by Anna Tambour
"Now this is the most important part," Flora warned, and the little group stopped its fidgeting, giggling, and for half the men, muttering.
"You all gonna get healthy now. No more bully beef and rice, bully beef and rice, all the time. We—all of us—gonna buy some chickens, we gonna raise them. We gonna plant vegetables. We gonna eat vegetables again. We gonna all lose some weight." She looked over at the bloated Didier. "You, too."
She put up her hand to the loud groan. "We all gonna drop dead too soon if we don't. Too high cholesterol. Too much fat."
"Why retire?" yelled Telltale, who was first on the list, "if we gonna be skinny and run by our wives?"
"You won't get skinny, Telltale," Flora smiled. "I just want everybody to live healthier. But I've never been unfair, have I? No one need to lose more weight than me. If I can't, then we all be fat together."
Didier, who was worried that he'd retired to a health farm, relaxed when he heard the explosion of laughs.
"You gonna stop eating those Milk Arrowroots you got stashed away?" Mary asked.
Flora would have blushed, but recovered with an effort that took the last of her willpower away. "Let's try, at least," she laughed.
People began to uncross their legs to stand up, but she held up her hand, and her face wasn't smiling now.
"One more thing. Anyone who tells anyone off Sufisi what go on here—no more payments, and if we catch you, it's long-pig you be. I speak true."
~
The first Sunday pissup/dance/all day feast had a sobering result on Monday. There were no hangovers. Everyone felt a glow and a happy belly from the day before, but no stomach bloating, furry mouths, or the expected pounding drums. They'd all danced and sung so much that the calories and alcohol had been sweated off in the fun. Many couples had continued their private fun into the night, but there was still a suspicion amongst all that maybe they were all turning into old fogies. Temperance doesn't sit with a fierce reputation. Still, the pattern was set. Sunday was a full-on rage, but a healthy one that everyone thoroughly enjoyed. Flora was smart enough to shut up about her happiness, lest some overindulge out of sheer rebelliousness against their sense of fun, in favour of a reputation to reclaim.
Didier experienced a personal renaissance. If he could have shed his accent, too, life would have been perfect. But, he mused, you can't have everything.
His feasts were the first Wednesday of each month. He had to space them out to make his own highlight of a happy retirement last.
But by the fourth month, he was under pressure by the list members to speed things up. That, and his own passion to create, forced him to make one feast every three weeks, but he didn't want to freeze his meat or smoke it (another old Sufisi recipe). He wanted to create with the freshest of ingredients.
Also, he was disturbed by the stump remains. They looked crudely done and uncomfortable.
He spoke in confidence to Flora first. Then he said good-byes to everyone when the Venture came again, and left for two weeks.
~
When he returned on the little blue one-man fishing boat skippered by Moses Kufe, Didier's new, discrete acquaintance, his arrangements had been made.
Thereafter, Dr. T. arrived for a two-day visit every three weeks, arriving Sunday morning with Moses and leaving Tuesday morning on Moses' boat. First, the doctor set up a splendid clinic for Flora, equipped with a stash of drugs and equipment that he'd brought with him. Next, he redid the stumps that had been previously sealed, and when these healed, they were all now smooth and beautiful. Next, he, with Flora as nurse, performed subsequent amputations to his satisfaction.
Dr. T. knew what it was all about—Didier had been honest with him. The doctor enjoyed the break from crowded Bangkok, enjoyed setting up the clinic and the challenges of the basic setting. In his chosen calling, he had seen enough of reality to not only keep confidences as part of his nature, but to expect eccentricity as normal. He was tickled by the existential choices made to maintain a passive lifestyle. The Buddhist monks at home cadged off everyone else to reach nirvana. These people didn't. He admired them.
Dr. T. was vegetarian, so declined Didier's invitation to a special degustation. But he believed in tolerance, as all Buddhists are supposed to, so never concerned himself with another man's meat-eating tastes.
What Dr. T. craved were his Sunday rages with the islanders. He loved to party, but couldn't in Bangkok. All the party places were full of his clients, exclusively of the fawning kind. These clients were different and fun. He went into Monday ops invigorated, with calm clients and a happy nurse.
