Chapter 3: Sunday Breakfast

My mother is evil! I mean, really evil. Don’t get me wrong. I love her and all that, and a lot of the time she’s really nice. But when she gets it into her head to give someone a hard time, you do not want to be that someone. This time it was my brother Dan who was in her sights and she was locked, loaded and ready to fire. I guess until I’m older and have had a few hangovers myself, I won’t really understand how evil Mum was that Sunday morning, but I had a pretty good idea when it was happening.

Dan had gotten drunk the night before. Really, really drunk! And Mum was severely ticked off. She knew he would have a hangover, and she intended to extract the full extent of suffering from him. Unfortunately, my sister Tara and I were unwilling recruits for her little games.

When Mum first came to get me for breakfast, I was in my room dressed only in panties, looking at myself in the mirror. Something, I hasten to add, I don’t do very often. I know I have an ugly body so I usually don’t bother looking at it. Maybe I’ll explain why I was looking later, but right now, this is about my mother.

Mum knocked on my door as she opened it, dressed in her usual Sunday dress, plus frilly apron, to find me standing there in my underwear. Of course I squealed and turned my back on her, before yelling “MUM!” at her in my most outraged voice. I was mortified that Mum had walked in on me like that.

She snorted at me, “For goodness sake, girl, put some clothes on. It’s nearly time for breakfast, and you certainly won’t be getting fed if you turn up dressed like that!”

As if I would ever turn up to breakfast like that anyway!! With that she started to leave, then stopped and turned back, “Why don’t you wear that nice top your Aunt Janice gave you last Christmas?”

I had been in the process of wrapping a robe around myself when she dropped that little bombshell. I held it closed around me as I turned to stare at her in shock. “But Mum, it’s ugly! I hate that thing.”

“Don’t be silly! It’s perfectly nice. I’m sure your aunt will be delighted to hear that you’ve been wearing it.”

Mum had that tone of voice that made it plain that there was no point arguing. Silly me, I tried anyway; “Mum, pleeeeeease, do I have to?”

Mum put this really severe look on her face, then she reached into the wardrobe and pulled it straight out. She didn’t have any trouble spotting it in the middle of my other clothes. The damn thing was a bright iridescent green with yellow and purple splotches all over it. I think it was probably radioactive! I was quite convinced that wearing it would expose both me and everyone around me to a crippling dose of deadly gamma rays.

“Oh, will you tell Tara she can wear hers too. For some reason, hers ended up in the rubbish, but I rescued it and washed it so it should be perfect. It’s on a hanger on her door. Oh and do be a sweetie and get her up for me, I have to get back to cooking breakfast. You’ve got fifteen minutes.”

She’d done that whole speech with a sickly sweet, butter-wouldn’t-melt smile fixed to her evil, evil, evil face. Then she left the room, closing the door behind her before I had a chance to respond.

Boy, did I want to respond. You see Tara is not a morning person. I usually wake up before her, and I usually wake up quickly. Tara, on the other hand, well ... ughhh! To make things worse, we’d both been up extremely late the night before. Waking Tara was not my idea of a fun way to spend Sunday morning.

Realizing I had little choice, I sighed and pulled on some clean sweatpants and the monstrosity of a shirt. The shirt didn’t go with the sweatpants, but I wasn’t sure if I owned anything that would go with the shirt, so I opted for at least a little bit of comfort. I headed next door to Tara’s room, knocked and went in. I didn’t bother waiting for a reply; I knew Tara would still be fast asleep. I went to the window and pulled the curtains apart a bit so there would be some light in the room, then went and sat on the bed next to my sister.

I grabbed her shoulder and gave her a firm shake. “Hey! Wake up!” No response! I shook her again and got a muffled groan. A third shake resulted in a long, drawn-out moan while she rolled flat onto her stomach and buried her head, face first, into the pillow.

“Wakey-wakey, Tara! You have to get up!” I grabbed all her blankets and stripped them down to the bottom of her bed. Tara was wearing a long pale-blue nightie, but it was twisted up and had ridden up so she was flashing her panty-clad bum at me.

“Mnnmmmphgh! Get orraffmmm y litllll raaaat!” (I think that’s what she said.)

I shook her again. “Come on, Tara, wake up!”

A fist came flying blindly back at me and struck me right on the chest. It hurt! I mean she hadn’t hit that hard but my chest had been tender lately, and she’d connected right there. I grabbed her wrist firmly with both hands, backed off the bed, and hauled backwards as hard as I could. Sure enough, Tara came sliding straight off the bed and thumped onto the ground, pillow still clutched firmly in her other arm.

