Jim Crace - The Devil's Larder

Not me. I used to fear my mother’s pies. I hated my birthdays, too. Still do. While we were exiled from the kitchen, my sisters would torment me, twisting arms and pulling hair, just to turn my birthday sour. ‘You should have been a girl,’ they’d say. ‘Mother only wanted girls. She said you were a curse, when you were born. She told us she could never love a boy like you. You’ll see. You’ll see how much she loves you when she serves the pie. You’re in for a surprise.’

So I’d learned to fear the contents of the sixth, that dark and blind compartment with no edible filling. Inside there’d be, my sisters would say, a little snake for my birthday, hissing hate and steam. There’d be a smooth, black bat — well baked — to break out of the pastry lid and hunt for warrens in my hair. There’d be a nest of cockroaches to mark my anniversary. Or a cake of melted soap, with body hairs, girls’ body hairs. Or else a dry and steaming toad to sing ‘Congratulations’ with its dry and steaming voice. Alone, alone amongst the birthday celebrants, I always prayed my piece of pie would not be a surprise. I know, of course, what it was I always feared the most — not gifts, not bats, not toads, but that my mother’s love would prove as hard and hissing as my sisters said.

And so, too late, I plan to bake a pie for her and for my sisters on our mother’s anniversary, to show I know they meant me harm. I have her pencilled recipe for guidance. I have my grievances to mix in with the pastry. I’ll fill the six compartments, lid the pie, and cook it well, as well as any woman could.

I’ll serve the pie myself. My hand, I know, will shake as I plunge the spoon into the pastry. I know my sisters will expect surprises, gifts. They will be surprised. There’ll be no empty compartment for the birthday dead, no ornament, no snake, no necklace, and no soap. And nothing edible. No steam. They don’t deserve sliced fruit and dates, or leek and cheese, or chicken and onion. Pigeon and damsons are too good for them. The six compartments will be full of flour and dry beans. Blind pie. The sort my mother baked when I was small.

MORE THAN forty years ago, in simpler times, our produce wholesaler, by way of an experiment in exotica, bought a consignment of kumquats, cheaply, off a storm-docked cargo boat. Well, cheaply if he could pass them all on to his retailers, and quickly. Then he’d make a profit. He gave the problem of disposing of this unfamiliar fruit to his raw and unpersuasive son. But after two days of softening and maturing at the depot, the kumquats were — mostly — still unsold.

‘People don’t want kumquats, whatever they might be,’ his son explained. ‘They just want simple oranges. This isn’t Paris. Don’t blame me.’

‘Well, give them simple oranges.’

His father took a fat black marker from his desk, and underneath the word ‘ KUMQUATS’ on the display card, wrote ‘ a.k.a. PYGMY ORANGES’.

They’d made their profit by the end of the day. Pygmy oranges were all the rage, just right for kids and snacks and picnics. They could be eaten whole. No peel, no mess, no lacquered chins. How had our town got by without this infant fruit for so long? The retailers demanded more. But our wholesaler could not discover any fresh supplies. He couldn’t count on any more storm-docked boats.

‘That’s life,’ his son said. ‘Ten days ago, they didn’t want to know. Today they want kumquats and won’t settle for anything else. Oranges are far too vulgar now.’

‘Well, give them kumquats,’ his father said. ‘The wholesaler should always come up with the goods.’

He took the same fat pen from his desk, found the display card for ‘ ORANGES’, and wrote below ‘ a.k.a. KINGQUATS’.

He gave his son a knowing, weary look. He hoped this twice-explained lesson had been learned, that if customers were soft enough to like their oranges reduced, then they’d be bound to love their kumquats swollen and resized. This was his understanding, from a life in trade. The buying public were as innocent as kids. They’d always pay to see the scale of life disrupted by the pygmies and the kings.

HERE IS A QUESTION for your guests, next time you dine with new acquaintances at home. The coffee has been served. You sit, not quite at ease, confronted by the detritus of empty plates and by the awkwardness of strangers. You say, to break the ice, ‘Imagine it. You’re on a raft, the two of you, three days from any land. Everybody else has drowned. The sea is calm; it’s hardly bothering the raft. The four horizons offer you no hope of rescue. The skies are absolutely blue. Bad news. Blue skies provide no rain. The empty can you’ve found aboard the raft will not fill up with rain before eternity. You’re bound to die of thirst within three days, before there’s any chance of being washed up on a shore, unless you drink. You have to make a choice. What do you drink to save your lives? Sea water, or your own urine? Will you take piss or brine? Decide. You’re caught between the devil and the salt blue sea. Don’t hesitate to say.’

I promise you, the woman always takes the devil. It does not bother her that piss contains her body waste, the excess, sterile toxins of her complicated life. She is at ease with body fluids, blemishes, has to be, she deals with them throughout her years. She finds salvation in herself, collects the urine in the can, and drinks.

The husband — again I promise you — selects the sea, invariably. He knows the dangers of the salt. They say it dries your blood and drives you mad. The water makes you thirstier, so you drink even more. But still a man can’t face the poisons in his life. He’d rather die. He finds salvation in the seven tenths. He dips the can into the sea and drinks.

Which of the two survives, do you suppose? The woman, obviously. She must outlive the man. Her own bladder is soon empty, but the ocean is endless. Her husband’s lips are white with salt, not thirst. She has a second chance through him. She makes her husband get his penis out and — despite his protests of disgust — fill the can for her. His water is quite clear. Not salty either. His kidneys have removed the salt. So long as he drinks sea, preferring universe to self, she will survive unscathed.

There are no shores. There are no rescue boats. No rain.

NOBODY THOUGHT it wise or necessary to invite the director to my backward-running dinner party for colleagues on my twenty-seventh birthday. He was not the sort to much enjoy our kind of levity. He wouldn’t be amused, we thought, by the reversals that I’d planned. I was not keen that he should see me — his ambitious protégé — in this minor, playful mood, in which digestifs came before aperitifs and cutlery was dirtied in topsy-turvy order.

But he came nevertheless, and was announced with some embarrassment by the steward at the private club room just as we were finishing cigars and Calvados and looking forward — backward? — to our meal. He indicated that we should not rise from our places; the evening was informal, and he was hungry only for some company. He had, he said, good news. For one of us.

He pulled a chair up to the angle of a table end and passed some pleasantry about it being just as well that he had missed dessert. The director took the uneasy volume of laughter which greeted his remark to be a friendly acknowledgement of his spreading waistline. We assured him — bravely frivolous — that he had not missed dessert at all. I dared not catch his eye.

The director hung his jacket over the back of the chair, accepted a small cigar and a liqueur for himself, and started to address the other seven at the table. ‘I have been honoured,’ he said, ‘not only, of course, by your hospitality this evening but also by the Board of Governors. .’ He produced a fax from his jacket pocket and waved it at us. ‘Brussels, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I am to be Director Europe, Forward Planning.’ We rewarded him with some applause.