The manager said Corina was very good at her job. He had told her that he was going to promote her permanently to the till. No more mopping up and collecting trays. No more frying burgers and preparing french fries. She was on the counter from now on, he said, with a great big smile that must have meant something. He fancied her, that was for sure. He said she was very intelligent and that she had the ability to become a manager herself. But this only worried her even more.
As she finished her hasty meal, she understood at last what the hamburger and french fries were supposed to do. They triggered off subliminal memories of other food. Meals back home in Romania, like sarmale, and mititei. And papanasi.
Mr Killjoy was having his lunch at one of those wholefood restaurants, run by a co-op of local women. Chicken in white wine sauce, with rice and pineapple. Every dish on the menu at the Whole Earth restaurant was his favourite. Especially the desserts.
He took out the Irish Times and set it beside him on the table. It was not a newspaper as such, but a device for distracting attention from food. A utensil, needed for eating your lunch; some kind of mental fork or psychological shoehorn, on a par with any other cutlery. Killjoy needed a decoy to make onlookers think that he was more interested in the news than he was in food.
The presence of the newspaper allowed him to enjoy his lunch without thinking that he was being watched. He could eat heartily, uninhibited by the casual gaze of other people. He could remain inside the closed circuit of his own world, forking the chicken dish with one hand, pinning down the paper with the other.
It was a platform of deceit. A form of food denial. As usual in Ireland, everything operated on the reverse. If you said one thing, then you meant something else altogether – usually the opposite. Words and gestures were a bluster, meant to convey what people wanted to hear.
It was only when Killjoy had finished his banoffee that he could raise his head again and look around. Then he was suddenly curious about what other people were eating, looking at the mound of food the man next to him had on his plate. And finally, when Killjoy sat back over his coffee, he began to take on more global interests. He actually started reading the paper.
Mongi was running his own catering operation, feeding fish to the visitors out in Clondalkin. It was basically a piece of monetary realism that helped to speed up what he called the wet-back repayments. Because he had failed to persuade Corina to enter into a more lucrative line of work, he would have to convince her in some other way. By leaning on her relatives.
Some of the Romanians were living in the low-density, car-dependent suburbs of Dublin, while Corina and a few other women lived in a flat in town. Her brother and cousin lived together in Clondalkin. Apart from some occasional shifts on building sites, they had found no permanent employment yet.
Mongi forced his way into a semi-detached house and found them sitting in the living room watching TV. Martin Davis put a box of mackerel down on the purple carpet. Looked around at the pattern of damp black stipple coming through the floral wallpaper in the corner. At first, it looked like he had brought them a gift. Some freshly caught fish. And though this turned out to be true, it was not quite what the Romanians had in mind.
Mongi was getting really pissed off, the skipper began to explain. He was there to give them a new deadline. He couldn’t care less where they got the money. They could steal it if they liked. He wanted to be repaid in full by the following Friday.
Right, you fucking wet-backs, Mongi took over himself, making a call on his mobile. The amusements. It’s time for some A-M-U-SAMENTS, he said, pronouncing the words as though they understood no English.
Caius and Tudor looked at each other.
Amusements, Mongi repeated. Amusamenteees. Amusementescu or whatever the fuck you call it over there.
What are you doing? Martin Davis asked. He was beginning to feel nervous about this.
Mongi asked to speak to Corina Stanescu on the phone. There followed an altercation, along the lines that Corina was busy in the restaurant. So Mongi stressed the urgency of the situation. Said he was a surgeon at St Vincent’s hospital. Talked about having to notify the next of kin, so the manager of the restaurant eventually capitulated and allowed her to come to the phone.
Corina Stanescu, Mongi said.
Yes, she said.
Mongi handed the phone to Caius. Then he took out one of the fresh mackerel – first of the season – and began to hold it up towards the young Tudor, brother of Corina. Caius talked quickly in Romanian, as if he was reporting on the scene.
Fresh fish, Mongi said. How do I know? Because it’s stiff.
