Sergeant Corrigan had his lunch at the Marine Hotel. It was the main meal of the day for him. Carvery lunch in the lounge. Chefs in white hats and red faces behind a self-service counter. Corrigan was not interested in the smoked cod pie or the boeuf bourguignon, so he opted for the bacon and cabbage with potatoes in their jackets. Just what he loved.
Corrigan was accompanied by a younger colleague who chose the bourguignon. The chef wiped his hands on a blue and white checquered apron before handling the food. Sharpened a short carving knife with a musical interlude before cutting fresh slices of bacon. Smiled and gave the sergeant extra, knowing that he was in the force. Corrigan rubbed his hands in anticipation.
The Marine carvery had the atmosphere of a sanctuary. Plate sounds and cutlery clash. The low hum of monotone voices: a rising babble of sufficiency. Corrigan and his colleague sat at a round table in silence. For them, food was still of such primary importance that a curfew prevailed. Until they crossed the hunger threshold they could not really afford to get into any serious conversation.
How are the wardrobes coming on? his colleague attempted.
Fine, Corrigan said, and normally he would have been only too delighted to start talking about the cult of home improvement. Every screw, every measurement, every tricky corner. His new black ash veneer built-in wardrobes with tinted mirrors were a matter of great pride. But this was not the time for it.
Corrigan opened the buttons on his jacket and sat leaning forward, knees apart on either side of the round table. One of his feet curled round the leg of his chair for support. Red napkin on his right thigh like a piper’s patch as he peeled one of the potatoes. The noble spud. Big as a lumper. He picked it up in his hand and stripped away the freckled skin with meticulous care, catching it between thumb and knife and exposing the bright and steaming pulp underneath. There was a slight frown on his forehead and a barely concealed smile on his face as he concentrated on this intimate task. He respected the potato and seemed to be talking to it all along. Come on, take your jacket off now, like a good lad. You’re far too hot. He undressed it quickly, juggling the hot core around on a tripod of his fingers until he had finished and dropped it gently on to the plate, right beside the cabbage. Jacket folded away neatly on a side plate. Then he plunged the knife into the centre and the yellow-white, powdery landfalls of flesh fell apart. Steam bursting up from the scalding interior. Butter melting into a golden pool.
He ate with gusto and possessed excellent food management skills. He cut a triangle of pink bacon, anointed it with a touch of mustard and moved his torso forward so that his head came to meet the fork. Again and again, this repeated welcoming motion. Bowing to the bacon. Following it up with a forkful of cabbage and potato. He held the knife like a fountain pen, deftly levering a bale of cabbage on to the fork and bonding it temporarily with the adhesive potato mash, before moving his body forward again to meet the oncoming food.
The potato was still too hot, so he whistled a bit to cool it down. Then he remembered to drink his cordial, before starting the same routine again. His eating was carried out in a series of well organised clearing operations. Demolition and disposal. Keeping an eye on the custard trifle to follow.
His eyes were in fact semi-glazed. He looked out the window towards the seafront but failed to see the band of blue water. He half noticed people coming and going. But his eyes stopped seeking information. His vision was impaired. Women and men could have danced naked on the other side of the room. He was virtually blind to anything further away than two feet around him. A kind of voluntary blindness. As if there was an area cordoned off with crime scene tape, beyond which everything was a watery blur.
John McCurtain had lunch at the Anchor Bar. It was as convenient as anywhere else. He intended to make a right pig of himself. He was starving and Kelly’s did a great sandwich.
Port and Docks! That’s what McCurtain worked at. Nobody ever knew what exactly that meant, or what kind of duties he performed. It could have been anything from sweeping the offices to designing lighthouses. It didn’t seem to matter much. The Port and Docks board was a kind of vocation that embraced a great number of men and women under a cloak of respectability.
McCurtain walked into the Anchor and slapped the Star newspaper on the counter. Sat up on the stool and started reading the front page. Ordered a ham and cheese toasted sandwich with relish. An American touch. He also asked for onion rings. The truth lay in between the slices of a sandwich at the Anchor Bar.
