The Devil's Larder (16 page)

The charges made the Air & Light too expensive for the students, but still the tables were packed out each night by the better off, keen to be part of the installation and at the cutting
edge of food and art. They tipped quite heavily. But, in a way, they were not cheated. The ambience was wonderful. The restaurateurs let buskers in to entertain the clientele. The waiters were
attentive and amusing. The conversation was the most animated in town, and uninterrupted by eating and drinking. The ‘meals’ were meditative and purifying. And outside, on the street,
there was always a deep and noisy audience, hustling for places near the window. If you needed to be noticed, then the Air & Light was the place to go.

Al Pacino, in town to film
The Girder Man
, was photographed being witty with an empty plate. The singer Tambar went there and sang an aria, leaning on the till. It was, according to the
local radio, the coolest spot to take your girl. By the end of the first month – such is the vulgar power of modernism – determined customers had to book their tables a week in
advance.

It was, of course, a splendid comedy – but there were some who claimed that the restaurant, by formalizing diet and restraint, was servicing a greater cause than simply a desire to be
amused. The Air & Light combated publicly, they claimed, the countless tyrannies of food. It opened up new channels from the body to the mind. It celebrated emptiness in an otherwise oversated
world.

It was a bad mistake, in retrospect, to start the takeaway. It brought the poorer students back and let the street crowd in. There was a lot of jostling between the tables. The waiters could not
move around as easily. Conversations were interrupted by the general din. The restaurant soon lost its atmosphere. Such things are delicate. Besides, the lesser artists had grown rich and famous,
and bored with labouring till the early hours of the morning without a drop to drink. They wanted to get back to their own work. They’d have no trouble selling their under-coloured paintings
now. So they closed the Air & Light without a fuss, and all the smarter, richer people from the town were forced to take their hunger and their patronage elsewhere.

O
UR SALTED COD
has dried and shrivelled through the winter to half its netted weight and a quarter of its thickness. We well remember how we caught it
on a line, the three of us, my brothers and I. It needed three to play it in to the boat, though three was hardly enough (for we were tired by then) to lift it in the keep net onto the deck. That
fish was strong. We even wished our eldest brother hadn’t gone away to God knows where to drink himself insane and difficult. A fourth set of hands – even his – might have made
the cod a little more obliging. It felt as if we’d brought a squall on board. We’d caught a storm. Even once we’d split the catch open with our knives and hauled its innards out,
our boat still rocked and heaved, though there was hardly any swell that night. Its end was intimate and slow. This fish, we knew without expressing it, was one we’d have to keep for
ourselves, not sell.

Now the day has come to cut our cod down from the rafters of the drying room where, safe from draughts and cats, it has been companion to our overalls and waterproofs since summer. We hope that
it will feed us for a week or two. The prospect isn’t pleasing, though. A fisherman would sooner not eat fish. It brings bad luck. But we have no choice except to take it down for food. Our
boat was washed up in the gale last week and holed. There’ll be no more fishing for us, and no income, until the fixing plate we’ve ordered from the engineers is delivered by truck. And
that won’t be before the spring has opened up the roads. The snow is deep and treacherous this year. It is my job to haul the biggest pot out of the workshed and roll it through the snow to
the drying room. I have to scrape out shards of time-toughened pitch. It’s the pot we use each spring for caulking the seams of our hull and sealing decks. A salted cod this size needs
soaking in deep water for a day or two before it’s ready for the kitchen. You’d need a chainsaw to cut it now. So I lift the fish free from its hook and cradle it in both my arms, as
stiff and lifeless as a leather bag. One brother is enough. It hardly weighs. I put it, head down, in the empty pot next to the hot stovepipes, throw in some handfuls of coarse salt and then turn
on the hose until all of the cod, except for its protruding tail, is under water. I stir it in. I lick my hands to check the balance of the water. It tastes as salty as the sea. The cod will have
the chance to quiver, swell, resalinate, before we trouble it again.

W
E SHOULD HAVE
been more vigilant and checked the progress of the fish each night. The timing of such things is critical. The water and the salt
restored the cod more rapidly than we’d expected. That’s our excuse. ‘Excuses never fed a man,’ my father used to say. Our two-week meal doubled its weight and quadrupled
its thickness behind our backs. We had only a moment’s warning. The three of us were on the slipway, pulling up the kelp for fuel, when we heard the splintering and looked up to see the birch
door on the drying room fly back and wedge itself in the snow. Our efforts had revivified the cod, as they’d been meant to. But it did not intend to help us through the hungry weeks ahead. It
had the strength to clear the pot, as agile as a salmon, and flap into the open air.

