Red Gloves, Volumes I & II

by Christopher Fowler

  I was so fucking tired of competing.

  Setting the cookery book before me, I began to read.

  ‘I do so abhor those grim little boxes with pre-tenderised meat you find in supermarkets,’ said Nigella, leering out of the book with a sultry smile, ‘but they’ll do in a pinch until you can reach a decent poulterer.’

  What the hell is she talking about? I thought. Poulterer? Is that someone who just sells chickens, or does he actually shoot them as well? The word conjured those sepia Victorian photographs of men in straw boaters standing outside cluttered shops holding gigantic feathered birds up by their legs. But I soldiered on, turning over another page of Nigella’s cookery bible, perfectly described by the term lavishly illustrated.

  ‘Of course, you don’t have to choose Château d’Yquem when you’re making lemon balm jelly.’ I racked my brain. Nothing. Nigella might as well have been writing in Swahili. I tried another page. Fish pie, I think, that’s nice and simple.

  ‘The saffron redeems the bland, cotton-woolly fish you buy in those plastic-wrapped polystyrene trays at superstores; useful when you can’t get to a fishmonger.’

  Did people really speak like this? I turned more pages.

  ‘Bacon lifts the flabbiness of farmed salmon.’

  ‘There’s an authenticity to the waxy nut.’

  ‘Luscious, honeyed creaminess.’

  On and on it went, the burbling of a madwoman wandering the halls of some forgotten culinary insane asylum.

  I slammed the book shut. What fucking planet is this woman living on? I wondered. We live in Hamingwell. It’s a commuter estate. We don’t have a poulterer, we have a Waitrose half a mile out of town, or shops like Greggs where dumpy girls with doughy faces that disappear into their necks serve sausage rolls to morbidly obese children. We have stubbled dole-scum on park benches hammering the Tennent’s Super at eight in the morning. Down by the bus station there’s a bowlegged crack-whore with needle-marks behind her knees who takes a dump in the gutter and talks rubbish to frightened old ladies outside Argos. There are mad tramps having shoving fights over bottles in playgrounds, and drunks in pyjama bottoms pissing with one hand against the window of Iceland to steady themselves, and stoic African traffic wardens pimp-strutting around vans, and pasty teenaged burnouts with neck tattoos and baggies kick-lifting skateboards in car parks, and the Eastern European bloke who crouches in the corner of the building next to Somerfield glaring at everyone through his facial hair. We do have one specialist shop in the high street. It used to be a funeral parlour, and now performs tattoos and piercings.

  I looked at Nigella Lawson’s face on the cover of her cookery book. Her recipe for fish pie was called ‘Blakean Fish Pie’ because the dye in it reminded her of a sunset in a fucking painting.

  I would have loved to live on Nigella’s planet. I imagined the kitchen goddess at dinner parties, those dreaming, sensual eyes recalling a golden memory of scented Provence hills as she ruminatively chewed a chive-tinted flake of monkfish. Her lightly frosted lips parting slightly to allow the entrance of another morsel. Should we be drinking the Château d’Yquem tonight? I wondered. Although as it says here that Château d’Yquem is a Sauterne that goes with sweet puddings I guess the answer is no, we should be on a Pouilly Fumé.

  On page 164 of Nigella’s How to Eat (stupid question, you just open your mouth and shovel it in) there was an artfully minimalist picture of a sardine can with the lid gracefully bent upwards. Funnily enough, I thought, there’s a tin just like this hanging from the tree outside my front door, although I don’t think it was put there by a photographer’s assistant, and the pool of sick at the tree’s base with the discarded Sunny D bottle stuck in it somewhat mitigates the mise-en-scene.

  Looking through the cookbook I realised with a shock that there were no food pictures in it at all, just ladles and spoons on dynamic backgrounds. That’s the proof I needed, I decided. Nigella actually hates food and the mess it makes. She hates screaming kids and dirty hands and girls without tights and betting shops and nuisance drinkers because in her world there is only the fecundity of blossoming buds and the firm ripeness of hand-picked white peaches.

  I’m not supposed to cook from this book at all. I’m meant to keep it on a kitchen table with a sprig of dried lavender on top like some kind of votive ornament.

  Fish pie it is, then.

