Season to Taste

by Natalie Young

  She’d found there was a rhythm to this. She was settling in. It was nearly spring. She got some wood from the garage to make a bonfire on the lawn.

  Outside, the dog ran around in the near darkness while Lizzie stood in the kitchen and watched.

  She went upstairs to the linen cupboard. She had eaten the tender fillets from the back of his leg, plain, on a plate at the table. She was keeping busy while she digested. The rest of the lower right leg was cooling in its foil parcels on the shelf beside the barbecue. Rita sniffed the meat, then turned and whined, then ran back to sniff some more.

  The towels were to go on the bonfire, and all the sheets. There were three spare duvet covers, including the one he’d given her as a present, with the flowers on. This one she threw into the bedroom on her way down the stairs. The rest went out with her through the back door and onto the pile in the garden.

  She looked at the lawn of brown muddy holes from her turfing job, and the bonfire right in the middle with the old towels and the white crumpled sheets.

  Everything from the drawer full of paper clips and batteries, old receipts and other clobber went in the bin. She was left with an almost empty drawer containing a china bowl of various stationery items including the old stapler Jacob had sworn they’d lost years before. She also found the Sellotape.

  She spritzed everything in the kitchen in a lemon-scented spray and wiped it all down, using cloths that were warm and thick and full of hot soapy water.

  She lit a candle, put the heating on, and went out to the barbecue for the leg bone and the knee.

  7

  His books and all the Christmas decorations went on the bonfire. Lizzie carried the books in her arms and put them on top of the sheets and towels. His alarm clock went on. And a book he’d been reading about Spain. In his bedside drawer there were tissues, a tin bowl of badges, old foreign coins. And a bleary photograph of her in a frame. She wasn’t smiling, but looking absent, in a woolen hat, on a walk.

  Everything went on the bonfire apart from the tin bowl and the badges and coins, which she dropped into the recycling box by the back door.

  She hurried down with his clothes and got the warm, awful fug of him on the stairs.

  The bedside table went on too. And the white paper lining.

  It was easier, she thought, flying back up, to just put everything on. There’d be nothing left in the house. She’d be clearing out, ready to start again.

  She came back down the stairs two at a time, and stopped for a drink in the kitchen. Her heart was pounding. The right lower leg bits were still on the table, still on her plate. She wasn’t eating. She was too busy. It was night. There wasn’t time. In the garage there was petrol. She poured it on his jumper, on the pillows. It went like this at night. A little drink, and then a binge. Lots to do. Things leaped forward. A midnight conflagration. Poor people in the village, she thought, shaking the can onto the pile. She was back in her Wellies. If they ever knew. She thought about Joanna outside the antiques shop with him. Her mother would have called it an affair. Plain and simple. It didn’t matter what they actually did with each other. He had felt it; she had felt it. That was an affair.

  She rolled up the Farnham Herald and made a flaming torch. She threw it towards the bonfire, but from too far away, so she tried again, going closer this time, and the torch met the fuel on the pillows and burst into flame.

  Lizzie walked into the kitchen with her arms folded, and she sat down at the table with a knife and fork. She crunched and ate the lower right, sitting upright as she had been taught to do as a child, using a napkin to dab at the corners of her mouth. She sat there for two and a half hours, still in her boots. She chewed around the knee by lifting the leg with both of her hands to her mouth. Her teeth went into his flesh and pulled it away. It was dark outside, everything was quiet but the dog moving around the bonfire, restless, jumping, coming back into the kitchen, trying to be still.

  She looked at the clock. It was 2 a.m.

  His left lower leg was also pale. In the garage she sat cross-legged in thick socks to shave it and prepare it with olive oil and salt. Her heart was still pounding. She leaned over it, trying not to voice her thoughts. She could feel the jutting in her jaw and the aching in her neck and shoulders. Her stomach was huge now, and she felt like a spider with a sack of him in her belly.

