Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone

by Will Storr

  Kathryn sighed in such a way that I instantly regretted asking.

  “Sorry–”, I began.

  “She’s not well,” she said.

  “She’s sick?”

  “She’s in a home. A kind of hostel.”

  She gazed at the dully shining top of an aluminium beer can. For a long moment, I was scared that she might cry.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She shrugged, smally, without replying. Then, she said, “The place that she’s in – I want to get her out of it. It’s a shit-hole. That’s kind of why I’m working so hard at the restaurant. It’s…” She looked up at me. “I think, the people in that place, they don’t treat her properly.”

  I wondered what would happen if I placed my hand on hers, just as she had done to me the other day. I could do that. Couldn’t I?

  Her skin felt cold. I let my hand lie there, my arm stretched uncomfortably, damp soaking out on my fingertips. There was that kiss of reddish pink on her cheeks again and even though she was a year older than me, our proximity made me aware of her youth; of the simple clarity it afforded her skin and hair and neck; how her face could have been formed from a single, fresh drop of wax. I could feel the baying darkness outside and my heart beating inside and the seconds thumping past. She didn’t mind, you see. She liked it. I looked at Kathryn’s mouth. I shifted closer. I wasn’t a child any more. I was here, in her flat. She had invited me here. We were touching. Not a boy, not any more. A dog, I leaned in towards her.

  “What are you doing?” she said, rearing back. “For fuck’s sake!”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Sorrysorrysorry. I’m sorry, I–”

  She stood up and took a few steps back. “Forget it,” she said. “You’re just a stupid, silly man. You can’t help it. Forget it. It’s fine. Do you know what, though? I’m knackered. I’ll get you a blanket and pillow and stuff.”

  There was a branding on my arm. A hot butcher’s stink as my skin bubbled and melted.

  Then I was outside in the grass of Dor, amongst the rain and dark soil. I felt the earth shift beneath me. It moved with all the trouble in all the surrounds.

  I heard footsteps up by the cottage. I watched from the grass, through filthy air, as the finder man led the earl’s man along the narrow path. He spoke quietly: “They say that she boils Feathers and Blood together using devilish Speeches and strange Gestures. She hath an Evil thing within her and the Devil attends her in the form of a Fly. She hath been heard to say that in her visions she sees four colours, red, yellow, green and black and that black is always Death.”

  The wet wind whipped his voice away.

  There was something about a black book.

  Something about mischief.

  Something about devilish plants.

  23

  I was straining in alert silence in the kitchen the next morning, when I finally heard it – a movement on the staircase. I dropped my basil leaves and went quickly, pushing my wet hands down my torchon and hurrying through the washing-up area towards the open door. By the time I got there, Ambrose had almost got away. He was high up, nearly at the well where the stairs turned ninety degrees. I could see his shiny brown shoes, his scarlet socks, the back of his trousers and his surprisingly plump bottom under the tail of his jacket.

  “Um, Mr Rookwood,” I said.

  He stopped and peered back at me, over his shoulder, his hand gripping the banister, his white face floating in the gloom.

  “I was just wondering if you wanted me to make your lunch today?”

  “Not today, thank you,” he said cheerily, and began moving again.

  “Was it all right last week?”

  “Not as good as I remembered, since you ask,” he said, now just a voice disappearing into a lofty, dark echo.

  Two hours later, I was cutting lemons into wedges; carefully removing the pith and pips with my paring knife – correcting all the ugly inconveniences of nature – when in my peripheral vision I noticed Carlo on his way to the fish station, delivering an eldorado of the very same butter that Max habitually promised millions never featured in his kitchens. I’d watched Carlo use it for his salmon, which was cooked rosé à l’arête – fried on one side before a hand-grenade of French butter was thrown into the pan and a lid put on, which allowed it to steam in a hot mist of yellow fat. If anything could have given me cause to doubt Max, it was this incredible deceit. Although he did use Nouvelle Cuisine principles, the idea that he merely used water and ‘Teflon pans’ to achieve his two-starred version of perfection was a fiction that had been sustained so long it was never even remarked upon in the kitchen.

  By now, Kathryn, who had been working all morning in the walk-in freezer, was back next to me. I tried to catch her eye. All I wanted was one small, true smile, to tell me that I was forgiven.