  I couldn’t be arsed to go to Waitrose. I went to the Am-La 24 Hr SuperMart and asked the girl behind the counter for one of the ingredients to the fish pie, crayfish. The girl pronounced the word back at me, trying it out on the tongue, then shook her head in confusion. No, it clearly didn’t ring a bell.

  ‘You want ’addock?’ she offered with a hopeful smile, pointing to a tray of luminous yellow fillets that might have been irradiated during the Chernobyl meltdown. The checkout boy was a cute-faced Eurasian called Sunii. He was helpful and kind and laughed in my face when I asked him where the fresh nutmegs were kept. I returned to the underground car park and briefly found myself trapped between two unbreakable glass doors smeared with pieces of burger. I knew it was a McDonald’s burger because I could recognise the machine cut of the dill slice stuck to the overhead neon tubing.

  Shouting through a sheet of filthy glass, the parking attendant explained that I needed to have my ticket punched by the checkout clerk, then swipe it through the safety box, then re-validate it in a machine, then enter it into another machine before a pole barrier and a set of yellow steel grilles would swing open to release me. When I had the temerity to ask why this was, he laughed and said, ‘Where do you normally shop then, love?’

  Now I understood the appeal of Nigella-land, where Pooh still sat on an oak tree branch and vicars doffed their trilbies to nurses with perambulators, where there was honey still for tea and the empire sun could never set on those who truly believe in fairies. Nigella wasn’t baking cakes, she was selling reveries of a hopelessly misremembered past.

  A woman stopped me and tried to get me to sign a petition to save a horse trough. The trough had been empty for years and was used as a litter bin by the local kids. She wanted it planted with flowers.

  People are always trying to save things, I thought. Save our post office, save our church hall, they collect a hundred signatures, paint some banners, then march down to the town hall to present their petition. They’re wasting their time because all the places they march for are doomed. They’ve been unprofitable for years, because the people who march to save them never used them when they weren’t under threat. Oh, they like the idea of such places, picturesque contributions to the old-world charm of England’s village past, but in truth, the shops and streets and monuments they try to save are too useless, too slow, too busy, too old. To make any business successful these days you have to deal in bulk, in mass output, in fast turnaround, in unit throughput.

  So they buy Nigella’s books instead. Abasing themselves at the feet of the kitchen goddess is the least they can do.

  I realised that this must have been the moment when I decided the kitchen goddess of the aspirant middle classes must die. Then I thought, Her house will be protected, she probably attracts stalkers with those come-hither buttered fruit dumplings that must be made with real cream, sinful but so gorgeous of a summer evening. She spent her whole time feeding us fantasies we could never fulfil.

  Maybe the problem wasn’t Nigella at all but the whole race of people like her, people who complained about speed-bumps and traffic cones from the space-hogging absurdity of their 4X4s, people who moaned about the difficulty of finding a really good private school for Harry and Charlotte, by which they meant that most of the schools were full of ethnic kids, and they didn’t want their darlings to start speaking with glottal stops and getting TB, people for whom the state of luxury was a given, not an aspiration.

  When you actively decide to hurt someone, I thought as I queued for a bargain bunch of shop-soiled daffodils, you must assume that you are damned at the moment you act. The sense
of relief that followed this knowledge was intensely liberating.

  I wanted to plan a crime. Ideally, I would have kidnapped a rich little girl from a Chelsea nursery school and subjected her to an upbringing on a sink estate, but the wealthy have the power to mobilise unseen forces against you, so I abandoned the idea even before I got home.

  Then I read that Nigella would be signing copies of her latest cookery manual at Waterstones bookshop in Kensington High Street at midday on Saturday morning.

  The good thing about bookshops is that they don’t have metal detectors, but just to be on the safe side I took a 22-centimetre anthracite ceramic utility knife I bought on Amazon. As I shuffled forward in the long queue of adoring acolytes I knew that nobody would suspect me because I looked like any other downtrodden, knackered housewife pretending that quality cookery had liberated her from the drudgery of married life.

  When I reached her signing desk—which I noticed had snowdrops on it in a little pink vase—I looked up and saw that Nigella was, in fact, beautiful. Her complexion was probably the result of using apricot facial scrub and tropical vanilla pod essence. I knew then that I couldn’t hurt her, any more than I could have stuck a knife into the Virgin Mary.

