by Jim Crace
So I was curious when he and I crossed paths. I followed him. He let me follow him, for he is not afraid of us. He turned his back on me and didn’t care. I watched his antics in the night. I watched his white hands and his sack. And I can tell you, he has fooled you yet again. The devil is not emptying his sack, but filling it. He does not plant. He picks, he picks, he picks: that’s why his back is bent. He is the one who wants the mushrooms for himself. His greed is stronger than his spite. He thinks the mushrooms are too good for us. We’d not appreciate the poisons or the tangs that they provide, their blasphemies. We are too dull and timid for the magic and the flesh. He roams the woods and meadows when it’s dark to satisfy himself. He knows which mushrooms to pull up. The ones he leaves for us are flavourless.
55
HERE IS AN average restaurant. Each Sunday, we take our seats to order omelettes and to watch the chef present our mussels to the visitors. He has become the weekend entertainment of the town. There’s nothing else to do – except in church, or ten miles up the coast, away from friends and family.
Last summer (so the chef reports) a politician from the state drove through. The woman with him couldn’t be his wife. They sat right there, next to the window, with a sideways view down to the port. He ordered local produce for her (‘I always dine from the region,’ he said. ‘That’s how you end up with the simplest and the freshest food.’ The cheapest, too). They’d have the brandied aubergines to start with – oily, cold, lascivious – and then the pork stew and a bottle of the earthy, hillside wine that no one from the region drinks. You can imagine what he had in mind for her – what with the alcohol, the aphrodisiacs, his hand pushed out across the table top to stroke her painted fingernails, the showing off.
A little ancient jealousy from chef, perhaps, explains what happened next. The politician only wanted to impress his guest and not be made a fool of by the food. He had a point. The wine bottle was insufficiently chilled, he complained. The bread (served in one of the yellow, woven-plastic baskets that gave the restaurant its name) was ‘not today’s’. The aubergine was bitter. Had no one in the kitchens degorged it with salt before they dished it up? Did they employ a comic or a cook?
The waiter at that time (a student long since gone up north with one of our town’s better-looking girls) returned the wine and the dish of aubergine to the kitchens. ‘I heard!’ chef said. ‘So give them my apologies. And they can have two dozen mussels on the house.’
Oh, surely, everybody knows that our mussels can be dangerous, particularly at that time of the year. The tides are far too weak in summer to clear the soup of sewage from the banks. Dead shellfish decompose more thoroughly when it is warm. So was it just bad luck that nearly all the mussels that finished up on that free dish were treacherous?
Now, this is supposition. No one truly knows exactly how the lovers spent their afternoon. It’s possible, of course, that their intestines had been lined with steel and that the sifted toxins of our lavatories passed through without effect. But where’s the anecdote in that? We’d rather have the chef’s report in which (and God knows how chef knew) the politician and his lunch guest had hardly reached the hotel down the coast when justice called. It might have seemed to other guests or to the ever-patient clerk that their eagerness to reach the room was simple summer lust. But no, they were too pinched about the haunches and too self-involved to be true lovers. And no, his hands were shaking at the lock with something more disruptive – and less fleeting – than desire. Inside at last, alone, they would have tussled for the sink and toilet seat, her skirt half up, his trousers down, but not for the reasons they had planned.
Indeed, the politician had been right to ask; the chef was more a comic than a cook. The stories that he served were better than the food. He made good soufflé out of lies. He made bad soufflé out of eggs. And so, while we might only risk the omelettes or grilled fish on our visits to the Yellow Basket, we never tired of his stories of revenge, or hearing him reproduce on the expresso machine the sound those depth-charged stomachs must have made when his rogue mussels were propelled into the hotel room that summer afternoon. We didn’t mind the repetitions, or that he would always illustrate the colour of the diners’ skin by holding a lime up to the light, or that some of the details changed – improved – with each retelling.
