Jim Crace - The Devil's Larder

So when she didn’t want to turn up at her sister’s funeral, would rather die than show her face, would rather swell to twice her size than add her small voice to the hymns, she bought herself a piece of fish for supper — two fillets of blue-water mackerel. She had them decapitated, boned and skinned in the shop. Disguised, in fact, so that she wouldn’t gag at just the sight of them. Her uncooked meal looked more like mozzarella than fish.

The flesh was yellowish and pungent in the dish — that lewd and acrid smell of fin and brine — but still it did not seem particularly hazardous. She pasted the fillets with mustard, sprinkled them with salt, baked them for half an hour, ate them in her armchair with a fresh brunette of bread, and fell asleep.

Next morning, after a night of storm-tossed dreams and nausea, she was, as she’d expected, at death’s door, scarcely strong enough to lean across from the armchair to reach the telephone. Her fingers were like woollen sausages. Her lungs were sponge. Her hot and cold sensations had reversed, so that although her hands were scorching the inside of her mouth was dry and wintry. Her lips were tingling at first, then numb. She phoned her brother’s house. She couldn’t come, she told him, not with the best will in the world. She was too weak and too distressed. Her face was twice its normal size. If only he could see how weak she was, how mournful.

He couldn’t see, but he could hear. His sister’s voice was muffled, breathless, tense. She’d have to have the benefit of his doubt.

That afternoon, after the interment, the brother and three other mourners visited her, with flowers and some fruit and a printed copy of the church service. They caught her sitting in the same armchair where she had slept, a box of tissues on her lap. Her eyes were pools of tears. Her nose was streaming and her lungs were drowned. They’d never seen her so beleaguered. They’d never seen a woman so distressed, so changed and damaged by her grief. To tell the truth, they felt ashamed to be so calm and well themselves, to be so full and scrubbed and smart while she was so reduced.

She begged them not to worry. She’d be well. She’d only got a bug, some passing thing. They ought to let her sleep in peace and, in a day or two, she’d phone to say she had recovered and could begin to come to terms with her great loss.

ON BIRTHDAYS in our village on the estuary, where spitting was as commonplace as fish, we had a sweet observance for the children. We didn’t blow out candles on the cake. Instead, once we had finished feasting at the trestles under the tarbony trees, we spat the past year out, its disappointments and its failures, the lies we’d told, our arguments, our cruelties. We expectorated all our vices, errors and misdeeds so that our coming year could start anew.

All you needed was a bunch of grapes. With the neighbours and the family gathered round, your classmates, your parents’ friends, you’d have to eat one grape for every year of your life. You had to burst and eat the flesh but save the pips. Quite difficult. To swallow one would be to swallow last year’s wickedness. You’d tuck the pips into a corner of your mouth or push them up into the space between your top teeth and your lip. A two-year-old — and so a child relatively free from sin — would only have to store, say, seven pips in its soft mouth. A boy of fifteen — a scamp, a self-abuser and a stop-abed, as you’d expect — would have to tuck away, say, thirty pips or more. There was, of course, a lot of laughter and some tickling to make the task more difficult.

By the time you’d eaten your last grape, the birthday guests would have formed a circle, and would be moving, hand in hand, around the birthday child. There’d be a countdown — ten, nine, eight. . And on the shout of ‘Go!’ you’d have to spit out all your pips. You’d spray the dancing circle with your flinty, salivating sins. It was a blessing and an honour to be hit. Ours was, as I have said, a village used to spitting and used as well to sending all its faults and its offences into the past.

IT IS, IN FACT, my twenty-seventh birthday today. I do not have the courage to phone home. I’m going out with friends tonight to celebrate. But in the hours I had to kill this afternoon I went down to the market streets far below my small apartment to treat myself. A book, the latest Bosse CD and a bunch of local grapes. Black grapes. In these supermarket days those are the only ones with any pips.

Like almost every guilty man who has neglected home and family, I am a sentimentalist. I placed the CD on the stereo, selected its romantic track. I burst my twenty-seven homesick grapes between my teeth and stored the almost sixty pips against the soft side of my mouth. Of course, I had no dancing witnesses. I counted down from ten to one myself, silently, hardly daring to move my lips. Then, standing at the open window, I threw back my head and spat my disappointments out into the street. Before I had the chance to look, I heard the clatter of my twenty-seven birthdays strike the windscreens and the roofs of passing cars. In that same instant, I glimpsed a shaded stretch of water far beyond the town, a stand of trees, abandoned tables, and the turning circle of my half-remembered friends, smiling, smiling, but with no one at their centre from whom to take the impact of those past forgiven years.

THERE IS no greater pleasure than to be expected at a meal and not arrive.

While the first guests were standing in the villa’s lobby with their wet hair and their dry wine, their early efforts at a conversation saved and threatened by fresh arrivals at the door, he was driving slowly in the rain along the coastal highway, enjoying his loud absence from the room, enjoying first the cranes and depots of the port, and then the latest condominiums, the half-glimpsed bypassed villages with their dead roads, the banks of coastal gravel, the wind, the darkness and the trees.

While they were being seated at the dining table and were thinking — those who knew him — Lui’s always late, he was taking pleasure from the water on the tarmac, the old movie romance of the windscreen wipers and the dashboard lights, the prospect of the speedy, starless, hungry night ahead.

At what point would his sister, or her husband George, dial his home (discreetly from another room) to get only the answerphone and leave the message. . What? Was he OK? Had he forgotten that they’d asked him round to eat with friends? Would he come late? Was he aware what trouble he’d put them to? Would he arrive in time to charm the sweet young teacher that they’d found and placed at his left elbow?

At what point would his plate, his napkin and his cutlery be gathered up and two women be asked to shift their chairs along to fill his place and break the gendered pattern at the table?

At what point would his hostess say ‘It’s not like him at all’?

While they were eating in his absence — a sweetcorn soup, a choice of paddock lamb or vegetarian risotto, Mother Flimsy’s tart with brandy — he was driving with one hand and, with the other, breaking pieces off his chocolate bar. He was dreaming repartee and dreaming manners of a king, and being far the smartest, sharpest person in the room.

While they were sitting in his sister’s long salon, for coffee and a little nip of Boulevard Liqueur, and getting cross about some small remark their host had made at their expense, Lui reached the hundred-kilometre mark that he had set himself. He took the exit from the highway, slowed down to drive the narrow underpass — sixty sobering metres of bright lights, dry road, wind-corralled litter, a couple sheltering — and turned on to the opposite lane. He headed back towards the town and home, another hundred k, a hundred k less cinematic, less romantic, and more futile than the journey out.