Cooking With Fernet Branca

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘Yeah? Maybe not. There’s no reason why a UFO mightn’t look like a helicopter.’

  The poor kid’s quite off his head, I thought. It’s going to be heaps of fun working together. ‘Nanty, there’s nothing on this mountain besides us, not at this level or above. I promise you, it’s just forest and ravines up there. If he tries to land anywhere up here it’ll be suicide, so in a second or two he’ll go away.’ But even as I spoke the machine was suddenly close enough to acquire bulk against the darkness, a huge shape lit from within by a pale glow. Before either of us could say anything more it was arriving slowly above the terrace a hundred feet up, the scream of its turbine deafening. Our paper napkins whirled away in the downwash and bits of twig and leaf rained from my carefully tended pergola. The damned thing obviously was going to land, but where? It passed over us and seemed to drift down behind Marta’s house and I suddenly remembered the patch of semi-jungle she’d cleared at the back. Even so, I saw no significance in this. To me, the helicopter was evidently in some sort of difficulty and was heading for her backyard as the only available landing space up here. Giving a small inward groan, the finely honed Samper conscience reminded me I owed Marta a debt after my accident with the jakes. Quite a small debt, it was true, but the redundant English gent in me was going to have to go over and see if the fat slag needed assistance at this moment of high drama. As my Norman ancestors would have reminded me, Samper derives from ‘Sans Peur’. Fearlessly I nipped into the kitchen and snatched up my torch. ‘Come on!’ I called. ‘Let’s go and see.’

  Nanty appeared paralysed, pieces of vine leaf resting on his bald head. He looked like a boy Bacchus whose wreath had failed. His face was china white.

  ‘Well, I’m going anyway,’ I told him impatiently, turning away.

  ‘Wait for me! Don’t leave me here!’

  ‘It’s not aliens, you idiot. It’s a helicopter that’s just landed at the back of my neighbour’s house, and I want to know why. She’s a Voynovian,’ I added as we hurried off together through the trees. He gave a small squeak as though I had mentioned a planet with which he was horribly familiar.

  ‘Turn that bloody torch off or they’ll see us,’ he said urgently as we skirted Marta’s house and approached her clearing. ‘Oh, Jesus H.’

  The matt black helicopter was crouched like a space age beast, hissing slightly as its blades twirled to a standstill. Nanty clutched my arm as the black-clad pilot removed his silver dome and walked towards Marta. It was she who held my attention. She was walking forward with her arms held stiffly out, easily recognizable by her frizzy mop of hair but tonight looking different in some way. Mesmerized? Drugged? Sleepwalking? She was wearing a long robe and something lumpy and unidentifiable around her neck from which dangled a long string ending in a plummet that sparkled in the machine’s coloured lights. I could make nothing of this. And I could make still less of the fact that she walked straight into this sinister black figure’s close embrace.

  This was a Marta I hadn’t suspected. My Marta was a dumpy peasant from Mitteleuropa who lived in Beatrix Potter rural squalor and pretended to write music in order to annoy me. Now here she was, wearing strange kit and greeting helicopter pilots at midnight like one of Frankenstein’s brides. A demon lover? Marta?? Something didn’t add up. They disappeared into the house together and I managed to pull Nanty up by the roots his feet had apparently put down. His hand trembled violently on my arm.

  20

  Getting my guest to bed that night was no easy matter. As Brill, surrounded by fixers and bodyguards and able to deploy untold millions to get his own way, he was probably quite a little tyrant. But as Nanty Riah, shorn of his wig as well as his recreational substances in order to fly Ryanair undetected, he was a baby. Without asking, he threw the bolts on front and back doors, turned on every light in the house and sat at the kitchen table shaking and knocking back Fernet Branca.

  ‘There’s really no coke in this place?’ he asked plaintively. ‘No hash? Not even a disco biscuit?’

  ‘Sorry. Plenty of booze, though, plus my calm and reassuring presence to remind you that what we’ve just witnessed has no connection whatever with outer space. What it’s all about I don’t know, but it’s obvious my dumpy neighbour isn’t quite the person I’ve been taking her for. Or at least she’s got herself mixed up in something I probably don’t want to know about.’

  ‘She was wearing cans, did you see? Headphones, right? Like, round her neck? She talked that thing down, whatever it was, disguised as a paraffin budgie.’

