Season to Taste

by Natalie Young

  Some people had said it might be hard. Just the two of them out in the woods like that, going into business together. They might not make it in this market.

  But how hard could it be? Wedding cakes, birthday cakes, anniversaries, funerals.

  Easy-peasy.

  She made them. Sleeves rolled up in the kitchen, flowers in a jug on the sill. Jacob took orders on the telephone. He washed up, and then he delivered the cakes in the Volvo. He got lost, a second time. A fortieth birthday in Weybridge. Just up the A3. A pub not far from the exit. He didn’t know why.

  “Don’t know,” he said when she asked the next morning. She was trying to find the right time to inquire.

  “How could you have got lost, Jacob? The directions were so clear.”

  “Shitty map, though.”

  Lizzie went back to weeding the garden. Then the customer rang and said how much they’d be charging for the inconvenience of all those phone calls from the party and someone having to buy chocolate cake from the supermarket right in the middle of the speech.

  Meanwhile, for supper in the kitchen it was shepherd’s pie, and the salmon thing in a pastry roll, the leek and potato soup he’d always given a thumbs-up. Cottage pie. A good roast. Pork, chicken, beef. They’d never had much lamb, except on a special occasion. More as a treat. But British in the main: food enjoyed in childhood was food enjoyed always. He’d liked things the same. He’d worn his boots till the soles flapped off, then they’d got replaced at Clarks in Guildford; and every Easter, for five years, he’d hired a van, and driven a sculpture of his own creation up to a woman called Joanna for her pleasure garden in London.

  “Three hundred and fifty quid,” he said, coming back from the first time, striding in. His jeans had holes in the knees.

  At the antiques shop in Guildford he told his striking customer that sculpture was really his thing. It was what he would have done, he said.

  They smoked outside on the street, Lizzie imagined, and laughed.

  Joanna said, “Will you bring me something?”

  That was what he reported.

  Lizzie asked: “What did she wear?”

  “What do you mean, what did she wear?”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “What do you mean, what kind of thing?” he said, milking it, pouting a little, inwardly proud. “Black,” he said. “Leather jacket. Little leather skirt.”

  Lizzie said, “Leather skirt?”

  “She says I should follow my heart.”

  Ah well, Joanna would have to do without his little creations now. There was no way of contacting him. She’d probably try, once or twice, and then tire of it soon enough. Joanna was a busy woman in London, and busy women let people slip away to sea, Lizzie had found. Jacob Prain wasn’t a priority. Him in his little woodland house, out in the dark somewhere, ruminating on the life he might have made.

  They’d both been ruminators, though. That was part of the problem. She went back to that Monday morning and saw herself in her jeans, with her legs flying back under her nightie, and her hands on the wheelbarrow she was pushing across the lawn. She saw herself reaching under his shoulders and swiveling the body around on the grass, falling back on her arse and then over him once with the strain. She was able to tilt the body by lifting his shoulders and wedging her knee against the top of his back, allowing the blood to flow from his leg stumps into the hole. She had tried to bring his leg stumps together but they splayed back open, leaving his shriveled privates exposed. The hole soon filled to the brim with blood and she let the body back down on the grass and then used the hose to wash the blood from his stumps and from her fingers.

  She had used the axe then, to take his hands off at the wrists and wrap these, and then the arms, which left her with just the torso to deal with. And the head, of course. Each of his organs, she decided, would need to be individually wrapped and labeled so that she could quickly distinguish in the aftermath what was what.

  She knew it was going to take a little more sherry to still the shaking hands, so she went back in for the bottle to keep beside her, and she had a swig before bending down to bag and tie everything up. Every bag was pulled tight and neatly tied. Then she pushed them all over to the freezer in the wheelbarrow.

  She let the dog out. Rita sniffed and wagged and licked, then disappeared, leaping the fence behind the shed and going in search of her own, smaller kill.

  Lizzie felt her hair coming away from its clip and she knew she looked mad, with the pale frizz and the blood all over her face. Her adrenaline was really pumping, and in its wake was a new strength, as if a human being had always known, deep down, how to get on with the business of doing away with another.

  Determination. That was what Jacob said was lacking in her when she came back from the interview at the shipbroker’s.

  “I can’t help thinking you should have stuck it out at art school,” he said, and Lizzie wondered if he felt responsible for her change of direction.

  “I’m not going to make it as an artist, though. It’s perfectly obvious, Jacob. I don’t have the talent.”

  “It’s not that,” he said. “You’re not as bad as you think. But you lack determination. It’s as if you missed that piece,” he said, with a smile. “Ego, and determination, to do things for yourself.”

  Which was better than being a hard-arsed bollock-breaker, she replied. To which he suggested she relax.

  And thinking about that out on the grass while chopping him up that Monday made Lizzie pause, and take the gloves off, and spritz them with the hose. Then she sat back on her ankles with her hands splayed out flat on her knees.

  She had to check herself then, to know that she was all right.

