The Catastrophe

by Ian Wedde

  But she just never bothered to tell Danny. Or she did, once, at a gig in Venue on New Cross Road by the college, only it was too loud for him to hear what she was saying and she knew it. Anyway he was singing along with Joe Jackson and he was stoned out of his mind. Don’t you feel like breaking out or breaking us in two?

  And then all those years, finishing at art school, the magazine work, trapped between two images: poor little Danny with one shoe off and his head tipped sideways into the vomit on his shoulder, and the piled-up corpses at the end of the alleyway in the Beirut refugee camp.

  One image so neat and deliberate, despite the shoe, the other one a panicky mess.

  Sometimes she got out, there were really good times, the money was phenomenal during the ’90s, they were all having lots of fun. And then without warning she’d be back in the space between Danny and the dead Palestinians.

  No sensation, that awful, magic word.

  But that usually saw her back at Serenity, shovelling her trust funds into their bank account.

  And then, one day, there was Christopher looking at her with his mooncalf eyes, his delirious smile, over the absurd pile of food on the platter between them, near Genoa.

  That other food is love moment – the other big question moment.

  The Cappon Magro was the silliest thing she’d seen in her entire life, but how could she tell Christopher that? Boccadasse was quaint, the colourful houses, the narrow streets, the fishing boats, lots of seafood restaurants. The Santa Chiara was a particularly lovely one, and Christopher so wanted her to love it. The owners were Christopher’s friends, maybe even relatives. The man, Luigi, pinched Christopher’s cheek and called him cuginetto, while the woman, Luisa, performed an eloquent little head-rock and went back to her kitchen.

  ‘Yes, we prepare special for you, after my little cousin telephone, Luisa work all day, a special Cappon for the bride of my savage cousin from New Zealand.’

  She’d caught Christopher’s quick look, then, almost apprehensive. He was waiting for a reaction, but she let it pass – bride – thinking it was just the owner’s English.

  Christopher was still being sorry after the risotto nero incident and his ‘big question’ faux pas back in Venice. They were meant to go on to London after Venice but he insisted they had to come all the way back to Genoa so he could make it up to her for the Thé Glacé fiasco. Bob would be furious – the delays, the cost, but most of all the gall.

  After all the lovely grubby wine and sex on the sleeper going north the return trip was utterly miserable. The train was completely overbooked in the best Italian manner. By the time they got to Genoa they were exhausted. And then, outside yet another of Christopher’s ‘amazingly cheap’ hotels, there were noisy machines doing road improvements first thing in the morning.

  ‘Don’t be so grumpy, Pepper.’ He was frowning at her over his cup of coffee, but trying not to. His coat collar was turned up. It was blowy and gritty in the square and some Arab truck drivers were smoking smelly cigarettes at the table next to them. She thought the pigeons looked diseased, squabbling over the pastry she hadn’t liked.

  ‘Bob’s going to have a fit.’

  ‘But here you are.’

  Yes, she was. And she’d hardly been kidnapped. She’d said yes. They did this all day. Back and forth, not quite quarrelling. He was trying not to be grumpy with her. Really, she wished she was going home to London, and he wished she would love whatever he was up to. But she couldn’t work out what that was. What he was being so secretive about.

  ‘Oh, come on, Christopher – what are you cooking up?’

  ‘It’s a secret, Pepper.’ That hopeful smile. ‘You’ll see.’ He pressed both her hands, made pouty kisses. ‘You’ll love it.’

  Love what?

  They ate some tasteless octopus terrine standing up at a booth near the ugly industrial port. He had that slightly beseechy look. She didn’t even like it let alone love it, the octopus terrine. Her feet were killing her. But the octopus lunch wasn’t the big secret surprise, obviously. Just as well.

  Then they looked at some paintings by Caravaggio in the Palazzo Rosso because he thought they would ‘cheer her up’. She could have made fun of the suggestion that Caravaggio might cheer anyone up, but that would have sounded know-all and snotty.

  There was an immense, devouring field of darkness at the back of Caravaggio’s Ecce Homo and she panicked when she saw that the young model for Christ looked like Danny. The tender, downcast eyes, wispy beard, young hairless body. The last thing she needed in her life at that point: a tragic Danny cue.