  ‘Oh, right, on her sub-ethernet communicator, you mean? And his disguise was so realistic he even made his down-draught stink of kerosene … Come on, Nanty, that was no wily space alien we saw. That was a demon lover or a coconspirator or maybe a DHL courier. I shall certainly go and see the old slag tomorrow morning and ask if we can expect late-night air activity on a regular basis because it’s playing havoc with our sleep pattern, not to mention my pergola. I expect her to say something like “Ooh, Gerree, is very apologies. Was flying doctor urgent for my parts”, but I suppose I might learn something.’

  I thought he looked faintly reassured that I was taking it all so lightly. Perhaps my manner also did something to allay his suspicions that beneath my natty leisurewear (from Homo Erectus, thank you very much, and not cheap) I was really one of the six-foot extraterrestrial lizards that David Icke knows to be the true progenitors of the House of Windsor. But I realized it was probably not enough to change his terrified townie’s perception that we were a long way up a mountain with the lights of civilization twinkling unreachably far below. I could imagine that if we ever did work together he might insist on doing it in a guarded hotel suite in downtown LA. At that moment the helicopter burst into distant life again and took off in a crescendo of sound that peaked and dwindled rapidly as it went behind a mountain ridge. Nanty’s bulging eyes followed its course as though the walls of my house were transparent.

  ‘For my money that’s a helicopter,’ I said. ‘But whatever it was, it’s gone.’

  ‘You think,’ he said. I noticed his fingers were trembling. ‘And who knows what it might’ve left behind? Her intergalactic cuddle-monkey, perhaps.’

  As he went upstairs at last I pressed Gazzbear on him for company. Its reassuring little blutt! of flatulence provoked a brave smile and the bald kid megastar gratefully took my teddy off to bed with him. That’s what years of recreational drugs and vampire-slaying do to you, I thought. Rampant paranoia.

  What lousy company we keep to earn our living.

  Sometime during the night I heard his voice distantly from his room. Its tone was raised and anxious, though I couldn’t make out any individual words. My first thought was that he might be praying, but then thought no – of course: he’s on his mobile. I’d not seen it, but it was hardly likely a zillion-dollar property like young Brill would take off into the unknown without one. His managers and lawyers had probably got this house on a satellite fix. I’d no doubt he was lying in bed clutching Gazzbear and hysterically spilling UFO stories into the ears of agents, band members, his psychiatrist – anyone who’d listen – while outside his hermetically closed windows owls went about their bloody business making noises like extraterrestrials homing in on him. Poverino.

  *

  The brilliant Tuscan light of a new morning restored a good deal of perspective to the events of the previous night. They had already acquired an unreal air, almost as though they had come out of a bottle along with the fermented juice of many grapes. My guest’s lunacy also appeared to have passed its acute phase. He came downstairs wearing a gold chain around his neck and a light blue T-shirt emblazoned with the word ‘Fothermuckers’ in dripping yellow letters. Odd lumps could be seen on his thin chest beneath the T-shirt as he sat down. His face had the crushed look of a newly awakened child.

  ‘Don’t want to talk about last night,’ he said illogically. ‘Freaking maxi-wig.’

  Without asking I placed before him a plate
of grilled bacon – real English bacon from Waitrose out of the freezer, not pancetta. It’s sad, but the Italians don’t do proper bacon.

  ‘My guru says bacon and speed are the two greatest evils in the world.’

  ‘Speed? Worse than, oh, crack cocaine?’

  ‘No, no, speed. You know – the hectic pace of modern life. Too much speed, too much rush, too much communication. That’s what she says.’

  ‘I see. And bacon, too.’

  ‘Yah, bacon’s the worst. I’m becoming a vegetarian in two weeks, maybe a vegan if all goes well. My karma needs rebalancing.’

  ‘I can hardly believe it, Nanty.’

  ‘Really. Probably yours does, too. Beetroot croquettes are the thing.’

  ‘Beetroot croquettes, eh? Let me tell you something. After careful observation and much meditation I’ve no longer any doubt that beetroot are capable of experiencing pain. That has to be bad for one’s karma, surely.’

  ‘Beetroot can feel pain?’

