Jim Crace - The Devil's Larder

‘We have to be patient,’ we told our uncle. ‘It can take an hour just to catch our tick. But then it only takes five minutes to trap the bird, and five minutes in the fire to roast it.’

‘That must be hard,’ he said, ‘to catch a donkey or a sheep and then persuade it to stay still while hot smoke tunnels in its ear.’

We shrugged. We laughed. We begged my uncle for his matches and his cigarettes.

It’s true, we did sit down below the bushes in the river bed. But we did not care for dining out on scrub fowl. We did not hunt for ticks, or look for sheep and donkeys. We smoked my uncle’s cigarettes, one at a time, passing them between us so that the smoke was never idle. ‘Smoke is better than a catapult,’ we said. We filled our mouths and stomachs up with smoke.

We fed on cigarettes. We loved the peach and salt and sulphur in the nicotine, the ashy meat and wood. We waited while our appetites fell free, and hit the stony ground, and burst.

THE MELTED fondue cheese was not as tasty as she’d hoped. Her seven friends were only playing with their long-handled forks. They pushed their cubes of bread about inside the caquelon with hardly any appetite. She should have used a cooking cheese, or added chunks of blue, or paid the extra for some Gruyère or some Emmental.

The processed cheese that she had favoured had been quick to melt but then had separated over the heat of the tiny, blue-flamed table stove. It had emulsified like sump oil in water. The mixture produced an unappealing greasy skin.

It had been an error, too, to forsake the traditional and generous glug of kirsch in favour of a kitchen wine. What could she do now to save the meal? It must have seemed a good idea — with so much restlessness and irritation at the table — to play a game that no one had heard of, let alone attempted before: strip fondue. Anyone who left a cube of bread in the cheese or dropped a piece before it reached their mouth would have to pay the forfeit of removing an item of clothing.

Hot cheese is famous for its treachery. It is a law unto itself. Its strings and globules have scant regard for the principles of adhesion. It worships gravity. A long-handled fork and a shaking hand are no match for it.

It was not long, therefore, before her company of friends was getting naked at the table. It was not long, either, before the scorching cheese was dropping onto unprotected flesh. Her pretty colleague from the office was the first to suffer. Her knee received a nasty, clinging burn. The men on either side of her were quick to cool the knee down with napkins dampened with Perrier. Another of the men suffered a lesser burn across his chest, but it was difficult to remove the stiffening cheese from his hair. His girlfriend tried to flick it off with her long fork and only partially succeeded. But then another woman, not known for her discretion, made a better job of cleaning him up with her fingers and her teeth. It now became a secondary rule of strip fondue that mislaid cheese could not be retrieved by the person who had dropped it.

Quite soon her friends were dropping cubes of cheese-soaked bread into their laps. Almost wilfully, you might have thought. A gasp of pain. The whiff of sizzling flesh and hair and cheese. The welcome offer of the fork, or the fingers, or the teeth.

By the time all the cheese had gone, nobody at the table was without a burn and a poultice of damp napkin. Even those who had been reluctant at first to lose as much as their socks and risk a scorching had in the end decided this was not a dish to miss. Everybody produced at least one set of welts and blisters to nurse as they drove home.

Next day, if anybody asked, ‘What did you do last night?’ or, ‘How was the meal round at your friend’s?’, how many of the guests would have the nerve to pull their jumpers up or tug their trousers down to show and justify their scars? Here was something to keep quiet about. It would, though, be tempting to repeat the meal with other friends, to suffer at the ends of forks again, to bare themselves before the scorching treachery of cheese, and hope for fresh disfigurements.

THEY SPOILED the little beach house, fitting new window frames, daubing paint on ancient, silvered wood, cutting back the creeper, adding a veranda, and putting up a perspex barrier to keep, they said, the sand away but save the fine views of the sea. Old Mrs Schunn would be turning in her grave if she’d lived to see these changes to her home. She wouldn’t like the way they disinfected everything as if the place were full of dirt and germs.

Perhaps that’s why — respect for her, revenge — I failed to warn them that where they’d put their iron bench and table was also where, every couple of years, the toilet waste was buried from the house’s ninety-litre barrel. But anyone with half a nose and a quarter coffee spoon of brains should have recognized the salty, oceanic smell of latrine earth and kept away. Perhaps they thought it was the sea.

They’d picked the garden’s only green and pretty spot for their retreat. Despite the covering of seaweed and sand, our neighbour’s hidden night-soil provided nourishing, warm loam for plants.

I should have warned them also, I guess, about the fruits and vegetables that flourished there. These volunteers had not been planted from the packet. But, by the time the summer came and seeds processed by Mrs Schunn’s large and active bowel had produced three verdant, aromatic melons and a healthy patch of tomatoes, I was too amused and irritated by the newcomers to intervene.

They’d speed down on Friday nights in their grand car, sit out with their iced drinks amongst their plants and watch the sun set through the perspex barrier. I’d see them picking their tomatoes from the stem and eating them like kids with sweets. They’d never tasted finer toms, it seemed.

They called me over for a drink on the day they harvested their melons. They sliced one open for themselves, squeezed a lemon over it, and powdered it with nutmeg. I said how sweet it smelled. My private joke. And so they offered me a melon, to take home. That might have been the time to tell the truth.

I have not dared taste my melon yet. Though that’s not logical, I know. All fruits and vegetables benefit from manure. But Mrs Schunn had been our neighbour for almost twenty years. We knew her far too well to take a knife to her or eat the products of her waste. Yet I might dry and save the seeds for the coming season. It seems the least that I can do. Respect for her and for her disfigured house.

So the melon darkens, softens, ages on my window shelf. The raised embroidery that nets the skin is losing its rigidity. There is a bluish mould around the puncture of the stem scar. The sap is leaking from a split. Already I can trace the brackish odour of decay.

WHENEVER SHE ate fish, her eyes puffed up and watered, her nostrils closed, the tissues of her mouth and throat rose like dough, damp and squashy, until she had to gawp for breath, just like a bruised and netted cod, tossed on the deck. Her skin became as mottled as cheap veal and her heart metamorphosed into a moth, flapping and scorching itself against the fevers of her ribcage. The symptoms were not fatal in a woman of her size — though sometimes children died of toxic shock from eating fish — but, obviously, she did her best to avoid seafood, to check a menu carefully, to study the ingredients of any can, to mistrust relishes and pastes, to make sure that anyone who asked her home to eat was warned well in advance. It was nine years since she’d collapsed so comically at the Cargo Restaurant in front of all her colleagues. She hadn’t realized the soup had fish in it until, before the entrée arrived, she’d flushed and paled and slipped down off her chair as if her bones had suddenly dropped into her shoes, as if she had been filleted.