Rigor mortis, the skipper added, but he was not happy about the idea of fish being used as a threat. Fish were sacred.
Erect, Mongi pointed out, holding the freshly caught fish with its blue, green and black tiger stripes up to Tudor’s face. Later on it will go limp again. That’s how you can determine the time of death.
It was like a party line. Mongi indirectly communicating with Corina in the restaurant, through Caius and a thousand years of the Romanian language over the mobile phone. In turn, she was trying to deal with the restaurant manager who was getting angry behind her at the time she was spending on the phone. And he in turn was trying to deal with starving customers.
Mongi said no more. Just held Tudor’s head back against the wall with one hand and pushed the fresh mackerel into his mouth, head first. Tudor struggled, but Mongi was in a dominant position for this force-feeding programme. Soon there was little more than the tail end sticking out. Like an unexploded torpedo.
This was all in the nature of a parable. Mongi was not seriously trying to feed fish to foreigners. It was merely a gesture, a liturgical offering which was relayed to Corina as an indication of what might happen if she didn’t clear the debt by the given date. For the moment, Mongi was at pains to point out, this was strictly a symbolic feeding. The next time it would be real. And maybe not oral either. Then he took back the phone and spoke directly to Corina.
I’m giving you a week, Mongi said. Then they left.
Fred Metcalf was too old to eat lunch any more. He opened the box of Kentucky chicken and fed it to a range of cats which instantly arrived as though they could read his mind. He stood on the doorstep of his flat and threw them the chicken legs that Coyne had brought. In the background, the TV was on all the time, with the sound turned down. Silent figures of a daytime soap opera.
Fred’s stomach had come to a standstill. All he ever ate these days was biscuits and tea. Mikado, custard creams, chocolate Kimberly. Anything that people brought to him at his small flat. But especially pink biscuits. Flamingo pink sponge. By now there was a large concrete block of pink, reinforced cement lodged in his abdomen. Surgeons said there was no point in operating. He was too far gone.
When the cats had been fed, he went back inside and sat down with a cup of tea. But even then he had no appetite. Instead he was transfixed by a commercial on TV. The agility of young people dancing and skating around in front of him was stunning. Here was the landscape of the future, full of young people leaping around and eating Pringles. Music punctuated by the amplified crunch of their mouths around the wafer-thin food. That’s what youth was – hunger and energy and fun. Crunch! Crunch! Fred watched this high-speed meal with great awe. Once you start you can’t stop. These people were eating themselves sick.
The take-away restaurant suddenly became packed with schoolboys in their crested college blazers. The windows were steamed up. You couldn’t get in the door. They were all there for their usual burgers and hot dogs and french fries. But they were also there to look at the new woman behind the counter in her blue gingham overalls. Something about the way Corina looked each one of them in the eye as she served them. Something also about her foreign, East European accent drew these boys down from the nearby college every day. Some of them asked her irrelevant questions, trying to get
her to smile. They laughed about hot dogs. Muttered in baritone voices as they ate. Threw straws of french fries at each other. Called each other wankers and gave each other wedgies, especially those preoccupied with the Romanian woman behind the counter with the smile and the shadows round her eyes.
The girls from Loreto Abbey were hanging around outside a local newsagents’ shop. Mr Kirwin did a little pizza business every lunchtime and Jennifer and Nuala bought a slice each. Most of the older girls were having cigarettes: more tar, less calories. The convent girls were using as much bad language as possible, making up for lost time, when girls were sweet and full of Catholic ethos. Mr Kirwin seemed to put up with it most of the time. Will you fucking give us a fucking light you fucking bitch! Which was as sweet and polite as they were ever going to be to each other. I’ll give you a kick in the clit, you cow! While Jennifer and Nuala ate their pizza, they watched as two older girls threw down their bags and challenged each other to a fight. There were no rules among girls any more. Biting, scratching and kicking were all legal. Knickers in the air to passing motorists. Skin and hair flying until Mr Kirwin, the United Nations shopkeeper, had to come out and separate them, saying Girls, Girls, Please! and offering Kleenex to the one with the bloody nose.
