Hugo Xawery gripped Craig’s shoulder, and stared into his eyes with such emotion that Craig thought for a moment that he was going to weep. “You’re a great, great chef. Do you know that? After tomorrow, your name will rank with the very finest.”
“We’ll see,” said Craig.
Without taking his eyes off Craig, Hugo Xawery called out, “Xanthippa!”
She turned and frowned at him.
“Xanthippa, I have a surprise for you!”
The bedroom that Hugo Xawery lent him was silent and painted a silky gray. In the centre stood a massive carved-oak bed, heaped with Moorish cushions. It was a warm night, so Craig left the French windows open. The net curtains billowed silently in the breeze, like the ghosts of nuns.
Craig was sitting up in bed reading The Secret Shih-Tan when the door quietly opened and Xanthippa came in. She was wearing nothing but a thin shirt of aquamarine linen and small brown beads around her wrists and ankles. She came across the room and climbed onto the bed next to him. She smelled of nothing but the natural biscuity aroma of an aroused young woman.
“You’re reading that book,” she said, although not accusingly.
Craig closed it, and dropped it down by the side of the bed. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Why should you be?”
“It isn’t very good taste, is it, considering what I’m supposed to do to you tomorrow?”
“You don’t understand. I’m looking forward to it. Hugo is one of the greatest men in the world. He’s intellectual, he’s refined, but he doesn’t believe in limits. With Hugo, everything is possible. I’ve already had enough pleasure for five lifetimes. Why should I worry if it ends now?”
Craig gently touched her cheekbones, and then traced the outline of her lips. Carefully remove the eyes, and set aside on a dish. Then he leaned forward a little and kissed her.
“You’re very beautiful,” he told her.
She smiled, and kissed him back. She kissed him like no woman had ever kissed him before, sucking and teasing his lips, and then sliding her tongue into his mouth and stimulating nerve-endings he didn’t even think he had. Underneath the blanket, his penis stiffened.
Xanthippa crossed her arms and took off her shirt. She was lean and small-breasted, but her skin was so exquisite that Craig couldn’t stop himself from sliding his hands up and down her bare back. Her pubic hair was shiny and black, and she had plaited it tightly and decorated it with small coloured beads, so that the lips of her vulva were exposed.
She said, “Lie back … you can taste me first.”
He lay back on the pillow and Xanthippa drew aside the blanket. She climbed astride him, with her back to him, and then she lifted her bottom so that he was confronted with her vagina. He kissed all around it, and then he ran the tip of his tongue down the cleft between her buttocks and tasted her tightly wrinkled anus. She sighed, and kissed him all around his penis in return.
The room was so quiet that he heard the moistened lips of her vagina opening, like the softest click in the Xhosa language. He slid his tongue into her wetness and warmth, and tasted saltness and sweetness and something else as well, like highly purified honey. At the same time, she slowly sucked his penis, flicking it and drumming it with her tongue.
They made love for hours, and she showed him all of the tastes of love. He licked her perspiration-beaded armpits, and the soles of her feet. He swallowed her vaginal juices when they were thick with early arousal; and again when they thinned out, just before orgasm. He tasted her saliva when she was excited, and again when she was drowsy. She had eaten a salad for lunch with wildflowers in it, and he could actually taste it.
Eventually, as it began to grow light, she rubbed his penis so that he climaxed into her mouth, and she drank his sperm with long, appreciative swallows. “Did you know that you can chew sperm, and that it actually changes texture as you chew it?”
They lay together in silence for a long while. At last Craig sat up and said, “Would you do something for me? Something really special?”
“I’m yours now,” she said, her voice husky. “You know that.”
“Well, that’s the point. I feel like you’re not really mine at all. I’m just the chef. I’m a craftsman, not a lover. If you belong to anybody, you belong to Hugo.”
She propped herself up on one elbow. “So what do you want me to do?”
“The recipe says that there should be lovemaking before the meal is prepared, to give it spiritual tenderness. But I can’t give you anything like the spiritual tenderness that Hugo can give you. I mean, think of it, Hugo’s the one who’s actually going to—”
“You think I should make love to Hugo?”
