Slights (41 page)

One book?
Life: a User's Manual
, Georges Perec.

One story?
Night Piece for Julia
, Jessamyn West.

One film?
A Zed and Two Noughts
, Peter Greenaway

One song/record?
Wish You Were Here
, Pink Floyd

One book to burn?
Never!

The next book you'll read?

  
The Sin Eater
, by Gerry Jones, published 1971. I found this in a strange little shop in Suva here in Fiji, which is where I find most of my books at the moment. I've read two or three other "Sin Eaters" and really love Elizabeth Massey's version. This one is touted as "The Most important literary debut since Dylan Thomas" because the author is Welsh. Google tells me he only wrote this novel, then produced radio plays until he died in 2007. Interesting that he never came out with another one.

One influence you wish didn't keep showing

through?

  I don't regret any influences, but I wish I could remove the words "just" and "a little" from first drafts.

  My Dad. He went through a very difficult time during the Second World War, living in a children's camp in Siberia. He lost most of his family apart from his father and an uncle we only discovered a decade ago. But he never passed that suffering onto me and my sister. Never. He talks about it, but he mostly talks about how much love he felt from his mother. How protected he felt, how loved.

  Grover's Mill, New Jersey. This is the town where Orson Welles said the aliens landed, and you can still see the bullet holes in the wheat silo the locals thought was one of those aliens.

Earliest memory?

  I swear I remember eating scrambled egg but my mother says I was only 8 months old at the time.

  Recurring dream in which I'm in a hurry and my feet lift of the floor so I float. Nice. Nasty is the recurring dream I have about filthy public toilets.

  Anything retro. Jacquie Kennedy Onassis is a recent fave.

Favourite word?
Discombobulated.

Favourite possession?

  The 1960s-vintage full size hair dryer we have in storage. Name of Earnest. I miss it.

  A dress Jacqui O might have worn. Got it from the fabulous second hand shop here in Suva.

Do you have an unusual talent or skill?

  I wish. I'm the only one in my family who can roll my tongue, so I tell them I'm special.

We might regret this, but tell us a joke!
A guy goes into a restaurant and says, "Hey

waiter, how much do you charge for bread?" The waiter says, "Nothing." The guy goes, "How much for gravy?" The waiter says, "Nothing." The guy says, "In that case, I'd like to order a bowl of gravy and some bread, please."

Do you plan in detail or set off hopefully?

  I always take a bottle of water but I don't like plans beyond that.

If you weren't a writer what would you be?
A detective. Murder.

What are you going to do right now?

  I'm going out for a quiz night, where I'll likely make a total fool of myself by knowing nothing, when everyone expects me to know everything there is to know about literature, ever.

The trader from Aloes travelled with them, laden with jars of jasmine oil.

  "I'm not sure what you will make of the market we share with Ailanthus. The market holder is odd. He camps by the roots of the Tree, waiting for market time. He does nothing else. I am glad to be the trader, though. This walk, fifteen days, this is a good walk."

  The market was better built than the one between Ombu and Aloes. The market holder collected driftwood in his waiting time. He stained it orange by scraping some of the bright moss off the long Limbs bent towards the sun.

  He built shelves into the natural crevices of the trunk and here he stood goods of all kinds. Lillah recognised some of Ombu's jars, but it seemed he had items from everywhere in Botanica.

  Sea sponges, decorated plates, painted nutshells, necklaces, hair clips, perfect shells. The teachers and the children cooed over the treasures.

  The market holder and the trader did their business, then he leant back against the Tree, knees spread wide, his sulu tucked between his thighs. He smelled very sweet, not such as jasmine, but clean and fruity.

  "You live here all the time?" Melia asked.

  "Too many things to transport now. And I can't leave these things out for the monkeys."

  "Or the ghosts," Thea said.

  "There are no ghosts here. Not in this place. That's why I chose it."

  Thea pointed at a fissure beside him. "What about in there? That looks like a ghost cave to me."

  He turned. "No ghosts, teacher. You are safe here. Would you like to stay with me? It's a lonely life but a fine one."

  He smiled, his teeth large and blunt. Lillah was not sure if he was joking. "You are too old for any of us to choose you, market man," Thea said. "You are old and ugly and dull."

  Her anger surprised everyone. The market holder turned his mouth down. "I would like someone to stay with me."

  "You would soon tire of a companion," Lillah said.

  "Yes. You're right."

  Melia spoke to him, more questions and more, while the others looked at his goods.

  Morace stood by the fissure, arms stretched up, hands holding the sides of it. He leaned in, sniffing

the air in there.

  "Morace!" Thea shouted. "Leave that alone. Leave the ghosts alone, you stupid child."

  "There are no ghosts," the market holder said.

  Borag squealed. "Don't go in! The ghosts will take you and put a ghost child in your place."

