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“You might be thinking of RICE?” suggested Leo desperately. “Rest. Ice. Compression. Elevation.”
Mum frowned. Then her expression cleared. “RICE? RICE. Of course, it’s RICE. But what’s RACK then?”
There was absolutely no way I was telling my mother that.
“Your mum’s getting dementia,” she concluded. “I’m getting dementia, Krzysztof. Oh wait. Risk Aware Consensual Kink. That’s what I was thinking of.”
I threw back my head and groaned my heart out.
“Is it very painful, baby?” asked Mum sincerely.
“Yes,” I said equally sincerely. “It’s extremely painful.”
Dad’s eyes were glinting behind his unfashionably round glasses. “Maybe you should give him some of that weed.”
My father’s sense of humour had always been impossible for me to deal with. So I resorted to shooting him a sullen look.
My mother, however, deployed a marital whack on the arm. “Behave yourself. I’m not supplying drugs to my own son.”
“But you will supply drugs to Leo?” I asked.
She nodded. “Absolutely. Giving drugs to your kid’s friends makes you a cool mum. Giving them to your kid makes you a bad one.”33
“You do know I’m over thirty?”
“Rationally I acknowledge that,” said Mum generously. “But you’ll always be eight years old to me.” She heaved a happy sigh. “And as cute as a little pie.”
I slumped against the sofa, hoping to be spontaneously assassinated. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Are you leaving yet?”
Leaning over me, Mum kissed me on the brow. “That sounds like a hint.”
“You could say that.” Because, yes, technically you could say that. You could say pretty much anything.
“All right, paczek.” The brow-kissing having proven insufficient, my mum ruffled my hair as well. “We’ll just get unpacked and then we’ll be off.”
I sat up again so swiftly I nearly headbutted her. “Wait. What? Unpacked?”
“Well”—she bounced off towards the kitchen—“we didn’t know what you’d need.”
“I don’t need anything.”
“And we didn’t want you to miss out on Wigilia.”
Hanging off the side of the sofa, I squinted after her. “Those bags better not be all food.”
“They’re not all food,” confirmed Dad. “Your mother thought you might also need a toothbrush.”
Mum looked around at everything she’d piled on Leo’s floor. “I’ll be the first to admit, I didn’t think through the whole boat angle.” A faintly despondent expression crossed her face, lingered there for a fraction of a second, then vanished, as if despondency had no more claim on my mother than snow over summer. “How about you take what you want and we’ll find something to do with the rest?”
“Okay,” I said. “Great. We don’t want any of it.”
“Marius.” Leo spoke so softly, I almost didn’t hear him. “Your parents carried all this here.”
“Which means we know they can carry it back.”
But Mum was already unloading Tupperware, stack after stack of it piling up on the countertops. “Don’t worry, Leo. He’sjust being contrary for the sake of it. He’ll soon change his tune, especially when he sees we’ve brought”—she whipped the lid off a container—“Christmas pierogi.”
“Fine.” I surrendered with ill grace, as if there was any other way to surrender. “The pierogi can stay.”
