by Jim Crace
58
YOU’LL NEED a liturgy and a medium pan, a hen’s egg, some bread, some salt, a knife, a spoon, the kitchen to yourself. Put the egg in water over a medium flame. Find, at once, the 37th hymn, God’s way of timing eggs, and when the water starts to boil begin to sing. Not too briskly. Moderato all the way. Sing all three verses and the chorus lines. The hymn is timed to suit the egg.
Make as much noise as you want. Belt out the words: ‘And on this rock Our church will stand,/A gateway to the Promised Land.’ The final word’s ‘amen’, of course, two sinking syllables beyond the tune. The amen is the point when yolk and shell and albumen become discrete.
Now spoon the amen egg out of the pan, decapitate it with a knife. You’ll find the flesh is cooked exactly to your taste, the white precisely firm, the yolk still bright and viscous, the smell of hell and sulphur on the air – as you would wish whenever you sing hymns.
59
EASTER DAY. The village custom was for everyone – even those who would not go to church – to spread a handful of flour on a stone as an offering. You could expect the flour to be gone within the hour. Rats and birds would have it. Or else the wind or rain.
We have a misplaced stone next to the gate into the orchard. It’s a vagrant, not a local stone – the local stone is silver-grey – but whoever brought it there did so more than eighty years ago. My grandmother remembers it from when she was young. She used to sit her dolls on the flat top and let them watch her stretch out in the grass and read. They were her guardians. The colour of the stone, she says, was like material – velvet, mauve. She had a matching dress and she made matching dresses for her dolls.
That flat top was, of course, the perfect place to put our offering, a gram or so of bleached self-raising flour on a tonne or so of blood-red stone.
It was only because the weather was good and my spirits unusually low that I spent so much time, that Easter, out of doors. Otherwise I might not have witnessed what occurred beneath the canopy of fruit trees. I have to tell you what I saw with my own eyes, something defying science and good sense, in order to convince myself, not you, that sometimes simple things – like flour, sunlight, stone – can break the rules.
I knew that there were rats around. There always are in orchards. I could hear the fretful, constant scurrying of rodent feet. And there were nesting birds for whom the flour ought to provide easy foraging. But, possibly because I was settled in the grass a metre from the stone, engrossed by the music on my Walkman and by a soothing glass or two of beer, the wildlife kept away on that first day. And when I got up in the afternoon to go back to my parents’ house, greatly rested and tranquillized by my half-sleep, I noticed the flour was untouched. Indeed, it seemed to me the volume of the flour had increased, as if it had drawn from the air or from the sun a fortifying trace of heat and moisture.
I do not know what made me turn my empty glass upside down and place it over the flour. I can’t imagine that I wanted to protect it from the dew or deny the birds and rats their easy meal. I cannot claim I had an inkling of what might happen overnight. I was just curious to see how long our offering would last if I protected it.
Again, I was not sure when I returned next day if the actual amount of flour had increased as it appeared to have done. The volume had, of course. The offering had swollen by a centimetre. Anyone could see it had. The risen flour pressed against the sides of the glass. And when I lifted up the glass, its contents were as rubbery as dough, and round. You might say it most resembled a communion wafer.
That second day, encouraged by the unseasonal heat, we both – the offering and I – baked in the sun. Each time I looked, the dough suggested that it had proved itself a little more. Certainly, by lunchtime, the wafer had thickened and enlarged. By late afternoon, when the shadow of our roof and chimney pots was stretched across the chilling grass, the wafer had become a ball of dough. The flour must have located airborne yeast, I thought. What other explanation could there be?
I brought my mother’s glass salad cover from the pantry and put it on our mauve stone to cover the ball of dough and save it once again from animals. I dropped a pinch of table salt onto the mix. A blessing of sorts. A petition for good luck. A prayer to end the cruel disruptions of my family life. My parents walked down to the orchard, arm in arm, and laughed at me, my pinch of salt, my simple faith in signs. I’d had too many beers, they said. I was too stressed, too fanciful, I was upset. They’d seen mushrooms, bigger than my dough, spring up in half an hour. Nothing to get excited about. ‘Nature’s odder than you think. Things grow.’
That night, of course, I had the oddest dreams. Who wouldn’t dream at times like these, my marriage on the rocks and me, a refugee from home, reduced to staying in the same bedroom where I had slept when I was small? Who wouldn’t dream?
The earth was baking in my dream. It proved to be the hottest day of all, sub-tropical. You had to wear a hat. I was walking down to the orchard gate, fearful, doubting, full of hope. The stone, flattered by the warmth, trembled like a heated coal. It glistened like volcanic jewels. The smell was not volcano, though, not sulphur and not ash. The smell was bread, fresh baked. I lifted up the glass protector from the flat top of the stone and touched the crust, the split, chestnut turban of a finished loaf, fresh bread baked out of nothing on the hotplate of the stone, our risen offering, my answered prayer. Beyond the odour of the bread there was a hint of aloe and of myrrh. In my dream I covered up the bread with linen. And then I ran down to the village for the priest to come and witness what I took to be a miracle. That risen loaf’s a sign, he said, that everything is well. Our blighted pasts are taken from the cross and rubbed with spices and with oils. Our futures are uncrucified. Things grow.
On the third day, I woke exhausted by my night of dreams and went a little sheepishly down to the long grass by the orchard gate to read and think about the battles and the custodies ahead. My mother’s glass salad cover had somehow fallen to the ground and smashed. A disappointment and a shock. The stone itself had shifted too, I thought. A touch displaced.
The day was chilly, damp, not tropical at all. Any trace of resurrected dough had disappeared, of course. My dreams had been misleading, mischievous. There was no evidence. The rats and birds had come and knocked the salad cover to the ground. The rats and birds had dined.
My little daughter, five years old, has come today to rescue me. She puts her dolls up on the flat mauve stone and they guard over us while we stretch out a metre from the orchard gate and stare into the pages of our open books. And if I turn and sniff the air, as country dwellers always do when weather’s on the move, I fancy I can smell a bakery – though, let’s be honest, an orchard always smells of bakeries. There’s yeast in rotting fruit. There’s dough in mulching leaves. Tree bark and fungi stink of bread.
60
OUR STRANGEST restaurant, the Air & Light, survived five months before its joke wore thin.
We’re not immune in this small town to global trends. So when the food and healthcare magazines were full of stories from Japan about a prana sect that did not eat or drink but lived instead on ‘atmosphere’, two of our lesser artists, tired of paint and canvasses, installed the front part of an empty shop with tables, chairs and blinding lights. It was, they said, the world’s first prana restaurant. Their friends dressed up as customers and waiters. There was a pompous maître d’ and pretty tablecloths. Orders were taken. Empty glasses, dishes and plates were delivered to the tables. Passers-by could look through the shop’s front window to watch nobody eating anything. It was live art. It was, as well, the liveliest and smartest place in town.
It wasn’t long, of course, before outsiders – students mostly – came into the restaurant and filled the empty places, keen to play their part and not be fed. There was a queue of volunteers. What isn’t clear is how the perpetrators, instead of closing down after a day or two as they had intended, began to charge for admittance to the Air & Light, a modest table fee at first. But the
n something much more complex, listed on a bill, including details of the ‘atmosphere’ provided, quantities of prana consumed and a local tax of 12 per cent.
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.
61
OUR 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.
WE 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.
62
SHE’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. Com
e 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.’
63
MY 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.
