I Won't Forgive What You Did by Faith Scott

come from his breakfasts; my mother cooked chips for us almost every night. We lived on chips most of the time, it seemed. Sometimes we’d have stews, made from scrag ends of meat, or mince, or liver my father got from the slaughterhouse for nothing, and sometimes a pie or toad in the hole. This, however, depended on how she was feeling. Sometimes too, in the school holidays, if she was feeling energetic, she’d make a jam pudding and custard and would actually sit down with us while we were eating. But then she’d start telling us her jokes about people weeing and pooing and ‘blowing off’. She’d laugh so much there’d be tears rolling down her cheeks. It was one of the very few things that seemed to make her animated – slightly hysterical even – and, caught up in this, we’d laugh too.
    She didn’t often spend time washing up anything, and the two big metal chip pans made the whole kitchen smell horrible. She’d cook them in batches, and great bouts of smoke would billow around, seeping into every last corner of the house. She often had chip pan fires, which terrified me while she ran in a frenzy, trying to put them out. I’d sometimes attempt to clean the disgusting pans myself, carefully straining the fat from them through a tea strainer into a jug, and throwing away all the ancient black bits. I’d then attempt to scrub them, but it never worked. They stayed black and would never come clean.
    I’d also try to wash up, but there was so much dirty crockery in the sink I couldn’t even turn the taps on properly. And it was never just piled in the sink either. The kitchen table, the yellow cupboard and the red kitchen cabinet would almost always be covered in crockery and pans of congealed, rotting food, some of which would have green mildew up the sides. There would even be piles of dirty saucepans stacked on the floor, sometimes with remains I could clearly identify – the green beans, for example, Pops had brought the previous Saturday. He still brought my mother vegetables when he came, because if he didn’t we’d hardly have any. The only other veg we ever seemed to have were the potatoes, cabbage and swedes my mother said my father used to pinch sometimes from where they were on sale on the trailer parked up the road.
    My mother never seemed to notice the mess. She never fretted about it, or commented on it, and seldom said, ‘I must tidy up.’ It was almost as if she couldn’t see it. By now she’d spend lots of her time just sitting. I couldn’t understand why she’d want to sit where she sat, because much of the time she was parked only inches away from where she kept a pan of my father’s dirty underwear boiling on the stove. It’d be there for days, and would keep boiling dry, but she never seemed to deal with it, or hang it to dry – she just topped up the water, again and again, for what seemed like for ever. Eventually, she’d tip the whole lot into the sink, where it would remain for a few more days, among the dirty dishes. She’d also often have another pan, of boiling chicken, on the go. She always bought ‘boilers’ as they were cheaper, and, as with the underwear, they’d boil away for days – until my father could tolerate the stench no longer, and then swear at her, and she’d put the stinking pan out in the yard. Mostly, she’d remove the boiled chicken before she did this, but the cooking water would remain in the pan, growing mildew, until the next time she wanted to use it.
    And then she’d go back to her endless bouts of sitting, and tearing bits out of magazines, and humming. She hummed more and more, even when out shopping. She also, increasingly, had started twisting her thumbs. Passing them over one another, again and again, quickly, first one way and then the other. She had started tapping as well, clicking her long dirty nails, endlessly, on the wooden arm of her chair. Her tapping almost had a kind of tune – a clear rhythm. It went clickedy, clickedy