  This time she didn’t chop the leg into two pieces with the axe. It was still cool but had thawed. She ran her hand along the smooth shin and then rolled it carefully in tin foil. She slipped her feet back into her boots and then carried it under her arm to the bonfire.

  It went in on his books. She waited, for half an hour. It was 4 a.m. She’d brought the duvet down from upstairs and had bundled up in it to drink coffee laced with sherry. It was warm and comforting. Sparks from the bonfire were flying out into the garden. She walked around on the grass.

  Joanna had come here once. Lizzie remembered how they had sat, the three of them, in the garden, eating cake. It had been a warm summer’s day, and Lizzie had felt moldy beside the pale gray of Joanna’s shirt and the tailoring of her trousers. She had told Joanna that she’d been raised by a single mother and knew that a woman had to work to get anywhere in the world. She’d learned about life from sitting behind the counter in the Becketts’ shop as a child, and she knew what commerce meant. Something had diverted her, she’d said, high on a drink. Something had thrown her off.

  Joanna hadn’t come again. Not to the drip of the ugly trees. So damp and dreary, she’d say to her friends, if she told them at all. Or perhaps she’d kept her country visit a secret. Perhaps she’d simply woken up the next morning and jumped out of bed, feeling it slip out of her memory without having to think about pushing it out at all. Jacob and Lizzie Prain. Why would anyone remember them?

  Jacob had come upstairs after Joanna had gone. He’d done nothing but lie down beside her in his clothes and put an arm around her. She’d felt needed then. He’d hoped Joanna was going to commission a sculpture. She hadn’t done. But he still had his Lizzie, and in his own private battle with what he was trying to do he’d needed to know, she felt, that they still had each other, and their little life under the trees wasn’t a fantasy of Joanna’s, or his, but a real life, simple and ordinary: soap and bread, and a dog that would need a walk in the morning.

  She unhooked the barbecue tongs from the hooks nailed into the wooden slats on the side, and she pushed the leg about in the embers of the bonfire.

  The sad fallacy of disguising with flavors was beginning to exhaust her, so this time she simply used her gloved hands to smooth out the hot foil on the table outside, and she sat down in her duvet, the torch now dead, the lights on in the kitchen.

  With knife and fork she ate it, in small bits. It was past five in the morning, and the wine was gone.

  Lizzie went to the bottom of the garden and stood for a long time by the shed, in the dark, her hand on the window ledge. She looked at the moon above the trees and straightened her back. She had put the bone on the dying fire. She stared around the garden, then up at the moon again. All around, the trees were slowly taking on light and color. She felt the cold. She should have put all of him on the fire instead of eating him. She could have been standing there for one night only, with a glass of wine and a packet of cigarettes, watching the bonfire rage through the night, standing to one side, detached: how some people got through divorce.

  92. Eating him might turn out to be kinder.

  93. We won’t call it an “act of love” as such. But you are doing it with care and attention. You will get nourishment and strength, and a sense of achievement. Completion. A job done.

  94. Hope is a quiet room in Scotland.

  95. You are doing the best you can.

  Lizzie pushed against the shed door and went into the small space at the front. She stood for a moment in the dust. Right in front of her, keeping quiet in the moonlight, was a wall of junk, of boxes and television aerials, old picture frames, a cardboard
box with a saucepan handle and a ladle, and a pile of newspapers he’d been keeping. There was an old kettle, another frame with cracked glass, paint cans, bundles of tarpaulin, an old casserole dish, and a box of his records. At her feet, the penis sculpture Joanna hadn’t wanted. He’d come back with that one; he’d flushed red in the kitchen and said, “Oh well.” He’d missed her by miles.

  96. This isn’t the time for oughts and shoulds.

  97. Have the courage to go mad completely if that’s what it takes. Just let yourself feel whatever comes up as you go along.

  98. Don’t take the thoughts or the feelings seriously. You’re passing through time. That’s all this is.

  “Lizzie,” she said, “go to bed,” but when she lay down upstairs in the coat and the duvet her stomach heaved and her head spun with all that she’d had to drink. She went back downstairs and walked around the garden. Then she went for a shower and washed her hair.

