The Decadent Handbook

by Rowan Pelling

  ‘If truly you are intent on learning the particularities, Madame, since I was a child, I never was one to clear my plate, so I assure you, I couldn’t care less how big the portion is.’

  I never saw a face so sceptical when hearing the truth spoken. She looked down at my hair dress, crinkled her nose in disgust, and pulled my hair mercilessly. I was certain the silver chain was going to cut my throat, when it all of a sudden broke, and the tiny Jesus fell into the cleavage of my breasts.

  ‘If you’ll forgive me, Madame, I left something on the stove … and I really must be going … ’

  Grass seeds had been planted around the building, but the grass had not yet grown; normally we weren’t allowed to be standing where we were. I looked down and saw my silver chain, long and fine, a shiny scar across the earth, a tiny food chain, a food chain Jesus was an integral part of.

  ‘Don’t give me no fuckin’ cop-out! I asked you a question an’ I wanna answer now!’

  ‘Would you terribly mind restating it more specifically?’

  ‘Why in hell did ya choose my husband?!’

  ‘I assure you, I did not choose him. I did not even sample him. There is all of him still available for you.’

  ‘You think he was good ta play with, an’ now ya throw him back like scraps! Like a bone ta an ol’ dog!’

  ‘Scraps? I didn’t even get a mouthful! If he came home stripped, it wasn’t me!’

  ‘Delinquent,’ she kicked me before crossing the street as an old man peddled by, flag high on his three-wheeler like a proud tail.

  I studied the shelf with care before making my choice: tarragon, allspice, capsicum, celery salt, grains of paradise, bay leaves, caraway seeds, juniper, mace, turmeric, coriander, garlic powder, oregano, nutmeg, cardamom, thyme, cloves, saffron, cumin, paprika, red pepper, thyme, sesame seeds, and dried parsley. I avoided looking at the cashier. I looked down at my bare and blistered feet instead. She rang the small bottles up and, one by one, rolled them down to the bag boy. I could feel her eyeing me like I was weird; maybe it was my teeth chattering, or my shifting from foot to foot.

  When I returned, the hob was beaming with anticipation. The idea of cooking was succulent to me. I tore off my hair dress. It stuck to me and I felt like I was skinning myself. My whole body was perspiring, which proved useful, for the spices adhered more easily. I powdered my self instinctively, primitively, powerfully.

  When I sat on the hob, the heat was like a magnet attracting my skin, adhering to it so thoroughly, it felt like being sucked into the metal disc. I did not scream, only my other self did, for it was weak just as flesh is known to be. I smelt meat quite soon, several meats at that, for sitting as I was, I’d offered the hob all seven, and as many different skins. The small triangles of fattiness at the junction of my thighs were most unlike the leanness of the red meats; the stringy, brown loop to the back yielded an earthy scent I could clearly distinguish from the buttery, lardy layer of the buttocks; the mild cheesiness of the labia, the fishiness of the mucous membranes, the warm, eggy, yeasty gases that came from the life-giving orifice were each quite unique. I had detected the particular aroma of fish, fowl, red meat, rabbit, pork, veal, and shellfish, when unfortunately the bouquet was spoilt by the smell of burning hairs. These were like onions, put in the pan too early, and now scorching, overpowering the dish. The snapping and popping were not everywhere uniform. Those dangling flaps which can be spread like a tiny quail’s wings, whose edges were already crinkly like bacon, strangely, reacted the least, stuck too sadly to the burner to move, they turned a greyish-white. My buttocks, the most sedate of the mass, on the contrary, made a tremendous fuss. The tiny pockets of air behind the dented orange skin were liable to unexpected explosions, and the onslaught of greasiness threatened fire. My intimate folds shrunk before my very eyes. My juices ran down the front of the stove and onto the floor, between the other burners and down my legs and feet; some of it cooked as soon as it was freed, thickened, browned, blackened. The pain was atrocious, for my uncooked cells were still imbued with that force, pulling themselves away from inert food, holding tightly onto the miracle, the autonomy, the fuss, one calls life.