Was it, then, simply to please himself or to keep us in his thrall (and in his restaurant) that chef announced at the beginning of this season that mussels would be served ‘by way of an apology’ more regularly at the Yellow Basket? He says that he can tell which mussels will be troublesome. The safe ones snap shut at once if they’ve been prised open with a fork. The dead ones don’t. Others to avoid are those with shells that have unhinged before being cooked, and any that do not fall open to accept the sacrament of garlic butter and parsley once (according to his recipe) they have been roasted in hot ash. All these unworthy ones are set aside for chef’s selected guests. Perhaps he’s only teasing us, but still we have to – want to – swallow all his words.
They look so innocent, those blue-black castanets, their pearly inner cases and their fat grey beans of meat. But they have caused, this year, a banker from America to spoil his trousers and the front seat of his car. And they have packed their dark export of bacteria into the luggage of at least three lady pensioners from the cruise liner, which puts into our port on its round trip each spring. The on-board doctor almost had to have one of the women lifted off by helicopter. And the chef’s apology has given the sweats, the vomits and the chills, the cramps and the diarrhoea to one lone diner from Milan, two German boys, a family of five with noisy children, a Princeton graduate, a priest, the owner of a smart boutique in France, a couple planning a divorce, several state executives and (according to the chef) a gastronomic writer from the New York Times magazine. It was as if we’d made these strangers pregnant. They’d gone away with our dull, revengeful town inside. And they’d rebirthed our mussels down the coast.
So, as we lift his omelette to our mouths each Sunday lunchtime, we pray for troublemakers. We pray that chef will be offended by his passing visitors, that they’ll complain, that he will offer his apologies and speak those paralysing words, ‘I hope you will accept a plate of mussels on the house.’ We do not like to stare, of course, but it is hard to resist a sideways look from time to time. We want to see the empty shells pile up.
So this is how an average restaurant can always have its tables occupied.
But best of all is on the street, when the driver of too large a car, or the possessor of an accent we don’t like or merely someone who appears too fortunate enquires, ‘Where is a decent place to eat?’ It is a duty and a joy to point and say, ‘The Yellow Basket. Up above the port. The mussels are quite good, I hear. Bon appétit.’ An unexpected opportunity.
We’re cruel, of course. We’re unforgivable. Why should we punish them simply for coming from a different place or having better lives or being on vacation? The pleasure that we get when we imagine how they’ll pass their afternoons is hardly warranted. We know our laughter is malicious – but surely there’s some justice in it too.
We feel as if we’ve cast a heavy stone onto the all-too-perfect surface of the sea, to send our ripples out against the waves.
56
EVERYBODY – rich or poor – had soup stones in those days. I found ours a half an hour’s bike ride out of town on what, before the container port was built, used to be Crescent Beach. I had to wet my shoes and trouser legs to retrieve it from the plunging tide. Amongst the million grey-white granite rocks, it caught my eye, distinguished by a circling band of black, which made the stone appear as if it had been split in two then fixed with tar gum. It was a glinting and dramatic gem, still wet in that hard light, a perfect fit in my small hand.
It was less glinting when I got home that afternoon. The granite had dried and dulled. A half an hour from the sea was all it took to rob my stone of light. But still I prepared it for my mother’s kitchen, full of ho
pe. You had first to boil the ocean out, or else your soups would always taste of fish.
My mother used that stone in every soup she made. She couldn’t make good soup without its help, she said. The flavours wouldn’t mix. The bottom of the pot would burn or stick. The ingredients would tumble on the heat and boil over. A soup without a stone was as heartless as a peach or plum without a stone. But with its help, she claimed, she could even make good soup out of just tap water. No stock, no meats, no vegetables. Perhaps the granite had a flavour of its own. We’d have to try one day. Perhaps it stored a memory and aftertaste of everything that had ever shared its pot.
Whenever she made soup and I was home, she used to let me add my piece of granite to the pot before she lit the gas. And, when the soup was cooked, it was my job to take the colander spoon and lift the soup stone out. I used to marvel at its fleeting smell and how it had briefly regained the light and colour of the beach.