Mrs Gogarty had invited Carmel around for lunch to meet some of her friends. Nothing was spared in terms of effort and style. It was lunch in a formal sense. The full orchestra. The best delph. Silver cutlery, silver napkin rings and silver knife and fork rests so as not to stain the white tablecloth.
The main course was fresh grilled salmon steak with hollandaise sauce. New potatoes and fresh garden peas. All organically grown, as Mrs Gogarty was only too pleased to point out.
Carmel gave her some help in the kitchen, but everything had already been prepared. All Mrs Gogarty had to do was cut the fresh brown bread, and Carmel noticed how her mother leaned forward in a special bread-cutting posture, with the knife in one hand and the bread in the other. Everybody was equal in front of bread.
The women in Mrs Gogarty’s circle had elevated the business of lunch to a showcase. It had less to do with food or the gratification of appetite than with the whole pageantry around the meal. For them it was more like a ritual. A stage drama which they revived and re-enacted every now and again to elevate food and remove it from the vulgarity of need.
Conversation ran along the lines of a daytime talk programme. Should drivers be allowed to use mobile phones while driving? By gum, one of the women said, they should not. Mind you, in defence of the mobile phone, another one of the guests said, it was great security to have one in the car. Finally, they moved on to horrific accidents. The fact that there was no crash barrier along the central reservation on the new motorway. The idea of a car coming across that central reservation straight into the oncoming traffic.
The idea behind this great lunch was to defy the existence of hunger and appetite. They had a way of eating salmon and hollandaise sauce without damaging their lipstick or leaving lip marks on wine glasses. It was more like a hunger test, to establish who could best conceal their appetite. Mrs Gogarty had learned all of this at boarding school down the country. Ladies ate bread before they went to a meal so they didn’t end up behaving like a starving peasant. Never go to dinner hungry, Scarlett O’Hara’s mother used to say. Because Irish people, no matter where they ended up, were taught to present a noble abstinence. It was food warfare. Mrs Gogarty ended the meal with a flourish, placing a basket of exotic fruit on the table with lychees and kiwis. The guests surrendered.
The poet with the four docile dogs was great on food phrases. He possessed a number of key lines in praise of food. Even though it was hospital food and he wanted to dig in as soon as the nurses brought the tray, he didn’t feel right eating in public – in the public ward – without ritualising the meal with a few of his phrases. Letting the other silent patients know how hungry he was. Fucking starving! The Irish had refined many lyrical disclaimers to allow the naked savage in his wine-coloured, leaf motif pyjamas to attack his food with as much right as anyone else and not feel guilty about it. I could eat a farmer’s britches through a hedge. I could eat a camel’s balls through the eye of a needle. I could eat a pregnant nun’s arse through a chair.
Ms Clare Dunford was trying to keep her weight down. It would be a lifelong struggle. In the same way that people once struggled to keep fed, she now had to fight a daily battle to keep from being overfed. Life will always revolve around food and money, she thought. Whether you have it or not. That day she skipped breakfast, or more correctly, postponed it until lunchtime.
She decided to take in a sandwich at the hairdressers’. There was not enough time for the hair appointment, and lunch afterwards, before she rushed back to her patients. She opted to combine the two, and had already taken a bite out of a cumbersome chicken and salad submarine when she was asked to lean back to have her hair shampooed. There was a momentary loss of reality as the hairdresser rubbed vigorously, almost forgetting that Ms Dunford was human. Just another disembodied head for shampooing, like pots were for scrubbing. Ms Dunford chewed and examined the ceiling. Cool rim of the basin on her neck, hot water on her scalp. She savoured the combined taste in her mouth, even as she obediently leaned forward again with a red towel over her head. Eventually, she got back to the sandwich and coffee while the hairdresser started clipping and talking.
