Cooking With Fernet Branca

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  This discussion goes on in much the same declamatory and pointless fashion for another hour, with each of us telling the other things we both already know, which seems to describe ninety-five per cent of all human discourse and especially that between family members or lovers. Finally Ljuka looks at his watch and yawns and says he must go. He’s locked into it all in a way I can do nothing about. My little brother, so handsome (and my God he is a handsome kid, everything his elder sister isn’t) is unreachable and alone as he walks out into the night in his black jumpsuit. When I embrace him I leave my stupid tears on the flap of his breast pocket as I grip his shoulder blades, pulling us together and determined not to allow my hands to stray in order to satisfy a bleak curiosity that wants to know if he is armed. Those Makarov pistols, whatever became of them? If you fly mysterious unmarked aircraft in a NATO country things will go hard with you if you’re also found to be carrying concealed weapons, unless … unless … Oh, I don’t want to know.

  ‘I’ll be back in a bit,’ he says. ‘You only need call and I’ll come, Matti.’

  These childhood names. We’re still the kids we’ve always been. What on earth would Mili think if she were standing here in the dead of night watching the children she had nursed waving to each other through perspex as the turbine groans, whines, and the sagging blades overhead whirl and stiffen? But she’s a survivor, too, and has seen far worse. In a calamitous typhoon of downdraught and hot kerosene gas the winking machine lifts, tilts out over the gulf and sinks, its whup-whup-whup banging back from the cliff face opposite as it flogs the night air below where I stand. Long afterwards I glimpse his lights as he curls away towards the northeast, gaining height to clear the Apuan Alps. Far below, the quilt of lights that is Viareggio and the coastal strip ends abruptly at the black invisible Mediterranean Sea. If I follow that coastline down far enough I might just see the lights of Pisa. I wonder if even at this moment some American at Camp Darby is watching the blip of my brother’s helicopter on a radar screen with a puzzled frown, reaching for a telephone. A sister’s paranoia? (But pride, too, that our family should have such power.) I shiver and stare long at the now silent sky and its pricklings of ancient starlight over Mt Matanna.

  Gerald

  19

  Off to a famous start down at Pisa airport, having with some difficulty spotted my man coming out of the Arrivals hall with the bemused look common to air travellers. This, together with his gamin figure, gave him an air of youthful vulnerability I wasn’t quite prepared for. I was expecting something rather more raddled.

  ‘Mr Riah? I’m Gerald Samper. Welcome to sunny Tuscany. May I call you Nanty?’

  ‘Nanty’s fine.’

  ‘Right.’ I lowered my voice as his fellow passengers elbowed their way past in order to beat each other to the car rental windows. ‘I recognized you at once, thanks to having been warned. I must say that’s far and away the best bald wig I’ve ever seen. Congratulations.’

  He removed his dark glasses and revealed cold blue eyes. ‘It’s not a wig.’

  Oh well done, Samper. ‘Ah. Sorry. I was told you’d be wearing a disguise. Wig and shades, they said.’

  ‘This is a disguise.’ The blue eyes blinked once as though taking a snapshot. ‘You didn’t recognize me, did you? You just guessed.’ His voice is triumphant, bright boy catching out teacher.

  We Sampers are not often at a loss for words but I led the way to the car in what I hoped was a conciliatory silence. Only when we were on the Genova motorway did he say: ‘You really don’t recognize me, do you? Not even enough to know that when I’m Brill I wear a blond wig, which is too much of the time. That’s fine.’ He smiled at a passing truckload of soiled pigs speeding towards their Golgotha. ‘That’s just what I wanted. Someone who can see me for what I really am.’

  Bald, he means? My fingers tightened grimly on the steering wheel, like Per Snoilsson’s in chapter three. How many days of this would I have to endure? My mind started flitting, for some reason touching on roasts and fricassées. What would make the best stuffing for Marta if I survived an Andean plane crash and she didn’t? We could hardly be a planeload of rugby players, though. Hang on – a planeload of chefs, of course, flying to Valparaiso to take part in a televised cookery contest. Each is bringing his own supplies and equipment with him so the aircraft’s hold is stuffed with exotic spices and personal kitchenware. That’s why the glacier outside the shattered cabin windows is strewn with brightly polished copper chafing pans flashing in the high-altitude sunlight … ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I said, I’ve never been to Italy before.’

