Amazing Disgrace

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  The other person I phoned that day was Dr Adrian Jestico, now back in his Southampton office after his quick flip off-shore. If you remember, his sister Jennifer had explained that he wasn’t able to join us for dinner that night at Crendlesham Hall because he’d been called away to deal with instrument problems aboard a research vessel. Having interviewed him and his colleagues after the EAGIS trip, I now have a respectful grasp of the fortune it costs each day to run these ships and understand why there’s a panic when things go wrong at sea. By a strange coincidence this particular vessel to which Adrian flew was also working in the Canaries, although it had no connection with EAGIS or volcanoes. The scientists aboard the R/V Tony Rice had been plotting deep-sea currents to the west of La Gomera using acoustic thermometry. Something to do with global warming, apparently. Suddenly, their work was disrupted by ten-minute bursts of loud incoherent signals coming at irregular intervals from the seabed some way to the north of their position. Puzzled, and preferring to do some detective work before abandoning their measurements, the scientists eventually tracked down a singular train of events.

  Three months earlier a freak wave had washed a consignment of thirty new transponders off the deck of a container ship bringing them from the United States to Rotterdam, en route for some European research department. The transponders were packed in a ten-foot container and the wave swept it into the Atlantic where it drifted for weeks before its seals began to degrade, water leaked in and it gradually sank. This is apparently a common enough occurrence for floating containers to constitute a real danger to ocean-going yachts. For a long while they remain buoyant enough to float barely submerged and as invisible as blocks of ice. What made this container a hazard to oceanographers was its consignment of transponders that had already been profiled to form a network for detecting seismic events. Each transponder had been set up to chirp at a different frequency so that the events could be pinpointed using triangulation. Once deployed, they would remain silent until they detected a seabed tremor, whereupon they would switch themselves on and interrogate each other for ten minutes. While their container was sinking in stately fashion to the sea floor off La Palma, the water pressure activated the transponders. When the container touched down on the bottom, the bump was enough to set them off in a ten-minute burst of activity.

  Since then, each minor seismic event beneath the seabed has triggered them again, and since in that area such events happen several times a day they have made themselves heard a good deal. There they are in their container, sending out wild bursts of data and each responding to the others’ acoustic bleeps in a recursive stream of feedback. Their chatter is unstoppable and fills the water column with the weirdest tweetings and cheepings. The scientists aboard Tony Rice have tried sending commands to them to turn themselves off or otherwise commit suicide, but without success. They continue to sit like a group of housewives at a coffee klatsch, compulsively gossiping down there in their little room in the dark. And there they will continue to gossip until their batteries run down or some method is devised of shutting them up. In the meantime they are making any further acoustical experiments in the area impossible.

  Since Adrian is in charge of the thermometry project he had to jet out to Las Palmas and be helicoptered aboard the ship to see what could be salvaged. The weather on site was unsettled and Adrian found the Tony Rice tossing fretfully, a state of affairs that he said applied equally to the vessel’s complement. The lost container is on the bottom in a place described as virtually inaccessible. The sea is very deep at that point and the seabed a chaotic jumble of volcanic detritus. The scientists have concluded there is little chance of retrieving the container and any salvage attempt would cost vastly more than the transponders are worth.

  All of a sudden I saw the possibilities this story of oceano-graphical woe offered. Perhaps my sense of grievance – normally the most quiescent and least visible side of my nature – had been gingered up by the awful contretemps at Marta’s house. But at once I spotted how a costly but minor maritime upset could be turned to Samper’s advantage. So I rang up Adrian and told him my plan, extracting his promise to come and visit me shortly. However, I rang off without telling him about my recent night of shame. I’m still a little nervous of his laughter, to be frank, and before recounting tales at one’s own expense one needs to be comfortably à deux and with a fair slug of prosecco under one’s belt. I thought it judicious to wait before making him privy to my amazing disgrace.

