Why had that woman had such an effect on him? He was unable to enjoy this simple pleasure. Harmless, he thought, but it was a twisted indulgence that had prevented him from growing up and becoming a man.
Meanwhile, Fiona was still standing outside her trailer. She, too, had watched Viola stalk across the cape. Her tears had dried. Her hands were balled up into fists; the usually sunny smile had left her lips. Instead, her mouth was set in grim determination. Her eyes were full of hate.
The last insult, she was thinking. The last insult.
She was right.
The Japanese chef didn’t appear to speak a word of English. Anton was surprised since he needed the language in his country and profession.
But he was pretending. It had served him on a few occasions – to supplement his pay with harmless blackmail from things he overheard. He didn’t do it for money, but to ensure he’d get another job. A couple of times Anton thought he saw clear understanding in the man’s eyes and gestures. Well, all he had to do was get the pufferfish poison out correctly, and Anton didn’t care what language he spoke.
Fiona was talking enough for the two of them, babbling in her delight to be working on this important dinner, seemingly cured of the wound Viola had inflicted. She didn’t even notice that the chef wasn’t listening to her at all.
“I’ll use this plate here…now, which knife? Oh, yes, this one will do perfectly.” She chattered away, the stream of words flowing from her mouth, describing every action she was taking.
The chef had slapped the blowfish on tempered glass and was humming as he took the knife to it, carefully, precisely.
Looking at the fish, Fiona was disappointed.
“I thought they were supposed to be all puffed up, like a balloon.”
“That’s how they fend off danger in the water,” Anton explained. “They take in water and blow themselves up, to look bigger, scarier.”
Was that how she looked to people? Fiona wondered. Big and scary? The chef began to cut out the liver, then the ovaries, and finally the intestine. He did it with such speed that Anton doubted his accuracy.
“Leave some in there.”
The chef looked at Anton and nodded. So he did understand English.
“Leave some what?” Fiona rinsed out a bowl, set it down, and came over.
“Some of the poison.”
“You’re giving your guests poison?”
“A smidge.” Anton poised his thumb and forefinger close together and caught the chef’s eye. He nodded and mimicked Anton’s gesture and waved the knife at the fish.
“People get high from eating it. Just a trace. That’s why I have him here. He’s trained for three years to be able to do this. His graduation was to prepare and then eat the fish himself.” Anton smiled. “The degree is a matter of life or death.” It seemed to amuse him. Fiona was horrified.
“What do you mean by high? Antsy, like with cocaine? Mellow as marijuana?”
“More numb, tingly.”
“That doesn’t sound very pleasant.”
“It’s not. But it’s what they want.”
“They want to die…eating?” Fiona sometimes thought that’s how she’d like to go, but only as a matter of timing, not poison.
“They want to dine with death. Not die.”
“And if they get too much poison?”
“Then they do die. A horrible, painful death.”
“Instant?”
“No, that wouldn’t be horrible or painful. It’s gradual. First, the extremities – the lips, the fingers, and the bowels paralyze. The diaphragm, the respiratory system break down, and all while the person is conscious.” Anton had the description down pat – he would be regaling the diners with it before they ate.
“Is there an antidote?”
The chef and Anton both shook their heads.
“The toxin spreads through the body – last to the brain, so the person is like a zombie, trapped inside a body that can’t move, until finally the poison attacks the brain.”
“Bon appetit,” said Fiona.
Anton smirked. “Indeed.”
Viola slipped out of Anton’s an hour before mealtime. She scurried across the cape, weapon in hand. She’d found it behind Jared MacPherson’s cookhouse, during a cigarette-smoking walk on the shore prior to dinner.
While she puffed smoke into the ocean breeze, her eyes had been fixed on the turbine high above her on the cape. It was fueling Newton’s batteries and her determination to do something about it.
She needed a weapon. What? Where would she find something? She spied Jared’s cookhouse and circled it, rummaging in piles of fishing rope and broken buoys until she found what she wanted. She grabbed it, eyes gleaming, and dragged herself along the sand as fast as she could manage, puffing up Wild Rose Lane and across the cape to the turbine, looking ridiculous with a long fishing hook in one hand, and her purse held in the other. She couldn’t be parted from her cigarettes.
There was one other thing in that purse. A book with a fawn-coloured kid-leather cover, aged by time. It, too, was a weapon. She marched right up to the dome, laid the book down on the stoop, and then turned her attention to the turbine.
She was set to do battle and slay the giant. The long hook was a gaff, used to land big fish.
Whoosh, thwarp. Whoosh, thwarp. Whoosh, thwarp.
Well, she thought, she was about to land the big one.
She took a swing at the tower, and smacked it with unusual force, considering her size and age. It clanged and reverberated back on her, sending unpleasant vibrations into her hands and up her arms.
That did not deter her. She swung again, a wider arc this time, bringing it down with sufficient force to make a dent. She smiled, encouraged, and bashed at the tower again, like a twenty-first-century female Don Quixote tilting at a windmill.
