American Savage

by Matt Whyman

  ‘But why?’ asked Ivan. ‘His mobility scooter is outside.’

  ‘Because you’re his grandson,’ she told him, mindful that the old man was in earshot – not that he heard a great deal nowadays – ‘and it’s the right thing to do.’

  Angelica tightened her lips as Ivan shrugged and turned to fetch his baseball cap. There was no doubt that he’d become a little sullen lately. Then again, it came as little surprise from a boy of his age. Angelica supposed she should be grateful that she didn’t have a teenage son smoking weed in the back seat of a stolen car. Instead, he spent a great deal of his time at home and never missed a meal. Nevertheless, she didn’t take kindly to the attitude.

  ‘Ivan,’ said Titus, who had witnessed the exchange, ‘what do you say to your mother?’

  The boy slotted his cap on, bill facing backwards, and seemed confused about his response for a moment.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said finally. ‘Thanks for cooking, Mum. It was a good one.’

  ‘It was spectacular,’ said Oleg, as Titus helped the old man to his feet. ‘At my age I have to assume it might be my last, but I enjoyed every mouthful.’

  ‘That’s good to hear.’ Angelica stepped back to let Amanda cross between them with the plates. ‘You’ll always have a place at our table.’

  ‘And no doubt there’ll be many more feasts to come,’ said Titus, before escorting Oleg across the tiled floor. Prompted by a nod from his father, Ivan opened the front door. With all the blinds still closed, the intense sunshine that flooded inside was in marked contrast to the gloom in which they’d dined. Oleg followed his grandson outside, squinting as he peered up at the sky.

  ‘It’s a shame we can never dine al fresco,’ he observed. ‘A barbeque would be wonderful.’

  ‘Think of the breeze,’ Titus cautioned, and then gestured with his eyes at the neighbouring villas.

  In his lifelong experience as a modern-day consumer of human beings, Titus Savage had made few mistakes. He was a conscientious hunter, always going to great lengths to cover his tracks. Only once had the family’s appetite for people been uncovered, which is why they’d had to leave England in a hurry three years earlier.

  Naturally, Titus had planned for this eventuality. To overcome the arrest warrants, he’d had fake passports prepared for everyone. As Amanda was not a suspect at that time, having only dined with them as a guest on that one fateful occasion, she was free to flee under her own identity, before joining the family at a later date. Wanted for the murder and consumption of a man, and possibly many others, Titus was well aware that only another planet could provide a safe haven. It was a notion that prompted him to think hard about where the family should relocate. In hindsight, Panama had been a mistake. The kids just complained about the humidity and erratic internet access, which is when he had set his sights on Jupiter. It would seem like light years away from their former lives in London, as he pitched it to them all, but not as alien as they first feared. When Titus had unfolded a map of America and explained that Jupiter was in fact a sleepy coastal town in the country’s Sunshine State, he just knew that this was a golden opportunity for the Savages to start afresh and thrive.

  ‘Four hundred years ago,’ Titus had said, in a bid to seal the deal, ‘the earliest English settlers arrived on the country’s shores at Jamestown. Only the promised land was a little short on something central to their survival.’

  ‘Videogames?’ Ivan had suggested.

  ‘Food,’ his father pressed on, having pretended not to hear. ‘So, as the cruellest of winters set in, those poor souls were forced to dig up the corpses of the fallen and eat them just to stay alive. We’re talking about America’s ancestral heritage here. They might not feast on human flesh any more, but it’s in their genes! In my view, that makes it our spiritual home. We can live among these people and instinctively nobody will suspect anything out of the ordinary.’

  ‘As long as the climate is good where we’re going,’ Angelica had said. ‘Warm, with good shopping.’

