Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

She had a broken egg in her hand and was slipping the white into a bowl, holding back the yolk with a crinkled piece of shell. The yolk she then put into another glass bowl crowded with several other displaced yolks. Joe had never watched an egg being separated before. He wanted to ask why she had taken the centres out, but at eight years old he was too shy. “You know what I’m making?” she asked.

Joe shook his head.

“Baked Alaska,” she smiled. “It’s a very special pudding.”

He’d heard of Alaska. A very cold place where people lost bits of their body – noses, ears, fingers – because of frostbite. “Is it from Alaska?”

The woman laughed. “No, but it is something your Uncle Gihan discovered on one of his trips abroad. It has cake and ice cream! He really likes it.”

Suddenly the world seemed to shrink for Joe. This Gihan was a man who discovered what he liked on the other side of the world while everybody else managed to find, at best, only a ripe pineapple on the other side of Rickman’s road. He was a pilot. Joe wished he could be one too and fly high up above the clouds. Discover new things and see the whole world. Gihan and Flora had no children but seemed to Joe to have everything he could imagine.

Flora beat the egg whites and prepared her dish for the oven. After she had put it in, she picked up the bowl of yolks. “Do you like scrambled eggs?”

Joe nodded. He liked scrambled eggs. He liked scrambled eggs much more than boiled or fried, the only alternatives at home.

She looked pleased. “Good. I’ll make you some then. Eggs are good for a growing boy.” She got out a heavy frying pan and started to heat a slab of New Zealand butter in it. Then she mixed the egg yolks and started to cook the yellowest scrambled eggs ever. When they were done, she eased the eggs onto a gilt-ringed plate and gave Joe a light stainless steel fork and knife. He sat at the American-style breakfast bar and ate slowly. He had never been to such a modern apartment. The fitted kitchen had chromium tubes and laminated cupboards. Everything shone.

“Is it OK?” She put the pan and bowls in the sink.

He nodded, wishing he could grow up faster.

Flora smiled a little dreamily. “Can you imagine, an egg is the beginning of everything ...”

Then the timer in the kitchen buzzed and she rushed over to the oven. In a moment she had a huge snowy mountain out with peaks of burnt meringue. “Here it is,” she announced and waltzed out into the sitting room.

Joe wondered about the ice-cream. She had promised ice-cream. He had even noticed an empty carton near the kitchen sink: the oblong shape of what was called a family block of vanilla ice cream. And hadn’t she mentioned cake? He quickly swallowed the rest of his scrambled eggs and followed her.

In the sitting room Gihan was talking to Joe’s parents and a group of friends. All of them were drinking brandy from a bottle made in France. The room had leather furniture, wall-to-wall carpeting and air-conditioning.

Flora knelt by the glass coffee table in the centre of the room and the white mountain seemed to float down to rest. Gihan turned and snapped his fingers,“Voilá!” He picked up a carving knife and plunged into the centre of the dish. A second later he had split the mountain open to the delighted gasps of his audience, and there it was: a ring of golden Madeira cake and in the centre a familiar block of whitish ice cream steaming in the glare of two spotlights.

*

On the way home with his parents, afterwards, Joe saw a silver fuselage and tail-fin gleam between a screen of coconut trees. He imagined flying above the clouds in a huge circle around the world. Going somewhere far away, somewhere snowy and bursting with white mountains, somewhere so different and so cold, so adventurous, and then coming back home to ice cream and cake. Returning to more or less where he had started from, where everything would be the same and yet somehow not the same.