  Nigella was looking at me expectantly, with smiling eyes, her beautiful fountain pen raised, her assistant delicately pinning open the book at the first page. ‘How shall I sign it?’ she asked sweetly.

  I thought about my days, the diurnal passage of sun and moon that brought nothing, absolutely nothing at all that I would want or could afford. There was only one thing in the world I needed, and that was freedom.

  ‘Sign it in blood,’ I said, withdrawing the knife and sticking the white point deep into my bare throat. So white—I do so adore the whiteness that lifts the flabbiness of farmed salmon and adds a luscious, honeyed creaminess to the authenticity to the waxy nut. So red, a red that redeems the blandness of the cotton-woolly fish you buy in superstores.

  To say that Nigella was quite surprised is a bit of an understatement. A perfect parabola of crimson arced across her sweater, as if it had been hand-stitched in by nuns working for Agnès B. There was an awful lot of screaming, but Nigella was as calm and helpful as Florence Nightingale.

  I don’t remember much after that. It wasn’t Nigella’s fault; I know that now. It was me—I simply didn’t measure up. My ambitions ended at stained faux-beechwood when they should have been set much higher, at Blakean Fish Pie.

  They tell me I’m not very well.

  I like the food here. It comes in white plastic trays with a little white plastic implement called a spork, a combination spoon and fork that’s so blunt it won’t even cut a Brussels sprout that’s been boiled in the hospital kitchen for over an hour. Everything tastes exactly the same, like soft potatoey chicken. Or chickeny potato. There are brown swirls that might be blancmange or swede, and green swirls that might be peas or jelly. I can usually detect top-notes of turnip or lard. It’s perfect. My life is finally perfect.

  Although they have to take me out of the day room when Nigella’s on the television.

  Oh I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside

  Toby pushed the nail deep inside the piece of bread, placed it in his steel catapult and fired it high over the side of the pier. A seagull dropped from the steel-grey cloudscape, its yellow beak agape, and swallowed it.

  ‘Choke, you fucker,’ Toby yelled. He turned to Harry. ‘Got any more?’

  ‘That was the last one,’ said Harry. ‘We’re wasting our time. They can eat broken glass without dying. They’ve got special stomachs.’

  ‘What about barbed wire?’

  ‘Same. My dad’s got some rat poison in the shed. He saved it from when he was in the military. They’re not allowed to sell it in shops.’

  ‘Nah.’ Toby kicked at the railing until a chip of blue paint came off. ‘Do you think the pier would burn?’

  ‘The one in Brighton burned.’

  ‘Let’s get something to eat.’ He cast a cheated look back at the gull, which had alighted on a post further along the pier. It gave a healthy shriek as he passed. He threw a pebble at it and missed.

  The funfair was empty. A boy with a Metallica tattoo across his shoulders was mopping patches of rainwater from the steel plates on the bumper car floor. Everyone teased him because the tattooist had spelled the band’s name wrong, with two Ts and one L.

  ‘Oi Damon, you wanna be careful, you’ll electrocute yourself,’ Toby called.

  ‘Fuck off,’ Damon shouted back. ‘It only works if you touch the ceiling.’ He raised his metal broom handle and thrashed the mesh above his head, spraying sparks, forgetting he had bare feet. ‘Fuck!’ He hopped back and swung the broom at them.

  ‘What a moron.’ Toby and Harry laughed together. Damon had ingested so many drugs during his clubbing years that he could barely remember his own name. They passed Gypsy Rosalee the fortune teller, who was actually a secretary at Cole Bay Co-Operative Funerals, making a bit of money on the side by building sales pitches for lay-away burial plans into the predictions for her elderly clients. Once he had paid to have his palm read, and she had told him he would go to the bad. ‘You’re not satisfied with your lot,’ she had said, sitting back and folding her arms. ‘You think you’re too good for us. Lads like you always come unstuck.’

  ‘You’re not a real fortune teller.’

  ‘I know enough to recognize someone living under a curse when I see one.’ She dug out his money and threw it back at him. ‘Go on, fuck off.’

  Now he skirted the helter skelter, where rain had removed so much lubrication from the slide’s runners that it was common to see someone getting off their mat halfway down and giving it a push. Ahead was the big dipper that had been closed ever since a pair of toddlers were catapulted into the sea when their carriage braking system failed. Apparently one of them was still in a coma. He hated the pier even more than he hated the rest of the town.

