Free Swallowing Grandma by Kate Long

half an ounce of cornflour in with your butter).
    ‘What’s for tea?’ the infant Poll used to ask her mother.
    ‘Three jumps at t’ cupboard an’ a bite at t’ knob,’ Florence would reply, flicking through her Ministry of Food leaflets. Desperate times all round.
    It’s from these lean years, Cissie says, that Poll’s developed her skewed relationship with food. So we have two bread bins, one for bread, and the other for sticky no-brand cakes with lurid icing and foreign writing on the packet. She buys these off Chorley market, or they get brought along in tribute by the Dogman, and they don’t last two minutes. ‘It’s a shame to let ’em go stale,’ she’ll say, licking hundreds and thousands off her fingertips. For breakfasts we have tram-scotcher toast – slices two inches thick – and condensed milk sandwiches for suppers. In between it’s compulsive chain-snacking. The only reason Poll’s not built like a sumo is she’s Queen Fidget.
    My trouble is, I spend too much time sitting on my bum and reading.
    My trouble is, having Poll around.

    *

    ‘It’s in your best interests,’ I remember them saying. They said it when they took my clothes off, and when they put me in a dim room and when they tried to show me the screen. I wouldn’t look.
    ‘There’s no damage,’ I heard the doctor say to the nurse.
    There is. There is! I wanted to shout. There’s damage in my head. How can that thing be alive when Mum’s not?
    But I didn’t say a word, just bit the side of my hand hard.
    In the end they switched the scanner off because I just kept my eyes tight shut and my head turned away. In the darkness I saw:
    Him, holding a spray of lilac to my face. Close your eyes, he told me.
    I did.
    Open your mouth, he whispered.
    I parted my lips and he placed something cool and moist and flat against my tongue.
    Now eat it.
    I chewed, carefully.
    Keep smelling the lilac as you eat, he said.
    I opened my eyes and saw him holding the apple and the penknife apart, then bringing them together and smoothly cutting another thin slice of white flesh. He passed it to me on the blade.
    Do it again, he said.
    Why? I asked.
    Because I want you to, he said. I want you to experience life.
    When they turned the lights back on, there was a crescent of purple teeth marks across the edge of my palm. I put my hand quickly behind my back, but the doctor saw. ‘Have you any questions at this stage?’ he asked me, picking up his notes. The nurse behind him had a face that would have soured milk.
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘How did I get to where I am now?’
    ‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ he said.
    ‘I mean, this shouldn’t be happening. I want to go backwards. Rewind. Six months ago, I was happy. Now I’m stuck in here and you’re telling me a pack of lies. You can’t keep me here, you know.’
    I thought they’d give me my clothes then, but they didn’t. They brought Dad through instead.
    ‘They’re wrong, Dad,’ I cried. ‘There’s no baby. There can’t be, I’ve not even had sex yet. Honest. They’re making it up.’
    But his eyes had gone like glass and he shook his head at me. It was about that time they were wheeling my mother down to the basement.

    *

    It hadn’t been too hard to conceal my new hobby from Poll, although Maggie caught me once just after a session in the bathroom and gave me a few searching looks. I stayed to ear-wig on the stairs.
    ‘What’s up with your Katherine?’ I heard her ask.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘She looks as though she’s been skrikin’.’ Poll probably shrugged because she didn’t reply. ‘Has Dickie said summat daft?’
    I nipped back down and wandered in all innocent, blowing my nose noisily into one of Vince’s large hankies. ‘I tell you what,’ I said, ‘my hayfever’s been terrible since old Rowlands planted all that rape at the bottom of the Brow.’
    ‘Ah,’ said Maggie. She was sitting by the gas fire drinking her tea from a sugar basin.