  She gave up the gloves. They were in a terrible state and made her hands sweat. She went on with her bare skin and turned what was left of him over onto its front and positioned it so that the head with its white neck was facedown on the inside of a bin liner she’d pressed into the bloody hole. She knelt down beside the neck and splayed her fingers where she wanted to make an incision with the saw. The axe might have been quicker, but she feared its abrupt violence now, and felt that the head required specific care.

  She placed the ridged blade against the skin, feeling in her own neck a stab of pain as the blade went in. Into her mind came the blue-gray eyes she had known—they were staring into the hole now—so dark on some days they’d gone a scary slaty black, and she got a sudden mysterious whiff of his aftershave and tobacco.

  The only sound in the frosty garden was from the saw as her hand moved it back and forth minutely in his neck and eased through the top of his spine. The marrow was something to bear in mind, and she’d not expected to see it quite like that, with all the white threads coming out as the head tumbled into the bag. She tied a knot and went to the freezer and placed the bag inside, with a label, HEAD, pressed on and smoothed.

  She had tried to do every major chop over the hole he’d been digging, and in most cases she’d succeeded. Blood had gone right into the soil and turned it the color of aubergines.

  54. You were absolutely right to keep spritzing the body with water from the hose.

  55. But try not to think back. I believe it’s a strategy—this glancing back all the time—that the mind has adopted to keep you from the task at hand.

  56. Gently come back to what you are doing. Don’t worry about the time, or any sounds you might hear in the lane. You are quite secluded in these woods, and the trees and darkness will give you the protection you need at the moment.

  She’d used the saw to get through his waist, lining up with his belly button. She went in through the downy hair and punctured his stomach. The juices sprang into the air and squirted her face and made her vomit. She had not known a smell like that—she was really shaking then—and knew she was on the verge of passing out, so she stuck her jaw forward as she wheeled him over the grass and into the garage for the final labeling and freeze.

  Lizzie had watched a lot of tel
evision in her life—probably more than most women of her age, he’d told her—even so, real life, the one she’d suddenly jumped into the picture for, wasn’t so spectacular. The body was softer and less bloody than on the TV, and leaping up behind the axe to get through his femur, for example, wasn’t necessary. There were clots flung out on the ground that she scraped with a trowel, but everything was hosed down by four in the afternoon, and the hose was coiled back on the wall, the freezer shut.

  Saturday morning. Lizzie opened the lid of the freezer and took two chunky bags out.

  “What the hell,” she whispered to herself. She’d had such a good start. A fortnight was surely more than enough to do this in.

  She put the pink gloves in the bin. They made her hands hot and itchy and she would need to get some better ones. From the cupboard beside the fridge she took down the ring binder and found the number of the telephone company. A man had come and installed the router so that they had been able to make better use of the Internet. He’d improved their speed, just before she lost her job.

  It was still her voice. Of course it was. It was just a regular Saturday morning and she was speaking on the telephone.

  Lizzie dialed the number and waited. They could cut the phone line whenever she was ready. The man was cheery. He said that was absolutely fine.

  57. So far you have eaten your husband’s right hand and his left foot.

  58. Give yourself some credit for achievement.

  59. Keep up the notes. Remember when he said that your cakes were probably fundamentally poor owing to a lack of imagination in their creator? To which you’d replied, of course, that it doesn’t take imagination to follow a recipe.

  60. Might be worth having a little look at the knives. Are they nice and sharp?

  61. Handy to have a good, sharp fruit knife for skinning fiddly bits like fingers and toes. A bread knife will get you through anything but with a bit of mess. Goes without saying of course that the carving knife needs to be in pristine condition. Once sharpened, try storing your knives in a cloth pouch in a separate part of the cutlery drawer. Others have used cork. The principle is the same.

  62. As night falls on the third or fourth day, you may feel a little bit weary and a little bit afraid. I’d light a good fire in the living room and sit yourself down in there with a cup of tea or glass of white wine. Keep the curtains drawn against the dark and random little peepers. Let your spirits sink for a moment or two if you sense they are going that way. No need to fight the moods. Let them be as they are, and rest in the knowledge that you’ll pop back up.

  “Nothing lasts,” Jacob had said about the cold she’d got from standing outside the house waiting for him on a damp, freezing Sunday afternoon. He had said to get to the house at two o’clock. The bus had dropped her off in Puttenham and then she’d walked, out past the pub with the hanging baskets and the field with the horse.

  She’d waited on the porch all afternoon. In the rain, he struggled out of the taxi, and held out the door key. He limped forward with a crutch. She got up from her huddle and went towards him, stretching out an arm. She introduced herself.

  “I’m really sorry,” he said, gently. Then he put his head down, and winced.

  Which was the moment, she now thought, if there had to be a precise one, that she’d got sucked in. That warmth in “sorry,” the head down, the wince. Softness and sorrow and pity. She’d wanted to help him. In helping, she was able to go somewhere, to slide right into the warmth she would make.

  “Thanks,” he said. They walked together up to the door. “I’m really sorry for keeping you.”

  They sat in the kitchen.

  She watched him moving around. He lit a fire in the living room, and made a pot of tea that they drank with his tin of digestive biscuits between them. He was charming.

