Charlie Burness is a Londoner who constantly dreams of the next destination.
She has a near-on obsession with discovering where she can eat the best food
in each place she jets off to. She documents her travels and findings in food
porn at www.burnessie.com and www.firstweeat.net respectively.
The sugar crystals roll on my tongue, discrete pockets of sweetness. Below them is cooking oil weight,
the comforting gum of leavened bread, thick and quiet and shaping itself into a negative of my soft-palate. And
last of all, waiting for its moment, is the cardamom, like the perfume of someone just over my shoulder. And
like footprints too, small and human, in red sand. Tiny scorpions, near invisible, appearing for a second before
somehow they are gone. And a twitching bird hopping along beside the baobao tree, and leaving a long indent in
the dirt, tracing the path of its dragging wing.
My mother doesn’t make mandazi often. When I complain about my stepfather’s rules she says, ‘We’re
lucky he would have me, with a child too.’ As if she resents me for not allowing her to do better, when she’s always
told me that she came here for me, for my perfect English and my shoes, no holes, neat by the door.
My mother turns and takes three diamonds of dough from the table where they are rising. She drops them
into the saucepan, and I move and stand beside her and watch the hundreds of bubbles pushing the expanding
dough up until it bobs half out of the cooking oil.
She stops eating her bread. She holds it carefully between two fingers so that she doesn’t squash the air out
of it. She flips the three mandazi in the pan so that their pale undersides disappear and we see the brownness of
their top skins.
‘Do they make you think of home, too?’ I ask her, and she slowly and carefully turns down the gas hob.
‘They do not need to,’ she says, ‘I think of it often.’
I eat the rest of my mandazi in one, no sugar, like she would buy for me from plastic tubs outside church,
where men sat at tables and played drafts with bottle caps, and dominoes too, although much of their set was lost.
‘I’m sorry I don’t remember it well,’ I say, and she uses a slotted spoon to fish the breads out one by one and
drop them onto the kitchen towel with the others.
She puts the end of her half eaten mandazi down on the table before she picks up the last few to drop into
the oil. Her face is shiny with beads of sweat as though she, too, is being cooked. Once, when he was very angry at
me for getting mud in the house and then saying it wasn’t me, my stepfather told me I’d ruined my mother’s life. He
said, ‘She won’t tell me, even, who your father is.’ Then he slammed my bedroom door and said loud enough that
I’d hear ‘Probably that fucking minister.’
I pop the mandazi my mother has abandoned into my mouth. There is crunch and the silence of the soft
middle, and then there is the queue of girls in front of me in their school uniforms. I inch myself closer to the
shade of the medical centre’s porch. Hard swollen fruits like yellow tomatoes are all over the ground, and I push
them into one another with my toe, the sole of my black leather lace-up flapping. Through the open door I see the
nurse, short so that his scrubs are rolled up at the ankles, weighing a girl and nodding. And then I am screwing my
eyes tight shut and seeing nothing as the nurse taps on my belly. His hands are cold because the concrete building
is cold. He moves to the door to call for the female healthcare assistant.
I didn’t bother pointing out to my stepfather that if it weren’t for me my mother would still be living in
a village in East Africa, and would never have married him. Perhaps he would have preferred this; I wouldn’t be
around to tread mud through the house, and he wouldn’t have to waste so much Febreze getting us out of the
curtains.
I put a hand on my mum’s back, ‘How do you know when they’re ready?’ I ask her, and she pushes one
down so that I can see its two halves. ‘This colour,’ she says, and I want to ask her how the church raised the money
to send us away, and why, and about how hot sand feels under bare feet, and whether it was the nurse or the
headmaster who broke the news of me to her father. But instead I say, ‘Maybe next time you can show me how to
make them from the beginning?’