at the very least wait until they left the room—seemingly a concept she had never grasped.
Jonathan’s last girlfriend, the one before he married his now ex-wife, had said, after meeting his mother, that she was a sociopath, incapable of feeling any emotion that did not directly involve her. Jonathan had replied that he wasn’t sure that was actually what a sociopath was, resulting in her calling him a ‘mummy’s boy’ and ending their relationship there and then, before he could add ‘but you have a point’.
He thinks of the porridge again and again his stomach turns, but this time his mouth remains dry, the possibility of vomiting on his mother seemingly no longer on the table. It is, and always has been, an instant reflex, his stomach turning when he thinks about porridge, with even the word itself causing him to swallow quickly and carefully, like how some people are unable to read the word yawn without finding themselves yawing. Walking down the cereal aisle in the supermarket, he has to avert his eyes from the porridge section, grabbing his usual box of cornflakes as quickly as possibly, holding his breath and keeping his lips pressed firmly together until he is in the next aisle, whatever he had eaten that day—usually his breakfast—threatening to rush into his mouth.
Someone behind him coughs, a touch of impatience all too apparent in the sound. Jonathan nods to himself, though why he does so he does not know. He would much rather turn around and tell whoever it was behind him that his mother wasn’t going to be any less or more dead when they got to see her, and now that he thought about it, why was there a line of people standing behind him when there was ample space all around the coffin for people to stand, or was there some unwritten rule he didn’t know about, some funeral etiquette which decreed that only one person at a time could look into the coffin, least the body become embarrassed by all the attention?
He takes a deep breath and looks at his mother’s body and tries to see her through the eyes of a loving son, a heartbroken son, a son who will miss her now that she is gone, but all he can think about is porridge. He forces himself to think of something else, anything else, some other memory he holds of her, but all he comes up with is when he had rang her to tell her that he and his wife were separating and her first response had been to say ‘Well you can’t come and live here’, which he had hoped he might be able to do, if even only for a few weeks while he reassembled his life, and which was the very reason he was ringing her. He had felt foolish immediately after he had told her, almost before she had replied, for having believed that she would have replied any differently than she had; afterwards he blamed the shock of being told by his wife that she no longer loved him and was in fact in love with someone else, for his fleeting burst of hope that his mother might, against all previous evidence to the contrary, display some of that motherly, and supposedly biologically programmed, love that he had always witnessed in the mothers of all his friends but had been missing from her for his entire life.
Jonathan moves from beside the coffin and stands at the end of it. From this angle she looks even more fake as she lies there, like some mass-produced mannequin, built solely to hang clothes upon with only a passing resemblance to a human being. His eyes stray to her hands which are folded tightly together across her chest, rosary beads twined under some of the fingers. He didn’t know where the beads had come from—he certainly hadn’t given them to the undertakers when he gave them the clothes she was now wearing—but it seemed to be the kind of thing she would approve of, even if, as far as he was aware, she had never said a prayer in her entire life, and only entered a church when it was someone’s funeral. He lifts his eyes from his mother and looks at the owner of the impatient cough who is now standing where he had been beside the coffin: a woman of his mother’s age who he does not recognise, and who seems to be close to tears at the sight of his mother. There were a lot of people here, most of them, like the impatient cougher, around his mother’s age, and, again like the impatient cougher, most he didn’t recognize—and there were a lot of them, more than he believed his mother had known across her entire life—and those he thought looked like he might know them seemed to look familiar in that way that all old people always looked the same as each other. The most surprising thing about them though was that they all seemed to be genuinely upset at her passing, as though a great light had been extinguished from the world. But maybe that was the way things were with children and their parents, how unknown they were to each other, unknown and unknowable; at that thought Jonathan can’t help but look over at his son who still sits beside his ex-wife, a sharp stab of grief hard in his chest at the possibility that he might stand over his coffin some distant day and be harbouring similar feelings that he, Johnathan, was harbouring for his mother, and for the first time since hearing of his mother’s death he felt the soft itch of tears in his eyes, though he suspects the tears are more for himself than his mother.
