Jim Crace - The Devil's Larder

I AM A PIMP of sorts. I have a team of girls. When school is finished and it’s low tide, they work for me. I arm them with a bucket and a bag of salt, and send them out onto the flats, between the rock spine and the bar, to hunt for razor clams. They’re not paid much, but then the task isn’t very difficult. All they have to do is walk barefooted on the rippled sand, on the lookout for the comic, tell-tale squirt of water, which reveals the hiding place. They bend or kneel, peer into the opening of the clam’s burrow, drop in a pinch of salt, and wait. No one is sure if it is love or hatred of the salt that makes the clam momentarily protrude its twin valves by half a centimetre and extend its pink and fleshy siphon, as if gasping for light or oxygen, or — given what it most resembles — something lewder.

My girls are quick. They have to seize the brittle upper shell and snap the clam clear of the sand before ‘the sea dick’ disappears again or, digging with its muscled foot, slides free from their gripping fingers. ‘Prick-teasing’ is their name for salting clams — though none of them is older than twelve.

Sometimes, between the lunchtime sittings at the restaurant and the early evening customers who come for Sunset Snacks, I sit on the terrace by myself with my binoculars and watch the girls. They have no concentration. In between short bursts of work, I see them kicking loops of sand and water at each other. I see them arguing. I see them playing tag, or writing libels in the sand, or squatting on their haunches, so very far from any bush, to urinate. I have to keep an eye on them. If there’s a racing tide or heavy winds I have to call them back. The flats are hazardous. Once in a while, I catch them waving at me from afar. They’re out of salt. And then I ride out on the quad bike with a fresh supply. They know I’m watching them.

It is the teacher from their school who bothers me. She’s come into the restaurant at night several times, with different men. She loves my clams, however I present them, whether chowdered, steamed with seaweed and a freshener of lemon, grilled with garlic, butter and oregano, tenderized for zuppa di cannolicchi , ground up with crumbs and spices and then frittered or simply boiled and flattered with a sauce. They are, she tells me, ‘sweet’. My heart stands still for her when she says ‘sweet’.

She also tells me, every time she sees the bill or spots the prices on my menu, that I am exploiting her young pupils, abusing them, that, at the very least, I ought to pay the hunters a quarter of the menu asking price. ‘I’ll have to organize a strike,’ she says.

Last week, she went down with my team when school was closed to try prick-teasing for herself. She splashed along the beach towards the flats just like the rest, barefooted, her skirt tucked up, her bucket heavy with a half-kilo issue of rough salt. And on her back, a bag of pickings from her kitchen, some sachets of cinnamon and cayenne pepper, tubs of curry powder, twists of jam and pickle in greaseproof paper, a vial of vinegar, packets of sugar and flour, mustard seeds, a bottle of pop. She explained she’d set her girls a project. The usefulness of salt for teasing out clams was, she said, ‘unproven’. The pupils had to carry out experiments to understand why clams would pop up so recklessly for salt. Why salt and nothing else, when they were living ‘up to their necks’ in salt anyway? You might as well hunt rats with air.

I told the teacher how people from the coast had been catching and cooking clams for centuries, and they’d always used salt. It smuggled its flavour into the flesh. They can’t all be wrong. ‘Indeed they can,’ she said. She thought her girls, my team, could prove that a pinch of anything, a drop of anything, was good enough to tease the siphon from its shell. Not just salt would do the trick. She could smuggle other flavours in.

I watched with my binoculars. I watched them bend and kneel and hunt for razor clams with all the products from their teacher’s bag. The girls, for once, were working hard. A new project is always fun. They seemed to be more lively on the flats than they had been for weeks. Their buckets, I could tell, were getting full. I could not drag myself away and go to work while they were there. The teacher held me by my brittle shell. I could not take my eyes off her. I would have watched until my eyes were sore, except — too soon — I shamed myself with my binoculars and had to flee, red-faced and fearful, from the terrace. I’d gone too far. I’d caught her squatting on the flats, her skirts held up, her underpants pulled clear, the urine sinking at her feet. The clams for that night’s customers were springing up between her legs. And she was beckoning her girls.

She came that evening, of course, to taste her spoils. I shucked and cooked for her, no charge, as payment for her efforts on the beach. I’d not exploit her as I had the girls. She waited in the kitchen, at my side with a beer, while I took my clam knife to her catch, rotating its flat blade between the razor shells to sever the upper muscle. I rinsed the clams clean, showed them to the steam for half a minute and let her eat them on the half-shell, raw. They tasted just like prawns, she said, but not as salty. She liked the satisfying chewiness and swore she could detect the jam, the cinnamon, the pop, and many things besides.

TAKING DOWN the rucksack in the spring for our first outing, we found the undiscarded detritus of last year’s final picnic, the chocolate wrappers and the little Thermos flask, the balls of foil that had been used to wrap sandwiches and a plastic box with half a cake inside, vermilion with age. From deep in the rucksack we retrieved an undiscovered element harder than a curl of tin, which once had been an orange peel, and (looking almost perfect, five months on) a white hen’s egg boiled in its shell.

We cracked it open on the window ledge, pulled off its shell and cut it lengthways into halves. The albumen looked curiously transparent, though edible, despite its age. The yolk was greenish brown and fibrous. The smell was subtle and unnerving.

Our dog would not accept the cake, but she seemed glad to eat the egg. She did not mind the colour or the smell, or care about the months of darkness and neglect. Besides, she liked to see the rucksack and the Thermos flask. There’d be a picnic and some exercise at last.

YOUR GRANDFATHER was not a modern man. He thought a woman’s business was waiting — first on her father, then on her husband, then on their sons — not dressing up in coat and lipstick and going out with friends, like Parisian wives. He made that clear when he was courting me. I found the prospect charming in a way, because I’d loved my father and I wanted sons.

One afternoon — the most shaming day of my life — when we’d been married about ten months and I was hardly pregnant with your eldest aunt, he came back early from the warehouse, wanting to be fed. But I’d gone out with my cousin to the little restaurant, where the pharmacy now is. I’m glad that restaurant has closed. It made me blush to even pass it.

Your grandfather, he tracked me down that afternoon — and naturally he made a dreadful scene, showing off in front of all the women there. You could hear the little coffee spoons rattling on their saucers, he was so loud. I told him why I wasn’t in the house when he came home, as quietly as I could, although I trembled as I spoke. My little cousin had called, and we had strolled down to the corner for a conversation and some cake. I wiped my mouth to hide my face from him. There was a smudge of pastry cream reddened by my lipstick on the back of my hand.

Well, as you must have heard from your mother, nothing could silence the man once he’d had a lunch-time drink, particularly on this occasion, with his unexpected audience of captive women, their fingers glued to their coffee cups. He loved an audience of women.