Vinegar Soup

by Miles Gibson

  ‘Do you think he can make it?’ asked Frank, when Gilbert explained what had happened.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Gilbert.

  They watched Boris start the car and drive slowly away down the steep forest track. The engine spluttered. The wheels sprayed arches of fine, red mud.

  ‘This weather will wash out the road,’ said Frank, shaking his head.

  ‘It’s not too late,’ scowled Gilbert.

  An hour later the car returned. The headlamps were shattered. The windscreen was caked with branches and leaves.

  They ran down to meet it, legs loose as rubber, heads bent against the pelting rain.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ shouted Gilbert as Boris clambered out and slammed the door.

  ‘You bastard,’ roared Boris. ‘Mad as Sam. You want to kill me? The road all gone. Nowhere to drive. Nothing out there but mud and water.’

  He tore at his arm and threw the gold wristwatch into the mud.

  16

  A storm swept over the forest, broke along the peaks of roof, sprayed into windows and washed along floors. The ceilings sagged. Furniture floated. The bedroom walls changed colour and sweated an evil-smelling milk. All through the afternoon Frank and Gilbert ran from room to room, plugging the leaks and sealing shutters. Boris dug a trench through the shanty town to channel water away from the kitchen. Happy struggled to lash the veranda more securely against its moorings. Veronica went searching for Chester. Terrified by the belching thunder he had managed to scramble free of her arms and scuttle away to hide, wings out, beak snapping, tail feathers hanging in shreds. She wandered forlornly through the hotel, calling his name and clucking her tongue to attract his attention; but he would not answer.

  It was night before the storm had blown itself out. The rain died away and the moon appeared. The silence startled them. On the edge of the forest frogs were calling.

  ‘It’s stopped raining!’ shouted Gilbert. He ran outside and took a great gulp of the cold, calm air.

  ‘But it’s too dark to do anything,’ grumbled Frank.

  ‘Let’s go to the kitchen. Find the lanterns. Light the stove. We can dry our bones and find something to eat before these mosquitoes bleed us to death,’ said Gilbert. He screwed up his face and spat legs through his teeth.

  They called everyone together and made their way across the flooded compound. The mud splashed their knees and squirted in worms through their toes. When they reached the kitchen Happy hung lanterns from the ceiling while Frank and Gilbert tried to fire the oven. Veronica and Boris searched the shelves for something to start a stew.

  ‘I can’t find anything,’ said Veronica impatiently, rummaging among the pots and bowls.

  ‘What have we got for the stew tonight?’ asked Frank, turning to Happy.

  Happy frowned and rubbed his chin. He looked up and down the kitchen as if he expected to see calves’ heads, pigs’ trotters, mutton pies and yards of peppered sausages come rolling out of the darkness. When nothing happened he looked disappointed. ‘You lekbret?’ he asked anxiously.

  ‘Yes,’ said Frank.

  Happy nodded. Good. ‘You lek frout?’ he inquired.

  ‘A chop am,’ said Frank.

  ‘OK,’ said Happy. His face brightened and he looked relieved.

  ‘For wat?’ insisted Frank.

  ‘We mek bret an frout chop patron,’ said Happy in a low voice.

  ‘What’s happening?’ demanded Veronica.

  ‘He says we’ve got bread and fruit,’ said Frank. He looked at Gilbert and shrugged.

  ‘Nothing else?’ said Gilbert.

  ‘Kofi an korn,’ said Happy. ‘Res an souka.’

  ‘You bastard!’ roared Boris. He turned, rushed at Happy and tried to scalp him with a swift slice from his hand. ‘You steal the food from our mouth? You got food here. Where you hide it?’ he demanded.

  Happy whimpered and cowered in a corner. ‘Bifo ren he fol we don chop plenti tin. Mek mistik. Toude de kopot he empti. A kouk notin.’

  And then, before anyone had time to stop him, Boris began to attack the shelves, throwing down the pots and pans, shaking baskets and smacking bags with his fists. ‘Look here!’ he shouted in triumph. ‘I found an egg!’ He waved it at Happy. He waved it at Gilbert. He managed to drop it.

  ‘What else you got hiding?’ he growled, pulling Happy from the corner. He took him by the scruff of the neck and shook him until he farted.