  And then in the evening, after a nasty windy walk along the Corso to Boccadasse, this enormous plate on the table in front of her. Glasses being filled with wine, Christopher’s eyes brimming over with joy and happiness, and the sudden sound of clapping from Luigi and Luisa when Christopher lifted his glass to her and tried to control his shaking lips.

  ‘What is it, Christopher?’

  ‘It’s a Cap-, Cap-, Cappon Magro, Pepper.’

  She’d never heard him stammer before. His eyes flooded and the tears poured out down his cheeks and into his trembling grin.

  ‘No, Christopher, don’t be silly, I know what that is. You’ve told me. Don’t be such a dolt. I mean, what’s ... ?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he gasped, swabbing his eyes with his napkin. ‘I’m just ...’ Then he swallowed about half his glass of wine at a gulp. ‘Thé Glacé ... will you marry me? Miss Pepper? Please?’

  In front of her there’d been an enormous pile of green beans, cauliflower, potatoes, carrots, celery hearts, artichokes, beetroots, hard-boiled eggs, white fish, dark dried tuna, lobster and scampi, mussels, cockles, oysters on half shells, anchovies, black and green olives, mushrooms, all on a bed of thick toast. There were half a dozen skewers poking up out of the pyramid with more bug-eyed scampi, mushrooms and anchovies impaled on them. The whole catastrophe was bathed in glistening sauce.

  ‘Will you, Pepper?’

  His friends had appeared on either side of him, with full glasses. The aroma that was rising from the absurd Cappon Magro was indescribably delicious. But she couldn’t tell if that was what made her feel faint, or if it was something like the awful darkness at the back of Caravaggio’s Ecce Homo with its sad, lovely portrait of the wilted, almost beardless boy with his head drooping to one side.

  But then, at the very moment she couldn’t hold her huge sob back any longer, just as she was going to pass out or disappear into the deep darkness behind Danny, she saw Christopher’s big moppy head loom into view above the pile of food. He looked so comically a part of it that her sob turned back on itself and became a sort of whoop.

  ‘Food is love!’ – the arrogance of the man.

  The Cappon Magro: there it had sat between them with its absurd palisade of skewers stuck with prawns and mushrooms. It had always been between them. But how could she have told him that then? When his ‘food is love’ story about his wretched Italian grandmother was so desperately trying to join them together? How could she have known what was going to happen?

  Desperate, desperate, desperate Christopher. Desperate for love. Love that admired him. Love that made all of him swell up, not just his big bulgy cock. Love that would always come to his rescue.

  Christopher’s cry for help: ‘Food is love!’

  Well, not her, not this time, not any more. Let alone when the cry came via some Maya Yazbeck – ‘A message from your husband.’ Let her prop the poor clod up. Whoever she was.

  Back then in Boccadasse, they’d been laughing and crying all over each other and all over Luigi and Luisa and half the guests in the restaurant.

  But had she said yes?

  Her strange whoop.

  Yes, of course she’d said yes.

  They drank toasts to food and love. Mangiare è fare l’amore!

  And of course the ribald jokes – Cos’e che ti rode!

  Before they devoured the Cappon Magro she photographed it. Once by itself, lo
oking like an outrageous, mocking art work, a revoltingly excessive still life of some sort. And once with Luigi, Luisa and Christopher raising their glasses to her, with the Cappon crouched in front of them. Its hackles up.

  Of course she could never be in the photographs she took, except as a kind of absent reflection, the ghost of decision – or indecision. Of course she’d said yes. Yes to Christopher, yes to taking the photograph. It was her yes that they were raising their glasses to, that they were all beaming at, Christopher most of all, just beside himself, exuberant and ecstatic.

  But she wasn’t in the picture. She wasn’t there, that’s what struck her when she looked at the test-strip, back in London. Not there – Thé Glacé, Mary Pepper, not there. Didn’t anyone, not least her, think it was worthwhile putting her in the picture? Luigi or Luisa could have photographed her and Christopher, with the Cappon. It was as though the Cappon Magro had taken her place and also the place of her yes.