  Izzat so, buster? ‘That’s quite an achievement, Nanty. Not easy, these days. I thought all the British nobs came here now. You know, Tony Blair and the rest. Tuscminster.’

  ‘I must have been avoiding it.’

  I catch the blue glance sideways. Maybe he does have a sense of humour? Like a lot of showbiz stars young Brill is surprisingly small. The baldness is distracting but underneath is a professional youthfulness that makes his actual age hard to guess. This little number, I think, may even do a Cliff Richard if he can keep it up and shun evil. I go on mentally fitting him with a succession of wigs to see if I recognize him. Nope. I’m afraid that like many people with rather a good head of hair I’m quick to notice the follicularly challenged. I wonder what happened to his? A fashion statement, perhaps. One of those clones with high-gloss scalps. Or maybe he was staying in the Chernobyl Holiday Inn when … Not AIDS?? The thought is disquieting. Naturally I know all that stuff about loving the patient and not the disease, easier said than done, and no doubt it’s difficult to catch in the normal course of non-erotic domesticity. We all saw those pictures of Lady Di fearlessly pressing terminal flesh in hospices around the globe. But we were never shown the next shot, when she was whisked away to gargle with bleach and plunge into a bath of boiling Dettol. After Nanty’s gone am I going to have to smash all the crockery like a Romany who’s discovered that his daughter was menstruating when she did the washing-up? Make a funeral pyre of my choice oak lavatory seats? Am I being a little hysterical?

  ‘Alopecia,’ he says.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You’re wondering why I went bald. Everyone who sees me like this does. How can the leader of a boy band be bald? It’s simple. I got alopecia and they don’t think it’s reversible. It mostly all fell out except my eyebrows and, if you’re interested, what the specialists call “scanty body hair”.’

  The funny thing about hearing a phrase like ‘scanty body hair’ (or even ‘Nanty body hair’) is that you can’t stop yourself trying to visualize it. Young Mr Riah has been there, too.

  ‘Not enough to fill a contact lens,’ he said briefly.

  We had long since left the motorway and were just winding uphill to Casoli. ‘You must be wondering where on earth I’m taking you.’

  ‘Not really. Your bloke said it’s secluded. That’s good enough for me, unless you’re a mad axe-murderer.’

  Not yet, I thought to myself. Just don’t push it. Ten minutes later my megastar guest was clearly taken by the house. He admired it, he admired its position, he admired my downstairs lavatory.

  ‘He’s kick, your teddy-bear,’ he said when he returned to the kitchen.

  ‘He’s called “Gazzbear”.’

  ‘That right? I saw he’s wearing a waistcoat saying “Squeeze me – I’m a gas.” So I did. Seriously unbad.’

  ‘He’s advertised as “The World’s First Farting Teddy Bear.” He comes from Pennsylvania. I discovered you can modify the fart with KY Jelly, depending on how wet you want it to sound. You feel a bit of an idiot with your little finger inserted in the pink rubber anus of a stuffed toy, but you get over it.’

  ‘I’ve seen worse at parties.’

  ‘Oh, good. We’re going to need a lot of baroque detail for this book of yours. That’s what the punters come for.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘Trust me. It’s always been like that. Whoev
er wanted to read a biography of Nero without the orgies and tortures?’

  ‘Did you catch that movie, Nero’s Birthday? Hey – unbelievable stuff. I’ve got the director’s cut on DVD.’

  ‘Exactly. We’re voyeurs at heart. After half a century of TV we all want to see without actually having to risk anything. Heroin overdoses are really only fun to read about. True of many things. Even sex, quite often.’

  Nanty glanced at me sharply. ‘The voice of experience?’