  ‘Leave him alone!’ barked Gilbert. He prised the two men apart and used all his great weight to force Boris back against the wall. ‘We’ve got food here and you know it,’ he said. ‘You’ve put most of it under lock and key.’

  Boris shrank along the wall and wagged his head in horror. ‘It’s emergency,’ he moaned. ‘We don’t touch it. Top-quality rations.’

  ‘Tomorrow we touch it,’ hissed Gilbert, baring his teeth. ‘As soon as it’s light you’re going to open those rations.’

  The next day, at dawn, they assembled before the store and waited patiently in the mud for Boris to surrender the key. The sky smoked. The early rain was a shivering drizzle. Veronica was wearing her polythene shawl with an old flour sack for a hood. Frank and Happy let the rain soak them. Their faces gleamed. Their clothes clung like treacle. Gilbert, driven mad by the way the rain kept scrubbing his skull, was wearing a red, rubber bowl on his head.

  ‘Do you think he’ll do it?’ asked Veronica.

  ‘I don’t care,’ snorted Gilbert. ‘I’m starving. If he doesn’t unlock it I’ll take it apart with my bare hands.’

  ‘We could cut that barbed wire and climb down through the roof,’ suggested Frank, surveying the fortifications.

  ‘We’ll give him another five minutes,’ said Gilbert, glancing in frustration at his empty wrist. ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘My watch has stopped,’ confessed Frank sadly, looking at Veronica.

  ‘I don’t even know the day of the week,’ said Veronica.

  ‘Tuesday,’ said Frank.

  ‘Friday,’ said Gilbert.

  ‘Sondi,’ said Happy.

  When Boris finally appeared he was stripped down to his underwear. The vest sagged from his shoulders. His underpants drooped and filled with water that leaked, in a trickle, between his legs. He cursed the eyes of his audience, removed the padlock and dragged open the store room door.

  The stink astounded them. It was the ammonia smell of condemned meat, the sickly scent of rotted fruit, the musty vapour of rancid fat and spoiled cereal. They were too shocked to speak or turn away. They stood, transfixed, and stared at the ruin. The tinned rations had exploded with the force of grenades and plastered their contents over the walls. Strings of poisoned cocktail sausages were hanging from shelves like guts. Shrapnel shone in the ceiling. The floor festered with a creeping carpet of black fruit salad.

  Boris looked bilious. ‘No, it all wrong!’ he sobbed. ‘This don’t happen to me.’ He fell down on his knees and burst into tears.

  They stepped over him, picking through the odious porridge in the hope of finding something left fit to eat. Several times the smell threatened to overwhelm them, driving them back into the rain. But after ten minutes of fretful digging they managed to salvage a dozen tinned fruit cakes and carried them home to the kitchen. No one cared to comfort Boris. He wandered off through the rain and vanished.

  They quartered a cake and stuffed themselves with it while Happy boiled the water for coffee. The heat from the stove began to warm and revive them. Their clothes steamed. Happy took off his winklepickers and hung them up to dry. Gilbert prised off his red rubber bowl which had made a groove around the top of his head.

  ‘We can feed ourselves for a week!’ said Frank gleefully. The cake was rich and dark and full of raisins. He filled his mouth until his cheeks bulged and he couldn’t work his teeth, his tongue clasped tight in a soft knob of sweetness.

  ‘It’s not going to rain for ever,’ said Veronica. She bent her head to dry before the heat of the stove. Her hair ch
anged colour and sprang into spikes.

  ‘No,’ said Gilbert. He licked a finger and began collecting crumbs from his plate. ‘It might rain for a couple of months. But it won’t rain for ever.’

  ‘We can’t wait for months!’ cried Veronica. She turned from the stove and stared in alarm at the row of cakes.

  ‘I can’t change the weather,’ said Gilbert. ‘We’ll have to be patient. Anyway, it’s not so bad. There’s been a drought. The crops need the rain.’

  ‘We don’t have any crops,’ said Frank.

  ‘We could plant some,’ said Gilbert.

  ‘We’ll starve!’ spluttered Veronica. ‘We can’t do it. It’s mad. I’m getting out.’ She stood up and searched for her polythene shawl.

  ‘Where?’ asked Frank.