It was a new experience, Ms Dunford thought. A little disconcerting too, to watch her reflection struggling with the submarine. She observed a menacing grimace on her face as she bit into the roll and the contents of chicken bits and tomato squirmed awkwardly out through the sides. Hand like a safety net underneath. Lower set of teeth coming forward, round cheeks rotating, a little frown on her forehead and her marsupial nose curling up as she sipped from the styrofoam coffee cup. She was appalled at the vision of her own animal desires.
By now, everything was covered with a layer of clipped hair. Under the gusting blow-drier, she thought about the concept of food. It was cerebral as much as physical. Phantasmal, even. Perhaps it would become a revolutionary new dieting technique, to look at yourself eating and to see at first hand the singleminded greed in your own eyes. Ms Dunford was so astonished by her eating habits that she pushed the submarine away. Only then did she notice that, with a touch of mousse, her head had begun to resemble a Donegal ram which had stopped grazing for a moment to look at a passing car: two great hanks of hair curling dangerously forward on either side of her face, and her lower jaw still swinging relentlessly.
Coyne took his time reading through the postmortem report. There was nothing in it that pointed the finger at any murderer. Nothing that indicated foul play as such. Only the cause of death by drowning. The rope burn marks and an injury to the head which was assumed to have been caused by Tommy’s head striking against the side of a boat during his fall. The report mentioned injuries consistent with motion.
Coyne was struck mostly by the details on Tommy Nolan’s intestines. The pathologist had found considerable amounts of alcohol in his body. There was also evidence of chips, partially digested. Tommy must have gone up to the chipper before he went down to the harbour. That’s why Coyne could not find him on the night in question. Because Tommy was standing in the Ritz waiting for a bag of chips. Probably looking at himself reflected in the convex stainless steel front-piece of the chipper. His face clownishly elongated as he waited.
Salt and vinegar?
On his way to the psychologist that afternoon, Coyne could not help thinking about Tommy’s stomach. He imagined what everyone else had in their stomachs that afternoon. Like some laser vision, he could see into stomachs all over Ireland: a cross-section of the food that was consumed at lunch on a single day. Mikado biscuits. Sausages. Tomato soup. Chips. Fresh salmon. Chicken in white wine sauce. Chicken submarine. As though Coyne had carried out a national autopsy on the potato republic. Fresh garden peas. Beans. A slice of toast here and
there. Biscuits with cheese. Cabbage and boiled potato. Hot dogs, doughnuts, sausages, Pringles and lychees.
Ms Dunford asked Coyne to sit in the usual chair while she started strolling up and down her office. She looked out through the window with her back to him.
Coyne appeared to have something to say that afternoon. He was unusually eager to talk, and lifted the embargo on his schooldays. Without realising it, he was giving Ms Dunford what she was looking for.
I’ll tell you about the bread and seagulls, he said.
It was in the school-yard. There were two gangs, with two dens. It was always like that, gangs running through the yard, clashing somewhere in the middle and retreating. The physical force tradition of the Irish school-yard. Coyne always kept his back to the wall and watched as they came. And then one day, in the middle of the yard, he saw one of them punch one of the younger boys full in the stomach. An innocent bystander.
He just doubled over, Coyne said. I turned around and saw him there with his mouth open, leaning forward. Holding his stomach with one hand. His sandwiches in the other. His mouth was wide open. But there was no noise. It was like a silent scream.
Coyne remembered a piece of masticated bread slipping from the boy’s mouth. It hung on to his lip for a moment and then fell to the ground. And then all the other sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil also fell on the tarred surface of the yard while around them the warring continued. Boys with sticks and cardboard shields, shouting and flailing at each other in combat. The boy who was hit in the stomach, right in the middle of the war. Speechless. Screaming silently.
It was Tommy Nolan. Everybody was patting him on the back and asking was he OK. Are you all right? When the gangs retreated to their fortesses, Coyne picked up the sandwiches and put them back in the tinfoil wrapper. But Tommy’s hands were limp and he dropped the sandwiches on the tarmac again.
Sad Bastard Page 10