  Cole Bay, population 17,650, former fishing village, was like a hundred other British seaside resorts, a byword for boredom, a destination that might have amused the Victorians, but was hopelessly outpaced by the expectations of modern daytrippers, who wanted something more than rip-off amusements, a few chip shops, some knackered beach donkeys and a floral clock. By day sour-faced couples huddled in shelters unwrapping sandwiches and opening thermos flasks. By night every teenager in town was out in the backstreets, getting pissed and goading their friends into punch-ups. Where the land met the sea, all hopes and ambitions were drawn away by the tide.

  Ahead, a bored girl was rolling garish pink spiderwebs of candy floss around a stick. Her name was Michelle, and she had originally planned to work at the fair on Saturdays until she could get away to London, but now she seemed to be on the Pavilion Pier every day. As she blankly swirled the stick, strands of reeking spun sugar flicked onto her bare midriff.

  ‘What the fuck are you lookin’ at?’ she said, popping a pink bubble of gum at Toby.

  ‘Why do you keep making that shit when you haven’t got any customers?’ Toby stuck his finger in the tub and allowed sugar to cover it.

  ‘It gets bunged up if I stop. We get flies in it and all sorts. The punters don’t notice. I’m not going out with you so don’t ask.’

  ‘Wasn’t going to. You’re too old for me, and you’re getting fat. Anyway, I thought you were leaving Cole Bay and going to London.’

  ‘Changed my mind, didn’t I. Went full time. It’s easy work ’cause there’s no-one here midweek.’

  ‘Boring, though.’

  ‘Not as boring as being at school. Which is where you and your mouthy mate are supposed to be.’

  ‘Double games period. We bunked off. We’re going to see a horror film.’

  ‘The living dead thing? You don’t need to watch a movie for that, just hang around here. And you ain’t gonna pass for eighteen, neither of you.’

  ‘The ticket guy goes out with my sister. If he doesn’t let us in, I’ll put the blocks
on his chances.’

  The first fat drops of rain spattered on the pier’s floorboards. ‘Go on then, take your grubby fingers out my tub and fuck off to your film.’ Michelle tugged at the striped awning of her stall, dismissing them.

  They ran back along the pier, past pairs of shuffling pensioners in plastic rain-hoods. They still had an hour to kill before the film started.

  The Punch & Judy man was on the beach packing up his theatre. They called down as they passed. ‘No show today, Stan?’

  ‘Fucking weather,’ Stan called back. ‘I’d make the effort and stay open, but we had a gang of kids in earlier, right tearaways, the little bastards were making fun and chucking stuff. Puppets not good enough for them now there’s video games.’

  ‘You should try putting in some new material,’ said Toby.

  ‘I’ve tried that. Blue jokes, new songs. I had Mr Punch perform a yodeling number, but the last time I tried it I swallowed me swozzle.’

  They headed up to the promenade, where the old folk sat in hotel greenhouses trying to ripen like tomatoes. The air reeked of doughnut fat and seaside rock. Outside the Lord Nelson, a drunk fat girl in a tiny halter top was sitting on the kerb, stoically attempting to be sick between her spread legs.

  Dudley Salterton was sitting on a bench outside the Crow’s Nest playhouse, looking more than ever like a tramp. He pulled the withered roll-up from his lips as the boys stopped before him and coughed hard, spitting a green globule onto the pavement.

  ‘You all right, Dudley?’ asked Toby. ‘You got a piece of cigarette paper stuck on your lip.’

  ‘Fuck off, will you? I’m on in a minute.’

  ‘You’re not in the panto, are you? I thought it started ages ago.’ Toby looked up at the poster for Aladdin, which starred someone from Steps and a runner-up from Big Brother. Dudley was the resident compère at the Crow’s Nest’s variety nights, filling the gaps between acts with lame magic tricks and banter he had first used in the years after the war, half-heartedly updated to include jokes about modern TV personalities. Not that his elderly audience cared; they came to catch up with each other, to wave and eat and chat. They came because it was raining, because there was nothing else to do in Cole Bay on a wet Wednesday afternoon, because they were afraid of dying alone.