Kiss Kiss (23 page)

      
“That’s all.”
      
“But there must be more to it than that, surely?”
      
“You got to get a good piece of meat to start off with,” the
cook said. “That’s half the battle. It’s got to be a good hog and
it’s got to be butchered right, otherwise it’ll turn out lousy
whichever way you cook it.”
      
“Show me how,” Lexington said. “Butcher me one now so I
can learn.”
      
“We don’t butcher pigs in the kitchen,” the cook said. “That
lot you just ate came from a packing-house over in the Bronx.”
      
“Then give me the address!”
      
The cook gave him the address, and our hero, after thanking
them both many times for all their kindnesses, rushed outside
and leapt into a taxi and headed for the Bronx.

The packing-house was a big four-storey brick building,
and the air around it smelled sweet and heavy, like musk. At
the main entrance gates, there was a large notice which said
VISITORS WELCOME AT ANY TIME
, and thus encouraged,
Lexington walked through the gates and entered a cobbled yard which
surrounded the building itself. He then followed a series of signposts
(
THIS WAY FOR THE GUIDED TOURS
), and came eventually
to a small corrugated-iron shed set well apart from the main building
(
VISITORS’ WAITING-ROOM
). After knocking politely
on the door, he went in.
      
There were six other people ahead of him in the waiting-room.
There was a fat mother with her two little boys aged
about nine and eleven. There was a bright-eyed young couple
who looked as though they might be on their honeymoon.
And there was a pale woman with long white gloves, who sat
very upright, looking straight ahead, with her hands folded on
her lap. Nobody spoke. Lexington wondered whether they
were all writing cooking-books, like himself, but when he put
this question to them aloud, he got no answer. The grown-ups
merely smiled mysteriously to themselves and shook their
heads, and the two children stared at him as though they were
seeing a lunatic.
      
Soon, the door opened and a man with a merry pink face
popped his head into the room and said, “Next, please.” The
mother and the two boys got up and went out.
      
About ten minutes later, the same man returned. “Next,
please,” he said again, and the honeymoon couple jumped up
and followed him outside.
      
Two new visitors came in and sat down—a middle-aged
husband and a middle-aged wife, the wife carrying a wicker
shopping-basket containing groceries.
      
“Next, please,” said the guide, and the woman with the long
white gloves got up and left.
      
Several more people came in and took their places on the
stiff-backed wooden chairs.
      
Soon the guide returned for the third time, and now it was
Lexington’s turn to go outside.
      
“Follow me, please,” the guide said, leading the youth across
the yard towards the main building.
      
“How exciting this is!” Lexington cried, hopping from one
foot to the other. “I only wish that my dear Aunt Glosspan
could be with me now to see what I am going to see.”
      
“I myself only do the preliminaries,” the guide said. “Then I
shall hand you over to someone else.”
      
“Anything you say,” cried the ecstatic youth.
      
First they visited a large penned-in area at the back of the
building where several hundred pigs were wandering around.
“Here’s where they start,” the guide said. “And over there’s
where they go in.”
      
“Where?”
      
“Right there.” The guide pointed to a long wooden shed that
stood against the outside wall of the factory. “We call it the
shackling-pen. This way, please.”
      
Three men wearing long rubber boots were driving a dozen
pigs into the shackling-pen just as Lexington and the guide
approached, so they all went in together.
      
“Now,” the guide said, “watch how they shackle them.”
      
Inside, the shed was simply a bare wooden room with no
roof, but there was a steel cable with hooks on it that kept
moving slowly along the length of one wall, parallel with the
ground, about three feet up. When it reached the end of the
shed, this cable suddenly changed direction and climbed
vertically upward through the open roof towards the top floor of
the main building.
      