It was more like a meal, both in price and handling. Not the kind of sandwich you could hold in one hand while you had a pint in the other. It was a knife and fork situation, with thick, generous rivers of relish running like lava out from between the slices. McCurtain lashed into it. Cut smartly with a downward motion of his elbow, and a look of disdain on his face which seemed to imply that he actually reviled what he was about to eat and enjoy. His nose was curled up. Mouth shaped into a grin. And his eyes leering at the food like a voyeur.
He sat up straight, inhaling deeply as he chewed and stared at the topless woman in the newspaper on the bar counter beside him. He gazed at her arm cradling her massive breasts. Jesus, she had to hold those things up, they were so big. Almost like an arse. His fork was like a crane hire service, delivering chunks of ham and cheese sandwich. He started humming with pleasure. No particular song; something more like a speeded-up version of classical Western film music like Big Country or A Few Dollars More. He took a great draught of creamy black milk. He hummed and swallowed and chewed and looked sideways at the woman, as if he had something against her.
It was feeding time at the Haven. Jimmy pushed the trolley carrying trays along the corridor, the smell of tomato soup drifting before him. The nursing staff helped to distribute the trays to the various rooms: Mrs Broadbent, Mrs Bunyan, Dermot Banim, Bernard Berry, etc. Some of them were still able to handle their own lunch, more or less, though they sometimes dropped their spoons and had to call for help. Some made a big mess of themselves. Jam and butter all over their faces. Bernard Berry instantly slobbered soup all over his trousers.
Each tray had a bowl of soup, a knife, fork and spoon, a side plate with two slices of white bread cut diagonally across with a pat of butter. After he had delivered the trays, Sister Agnes asked him to take care of Mrs Broadbent who had already spent twenty minutes trying to open the butter. At this rate it would take her five days to finish the soup. Jimmy slipped the tip of the knife into the pat of butter, unfolded the edges and spread the soft yellow butter across the white triangles. Then he stuck the spoon into Mrs Broadbent’s hand, a slice of bread in the other and stood back.
Off you go, Mrs Broadbent. I’m timing you.
Some of them wanted to go to the loo as soon as they saw the food. Others had to be spoon-fed. Nurse Boland normally spent a half an hour over soup with Mr O Reilly-Highland, pinning his head back against the armchair to stop him nodding. Even the triangular slice of white bread was a problem for some of them, because the tip flopped down and took them forever to aim at their mouths. Bernard Berry was trying to stick the bread in his ear.
Finally, when this daily drama was over and the Duphalac had been administered, Jimmy sat down in a wheelchair, looking out the window over the harbour, to eat a bowl of soup himself. He was hungry enough to be able to censor the grotesqueries of the old people’s home out of his mind for the time being. Tried to convince himself he was not eating flaky skin and bedsores. Incontinence sheets. Mrs Spain’s shrunken breasts. Polyps. Corns. Lesions and festering melanomas. Jimmy was beginning to feel jealous of the old people. And when Nurse Boland came into the sitting room, he started rattling his spoon against the side of the stainless steel bowl. Pretending to spill it all over the floor. Threatening to slobber and pee all over himself. Throwing slices of white bread around like paper aeroplanes until Nurse Boland smiled and knelt down in front of him to feed him with a mock frown.
Sk
ipper Martin Davis had lunch on the move. He parked the red van on the pier and stepped out, took the wrapper off a tuna sandwich and opened a can of Sprite. The seagulls perched nearby and watched each movement of the food towards his mouth. He left the door of the van open so that the music on the stereo played to the open air.
It was a rushed meal, because Mongi had asked him to deliver a box of fresh fish.
Martin Davis threw the crust out on to the oily water where the gulls shrieked and fought for it. Then he walked over to the ice-box where the women sold a variety of fish. Two men from a Japanese restaurant nearby were picking and choosing. The skipper bought a full box of mackerel and the women were surprised that a fisherman would be buying fish. But Martin Davis side-stepped the enquiries by saying it was a special delivery to a catering firm.