  Zygo rolled his eyes into his head and walked stiffly, his arms out, towards Morace. "I am dead-butwalking," he said. "I will steal your heart and feed it to the fishes. I will eat your mother and your father and I will spit their bones out all polished and white."

  Morace screamed. "Keep away from me!"

  The children were agitated. Tired. The teachers were warned this would happen once the excitement faded. "Does everyone have their smoothstones?" Erica called out. "Hold them in your hands, take comfort from them. Touching the smoothstone is stroking your mother's cheeks, being lifted by your father."

  "I don't have mine!" Borag said. Her voice was high with anxiety, disconnected somehow. "I dropped it!"

  "Maybe you put it in your bag. Or someone else picked it up."

  "Why would someone else pick it up?" Zygo said.

  Yet when they searched the bags, there it was in Zygo's things.

  "Somebody put it there!" he said.

  The teachers felt panic, unhappiness around the children.

  "Let's move on," Lillah said.

  "There are crabs ahead," the market holder said. "Too many for me to eat. Where you see the Tree hanging low in the water, you will find too many crabs to eat. They like rocks or limbs to crawl on. They don't mind bones, either. These are the tastiest crabs you will ever eat. They love to be eaten. They crawl along the sand with their claws and with their tiny voices they call out, 'eat me'!"

  The children leapt about with excitement, mimicking the talking crabs. Morace and Rham made them all laugh with their play; two crabs fighting over an old fish-head. Lillah smiled at the market holder, impressed at his knowledge of children and their humour.

  He said, "You know how good crabs are? Did you know that the ones which eat humans still taste like humans, they say."

  Corma nodded as if she knew all there was to know.

  "How do you know how humans taste?" Rham asked, and the other children laughed at this. Lillah kissed her head, thanking her.

  "All right, let's pack up and look out for crabs as we walk," Lillah said. They waved goodbye to the market holder. Corma's husband Hippocast had exchanged a shell he'd found for a necklace of seeds; Corma looked happier than before.

  The children ran ahead, finding the crabs. Zygo found the most, draping them around his body and dancing, ignoring the pain of their nippers. They cooked up a feast.

  Having Corma and Hippocast with them changed the nature of the walk. The children loved having Hippocast along, because he never tired of playing the games they loved to play. He was nervous to be away from home so he laughed and joked most of the time to take his mind off his fear, and it was hard to be serious with him around. It was hot, most days, so hot they tried to walk in the shade of the Tree, dunking themselves in the water whenever they paused to eat or rest.

  After a while, Lillah began to tire of the constant chatter and laughter, and to need some time alone. She held back; when Melia raised her eyebrows questioningly, she shook her head and waved Melia on.

  She could think alone. Not that there was much to think about, but she had taken her first lover, made her first new friend, and managed to keep the children alive so far, so there were some things.

  Her father had heard of Ailanthus, and their prowess at cooking. He'd said, "Your mother would have stopped there if she could. She envied an Order that worshipped food like these ones do."

  "But we liked her cooking."

  "It wasn't enough for her. She wanted it to be worshipped."

  So Lillah looked forward to this Order, but was nervous as well. What if they expected her to have some knowledge? What if she couldn't tell the difference between their food and that of the two other Orders she'd eaten in?

  She caught up with the school. They were tired and ready for a break, but she knew they could make the next Order by nightfall if they hurried. It was a worthwhile effort: they were all tired of sleeping out of doors.

The sun was setting over the Tree when they arrived. The first thing they saw was a hand-built rock pool, which sat on a part of the sand where the sun reached most of the time. It was filled with rainwater, they were told later, which was collected in carved wooden bowls and poured through cloth to keep it pure.

  "Look at it," Melia said. "Clear. Clean. Imagine what it tastes like." She bent down and paddled a finger in the water. Tasted it. "It's okay. When I find a place with good, fresh water, that's where I'm staying."

  Three young women came up to them, children running at their feet. "Welcome to Ailanthus. We are happy to have you here, aren't we, children?" The children cheered and laughed and they began to chase each other around the adults' legs.

  There was far less fanfare on arrival in this Order. Everybody was busy, gathering nuts, cooking, preparing the feast. Corma was taken to the Birthman so he could see her shape. Her husband, Hippocast, was collected by the young men. "I'm supposed to go straight home," he said.

  "You cannot leave your wife with child. She needs you here. You need to look after her," he was told.

  Borag watched the cooks; saw how the root vegetables they grew were pale pinkish in colour, perhaps from growing near the flowers. The flowers growing here produced a sweet sticky substance.

A woman came up from the water, a large fish flapping in her arms. She ran with it, heavy feet almost tripping in haste.

  She knelt down and let the fish wriggle into the fresh water pool.

