The Devil's Larder (9 page)

‘That’s more than thirty years ago,’ George said. ‘I can’t remember all my customers.’ He rubbed his floury hands across the bald crown of his head. The day
was loud with wind, and sea, and gulls, the straining of the anchored quay, and, at our backs, the honking cars, the muttered prayers, the clapping hands, the less-than-half-regarded heavens of the
town.

‘But I’ll say this,’ George added finally, ‘if that guy had my cakes for breakfast, even though it might be thirty years ago, he’s flying still. Those cakes of mine
were savage stuff. I bet he hasn’t even realized he’s dead yet. He’s giggling up there. He’s floating and he’s giggling. His pupils are like pinheads. His
skull’s on fire. He can’t stand up. He can’t sit down. And, boy, he’s hungry. He could eat a horse.’

N
O NEED TO STARVE
. When we were big enough, our parents let us wander in the hills behind the village. We knew the taste of everything – the salty
gypsum in the rocks, the peachy flavours in the leaves of morning star, the sulphur of a pigeon’s egg boiled in the furnace of the sand. We knew where water was.

Sometimes we begged my uncle for some matches and some cigarettes – to catch scrub fowls. ‘Smoke is better than a catapult,’ we said. We told him how we’d sit underneath
the bushes in the river bed and wait for a donkey or a sheep to come down for the leaves. A goat would do. We’d have to blow smoke from his cigarettes into its ears, and wait for ticks to
show themselves in the folds of skin. The grey or blackish ticks weren’t any good. We needed one which was red-brown, bloated with sheep or donkey or goat blood. We couldn’t grip the
tick and twist its jaws free of the skin without its body popping between our fingertips. But, with luck, with one more cigarette, smoke might make it drop free of the ear. We’d have to catch
the tick before it hit the ground, or it would burst.

Then it was simple. All we had to do was pull a length of cotton from the bottom of our shirts, lasso the tick and put it on a stone out in the sun, then tie the free end of the cotton to a
branch. We’d find a cool place underneath the bush. We wouldn’t have to count to ten even before a scrub fowl came. It loved the blood bean of a tick. The captive tick, the cotton line,
went down its throat in one. We’d snared our meal.

‘We have to be patient,’ we told our uncle. ‘It can take an hour just to catch our tick. But then it only takes five minutes to trap the bird, and five minutes in the fire to
roast it.’

‘That must be hard,’ he said, ‘to catch a donkey or a sheep and then persuade it to stay still while hot smoke tunnels in its ear.’

We shrugged. We laughed. We begged my uncle for his matches and his cigarettes.

It’s true, we did sit down below the bushes in the river bed. But we did not care for dining out on scrub fowl. We did not hunt for ticks, or look for sheep and donkeys. We smoked my
uncle’s cigarettes, one at a time, passing them between us so that the smoke was never idle. ‘Smoke is better than a catapult,’ we said. We filled our mouths and stomachs up with
smoke.

We fed on cigarettes. We loved the peach and salt and sulphur in the nicotine, the ashy meat and wood. We waited while our appetites fell free, and hit the stony ground, and burst.

T
HE MELTED
fondue cheese was not as tasty as she’d hoped. Her seven friends were only playing with their long-handled forks. They pushed their
cubes of bread about inside the
caquelon
with hardly any appetite. She should have used a cooking cheese, or added chunks of blue, or paid the extra for some Gruyère or some
Emmental.

The processed cheese that she had favoured had been quick to melt but then had separated over the heat of the tiny, blue-flamed table stove. It had emulsified like sump oil in water. The mixture
produced an unappealing greasy skin.

It had been an error, too, to forsake the traditional and generous glug of kirsch in favour of a kitchen wine. What could she do now to save the meal? It must have seemed a good idea –
with so much restlessness and irritation at the table – to play a game that no one had heard of, let alone attempted before: strip fondue. Anyone who left a cube of bread in the cheese or
dropped a piece before it reached their mouth would have to pay the forfeit of removing an item of clothing.

Hot cheese is famous for its treachery. It is a law unto itself. Its strings and globules have scant regard for the principles of adhesion. It worships gravity. A long-handled fork and a shaking
hand are no match for it.