  She wrote a note for the postman with instructions to put the post in the box attached to the hawthorn. Outside it was bright and cold.

  She heard the shushing of wheels in the lane and turned. Her legs were heavy and her face was tight and dry. Mike from the pub was on his bike, tall and broad-chested, in a faded blue sweatshirt. His dreadlocks were pinned back from his face. She stared at the ring in his eyebrow and the mud on his chin.

  In her time here she’d not met many people in the lane.

  “Nice hat,” he said, pointing to the beret she’d found in the shed. It was the hat she’d worn on her wedding day. She felt very far away. She was tired and confused.

  “Good timing,” he said. “I was coming to find you.”

  “I haven’t slept,” she mumbled, but he didn’t seem to hear. He looked back up the lane the way he’d come. Sunlight was piercing the trees. She followed his gaze, her eyes narrowing to slits. In her mind she saw posters pinned to the bark.

  “Guess what?” he said, as if he’d known her a really long time.

  She turned to look at him and felt her heart beating through her coat. Her scalp itched under the beret.

  “Thank you for the cigarettes,” she said, before he could speak. She wasn’t sure what he knew of her and her husband. He had worked at the pub for nearly five years. “I’m getting hitched,” he said. “I’m going to propose to her in the pub. Tonight.”

  Lizzie looked where he’d looked, where he was pointing, back up the lane. There wasn’t much to see, apart from the hawthorns, and the dripping alders. A load of sand from the verge had slipped into the road further up, making a yellowy muddy slick on the side. When the twins had gone to secondary school Emmett had put a MISSING poster of them as toddlers up on the telegraph pole. Jacob had found that funny.

  “Nic,” said Mike, grinning, leaning back on his bike.

  “I’m going to ask her to marry me,” he said. “You know Nic. Up at the farm? Plaits. Colorful hats. We’ve been going out two years. She works in a shop.”

  Lizzie nodded.

  “Jewelry’s her main thing. She makes it.”

  Lizzie nodded, remembering the girls who ran a stall one year outside the Dog and Duck. Everything tiny, labeled, penciled in, immaculate. Two stick-thin girls and their vast parents propping up the background like a painted man and woman you put your head through at the seaside.

  “They ran a stall,” she said. “When they were young. About fourteen.”

  Mike laughed and rolled forward on his handlebars.

  “That’s when she got this thing about making jewelry.”

  “I know Tom, their brother,” she blurted. “He sold me a barbecue at the garden center. He showed me how to use it.”

  “Tom’s a nice guy,” Mike said. “Bit misunderstood, I think. Anyway, time to change all that. Time to bring a little love into that household. Then focus on the career.”

  “What are you going to do?” said Lizzie, hearing not her own voice but someone else’s. Another voice from round here. Not hers.

  “I’m going to teach,” he said, holding a hand out to the woods as if there were children in there.

  Lizzie smiled. She liked thinking about Tom Vickory in his own little world, moving around everyone else up at the farm. Misunderstood. She didn’t know why it made her feel happy to hear that. She had an image of him as a little boy in her mind. She’d been to the garden center so many times in the last year. She’d hung around and watched him work. It had been a place to go to, a place to get away. There was another garden center halfway up the A3 that she’d been to once with Jacob. Driving round the car park, looking for somewhere to park.

  “It’s Nic’s birthday,” Mike said. “Don’t suppose—long shot—you can make a cake?”

  Lizzie looked at his face, and the easy, wide-open smile of a man for whom life had not been particularly complicated. She could see it with these two, how the troubled girl from up the road would come to depend on the easygoing lad with the dreadlocks and ring in his brow. She’d let herself be folded in these arms. They’d be looking for a place to live. They’d have a family of their own. The girl would be breaking away now from her life at the farm.