  My head, heavy with thoughts, drooped dangerously towards the floor. I noticed a small flame had taken in the triangle of coarse hairs; it was dancing its everlasting hip-thrusting dance, celebrating its power to transform flesh to meat, life to food, pain to senselessness. The kitchen began to turn faster and faster. My head fell forwards, bringing the rest of my body down with it, down onto a pile of dirty dishes which broke, their fragments sticking into the last of me.

  Alice, the Sausage

  Sophie Jabès

  Alice had seen the light: that was it, that was exactly what she wanted to be, a salsiccia, a beautiful and big salsiccia, extremely fragrant, smooth and fat. A sausage. Alice couldn’t take her eyes off the streaky bacon she had just prepared for herself. Alice the sausage. Alice had finally found her way. She was lying there, in the sauce, in the middle of the lentils, smiling, pleasing and appetizing.

  Alice went to stretch out on the sofa. The revelation was decisive, she had to meditate, weigh up the consequences of her discovery, establish a plan of action, concoct a strategy. The task was not going to be easy.

  Alice dragged herself in front of the mirror. She smiled with childish, amazed delight. Her arms bloated, her stomach, swollen like a wine skin, her eyes drowned in the fat of her cheeks constituted so many pleasant surprises for her to evaluate with thorough precision. Those arms had to swell even more, puff up, stretch and become even podgier. There had to be no more difference between arms and fingers, or between thighs, calves, ankles and feet. All had to come together in one round form towards which all Alice’s desire strained.

  Alice’s skin was soft. She worked at making it even smoother. Three times a day she slid across the floor, on the tiles from Ferrara. She rolled from left to right, right to left, roaring with laughter. It was a long time since she had laughed so much. She liked the contact of the cold floor beneath her thighs and forearms. She kneaded her body in that manner for hours on end. Her skin was turning blue, with red marks, resembling the marbling of the chipolatas bought in the market. Alice was delighted.

  Alice was still hoping the telephone would ring. But it didn’t. In fact, she was no longer in such a hurry to see the twins again. Deep down, she knew that they would reappear one day, enticed by the fat. She wanted to be ready, surprise them, amaze them, leave them breathless.

  Alice had bought a parrot. It was a male macaw which murmured words of love and encouragement all day long. ‘Go go tootsie wootsie,’ it hurled when it saw Alice rolling on the floor. ‘I love you, yeah yeah yeah,’ it sing-songed with little clucks of satisfaction, delighting the young woman each time she was depilating. The parrot could also sing some tunes from La Traviata that he interlaced with obscenities, thus rendering something like, ‘E troppo tardi … show us your arse, sweetie.’ Alice listened to it while eating pizzas, her mouth full and her hands greasy. She spent hours making him repeat, ‘Alice the sausage, Alice the sausage.’ The parrot looked at her with empty round eyes and intoned, ‘Alice the sausage, the girl who fucks nice, Alice the sausage, the girl who sucks spice, Alice the sausage, are you getting the message?’

  Alice often fell asleep on the sofa. The parrot carried on muttering ‘heave-ho!’, the cuckoo sounding the hours and half hours, amid the greasy wrappers, the bottles of Chianti and Coke, the piles of plates she refused to wash.

  Alice left boxes of pizza, plates with sauce, leftovers of ice cream and squid fritters littered everywhere. It all blended cheerfully, and it stank like a pigsty. Alice delighted in that putrid smell. ‘A sausage cannot be made with Hermès scarves,’ she loved to repeat.

  Alice slept more and more. She was awake for three hours a day at the very most. She rose, or rather, slid to the floor, crawled as far as the kitchen, devoured everything there was to devour, gave some seed to the macaw, which thanked her with
moist eyes: ‘Thank you, sausage,’ looked with satisfaction at the progress of her swelling in the mirror and rolled back to bed.

  Alice’s skin became extremely smooth. Flavoured too. With basil. Parsley. Green peppercorns. She smelt of the herbs and spices she sprinkled passionately on her food. It was marvellous to behold. Her flesh was swelling, abundant, springy, or almost.

  Alice went to so much trouble caressing herself with creams and potions patiently prepared, kneading herself, that it was as if her skin became lined with felt. Alice had started her depilations again. The sessions lasted longer, that was all. She now needed between ten and twenty kilos of lemons and as much sugar, very little water and lots of patience. Alice had plenty of that.