It was not long, therefore, before her company of friends was getting naked at the table. It was not long, either, before the scorching cheese was dropping onto unprotected flesh. Her pretty
colleague from the office was the first to suffer. Her knee received a nasty, clinging burn. The men on either side of her were quick to cool the knee down with napkins dampened with Perrier.
Another of the men suffered a lesser burn across his chest, but it was difficult to remove the stiffening cheese from his hair. His girlfriend tried to flick it off with her long fork and only
partially succeeded. But then another woman, not known for her discretion, made a better job of cleaning him up with her fingers and her teeth. It now became a secondary rule of strip fondue that
mislaid cheese could not be retrieved by the person who had dropped it.

Quite soon her friends were dropping cubes of cheese-soaked bread into their laps. Almost wilfully, you might have thought. A gasp of pain. The whiff of sizzling flesh and hair and cheese. The
welcome offer of the fork, or the fingers, or the teeth.

By the time all the cheese had gone, nobody at the table was without a burn and a poultice of damp napkin. Even those who had been reluctant at first to lose as much as their socks and risk a
scorching had in the end decided this was not a dish to miss. Everybody produced at least one set of welts and blisters to nurse as they drove home.

Next day, if anybody asked, ‘What did you do last night?’ or, ‘How was the meal round at your friend’s?’, how many of the guests would have the nerve to pull their
jumpers up or tug their trousers down to show and justify their scars? Here was something to keep quiet about. It would, though, be tempting to repeat the meal with other friends, to suffer at the
ends of forks again, to bare themselves before the scorching treachery of cheese, and hope for fresh disfigurements.

T
HEY SPOILED
the little beach house, fitting new window frames, daubing paint on ancient, silvered wood, cutting back the creeper, adding a veranda, and
putting up a perspex barrier to keep, they said, the sand away but save the fine views of the sea. Old Mrs Schunn would be turning in her grave if she’d lived to see these changes to her
home. She wouldn’t like the way they disinfected everything as if the place were full of dirt and germs.

Perhaps that’s why – respect for her, revenge – I failed to warn them that where they’d put their iron bench and table was also where, every couple of years, the toilet
waste was buried from the house’s ninety-litre barrel. But anyone with half a nose and a quarter coffee spoon of brains should have recognized the salty, oceanic smell of latrine earth and
kept away. Perhaps they thought it was the sea.

They’d picked the garden’s only green and pretty spot for their retreat. Despite the covering of seaweed and sand, our neighbour’s hidden night-soil provided nourishing, warm
loam for plants.

I should have warned them also, I guess, about the fruits and vegetables that flourished there. These volunteers had not been planted from the packet. But, by the time the summer came and seeds
processed by Mrs Schunn’s large and active bowel had produced three verdant, aromatic melons and a healthy patch of tomatoes, I was too amused and irritated by the newcomers to intervene.

They’d speed down on Friday nights in their grand car, sit out with their iced drinks amongst their plants and watch the sun set through the perspex barrier. I’d see them picking
their tomatoes from the stem and eating them like kids with sweets. They’d never tasted finer toms, it seemed.

They called me over for a drink on the day they harvested their melons. They sliced one open for themselves, squeezed a lemon over it, and powdered it with nutmeg. I said how sweet it smelled.
My private joke. And so they offered me a melon, to take home. That might have been the time to tell the truth.

I have not dared taste my melon yet. Though that’s not logical, I know. All fruits and vegetables benefit from manure. But Mrs Schunn had been our neighbour for almost twenty years. We
knew her far too well to take a knife to her or eat the products of her waste. Yet I might dry and save the seeds for the coming season. It seems the least that I can do. Respect for her and for
her disfigured house.

So the melon darkens, softens, ages on my window shelf. The raised embroidery that nets the skin is losing its rigidity. There is a bluish mould around the puncture of the stem scar. The sap is
leaking from a split. Already I can trace the brackish odour of decay.