Mongi O Doherty was a great man for the kiddie food. Beans, chips and sausages. He had not progressed to an adult diet yet, and his mother was cooking up some prime pork sausages for his lunch. She had crossed the city on a bus to get his favourite Hick sausages and now stood in the kitchen, staring out the window as she listened to the radio, all about a young boy who had been inducted into a religious sect and brainwashed. It would never have happened to her son, Richard.
Mongi was in the living room watching Sky news. Every now and again they would break in with the latest stock market reports and share index, which irritated him no end.
Does my head in, he said to himself.
For practical reasons, much of his money was tied up in property. He had recently bought the house and put it in his mother’s name, though it was understood, of course, that an unwritten contract between mother and son was more binding than any legal document. His present address was at a city centre luxury flat where he spent most of his time with his present girlfriend, Sharon. Cooking was not one of her strong points, however, and Mongi usually ate at home with his mother.
Mind, the plate is hot, she warned, placing the meal of ebony sausages in front of her son. A life in waitressing had taught her how to distract from the food at a crucial moment.
What’s this? Mongi demanded, looking at the disaster on the plate.
I was listening to this programme, she said. I got kind of carried away, son.
Don’t call me son, Ma.
There was no excuse for incinerating a man’s food. Unforgivable. It was worse than any double dealing. Worse than snitching. Worse than being fucked over by the law. His own natural mother, destroying the best of Dublin sausages as though she cooked them with a blowtorch.
They’re black!
I’m sorry, Richard.
And look, Ma! Did I ask for parsley?
No, she said. I just thought it would look good.
What use was a touch of garnish when the rest was totally inedible?
It’s pretentious, he said, picking up the lettuce and dangling it in the air. Especially when you go and burn the shaggin’ sausages.
I’m doing my best, son.
You know what lettuce and tomatoes says to me. It’s a set-up. A stake-out. It’s just the kind of thing the cops would hide behind. I can see them hiding under that lettuce in plain clothes. Lettuce and tomato is a dirty Garda operation.
He picked up the knife and pointed it at his mother. Even if it was only a butter knife, it was enough to terrify her. Nobody had more power to scare a mother than her own son.
You’re trying to shop me, Ma.
No, son. I’d never do that. I swear. My own flesh and blood.
Mongi ruthlessly pushed the greenery off the plate. His mother went back out to the kitchen and sulked, while he sat in the living room, trying to make the best of his meal alone. He took one of the ebony sausages and placed it on a slice of pre-buttered bread, drew a red line of ketchup along the top and rolled it up like a sleeping bag. He saw food basically as a victim. He bit the poor little sleeping sausage with a ferocious bite of his yellow smile, expecting it to scream in pain.
Mongi had subliminal thoughts about eating raw food. He looked at the Sky newscaster and imagined taking a big bite out of her arm. He wanted to return to the wholesale savagery of eating in the jungle, as though food didn’t taste right unless he killed it himself. Perhaps he should have been a butcher.
He pushed the sausages away and turned to a bar of Toblerone. Something about the pyramid shape made it more of a challenge. He bit off a slice of the mountain, leaving the satisfaction of his teeth markings behind. Chewed and took a good sip of Southern Comfort. Churned the mixture around in his mouth, inhaled through the grid of his brown teeth and swallowed.
There was a knock on the door. It was the skipper, Martin Davis waiting outside with his box of mackerel.
Marlene Nolan opened a tub of Hot Cup, poured in the boiling water and watched the metamorphosis taking place in front of her eyes. It was a miracle each time, like the resurrection of Christ. The room lit up as the golden light radiated from the Hot Cup. The smell that permeated the flat was something close to a block-layer’s armpit. She had got used to that reek and even began to crave it. Missed it when it was gone. It was like the bad smell they put into natural gas so that it could be detected by the human nostril, a scent that was designed to be thoroughly offensive but that you could get attached to, in a peculiar way. Maybe it reminded her of her father – his big overpowering, testosterone presence in a small two-roomed council house. Smiling with his white shirt rolled up at the sleeves, and the smell of stale smoke in his clothes mixed with his all-embracing Parmesan scent. A hundred thousand paternal armpits processed into one concentrated cup and brought alive with boiling water. She sat down and switched on the TV. A programme about dogs and dog owners. Taking care of your pet. How to vet the kennels.