Didier was happy, too, because his meat was unstressed. Stressed meat is always tough.
~
So medical standards soared on the tiny island. And after the next Venture visit, culinary standards did, too.
A gleaming Smeg gas-powered range arrived, along with boxes and boxes of mysterious paraphernalia. Women wove walls and all the double-handed men in the village were put to work building the most efficient kitchen Didier had ever had the joy to work in.
This kitchen was built beside the house. It had a pitched roof high as a temple. It faced the sea, with wide eaves and walls that could be rolled up or battened down.
The floor was of wave-polished stones, bedded in a thick cement screed. Stainless steel sinks. Fresh and saltwater hoses. A rotisserie made in Beirut (Didier preferred them to the effete European or V-12 American varieties). And all of his utensils suspended on hooks or stored in coconut-wood drawers (all smoothly finished with tiny sea-shell-wheel rollers). A kitchen for a food lover, built in paradise. And although it was space efficient, the building itself was oddly large.
When it was all finished, the whole village celebrated.
That Sunday, the villagers taught Didier to dance. Everyone had lost, on average, about two pounds. They all felt svelte, and even the fruit bats in the trees stopped their munching to listen to those pounding, stomping, singing, swishing, sweating, crazy humans partying up a storm.
The next day, Didier decided that—A)You don't live forever; so, B)He might as well share his riches; and, C)He needed to create for the few outside sophisticates he could trust—his "whiffy" friends. Those who could truly enjoy and appreciate his genius.
He took off on another trip, this time to Singapore. He made some phone calls to arrange his dinner party. RSVP then and there. Venue: Sufisi Island, flying in to Paurotown the next Wednesday to be met at the airport and boated over by Moses Kufe. Conditions of invitation: no one else knows where you're going or have been, or the menu. Warning: you might be shocked. Come at your own risk, but you must swear confidentiality.
~
Food is such a social lubricant. When enjoyed, the ultimate disarmer. Behind every hard-fought treaty these days is an army of slogging chefs.
But Didier felt uncomfortable with his foody fans, those gregarious, prying extroverts who brought their friends to his restaurants and with evangelical zeal, waved their forks and tongues over his creations with the fervour of a revival meeting. Because they "loved" him, they thought he was theirs. When they met him, they spoke in the tongues of restaurant critics to curry favour. Their worship was both claustrophobic and made him feel dangerously vulnerable.
Then there were the lone diners who had followed his food from France, who deconstructed the offending edifices to get to the gist of the experience—the simple joy of well-made food. They patiently waited for the fashion to pass, and Didier to find his roots again. They dreamed of his "old days" when he simply presented masterpieces of one-time oinkers. These fans made Didier feel even more uncomfortable than the loud sycophants, as they seemed to say but didn't ask when they looked into his eyes: When will you get over this? Their patience and faithfulness pained him. He wanted to strip off his layers for them, but their only sins were their revels in eating without distracting company—a foray into misanthropic indulgence achieved with the booking of a table for one. With this ascetic dedication to hedonism bei
ng the sum of their secret lives, they wouldn't understand how complex life can be.
So Didier's "friends" were an odd bunch—all with an oblique glint shining behind the civilised glance. He privately summed them up as the privately passionate few. They knew each other by the frank, eye-to-eye contact, only to be pulled down at the corner of the lids as if by a proprietary nurse—that's far enough. With each of the passionate few, the world hidden was what linked them, brought them close in ways that the normally gregarious never experience.
Didier's few friends were mostly gleaned from the travels/socialising that are necessary to success. Across a crowded room of babbling sycophants, one quiet jarring element would stand out. A look and mutual curiosity would bring the two into contact, and sometimes, when the clinging crowd had dispersed, a quiet sharing of ironies would bring Didier and the other to the lasting, erratic, and semi-confessional state that Didier could tolerate, and called "friendship". The knowledge of secret passions kept the bond, but the nurse in each always kept things from becoming too clear.
