Free Flying Under Bridges by Sandi Toksvig

darling, it’s not attractive.’ She disappeared into the kitchen. Eve
could hear her uneven tread on the parquet floor as she almost certainly
prepared to do wonders with a melon bailer. Mother had limped ever since her
daughter could remember. When she was little, Eve used to imagine her leaping
in the air perfectly whole and coming down on the ice a broken woman. It had
made Eve feel guilty all her life. Mother had told her many times that had she
not been pregnant with Eve then she would never have fallen. If she hadn’t been
pregnant, Mother could have been someone. A sequinned toast of the town.
Instead she had borne Eve and Eve had borne disappointment. Eve looked in the
hall mirror. She was scowling again. Perhaps she had been born scowling.
    Through
the arch into the dining room Eve could see the table laid for lunch. The large
mahogany surface was entirely covered with a plastic lace tablecloth. The cloth
was to protect the table. In forty-five years Eve could never remember seeing
the actual table. What was the point in having it if all you did was protect
the wretched thing? What was the point?
    Mother
had made an arrangement of bright flowers Out of multi-coloured tissue paper.
She had learnt to make them in the sixties and had been making them ever since.
They were everywhere. Fake flora and fauna in every nook and cranny. Flora and
fauna and God. Having given up the sequinned world of ice-skating, Mother had
turned to Catholicism for the show business part of her life. It hadn’t been
much at first. A few little icons when Eve, Martha and William were growing up.
Rather more candles than might be deemed necessary for a power cut, that kind
of thing. But since her husband had died it was becoming obsessive. There were
velvet pictures of Jesus, which in the right light showed his bleeding heart.
Rosaries hung from every framed prayer. Eve’s favourite item was a large clam
shell, which, when plugged in, opened to reveal the head of Pope John Paul I.
The head would rise a few inches, light up and play ‘Ave Maria’. The pope rose
and shone, rose and shone. Eve, useless Eve, stood and played with it for a few
minutes looking at the Holy Father. Mother always seemed to know what Eve was
doing or thinking. ‘Leave His Holiness’s head alone, Eve. We don’t want him to
get broken.’
    Indeed
they didn’t, so Eve left the leader of the Catholic world and wandered into the
kitchen to be useless in there. Mother was very carefully cutting up tomatoes
for the salad. She had developed a new respect for salad vegetables since she
had read a report in the paper about a holy tomato being found in Huddersfield.
The article was on the fridge under a St Sebastian magnet from a holy shrine in
the Basque country.
     
    Pilgrims
View Holy Tomato
    Huddersfield
salad ingredient joins list of
    symbolic fruit and veg
    By Martin Wainwright
     
    The holy tomato of
Huddersfield yesterday joined religion’s rich tradition of curious edible symbols,
taking its place beside the Jesus tortilla and the aubergine of Allah.
    More
than 200 people have so far travelled from London, Birmingham and Manchester to
enjoy brief glimpses of the fruit wrapped in cling film in a terraced house
fridge.
    The
excitement centres on fibres and marks in the flesh which appear to spell out
the Koranic messages: ‘There is no God but Allah’ and ‘Mohammed is the
Messenger’.
    Although
Arabic’s sinuous lines are well suited to the natural patterns of fruit and
veg, the tomato is a particularly accurate template.
    ‘God
must have made me buy it,’ said 14-year-old Shasta Aslam, who bought a 60p bag
of tomatoes on her way home from school. She had been astonished to read the
familiar texts as she sliced the fruit in half— the third of three tomatoes in
a salad for her grandparents at their home in Lockwood, two miles from
Huddersfield centre.
    The
round red Moneymaker, which is admired in brief door-opening sessions to keep
the fridge cool,