  A northernmost suburb of Miami, divided by a broad water inlet and shot through with creeks, Jupiter was a world away from the skyscrapers way down in Florida’s most famous metropolis. Unlike the outgoing spirit of the city, the people of Jupiter liked to keep themselves to themselves. With a waterside villa in a sought-after spur community, and false documentation that completely severed all links with their former existence, the Savage family were no exception. Every residence on the loop road was screened by careful landscaping, and featured private jetties out back to make the most of the tidal waters. It was a quiet, affluent but uneventful pocket of the county where palm trees sliced up the skyline everywhere you looked, pelicans roosted on porches and the rise and fall of the sun set the sky ablaze. Outsiders often said that the town’s attractive, clean and tidy appearance was just a front that hid the more desperate aspects of life. You only had to venture behind the local parade of stores, where freshly watered flower baskets hung from the awnings, to find vagabonds and crack addicts in the shadows of the alley. In many ways, this tendency to pretend that bad things didn’t happen suited the Savages just fine.

  ‘People only see what they want to around here,’ Titus once told his son on a drive across town. ‘That’s what helps us blend in.’

  They had just passed a traffic accident of some description, marked by hastily erected screens and all the cops who waved them on. From the passenger seat, Ivan had strained for a better glimpse.

  ‘If only that was true,’ he had muttered to himself on facing the front once more.

  For a centenarian like Oleg Savage, Jupiter’s pleasant climate and peaceful neighbourhood offered a new lease of life. The regular feasts helped, of course, but by and large the old man felt at home here. He had settled in nicely, drawing no attention to himself, just like his son and daughter-in-law. As for the grandkids, while little Katya had practically grown up native, it was Ivan who continued to stick out, despite his best efforts. Just then, as the boy accompanied his grandfather home, Oleg was forced to slow his mobility scooter to a crawl just to stay level with him.

  ‘My dad,’ asked Ivan, who walked with a pained-looking swagger as if he had some eggs in the seat of his pants and was trying not to break them, ‘was he always this controlling?’

  Oleg looked across at the boy, with his clip-on sunglasses flipped down and the scooter whining. He didn’t think it helped that Ivan had belted his shorts so they hung around his thighs. Another inch lower and the boy risked falling flat on his face.

  ‘Your father does the best he can under difficult circumstances,’ he told him. ‘You should only ever think of him as caring.’

  A moment later, a car with tinted windows crawled along the road. Rap blared from the speakers. Ivan looked nervous. As it passed, he flinched behind his grandfather’s scooter.

  ‘Will you relax?’ said Oleg, shaking his head. ‘This is hardly a gangland.’

  Ivan turned to check that the car had really gone.

  ‘I wasn’t scared,’ he said, sounding thoroughly unconvincing. ‘A Savage isn’t scared of anything!’

  As the boy resumed his swagger along the road, leaving his grandfather behind this time, Oleg reached for the accelerator dial on his scooter. With safety in mind, Titus had applied a strip of tape to indicate that the old man should never exceed half-speed. Just then, Oleg barely turned the dial by a notch before he found himself closing in on his grandson once more.

  ‘It’s quite a walk you have there,’ he observed finally. ‘I’m guessing it doesn’t come naturally.’

  Ivan glanced over his shoulder at the family elder humming along just behind him. Oleg was wearing a flannel shirt tucked into his slacks, while the old man’s mirrored shades offered the boy a clear picture of himself.

  ‘It’s got to be done,’ he told his grandfather. ‘This is the U S of A.’

  Oleg thought better of telling Ivan that his centre of gravity looked all wrong. It seemed to him like he had an invisib
le thread affixed between his shoulder blades, tugging on him as he moved. He also opted not to inform the boy that someone had penned the words ‘kick me’ across the back of his shirt. He’d find out for himself as soon as he took it off, which had to be marginally less humiliating than having it pointed out by his grandfather. Instead, as they approached the junction that led from the inlet community to the main road, the old man wondered what he could do to help him integrate better.

  ‘How is school?’ he asked.

  ‘The same,’ said Ivan.

  What with the shirt, Oleg took this to mean that after all this time the boy had yet to make any friends.

  ‘Your mum says you’ve joined the football team,’ he pressed on, looking for a bright side. ‘That’s great news. What position do you play?’