“Owww! What’d you do that for, you little shit?”

“You hit me! You utter bitch! Mum sent me to get you up. You have to get up.”

“I’m up!!” It was more of a groan than a statement, and at the same time, she curled up on the floor and put her head back on the pillow.

“Come on, Tara, you have to get moving!” The white panties stretched over her backside were too inviting a target. I leaned down and smacked her, right on the bum.

She suddenly spun around and sat up, glaring at me through a mess of tangled hair.

“Get lost you pile of scum! If you touch me again, I’ll...” her voice trailed off and she squinted at me and used a hand to clear hair away from her eyes. “What the heck are you wearing?”

I sighed, “This is the shirt Aunty Janice gave to me last Christmas. Mum wants you to wear yours too.” I waved at the chair in front of her dresser, where I’d draped Tara’s shirt on the way into the room. Her shirt was as bad as mine. It was a luminescent yellow with multi-colored diagonal stripes.

Tara stared at it in horror, and then groaned. “Shit, I knew I should’ve burnt that wretched thing! Ohhh kill me now!!”

I was sooooo tempted!!!

Tara let herself fall backwards so hard, her head made an enormous thump as it hit the floor.

“You have about ten minutes to get ready for breakfast,” I said. “You have to be wearing that shirt. I don’t think Mum’s in the kind of mood where you can get away with being late.”

I turned and left, closing the door behind me. I went to my room and spent a few minutes brushing my hair, then headed for the kitchen. Mum saw me arrive then grabbed an old saucepan and headed off to Dan’s room. I slid into my chair and looked around the table. Mum had obviously been busy. The kitchen smelt strongly of frying bacon and burnt toast and some other fairly strong smells I couldn’t identify. I wondered about the burnt toast smell. Mum’s never burnt a piece of toast in her life. The table was loaded with plates of food, all of them covered with lids to keep the food hot.

At that moment I heard an awful clanging sound from Dan’s room. Mum was obviously bashing the saucepan with a metal spoon. Then I could hear her screaming at Dan to wake up and how he was already late for breakfast and so on. She sounded pretty furious.

Tara and Dad slid into their chairs just as Mum came back into the kitchen. Tara had her revolting yellow shirt on. Dad was wearing this awful Hawaiian shirt. I was pretty sure he hadn’t chosen to wear it. With the three of us sitting in a row like that, we clashed horribly with each other, we clashed with the kitchen furniture, and we clashed with ourselves. I know I was wincing at the sight. As usual for breakfast, Tara was sitting slumped over, staring down at her empty plate. She seemed oblivious of the fashion crime we were all committing.

Mum had come back to the kitchen, relaxed and smiling. She put the now dented saucepan into the sink, then moved around the table, pouring milk for each of us, all the time singing this little song under her breath. I reached out to my glass to have a mouthful of milk but Mum slapped my hand away from the glass. Then she was standing next to me with a collection of tiny colored bottles in her hands. She selected one then carefully dripped several drops into my milk.

“What are you doing?” I asked

“It’s food dye,” she said. “It has no taste but it changes the color. Now give it a stir.”

I picked up a small spoon and stirred my milk. Then I stared in a mixture of wonder and revulsion. Have you ever put a tiny amount of green food dye into milk? It doesn’t give that strong green color of a lime milkshake. Instead you get a pale, insipid sort of moldy green that looks like ... well ... milk that’s gone off in a really bad way.

“Taste it!”

I glanced at Mum doubtfully and then cautiously sipped at the “milk.” To my surprise, it tasted like, well, milk! I shrugged at Mum, then put the glass back on the table. “It’s okay, I guess!”

Very soon, Tara had milk that was sickly yellow and Dad’s milk was a mid-brown. It looked like a glassful of mud and not at all as appetizing as chocolate milk. Then Mum dropped similar colored lumps into our milk. “Marshmallows” was the quick response to my questioning looks. Now the milk looked really off with the weird colors and the unidentifiable lumps floating in it. Mum seemed really proud of the effects.

“Well then, I’ve cooked more than we need, so don’t feel compelled to eat it all. You can start eating while I go fetch Dan, but don’t you dare touch that lovely milk until he gets here.”