  Every evening Alice inspected the results. Sometimes she lost heart. She collapsed on the sofa and contemplated her bruised legs with sadness. The task seemed impossible, the goal too far away. She cried, leaning on her Regency chest of drawers, ruminating with dread over the idea that she would probably never be a sausage. She looked at her life again. Those men to whom she had been as nice as possible, her father who used to sing in a raucous, albeit melancholic voice, her mother gone with her most generous lover. It all seemed so vain and useless. Her efforts, her sufferings, for nothing. For a few bruises and a few kilos too many.

  Her anxiety overwhelmed her all the more. The pit deep in her stomach became more hollow and deeper still. More threatening. She swallowed big plates of cannelloni, heaped spoonfuls of chestnut cream and fell asleep like an angel.

  Alice always had the same dream. She was on a beach, on the edge of a jetty, and there was an enormous chocolate cake topped with a pretty red cherry on the water. She wanted to get to the cake. A parrot came and landed next to her, cackling in her ear, ‘Alice the sausage, Alice the sausage.’ She could see her limbs change form, her legs and arms swell, her body become a big, chubby, white pudding with wings. She could then follow the parrot which took her near the much coveted dessert. As soon as she approached, the dessert sank in the water. As she left, it came back to the surface. The more she desired it, the more it seemed to defy her. She finally made up her mind and shot forward, trying to catch it. She landed a few centimetres from the cake. Only the cherry was left and from up close it looked all wrinkled.

  Alice always woke up in a sweat, screaming. She had missed the cake, she had missed her life.

  In order to soothe the wound which reopened, she dragged herself towards the fridge,finished off two plates of lasagne and a few slabs of milk chocolate. She found some bocconcini, mozzarella, rosette with mortadella and lentils with bacon.

  Slightly calmer now, she went back to bed holding her bulging stomach.

  She couldn’t fall asleep. The cuckoo sneered. The parrot snored on its perch. Alice felt lonely and empty. With that strange feeling that she was going to take off if she didn’t stuff herself. She had to eat.

  There was not much left. Alice was acting crazy. Stale farmhouse loaves, old apples that had been left about, roasted chicken legs, slightly rancid. Alice found a tin of flageolet beans at the bottom of the cupboard. Alice hated those beans. She devoured them avidly. It was as if she had a vacuum cleaner in her stomach. She sucked in everything she could find, unsalted rusks, stuffed cabbage, olives, a jar of mustard, some fresh cream, gherkins, slabs of cooking chocolate. Nothing could fill the emptiness.

  Alice went back to bed. She dreamt of porchetta and grilled lamb chops.

  Days went by, nights too.

  Alice hardly moved now. She ate straight from the bags the delivery men left at her door. She no longer had the strength to lift them.

  She caressed her shapeless body. Weighed its roundness in her hands. Spent hours staring at the portrait her brother had drawn of her. To become imbued with it. Convinced that her wish was soon to be granted.

  Alice, the sausage…

  One horrible January morning, a cold, rainy and soulless day, Alice didn’t wake up. Perhaps she felt like making the most of her reserves, like hibernating, we will never know, but the fact was that Alice didn’t deign to open her eyes. The macaw called in vain, ‘sweetie, tootsie wootsie, sausage,’ but she kept her eyes closed.

  It was on that same morning that, with a severe storm breaking outside, the twins chose to push the door open and pay their friend a visit.

  At first they were taken aback by the smell. They almost left, but they had brought three kilos of lentils with them, it would have been a shame to leave before showing them to Alice.

  So they came in, groping their way in a room plunged into total darkness, whispering:

  ‘Alice, Alice, are you there?’

  They couldn’t see a thing, the parrot kept quiet. They thought Alice must be out and they would have to wait patiently on the sofa.

  When they sat down they felt a kind of viscous but, at the same time, firm mass beneath them. They leapt to their feet.

  ‘What’s that?’ they shouted, their heads bobbing.

  Before their eyes was an enormous sausage, a kind they had never seen. A pink sausage marbled to perfection, a magnificent sausage.

  ‘What a beauty!’