  “I can’t believe how much butter Max uses,” I said to her, trying to grin as naturally as I could. “I wonder what Nigel Dempster would have to say?” I made a telephone with my hand. “Hello? Is that Nigel Dempster? I have a story concerning Max Mann and four tonnes of French butter.”

  A cold swipe of air on the back of my neck. Somebody was behind me. God, no: Max. I braced myself for the assault. But he just walked past, as silently as he’d approached.

  “Idiot!” whispered Kathryn, when he was safely gone. “Do you know what he’d have done if he’d heard you?”

  I looked at her blankly. She said, “Keep your head down for the rest of service,” and shook her head contemptuously. “God…”

  It soon became apparent that Max was having one of his stuttering days. I was aware of him shuffling around at the pass, his apron tied tight around his waist. The bags beneath his eyes were like dead bat wings. He looked as if he hadn’t slept and his gaze was snuffling around the place. But he wasn’t looking at our hands to see what we were doing; instead he was inspecting our faces.

  Later, Patrick told me that I would be helping to prepare one of Max’s signature desserts, a light passionfruit and lychee mousse that had a topping similar to that which you’d find on a crème caramel. My job was to sprinkle sugar over it, use a blowtorch to heat up a brand that had been moulded into the shape of a King logo and push it down, so the name of the restaurant was rendered in crisp, bubbling caramel. It wasn’t easy. The brand was precisely the same size as the ramekins that the desserts were set in, and Max didn’t want any excess sugar crystals visible on the surface. So how did you get them out? You couldn’t tip the mousse. You couldn’t blow on it. You couldn’t fish them out with a spoon without disturbing the surface. The only way, I decided, was to sprinkle on the exact amount of sugar in the right places so that not a single crumb remained un-caramelised. The branding had to be done just before the dish was sent out, so it was still warm on the tongue.

  The first desserts were usually plated at just after nine p.m. and immediately I had three to prepare. I began heating the brand with the blowtorch. Constantly aware of the sucking presence of Max at the pass, I dipped a tablespoon into the sugar and distributed it over the mousse surface in a thin drift. When I was sure the brand was sufficiently hot, I pushed it onto the sugar and watched carefully, my head no more than two inches away from the pudding. Pulling it up, I raised the brand just in time. Perfect.

  For the next mousse I sprinkled on a touch more sugar – I thought it could take it and I was right. The logo came up even better than before. I sprinkled yet more on the final dessert. In my mind, I saw Kathryn. I was beaming, telling her, “My mousses were great. You should’ve seen them.”

  And then I realised – too much sugar. I could tell that it was too much sugar.

  “Where are my mousses?” Max was calling, his voice piercing through the noisy kitchen.

  “Coming, Chef,” I shouted.

  I desperately tried to spoon off the excess without damaging the fragile surface of the pudding.

  “Mousses, mousses, mousses! Speeder!”

  I had another two desserts to prepare imme
diately and another five for three minutes after this. I pushed the brand in and it sizzled greedily. Perhaps if I held the heat there for a second longer, more of the stuff would melt. I smelled something rich, sharp, acid. A thin line of steaming black bubbles squeezed out from beneath the hot metal. I pulled the brand back.

  It was burned – and fringed with excess sugar crystals. Ruined.

  “Where are my mousses?” he called. “Speeder! Speeder! N-now!”

  I placed them on a tray, lifted it carefully and made my way to the pass, the kitchen turning into a blur, the hellish noise seeming increasingly as if it was directed at me. I paced back to my station and sprinkled perfect dustings of sugar into the next two ramekins and began heating up the brand, holding it into the flame of the blowtorch until the dark steel lightened. I saw him through the hot, rising air. I saw him: his whole height, his whole fame, his whole majesty, walking towards my station with one of my desserts in his hand.

  It was as if the air chilled as he stood in front of me, holding up a ramekin, his great nose rising in fury. He had a row of black hairs in each nostril, sprouting from a bed of broken blood vessels where, uncharacteristically, he’d failed to trim them.

  “What do you call this, you fuck-eyed mudlark?” he asked, showing me the burned, crusted mess. “What do you c-call this? I’ll tell you what I call it. A f-fucking cremation. What are you trying to do, you wretched pikey – send your dead aunt an offering?”