  When the jackhammers started up outside their hotel window the next morning after the Cappon feast at Boccadasse, Christopher didn’t move. He lay against her back, his lips vibrating gently. His breath puffed moistly onto her shoulder blade. There was a sweet, delicate taste in her mouth, not fishy and not like the artichokes or cauliflower, and not rich like shellfish. She’d eaten a whole lot of the Cappon, heaps – it was indescribably delicious – and Christopher was thrilled about that.

  But she’d never been able to tell him how bizarre, how ghastly it had looked when Luigi, with a grand flourish, had first put it on the table between them.

  Never.

  How it had reared up hideously over her sob, her whoop, her yes, with its skewers of black-eyed scampi and the pallid sheen on its flanks. How it seemed to have stationed itself at the centre of her fucked-up life.

  She had this comical flashback of Christopher chiding Peter Gordon at the Sugar Club in London: ‘It doesn’t look like food any more, treasure. It looks like fucking art. Sensational art, but art.’

  The poor Cappon had looked like the worst kind of parody of what Peter Gordon was doing, those artful fusion arrangements that Christopher was mocking as ‘fucking art’.

  Sensational art.

  Perhaps she’d gone back to sleep, then, she wasn’t sure. She slid somewhere between sensation and dreaming. It was nearly midday when Christopher woke up. Outside, the road repair machines had stopped. At first it seemed to be completely silent. Then she could hear people, pigeons, scooters.

  She felt Christopher give a startled twitch and lift his scratchy cheek from her back. Then he relaxed, and she could just picture the absurd, blissful smile on his face.

  And.

  And she still could.

  CHAPTER 6

  Hawwa Habash stepped back quickly from the door she had locked against the image of the food writer Christopher Hare’s imploring expression. His face was large as you would expect from someone whose work was to eat, but she thought the largeness did not come from eating but from an excess of personality, so that there was much room for confusion. At one moment this excess was of boldness and humour, at the next it was of sadness and indecision. At first she had thought his problem was bravado and stupidity, but now she had seen the grief and hope in his expression, his big-lipped mouth hanging open towards her as she shut the door, his hands open to make the sign of a question. And what was that question?

  Clearly it related to what he had said, in that calm way, with honesty that pierced her, though she knew better than to show it: this is the present. This is the only place from which I can go forward.

  Yes, she understood that. She understood it in the arid depths of her soul, that well into which no shaduf had been able to reach for years, from which no refreshment could be lifted out into the day.

  And also that he had attached his hope to her – this hopeless man.

  It startled her that when she turned from locking the door Philippe was standing on the stairs two or three steps below the landing. The image of the food writer’s imploring expression had not yet dissipated, and it seemed to float across the implacable face of Philippe, a face she knew it was wise to fear. He stood with both arms extended to the side, one hand holding the banister and the other’s fingers spread against the wall. How long had he been there? At least he had not been listening at the door. His location was surely deliberate: she knew Philippe well enough to understand his succinct drama, his message to her.

  But still she gasped when she saw him there. He lifted his shoulders and eyebrows in a question, ignoring her fright. His manner was even somewhat brutal.

  This is the only place from which I can go forward. She stopped Philippe’s commanding question with one hand while opening the door to the room she had slept in the night before. She closed the door on Philippe’s anger just as, moments before, she had closed another on the food writer’s open mouth, his how? or quoi?, his sad hands empty of answers. How can I go forward?

  In the room she rushed to take a pillow from the bed and catch her groans in it.