Newton did not see it in a romantic light. He saw a crazy woman attacking his creation. He emerged from the dome, and a motion light came on, though it was only dusk. She darted a look in his direction. Newton was outlined in the light, an aura radiating around his head, dancing with the flickering light and shadow cast by the spinning blades of the turbine. He charged forward, his foot kicking the fawn-coloured book. He didn’t notice it in his fury.
She took another swipe at the tower. The loose skin where her triceps should have been jiggled. He grabbed her hands before she could strike again, prying the hook from her. They battled over it, but he weakened, and she raised the gaff high above his head and brought it down. He jumped back, but the gaff ripped down the front of his shirt, popping the buttons and laying a long shallow wound down his torso.
She flung the gaff to the ground, heedless of what he might do with it, but Newton was a mild man, easily subdued, and he watched, unmoving as she picked up a rock and flung it at the turbine. On impact, the rock shattered into many pieces, sandstone dusting the air.
It was a ridiculous sight, this fragile old lady slinging sandstone rocks at the windmill.
She picked up another stone. Flung it. A futile attempt by one tiny woman to bring the towering monster down.
She felt dizzy. She took a few clumsy steps backward.
Newton, his shirt flapping in the breeze, caught her just as she was about to fall. He wondered why he had. Instinct.
She pulled herself away from him. Grabbed the gaff.
“Newton Fanshaw. That’s you?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer.”
Newton would be hearing from Viola’s lawyer. Not in the way she’d planned,but she would have the last laugh.
Newton found the book on his way back to the dome. He made the mistake of reading it. He squinted at the tiny lettering, pecking through it, skipping a number of pages, picking up his speed and anxiety. When he got to the end, he slammed it s
hut. He began to shake again, tears washing his face.
Newton didn’t know what he was going to do. He was still shivering – shaking – and that woman had already been gone for half an hour. He shouldn’t let himself be so affected by attacks like that, but it seemed he couldn’t help it. A brisk walk on the capes might help. He hadn’t been able to put the book down, leave it behind. It was gripped tightly in his hand, as if it had been welded there.
Gus watched him propel along the horizon – the best sighting of him she’d had since he’d come here, a skeletal man crossing the landscape in a hurry. Was it anything to do with the woman who’d crossed before, over to his house?
They’d both gone by Fiona’s Fudge Palace. The two of them like sticks. They could have used some fudge to fatten up.
Some of Fiona. That’s what Newton had decided he needed. He wanted to fold into her flesh to stop this shaking. He knew she was working in Anton’s kitchen that evening. Everyone knew. Fiona was so proud of being at the centre of the most exciting event in the village.
In case somebody hadn’t heard, she’d tacked a sign on the trailer door. Clos’ed tonight. S’ous’ chef at Anton’s’s’ Paradis’e.
Newton knew the menu by heart – she had told him again and again in her stream-of-consciousness babbling that sometimes made him want to wring her neck. Everyone in the village knew what the special guests would be eating tonight, because it had been in the newspapers. It had created a sensation all over the island, with some calling on their Members of the Legislative Assembly to call a halt to it. The phrase every mother has said at least once in her life, “Someone’s going to get hurt,” echoed down the coast from East Point to North Cape.
Someone’s going to get hurt.
Anton had retreated to the lounge and stopped answering the phone.
Someone’s going to get hurt.
Was that what he wanted? One particular someone?
He shook his head, to clear it. It would not be the pufferfish to blame. He hadn’t spent all that money flying in that chef for a botched job. A death at his inaugural dinner wouldn’t be good for business.
Or perhaps it would.
He mused on the thought, turning it this way and that, a thin smile on his face.
Chapter Thirteen
Newton hurried across the cape, but slowed as he approached Anton’s. The kitchen door was open, and through the screen door he could hear her voice, prattling on.
“No, that’s not the right dish…is there another? Oh well, this one will have to do…”
The Japanese chef was becoming so annoyed at her non-stop stream of talk that he was ready to run her through with the knife, but there was so much of her it would be dull by the time he hauled it out – and then it would be no good for the job ahead.
Her squeal caused the chef to make an unplanned thrust with his knife. He scowled in Fiona’s direction, but the scowl turned into a half-smile at what he saw.
Fiona – and half of another person, squeezed into her breasts and belly, head turned sideways and squished into furrows of wrinkles, eyes shut tight. Newton, still shaking, burrowed into her, searching for that floating feeling, that feeling of being in the womb, surrounded, protected. He got there, for just a moment, he got there. The book slid from his hand. It fell to the floor, and snapped him out of his reverie. He jerked, a spasm so sudden that Fiona fell back onto the counter. In her struggle to get free of Newton, they rolled along the counter edge, until she was on top of him, and he, red in the face, in fear of suffocating. She pushed herself off him, he hauled himself up, and, as he did, knocked a glass jar to the floor.
“Aiiee” was the first word in English that the Japanese chef spoke.
Fiona looked down at the mixture of broken glass and red powder.
“Oh, no. That stuff is worth a fortune. It’s meant to go in with the rice.”
Newton knelt down.
“I’m invoking the however-many-seconds-it-takes rule.” He picked out pieces of glass, and swept the red powder with one hand into the palm of the other. Fiona held out the rice bowl for him, and he dusted it off onto the white kernels, turning them a beautiful orangey-red.