  ‘Bench,’ said Ivan.

  Oleg appeared baffled by the response, but chose not to pursue it. If anything, he had to admire him for taking up the national sport. For Ivan wasn’t involved in the kind of football that used jumpers for goalposts, as it did in Oleg’s day. This was American football – a completely different ball game with rules that flummoxed the old man. He just hoped the lad’s young mind made it easy for him to embrace.

  ‘Well, bench sounds promising,’ he told his grandson regardless. ‘It’s certainly a start.’

  As he trundled across the junction, with Ivan still strutting awkwardly alongside him, Oleg focused on the sign on the lawn for the whitewashed complex up ahead. When the Savages first moved to Jupiter, it had been his idea to move to the Fallen Pine Nursing Home. At Oleg’s time of life, it was just easier all round. The home had lovely staff, with no stairs for him to negotiate, while the company of other people also in their winter years came as a comfort to him. With his son’s family just around the corner and a place at the table whenever a feast was served, the home suited his needs in every way. In fact, when one occupant passed on in the room across the corridor, and another one moved in, Oleg had encountered a renewed zest – one that he believed he had left behind in his teenage years. Negotiating the ramp towards the main doors, he looked across at the window to the communal room and saw her sitting there, as she always did when he was out, waiting in the sunny spot for his return.

  ‘Priscilla looks pleased to see you,’ noted Ivan.

  Oleg Savage nudged the scooter into the park position on the porch. ‘That’s my girl,’ he said, with a wink in the old lady’s direction, and then began the slow, painful process of dismounting from his steed.

  3

  ‘Now, be good,’ said Angelica, as she hung Katya’s coat on her pre-school peg. ‘No biting other children today, understood?’

  ‘OK, Mommy.’

  ‘Promise?’

  The little girl looked up with an air of such innocence and purity that Angelica found it hard to accept that she had now been warned twice for leaving tooth marks in her classmates. On the last occasion, the indentation was close to going beyond play that had got out of hand. Angelica had been forced to put on quite a performance to appease the teacher, and really didn’t relish the prospect of being called in again.

  ‘I promise not to taste them any more, Mommy,’ Katya replied.

  ‘Good girl,’ said Angelica. ‘And it’s pronounced “muh-mi”,’ she added. ‘As I keep telling you.’

  Katya nodded, and then puckered her lips with her eyes scrunched in readiness for her traditional kiss goodbye. She really was a sweetheart, as Titus kept repeating to anyone who would listen, with honey-coloured ringlets spilling over her shoulders, shining blue eyes and a little mouth in the shape of a perfect bow. Angelica watched her skipping off into the busy playground, and quietly hoped she really did recognise that friends should not be considered food.

  When the family had first arrived in Jupiter, baby Kat was still crawling and knew just a handful of words. She had since spent more than half her life here, and so it came as no surprise to her parents that she should sound so naturalised. Angelica was careful that she didn’t go too far, though she herself had come to love life in Florida. If the family didn’t already possess false documentation to support their citizenship, Angelica would’ve been first in the application queue. Yes, Ivan still nursed some issues settling in, but she felt sure that in time he would fall into the American way.

  Driving out to the gym with the top down, this toned, tanned mother and housewife relished the warm breeze on her face and gave no thought whatsoever to her former life. Jupiter offered the family everything, and that included a plentiful supply of people that nobody missed whenever the time arose for a feast. Maybe it was the year-round sunshine that had brought out the best in her, for Angelica had come to complement her love of cooking with a passion for keeping fit. In particular, she liked to train in the open air, and so her mood got even better on pulling into the gym car park, where her personal trainer was busy stretching his hamstrings.

  ‘Good morning, Joaquín,’ she said, on killing the engine. ‘I hope you’re not going to push me too far today.’

