by Will Storr
I couldn’t work out what was happening.
“Ambrose? Are you okay?”
“It’s Max. He’s dead.”
There was a moment of blankness before my emotions caught up with what I had been told.
“But why? How?”
My mind scrabbled for sense. What had happened? The book had said three herbs taken at once would lead to death. Max had only had the Hindeling and that was supposed to do nothing more than cause some sort of “madness of the mind”.
“It’s not true,” I said. “It can’t be. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Oh, Killian, he hanged himself,” said Ambrose. “There was the most horrific outbreak of food poisoning at King. Just unbelievable. Rivers of faeces and vomit. Beyond belief. Streams of it running across the floor. And flies – flies everywhere. I saw one old man, seventy years old at least, vomiting faeces. I can’t imagine how it’s happened.” There was a pause. “I don’t suppose you have any idea?”
“I left early,” I said. “I just did a bit on pastry and left. I wasn’t there for most of the night.”
I heard static. I heard the wind. I heard my heartbeat.
“Your voice,” said Ambrose, eventually. “Killian, you sound scared.”
I heard that creaking noise again.
“Why are you scared, Killian?”
“It’s, no – I’m sad.”
“Patrick tells me you were tampering with the salt and pepper.”
“I was refilling it.”
“I’m going to have it tested.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“Your voice is shaking, Killian.”
“I was helping Max,” I said. “I was only trying to help.”
“Killian Lone, you will listen to me now. I do not believe you weren’t involved in this somehow. If this is true…” I stood there and listened breathlessly, as my silence made up his mind. “You have destroyed my business, you have destroyed my friend –”
Before Ambrose could finish, I put the phone down, then let the receiver hang. I dropped to the floor, where I let out a single, animal roar. I took my two largest knives from a kitchen drawer and walked outside, through the high gates and into the physic garden.
The old walls stretched on into the darkness, the elms rising behind them like a mob of sentinels, their straight trunks disappearing fearlessly up into the black heights. The plants, all arranged in their neat rows, bowed and whinnied under the pressure of the wind and looked as if they were joyously celebrating my arrival, each individual stem baying for attention. Through the crowding insects, I began swiping at their bases with my knives, grunting with each strike, the wind blowing them into my face, slices of leaf sticking to my wrists and arms and neck. My back ached and my hands complained at the pain of the cold as I pushed deeper and deeper in, cutting and pulling up roots, the smell of damp earth and chloroform steeping in the air.
Soon, my fingers were bleeding and my knives blunting. I realised I had only cut down perhaps a sixth of the plantation. I ran back inside and found, in a box in the bathroom, two old hairspray aerosols. I pulled a rusting can of Castrol out of the shed and splashed what was left of it as far as I could over the plants. Lighting a match in front of the spray, I sent a plume of red fire straight into the garden and it was quickly engulfed in a breathing monster of strange violet flame.
It was the noise of the car pulling up that finally made me halt. I looked around, half expecting the blue lights of police cars. But it wasn’t the police. Small and trembling in the feral madness of the countryside, it was Kathryn.
I braced myself for the onslaught of fury. She took in the sight of the fire and ran for me, throwing her arms around me.
“What did you do?” she said.
“Nothing!”
“You killed him, Killian. You killed him.”
“I thought he was stronger,” I said.
She looked at me, a huddle of shivers and tears and wild feeling.
“I don’t know what happened, Kathryn,” I said.
Slowly, she let me have more and more of her weight. “You made me love you,” she said, eventually, into my arm. “You made me love you. And now look.”
I couldn’t take any more. I collapsed, pulling her to the floor. We sat there, sprawled in the mud as I pushed my thumbs into her cheeks.
“You’re the only one I can be normal with, Kathryn. You make me normal.” I grabbed her face hard and tipped it. I forced her to look at me. “I don’t know how it works, Kathryn. I tried. I tried really hard but I always got it wrong. I don’t understand how anything works. Without you I’m awful.”
I squeezed harder, feeling the bones of her skull under my thumbs. She looked back at me, her eyes fractured red. A long tear worked its way towards the soft boundary of her jaw. I squashed it in its passage.
“Do you think I’m bad? Do you think I’m a bad man? Kathryn, I’m scared.”