“What is it?”
“Saffron.”
“Oh.” It appeared to mean nothing to him.
“It’s worth a fortune.”
“Then let’s not waste it.”
He scooped up all that he could, dumped the final handful into the bowl, and wiped his hands on the seat of his pants. It left two red streaks, worth more than the machine he’d wash them in.
“I’m not sure we should have put it all in.”
“Too late now,” said Newton.
The chef had been watching in horror. It wasn’t clear, though, what horrified him most – that they had picked up the saffron from the floor, or that they had put so much in.
Fiona kept thinking about what it was worth. So much money in such a small side dish. She hoped Anton wouldn’t find out. The saffron gave the rice a beautiful red colour. A study in red – the stained rice and the wine-coloured kidney beans.
She turned back to Newton. He had begun shivering again. She touched him on the cheek.
“No harm done,” she said.
There had been harm done. Newton had realized Fiona couldn’t give him what he wanted. He’d been intimate with her, but she didn’t satisfy that yearning, the yearning that had been there all his life. To return to the womb. She’d come close just now, but he’d been robbed of the moment. The closest he’d ever come had not been with a woman. It had been five years before, when he was taken into hospital with heart trouble. Real trouble. A ninety percent blocked artery. They’d blown it open, and infused him with warm liquid. He would never forget that feeling, as he would never forget being born. A rush of warmth gushed through him. Warm from the inside out. Chasing the cold that was always in him.
He couldn’t stop the shakes. She couldn’t stop them for him. No matter how hard she gripped him. His need became disgust at the sweaty smell of her, the neediness of her, as needy as he. Without a word, he turned and left.
On the way out, he didn’t notice Viola, sitting on the upper deck outside her bedroom, alternately staring at him and his ugly contraption, and plotting how to get rid of them both.
Viola was used to getting her way.
She did have the advantage over him. She knew who he was, and was hoping the weapon she’d handed him would turn him against himself. Kill the killer.
Moira took a kitchen knife and cut along the seam of one of the boxes Frank had brought into the kitchen. Inside was an envelope. She opened it. It was a large red card in the shape of a maple leaf, covered with glitter that flaked onto the floor. Moira frowned.
Dear Moira, read the impeccable cursive hand. We have despaired of your ever getting married. Don’t take this as a criticism. The despair is that we’ve had your wedding gift in the back room since you were born, forty years ago, and we can’t wait any longer to give it to you. We’ve been in an agony of excitement since we completed the purchase ten years ago. We hope you love them as much as we do. Happy Canada Day. Your loving aunts, Bessie and Jessie.
Though “fragile” was printed all over the package, the contents were not. They were twelve place settings of unbreakable, dishwasher-proof white plates made of hard plastic. Cornish Ware. A knock-off of the better-known glass brand. Moira’s aunts had bought them by saving black stamps at their local grocery store in Tatamagouche. It had taken five years to collect the dishes, and they were short twenty-five to complete the set when the black stamp program was phased out. The store manager helped the two batty old ladies find the last of the dishes they needed, forgotten in a warehouse in Halifax. For Bessie and Jessie, it was the mother lode.
Beautiful. Moira delicately lifted one of the dishes out of the box, turned it over. Just beautiful. She slid th
e plate back into its nest and closed the box. Too good to use.
“Could you move these one more time for me?”
Frank swiped a sleeve across his mouth and stood up. “Sure? Where?”
Moira motioned to a cupboard in a back corner of the room. Frank huffed and puffed the boxes across the kitchen. Moira opened the door. Inside were a few pieces of silver plate, polished so severely that there were gunmetal grey patches where the silver had been rubbed off. A set of china dishes belonging to her grandmother, cheap but cherished.
Frank placed the boxes on the floor of the cupboard.
Moira looked at them, with one small twinge of regret. They were practical. Tempting. She closed the door on them.
They would stay there for another forty years.
Moira made a mental note to send a thank-you card to Jessie and Bessie. Not right away. Let them wait.
The marriage comment had annoyed her. It had also inspired her.
Frank liked her, she knew. She began to plot how she could force his hand.
Anton was livid when he found out about the upset jar of saffron.
“This has cost me hundreds of dollars!”
“Oh, no,” said Fiona with the eagerness of a puppy anxious to please. She held up a bowl. Red rice and kidney beans.
“We scooped it up – five-second rule – and put it in the salad.”
Anton looked horrified, but the look of horror quickly vanished and turned to a sly smile.
“Can’t have too much of a good thing.” He dipped a spoon into the concoction and tasted a small sample.
“Just what I says to the chef here.”
Fiona was tense until Anton left the room, although he had taken it well. She fanned herself. She was sweating, hard, from fear, relief, and the heat of the kitchen. The meal was more or less ready. She cleaned the counter, and began to sweep the floor.
That’s when she noticed it. The fawn leather book.
She picked it up, her sweaty, floury hands leaving black-and-white smudges on the leather.
She opened it up.
“Can’t read a damn thing,” she muttered. The words were so small. She could just make out one word on the first page. “Viola.”
Something Fishy Page 10
