by Hughes, Rhys
Odette came down to see what the fuss was about.
“Have a good sniff of this,” I croaked.
She took the leaflet and her nostrils quivered. “Forty-nine billion Pork Vindaloos, twenty-three million Shashlik Kebabs, seventeen thous- and Orange Duck Curries, eight hundred and sixty-two Chilli Chicken Hotpots, fifty-seven Veal Jerks and a pint of lager.”
“There’s a Frog Moussaka in there as well, I believe.”
“No, it’s Toad. With a wart sauce.”
“Rotten salesman. It’s a stinking trick. I’m going to wire the door up to a generator. He’ll fry if he returns.”
Odette brushed her red hair back over flawed ears and chuckled. “It wasn’t a deliberate insult, Donald. How was he supposed to know you’re a vegetarian? He’s just doing his job.”
“I admit it’s a neat piece of advertising.”
“And it’s come just in time for our first anniversary. You promised to take me for a meal. This place is local.”
I sighed. Despite my basic apathy concerning morals, I rarely break a pledge. The execution of an oath, the display of its rotting corpse in the gibbet of my swagger, has little to do with conspicuous virtue. What I enjoy is the pleasure of contrast. When the burden of an obligation is eased off, like a pinching shoe, I am suffused with profound relief, the freedom of irresponsibility. Let us say my addiction to making vows must culminate in its cure—with the promise never to make another promise. Until then, Odette will suck my wallet.
“Very well, we shall feast in an abattoir.”
She pecked me on the cheek and I trembled. Despite twelve months of marriage, our relationship was still viable. Odette loved me in the same way a circle adores its circumference. She needed to be restrained by my embrace or else she would explode into emotional nothingness. I held her against my stomach, that basilica of rumbling egoism. The tenderness was interrupted by Billy, our lodger, who paused at the top of the stairs on his way to the bathroom. His face, with its divergent eyes and the frown of an athlete who smokes, annoyed me intensely. Odette twisted out of my clutch in embarrassment and vanished.
Billy smiled timidly at me and resumed his voyage to the sink. This violation of my grope seemed an evil augur for the remainder of the day. We both disliked sharing our home with a stranger but the revenue gained from renting the spare room was crucial to our solvency. Since losing my job at the hospital, our combined income had been reduced by a third. It was unfair to criticise the idiot student for his presence—he was not unreasonable in his habits—but his shambling gait and scratched vinyl giggle presented an easy focus for resentment and I was unable to resist radiating disgust over his footsteps.
I listened to the flushing toilet and scrape of brush on teeth, two sounds I had forsaken. Picking up the telephone in the hall, I jabbed at the number printed on the leaflet. As I waited for the connection, which seemed to take ages, as if I was dialling across an interstellar gulf, I studied the sheet more carefully. The lettering writhed over the surface like mangled hot pokers on a frozen lake. Impregnating the laminate with an excess of cooking scents was a whisk of genius. I wondered how it had been accomplished. I was still debating when the connection was made and an attenuated ringing tickled my ear.
The voice on the other end was faint: “Yea?”
I cleared my throat. “Is that the Stately Pleasure Dome?”
“It has been decreed as such.”
“I wish to book a table for two on Saturday night.”
“Divulge your appellation.”
“Donald and Odette Saunders.” I paused while a distant pen wandered across an invisible register. “Tell me, do you serve vegetarian food? I mean, there was nothing on the menu.”
The silence was gratuitous, like a nun’s ovulation.
My discomfort grew as the passing seconds became minutes. Was there a fault on the line? I bit my tongue.
“I’m quite happy with a simple salad.”
Again there was no response. Desperately, I continued: “So we’ll be there at half past eight. Thank you.”
And hung up. I had a feeling the call was going to prove enor- mously expensive despite its brief duration.
Later, after Odette had left for work and Billy for college, I went up to the attic and stared out of the window at the urban mistake called Swansea. A tedious life I led, moping through rooms, licking books which no longer intrigued me. Even my taste in pompous music had dulled—the stereo now belonged to silence. There was only one activity left which was wholly mine—isolation. And every recluse knows that the best way of widening an ache in a soul to abyssal dimensions is to spy on happier folk.