There was Lillian. Elegant, slim, owner of Issimo Issima Isthmus, food tours to men and women who need to be jewelled to eat in public. Lillian's passion was medlars. She was the only person he knew who liked and understood their rotten-looking souls. She loved their wrinkled skins, their fraught-with-putrescence state that has to be, when they're ready to eat. The individualness of their beings. The way they look like their unfortunate common name—dog's arse. She grew them and a weird assortment of fashionable (400 years ago) fruits and vegetables at her hideaway in Oregon, where she lived her holidays in overalls and a film of garden soil.
Then there was Satoru, once fusion-art-sushi emperor of Sydney. His secret passion was eucalyptus. Didier and he met years ago, in a Chefs in the Park gala for the Sydney Carnivale. Big screens showing Didier's anti-gravity acrobatics with edibles, followed by Satoru, wizard of the knife—in front of a salivating crowd of 50,000. Their eyes met ... and like a steak thrown on a smoking pan, the air Zzinged—We're cartoons! And as for THEM ... ! Satoru could only admit it to Didier, but Japanese food bored him to tears. He made so much money that he could have made futons from it, but every chance he got, he escaped to the Colo River with his dog Kwai (it kept people away), and brewed tea on a billy with tannin-browned river water, the "tea" leaves being Sydney peppermint, turpentine, spotted gum, woolybutt—every time, a different eucalypt. He envied the koalas. They could eat this stuff.
The closest he could get to heaven was his secret bancha tea—koala droppings gathered on a yearly visit to a holiday-house suburbia at Wilsons Promontory, where a family of semi-tame koalas nests in the trees beside garages and family dogs, fierce claws gripping the bark of trees planted in the tame lawns. Facial expressions scornful as malicious old men, but dropping their olive-seed-like excreta with predictable frequency on the grass.
In one visit, Satoru collected two years' special brew-worth for his own private ceremonies, but he usually visited each winter, when the houses were locked up, the sometime-residents working away in Melbourne. Typical of the level of confessional: Satoru knew Didier despised the towers and wanted to get back to horizontal pork, but thought money was the only motivation (same as for Satoru). Didier knew Satoru loved his eucalyptus leaves but knew nothing about the bancha tea.
Then there was Cardinal Florey, who'd only confessed to God and one man the real reason he turned down a promotion to Rome: his insatiable lust for kosher-pickled tomatoes.
Didier met Sean at a dinner arranged by the Cardinal. It was dinner for three—cruibins—grilled pigs' trotters. "A most restorative food" the Cardinal called them, and they had been prepared by the Cardinal's own cook.
"I've been telling Sean he should set up a restaurant again ... settle down," Florey said as Didier dipped his moustache into his stout.
"Oh, you cook?" asked Didier, his interest only possibly aroused by this man who was pale as a cook but had the hardness and build of a longshoreman from the days before shipping containers.
"Used to," dismissed Sean, shooting a sidelong so-there-you-go-again glance at Florey before cutting into his trotter.
The Cardinal was undeterred. "Sean could make pork sausages better than anyone, until you. And his fried bread ..."
"Yeah," Sean said, and grinned, "As they say here—to die for."
"Why did you stop?" asked Didier.
"Got tired of talking to the fat."
"He sells luggage now," Florey explained. "Travels around the world. No home life. That's no way for a man to live, Sean."
"Your Eminence," Sean smiled. "You care for me like a father."
"Yeah, well ..." His Eminence replied. "Somebody has to."
The Cardinal's intent failed miserably. Sean wanted to settle down and open a restaurant, particularly a fancy one as much as Didier wanted to open a shop that sold blow-up dolls.
But their friendship was established at that first meal, mostly because Didier knew Sean didn't just sell luggage, and Sean knew Didier knew.
Their differences complemented each other, though they never spoke of much in particular and Didier couldn't say he knew the man. One Monday night in August, Sean took Didier to a little place out in Brooklyn, called Sneads. It was a bar, the kind where you can get a meal with your drink, but don't look at the state of the floor or the glassware.
Sean took Didier out back to the cramped kitchen. "My cousin, Troy. His fried bread's also to die for," he laughed.
The T-shirted Troy flung a grey towel over his shoulder and stuck out his ham-sized hand to Didier. Didier and Sean stood in the oppressively hot doorway watching as Troy cooked them a feed—a meal that only a born cook can produce. The man had never used any gauge for amount, timing, temperature, except his nous. The whole meal was like the fried bread—to die for.