  ‘Maybe it’s not as uncommon as people like to pretend,’ I said evasively. ‘You may remember a predecessor of yours, John Lydon, a.k.a. Johnny Rotten? He memorably said “Love is just two minutes fifty-three seconds of squishing noises.” I think he went on to remark that only someone who needed his head examining would bother with it, but I can’t remember the exact quotation. And that was love, mind.’

  ‘John’s not wrong,’ said the lead singer of Freewayz with conviction.

  *

  We ate lunch on the terrace. I had deliberately prepared nothing exotic for my guest, after all. My Rabbit in Cep Custard could wait as I already had a good cold bird in the fridge. I thought I’d try him with a perfectly standard scratch luncheon: home-made bread, salami, prosciutto crudo, a salad of tomatoes, mozzarella and basil, with three different cheeses and fruit to follow. He blenched at nothing, didn’t call for Branston pickle, and addressed himself like a trooper to the wine – a quite passable chilled Greco di Tufo. Indeed, he became merry as the afternoon slipped by and positively flattering about Downhill all the Way!

  ‘Great book,’ he summed up, pouring himself another glass from the third bottle I had opened. ‘Great title, too.’

  ‘I don’t know how on earth I got it past them. I really don’t think they noticed. They just registered the word “downhill” and because Luc was the world’s most famous downhill skier they didn’t see beyond it. Even stranger because he was clearly past his peak at the time I wrote it, although he didn’t do his spectacular collapse until after the book was out.’

  ‘Burnout?’

  ‘Oh, everything. Knees had gone, hips were going, bladder problems. Plus he’d snorted more snow in ten years than he’d skied over. Couldn’t get it up, but not for want of trying. And all this at twenty-eight. I’d call that downhill, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘But, like, you were sympathetic, you know? You made him a real person. I mean, not just an icon in snow goggles.’

  ‘Luc was a real person. Still is, I suppose, in that Swiss clinic of his. These days he’s a prematurely aged businessman who totters from chair to chair discussing sportswear franchises and authorizing his signature to be put on a line of skis he’ll never wear. He’s surrounded by nurses who look like Playboy bunnies and who, when he’s in wistful mood, give him vigorous enemas. But it does no good.’

  Shortly after this we both had to go and lie down, Nanty describing his condition as ‘totally stocious’. I wouldn’t have said he was a fellow I yearned to work with, exactly, but compared to Per Snoilsson he was practically a kindred spirit despite his occasional Buffyisms and mockney vowels (he’s actually from Harpenden). As far as I was concerned he’d passed the first test by not being faddist about food. The second test, too, by not being especially boring and for having some sense of irony. The third test …

  The third test he flunked – and retroactively the second one after all – when we were sitting on the terrace later that evening having eaten a resplendent bird stuffed with some of the precious smoked cat I get from a little alpine village in the Alto Adige and which I must learn to make for myself. You hang the cat in a chimney for some weeks. If you mince the meat fine, mix it with porridge oats soaked in Fernet, pack it into the hollowed skin of a pomegranate pierced with holes and stuff a bird with it, a delicious smoky-sweet scent pervades the flesh of the stuffee – in this instance a guinea-fowl. I didn’t tell Nanty exactly what the stuffing was made from, saying only that it was a chef’s secret. I don’t yet know him well enough. Still, he ate a good two-thirds of the bird.

  But it was after this, when we were toasting each other in vin’ santo and gazing out past the dark crags of our eyrie at the twinkling panorama below, that he asked the dreaded question that failed him the third test: ‘Gerry, do you believe in UFOs?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘No, Nanty.’

  ‘I guess that means you’ve never seen one? You will when you do.’

  ‘No doubt. The same goes for ghosts and visions of the Virgin Mary. Until then I remain a profound unbeliever.’

  ‘I’ve never seen one,’ he admitted to my surprise. ‘But I’ve read enough to know they exist. You ought to read Timothy Good – he’d convince you. It’s completely impossible that all those people are either liars or nutcases. I do wish I could see one,’ he said. ‘This is just the sort of place. Nice and dark up here. Panoramic field of view.’ He stared wistfully upwards. ‘I know they’re up there somewhere. The question is, would I definitely recognize one if I saw it?’