  ‘Definitely. Not pain like ours, maybe, at a death in the family or on hearing bagpipes, but certainly anguish of a kind. You must have seen that famous Kirlian photo of half a beetroot? You can clearly see the outline of its phantom other half, its missing limb. I ask you, what could be better evidence of lack – the absent twin or brother without whom the amputee beet can never again feel whole?’

  ‘You’re shitting me.’ Bacon dangled momentarily from his lower lip.

  ‘Absolutely not, Nanty. Such are the cruelties committed in the name of vegetarianism even as they’re concealed by a cloak of virtue. Come to that, imagine dropping a live potato into boiling water.’

  ‘Nah, you’re shitting me, man,’ said Nanty again. ‘Spuds don’t have nerves. Someone’s been having you on.’

  ‘On the contrary. Did you never see that programme about scientists recording the sounds made by individual cells? It’s a new technique called CS, or coherent sonagrammetry. They actually took this potato, hooked it up to electrodes and dropped it into boiling water. Unbelievable. Horrible. As it died each cell gave out this awful squeak. Millions and millions of them, rising in a crescendo and then fading into silence. Even the scientists doing the experiment looked shaken. It really made you think about the everyday vegetable agonies that take place below our crude sensory thresholds. We’re not aware of even a fraction of the pain we cause each day.’

  Nanty was listening with the remnants of a sceptical expression on his face, a last morsel of cold bacon impaled on his arrested fork, but his eyes were round.

  ‘So how can you even make french fries humanely?’ he asked.

  ‘My very question when I was scripting a video recently for the London Institute of Ethical Culinary Practice. They told me the kindest way to dispatch a potato is to plunge a Sabatier knife cleanly between its eyes. Or else it may be placed gently in cold water and brought slowly and mercifully to the boil. Peeling is agony, of course, so you need to soak the potato first for half an hour in a solution of local anaesthetic. They were using xylocaine.’

  ‘Nah … Are you having me on?’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. Now the trouble with vegans is they’re even crueller than ordinary vegetarians because they don’t stop at the usual tortures. It’s a good thing there aren’t more vegans because if there were their beliefs would cause massive environmental damage as well, by helping to drain the gene pool. How? Think about it. By outlawing all animal husbandry, as vegans would like to do, you’d bring to an end domesticated species such as the humble cow and the humble hen, to say nothing of the humble pig. If at the same time you also outlawed their slaughter, the only ethical thing would be to turn farm animals loose to live out their natural lives. But they’ve been selectively bred for centuries – genetically engineered, if you like – so they’re not proper wild animals and anyway there aren’t any wilds left for them to return to. Whoever saw a feral cow wandering the pedestrian precincts of Milton Keynes? I mean, it’s not New Delhi. As for chickens, are we to believe this ex-tropical jungle fowl would happily revert to its natural state in Epping Forest? I know some parakeets have found niches in the London suburbs, but can we really imagine vast flocks of rehabilitated chickens darkening the sun as they migrate over the South Downs? And consider pigs. What is the pig’s natural predator, other than man? Nothing. Or nothing in Europe, at any rate. After five years of the vegans’ benign sway the whole of the EU would be knee-deep in famished porkers, grubbing up and devouring innocent potatoes and beetroot all oblivious to the vegetables’ anguished screams. What does your guru have to say to that, Nanty?’

  ‘Er, well, I’d have to ask her.’ My guest was looking a little abashed. Unconsciously he had pulled from his T-shirt a bunch of amulets, pendants and stones he wore around his neck on a gold chain and was fondling them like worry beads. ‘I’ve never thought of it in quite that way. It’s sort of muddling, what you’re saying. It’s not what you usually hear about vegetarians and vegans, is it?’

  ‘No indeed,’ I said gravely. ‘It wouldn’t suit their conspiracy.’

  ‘Conspiracy? Are you working on an exposé or something? I mean, where are you coming from?’

  ‘The kitchen, mainly,’ I said. ‘I’m a cook. Incidentally,’ I changed the subject, ‘what does your T-shirt mean?’

  ‘“Fothermuckers”?’ He laughed. ‘That was the band I started back in uni. Down-and-dirty heavy metal sort of thing. There’s a lot of Jaggerage in me, I guess. But these days there’s more dosh in being a nice boy, so for as long as I can stand it I’ll wear my wig and do the clean teen. Goes against my true nature, though. That’ll be majorly themey in your book, I reckon, this business of me being musically compromised. That’s why Freewayz is different from other boy bands: we all play instruments as well as sing. It’s the legacy of my true self.’ He heaved a sigh. ‘Fothermuckers was a great band, specially for uni.’