  Was it any longer an issue of her authenticity? No, she had not been brought up in the squalor of Shatila but in a comfortable house in Amman. Her family had not walked in the terrible heat to Barfiliya at the time of al-Nakba and the invasion of Lydda in 1948, but had left a week earlier and escaped to Amman, taking the deed box and the key to the house, and taking also her grandmother’s future performances and commemorations during the bad-tempered conclusion of the hamseen. And no, as she herself had never denied, as Philippe knew well, she had not been in Shatila in 1982 when the Kataeb entered the camp under the patronage of the Israelis and defiled many young women and mothers her age, rather she had been for whole days and nights happily in the fresh marriage bed of her new husband Abdul Yassou, in the small apartment on rue Lepic provided by her brother Habib, to keep his disgraceful sister under the eyes of her family who might have been better advised to disown her, as he was fond of repeating. Since her marriage had been a hasty affair, conducted hastily for all the world to see in the official French manner in the mairie on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin, which was, it hardly needed to be said, a long way from Amman, without her father or mother present, and without Abdul Yassou’s father also, and without any suggestion of a subsequent ceremony in the church on Jebel Ashrafieh in Amman and without a week of celebrations hosted by her father, and without a dowry – as a consequence of this display of indifference the only siege she had suffered was that of her own brother’s vigilance.

  And what of her own defilement, for which her brother had been obliged to take responsibility on account of his earlier inattention, though his attention to one careless impromptu had been sufficient to expose her affair with Abdul Yassou? That she had agreed to, the affair, willingly and rebelliously, and in due course with pleasure, after many months of secret courtship by handsome Abdul Yassou. It had been her choice, to defy the codes of her family and embrace those of her friends at the Jussieu campus.

  Abdul Yassou loathed the apartment for its degrading size, its enslavement of his honour and its proximity to the filthy Africans of the Goutte d’Or, as he would often complain – and as he did also about the dowry. But that did not prevent him from relishing his newly legitimate bride, and it did not prevent her from rejoicing in her rebellion and in his connoisseurship in their bed.

  And it was the case, on the day of the massacres of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut, that the lovemaking cries of Hawwa and Abdul Yassou in Paris caused their neighbours to complain or perhaps to celebrate by banging cooking pots together in the hallway of the apartment building and on the balcony next door, where the windows were open day and night because of the fierce summer heat. And, indeed, perhaps it was the case that during those roasting days and nights of unrestrained passion, of clashing pans and complaints, of Abdul Yassou’s big hands gently lifting her loins towards his patience, that their son Boutros was conceived. Indeed it was possible he was conceived on the very day of the Shatila and Sabra massacres an
d defilements, a stupid thought whose melodrama she despised, which did not prevent it returning often to twist her heart.

  But she could not deny it: it was then that the vivid years of her life began, when she inhabited every day to its very limits, when Boutros had at last slithered out of her in a rush of blissful fluids, when she had sung in the mornings, when her hot arguments with Abdul Yassou had ended in love-making, when she was always alive, minute by minute. A presentness that she had subsequently dragged around, wishing to be free of it, and now perhaps at last she might be.

  Of course there were signs even then, in the time of her rebellious happiness. She was young but she was not stupid. She saw her husband’s rage at the lost dowry, which suggested he had wanted it. And, in spite of the withheld dowry, the ample money he often had. His residency permit for San Marino, where he did not live, but banked, so it seemed. His anger when the PLO forces of Yasser Arafat evacuated Lebanon in August 1982, the first month of her womanly bliss – was this because the fedayeen were now admitting defeat and betraying the Palestinian cause, because they were abandoning those left helpless and without defense in the ruins of the refugee camps? No, for Abdul Yassou it was because of the billions of capital owned by the PLO that would now flee the country, and the cessation of remittances to PLO banks in Beirut. The cessation of arms shipments to Sidon and Tyre. The retiring of Lebanese-French banks from that place. The inflation that had already begun as a consequence.

  Abdul Yassou did not mention the difficulty of doing business with the Phalange of Gemayel, the same who had perpetrated the massacres of Palestinians at Shatila and Sabra. This business she only discovered many years later, when Philippe placed the dossier of her husband on a table in front of her and invited her to read it in front of him, Philippe, while he watched.

  Had she known? What had she known? Philippe saw from her behaviour that she had not known, and that was also perhaps why he agreed that she should be the one to shoot Abdul Yassou. Why perhaps he had already seeded the possibility that she might propose this herself, the justified execution of her husband Abdul Yassou. Her handsome lover Abdul Yassou who had smiled so insolently when her brother Habib by chance opened the door when he should have been at work, and saw them. Abdul Yassou the father of her beautiful son, Boutros, rest his soul, her baby who might already have begun to exist that day or others not long before.