Dad and I cautiously lifted the lids off the food and both of us quietly whistled in awe. Mum had gone to town with the food dye and with the extras. There was a dish of vibrant purple scrambled eggs. Some poached eggs with green streaks through the eggwhite and the yolks were obviously very runny. There were some canned sardines covered with something that could only be described as slime. There was a plate of pancakes of several different colors, none of them natural. There were sausages, bacon and sliced ham – all coated with extra grease. There was a bowl of spaghetti in tomato sauce with extra unidentifiable bluish lumps in it. There was other food too, but I forget what.

Dad and I served ourselves with a variety of stuff. Everything I chose, I put some on Tara’s plate too. She was basically sitting and staring down at her plate as I gradually filled it up. That part was normal. If she were hungry she’d eat whatever was in front of her, but don’t ask her to make a decision at that time of day, it takes forever. The food was surprisingly tasty. Mum sure does go weird on us sometimes, but she is a great cook. I avoided the slimy sardines. They seemed a bit much and they smelt awful, but Dad tried them and he licked his lips as if he liked them.

I was looking down at my plate, filled with this bizarre spectrum of colored food, most of it doctored to look mouldy. Then my brain did a little hop and skip sideways. Suddenly, instead of looking horrible, my food looked pretty! All the contrasts in color and texture were like a work of art. This was a piece of Mum’s artwork. Sure it was a bizarre mixture of The Addams Family and that meal the Lost Boys have a food fight with in the Robin Williams version of Peter Pan, but it definitely was art.

Just then Mum almost literally marched Dan into the kitchen and he slumped into his normal chair. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d dragged him at least part of the way by his ear. As Dan walked into the room, I had a sudden flashback to what had happened in the shower last night. My brain started to go fizzy like it had last night. Then I realized all this was happening at the breakfast table in front of my family. My face went bright red and I had to drop my head down and let my hair cover my face to hide my embarrassment. I couldn’t look at Dan! A rush of fear went right through me that I’d never be able to look my brother in the face again. My favorite person in the whole world, and I’d have to hide from him for the rest of my life. All the fizzy washed straight out of my brain as I tried to absorb the enormity of what I’d done.

I stared down at my plate of breakfast art. I guess fear overcame the embarrassment, because I started trying to peek at Dan out of the corner of my eye, through the curtain of hair hanging over my face. Then I forgot my own problems. Dan looked sick, really sick. I realised I’d had a mouthful of purple scrambled egg all this time and started chewing it as I studied my brother more carefully. He looked terrible. His skin was all pale and clammy, he needed a shave, he had these big dark rings under his eyes and his hair was a complete mess. His nose was all screwed up from the strong cooking smells in the room and his eyes were squinting against the light as he blinked and tried to focus on the multi-colored mess in front of him. Like I said: really, really sick.

It must have seemed like all his senses were being attacked at once, because Mum chose that moment to drop a handful of cooking utensils into the sink with a mighty crash.

“Aaauurgh” said Dan as he slumped further down into his chair and tried to simultaneously cover his eyes, ears and nose with his hands.

I took a mouthful of my moldy green milk; the little green marshmallows were delicious. I watched as Mum enthusiastically slopped greasy bacon and runny eggs onto his plate and half covered them with a dollop of spaghetti with lumps. Then she slid a couple of grayish pancakes onto the other side of his plate, added a dash of orange butter on top and topped that off with a couple of slime covered sardines. Then she threw a handful of Parmesan Cheese across the top. I could smell the cheese from all the way over on my side of the table. It smelt like vomit. I’m not kidding, and I’m an expert on what vomit smells like. I was covered in it last night. Dan turned greener than my milk, let out this strangled, choking sound and then lurched from the table to the sink to pour himself a glass of water.

“Sit down young man. You are NOT yet excused from the table!” No prizes for guessing who that was. Like I said, my mother is evil! She got him back into his seat and started this running patter, encouraging Dan to eat up, explaining that a big young man like him needed to eat a big healthy breakfast to keep up his strength.

I took another mouthful of egg and watched in awe as Mum, through sheer force of will, got Dan to cut a piece of sausage, wincing as his knife screeched and clattered on his plate, and then, in slow motion, speared it with a fork and raised it with a shaking hand to his mouth. I could’ve sworn his skin was grayer than the pancakes and the way he chewed on the sausage, it looked like it tasted to him like the worst kind of garbage.

I took another sip of moldy-green milk and put my glass back on the table, only realizing as I did so that Dan had watched mesmerised my every movement, his fork frozen halfway back to his plate.

He seemed to try to speak, then tried again, “Bec,” he croaked, “what in blazes are you drinking?”