  The young man awaiting her arrival was dressed in a vest that exposed his broad shoulder blades and running shorts accentuating his tight waist. His wavy black hair was waxed back to the nape of his neck, while Angelica often joked that she could strike a match on his stubble. Joaquín Mendez was a twenty-one-year-old Argentinian with strong beliefs. The cross around his neck symbolised his deep religious commitment, while the absence of trainers on his feet marked his passion for the soulful art of barefoot running.

  ‘If I didn’t push you, Mrs Savage,’ he said, in his rich South American accent, ‘I would not be doing my job to the best of my abilities.’

  Angelica climbed out of the open-top and shut the driver’s door while facing him. ‘My husband hates to see people suffer,’ she said. ‘You’re so different from him in lots of ways.’

  Titus Savage had arrived early at the apartment in order to prepare the place for a new occupant. With a viewing lined up that morning, he needed it to be clean, tidy and smelling of fresh coffee rather than the corpse he had recently allowed to mature in the front room.

  Sitting in the kitchenette, having flung open the windows, he found himself thinking ahead to lunch. No doubt Angelica would bring something nice back from the deli, as she always did after a workout. Some bagels, perhaps, or the sourdough bread that he liked so much – especially when it was still warm from the baker’s oven. You couldn’t live on human flesh alone. Like any diet, it was important to keep things healthy and balanced. He dwelled on this over the large latte he had picked up on the way over. With the plastic travel lid in place designed for sipping on the move but which never seemed to work, it was inevitable that he’d slop several drops onto his tropical shirt. Peering down at the wet spots where his stomach sloped outwards, Titus was reminded that one aspect of his eating habits really needed to be addressed.

  ‘This must be what they call a midriff crisis,’ he half joked with himself. It wasn’t that long ago when a spilled drink like this would’ve had a clear drop to the floor. Nowadays, Titus often found he had to brush crumbs from his belly. Setting the latte on the kitchen counter, he hopped off the stool and stretched. Then, out of curiosity, he attempted to touch his toes, but got no further than his upper thighs. Standing tall once more, he shook his head and sighed. ‘You’ve let yourself go,’ he declared, addressing his reflection in the oven door. ‘What are you? A Savage or a slob?’

  Titus felt a tinge of shame. As head of the family, especially one with such a noble tradition to uphold, was it not essential that he led them like a warrior? He took a long look at himself in the darkened glass and then let his shoulders sag. As a second-generation Russian, born in the UK but with the pride of the motherland in his heart, blood and bones, what had happened to him out here? Florida was a wonderful place to be in lots of ways, but the temptations had taken their toll. Titus only had to look at so many of the citizens to know what was responsible for his increasing weight. There was no denying tha
t such fatty food had caught up with him. Despite what he faced in the glass, however, Titus couldn’t allow himself to go to seed like this. Angelica had taken steps to look after herself, and Amanda seemed able to eat pretty much anything without putting on weight, but that wasn’t the point. Take his son, Ivan. The boy looked up to him, and a father who broke a sweat while carving wasn’t setting much of an example. Titus resolved to do something about it. For one thing, he told himself, there was no need to drive to the apartment complex as he had just now. It was a short walk from the Savage residence, just three blocks beyond his father’s nursing home. The next time he came out here, he decided, the keys to the pickup would stay in the villa.

  It was the sound of the door buzzer that prompted Titus to stop gazing disapprovingly at his stomach. He glanced at his watch. The potential tenant was precisely on time, which was impressive. Turning to answer the call, he hoped this meant he would be renting to someone who wouldn’t cross him for a while. For Titus resolved just then that he needed to get in trim before the family could enjoy another feast.

  4

  Amanda Dias had a particular taste in men. The slight but determined twenty-one-year-old could look back on a healthy number of dates since arriving in Florida. None of them had ended well, however. The guys who asked her out came from all walks of life. What they all lacked was the backbone to develop a relationship with a girl who had such strong views about food. Amanda didn’t chew them up in the physical sense. That aspect of her diet wasn’t something she’d ever share. Still, each one was quickly forced to recognise that they were dining with someone who possessed uncompromising convictions.