The twelve pigs were huddled together at the far end of
the pen, standing quietly, looking apprehensive. One of the
men in rubber boots pulled a length of metal chain down from
the wall and advanced upon the nearest animal, approaching
it from the rear. Then he bent down and quickly looped one
end of the chain around one of the animal’s hind legs. The
other end he attached to a hook on the moving cable as it went
by. The cable kept moving. The chain tightened. The pig’s leg
was pulled up and back, and then the pig itself began to be
dragged backwards. But it didn’t fall down. It was rather a
nimble pig, and somehow it managed to keep its balance on
three legs, hopping from foot to foot and struggling against
the pull of the chain, but going back and back all the time until
at the end of the pen where the cable changed direction and
went vertically upward, the creature was suddenly jerked off
its feet and borne aloft. Shrill protests filled the air.
      
“Truly a fascinating process,” Lexington said. “But what was
that funny cracking noise it made as it went up?”
      
“Probably the leg,” the guide answered. “Either that or the
pelvis.”
      
“But doesn’t that matter?”
      
“Why should it matter?” the guide asked. “You don’t eat the
bones.”
      
The rubber-booted men were busy shackling the rest of the
pigs, and one after another they were hooked to the moving
cable and hoisted up through the roof, protesting loudly as
they went.
      
“There’s a good deal more to this recipe than just picking
herbs,” Lexington said. “Aunt Glosspan would never have made
it.”
      
At this point, while Lexington was gazing skyward at the
last pig to go up, a man in rubber boots approached him
quietly from behind and looped one end of a chain around
the youth’s own ankle, hooking the other end to the moving
belt. The next moment, before he had time to realise what was
happening, our hero was jerked off his feet and dragged
backwards along the concrete floor of the shackling-pen.
      
“Stop!” he cried. “Hold everything! My leg is caught!”
      
But nobody seemed to hear him, and five seconds later, the
unhappy young man was jerked off the floor and hoisted
vertically upward through the open roof of the pen, dangling
upside down by one ankle, and wriggling like a fish.
      
“Help!” he shouted. “Help! There’s been a frightful mistake!
Stop the engines! Let me down!”
      
The guide removed a cigar from his mouth and looked up
serenely at the rapidly ascending youth, but he said nothing.
The men in rubber boots were already on their way out to
collect the next batch of pigs.
      
“Oh, save me!” our hero cried. “Let me down! Please let me
down!” But he was now approaching the top floor of the
building where the moving belt curled over like a snake and
entered a large hole in the wall, a kind of doorway without a
door; and there, on the threshold, waiting to greet him, clothed
in a dark-stained yellow rubber apron, and looking for all the
world like Saint Peter at the Gates of Heaven, the sticker
stood.
      
Lexington saw him only from upside down, and very briefly
at that, but even so he noticed at once the expression of
absolute peace and benevolence on the man’s face, the cheerful
twinkle in the eyes, the little wistful smile, the dimples in his
cheeks—and all this gave him hope.
      
“Hi there,” the sticker said, smiling.
      
“Quick! Save me!” our hero cried.
      
“With pleasure,” the sticker said, and taking Lexington
gently by one ear with his left hand, he raised his right hand
and deftly slit open the boy’s jugular vein with a knife.
      
The belt moved on. Lexington went with it. Everything was
still upside down and the blood was pouring out of his throat
and getting into his eyes, but he could still see after a fashion,
and he had a blurred impression of being in an enormously
long room, and at the far end of the room there was a great
smoking cauldron of water, and there were dark figures, half
hidden in the steam, dancing around the edge of it, brandishing
long poles. The conveyor-belt seemed to be travelling right
over the top of the cauldron, and the pigs seemed to be dropping
down one by one into the boiling water, and one of the
pigs seemed to be wearing long white gloves on its front feet.
Suddenly our hero started to feel very sleepy, but it wasn’t
until his good strong heart had pumped the last drop of blood
from his body that he passed on out of this, the best of all
possible worlds, into the next.

All day, in between serving customers, we had been crouching
over the table in the office of the filling-station, preparing the
raisins. They were plump and soft and swollen from being
soaked in water, and when you nicked them with a razor-blade
the skin sprang open and the jelly stuff inside squeezed out as
easily as you could wish.
      
But we had a hundred and ninety-six of them to do
altogether and the evening was nearly upon us before we
had finished.
      