I let go of her face and began to sob.
“I don’t think there are bad people. It’s just – ordinary people sometimes think themselves into bad places. They look like good places but they’re not.”
“I tried to be good. I tried to always choose the right thing to do. But how do you know? How do you tell?”
She closed her eyes.
“Stay there,” I said. “Wait. I have to get something.”
I pushed myself to my feet and staggered towards the raging herb garden, to the far right corner where the stems, still unburned, groaned and waved in fear of the approaching heat. Carefully choosing one fat specimen each of Hindeling, Cauter and Earl’s Leaf, I made no attempt to bat away the flies which were humming around my head; circling and swooping and playing.
I kneeled back down in the mud, my knees damp and cold, and, taking her hands, I made myself smile.
“Kathryn, it’s going to be okay,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” she said. “How can it ever be okay? Everything could have been so good. Killian, I don’t have anyone. And then you… I thought I could be happy. And now you’ve done what you’ve done and I can’t be with you any more. I can’t… I’m nothing again. I’m invisible.”
I pressed her palms and gathered my courage as the heat made a noisy and sudden advance.
“Stop now,” I said, gently. “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay. You know, I filled in the will ages ago. Dor is going to be yours. And I’ll never leave you. I will prove to you that loyalty can be good. I’ll always be with you. I promise.”
I lifted the three leaves and put them in my mouth. I wasn’t aware of any flavour, just a feeling of prickling numbness as I bit into them. Kathryn’s gaze sharpened.
“What are you doing?” she said.
A dead sensation hit my throat. It sank past my heart and into my stomach. I slumped a little. Over at the cottage, there was a rising rattling noise, as if it was being bombarded from the inside, and then a crack of something breaking and a low, deafening hum.
Kathryn’s eyes grew huge at the sight, her fingers tensing as her neck craned up in horror. A black column of flies coursed into the filthy sky, moving and twisting up and up. It swarmed into the coming dawn like smoke and then came for us, spreading over the physic garden, a hundred thousand insects landing, silver and black and red, on stems and leaves and the stone faces of the gargoyles and into the fire where they fizzed and singed.
“It’s okay, Kathryn,” I said. “It’s okay, my love. Don’t be scared. You’re going to be happy now. I’ve made everything okay.”
She wailed at the final realisation of what I had done. The sight of her doing so overwhelmed me. I wasn’t ready yet. I had to see her happy.
“Smile for me,” I said. “Please smile for me, just once.”
“No, no, no, no,” she sobbed. “Not this, Kill. Not this, please.”
“Just smile, Kathryn. Once more.” I tried to look happy for her. “You can promise me something. You’ll make son-in-law eggs.”
Im
possibly, her eyes lifted and shone for a moment. But they fell with the realisation that I had now become too weak to speak. I knew that her hand on my face would be the last thing I would feel of her. I rocked softly back as it all drained away. Nine years of this pretence, this desperate game, this fantasy of strength – it left me as if it had never happened at all. I was eleven years old again. A boy, never a dog.
My breaths became forced, dragging at the back of my throat and catching in my chest. I attempted to keep my eyes open.
“We’re fuck-ups, aren’t we?” I whispered.
Kathryn, whimpering and shaking her head, stroked my face with her fingers. The tears running in trails down her cheeks and the flames glowing against her beautiful birthmark and chocolate-spray freckles, she forced a final smile. “Fuck-ups together,” she said.
I fought, for as long as possible, to keep Kathryn in focus. I struggled to keep it all in view: her quick, smart mouth and her green and gold-speckled irises and her rich brown hair all bunched in the rain. There she is, my wonderful girl. There she goes.
By the time Kathryn had gathered the courage to go into the house to call the ambulance, a gap in the dirt-coloured ceiling of cloud had opened up. When the sirens finally approached, a dart of dawn sun hit what remained of the top attic window. Two hours later, the herbs were reduced to sporadic blackened stems, the earth hot and black and giving out little eddies of smoke here and there. The morning’s fresh light touched the stone gargoyles that guarded the physic garden. The elms fell silent.
