The hour struck. Some drivers sounded their horns. An emergency congregation spoke its prayers outside the church. Somebody clapped, but mostly people shook their heads, checked their watches for the umpteenth time, and went about their lives with less than half an eye fixed on the heavens.
I watched the execution through my binoculars from our top room. They pulled the prison buildings into town. I could see the detailed silence of the place, the dead, parked cars, the office doors ajar, the tiny windows of the block, the clouds as solid as the hills. The only movement was a hardly stirring flag. I watched for almost fifteen minutes afterwards. Then the prison came to life again. The yards were quickly filled with exercising men. A van backed up. The winds began to lift the flag and shift the clouds. And, for an instant, I swear, the sky went pink with melody, not death. But I was sentimental in those days. The rumours that I’d heard the evening before had made me ready for, and keen to glimpse, transcendence with a pair of human wings.
GEORGE AND I have not been friends for many years. I was, I am, too dull for him. But he was unusually friendly when we met at the far end of the quay today. I recalled how I used to spy on him with my binoculars and how I used to wish that we were close. So, while we smoked our cigarettes and looked out across the ocean at the ferries and the tankers, I reminded him of those uncomplicated days. Did he remember how he used to play guitar to foreign girls? He smiled at that. Did he remember those hashish cakes and drug-laced biscuits that he used to bake behind his father’s back? He laughed. They’d made him rich. And were they true, those rumours that we heard, about the executed man and what he ate for breakfast?
‘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.’
31
NO 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.
32
THE 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.
33
THEY 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.
34
WHENEVER 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.
35
ON 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.
IT IS, IN FACT, my twenty-seventh birthday today. I do not have the courage to phone home. I’m going out with friends tonight to celebrate. But in the hours I had to kill this afternoon I went down to the market streets far below my small apartment to treat myself. A book, the latest Bosse CD and a bunch of local grapes. Black grapes. In these supermarket days those are the only ones with any pips.
Like almost every guilty man who has neglected home and family, I am a sentimentalist. I placed the CD on the stereo, selected its romantic track. I burst my twenty-seven homesick grapes between my teeth and stored the almost sixty pips against the soft side of my mouth. Of course, I had no dancing witnesses. I counted down from ten to one myself, silently, hardly daring to move my lips. Then, standing at the open window, I threw back my hea
d and spat my disappointments out into the street. Before I had the chance to look, I heard the clatter of my twenty-seven birthdays strike the windscreens and the roofs of passing cars. In that same instant, I glimpsed a shaded stretch of water far beyond the town, a stand of trees, abandoned tables, and the turning circle of my half-remembered friends, smiling, smiling, but with no one at their centre from whom to take the impact of those past forgiven years.
36
THERE IS no greater pleasure than to be expected at a meal and not arrive.
While the first guests were standing in the villa’s lobby with their wet hair and their dry wine, their early efforts at a conversation saved and threatened by fresh arrivals at the door, he was driving slowly in the rain along the coastal highway, enjoying his loud absence from the room, enjoying first the cranes and depots of the port, and then the latest condominiums, the half-glimpsed bypassed villages with their dead roads, the banks of coastal gravel, the wind, the darkness and the trees.
While they were being seated at the dining table and were thinking – those who knew him – Lui’s always late, he was taking pleasure from the water on the tarmac, the old movie romance of the windscreen wipers and the dashboard lights, the prospect of the speedy, starless, hungry night ahead.
At what point would his sister, or her husband George, dial his home (discreetly from another room) to get only the answerphone and leave the message . . . What? Was he OK? Had he forgotten that they’d asked him round to eat with friends? Would he come late? Was he aware what trouble he’d put them to? Would he arrive in time to charm the sweet young teacher that they’d found and placed at his left elbow?