  Underneath the scorched sugar, the mousse looked like Peach Melba Angel Delight. That had been one of my mum’s favourites when she was a girl. Peach Melba Angel Delight with chocolate hundreds and thousands sprinkled on top of it.

  “Oui, Chef,” I said.

  I wondered if Max Mann had ever eaten Peach Melba Angel Delight with chocolate hundreds and thousands sprinkled on top of it.

  “Mistakes,” he said. “I hate mistakes.”

  I imagined myself feeding it to him. Spooning it between his teeth; his lips closing over it. Gently cleaning away a smudge that had fallen onto his chin.

  “Show me your arms.”

  I knew what was coming. I’d seen this before.

  I pulled my sleeves up, bunching the material of my tunic securely into my elbows. I remembered the last time I’d eaten Peach Melba Angel Delight.

  “You don’t have enough burns to work in this kitchen.”

  I picked up the brand from where I had left it on the pass. The edges were still whitened with heat; the dark steel of the word “KING” a light, wispy grey. I gripped my fingers around the plastic handle and brought it towards me, feeling the hotness of the metal as it approached my skin. Max’s eyes followed what I was doing. They tracked my movements as I tracked his.

  I imagined Max and my mother seated around a picnic table in a sunny garden, and me carrying in a vast dish of Angel Delight to them, pale and sculpted and wobbling and decorated in chocolate hundreds and thousands and Jelly Tots and chopped glacé cherries and popping candy. I would cut into it and there would be real peaches inside, peaches that had been macerated in Armagnac and Max would give a little clap and Mum a gasp of joy and I’d spoon it out onto silver plates.

  For just the tiniest moment, the brand’s contact against me felt cold. I pushed it in, hard, and then the agony and then nothing but pure white floating peace and the battlefield stench of scorching hair and skin.

  There would be peaches inside that had been macerated in Armagnac and I would spoon it onto silver plates and give a little bow and Max would grimace and wretch and mock and my mum would say she didn’t even like Peach Melba Angel Delight, it was disgusting, awful, baby food, full of chemicals and sugar and rot and those foul, soggy peaches…

  I swallowed as a jolt of pain ran up my spine and made my upper lip twitch again and again and again. Max took a step back. He was even paler than before. A fly started turning noisy circles around his head. A single drop of sweat fell from his brow and onto the end of his nose.

  He hit the brand out of my hand. It clattered to the floor.

  “No more mistakes,” he said, his voice shaking slightly.

  “Oui, Chef,” I said, bowing my head in deference at his retreating form.

  On my arm, the word “KING” was tattooed in a grotesque scarlet logo, the edges of the letters bunched up and livid, a blister quickly forming. Andy, having seen what had happened, filled a bucket with cold water from the fish sink and forced my arm into it, whispering, “That was amazing. You nutter! I have never, ever seen anyone shut Max up like that. Are you totally bloody insane?”

  I didn’t reply. I just wanted to get back to my desserts.

  24

  It was after one a.m. by the time I arrived at Dor Cottage, my eyes wired with exhaustion, my left arm in a loosening amateur bandage. I unlocked the heavy wooden door that opened straight into the lounge. Turning on the light, something caused me to pause. I had the strange experience of being alarmed by the scene, but for no obvious reason. The room felt as if it had been brooding in the darkness. There was Dorothy’s green armchair and her little coffee table and the cat-print curtain that went across the TV cabinet. And there on the mantelpiece, a framed picture of me as a boy with raspberries on my fingers, oblivious to the loving gaze that she was sending towards me. It was a stage set for yet more magical lunches and warm, cloistered evenings with fennel-caramels and vanilla ice cream with salt and peanut butter and my great-aunt – all the props were poised expectantly, unaware of the disappearance of the essential actor.

  Aware of my pulse and breathing, I paced through the shadows, straight to the kitchen. It seemed active, somehow, in its mad, toppling stillness. On the side, there was an open box of 40 PG Tips, a half-filled kettle, an old Sicilian cookbook and a Collins English-Italian pocket dictionary. I refilled the kettle and leaned against the counter, my eyes nervously tracking about the room. My forefinger tapped on the surface as the sound of the water roared into a boil. Mug of sugared black tea prepared, I carried it – slowly, defiantly – into the lounge and sat myself in the armchair. This is my house now, I thought to myself. Then I said it. “My house.”