I keep the family soup stone on the windowsill of my apartment now. I haven’t cooked with it for years. Who makes soups these days? There’s such a choice of ready-mades in shops. Occasionally I use the stone as a pocket companion for travelling, a granite talisman to keep the plane from crashing, but otherwise I hardly notice it. Except sometimes, when I’m reminded of home, I run my soup stone underneath the tap to bring the smells and colours out, the beach, the sea-tricked light, the gems of silica, the small boy stepping in the tumbling tide, retrieving flavours for his mother’s thousand soups.
57
HIS BREATH WAS damp and earthy. The old man had tuberous growths in his gut. Dr Gregor could palpate them with his palm. They were starchy, as tough as carrots. ‘There is some inflammation,’ he said. ‘Nothing to worry about. Rest is what you need.’ What was the point of alarming a man of eighty-two with an honest diagnosis, with hospitals, with surgery? He would be dead within the month. ‘Are you in any pain?’ The old man shook his head. The doctor prescribed warm olive oil to ‘ease the passage through your bowel’.
He did not die within the month. He lasted ten more months before he came to Dr Gregor’s clinic again. It was the spring of the drought. He looked as tough and sinewy as a man of half his age. Indeed, he looked a little younger than before, though he was eighty-three now.
‘Are you in any pain?’ the doctor asked again.
‘A little. Once in a while.’ When he bent to tie his boots, he explained, or tug at weeds, the hard knots in his stomach bunched against the waistband of his trousers. It was uncomfortable. What man of eighty-three could bend to touch his boots without a little pain?
‘I think I’d better take a look,’ the doctor said. He helped the old man onto the examination bed and turned him on his side, his face towards the wall. He pulled on a pair of disposable lubricated gloves. ‘Knees up. This shouldn’t take a second. Think of somewhere nice.’
The old man searched for somewhere nice. At first it was the modest garden where he now lived in town: the tiny square of lawn, the hem of evergreens, the single potted maple on the patio. But soon he settled on the larger piece of land that he had owned when he was younger, its trees, its stony paths, its dogged thistles, its flinty earth, the vegetables, which he would harvest on summer Sundays and bring up to the house in a trug.
The doctor did not have to penetrate too deeply beyond the sphincter to find the woody growths in his patient’s bowel. Perhaps they were elephantine polyps of some kind, and not a string of cancers. Perhaps they were benign. Clearly they caused no pain, except when the old man stooped to touch his toes. Dr Gregor pushed against the lowest tumour with his index finger. It did not seem attached, but moved freely. Its shape was odd. It was not symmetrical or funnelled, but complex, with extensions and recessions like the chambered plaster cast of an earth-roach burrow. ‘Have you examined your stool of late? Anything unusual? Any blood?’ The old man shook his head. Why would he want to examine his stool?
The doctor was not a sentimental or a squeamish man. He managed to work a couple of small ‘polyps’ loose. He put one in a lidded specimen tub and labelled it with a date and a reference for the laboratories. The other he put in a sterile bag with a little purified water. He was puzzled, but doctors are often puzzled. Let the laboratories give a name to it. He put his arm around the old man’s shoulders and took him to the door. ‘Warm olive oil,’ he said.
Laboratories can take a month to analyse and process specimens. Dr Gregor did not think the matter urgent enough to telephone for their report. The old man was fit for eighty-three. What was a month to him? They’d get their answers soon enough. In fact the old man died within three weeks of his last visit to the surgery. A sudden and unheralded stroke, too quick to experience. A neighbour called the doctor out one morning and led him to the body. His patient must have died the evening before. He’d been standing in his tiny garden with a hose. The grass and shrubs were green with care, despite the weeks of drought. The tap had been running all night long. The old man lay on his back in shallow water. Slugs were on his shirt and trousers, taking refuge from the flood. There was a smell – damp and earthy like the old man’s breath had been. It was the smell of vegetation. So that was that. He’d made a decent age and met a decent death.
The laboratories sent their report and their invoice. The old man’s specimen was described as ‘non-invasive’, ‘benign’, and ‘entirely vegetable: water 83%; albuminoids 2%; gum 9.1%; sugar 4.2%; inulin 1.1%’. Dr Gregor held the ‘polyp’ he had kept up to the light in its sterile bag. It seemed more swollen. The inside of the bag was silvery with condensation. He paid the laboratory bill by cheque. A waste of time and money. He could not pass the costs on to a patient now. He put the swelling polyp on his windowsill. He did not like to part with it, now that the man was dead.