  ‘Which university was that?’

  ‘Well, it was a poly when I went. Molesey Polytechnic. On the Thames? It became Hampton University my second year. I took Counter-cultural Studies and majored in Neo-Paganism. But of course,’ said Nanty hurriedly, ‘I’ve moved on since then. Light years. I was abused by Druids and that opened my eyes, you bet.’

  ‘Abused by Druids?’ Stone altars? The ruthless insertion of willow wands?

  ‘Verbally as well as physically. In the canteen one day. I made a joke about Isaac Bonewits. The Archdruid of Ár nDraíocht Féin? “Our own Druidism”. Well, a name like his is just asking for it, right? Before I knew it there’s this spotty geezer tips a bowl of mulligatawny over my head. Can’t take a joke. Celtic arsehole … You’re not Welsh or anything?’

  ‘No,’ I said faintly.

  ‘You don’t get off on oak groves and mistletoe?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yah, well, I could see they weren’t very serious,’ said Nanty. ‘Imagine trying to reconstitute a religion that was completely wiped out by the Romans. Daft buggers. One of their course projects was to compose a Druidic ritual, kinda tricky given there’s exactly one classical account of a ritual and that’s about how to harvest mistletoe. Oh, and there’s one sacrificial victim, that guy they found in a bog near Manchester, Lindow Man or whatever he was called. Great basis for a liturgy, right? A complete con, Druidism.’

  ‘Unlike UFOs.’

  ‘Sure, you can laugh now but it wasn’t so funny last night, was it? You can’t just dismiss ufology. Ever since Roswell it’s been more thoroughly studied in more countries of the world than just about anything. Your explanations were all very rational but you gotta admit there’s things you can’t explain. Like how was it that thing turned up just at the moment we were talking about UFOs? You’re not going to tell me it was pure bloody coincidence, I hope? My mistake was, I wasn’t wearing my crystals last night. I shan’t be taking them off from now on, want to bet? Plus –’

  But at that moment he was interrupted by sleigh bells playing ‘Für Elise’ with increasing urgency. He
hauled a mobile out of his pocket, all a-twinkle with violet lights, and killed the tune in mid-chime. Score one for Samper, I thought, as the founder of Fothermuckers took his call and left me to clear the breakfast table and sourly contemplate the prospect of writing this idiot’s life-story. It was odd to overhear a phrase in that boyish voice that sounded like ‘offshore negotiables’. Nanty’s New Age blarney had smoothly given way to hardnosed finance. I thought I’d better trot across and hear what bizarre explanation Marta could provide for last night’s events. Outside among the trees and sunlight I reflected bitterly on how little time it had taken to turn a quiet rural retreat into bedlam. Counter-cultural Studies, forsooth. Offshore negotiables, my eye. Crystals …!

  21

  As I neared Marta’s house I could hear peculiar noises from within. It was as though a really awful Italian tenor were practising high notes and always failing to reach them. It seemed to be a recorded performance, too, since there was an orchestra in the background. ‘Uffa … buffa …’ At the back of my mind the impression formed that somewhere, sometime, I had heard this incompetent before. Maybe he was the male equivalent of Florence Foster Jenkins, a self-deluded amateur rich enough to hire his own orchestra and Carnegie Hall? With difficulty I made my knocking on the kitchen door audible above the demented squalling and peeped in.

  The Voynovian vamp was seated at the table wearing a rumpled beige night dress with embroidery over its mountainous regions, no doubt a galumphing peasant attempt at the baby-doll effect. She was also wearing the headphones we had seen the previous night. Before her on the table was a keyboard, a screen and a computer. The music was coming from beneath the usual pile of old bedsheets, scarcely muffled. Marta was just then leaning forward intently to correct something on the tall sheaf of music paper propped on the keyboard’s stand. Her awesome bosom, barely contained by the babushka chic, depressed several keys at once, not to mention her distracted visitor. There was a gigantic yelp of sound. She glanced up, saw me, and with what looked like a guilty start killed the music and snatched off the headphones. Silence fell.