I smiled at him as cheerfully as I could, thinking I was being helpful by being all bright and happy, “It’s just milk, Dan, that’s all! Do you want to taste?” I held out the half empty glass to him across the table. I was thinking that if he tasted it, and realized it was only colored milk, he wouldn’t be so bothered by the way it looked.

Dan stared first at my smiling face, then at the glass of moldy green milk in my hand, with a sort of fascinated horror. Then he shuddered and closed his eyes, oblivious of the gob of tomato sauce that dripped off his sausage and smeared down the front of his t-shirt. Mum smiled at me with a happy, cheerful sort of smile. I figured I’d made a mistake but wasn’t entirely sure what. I decided to just focus on my plate and concentrate on eating.

Within moments, a weird sort of silence descended on the table. I could hear Angie playing happily in her room, Mum would have fed her earlier so she could concentrate on setting up this little piece of bizarre family theatre. The silence was suddenly broken by Mum using a knife to scrape charcoal off a piece of badly burnt toast. The sharp grating sound seemed to be sending knives into Dan’s tortured head.

I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye and realized that she was glaring at Tara and me, with her lips pressed firmly together. “Uh oh,” I thought. Clearly we weren’t doing something she wanted us to do. I kept my head down, hoping a tornado would zoom past outside and distract her. Or maybe the phone would ring and it would be someone from the government that had finally got clever and figured out that siccing Mum onto the terrorists single-handed, away on the other side of the world, would be way more effective than the entire armed forces were being.

No tornado!! And everyone in the government stayed stupid! Watching from the corner of my eye, I saw Mum’s expression change slightly. She’d decided something. She gripped the table with both hands and her body seemed to do a sudden little twist. For an instant I wondered what she was doing, and then I stopped wondering. Tara had jerked upright with an “OW!” then she backhanded me across the chest, hitting me in the exact same spot she’d hit me earlier. The blow hurt, of course, and also caused me to smear tomato sauce across one cheek and drop a lump of spaghetti and chunks down my front.

“HEY! WHAT WAS THAT FOR?” I yelled.

“YOU KICKED ME! YOU LITTLE BRAT!” Tara screamed at me. With that she flailed out with her feet and connected with her shin right into my calf.

“OWW!” I reached out, grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled with the hope of turning her head away from me and therefore making it harder for her to hit me or kick me. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. At the same time, I was screaming at her that I hadn’t kicked her and she was screaming at me to let go of her hair.

I didn’t waste my time trying to accuse Mum; she had that butter-wouldn’t-melt, as-innocent-as-pie look on her face, but her eyes gave her away. Mum’s eyes were fixed on Dan and were glinting evilly as he shuddered and held his hands over his ears.

“THAT’S ENOUGH!!” Dad roared over the top of us, which didn’t help Dan much – except that we stopped screaming at each other, which I guess did help Dan. I couldn’t believe that Mum had deliberately kicked Tara under the table, just to start us screaming at each other. I couldn’t believe I fell for it either, but that whack on the chest really had hurt!

“I think breakfast is over!” Dad continued in a more controlled voice. “You girls are excused from the table! Dan, you should...”

“If Dan has finished breakfast,” Mum cut in smoothly, “then he has a little chore to do.”

With that, she guided Dan away from the table into the laundry and shoved a basket full of wet clothes into his arms.

“You need to hang out the washing you created last night!” and she pushed him straight out the back door into the bright morning sunshine.

I think I heard Dan cry out in pain as he was pushed out the door, but when I went to check, Mum hustled me back into the kitchen to help clean up. Tara disappeared into the bathroom and Dad and I cleared the table. We scraped all the extra food into a big garbage bag. I have to say that all that colorful food mixed together in that bag started to look and smell a lot like the vomit I’d been covered with last night. I was starting to feel a bit queasy myself, so I grabbed a glass of water from the tap and gulped it down.

I’d wanted to talk to Mum this morning sometime and I figured I might be able to distract her from attacking Dan, and I wanted to get away from the vomit smell so I decided to give it a shot for all those reasons. Stupid, stupid me! I should have waited for like, hours!

“Ah, Mum?”

“Yes, what?”

“Can I, um, talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure, go ahead!” She folded her arms and stood there looking at me.

I looked nervously at Dad and also at Tara who’d walked back into the kitchen. “It’s kind of private.”

“Oh, okay!” She put an arm across my shoulders, led me a total of three steps to the other side of the kitchen and then in a voice only slightly quieter than a foghorn, said “Okay, go ahead.”

“Um ... it’s really, really private!”