  ‘Town,’ she shouted impatiently. It was obvious. ‘We’ve got to get into town.’

  ‘The road is washed out. Are you going to walk through that jungle?’

  She hesitated, glared at Frank and stopped looking for the cape. ‘We have to do something,’ she insisted, marching up and down the kitchen.

  ‘We’ll manage,’ said Gilbert. ‘The forest is probably full of food. Nuts and berries. Fish in the rivers. Fruit on the trees. You watch. We’ll be self-sufficient in no time.’ He picked up his plate and licked it clean. Enough meat on a crocodile to feed this circus for a month. First catch your crocodile. Sweet meat. Peel the tails like enormous lobsters. Make a necklace from the teeth. Something to give to Veronica. Frank wore a necklace. Threaded from noodles. Taught him to cook. Knows his onions. We’ll manage. Dogs. Rats. Lobsters. Men. All the same. Eat anything. Thrive on filth. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Ate them in the war. Pantry hanging with horses’ heads. A plague of gluttons sent to devour the land. Gobble the world. Squirt it out through your arse as shit. What’s left? When it’s finished. Rats to eat the lobsters. Dogs will eat the rats. Men to eat the dogs. Chinese cook chows. Meat like mutton. Men will eat each other. No doubt. Fat ones first. The fat will eat no lean. Fee fi fo fum. I smell the blood of an Englishman. Grind your bones to make my bread. The last man on earth. The last supper. Make a meal of his own fingers. Next. Nothing. A ball of shit as big as a planet spinning through eternal space.

  Veronica continued to march around the kitchen, slapping the shelves in exasperation. ‘I hate it. I hate the rain. I hate feeling hungry. My bed smells damp. The ceiling leaks. There are snails all over the walls!’ she screamed.

  ‘What sort of snails?’ asked Gilbert.

  Veronica was flabbergasted. ‘Horrible, giant, monster snails with their eyes hanging out on stalks!’ she shrieked.

  Gilbert clapped his hands and laughed. ‘We’ll go and collect them,’ he said, jumping up and wrapping Veronica in his arms. ‘They’ll make a stew.’

  He danced her around the kitchen and backwards through the door.

  ‘I’ll take Happy and hunt along the edge of the forest,’ shouted Frank as he watched them plunging into the rain. Gilbert waved and disappeared with Veronica still whirling in his arms.

  Happy was already back in his winklepickers and dragging a parcel of greasy rags from a cupboard.

  ‘What’s all this?’ said Frank, watching Happy lay the parcel lovingly on the table.

  Happy grinned and rolled his eyes. ‘You louk dis ting,’ he said, unpicking the rags.

  ‘Good grief! Do you know how to use it?’ whispered Frank. He was looking at an old French army rifle, a survivor from the Second World War.

  ‘Daso,’ said Happy, lifting the weapon from the table and nursing it in his arms. ‘No fia fo mek.’ He curled a finger over the trigger and gave it a squeeze. ‘Youselef?’ he asked, looking hopefully at Frank.

  Frank shook his head. It was the first time he had been in a room with a rifle. It looked dangerous. He thought he might learn how to fire it but he knew he could never hit anything.

  Happy looked a little disheartened. He was no marksman. ‘You kip dat nef,’ he said, nodding at a heavy butcher’s knife hanging from a hook on the wall.

  Frank took the knife and wrapped it in the flour sack that Veronica had used for a bonnet.

  ‘Na we go hunt fo kil dat bif,’ said Happy, growling and stabbing at the air with the rifle barrel.

  ‘Fo wat bif dat?’

  Happy considered all creatures great and small. ‘Mongi,’ he said, smacking his lips. ‘Senek. Taygra. Bouch kao. Wata hors. Even dam ting. Dis gon he plenti big nof fo kil alafen,’ he bragged.

  ‘There aren’t any elephants in the forest,’ said Frank.

  Happy grinned and rattled a box of cartridges.

  They left the compound through a hole in the wall and forced their way through the undergrowth. As they entered the deeper forest the trees gave shelter from the rain. It grew silent. The air diminished to a humid twilight. Happy moved ahead of Frank, clambering over roots and boulders, slithering into ditches, fighting free of the clinging thorn, with the rifle held always above his head.