Councillor Sylvester Hogan took a light lunch at the yacht club. He hadn’t eaten there in a long time and was told the food had greatly improved. It had always been more of a drinking haunt, for meeting up with people from the Chamber of Commerce. They had changed some of the kitchen staff and had since received a Sense of Excellence award, as if excellence was some kind of absolute in itself. Excellent what?
Who knows. Perhaps the dining room was worth another go, Hogan thought.
The waiter greeted him with huge enthusiasm and behaved like a method actor as he ushered Hogan to a table, bowing and practically genuflecting; speaking in a broken French accent. But Hogan knew he came from Sallynoggin, just up the road, and had picked up the strange hybrid dialect as a commis chef in Paris.
Hogan could have told him that Irish people didn’t like all this attention to be drawn to themselves when they were entering a restaurant. Eating out was still a stealthy engagement. And they didn’t want it broadcast around the world on Euro News every time they had a snack in public.
The waiter stuck a menu into Hogan’s face and stood back with gleaming pride.
Hogan went for the Seafood Symphony and bore an expression of supreme satisfaction when it arrived on the table. It was a dish in the great Irish tradition of pink prawn cocktails with orange mayonnaise sauce on a bed of lettuce and soft cherry tomatoes. A prizewinning College of Catering creation that came with slices of home-made brown sodabread which began to crumble in his hands as soon as he touched it.
Magnificent, he muttered, as he opened the four provinces of the butter pat and tried to bind the breadcrumbs together.
Some day Hogan would start a gourmet charter for his country. Show people what a real gastronomic sense of excellence meant. He could talk. Some of the meals he had eaten on his fact-finding missions to Europe were absolutely stunning. Such class. Such aesthetic masterpieces. The German Schweine-haxe ranked among his favourites.
Hogan skipped the main course and moved straight on to the pudding. The new chef had concentrated on minimalism. A tiny piece of apple pie sat at the centre of a massive dinner plate. A piece of confection which came with a knife and fork an
d looked like a secluded thatched cottage on a deserted plain, with icing sugar and frosted snow covering the frozen landscape. Rural desertification, with boreens of chocolate designs all over the empty plate to signify a trend away from the land. A humble apple pie in a Southfork setting, with a dollop of cream like a marquis tent on the ranch.
Any other day, Hogan would have been a little disappointed with the portion. But that afternoon, he had set up an appointment with a healer. Carmel Coyne was going to meet him at his home to cure his back. He was smiling to himself as he demolished the apple cottage.
Corina Stanescu ate a plain hamburger and french fries. Initially, when she started working at a diner-style, take-away restaurant, she was excited about this kind of food, with its new world taste of prosperity. But she had by now watched at least a million customers devouring the same meal. It seemed to her that it was fantasy food; customers who came there were just mentally hungry and ate an imaginary meal. She had seen people impatiently cramming french fries into their mouths as if they could never get enough. There was something insubstantial about them, as though each person knew they were being cheated.
She remembered how in Bucharest people had taken the McDonald’s trays home with them at first, thinking that everything was free, or else thinking that they deserved a little more. People had flocked with great excitement to the new fast food restaurants, as if they represented a new freedom. Her attitude had changed since she’d started working there herself. All she could think of now was the temperature of the deep frier, and the length of time it took to cook a hamburger, and the correct procedure with the garnish. At first, she hadn’t noticed the distracted looks on customers’ faces. Or the people who sat alone, not eating anything, just staring into the street outside and the passing traffic. Women with buggies. Men holding on to styrofoam cups.
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