Many years ago, before he and his ex-wife were married, and before she had met his mother, his wife-to-be—or ex-wife-to-be—had asked him about her; it had been a continuation of the usual finding out about each other’s family conversation that all couples have when they realise that their relationship might have a future, a two-part affair as his ex-wife’s family was vast and his, at that time, consisted of his mother. He had removed her from his life at this stage, her basic bitter horribleness more than he wanted to experience as he approached his thirties when he had endured enough of it in his childhood, teens, and twenties, and he did not expect to see her again until he received some phone call—from whom, he did not know, his father dying the year before he had cut off contact with her, and his absence, a deciding factor in Jonathan’s decision to walk away—that she was dead or was as close to dead as made no difference; the only reason he had regular contact with her—a contact he himself had reinstated, and to which she had shown no joy or hint of pleasure, only tutting down the phone as he told he she would be soon a grandmother—was because of his son, and Jonathan had not wanted him to grow up not knowing his grandmother, as he himself had not known either set of his grandparents, even though they had all been still alive well into his teens, after some falling out between his mother and all four of them, a falling out that no one seemed willing to explain to him, though he gave up asking long before they died, simply placing them alongside his mother in his mind as people he was related to but would never relate to.
“She likes to feed the neighbourhood cats,” he had told his ex-wife-to-be—though, while he had expected that he had a future with this woman, and that future would someday include marriage, he never thought she would eventually become his ex-wife—when she asked about his mother. “Every morning she opens the back door and they come to her, and she feeds them and pets them. One day, one of the cats scratched her and she in turn kicked it so hard it landed at the opposite end of the garden. The next couple of days this particular cat wasn’t to be seen, and my mother said, in all seriousness, that she couldn’t understand where it was.”
Jonathan’s ex-wife-to-be had laughed at that, thinking he was joking, or possibly exaggerating, but after meeting her for the first time she apologised to him for laughing disbelievingly when he had told her about the cat.
Jonathon moves away from the coffin, turning to look at his stepfather who still sits at the kitchen table, now looking more confused than lost—a small animal caught in the headlines of a speeding truck—as another woman Jonathan does not recognise, speaks to him, rubbing his arm and shoulder as though he is cold in that one particular part of his body and she is intent on warming it up, before leaning down to whisper something in his ear, causing him to startle slightly and turn and look at her, his lips moving as though preparing to say something before he turns away from her again and continues to stare at whatever it was he was seeing in his slowly eroding world.
He knows it is wrong to regret convincing his mother to keep his stepfather from a nursing home, when now the possibility that Jonathan would be responsible for him—he had no other family, an only child orphaned at an early age—seemed to be the most likely outcome, but that doesn’t magically make his regret disappear. When he had put his argument to his mother—that she would regret doing so—he had presumed that his stepfather may have had at most a year or two left of life—his physical health, as far as Jonathan could tell, deteriorating dramatically soon after he married his mother—while his mother would probably live to be in her hundreds, all the bile and bitterness inside preserving her against the travails of illness and old age, eventually being celebrated far and wide for being the oldest person in the world; Jonathan and his ex-wife had used to joke that she would outlive the two of them, and their son would probably be an old man himself by the time she decided to die.
Jonathan turns back to the coffin where another woman he doesn’t know appears to be actually weeping as she looks at his mother. He should be crying himself, he knows, or at least have some moistness around his eyes—the itch of tears of moments ago is gone as though it was never there at all—if only to give the impression that he is deeply saddened by the loss of his mother, lest all these strangers and his ex-wife and son think him some emotionless monster—emotionless being the exact word his ex-wife had used to list the many reasons she did not love him anymore, along with sarcastic and self-centred—but as he looks at her body lying there in the coffin—and the more he looks at her the less she looks like herself, not even passing muster as a fake-looking copy—all he can really think of is porridge, his stomach now twisting with a sharp, urgent pain as though he needs to find a toilet immediately before he soils himself. He swallows hard again and tries to tighten the muscles in his stomach, if there are any left beneath his middle age spread, which was another reason his wife had levelled at him as to why she had sought the affections of another man—which, to Jonathan, seemed a little shallow, especially coming from someone who was accusing him of being self-centred— a man, she said with pride, she eventually fell in love with, revealing to her what she had always suspected but could never admit to herself, which was that she had never really loved Jonathan at all, and, if it were not for their son, she would look at all of their years together with regret.
