Scott Madison
Affogato
The kitchen smells like sour milk and bins. We leave the window above the sink open to let out the heat, but more heat only lets itself in. This part of France doesn’t get a breeze in the Summertime. Moments exist until they are physically removed.
I chip through the thaw of the freezer: drawers full of things we won’t admit we will never consume. A pizza with black olives, a 2-pack of chorizo fish cakes, a candle burned and blackened to its bottom.
Wedged between a half-empty bag of chips and some loose magnums, I find the final Greek yoghurt pot. I run it under the hot tap until the contents are soft enough to slide out into a glass; a perfect cube - white at the centre, with a translucent coating.
The heat pauses for a moment to let sound arrive at the window: a jangle of keys being tried into a fussy lock. Jangle. Click. Jangle. Click. Jangle. Click, click, release. I lean over the window sill just as my mother opens the front gate and lets herself through, pausing to slip the set of keys back into her woven beach bag. Tomorrow, she will not remember which key it is the lock welcomes. She does not mind. Not remembering which key opens what lock is good for training the bladder, she’s told me more than once. And when I look back on my life, I think I will remember all of the women I have seen almost piss themselves on doorsteps, and that I have never seen one actually do it.
I press the power button on the achy espresso machine and it vibrates to life. I swap out an old pod for an untouched one, and watch as hot coffee pours onto the frozen cube of yoghurt. It’s still streaming down when my mother appears at the doorless kitchen opening. She is pink and salty from an afternoon at the beach. It smells like, air sniff, sour milk in here.
“I know,” I say. “And bins.”
“Yes. Bins.”
With both hands, I touch her arm, and she leaves. It’s one of life’s easiest tasks - telling my mother what to do, physically. Where to go. To sit down for a moment. To head to the balcony. To perch like a baby bird, open-beaked, and wait for a worm. Let me direct you, stroke you, present you odd things in glasses. Let me do it for you because I never understood you were doing it for me.
By the time I bring the concoction out to her, she is already on a call with her sister. She holds the phone between her ear and her neck despite having both hands free. Oh how awful. Yes, I remember. Yes, awful, she is saying. I grew up with just a younger brother, so I will live my life unable to speak the language of sisterhood. It is, for all its turbulence, a dialect I am sad to miss. I would like to hear about the divorces of old school friends, about court cases that were solved quite a few years ago, about how to stop the roasted courgette sticking to the aluminium foil.
“One second Deb, Robin’s brought me an affogato. Yes, yes, when in Rome!” She mouths thank you and rolls her eyes as if auntie Deb is asking her whether she’s been in a car accident and if she has insurance. And then she goes back to laughing at one thing or another.
What I have made my mother is not an affogato. It is thawed Greek yoghurt in a glass of watery black coffee. In a few minutes, it will begin to disintegrate into small, sour flakes.
The freezer was full of Greek yoghurt pots when we arrived at the beginning of July. They taunted my mother, these small pockets of sweetness that were never meant for us. She would have liked to throw them out, all seven or eight of them. But when I showed her a ‘guilt-free affogato’ recipe curated by an Instagram influencer promoting disordered eating, she agreed we might be able to put them to use.
I had presented the Greek yoghurt experiment with enough confidence that she had enjoyed it, taking several pictures, flash on, to send to her friends. Now, each afternoon, she expects her affogato. And so I will make it quite happily until the yoghurts, the last traces of him, are gone.
Lifting the cube with a spoon and wrapping her mouth around it from several angles, she is like one of those crumpled dogs who holds their toy between their paws and licks, pulls, licks until they taste the peanut butter inside. I catch myself thinking this in the reflection of the French window, and quickly busy myself with tidying around her.
When she is finished, she will tell me about the beach, about what auntie Deb said on the phone: who’s husband is dying and who is getting a bit too big for their boots. I will tell her the details of a case at work and a fictional piece of feedback from my manager. And we will talk about small things like these until the sun is gone and it is time to turn on the television.
Here is my father on this same living room floor, several years earlier, lying on his side as if he is about to extend himself into a side plank. He is fiddling with the box because somebody got him a good deal on English channels over here. He is muttering quiet things to himself, asking Siri questions Siri can not answer. He is always doing things like this, fiddling with boxes and getting deals from expat cab drivers who have the same South London accent as he does. We look out for one anotha, he had said as he closed Trev’s boot and tugged the handle of his suitcase up. And we had nodded, because we really do like watching television.
He was a good man, auntie Deb says to me from time to time when my mother leaves the room, as if my father has actually died. As if he is in the ground. Not in the bungalow of the lady who used to come round and cut our hair.
And now we are back in the present, if that is at all fully possible. My mother and I are watching A Place In The Sun. Perching on the floor in front of her, I let her plait my hair, though I have never liked my head being touched. We do not say much, even when the adverts play. We are not a family who love in tongue. We love in full stomachs and shoulder rubs and now in milky cubes in black coffee.
On the table in front of us, my phone vibrates. I flip it over instinctively. It is a force of habit; I mean nothing by it. And I would like to have not done it. But I did, and my mother has already removed her fingers from my scalp. The room is cold now.
“Is that him?”
“No.”
Minutes pass. I do not know what is happening in A Place In The Sun anymore.
She leans forward, holding her face so close that the Bacardi on her tongue feels like it’s on mine.
“You can tell me if you’d rather be with him. And her. Like your brother. Go on. You can leave tomorrow. I’ll pay for your flight.”
I do not answer.
“That’s all I’m good for, isn’t it? You can go. I’ll go to bed actually, when this episode is finished, so you can text him back and arrange it.”
And I cannot help it now. Because while we do not love in tongue, we are experts in using it to sting. And so, “Not everything is about you,” I spit, and flip my phone so it slams down on the table like a tiny expensive skateboard. And there is my screen, and the WhatsApp notification from Sam.
She does not ask the things I think I want her to ask, now she has seen it: why he is messaging again and if I think I will see him if he wants me to, despite his temper and the way the thick hairs on his hands curl when his fists do. She does not ask, and I will not surrender unasked. And then, just as heavy in the air, are the things I have not asked her. What day of the week it was, or what the weather was like the day she found them together.
After what the advert break tells me is a few minutes, she moves my new plait over one shoulder, and I feel her hands on my upper back, taking hold of the strings on my top that have been coming loose since the afternoon. I watch her mind work in the cabinet mirror; her lips tort like a squeezed lemon and her thick brows pointing towards her nose. She tries different loops, like placing a jigsaw piece into a hole at all possible rotations. And then she gets it.
Very quickly, she loops the two pieces of string into the sides of the top, and brings them up again. She moves the plait gently back to the centre, smoothing my shoulders as she removes herself from my skin altogether. She reaches forward, and moves my tea towards me. I have a tendency to let it go cold.
“Would you like to sleep in my bed tonight?”
Scott Madison is a London-based writery type person. Her poetry has appeared in independent publications like SEED, Dear Damsels, and Kamena. She can be found on Instagram @WordDonkey and is always happy to hear about writing / performing opportunities.