  That was three days ago. Since then I have looked at my new chapter for Millie! with renewed satisfaction, confident that I have produced a recognizable portrait of one of the outstandingly bogus characters of our day and age, a portrait I’m certain she will read entirely differently. As I explained to her in London, it would be impossible now to alter the text throughout to make it look as if she had been motivated from the outset by her numinous relationship with the ocean deities. That is not what drives world champions, and everybody knows it. My new short chapter, though, invents some soulful moments and blows a little dust from the road to Damascus into the middle of the book. There’s no actual moment of blinding revelation, no voice from the sky talking about pricks and persecution. Instead, there’s a growing awareness on Millie’s part of something that only the very successful and overpraised need be told: that there may possibly be more to this world than their own egos. Something in the starlit nights and the hiss of phosphorescent water past Beldame’s three hulls succeeds in making her feel marginally uncertain about where she is going and why. A step further involves her entertaining the novel idea that treating the ocean as the mere racing-circuit on which the engrossing saga of her personal achievements has unfolded is not merely bad taste but plain sad. My aim in this new chapter is to do little more than introduce the concept of a lone yachtsperson with Doubts, and maybe scatter a few seeds of callow spirituality that, by the time a sequel comes to be written, will no doubt have grown tall and can be harvested as a rich crop of orient and immortal bollocks.

  I give my new chapter a final going-over and must admit it deftly strikes just the right note. As I say, Millie will read it as straight. Anyone else with more brains than a greenfly will marvel at the unseemliness of a one-armed mid-fifties grandmother only now beginning to wonder whether her domineering competitiveness may not have shrivelled the rest of her like a parched pea. I’m so pleased with it I e-mail it off at once to Frankie so that he can print it out and have it biked round to the Hilton for Millie’s approval, which I’m confident she’ll give. She’d better if she wants to catch the Christmas market.

  That done, I can turn my attention to other things. One of these is not easy to think about because it brings back the other night’s events with too much clarity for comfort. It has to do with the spectacle I must have presented when first transfixed by the policeman’s blinding light and his blasphemous bellow. I have to ask myself whether my unconscious, having made sure I was woken by the policeman’s footsteps in the first place, mightn’t maliciously have driven me to expose myself at the window. For when on approaching his fortieth birthday a man suddenly finds himself packing more veal, it is possible that his unconscious might revel in it in a jock’s locker-room sort of way even as his ordinary self would cringe at so juvenile an urge. And of late I have found myself cringing whenever I remember my recent experiment with Mr and Mrs ProWang’s potent little pills. This is not so much from shame, since it’s hardly a cause for shame to wish to push back the boundaries of scientific knowledge, but from worry. Where will it end? That’s what I want to know. Like Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it growed, and as yet shows no sign of stopping.

  The question is, at what point do I go to a doctor and confess what I’ve done? As an insecure nineteen-year-old one might get away with it; but at thirty-nine the confession that I’d belatedly decided I was under-vealed would be embarrassing, to say the least. I also doubt whether anybody would believe me (‘Yeah, yeah, a scientific experiment. I mean, come on, Mr Samper.
Pull the other one’). But to admit that the revealing process had grown out of hand might be to invite the medical profession’s most scathing weapon, derision illmasked as professional sympathy. I suppose I might write to Mr and Mrs ProWang in Guangzhou – or better, c/o their internet site – and … and what? I can’t possibly complain that their pills have done exactly what they claimed they would, and more. Maybe they could start work on an antidote to arrest the process? Yet for that I would need the evidence of a medical examination, which brings me back to that consulting room and the medic struggling to maintain his or her imperturbability. And he or she, of course, would be eager to prepare a paper for publication in The Lancet or the BMJ on this exceptional case. I can practically write it myself:

  The micropenis has long been considered a clinical condition with its own fields of research, including endocrinology and psychiatry. The macropenis, by contrast, has hitherto not presented as a pathological condition and, indeed, the word does not exist in the medical lexicon. Although this condition has made a regular appearance down the ages in folklore and popular literature, in the medical literature it is mentioned only tangentially as a possible cause of dyspareunia or as a symptom in conditions such as precocious puberty, and then only in relative, not absolute, terms.1 In the case of a forty year-old patient, however, we enter uncharted waters with a symptomatology that includes abruptly raised Fibroblast Growth Factor and somatomedin/IGF-1 blood levels …