Sometimes Didier wouldn't see Sean for months, and then he'd pop up and they'd have a few quiet wind-down drinks late at night after Didier knocked off work. Didier always thought Sean found him soothing to be around and that this was one reason why the Cardinal wanted their friendship to bloom.
Didier's last friend was Abdul. He was the only fan Didier enjoyed, and he was probably Didier's most dedicated admirer. One busy Friday afternoon at Aether, the urgent question came to Didier, "A customer wants to make a booking now, but only if he can have dinner served déshabillé."
"I'll take it," Didier said, and picked up the extension phone. "Hey, man, when you gonna get over the crap?" the man on the other end laughed. Didier recognised the voice. Abdul, who'd followed him from restaurant to restaurant in France. "Come tonight, two-thirty, on the dot, Abdul. That's the only booking I'll make for you. Table for two only. Us." And Didier hung up.
Two-thirty a darkened doorway resounded with Abdul's knocks. Didier was ready, and they ate a meal made just for them. Only Abdul, of all the others, truly appreciated pork like Didier. For Abdul, Didier riffed, danced and sang in the kitchen. Abdul's only visible sign of work was his mobile phone calls—always to banks with names even Didier had never heard of, followed by furious tapping on a Palm Pilot. Abdul dressed like he cared about clothes, but that was only a show. It was at Didier's restaurants that he lived, and he lived best when the doors were shut and Didier cooked for them and them alone—and of course everything was stripped bare of artifice.
~
Didier didn't try the Cardinal. Of the prospective guests he did ring, 100% were intrigued beyond patience.
Lillian was between tours, so she was free.
Ben Dreiser (who Didier didn't think of as a "friend", but needed to prove himself to) had a life-crisis happening with one painfully boring client who just couldn't let him go. Not now. Ben prescribed a stay at Wildhearth, which he half-owned, and took the first plane out.
Satoru turned the management of his present restaurant over to his manager. There wasn't much to it as long as the ambulance number was kept by the phone.
Didier didn't have Sean's number, but he got the n
umber for Snead's and rang Troy there. Sean rang back an hour later, most intrigued at Didier's emergence from the vanished. Before flying out to this secret destination, Sean had to make some calls so that his sudden disappearance did not cause any unnecessary activities anywhere.
Abdul just left on the next flight, in jeans and T-shirt.
When Didier arrived home, it was on a very low-in-the-water blue boat. It took six men to carry his boxes and bags.
~
That night, Didier cooked a dinner for everyone on Sufisi—a massive baked dinner with roast vegetables—and for dessert—nobody could eat desert without having eaten their vegetables (but these vegetables were good)—for dessert, an enormous and everyone thought scrumptious pain d'épice (actually Grandma Grossnickle's gingerbread), and cute (but amateur) green-plaited cups of shiny rosy delicious ... "What is it?" everyone asked, as they turned the cups inside out and licked them clean.
"Sago," Didier smiled, suppressing a burp.
The men, as one, turned to their wives with faces that were downright accusatory.
The women looked utterly confused.
Eva asked first, with a polite little voice. "Will you teach us, please?"
~
After the burping was over, Didier, to the village's delight, moved six list members up the list (actually seven, since number six—Krischin Pu'atoi—chickened out and number seven took his place, so Krishchin was eliminated, at least temporarily, from the list).
The normal Sunday rage was changed to Saturday, Moses dropped off Dr. T. on Saturday, and on the Sunday before Didier's big dinner party night, Dr. T. and his artistic fingers performed. Flora was, as always, a more than skilful nurse. Dr. T. could have used her permanently if she'd only leave. But not only was she rich from her pay for these operations (Didier paid generously for all work performed in his interest) but she loved caring for her islanders in "Flora's Hospital", as everyone called it.
Tuesday afternoon there was an uncharacteristic knock on the "great kitchen" door. People weren't usually that formal, even with Didier, but he was creating, and they respected that. He wiped his hands on a towel and went to open it, wondering where Tomasi was. He hadn't seen him all day.