  He didn’t say why he’d been held up. It didn’t seem to matter by then. She felt the cold coming on. Something inside her had surrendered already. She had given up wanting to be at art school, where everyone seemed set on making a point. Here she could take some photographs and look after him. She could be away from the world.

  He was young, yet talking softly, and stooping, as if he were sixty.

  “I wanted to be a sculptor,” he’d said. “It’s what I would have done.”

  He hadn’t said: “It’s what I would have done if things had been different.” He hadn’t tried to lay the blame on anyone else. And she had turned her face to that and smiled. No resentment clogging up the air here then. A little bit of kindness. Rolled-up soft trousers, even in winter. And fresh air. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might know how angry he was, or who he was angry with.

  Nothing lasts, she said to herself, standing out in the garden now in a woolen hat and coat and scarf. She switched the torch on and aimed it at the trees.

  The thigh was vast. She had it in a bin liner on the garden table, and she stood for a long time looking at it as if she were planning to take a photograph. She drank a glass of white wine, and she looked at the thigh from every angle; she stood back and admired it, as he had done, occasionally, with hers.

  Like the first time they’d gone to bed.

  “Can you just sit on the bed, like that, on your knees, so that I can look at the shape?”

  She’d done as he asked.

  In the beginning, she always did what he asked her to do. He had a house; and she didn’t. Partly, though, she’d done it because it turned her on. Being his object was a way out of feeling—at the moment when she might have begun to feel the intimacy, he did something like this, he made her an object, which gave her an excuse to distance herself. What a relief, to sit on his bed, to kneel like that without any clothes on. What a relief to run her hands down her front with her head down. She wouldn’t have to hug him then, not while he was over there slumped in the armchair. She wouldn’t have to wrap her arms around him and tell him how she really felt, which was close to love, certainly.

  She walked around the garden table sizing up his thigh. She felt a sudden searing pain in her own thigh and kept putting a hand to it, rubbing around the hip. The front of her apron was dusted with flour from the potato croquettes she’d been making first thing.

  It was almost seven o’clock. If she was firm enough with herself—if she applied all she had to herself as she might have done to a child—there was a chance she would be all right. The trick was to breathe slowly, and go with each moment as it presented itself.

  She would hack through the femur with an axe and cook it in slices on the barbecue. Some of it she would be able to nestle down in the charcoal and it could cook away until she was ready to add the bones to another stockpot. She threw back the last few drops of wine.

  She selected some spice jars from the kitchen and brought them out into the garden on a tray. She lit a cigarette and set the tray down beside the five slices of thigh and bent down on her knees using a fresh bin liner to keep herself dry. In the torchlight she opened up the spice jars, using first a teaspoon, then her fingers, to sprinkle cumin and coriander, nutmeg and cinnamon, fennel, basil, ginger. She really went for it this time, opening up the jars and letting the contents just fall on. Saffron, celery salt. What did it matter? She was leaving here—she’d be gone soon: she could tip the whole lot on his thigh and on the grass and let it all mix in.

  It was as if she had stepped out of her own trajectory, and everything that had happened up to this point now seemed not irrelevant, but far less important; and all the old resentments had finally lost their cling. That they hadn’t had a baby and had never got to the bottom of whose problem it was or why, that they’d stopped even talking about it after a while so that it just began to hang around her when she was out on her own in town looking at other people’s kids, was no longer an issue. Children wouldn’t be looked at. She’d left that need behind and stepped into a new realm. The territory was marked for her by avoidance and denial now. Survival and absolute simplicity was all there was left for her and suddenly she wa
s at ease. She understood the boundaries. It was this, or nothing.

  The barbecue was flaming; it was quite a party, she thought, standing back from the sparks.

  Vitamins and nourishment; the goodness in Jacob, if there had been any at the end, was giving her the strength to get through this.

  Life could be appreciated in individual moments. One could simply cut—with a sharp mental axe—impressions, thoughts, feelings, and trim off the bad bits, discard the fat.

  She left the barbecue and walked towards the herbaceous border. She shone the torch right at it. The leaves on the rhododendron were a perfect deep green. She looked down at her neat white trainers and saw that there were little flecks of blood. But the trainers could be bleached, and washed; or they could be burned. If she decided the blood was a problem, if taking the trainers with her to Scotland with splashes of blood on the toes made her feel nervous, then the thing to do was simply to put them onto a bonfire of sticks on the lawn and burn them. While she was at it, she could burn the bedding and the actual bed. She could chop it up with the axe and use it for firewood. She could burn the trainers, burn the clothes and towels, and go to Scotland in her Wellington boots. That was it. She looked at her watch. Things were clear.

  She used an oven glove and the tongs from the kitchen to lift a piece of thigh. She would need better gloves and proper tongs and she added these to her mental list while placing the slice down on a plate to cool. She glanced at her watch. Then she wrapped the slice in kitchen roll.

  After the first bite, it was absolutely delicious. Like a hot piece of really flavorsome chicken, slightly char-coaled on the outside. She went into the kitchen for the ketchup and another bit of kitchen roll—he’d not been a good husband—and then she stepped back out to the garden. She would eat all the way through like this, she thought: all the pieces, wandering, moonlit and a little drunk, around the garden.