“Don’t they look marvellous!” Claud cried, rubbing his hands
together hard. “What time is it, Gordon?”
      
“Just after five.”
      
Through the window we could see a station-wagon pulling
up at the pumps with a woman at the wheel and about eight
children in the back eating ice-creams.
      
“We ought to be moving soon,” Claud said. “The whole
thing’ll be a washout if we don’t arrive before sunset, you
realise that.” He was getting twitchy now. His face had the
same flushed and pop-eyed look it got before a dog-race or
when there was a date with Clarice in the evening.
      
We both went outside and Claud gave the woman the
number of gallons she wanted. When she had gone, he
remained standing in the middle of the driveway squinting
anxiously up at the sun which was now only the width of a
man’s hand above the line of trees along the crest of the ridge
on the far side of the valley.
      
“All right,” I said. “Lock up.”
      
He went quickly from pump to pump, securing each nozzle
in its holder with a small padlock.
      
“You’d better take off that yellow pullover,” he said.
      
“Why should I?”
      
“You’ll be shining like a bloody beacon out there in the
moonlight.”
      
“I’ll be all right.”
      
“You will not,” he said. “Take it off, Gordon, please. I’ll see
you in three minutes.” He disappeared into his caravan behind
the filling-station, and I went indoors and changed my yellow
pullover for a blue one.
      
When we met again outside, Claud was dressed in a pair of
black trousers and a dark-green turtleneck sweater. On his
head he wore a brown cloth cap with the peak pulled down
low over his eyes, and he looked like an apache actor out of a
nightclub.
      
“What’s under there?” I asked, seeing the bulge at his waistline.
      
He pulled up his sweater and showed me two thin but very
large white cotton sacks which were bound neat and tight
around his belly. “To carry the stuff,” he said darkly.
      
“I see.”
      
“Let’s go,” he said,
      
“I still think we ought to take the car.”
      
“It’s too risky. They’ll see it parked.”
      
“But it’s over three miles up to that wood.”
      
“Yes,” he said. “And I suppose you realise we can get six
months in the clink if they catch us.”
      
“You never told me that.”
      
“Didn’t I?”
      
“I’m not coming,” I said. “It’s not worth it.”
      
“The walk will do you good, Gordon. Come on.”
      
It was a calm sunny evening with little wisps of brilliant
white cloud hanging motionless in the sky, and the valley was
cool and very quiet as the two of us began walking together
along the grass verge on the side of the road that ran between
the hills towards Oxford.
      
“You got the raisins?” Claud asked.
      
“They’re in my pocket.”
      
“Good,” he said. “Marvellous.”
      
Ten minutes later we turned left off the main road into a
narrow lane with high hedges on either side and from now on
it was all uphill.
      
“How many keepers are there?” I asked.
      
“Three.”
      
Claud threw away a half-finished cigarette. A minute later
he lit another.
      
“I don’t usually approve of new methods,” he said. “Not on
this sort of a job.”
      
“Of course.”
      
“But by God, Gordon, I think we’re onto a hot one this
time.”
      
“You do?”
      
“There’s no question about it.”
      
“I hope you’re right.”
      
“It’ll be a milestone in the history of poaching,” he said. “But
don’t you go telling a single soul how we’ve done it, you
understand. Because if this ever leaked out we’d have every
bloody fool in the district doing the same thing and there
wouldn’t be a pheasant left.”
      
“I won’t say a word.”
      
“You ought to be very proud of yourself,” he went on.
“There’s been men with brains studying this problem for
hundreds of years and not one of them’s ever come up with
anything even a quarter as artful as you have. Why didn’t you
tell me about it before?”
      
“You never invited my opinion,” I said.
      
And that was the truth. In fact, up until the day before,
Claud had never even offered to discuss with me the sacred
subject of poaching. Often enough, on a summer’s evening
when work was finished, I had seen him with cap on head
sliding quietly out of his caravan and disappearing up the road
towards the woods; and sometimes, watching him through the
windows of the filling-station, I would find myself wondering
exactly what he was going to do, what wily tricks he was
going to practise all alone up there under the trees in the dead
of night. He seldom came back until very late, and never,
absolutely never did he bring any of the spoils with him
personally on his return. But the following afternoon—and I
couldn’t imagine how he did it—there would always be a
pheasant or a hare or a brace of partridges hanging up in the
shed behind the filling-station for us to eat.
      