“Yes, I do.”
She smiled, and kissed him. “If you want me to make love to Hugo, one last time, then I will.”
It was nearly six o’clock in the morning. The house was already bright. Craig stood silently outside the door of Hugo Xawery’s enormous white-carpeted bedroom. The door was only a half-inch ajar, but that was enough for him to be able to see Hugo Xawery lying on his back on the white silk sheets, while Xanthippa rode up and down on his dark, erect penis as if she were taking part in some dreamlike steeplechase.
He didn’t know if either of them knew he was there, but Hugo Xawery looked over Xanthippa’s shoulder toward the door, and gave a wide, knowing, lubricious smile.
Craig watched his purple glans disappearing into Xanthippa’s stretched open vagina and tried to think of all the spiritual tenderness that was passing between them, one to the other. Hadn’t Yuan Mi said that spiritual tenderness flows both ways?
At eight, Craig was woken by a soft knock at the door. Hugo Xawery came in and stood over the bed. “Good-morning, Mr Richard. It’s time for the kitchen.”
“I’m ready,” said Craig.
“Xanthippa … was she enjoyable?”
“Oh, she was more than enjoyable. She was a revelation.”
Blood hurried down the grooves in the butcher’s table and he carefully collected it for blood puddings and gravies. His knives slit open skin and fat, and sliced through connective tissue.
On the stove, pans of stock were already simmering, and the ovens were warming up. The kitchen echoed to the sound of chopping and dicing.
By the middle of the day, the house was already filled with extraordinary fragrances … frying liver, poaching lungs, heat-seared filet of human flesh – all of them mingled with the aroma of basil and rosemary and coriander and soy sauce.
Craig worked non-stop, swallowing ice-cold Evian to keep himself going. By six o’clock in the evening he was almost ready, and the Mexican servant knocked at the door and announced that the first two guests had arrived.
They sat at the long mahogany dining-table, none of them speaking. The room was lit only by candles, and the plates and glasses gleamed and sparkled. The cutlery shone like shoals of fish. The sense of drama was immense.
At last, the double doors opened, and Craig appeared, in immaculate whites. Behind him, the Mexican servant was pushing a long trolley, more like a paramedics’ gurney than a serving wagon.
Craig recognized at least two of the guests as customers from the Burn-the-Tail, and a famous face from one of the movie studios. They must have recognized him, too, but they gave no hint of it. Their eyes were fastened on the long trolley, with its covering of highly-burnished silver.
Craig said, “I want to welcome you, on behalf of Mr Xawery, who has spent eleven years of his life preparing for this moment, when The Secret Shih-Tan becomes more than a book of recipes, but a reality, which you can eat.
“I always thought The Secret Shih-Tan was nothing more than the ultimate cookbook. But, you know, it’s very much more than that. It’s a book of thought, and justice, and devastating truth. Yuan Mei never intended that any of its recipes should ever be cooked. He just wanted us to understand what we are – that we are foodstuffs, too, for anybody or anything who finds us good to eat. He wanted to put us in perspective.
”
Craig beckoned the manservant to wheel the wagon right up close to the end of the table. Even though the lid was tightly closed, the fragrance of flesh and herbs was overwhelming, and one of the guests was salivating so copiously that he had to cram his linen napkin into his mouth.
Craig said, “I learned about life, cooking this meal. I learned about death. I learned about ambition, too; and vanity. But most of all I learned about love.”
The studio director said, “Shouldn’t we wait for Hugo? This is Hugo’s moment, after all.”
Craig took off his chef’s hat. “We don’t need to wait for Hugo. Hugo’s already here.”
With that, he rolled back the shining cover on top of the wagon, and there was a human body–glossy, plump, gutted of every organ, braised, fried, steamed and poached, and restored to its original shape. The greatest recipe that man had ever devised. It smelled divine.
Craig laid his hand on the body’s belly. “Do you see this? It was my uncle who first told me about The Secret Shih-Tan. It was my uncle who gave me the clue to what it meant. Cook your meal, he told me, and do it justice. And this is what this is. Justice.”