  “Yes,” she said, thinking of the beret on her head. Her new, fresh start. In the shed she’d brushed it and whacked it to get the dust off. “Yes, I can make a cake.”

  It was a tiny act of faith.

  Jacob had said, after he’d been to London once, “We’ve got to learn to swim upstream, Lizzie.”

  Joanna had taught him how to try to make a life on little acts of faith. One after the other. Even if there wasn’t a baby. Or a career path.

  “We still have to live as if, Lizzie,” he’d said, raising his hands to her. “Otherwise we are swimming in a vortex and life has no meaning.”

  She hadn’t known how to reply, and she hadn’t really understood what he meant by a vortex with water in it. He had always come back like that: all uppity and full of bright ideas. He’d bounced around like a pup for a few days. And she’d not known how to be. Not knowing what she was feeling about his trips to London, she’d gone around saying nothing. She’d gone to work and forgotten it. When she’d lost her job she’d not been able to do that. She’d got clumsy instead. The anger had come out sideways. All around her things had slipped, got broken or lost.

  It was getting cold in the lane.

  “I can do that. Yes,” she said. “I can make a cake.”

  “Cool,” he said. “My budget’s forty-five quid. And she likes chocolate.”

  “Does she like anything else? I can do a chocolate cake but it needs to be in the shape of something.”

  “Shoes,” he said, smiling.

  Lizzie said, “Shoes.” And she thought of some red ones with a high heel. She looked down and peered over her stomach at her big muddy boots. She’d worn awful shoes to the interview. It didn’t matter. In Scotland she would buy anew.

  “She’s got so many shoes,” said Mike, flexing the brakes with his fingers. He laughed.

  “I’ll bring it to the pub tonight,” she said. “What time will she be there?”

  “Midnight,” he said, “knowing her. Though I said to get there round eight.”

  Lizzie thought of the black car pulling out of the farm. Dad driving, twins all thin and bright, Mum sitting squashed in the front, Emmett in the back, staring, tiny, out at the lane.

  No one would love Lizzie Prain now.

  Perhaps it didn’t matter.

  “Seven thirty?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, “great!”

  He held out a hand to shake. Lizzie looked at it and offered her own. In the warmth of his, her hand felt small and cold. She needed badly to sleep.

  “Great,” he said again.

  Then he whipped the handlebars round and cycled away.

  8

  Lizzie watched him cycle up the lane towards Puttenham, and then she went back to the house.

  It was freezing cold inside and she couldn’t get warm. In the kitchen she wrote: I can’t do it
anymore. Then she tore the paper into small pieces and put each piece in her mouth. She let them melt on her tongue. She pushed her tongue through the pieces of paper. She swallowed them. The agent would say, about the kitchen and garage: “It’s clean here, and simple. A good place to start.” She made a cup of coffee, and went out into the sunlight.

  Lizzie had been fifteen when her mother had dumped Ian Harper. He’d been a primary school teacher in Brighton. They’d run on the beach together at weekends. Afterwards Anne said that the only way to get over a man you loved was to imagine the pair of you in a car crash and him walking away in shock leaving you bleeding in the car.

  Lizzie stood now with her cup of coffee and stared at the lawn and the ash patch where she’d burned almost everything in the last few days. She thought of Jacob walking away. He’d be looking down, she felt, at something in his hands. She could see herself, watching him, upside down in the crash. She wouldn’t be feeling her own pain, but his lack of it: “Poor bugger can’t feel,” she’d be thinking, with blood pouring from her nose and into her hair. “Poor man can’t handle his own feelings,” she’d be thinking, first, and her heart, close to the gearstick, would be going out to him, to his back as he walked away.

  99. Absolutely classic codependent thinking: catastrophizing, clinging on: anyone got some steroids they can punch into this self-esteem?

  100. A good opportunity to come in here and try to encourage a little more focus on the body parts in the freezer?

  “For God’s sake, don’t feel sorry for me,” Anne had said when Lizzie was fifteen, and the two of them were sitting up at the table in the window of the boarding house in Hove.