Free There's an Egg in My Soup by Tom Galvin

felt for the poor kids, particularly with regard to the cold. Between the windows and the central heating system, which ran off a massive coal-burning boiler but whose coal was spared for only the coldest days, the internat was not always warm. At least I had an electric heater, bought for me after a teacher leaked the information that I was taking the hob cooker out of the kitchen and into the main bedroom every night to get a bit of extra heat. The brand spanking new electric heater that arrived at my door made a good bit of difference. It also blew fuses regularly. The fuse box for the whole corridor, one of those antiquated boards with huge, ceramic fuses rather than trip switches, was in my hallway. Before a fuse blew there would be an ominous and quite frightening fizzling sound, like a giant glass of coke being poured out in the hall. Then bang. Lights out, electric heater out, the lot.
    All I could do was enjoy the darkness and wait until the following day to summon the school electrician. He would arrive in his blue coat, approaching the fuse box with the caution of a soldier about to defuse alandmine. Extracting the old fuse carefully, he would replace it with another as large as the butt of a snooker cue. Then, with a short smile, he would leave. Within three days he would be back to do it all over again. We became very close, that electrician and I.
    But the worst gripe I had in common with the students concerned the food. The only good day was Thursday, because you got meat, and to get the best bits you had to be there early. As for the food in general, they shrugged indifferently. We went through the menu of the various days together. What I thought I was eating, and what they told me I was eating, were two very different things, except for the sheep’s stomach. I was right about that – it was sheep’s stomach all right, and none of them liked it. But they ate it. That was the difference. It was food, and they were hungry all the time.
    One evening, some of the older guys who lived in the block came to my flat looking for bread. Most likely it was simply to accompany the vodka they had managed to smuggle in, but it was still pretty alarming. They treated bread as if it were actually manna from heaven. Whatever else you found in bins here if you went looking, you’d rarely find a piece of bread. From then on, I let them go early on Thursday and we all got the best bits of meat together.
    People underestimate the importance of food. When it is there in front of you all the time it doesn’t have areal value. But I grew to respect food greatly that first year, knowing that it would make the difference between me coming home to Ma looking like Dracula, a beanpole or – God forbid – in a black body bag. I was reminded often enough that I was getting close to one of these. Obtaining food, however, was the greatest of inconveniences.
    The supermarket in a small town would generally only have basic goods. The shop could be full, but there would be nothing there to eat. You could find pasta in every form imaginable, tins of odd stuff, single frozen fish gazing up at you with glassy eyes, and packets of that noodle soup they give out free in student unions. Getting a meal of decent food together meant visiting the grocer, the butcher, the baker and so on, accumulating all your ingredients and rolling up your sleeves for an evening bent over the hob.
    Most of the time I just wasn’t bothered, and arrived home to make do with whatever I’d come up with in one shop. Usually that was soup of some sort, normally powdered stuff, accompanied by bread. I ate barrels of this desiccated rubbish. When I later grew more adroit at the language, I realised it was sauce I had been eating, and not soup. Whatever it was, I knew it wasn’t much use. It filled rather than nourished, and my final belch lacked substance, suggesting that little had passed through my body but hot water. Christ, I was