Jim Crace - The Devil's Larder

That night, of course, I had the oddest dreams. Who wouldn’t dream at times like these, my marriage on the rocks and me, a refugee from home, reduced to staying in the same bedroom where I had slept when I was small? Who wouldn’t dream?

The earth was baking in my dream. It proved to be the hottest day of all, sub-tropical. You had to wear a hat. I was walking down to the orchard gate, fearful, doubting, full of hope. The stone, flattered by the warmth, trembled like a heated coal. It glistened like volcanic jewels. The smell was not volcano, though, not sulphur and not ash. The smell was bread, fresh baked. I lifted up the glass protector from the flat top of the stone and touched the crust, the split, chestnut turban of a finished loaf, fresh bread baked out of nothing on the hotplate of the stone, our risen offering, my answered prayer. Beyond the odour of the bread there was a hint of aloe and of myrrh. In my dream I covered up the bread with linen. And then I ran down to the village for the priest to come and witness what I took to be a miracle. That risen loaf’s a sign, he said, that everything is well. Our blighted pasts are taken from the cross and rubbed with spices and with oils. Our futures are uncrucified. Things grow.

On the third day, I woke exhausted by my night of dreams and went a little sheepishly down to the long grass by the orchard gate to read and think about the battles and the custodies ahead. My mother’s glass salad cover had somehow fallen to the ground and smashed. A disappointment and a shock. The stone itself had shifted too, I thought. A touch displaced.

The day was chilly, damp, not tropical at all. Any trace of resurrected dough had disappeared, of course. My dreams had been misleading, mischievous. There was no evidence. The rats and birds had come and knocked the salad cover to the ground. The rats and birds had dined.

My little daughter, five years old, has come today to rescue me. She puts her dolls up on the flat mauve stone and they guard over us while we stretch out a metre from the orchard gate and stare into the pages of our open books. And if I turn and sniff the air, as country dwellers always do when weather’s on the move, I fancy I can smell a bakery — though, let’s be honest, an orchard always smells of bakeries. There’s yeast in rotting fruit. There’s dough in mulching leaves. Tree bark and fungi stink of bread.

OUR STRANGEST restaurant, the Air & Light, survived five months before its joke wore thin.

We’re not immune in this small town to global trends. So when the food and healthcare magazines were full of stories from Japan about a prana sect that did not eat or drink but lived instead on ‘atmosphere’, two of our lesser artists, tired of paint and canvasses, installed the front part of an empty shop with tables, chairs and blinding lights. It was, they said, the world’s first prana restaurant. Their friends dressed up as customers and waiters. There was a pompous maître d’ and pretty tablecloths. Orders were taken. Empty glasses, dishes and plates were delivered to the tables. Passers-by could look through the shop’s front window to watch nobody eating anything. It was live art. It was, as well, the liveliest and smartest place in town.

It wasn’t long, of course, before outsiders — students mostly — came into the restaurant and filled the empty places, keen to play their part and not be fed. There was a queue of volunteers. What isn’t clear is how the perpetrators, instead of closing down after a day or two as they had intended, began to charge for admittance to the Air & Light, a modest table fee at first. But then something much more complex, listed on a bill, including details of the ‘atmosphere’ provided, quantities of prana consumed and a local tax of 12 per cent.

The charges made the Air & Light too expensive for the students, but still the tables were packed out each night by the better off, keen to be part of the installation and at the cutting edge of food and art. They tipped quite heavily. But, in a way, they were not cheated. The ambience was wonderful. The restaurateurs let buskers in to entertain the clientele. The waiters were attentive and amusing. The conversation was the most animated in town, and uninterrupted by eating and drinking. The ‘meals’ were meditative and purifying. And outside, on the street, there was always a deep and noisy audience, hustling for places near the window. If you needed to be noticed, then the Air & Light was the place to go.

Al Pacino, in town to film The Girder Man , was photographed being witty with an empty plate. The singer Tambar went there and sang an aria, leaning on the till. It was, according to the local radio, the coolest spot to take your girl. By the end of the first month — such is the vulgar power of modernism — determined customers had to book their tables a week in advance.

It was, of course, a splendid comedy — but there were some who claimed that the restaurant, by formalizing diet and restraint, was servicing a greater cause than simply a desire to be amused. The Air & Light combated publicly, they claimed, the countless tyrannies of food. It opened up new channels from the body to the mind. It celebrated emptiness in an otherwise oversated world.

It was a bad mistake, in retrospect, to start the takeaway. It brought the poorer students back and let the street crowd in. There was a lot of jostling between the tables. The waiters could not move around as easily. Conversations were interrupted by the general din. The restaurant soon lost its atmosphere. Such things are delicate. Besides, the lesser artists had grown rich and famous, and bored with labouring till the early hours of the morning without a drop to drink. They wanted to get back to their own work. They’d have no trouble selling their under-coloured paintings now. So they closed the Air & Light without a fuss, and all the smarter, richer people from the town were forced to take their hunger and their patronage elsewhere.

OUR SALTED COD has dried and shrivelled through the winter to half its netted weight and a quarter of its thickness. We well remember how we caught it on a line, the three of us, my brothers and I. It needed three to play it in to the boat, though three was hardly enough (for we were tired by then) to lift it in the keep net onto the deck. That fish was strong. We even wished our eldest brother hadn’t gone away to God knows where to drink himself insane and difficult. A fourth set of hands — even his — might have made the cod a little more obliging. It felt as if we’d brought a squall on board. We’d caught a storm. Even once we’d split the catch open with our knives and hauled its innards out, our boat still rocked and heaved, though there was hardly any swell that night. Its end was intimate and slow. This fish, we knew without expressing it, was one we’d have to keep for ourselves, not sell.

Now the day has come to cut our cod down from the rafters of the drying room where, safe from draughts and cats, it has been companion to our overalls and waterproofs since summer. We hope that it will feed us for a week or two. The prospect isn’t pleasing, though. A fisherman would sooner not eat fish. It brings bad luck. But we have no choice except to take it down for food. Our boat was washed up in the gale last week and holed. There’ll be no more fishing for us, and no income, until the fixing plate we’ve ordered from the engineers is delivered by truck. And that won’t be before the spring has opened up the roads. The snow is deep and treacherous this year. It is my job to haul the biggest pot out of the workshed and roll it through the snow to the drying room. I have to scrape out shards of time-toughened pitch. It’s the pot we use each spring for caulking the seams of our hull and sealing decks. A salted cod this size needs soaking in deep water for a day or two before it’s ready for the kitchen. You’d need a chainsaw to cut it now. So I lift the fish free from its hook and cradle it in both my arms, as stiff and lifeless as a leather bag. One brother is enough. It hardly weighs. I put it, head down, in the empty pot next to the hot stovepipes, throw in some handfuls of coarse salt and then turn on the hose until all of the cod, except for its protruding tail, is under water. I stir it in. I lick my hands to check the balance of the water. It tastes as salty as the sea. The cod will have the chance to quiver, swell, resalinate, before we trouble it again.