  The twins had never dreamed of anything so beautiful. They immediately believed that Alice must have prepared that sausage for their dinner. Extremely proud to have thought to bring the lentils, they settled in the wicker chairs to wait for Alice, who wouldn’t be long.

  They didn’t move. Alice didn’t come back.

  Could they leave without talking to her? That was out of the question.

  They fell asleep.

  When the twins awoke, hunger was gnawing dreadfully at them. Fulvio, being less timid, said aloud what Flavio had been thinking for quite a while.

  ‘What about cooking some lentils and eating a bit of the sausage?’

  ‘Without waiting for Alice?’

  ‘You know her, she’s so nice, she will be delighted to know we have eaten our fill.’

  Hearing those words, Alice opened the fatty slit which was now her eye. The twins, after so many months of absence, were standing next to her, whispering about how nice she was. Alice was on the verge of tears, her happiness seemed too copious. Finally her efforts were to be rewarded. She understood of course that the twins wanted to eat her. It didn’t matter, she realized that her life would take on its whole meaning. In that desire for her, there was an absolute gratitude, a boundless trust. Those twins, whom she had sucked so often and so patiently, were going to devour her … bit by bit. For the first time Alice felt an intense pleasure, close to ecstasy.

  Fulvio and Flavio put the lentils on to cook, took a little penknife they kept to slice the bread and porchetta and started to cut the sausage.

  Alice didn’t scream. She was in pain but the moment was so exquisite, her happiness so intense. Here was the opportunity to be perfectly nice to the twins. The gift of herself finally took on its whole and entire meaning. She didn’t utter a sound. At the third mouthful Alice passed out. It was never known if it was from pain or orgasm.

  Fulvio and Flavio had a feast. Until that day they had eaten nothing so delicious. So mild. So well-flavoured. So unctuous. So tasty. By the end of that winter day they had quietly relished the whole of Alice in a feast as unexpected as it was delicious.

  Once the sausage and the lentils had been consumed they had a rest. Despairing of all hope of seeing their friend come back, they left her a note assuring her that the meal had been fantastic. They departed feeling light-hearted, promising to return soon to thank her.

  When the twins came out into the street, the sky had cleared. There was one single cloud which looked down on them with affection as they passed. A cloud which wondered if the sausage meat had been unctuous enough, delicious enough, tender enough. The cloud smiled to see them so happy, but were they completely satisfied?

  Even in heaven, Alice was trying to fathom out if she had been nice enough.

  It was at that precise moment the parrot decided to speak. It had watched Alic
e’s feast without opening its beak, but, moved by remorse, or regret, it finally let slip, between two bird sobs: ‘Alice the sausage, Alice the sausage.’

  It repeated those words till nightfall, without stopping, only ending when it dozed off on its perch, missing its owner and the seeds she used to dish out.

  My Funeral

  Louise Welsh

  The old women are there, too old to give a damn,

  They’ve brought along the kids, who don’t know who I am

  Jacques Brel, My Death

  I’m generally an austere soul. I ‘drink gin to mortify my taste for fine vintages’ and always choose someone I’m not sexually attracted to when being unfaithful. I do however have one decadent pastime – planning my own funeral. After all the prospect of being at the centre of one last party is the only consolation death holds.

  For many years I flirted with the idea of copying Shelley’s cremation. Burned on an open pyre on a beach in Italy by his poet brethren. I imagined the chief mourner plunging her hands into the flames to retrieve my finely formed skull as Lord George Byron reputedly did for his old chum’s (it crumbled in his hands). Heart, lungs, liver I’d bequeath my organs to any mourner that desired them.

  But then Scotland gained devolution, Donald Dewer was given a state funeral, and while I know there’s many in line before me, I would relish the chance to stop the traffic one last time.

  I’ve no illusions, I know I’ve lived too long to make a beautiful corpse, so there’ll be no open coffin. Instead let some cherubic child carrying a picture of me slim and lithe at seventeen, head the parade. Behind her comes a New Orleans jazz band, every marching step a hesitation, every trumpet note mournful.

  The dress code will be black, as dapper or scruffy as personal style dictates, but shades are mandatory. All mourners must walk the long route round the city; I’ve no wish to make folk suffer so the infirm can be pushed in wheelchairs decorated with black crepe.