Our house catches its breath on the steepest hill in the city. Down toward the grainy sea, with its burden of rusty ships shaving the waves, innumerable filthy streets staggered. The windows of most buildings were bleary, lapped by mist stale as the breath of a cider-drinking donkey. There was little movement on the cambers and slabs. A solitary figure in a remote avenue stooped to slide something under a door. I grappled with my binoculars and focussed on his form. He was sheathed in a cassock and the bag of leaflets slung from his shoulder was actually a giant censer. For a halo he wore a garlic poppadum.
It never occurred to me to check out the exact location of the place. On Saturday night, after Odette and myself had performed the common rituals with soap, brush and mirror, we set off up to the summit of Constitution Hill. The Stately Pleasure Dome supposedly lurked at the junction of two ugly roads, Penygraig and Terrace, where litter brewed in fumes like the tea of a liar. Although the location was less than five minutes from our habitation, neither of us was familiar with it. We preferred to tramp in the opposite direction, to Cwmdonkin Park, unloading our stale loaves on vermin and mallards. I wore my purple shirt for the occasion and stubble brutal enough to impale spare crumbs.
We strolled to the address, confident of finding a typical licensed ethnic eaterie, with a Mughal facade and a flock of doormen to match the gaudy wallpaper. Instead, to my bewilderment, we approached a church, St Jude’s, a Gothic edifice with those depressingly asymmetrical towers one associates with Welsh Catholic architecture. The opaque windows throbbed with a sticky effulgence, like lemon curd spread on sacred hosts, and an excited muttering issued from the open portals. I compared the number on the iron gate with that on the leaflet. They were identical. We were not alone in our alarm—two other couples lingered outside the entrance in parallel dismay, hairstyles curdling.
Odette shrugged. “It’s a typographical error.”
I shook my head scornfully. “No, it’s deliberate deceit. I observed a priest deliver the things. A recruitment drive for a flagging diocese. I find this absolutely outrageous!”
“Do you really think they’d pull such a desperate stunt to increase their congregation? Maybe it’s a believer’s theme night? I’ve heard what can be done with fish and a few rolls.”
“Well I’m not eating in there. Papist cheats!”
I craned my neck to peer inside, in the unlikely event it was all a joke, but what little of the interior I could see was resolutely church. Shaking my fist at the gargoyles dribbling oily water onto the railings, I snatched Odette’s hand and pulled her away. The other couples followed our example, dispersing along secular sidestreets. We cantered back down Constitution Hill, the Mumbles lighthouse winking slyly at us across the bay like a headmaster with an erection.
“We’ll feed in the Bengal Brasserie instead. Or that Austrian place next to it, Mozart’s. How does that sound?”
“Look, Donald, I know you don’t really want to spend money on me. I realise you’ve become a worthless miser. That’s fine. I don’t expect any charity from a misanthrope. We’ll go home.”
“Curse your mature womanly sentience!”
I fumed and blustered but gratefully took the opportunity of saving cash. Odette wanted too much from my pocket—I had already treated her to the cinema the previous month. We returned to the house and because I usually
weaken when I triumph, I offered to make her a special meal with my own hands. She accepted without a smile and I raided the refrigerator for pugilist celery, fussy lettuce, cucumber, radishes, beetroot, yellow peppers bigger than cowardly hearts, avocados, watercress and coriander. Then I plundered less frigid regions of the kitchen for onions, parsley, pumpkin seeds and olives. This was going to be the mother of all salads, a denial of the flesh of the world.
Tarragon oil and rosé wine vinegar splashed the pageant. I shredded miscellaneous herbs over the bowl with a pair of broken scissors. As the central rivet worked loose, the blades pulled away from each other, like the legs of a newt employed as a wishbone. I tossed the result with fork and spoon, tuning the roughage to the pitch of a rabbit’s tooth. Thunder rumbled in my gut and elsewhere. Casabel chillies are testicles scorched by lightning in any raw dish. I cast them in whole, as if to fertilise a womb of chicory positioned alluringly on the vegetable bed. Beckoning my spouse to table is a tricky recipe in itself—she is always performing mysterious chores in the furthest corners of our abode. Lighting candles and dimming the bulbs, I waited.