  Even cloaked in anonymity I would find this sort of thing quite grim enough without the additional irony of serving to enhance somebody else’s career by turning over all my privately collected data and standing around mutely wearing a paper gown. True, there are alternative possibilities, one of them being to capitalize on this personal disaster. Think positively (I ought to be telling myself while lighting a patchouli-scented joss stick): this is not an affliction but a benediction. We are blessed by our adversities … A likely tale. All I can hear is Émile Coué’s famous maxim rephrased to mock me: ‘Day by day, in every way, I am becoming bigger and bigger.’ It is a pity that freak shows have fallen victim to amniocentesis and political correctness, otherwise I would be able to earn my living at fairgrounds alongside the Bearded Lady, the Fish-Scaled Boy and the Rubber Man. But one’s afflictions can still command a market value. There may be a new career opening for me as the guest star in strip clubs or those DVDs with arch titles like ‘What – The Butler’s Sore?’ Would that really be worse than writing about Millie Cleat? The answer, incredibly, is yes. I can’t even bring myself to explore possible avenues of succour on the internet by summoning up some perverted penile helpline designed for ghouls and insomniacs. No. I have not yet reached so low a point. I just wish I could banish from my mind’s eye an image in my school geography textbook of fattailed sheep in Australia obliged to tow their massive appendages in little carts. Well, the thing is not to become obsessive. I make a pact with myself that I will now take my tape measure into the bathroom only once a week, and carry on keeping a careful record. Whatever else, this is a scientific imperative. If I’m to make medical history, if not The Guinness Book of Records, I shall need impeccable data.

  Right now I have more important things to think about, such as producing a culinary artwork from the calves’ brains that are still sitting patiently in the fridge. Even at this altitude the weather is oppressive and I am disinclined even to think about heavy food. This is not the moment for seam-bursting winter fare. I bought the brains in Viareggio, you will remember, under the influence of my bedtime reading of Emmeline Tyrwhitt-Glamis’s Emergency Cuisine. In this book she made several pithy asides about the iniquity in wartime of eating such things as lamb or veal. Sheep and cows, she explained, were factories on the hoof and their full output was essential to the war effort. She was wholly opposed to the slaughter of any creature that had not attained decent old age unless it happened to be wearing a Nazi uniform, in which case it was never too young to be culled. Naturally, by today’s standards Dame Emmeline’s hard line strikes us as disgraceful. For one thing, it helped perpetuate the Protestant streak in British cookery that has done so much to earn us the pity and contempt of more discriminating nations. By ‘Protestant streak’ I mean the idea that it is sinful to allow notions of pleasure to contaminate the act of eating, which according to nonconformist zealots should serve only to refuel the machine. These people also consider it proper to maximize God’s bounty by, for example, picking broad beans only when they are leathery monsters the size of big toes, or runner beans when they are a foot long and covered in fibrous green parchment, or pears when they are weeping bombs of wasp-fodder. Dame Emmeline did not personally subscribe to this Calvinistic ideology. Indeed, her house in Berkeley Square became famous as a wartime haven for young naval ratings lost in the blackout, and there are ample accounts and memoirs to testify that she had no taste whatever for overripe fruit, being strongly inclined towards the invigorating hardness of comparative immaturity. Nevertheless, strictly from the point of view of wartime cooking, she did condemn as decadent the habit of slaughtering lambs and calves. In times of national emergency quantity must trump quality if it’s available at all. Citizens should eschew rack of lamb even as they lamented the lack of ram. Anywhere other than on her own settee Dame Emmeline called patriotically for less veal and more beef.

  Not one whit less than our fighting housewives, [she wrote] our British cows are part of the nation’s great Victory effort. We already know our gallant head-scarved women working their dangerous shifts in a munitions factory are in the forefront of crucial war-work. But you make a mistake if, the next time you see a herd of slow-moving Jerseys or Guernseys obliviously munching the lush grass of a shady pasture, you imagine they are mere shirkers and idlers living off the fat of the land. On the contrary, even as you watch them they are making the fat of the land in the form of best British butter: the essence of England to put heart and strength into our fighting men. What is more, these workers are mothers too, and in due course their offspring will be sacrificed at the Front in the war against hunger. What noble beasts are these! To watch them is to wonder what is going through their brains …