W
HENEVER SHE
ate fish, her eyes puffed up and watered, her nostrils closed, the tissues of her mouth and throat rose like dough, damp and squashy, until
she had to gawp for breath, just like a bruised and netted cod, tossed on the deck. Her skin became as mottled as cheap veal and her heart metamorphosed into a moth, flapping and scorching itself
against the fevers of her ribcage. The symptoms were not fatal in a woman of her size – though sometimes children died of toxic shock from eating fish – but, obviously, she did her best
to avoid seafood, to check a menu carefully, to study the ingredients of any can, to mistrust relishes and pastes, to make sure that anyone who asked her home to eat was warned well in advance. It
was nine years since she’d collapsed so comically at the Cargo Restaurant in front of all her colleagues. She hadn’t realized the soup had fish in it until, before the entrée
arrived, she’d flushed and paled and slipped down off her chair as if her bones had suddenly dropped into her shoes, as if she had been filleted.

So when she didn’t want to turn up at her sister’s funeral, would rather die than show her face, would rather swell to twice her size than add her small voice to the hymns, she
bought herself a piece of fish for supper – two fillets of blue-water mackerel. She had them decapitated, boned and skinned in the shop. Disguised, in fact, so that she wouldn’t gag at
just the sight of them. Her uncooked meal looked more like mozzarella than fish.

The flesh was yellowish and pungent in the dish – that lewd and acrid smell of fin and brine – but still it did not seem particularly hazardous. She pasted the fillets with mustard,
sprinkled them with salt, baked them for half an hour, ate them in her armchair with a fresh brunette of bread, and fell asleep.

Next morning, after a night of storm-tossed dreams and nausea, she was, as she’d expected, at death’s door, scarcely strong enough to lean across from the armchair to reach the
telephone. Her fingers were like woollen sausages. Her lungs were sponge. Her hot and cold sensations had reversed, so that although her hands were scorching the inside of her mouth was dry and
wintry. Her lips were tingling at first, then numb. She phoned her brother’s house. She couldn’t come, she told him, not with the best will in the world. She was too weak and too
distressed. Her face was twice its normal size. If only he could see how weak she was, how mournful.

He couldn’t see, but he could hear. His sister’s voice was muffled, breathless, tense. She’d have to have the benefit of his doubt.

That afternoon, after the interment, the brother and three other mourners visited her, with flowers and some fruit and a printed copy of the church service. They caught her sitting in the same
armchair where she had slept, a box of tissues on her lap. Her eyes were pools of tears. Her nose was streaming and her lungs were drowned. They’d never seen her so beleaguered. They’d
never seen a woman so distressed, so changed and damaged by her grief. To tell the truth, they felt ashamed to be so calm and well themselves, to be so full and scrubbed and smart while she was so
reduced.

She begged them not to worry. She’d be well. She’d only got a bug, some passing thing. They ought to let her sleep in peace and, in a day or two, she’d phone to say she had
recovered and could begin to come to terms with her great loss.

O
N BIRTHDAYS
in our village on the estuary, where spitting was as commonplace as fish, we had a sweet observance for the children. We didn’t blow
out candles on the cake. Instead, once we had finished feasting at the trestles under the tarbony trees, we spat the past year out, its disappointments and its failures, the lies we’d told,
our arguments, our cruelties. We expectorated all our vices, errors and misdeeds so that our coming year could start anew.

All you needed was a bunch of grapes. With the neighbours and the family gathered round, your classmates, your parents’ friends, you’d have to eat one grape for every year of your
life. You had to burst and eat the flesh but save the pips. Quite difficult. To swallow one would be to swallow last year’s wickedness. You’d tuck the pips into a corner of your mouth
or push them up into the space between your top teeth and your lip. A two-year-old – and so a child relatively free from sin – would only have to store, say, seven pips in its soft
mouth. A boy of fifteen – a scamp, a self-abuser and a stop-abed, as you’d expect – would have to tuck away, say, thirty pips or more. There was, of course, a lot of laughter and
some tickling to make the task more difficult.

By the time you’d eaten your last grape, the birthday guests would have formed a circle, and would be moving, hand in hand, around the birthday child. There’d be a countdown –
ten, nine, eight . . . And on the shout of ‘Go!’ you’d have to spit out all your pips. You’d spray the dancing circle with your flinty, salivating sins. It was a blessing
and an honour to be hit. Ours was, as I have said, a village used to spitting and used as well to sending all its faults and its offences into the past.