She eventually appeared with a handful of vitamin tablets, a signal that I was permitted to begin. She often chides me for the acidity of my dressing, so it is crucial to blunt her taste with caustic conversation. Yet I had nothing to say. This awkwardness was punctured by noises which had another source. Billy was wallowing about in the bath again. Despite the vibrancy of the Swansea college scene, our lodger led a mundane life which alternated between tub, pet hamster and secret cigarette. On those few occasions when he left our home to play badminton, Odette and I were so pleased we sometimes had sex. As I crunched the fibres with the teeth on only one side of my mouth, I listened to the student breaking wind in the soapy water. The candle wicks flared.
“There’s going to be a huge tempest,” Odette remarked.
“Can you tell that from the clap of a bum?”
“Yes, because little storms come up the other way. We belch isobars when they can be digested poorly. If they can’t be digested at all, they hurtle straight down. Nature is brewing.”
We gorged ourselves sick in anticipation. Then we rested on a couch and sweated out the condiment. All that remained of the noble salad were two olives, shining at the bottom of the bowl like pineal glands plucked from the fused craniums of Siamese twins.
The storm broke just after midnight. Rain slapped the roof like soup and I stirred out of a dream with the grace of a convecting lentil. I groped for Odette but her side of the bed was icy—she had gone. As I blinked into full awareness, the windows burst open under the weight of a horrid shape. A man dressed in lederhosen sprawled on the floor, accompanied by a dreadful stench of vomit. I threw back the sheets and jumped up, using a rug to cover my nakedness. The intruder stood and brushed fragments of wood and fabric from his narrow shoulders. He carried an antique firearm and levelled it at my head, sighting along a warped barrel longer than a tusk. I closed my eyes but no explosion came. There was a different sound, an avian trill which pecked my lobes.
When I regained my composure, I realised he was questioning me in a fluting voice. “Darf ich das Fenster öffnen?”
“Sorry, I don’t understand you. Damages must be paid for in full. I hope you won’t turn this into a legal issue.”
“Können Sie mir helfen? Ich weiss nicht, wo ich bin.”
“I think you should leave now. If you refuse, I’ll call my wife. Do you have any idea how angry she’ll be?
I backed toward the door and shouted for Odette. There was no reply and I briefly wondered if she had employed an assassin to remove me from her life. The intruder followed, the muzzle of his weapon poised over my spleen. It was an extremely unwieldy carbine and even he seemed slightly ashamed to be bothering me with it.
Retreating down the stairs, arms elevated in a pacific gesture, rug dropping to my feet, I was disturbed by a feeling of mythic recognition. During my housebound explorations of our bookcases, I once spent an hour with a volume on the history of aviation. Before fixed wing gliders were developed by Cayley, Langley and Lilienthal, a few pioneers attempted to conquer the skies in devices which mimicked the flapping of birds. These ornithopters usually failed to clear the ground, but in 1809 an Austrian by the name of Jacob Degen managed to stay aloft strapped to a hybrid of flexible vanes and hydrogen balloon.
His success inspired imitators who were less clever. After numerous accidents in Vienna, Degen was proclaimed an outlaw. He escaped with his apparatus and was seen circling the peaks of the Niedere Tauern, waiting for a gust to carry him to Salzburg. The authorities put up a reward for his capture and he became an aerial bandit, swooping on travellers after maiming them with his musket, which he supposedly carved from a sapling. He was a merciless assailant, by popular report, and his romanticism was always tempered with an insensate brutality. It was not inconceivable he had been blown off course to Swansea.
I tried out my theory on the visitor. “Herr Degen?”
He recoiled in surprise, then offered me an ironic grin. “Ja, freut mich! Ich habe hier Schmerzen. Es wird Schlimmer.”