  ‘I should imagine so. Aren’t they usually like whatever it was they think landed at that US air base in Suffolk in the early eighties? Revolving lights, tripod feet, the little turret on top, the classic saucepan-lid profile?’

  ‘That’s the whole point,’ he cried, spilling his drink for emphasis. ‘You can never tell. A UFO doesn’t necessarily have to look like a UFO. You can’t ever tell about aliens, either. They don’t always look like Greys in Close Encounters any more than they’ve always got green antennae. They can look however they choose. They might look like you or me.’ There was a pause. ‘They might be you or me.’

  Just for a scooting instant as I looked into those mildly insane blue eyes beneath the hairless dome I felt a chill pass over my bare arms and saw the hair on them rise. Long ago as early teenagers a friend and I had played that game of scaring each other shitless while walking home in the dark. It was an unlit country lane on a moonless night. We both knew the lane blindfold and in any case there was enough starlight in the sky for the hedgerows to be clearly visible. But we both saw the menacing figure at the same instant, its claw upraised. It was unquestionably keeping pace with us. We stopped in terror.

  ‘It’s just that dead tree the cows scratch on.’

  ‘No it’s not. That’s further on.’

  Bit by bit we talked ourselves into sidling close enough to see that it was the tree. ‘But supposing it hadn’t been?’

  ‘Yes. And supposing … just suppose you’re not the person I think you are? Suppose I turn my head suddenly and it’s not you at all? It sounds like you, but that’s because it’s taken over your body.’

  The tremble in his reasonable voice scared me too. ‘I could say the same about you,’ I said. ‘You might have been taken over ten minutes ago, and whatever you are now is just saying these things in your voice to lull my suspicions. If I dared look at you I might see you had a scaly tail dragging silently behind.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t. I promise you I haven’t.’

  ‘But you may be only saying that …’

  Together we worked ourselves into a state of barely suppressed panic, rigidly walking the last half mile not daring to look at each other, staring straight ahead and promising on everything we held sacred (suddenly quite a lot) that we really were the old friends we said we were and not monsters who might suddenly give a triumphant scream and turn with glowing eyes and rending claws. We tested each other on intimacies surely no monster could know about, listening intently for any uncharacteristic tone or word that would reveal the lurking impostor, even as we silently knew that the fiend could inhabit every last cell in our brains.

  And here on my terrace in Italy, maybe a little ‘stocious’ with wine, I felt the same momentary chill at the resurfacing of this half-forgotten childhood game, now played not in terms of monsters, which were kids’ stuff, but in terms of aliens, in which millions of adults worldwide fervently believed.

  ‘You think about these things a lot, do
you?’ My tone was one of sympathetic detachment, the cool old analyst noting down a young patient’s wacky fantasies.

  But Nanty wasn’t listening. He was staring out across the dark bowl of panorama whose craggy edges were formed by mountain outlines and whose bottom was stuck with myriad crumbs of light. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing.

  ‘What’s what?’

  “There – that flashing red light. It’s coming towards us.’

  ‘God knows. Some sort of aircraft. Pisa airport’s only just down the coast and there’s an Italian air force base attached to it, to say nothing of a US base near there. I agree, it does seem to be coming in this direction. Yes – it’s a helicopter. You can hear the rotors.’

  My guest remained silent. I reflected again on what a lot he’d drunk tonight in a quiet sort of way.

  ‘I can see a blue light,’ he said. ‘And a white light. And a green one.’

  The helicopter, which had at first been rather lower than us, had gained height and was still holding steadily in our direction, much to my surprise. To the best of my knowledge there was nothing above us on this mountainside except steep forest and some nasty vertical cliff faces. At his present rate of climb the pilot would never clear the summit. Now the nearby crags were throwing back the sound of the engine as well as of the rotors themselves.

  ‘Perhaps he’s playing chicken,’ I said uncertainly. ‘Probably some air force trainee pilot trying to give his instructor a heart attack. At least you can be sure it’s a helicopter and not a UFO.’