He turned, and beckoned, and Xanthippa appeared, wearing an impossibly short linen dress, a black bandana tightly braided around her forehead. She stood beside the body but she wouldn’t look at it.
“This is my new sous-chef,” said Craig. “She gave me the inspiration to cook this meal; and help in preparing it; and she also gave it the spiritual meaning that Yuan Mi demanded. Not just an eye for an eye, but a heart for a heart, and a spleen for a spleen, and a liver for a liver. She was the last person to make love to Hugo Xawery, and here she is, to serve him to you. Enjoy.”
Three weeks later, he took her to China with him, to Shanxi Province, where the Huanghe roars and froths between two mountainous, cloud-swathed peaks, called the Dragon Gate.
It was a chilly, vaporous day. The skies were the colour of slate. Xanthippa stood a little way away while Craig climbed right to the very edge of the river, carrying the book.
He looked around him, at the mountains, and the clouds. Then he ripped the pages out, six or seven at a time, in clumps, and threw them into the river.
He had almost expected them to catch fire, to burn, to leap in the air. But the Huanghe swallowed them and swamped them and carried them away. He tossed in the book jacket last of all.
“Are you satisfied now?” she asked him. She was wearing a pink ribbed rollneck sweater and tight blue jeans, and she looked almost good enough to eat.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think I ever will be.”
“Aren’t you going back to Burn-the-Tail?”
“What’s the point? Jean-Pierre is as good as me, he’ll keep it going. Once you’ve cooked from The Secret Shih-Tan, how can you cook anything else.”
“But what will you do next?”
“Try to understand you.”
She touched him, and gave him an enigmatic smile. He could never forget that she had been willing to be eaten.
“What about the human meat that Hugo hid in your freezers?” she asked him. “What are you going to do about that?”
“Well … I looked for it, and I couldn’t find it, and I think that Hugo was lying. But even if he wasn’t lying, it doesn’t matter. Human meat is the very best there is. It’s one thing to eat an animal. It’s another thing to eat an animal which you can talk to, and make love to.”
Xanthippa linked arms with him, and kissed him, and together they walked back down the hillside to the waiting tourist bus.
In the Burn-the-Tail restaurant that evening, Morrie Walker, the restaurant critic from California magazine, ordered the seared liver with celeriac. He jotted on his notepad that it was ‘pungent, strange … a variety meat lifted to a spiritual level … almost sexual in its sensuality.
‘Without being blasphemous. I felt that I was close to God.’
Men of Maes
Ystrad Mynach, Wales
Though Polish by birth, my wife Wiescka was brought up in South Wales, and that was how I first grew to knew the coal-mining valleys of the Rhymney River. By the time I came to know it, the mines were all but abandoned, and the infamous slagheaps were landscaped with trees. These days, the winding-gear has all been demolished, and the valleys are dotted with computer factories and superstores and light engineering facilities.
The Rhymney used to run black with coal dust. Now you can clearly see the stones on the riverbed. The only place where you can see a real mining cottage is in the Welsh Museum near Cardiff.
But toil and suffering always carry an historical resonance. The mines may have gone, but the work that was done has not been forgotten; neither have all the traditions that went with it, not yet. This story presents a different face of fear – the fear of passing time, and the fear of losing everything that we hold dear.
MEN OF MAES
He was approaching the bar in the Butchers Arms to buy himself another pint of lager when he saw Ellis Morgan walking past the window. He felt a split-second’s delight. Good old Ellis! But then he dropped his glass onto the floor so that it smashed, and stood totally still, staring at the window with his mouth open.
“Can’t even hold a bloody empty glass, that one,” called out Roger Jones.
“Aye, aye, David, breaking the place up, are we?” said John Snape, from the other side of the bar.
David turned slowly around at stared at his friends. The Butchers was small, low-ceilinged and crowded and filled with cigarette smoke. It had originally been rough and plain, with yellow gloss-painted walls and no carpet, but everything was different these days. The brewery’s marketing men had turned it into a bijou mock-Victorian pub, with flowery wallpaper and brass lamps and framed sepia photographs of people whom nobody in the pub had ever known. They even had women in the Butchers these days. They even had women on a Sunday dinnertime, when they should have been home cooking. That’s how bloody different things were.