“You should have died centuries ago!”
He shrugged and jabbed the gun into my belly, squinting through one eye as he squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened and he scowled, less in fury than resignation. “Es klemmt!”
We had reached the point where the stairway bent back on itself and it became apparent he would not be able to manoeuvre the carbine through this sharp angle. I turned and ran down into the hallway while he fought to twist the oversized barrel. My impulse was to head for the front door and escape into the street, but a low groan from the kitchen reminded me that my wife might still be in the house.
I knocked along the corridor in the dark, restraining an impulse to weep on our relatively new carpet. The kitchen was fitfully illumined by the candles we had used to bathe our salad. They were no more than stubs now and threw shifting shadows on the walls. Odette sat on a chair, face contorted in anguish. The bindings were invisible until I stood directly above her. I removed her gag and frowned.
“What are you doing all trussed up?”
She took a deep breath. “Look to your left, Donald.”
I obeyed her command and was astonished to note a bishop sitting at our table, leaning over a vast ledger. He held a quill in one rough hand and seemed to be scratching occult symbols on the vellum. Frequently, he would pause to pluck the strings of a lute which rested on his knee. The resulting note was plaintive and shrill. I covered my ears at the savage beauty of it and the bishop chuckled.
“Ples de tristor, marritz e doloiros,” he crooned horridly. “Comens est planch per lo dan remembrar.”
“It’s unbearable!” I stammered.
“I entirely agree. But who is he?”
“How should I know? I’ve got Jacob Degen upstairs. He used a flying machine to break into the bedroom.”
“Somebody’s coming down the steps. Release me!”
I snatched the broken scissors from the rack and hacked at Odette’s bonds. As I blistered my thumbs, she related all that had happened while I lay asleep. “There was this unbelievable downpour and then I heard the most wondrous singing outside. So I went down and unlocked the back door and this bishop pushed his way in and tied me up with this rope. I think he’s been torturing me for heresy.”
“It wasn’t a normal storm, evidently.”
“Let’s leave them to it. I’m not staying here another minute. We’ll spend the rest of the night in a hotel.”
The bishop regarded our departure with genuine sorrow. It was clear he would have obstructed us had he been more agile. But the girth of his abdomen and the dislocation of his hip when he rose demonstrated how the advantage had passed into our hands, or rather feet. He consoled himself by slamming his book, spraying wet ink over table and mitre, and picking out a haunted arpeggio on his lute.
“Perparan dreg, es tortz tant enantitz.”
We hast
ened down the hallway, also ignoring the voice which warbled from the landing. Herr Degen was still having problems working his rifle free. “Können Sie einen Mechaniker schicken?”
“Tell me what’s happening, Donald.”
“I thought it had something to do with you!”
Opening the front door, our eyes were assaulted by a chaotic scene. The streetlights had failed but illumination was provided by a fire upon which smouldered a dozen neighbours. A convocation of men in robes stood around the blaze, warming gauntlets and perspiring through the peepholes of pointed hoods. Dishevelled people raced up and down the middle of the road, dressed in sundry historical garb. At first it appeared that every amateur thespian in the district had suddenly chosen to stage an outdoor tragedy in the same place, lacking only a script. But these protagonists were too talented to be local actors.
We stepped forward warily, slipping on a puddle of vomit. Suspended from gables and chimneys, massive streamers of regurgitated food emitted an abominable odour. The entire city had been used as a bucket by a vast debaucher, a macrocosmic Vitellius of ineffable appetite. Mingled in the slurry, spices bubbled forth in opaque clouds which tumbled over gardens and parked cars like battlefield gas.
“There must be a link with that restaurant.”
Odette nodded. “Why don’t we find out?”
Directly opposite our house, a swarthy character climbed slates and launched himself off a roof. Sigils were spattered over his robes and he wore a corrugated beard. Instead of falling, he hovered in the air, wild kicks shredding the saffron vapours, a fist glinting with barbaric rings describing arcane figures above his head.