Jonathan swallows again and manages to tighten something in his stomach—there must be some muscles there, after all—and feels confident enough that whatever is happening in his stomach he can hold at bay until after the funeral, then looks over at his ex-wife, almost expecting her to be looking directly at him, somehow able to hear his thoughts of her. But she is looking at her phone—no doubt texting the man who has replaced him in her life—while beside her their son looks at the coffin as though he has lost the greatest person he has ever known in his life and knows that there will never be anybody able to replace her. Jonathan wonders should he tell him about the porridge story, if only to tarnish his view of his grandmother, but he quickly casts the thought away as being cruel and unfair, not necessarily to his mother, but more to his son; he is lucky in a way, his son, with her now dead he’ll never have to discover the unloving, uncaring woman she was, and she can remain the perfect person he believes her to be, and, at this thought, Jonathan finds himself envying his son, which, for reasons he can’t explain, also makes him feel guilty.
The doorbell rings and Jonathan imagines it to be the undertakers come to place the lid on the coffin and bring it out to the hearse, where it will go to the church and then to the cemetery. He looks at his mother one last time, and searches inside himself for some tiny semblance of sorrow that might be there for her passing—she was his mother after all—but of course, there is nothing, as there has always been nothing, the two of them mother and son in blood and nothing else, two strangers related to each other.
He was eight when the incident with the porridge occurred. He had woken up feeling ill that morning, and had told his mother so, saying he should stay home from school—a mistake he regretted instantly, telling her he should stay at home instead of asking if he could, his mother never one to be told to do anything and, more often than not, more likely to do the exact opposite of what she was told to do. His mother was dressed up in her Sunday clothes and smelt of perfume and hairspray, obviously going somewhere—where he did not know, and if he had asked, she would have told him to mind his nose. She had looked at him, placed her hand on his forehead and told him he was fine and to eat his breakfast and to be quick about it. Jonathan sat down at the kitchen table where his porridge waited for him in its light blue bowl. It had always been his favourite cereal, even more than Frosties or Coco Pops, those cereals of pure sugar. He had always enjoyed the sensation of the warmth as it passed down his throat and into his stomach, seeming to warm his chest as it made its journey. But this morning he didn’t want to eat it, didn’t think he’d be able to do so. But there was his mother, standing over him, her body seeming to hum with impatience, so, reluctantly, he spooned some of the porridge into his mouth and swallowed. Then he spooned another mouthful in and swallowed that. He felt his stomach shift and twist and make a sound like a small dog growling. He tried to tell his mother again that he wasn’t feeling well, and she again told him he was fine and to eat his breakfast, she didn’t have time for his messing, before she left the kitchen. He dutifully put another spoon of porridge into his mouth but when he tried to swallow it it met the previous two spoonfuls coming back up and he vomited directly into his bowl of porridge.
“Mom,” he had called, feeling dizzy, and when she returned to the kitchen, he told her he had been sick, pointing to his bowl as proof. But, because his vomit, as he had only eaten porridge, looked like porridge, it did not look any different to the porridge that had already been in the bowl. His mother, as she did when her patience was at an end, roared at him and told him to stop his lying or she’d give him such a slap he wouldn’t know what day it was. He still felt dizzy, and there was sweat forming on his forehead, and he again tried to tell her that he’d been sick, but she roared again and raised her hand, preparing to make good on her promise of rearranging his awareness of what day it was. He did not want her to hit him—she could cause a lot of pain with one slap, and the angrier she was the harder she hit—so he turned back to the bowl and, with her standing like a tornado beside him, proceeded to empty his bowl of porridge and vomit both.
“We’re ready now, if you are,” says a voice behind Jonathan, and he turns and sees the undertaker standing there, looking sombre and efficient. Jonathan simply nods at him and takes a step back and to the side, watching as the man places the lid on the coffin, averting his eyes at the very last moment, his mother now sealed away forever, a deep breath shaking in his chest that could be some shifting of emotion or, more than likely, his body trying to control the twisting of his stomach.
He walks behind the coffin as the undertaker wheels it to the front door. He feels a hand squeezing his arm and is surprised, when he turns, to see that the hand belongs to his ex-wife. Beside his ex-wife stands their son. Jonathan smiles at his ex-wife, again feeling his chest shake with a deep breath, and reaches out to pull his son close to him, then the three of them follow the coffin out into the rain that is just starting to fall, the drops darkening the ground beneath them.
THE END
Edward Lee's poetry, short stories, non-fiction and photography have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen, The Blue Nib and Poetry Wales. He is currently working on a novel.
He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Orson Carroll, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy.
His blog/website can be found at https://edwardmlee.wordpress.com
*