Encouraged by the heat and light and by the purified water, the vegetable grew a pair of tiny yellow horns. Its wrinkles flattened. Its extensions and recessions achieved a kind of nippling puberty. One horn pinkened, lengthened and uncurled. The old man’s polyp had a shoot. The doctor put it in a glass dish on a bed of damp toilet paper. He watered it each day. He gave it houseplant feed. Quite soon he had three green shoots and two more horns. Roots as thin as cotton thread clung to the damp paper. He had to pick a greenfly from its stem.
A patient – asked to lean against the windowsill while Dr Gregor checked her damaged vertebrae – recognized it as a tuber. Not a tumour, then?
‘I’ve never grown these ones myself,’ she said. ‘It’s root ginger, isn’t it? Or Jerusalem artichoke? What do they taste like? Does it smell?’
The doctor held it to his nose. The old man’s breath again.
‘You’ll have to pot it up,’ the patient said. ‘It won’t survive on that!’
The doctor sent his nurse out to the shops to buy a pot and some compost. He thumbed the polyp into the soil, and only damaged a couple of shoots. He put the plant outside the front door of his surgery. His patients dropped their cigarette ends into the pot, or spat into the soil. The soil flourished on bronchitis. It put up three good stems, with heavy leaves, and – in the summer – three inconspicuous yellow flowers at shoulder height. The old dears coming in for their pills didn’t have to bend to press their noses to the blooms. The yellow petals were busy with weevils. His patient’s diagnosis was confirmed by some of the many gardeners on the doctor’s list: they were Jerusalem artichokes – or Canadian potatoes as one man called them – not root ginger.
In September, the three stems and their leaves dried out and died. They broke away, and the pot became an ashtray, nothing else. In November, Dr Gregor found a moment to carry the pot through to the yard behind the surgery. He turned the soil out onto a plastic bag. He planned to wash the pot and plant a basil in it, or a daphne. Something colourful or evergreen for the steps. There were a dozen clusters of the old man’s polyps multiplying in the soil, a starchy kilo at the very least. The doctor picked them out and put them in the emptied pot. They smelled of soot. ‘More trouble than they’re w
orth,’ his nurse remarked. ‘Except in soup!’
That night, he took the crop to his apartment. He did not peel them or attempt to scrape them. They were too oddly shaped. He scrubbed half of them in warm water. He cooked them au gratin with bacon curls. His brother and his sister-in-law came for dinner. The Jerusalem artichokes, he said, were the gift of a patient: ‘He grew them himself.’ They tasted bland and floury. According to his sister-in-law, they would have benefited from a pinch of coriander, say, or more salt.
Dr Gregor was fond of his brother and his wife, but she was far too keen to give advice on what would benefit his life, his work, his apartment, his cooking. More salt. A dab of paint. A housekeeper. A bit of colour to his clothes. A holiday. A wife. ‘Why don’t you settle down?’ Or, ‘Find a woman for yourself. That nurse of yours is quite a decent sort.’
The doctor showed his brother and his wife to the door. He let them take the half-kilo of Jerusalem artichokes that had not been scrubbed and cooked. For their kitchen garden.
His guests were a little windy from their meal. Their breaths were damp and earthy. ‘They’re nice, but indigestible,’ his brother said.
‘Are you in any pain?’ Dr Gregor asked. ‘Take warm olive oil, to ease their passage through your bowels.’ He wondered if he should have said more about the artichokes, how natural, how death-defying and how benign they were.
The doctor’s brother dug the tubers into a trench of flinty earth, amongst the dogged thistles at the bottom of their garden. He put in lime and compost. In summer there were yellow flowers, and in autumn there were tubers by the kilo. On Sundays he would harvest them and bring his trug of starchy vegetables up into the house. They made the perfect Monday soup, which kept them warm and bilious in winter.