  It wasn’t long before the day caught up with me. My eyes became heavy and I welcomed it. As focus became harder to maintain, I lowered my still-full cup onto the carpet and rested my head against the worn, comfortable upholstery. I don’t know how long I slept for – it may have been only minutes but it ended with a jolt. I lurched forward, letting out a small cry. I had no notion of any sound or movement – no evidence of the thing that had disturbed me so abruptly.

  The sudden interruption from dreaming meant that I could still remember the contents of a kind of confused swirl of colliding nightmares. A mess of images and sounds: the night sky outside Dor, long ago, and a strange and frightening man whispering, walking up the path. I could recall, with all the substancelessness of a rapidly vanishing scent, dogs' mouths barking – white teeth and livid gums. And there was the voice of Dorothy, “Don’t you ever go over that wall.”

  I rubbed my eyes. On the end of the arm of the chair there were two silver-grey flies. In the slithery light, I was revolted to see that they were mating. I stared at them for a drowsy moment. Still wreathed in the ghouls of my unconscious, I reached forward – quietly, gently, semi-awake – and I crushed the insects between my thumb and forefinger.

  25

  Something changed while I slept that night. As I’d taken myself upstairs the previous evening, I’d hesitated before going to bed in Aunt Dorothy’s room at the front of the house. I had stood there on the buckled floorboards for some time, my hand stilled on the door handle. Why did the idea of it feel so much like a betrayal? I looked up and down the landing, the silence by now feeling so utter as to be deliberate. I wondered why the flaws of age always seem to give inanimate things human qualities; sagging walls becoming sagging cheeks, cracks becoming wrinkles.

  I was being stupid. Weak. I stepped inside, turned on the light and set about clearing her things with a forced
casualness. I took away the teacups and the Teasmaid; the tray with its dried fruits and its half-sized packet of dark chocolate McVities. The bed-sheets were stained with urine.

  I slept as if unplugged and awoke filled with a reckless excitement, longing for the day to begin. I gathered some apple crates and some old newspapers from out the back and began to fill them with all the possessions, scattered about on shelves, hooks and cabinets, that made the place not mine: coats; shoes; a brass-handled walking stick; a collection of glass dogs and cats; a small pink-tinged photograph of Mum on a pebble beach – Hastings, probably. She looked so different, sitting there, grinning under the precarious English sun. I studied it for a while, before placing it back on the mantelpiece.

  By half past ten, I had six full bin liners, the skins of which were beginning to stretch to a dangerous translucent grey. Without bothering to put my shoes on, I carried them carefully to the dustbin by the side of the house – the quickest route to which was via the front door. On my way back in, I stopped to admire the place, the warmth of the path’s bricks soaking through my socks.

  In a way, it was perfect, with its little white portico and satisfyingly fat chimney; ivy swarming up the walls and around the stumpy, nobly weathered front door. It was a reassuring scene; something about the harmony of the man-made and the natural managed to suggest that the world was ordered and rational and safe. If you were forced to name a single thing that was less appealing about the cottage, you’d probably pick out the small, deep-set windows that gave the building a defensive, furtive aspect. And then, of course, there was the garden.

  Dorothy never seemed to relish spending time in the surprisingly mean patch of green that lay on Dor’s eastern fringe. As a child, I’d long since given up asking her if we could play outside, as she’d unfailingly have “a much better idea” which would tend to involve desiccated coconut or chocolate drops or vanilla pods or, more likely, all three. It was a narrow and shaded space bordered, on the castle side, by a crudely built wall and was entirely empty bar the scrubby grass, some holly and rhododendron bushes and the shed that I used to spend entire afternoons in when I was young. Its walls unshaven with a million splinters, its uneven roof like a tinker’s hat, it sat in a distant corner of the lawn like some banished relative, and I loved it. That shed had been my spaceship, my boat and, of course, my restaurant kitchen. I’ll never forget the afternoon I discovered some dirty postcards wedged under a rickety work surface that someone had built in there, using dowelling for legs and a thin plank of eternally damp plywood.