  "He won't like it. But you watch. In a day, maybe two he'll puff like this." She opened her mouth and breathed out heavily. "And he won't taste so salty." The teachers gathered the children and the woman taught them about the saltiness of the fish, how to lessen the salt for a better flavour.

  The children knelt by the pool and watched the fish.

  "Does the salt come into the water?" Rham, the cleverest student, asked. She fiddled with her wooden puzzle.

  "Yes, it will cloud the water so that we can't use it. We empty the water, fill a new rockpool with fresh. It's hard work but worth it for the good fish we cook."

  Rham became obsessed with catching the moment the fish breathed out, and with the changes in the fish as the hours passed. Morace kept her company while he could, but crept away at times.

  "He's flopping about!" Rham called. "Come and see."

  So Lillah was there when the fish opened his mouth and puffed out a cloud of salt which floated then dissolved as they watched.

  Once the fish released its salt, it was killed in the water, a quick slash across its gills.

  "It needs to die quickly or the skin will toughen," the cook said. "It needs to think it is alive until it is dead."

  While the fish eyes were still ,flickering, it was scaled and washed, gutted and beheaded. The head was thrown into a large pot for a soup.

  The fish was rolled in the sticky flower pulp, then in crushed nuts. Then it was wrapped in large leaves and thrust into the fire.

  "This will crispen the skin while keeping the flesh soft."

  "Those pots are huge. How did you make them?" Borag asked.

  "We understand the fire. We find the metal on the beach; everybody does. But we know about the fire, and the heat, and we build the metal into the pots. That is why we are the greatest cooks along the Tree. We make these pots big to remember the people who used to live. The tall as a Tree people. If we forget them, they will be angry with the childbirthing."

  To make a sauce, the cook used nut oil, a dark brown, highly scented oil which did not burn easily.

  The children lost interest in the process after a while and just wanted to eat. The Order's children showed them how to gather the nuts that fell, nibble up the left over bits and crumbs, while the grown-ups shooed them away. They compared their smoothstones; the Order's children were nervous to show theirs, saying that it meant bad luck for a stranger to see your stone.

"Where are your bonsai?" Thea asked the young women.

  There were exchanged glances. "We don't follow the bonsai here. We feel it is taming the Tree and should not be done. Don't you think you can damage the Tree that way?"

  Thea shook her head in a way which meant, I never thought of it that way, and will never do so. After the welcomefire, where the jasmine oil was exchanged for nut oil, they talked about fire as the cook gave them further instruction.

  "Listen. You know the sound a fire makes. You know how hot it is by the way it sizzles and crackles. Now we put the bread on."

  The cook threw little round rolls of dough into a square pot on the fire and shook it in a frenetic motion until they darkened.

  "Every part of the Tree is edible if you cook it right."

  The bread was perfect with the nut fish. Lillah soaked up the last of the wonderful sauce with it. She felt very full, not ill. She felt so well and great she wanted to climb to the top of the Tree and shout.

  There was more food, though: sweet things and salty, things fried in the nut oil and served in great mounds.

Borag and Lillah watched, taking it all in.

  "Not everyone will share their knowledge," Lillah said.

  "Knowledge not shared is wasted," the cook said. "I am happy to have people listen to me and to pass on this food."

  The teller told the story of an old man who loved to eat the tender flesh of babies. He deep fried them whole and crunched them, bones and all.

  "They still hear him. They say he's inside the Tree, crunch crunch, you can hear sometimes." The teller took a piece of fish, cooked with all its bones, and crunched it, swallowing it dramatically, eyes rolling.

  "They say his brother took to the sea, fishing out water babies all salty and sweet. They say if the brother ever comes to land, just his foot on the sand will turn the grains to poison along the Tree and all children will die a throat-parched death."

  He touched his ears as they all did, to honour the missing.

  Thea swam for seaweed, and they used that to soothe tired feet and sore muscles. Thea sat watching, refusing treatment.

  "Thank you for the seaweed," one of the men said.

  Thea said, "There would have been more if any of the children helped to collect it."

  Corma, feeling for kicks in her belly, watched it all, sighing sometimes. Hippocast sat with her, brought her treats and told her happy stories. She felt her stomach more frantically, stopped, looked at him. "My baby isn't kicking."

  They roused the Birthman and he looked at her carefully. "It's ready to come. Sleeping, ready to come. We must prepare."

  Lillah found all of the men attractive. There was one with curly, wild hair, and she wondered what it would feel like to get her fingers tangled in it.

  He noticed her smiling at him, and jumped up with a sweet for her. She shook her head, so full of food she couldn't have any more. He popped it into his own mouth and led her off to show her the kitchen in his small house in the roots of the Tree. A small monkey sat on the roof, chittering. It watched her carefully.