We might have caught it had we been a little closer. But by the time we’d reached the foot of the slope up to our house, the fish, mouth gaping, was halfway to the sea. Good luck was on
its side. The tide was in, the hill was steep and slippery. Without the snow the cod might well have torn itself to pieces on the bushes and rocks. The snow, though, was a perfect slide, a wet and
speeding cousin to the waves.

We tried to cut our salt cod off by running down onto the beach and wading in. If only we could catch its tail. If only we could lift it in our arms before it reached sea deep enough to float.
But once a fish smells the ocean it gathers strength, it quickens. It doesn’t need the water even. It can swim in air.

Three brothers, then. A fourth one missing, no address. We’re standing on the shoreline in our boots, our boat well holed, the roads impassable, our prospects famishing. We hope to see a
final sign of our salt cod, far off. A tail perhaps. A fin. We only spot outlying plumes of surf, a half-encountered squall too distant to be frightening, and then the furrows of an ever-grateful
sea.

It is, we say, the perfect meal.

S
HE
’
D HEARD
an actor talking on the radio. He loved his cat. So, when it died, he had the animal cremated and put its
ashes in an airtight pot on the condiment and spices shelf. He’d add a tiny pinch of ash each time he made a soup or stew, or a cup of instant coffee. The ashes lasted him three months. They
didn’t seem to spoil the taste of anything. But it was comforting to have the cat inside, recycled as it were, and purring for eternity. He recommended it for anyone with pets.

When her husband died, she took the actor’s route. Cremated him and potted him and put a pinch of him into her meals, like grainy, unbleached salt. She judged that the flavour of these
meals suffered slightly from his ashes, to tell the truth. Or maybe that was just a widow’s queasiness. But certainly the comfort that she felt was less than she had counted on, She did not
feel possessed by him. She did not feel at peace as she had hoped. She was not reconciled with her new solitude. Instead, a small voice piped inside her stomach as she lay in bed at night. It
bothered her. Her husband’s singing voice, high-pitched and watery. The lyrics were not clear, but then they never had been clear when he was living. No matter what she did he would not stop.
His singing would not let her sleep.

The doctor listened with his stethoscope. He hummed the tune and tried to put a name to it. He took his patient’s temperature. ‘This sort of thing is common,’ he said.
‘I’ve heard all kinds of songs from widows of your generation. There’s not a medicine to fix it. But I’ll say to you exactly what I’ve told the other women, you
can’t eat grief. It’s far too strong and indigestible. You have to let the grief eat you. You have to let the sorrow swallow you. Then put his ashes in the earth and let him go. Come
back and see me in a month or two. By then I bet your husband’s voice will only be a memory and you’ll be happy with the quieter life that you have earned by loving him.’

M
Y DAUGHTER
asked me, ‘Do you think that pasta tastes the same in other people’s mouths?’ Let’s try, I said. You first.

I picked a pasta shell from the bowl, dropped it, red with sauce, onto my tongue and closed my mouth. My lips were pursed as if I was waiting to be kissed. I sat down on the kitchen chair and
spread my knees. Come on, I said, trying not to laugh or swallow. Be sensible.

She’d started giggling but struggled to compose herself. She pushed against my stretched skirts and reached my face with hers. It was a kiss of sorts. She had to turn her head like lovers
do, invade my lips and hunt the pasta with her tongue. She pushed the shell about inside my mouth and then stepped back, a little shocked by what she’d done, at what I’d let her do.

What do you think? ‘Tomato, onion, pesto,’ she said, remembering the sauce we’d made. ‘And lipstick, too. A sort of cherry flavour. Except for that, it tastes exactly the
same as it does in my mouth. Your go.’

She picked a piece of pasta for herself and put it on her tongue. Again she came between my legs. Again we kissed. My tongue got snagged on her loose tooth. Our lips and noses rubbed, we
breathed into each other’s lungs, our hair was tangled at our chins. I tasted sauce and toothpaste, I tasted sleep and giggling, I tasted disbelief and love that knows no fear. My daughter
tasted just the same as me. We held each other by the elbows while I hunted for the pasta in her mouth.

oh honey