This summer he had been particularly active, and during the
last couple of months he had stepped up the tempo to a point
where he was going out four and sometimes five nights a
week. But that was not all. It seemed to me that recently his
whole attitude towards poaching had undergone a subtle and
mysterious change. He was more purposeful about it now,
more tight-lipped and intense than before, and I had the
impression that this was not so much a game any longer as a
crusade, a sort of private war that Claud was waging
single-handed against an invisible and hated enemy.
      
But who?
      
I wasn’t sure about this, but I had a suspicion that it was
none other than the famous Mr Victor Hazel himself, the
owner of the land and the pheasants. Mr Hazel was a local
brewer with an unbelievably arrogant manner. He was rich
beyond words, and his property stretched for miles along
either side of the valley. He was a self-made man with no
charm at all and precious few virtues. He loathed all persons
of humble station, having once been one of them himself, and
he strove desperately to mingle with what he believed were
the right kind of folk. He rode to hounds and gave shooting-parties
and wore fancy waistcoats, and every weekday he
drove an enormous black Rolls-Royce past the filling-station
on his way to the brewery. As he flashed by, we would sometimes
catch a glimpse of the great glistening brewer’s face
above the wheel, pink as a ham, all soft and inflamed from
drinking too much beer.
      
Anyway, yesterday afternoon, right out of the blue, Claud
had suddenly said to me, “I’ll be going on up to Hazel’s woods
again tonight. Why don’t you come along?”
      
“Who, me?”
      
“It’s about the last chance this year for pheasants,” he had
said. “The shooting-season opens Saturday and the birds’ll be
scattered all over the place after that—if there’s any left.”
      
“Why the sudden invitation?” I had asked, greatly suspicious.
      
“No special reason, Gordon. No reason at all.”
      
“Is it risky?”
      
He hadn’t answered this.
      
“I suppose you keep a gun or something hidden away up
there?”
      
“A gun!” he cried, disgusted. “Nobody ever
shoots
pheasants,
didn’t you know that? You’ve only got to fire a
cap-pistol
in
Hazel’s woods and the keepers’ll be on you.”
      
“Then how do you do it?”
      
“Ah,” he said, and the eyelids drooped over the eyes, veiled
and secretive.
      
There was a long pause. Then he said, “Do you think you
could keep your mouth shut if I was to tell you a thing or two?”
      
“Definitely.”
      
“I’ve never told this to anyone else in my whole life,
Gordon.”
      
“I am greatly honoured,” I said. “You can trust me
completely.”
      
He turned his head, fixing me with pale eyes. The eyes were
large and wet and ox-like, and they were so near to me that I
could see my own face reflected upside down in the centre of
each.
      
“I am now about to let you in on the three best ways in the
world of poaching a pheasant,” he said. “And seeing that you’re
the guest on this little trip, I am going to give you the choice
of which one you’d like us to use tonight. How’s that?”
      
“There’s a catch in this.”
      
“There’s no catch, Gordon. I swear it.”
      
“All right, go on.”
      
“Now, here’s the thing,” he said. “Here’s the first big secret.”
He paused and took a long suck at his cigarette. “Pheasants,” he
whispered softly, “is
crazy
about raisins.”
      
“Raisins?”
      
“Just ordinary raisins. It’s like a mania with them. My dad
discovered that more than forty years ago just like he
discovered all three of these methods I’m about to describe to
you now.”
      
“I thought you said your dad was a drunk.”
      
“Maybe he was. But he was also a great poacher, Gordon.
Possibly the greatest there’s ever been in the history of
England. My dad studied poaching like a scientist.”
      
“Is that so?”
      
“I mean it. I really mean it.”
      
“I believe you.”
      
