The thing about me

Last Sunday I have a visit from Peter: he’s read the first ten chapters of my novel and has some feedback for me.  Whilst I make tea he prowls the kitchen until he finds – well what on earth? his expression says.  He has a way of asking a question with a sideways list to the head which makes me smile.  What do you think, I say.  He hazards a few guesses – a honey-drizzler for someone who eats it by the vat? – and then gives up.

It’s a hot chocolate maker; a whisk, more or less.  It’s made of wood, quite light, and has a slim, turned handle.  The upper half – the whisking bit – is carved, hand-carved I think though the thing itself is machine-made, into a series of notched shapes around the central stem, so that it has a sequence of waists.  Three of the waists are encircled by a loose ring, each carved with a different pattern and held in place by the body above and below but free to spin in its orbit.  If you shake it, the thing clicks and chuckles like a rattle.  The top end is shaped like a double flower head.  Between the two sets of petals is a kind of squashed hollow orb, with a row of little eyes cut into its circumference.  I am sure the whole thing has been fashioned from a single piece of wood but, when I examine it, I can’t figure out how this final embellishment has been made. 

This morning I catch the end of a radio item they call The Thing About You: what is the most precious thing in your life, the one thing you would save if your house were on fire, the item which defines and reassures you?  A man speaks about a carved dog from a concentration camp and tells his father’s story.  I think about my house burning and think I might save this chocolate maker, which has its own odd history.  It was given to me by another Peter on another Sunday 25 years ago, in a market in Tepotzlán, up in the hills outside Mexico City.  It was a holiday weekend, I think, always an encouragement to escape from the capital, and Peter was one of my few friends with a car.  Unlike the rest of us, young teachers from the UK and Canada happy to exist on a shoestring in return for a spell away from the confines of home, Peter had another, proper job as an orthodontist.  Teaching was something he did in his spare time, when he wasn’t throwing wild parties or planning elaborate excursions.  He loved to outrage: one story has him dancing naked with his two Siamese cats; another, less happy, involved him being picked up on the street in San Angel in the early hours of one morning, very drunk, thrown in the back of a car and deposited eventually stripped of everything (clothes, wallet, shoes) apart from his underpants.  

He died some years ago after what I imagine must have been a horrid and lingering illness.  I like to remember him for his excesses, for his odd mixture of generosity and meanness.  I went to the coast with him one weekend and he stayed in the Hilton whilst I battled the cockroaches in a dormitory at the other end of town.  I hadn’t been long in the country and he enjoyed my naivety, I think, watching my reactions as we scoured the stalls for magic remedies – Tepotzlán was famous for its witches – and translating the simplest phrases into Scottish Highlands camp.  This pretty little toy cost a few pesos at most but he presented it to me formally as if it were a treasure: ‘Kate, bienvenido a Mexico – welcome to Mexico.’  

Ever since I came back to England it’s lived in a corner of the kitchen, upended in a Mexican cup, gathering dust, whilst my family of two grew to accommodate a baby and then shrank again.  In the unhinged early days of single parenthood, the chocolate-maker became a microphone we passed between us every time we heard the opening bars of Feeder’s ‘Buck Rogers’, a verse apiece – you know, ‘He’s got a brand new car, Looks like a jag-u-ar, It’s got leather seats, It’s got a CD player (player player player...)  But I don’t wanna talk about it any more.’   The chorus took the two voices, mother and son, shouting our survival into the chipped petalled mike:

I think we're gonna make it

I think we're gonna save it yeah

So don't you try and fake it

Anymore, anymore

We'll start over again

Grow ourselves new skin

Get a house in Devon

Drink cider from a lemon (lemon, lemon, lemon...)

I never knew who Buck Rogers was, and we never made it to Devon.  We’re still going, though.   And the whisk: has lost a couple of petals and I’m not sure I fancy woodworm in my hot chocolate.  It’s a good reminder, though: old friends, far-away places, someone taking the trouble to make a useful bit of kitchen equipment beautiful and a taste of the exotic – cinnamon, sugar, warm milk and dark dark chocolate.