“I saw Ellis,” said David, in a voice as transparent as water.
There was a roar of derision. “How many pints have you had this afternoon then, eh?” shouted Billy Evans.
“No, no! I swear it! Clear as daylight! He just walked past the window!”
“You’re bloody daft, mun,” said Roger Jones. “What was he doing then, walking past the window? Coming in for a quick half, was he?”
“Ellis Morgan,” David repeated. “Clear as daylight. Had to be him. He was even wearing his red scarf.”
Through the frosted glass door panels, a dark shadow appeared outside, a man in a cap. The door handle sharply rattled, and for a long moment, all conversation stopped, and all heads turned around. The door opened, hesitated, and then old Glyn Bachelor walked in, the schoolmaster, with his overfed dachshund Nye.
Everybody sucked in their breath, and then burst out laughing.
“Gor, you gave us a turn, then, Glyn,” said John Snape.
“Frightened the life out of us, mun.”
Old Glyn Bachelor looked around the bar, bewildered by all the amusement. John Snape was already pouring him his usual half of Guinness. He poured the slops into a bowl for Nye. “David thought he saw Ellis Morgan outside.”
David was down on his knees, brushing his broken beer-glass into a funneled-up newspaper with a beermat. He was a big man, with dark curly hair and fiery cheeks and intense blue eyes. He wore a cheap grey rollneck sweater that was a size too small for him, and huge jeans. In spite of his size, his voice was high and soft, and anybody in the Butchers could have told you that he wouldn’t hurt a fly.
“They can laugh. I saw him clear as daylight. Red scarf and all.”
Old Glyn Bachelor creaked over to his usual seat and everybody shifted over to let him in, lifting their chairs without taking their bottoms off them, like children. Old Glyn Bachelor always sat in the corner between the fireplace and the window, because he was schoolmaster, and it overlooked the whole bar. Most of these lads had bee
n taught by Old Glyn Bachelor when they were juniors. In those days they had called him Mr Whippy, because of the Mr Whippy ice-cream vans that came around the estates, and because he liked to whip their legs with the thin, thin cane that he used as a board pointer.
He didn’t look much different today, like a young, old child, with curly white hair, and a button nose. Starched shirt, county-council tie. He was dressed in layer after layer of green cardigan and brown herringbone tweed, to keep out the damp. The Rhymney Valley could be fatally damp in the winter.
He sipped his Guinness, and brushed the froth from his lips with the back of his hand. “That’s the second one, then,” he said. He leaned over so that he could dig in his coat pocket for his cigarettes, Players untipped, almost impossible to get hold of these days.
“What do you mean, the second one?” asked Roger Jones. He was another tubby lad, with cropped fair hair and an ear-ring. Brilliant fullback, clumsy car mechanic. Even his thumbs had thumbs.
“Kevin Williams up at the Fleur-de-Lys curry house said he saw his da.”
“Never! When was this?”
“Last Friday afternoon, just when it was getting dark. He was crossing the river under the viaduct and he saw his da walking along the road to Ystrad. Just glimpsed him, mind, so he could have been mistaken. But he said he was carrying his old khaki Army bag, the one he always carried his sandwiches in.”
“Didn’t he go after him?” asked David.
“He said he started to, but then he stopped. He said that if it weren’t his da, he didn’t want to make an idiot of himself by running after him, see? But if he were his da, he definitely didn’t want to meet him. Not eleven years dead.”
David finished sweeping up his glass and gave the newspaper to John Snape so that he could empty it in the bin behind the bar. “Give us another, John,” he said.
“What, in a paper cup?” John ribbed him; but David wasn’t listening. He went to the front door, and opened it, and stepped out onto the wet grey asphalt of the car-park, and looked around, and listened. The November air was raw and foggy, and there was that smell of damp that never seems to leave the valleys, and coal-fires, and petrol fumes.
Faces of Fear Page 12