“Do you know,” he said, “my dad used to keep a whole flock
of prime cockerels in the back yard purely for experimental
purposes.”
      
“Cockerels?”
      
“That’s right. And whenever he thought up some new stunt
for catching a pheasant, he’d try it out on a cockerel first to
see how it worked. That’s how he discovered about raisins. It’s
also how he invented the horsehair method.”
      
Claud paused and glanced over his shoulder as though to
make sure that there was nobody listening. “Here’s how it’s
done,” he said. “First you take a few raisins and you soak them
overnight in water to make them nice and plump and juicy.
Then you get a bit of good stiff horsehair and you cut it up
into half-inch lengths. Then you push one of these lengths of
horsehair through the middle of each raisin so that there’s
about an eighth of an inch of it sticking out on either side.
You follow?”
      
“Yes.”
      
“Now—the old pheasant comes along and eats one of these
raisins. Right? And you’re watching him from behind a tree.
So what then?”
      
“I imagine it sticks in his throat.”
      
“That’s obvious, Gordon. But here’s the amazing thing.
Here’s what my dad discovered. The moment this happens,
the bird
never moves his feet again
! He becomes absolutely
rooted to the spot, and there he stands pumping his silly neck
up and down just like it was a piston, and all you’ve got to do
is walk calmly out from the place where you’re hiding and
pick him up in your hands.”
      
“I don’t believe that.”
      
“I swear it,” he said. “Once a pheasant’s had the horsehair you
can fire a rifle in his ear and he won’t even jump. It’s just one
of those unexplainable little things. But it takes a genius to
discover it.”
      
He paused, and there was a gleam of pride in his eye now
as he dwelt for a moment or two upon the memory of his
father, the great inventor.
      
“So that’s Method Number One,” he said. “Method Number
Two is even more simple still. All you do is you have a fishing
line. Then you bait the hook with a raisin and you fish for the
pheasant just like you fish for a fish. You pay out the line
about fifty yards and you lie there on your stomach in the
bushes waiting till you get a bite. Then you haul him in.”
      
“I don’t think your father invented that one.”
      
“It’s very popular with fishermen,” he said, choosing not to
hear me. “Keen fishermen who can’t get down to the seaside
as often as they want. It gives them a bit of the old thrill. The
only trouble is it’s rather noisy. The pheasant squawks like
hell as you haul him in, and then every keeper in the wood
comes running.”
      
“What is Method Number Three?” I asked.
      
“Ah,” he said. “Number Three’s a real beauty. It was the last
one my dad ever invented before he passed away.”
      
“His final great work?”
      
“Exactly, Gordon. And I can even remember the very day it happened, a
Sunday morning it was, and suddenly my dad comes into the kitchen holding a
huge white cockerel in his hands and he says, ‘I think I’ve got
it!’ There’s a little smile on his face and a shine of glory in his eyes
and he comes in very soft and quiet and he puts the bird down right in the
middle of the kitchen table and he says, ‘By God, I think I’ve got a
good one this time!’ ‘A good what?’ Mum says, looking up
from the sink. ‘Horace, take that filthy bird off my table.’
The cockerel has a funny little paper hat over its head, like an
ice-cream cone upside down, and my dad is pointing to it proudly.
‘Stroke him,’ he says. ’He won’t move an inch.’
The cockerel starts scratching away at the paper hat with one
of its feet, but the hat seems to be stuck on with glue and it
won’t come off. ‘No bird in the world is going to run away
once you cover up his eyes,’ my dad says, and he starts poking
the cockerel with his finger and pushing it around on the table,
but it doesn’t take the slightest bit of notice. ‘You can have
this one,’ he says, talking to Mum. ‘You can kill it and dish
it up for dinner as a celebration of what I have just invented.’
And then straight away he takes me by the arm and marches
me quickly out the door and off we go over the fields and up
into the big forest the other side of Haddenham which used to
belong to the Duke of Buckingham, and in less than two hours
we get five lovely fat pheasants with no more trouble than it
takes to go out and buy them in a shop.”