  Ah yes, their brains. In our enthusiasm to get their brains into our stomachs it is important not to be carried away by primitive ideas of sympathetic magic, such as that somehow the dead brains of cows are full of the residues of green thought in a green shade. You smile indulgently, of course, knowing all about lark’s tongue pâté and why oysters are supposed to be aphrodisiac; and you have sometimes wondered whether young David, having laid aside his trusty sling, was expected by his tribe to sit straight down to a barbecue of Goliath’s balls to be sure of incorporating all his fallen foe’s strapping manliness (and here I find myself wondering yet again about ‘orchic substance’ and decide that I won’t go there). Medieval nonsense, of course, although it’s amazing how much magical thinking has made it in various guises into this supposedly scientific age. If you stand on the terrace here at Le Roccie and look down at the coast you can see, beyond the patchwork sprawl of greenhouses and Viareggio’s outskirts, the very beach where in July 1822 Lord Byron and Edward Trelawny burned the bodies of Shelley and Edward Williams. It had taken ten days for Shelley to be washed ashore, his friend a little longer. Classic floaters in a warm climate, they were in a pretty disgusting state and burning must have seemed a cleansing and dignified measure. Shelley’s heart was raked out of the pyre unconsumed and in due course was buried in Rome. Can you believe that for two pins they’d still be at it today? In 2005 there was an official request for the heart to be cut out of Pope Wojtyla’s corpse for burial in his native Poland. (DHL Rush Manifest: One (1) old pump. Donor value: Nil. Relic value: See attached estimate.) And here we are again, back in the primitive world of martyrs’ thigh bones and pieces of the Ark and bottles of water imported from the River Jordan. The whole thing is most peculiar, not least this enduring idea that the heart is the seat of the emotions and the soul, despite centuries of anatomist
s saying ‘It’s the brain, stupid.’

  The culinary truth is that the years of fizzing thought and passions that have passed through a brain before it dies leave no characteristic flavour. There is just the pulpy machine; the ghost has been laid for good. Which is why I now propose a dish that perversely attempts to resurrect it in a green and pastoral form:

  Ghost soufflé

  Ingredients

  30 gm butter or olive oil

  30 gm plain flour

  500 gm fresh-picked clover

  4 egg yolks and 5 whites

  1 handful fresh basil leaves and stalks

  250 gm calves’ brains

  1 sprig of mint

  1 teaspoon coconut milk

  You will be making a roux with a difference, for which you will need 160 ml of clover juice in place of dull, conventional, play-safe milk. The first task is therefore to pick the clover. Use the entire plant except the roots. Wash well and spin in a salad carousel to remove excess water. Depending on availability the clover can be eked out with tender, freshly cut grass but do not exceed a proportion of fifty-fifty. This is also the moment to mix in the basil and the mint. Now you will need to have recourse to the sugar cane juicer you brought back from Southeast Asia because only it can apply real pressure. Forget the quaint aluminium apparatus slowly oxidizing at the back of the cupboard that you bought in a fit of meanness some years ago in the belief that it is possible to extract first-rate orange juice from fourth-rate oranges. Nor should you be tempted to use a blender to reduce the vegetation to mush: it will contain far too much cellulose and any grass mixed in will render it gritty. You are not expecting to lift out of the oven a mousse of compost. You are aiming to recapture the Spirit of Cow, to re-implant in the deceased animal’s little brain a placid, ruminant ghost suggestive of lush, sun-dappled pasture and slow, cuddish thought. To that end it is best to ensure your butcher sells you the grey matter of forage-fed and not grainfed animals. No matter what you do to it the meat of grain-fed cattle is never completely free of a hint of corned beef, a wartime standby that I believe is still in use for extreme eating purposes. Having gone this far I will confess that Derek once sent me a booklet that falls at the child pornography end of cookery books: something to be hidden away and brought forth only at moments of shared hysteria in carefully chosen company. This is an illustrated collection of recipes entitled The Great Taste of SpamTM that includes such creations as Spamtm Stuffed Potatoes Florentine and Spamtm Fettucini Primavera, the colour photograph of which looks exactly like what you find on the mat after worming the dog. You might infer that this is classic blue-collar cookery from something called Hearty SpamTM Breakfast Skillet. ‘Hearty’ is a tinned food adjective par excellence.