You are what you eat (IV)

It hadn't worked. Carbolic soap didn't smell how it used to, somehow. It was at once too pungent and too weak, sweetened with something. Probably a last-ditch effort to sell it to anyone who wasn't twice Amanda's age, she thought. Maybe it only ever smelt right on her dad. Downhearted, she finished washing her face with a squirt of something moisturising and, after a pause, dropped the soap into the bin.

Back downstairs, she fell downhearted into a fat armchair, and reached for the chocolate box hidden under its frame. No, Amanda, she thought: be good. Leaning over she grabbed the box of flour cakes from the sofa and collapsed back again, starting the laborious, calorific task of opening all the layers of packaging.

Nothing, she was sure, was ever how you remembered it. Had they really changed their chemicals, or had she changed hers? Had carbolic soap stayed where it was, while the chemistry set of her guts had moved on? What was the point of trying to conjure people up like dreams or small gods, when all you got was plasticky paper and dry disinfectant?

Her reverie was broken by an inward groan, a plaintive reminder from herself to herself. Grandad. Always a thankless task: he was the cheeriest soul in her whole extended family, without a tooth or a thought in his head, but he was hard work to talk to. Barely a conversation—if you could ever call them that—went by without a pitch into one of his naval stories or a yaw towards his part as a non-combatant in the great rescue at Dunkirk.

She nibbled again on the cake, stopped, and looked down. What was the point at which she had started thinking about her grandad? It had been in the shop, she realised. When she'd bought what was, she now saw, a packet of hard tack. Its brand name? The Merchantman's Stores, with a stylized line drawing of a wooden ship with sails unfurled, hunched against rough seas and spray. Not a nineteen-forties rustbucket by any means, but in her heart the two were close enough that she had made the leap between them without knowing it.

She wondered, if she mentioned anything about her biscuits to her grandad, would he tell her a story about it? Would it make sense? And would it be true? Would he even understand what she was talking about? Did that not really matter, so long as he was remembering, and she was listening? She finished the biscuit, picked up the phone, reached again for the chocolates, and dialled.