Tea and Cakes

It was a sweltering day. I’d planned on taking the kids to the beach. They’d been on at me for days. “Please please please please please please please,” Their incessant pleading ground me down. I didn’t blame them. We were in the middle of a heatwave and it was where I wanted to be too, sat on a rug up on the pebbles with my knitting and a thermos of tea, while they played on the sand down below me, coming back up for jam sandwiches and orange squash.

Then we got the call. His mother was coming to visit. I dreaded her visits. Nothing I could do was good enough. The boys always covered themselves in mud, or chocolate, anything messy, just before she walked in the door, eliciting some comment about how lovely it was that I was so “relaxed” about cleanliness. The next thing she’d do would be inspect the house for dust. I caught her peering behind the sofa once: she hadn’t heard me coming in from the other room. And then there was the food. Oh, the food.

Every visit brought with it a new fad diet or imaginary food allergy. First there was no red meat, so the nice rib joint was wasted. Then no dairy, but I bought the wrong type of soya milk. Then she embraced Atkins and it was all steak and cheese, but no bread. Then her cholesterol was up, so no fatty foods. Then the wheat allergy, but at least she brought her own bread with her. Damned if I was going to be baking especially for her. It’s sliced pan for my family.

I feigned excitement at her visit, pointing out that she could come with us to the beach and it would be a lovely family outing. Totally impossible. She couldn’t risk her skin coming in to contact with seawater “Terribly drying you know. Oh. You probably don’t, do you?” Right, I thought, doesn’t the name of your hundred and fifty quid a pot moisturiser mean cream of the sea? I kept quiet though. “And the seaweed? The smells? No, a visit to the beach is totally out of the question. We’ll stay in. You can do a buffet lunch in the garden.”

Of course it was left to me to break the news to the kids. A double whammy: no beach and grandma visiting. No amount of bribery was going to put me back in their good books. A re-scheduled trip to the beach, the option to bring a friend, and the promise of lots of ice cream got them to agree to behave for the duration of her stay, but they weren’t happy about it.

And now here she was. Sat on the sun-lounger, under the umbrella in her big white hat, sipping at her sparkling water and grimacing. What I’d managed to do wrong in the preparation of her sparkling water I don’t know. Maybe she was still ‘suffering’ from the lunch I’d prepared: “Too rich” this time.

The kids were kicking a football between them. Until she told them not to do that while she was there. Then they picked up a frisbee, but that was vetoed too. I didn’t really blame her for that. Accurate frisbee throwing and catching was a skill that neither of them had quite mastered. I distracted them by asking for help clearing the lunch things from the table, suggesting that once they’d finished that they could go play out front on their bikes for a bit.

Jack started it. My eldest. He’s ten. Sam, still the baby of the family at eight, knocked one of the plates, and in his effort to stop it falling got cake all over himself. Jack laughed at him, so Sam threw the rest of the cake at him.

I ran over to break it up, angry with my kids for acting like kids, just because she was sat there, disapproving. She’d have never let her sons act this way. Funny, James always said that they had the most fun when she wasn’t around. He was inside, watching the football, no help.

I told the boys to wash the cake off under the hose, and then finish cleaning up. I was angry and shouted, but I could see that I’d gone too far and had upset Sam. He stomped over to the hose and held it while Jack cleaned off. Then Jack took the hose, and held it so that Sam could wash his hands. As Sam rinsed off Jack flicked the hose upwards, catching Sam in the face with the cold water. Sam shrieked, and Jack ran after him with the hose, soaking him. Sam’s face lit up as he ran around the garden being chased by his older brother.

“That’s quite enough of that” she said. “Is there no discipline in this house?” I sighed, took the hose from Jack, and told the boys to go apologise nicely to their grandma, winking at them as I spoke. They looked a bit confused, and I could see Sam start to get annoyed with the injustice of it all, but Jack caught my eye, and took Sam by the arm over to stand in front of my mother in law.

I took a deep breath, smiled, and turned the hose on them all.

~~~

Inspired by Hands taken by CinDLin from Flickr.

This was written for Flickr Fiction Friday, and you can read other tales inspired by the same picture by: Elimare, Donal, Chris, and Aquafortis.