On the day that Kathryn finally moved into the cottage, the kitchen seemed so warm and calm and beautiful, it felt as if its ancient walls were welcoming her arrival. Placing the first of her boxes on the table, she sat and wept a little. Then she climbed the stairs, gingerly opened the door of the front bedroom and closed the curtains against the tumult of light that was rushing in through the window and breaking against the walls. Laying herself on the bed, she sank into the deepest of sleeps. She dreamed of fire and knives and turnspit dogs; of boiling bones and blood under the fingernails of men.
Before the summer came to an end, she had a new wall built, higher than ever, to shutter in the gargoyles and barricade out the Earl’s trees. The mischief became quiet. The old trouble slept. And Kathryn’s life at Dor became one of stillness and distance and memory.
But our story never dimmed. It remained, ever present; waiting, watching; an unquiet frequency, a language of sighs that filled the rooms; an old tale remaining stubbornly unfinished.
And then, the long and wearying sickness; the same one that took her mother.
And now, her death. The walls of Dor Cottage breathing in.
An expectancy.
I can feel her coming now. I can feel our story finally coming to an end.
Acknowledgments
Many of the kitchen incidents in this book are based on real reported events. Sections of language and dialogue in the dream sequences were sourced from period material. I am hugely indebted to the great chefs Michel Roux Jnr and Guillaume Brahimi who granted me permission to work double shifts and interview chefs and apprentices at their restaurants Le Gavroche in London and Guillaume at Bennelong in Sydney. Needless to say, you won’t find any of the gruesome events or characters that appear in these pages in their kitchens. Of all the books I read to research this novel, none was anywhere near as valuable as The Perfectionist by Rudolph Chelminski – a goldmine of insight as well as useful facts and observations. If you enjoyed the story of Killian Lone, then I urge you to track down his wonderful biography of the brilliant yet tormented chef Bernard Loiseau.
I am indebted to the array of talented writers who were kind enough to offer honest criticism throughout the four years that I worked on this manuscript. I owe thanks to Posie Graeme Evans and Lucy Dawson, undying gratitude to Rodge Glass and Edward Hogan and whatever it is that comes after that to my wonderful friend, Craig Pierce, who offered bracingly honest and insightful notes at no less than three separate stages – a truly heroic effort, and I have learned so much from it. Thank you.
Thanks also to Ann Eve, Jess Porter, Erin Kelly, Jonathan at The Bookseller Crow, John & Tam, Kirsten Galliott, Ross Jones, Emily Hayward Whitlock, Vanessa Beaumont, David Isaacs – one of the finest editors I’ve worked with – and all at Short Books in the UK and Allen & Unwin in Australia.
And very special thanks to my fantastic and fantastically patient agent Charlie Campbell, without whose wise counsel I would not have finished this book.
And bows, finally, to my beautiful and brilliant wife Farrah.
Will Storr is a longform journalist and novelist. His features have appeared in many magazines and broadsheet newspaper supplements in the UK and Australia, including the Guardian Weekend, the Telegraph Magazine, the Observer Magazine, GQ and the Sydney Morning Herald (Good Weekend). He is a contributing editor at Esquire magazine. His radio documentaries have been broadcast on BBC World.
He has reported from the refugee camps of Africa, the war-torn departments of rural Colombia and the remote Aboriginal communities of Australia.
He has been named New Journalist of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year, and has won a National Press Club award for excellence. In 2010, his investigation into the kangaroo meat industry won the Australian Food Media award for Best Investigative Journalism and, in 2012, he was presented with the One World Press award and the Amnesty International award for his work for the Observer on sexual violence against men.
He is also a widely published photographer.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SimonandSchuster.com
authors.simonandschuster.com/Will-Storr
Facebook.com/AtriaBooks
@AtriaBooks
We hope you enjoyed reading this Atria Books eBook.
* * *
Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Atria Books and Simon & Schuster.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com
Marble Arch Press
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead,is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Will Storr
Illustrations © 2013 by Anna Trench
Originally published in Great Britain in 2013 by Short Books.
Cover art and design by Alan Dingman
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Marble Arch Press trade paperback edition March 2014.
Marble Arch Press is a publishing collaboration between Short Books, UK, and Atria Books, US.
Marble Arch Press and colophon are trademarks of Short Books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 978-1-4767-3043-1
ISBN 978-1-4767-3044-8 (ebook)