  Frank followed with the knife hanging loose in his hand. He had folded the sack and tucked it under his belt, ready to bag whatever bush meat they could collect. He didn’t have much faith in Happy’s hunt for the buffalo and elephant but perhaps they’d be lucky and knock down a couple of birds. Anything to fill the pot. Gilbert said you could survive on snake and even grow fat on forest rats. He was breathing hard. His shirt was sticky with sweat. He supposed they were walking on a forest track but, when he turned to look over his shoulder, he saw nothing but undergrowth closing over him. The jungle drowned them. There was nothing to mark their progress through these secret passages and nothing to guide them out again.

  It was an hour before Happy allowed them to rest. ‘We go stop fo hia,’ he declared and sat down among a pile of dead roots to watch the surrounding forest. The trees around them were ancient skeletons, the trunks crusted in flowering warts, the branches hung with long beards of lichen.

  Frank wiped his face. He stuck the knife in a pad of moss between his feet and lay back among the roots. Nothing moved in the empty forest. He wondered if anything lived here but phantoms. It would be dark in another few hours. They should have carried a lantern. What happens in the forest at night? Light a big fire and sleep in a tree. They should have carried some matches. Perhaps he would search for some fruit and berries. Ask Happy to shoulder the rifle and help him. Something that looked like a soft, white crab fell from the leaves above his head and scuttled for cover under a stone. He sat up, startled, and stared at the ground. A party of ants crawled over his shoes.

  ‘Sofri!’ Happy whispered urgently. ‘Sofri!’ He cocked his rifle and pressed it firmly against his shoulder.

  Frank stared along the line of the barrel as it pointed into the darkness. At first he saw nothing. But then his eyes, adjusting to the shadows, picked out a group of apes watching him from the bushes. They were a little Stone Age family, peering out from a primitive nest of green twigs and ferns. The largest ape, an old female, stared at Frank as she chewed at a piece of fruit. She looked tired and wet and hungry. She reminded him, for a moment, of Olive. There was something he recognised in her crumpled face, something familiar in the way she peeled the fruit and sucked at the sweet, red seeds.

  ‘Won… to… tri…’ whispered Happy. His fingers trembled. He farted quietly as he squeezed the trigger.

  The ape looked at Happy, tossed the fruit away and wiped her hands on her knees. She sat, motionless and erect, as if posed to have her photograph taken. There was a terrible explosion and a rush of stinging, white smoke. Birds screamed from the treetops and hung in the rain like ashes.

  When the smoke cleared the old ape was still sitting beneath the bush with her hands clasped to her knees. She had been decapitated.

  ‘Chit!’ laughed Happy. ‘Chit!’ He dropped the rifle and ran out to admire the damage.

  Frank ran after him. He stared at the corpse and felt his skin crawl in horror. It was part human and part raw carcass, feet spread, fingers still
clenched, hot blood pumping as the life drained away. He spent several minutes trying to push his sack over the ape’s shoulders, working at the problem with infinite tenderness, as if trying to dress a crippled child in a badly fitting vest. But the ape was too large to be hidden and the sack began to split. He lifted the hairy body and carried it home in his arms.

  The hunters said nothing as they retraced their steps through the forest. Happy’s excitement at hitting a target had evaporated and he hung his head now, burdened by the weight of his guilt. Frank walked close beside him and cradled the slaughtered ape. The flies swarmed. The blood soaked his shirt and stained his skin.

  It was dark when they broke through the undergrowth and reached the safety of the compound. It was a cool night, the sky still heavy and running with rain. They met Gilbert and Veronica splashing towards the kitchen with a bucket slung on a pole. Gilbert shouted in delight when he saw them, dropped the bucket and rushed forward to look at the meat.

  ‘What a mess! Where did you find it?’ he boomed. ‘It looks like something tried to bite off its head.’ He was very impressed.

  ‘It was Happy,’ explained Frank. ‘We took out his rifle.’

  Happy surrendered the weapon like a soldier exhausted and sick of battle. Gilbert examined it with fascination, felt the weight of it in his hands, held it up to his nose and gave it a sniff.

  ‘What have you got in the bucket?’ asked Frank.

  ‘Snails! Hundreds of the buggers,’ grinned Gilbert. ‘We’ve been picking them all day. I think they must be falling out of Heaven.’