The Devil's Larder (15 page)

Laboratories can take a month to analyse and process specimens. Dr Gregor did not think the matter urgent enough to telephone for their report. The old man was fit for eighty-three. What was a
month to him? They’d get their answers soon enough. In fact the old man died within three weeks of his last visit to the surgery. A sudden and unheralded stroke, too quick to experience. A
neighbour called the doctor out one morning and led him to the body. His patient must have died the evening before. He’d been standing in his tiny garden with a hose. The grass and shrubs
were green with care, despite the weeks of drought. The tap had been running all night long. The old man lay on his back in shallow water. Slugs were on his shirt and trousers, taking refuge from
the flood. There was a smell – damp and earthy like the old man’s breath had been. It was the smell of vegetation. So that was that. He’d made a decent age and met a decent
death.

The laboratories sent their report and their invoice. The old man’s specimen was described as ‘non-invasive’, ‘benign’, and ‘entirely vegetable: water 83%;
albuminoids 2%; gum 9.1%; sugar 4.2%; inulin 1.1%’. Dr Gregor held the ‘polyp’ he had kept up to the light in its sterile bag. It seemed more swollen. The inside of the bag was
silvery with condensation. He paid the laboratory bill by cheque. A waste of time and money. He could not pass the costs on to a patient now. He put the swelling polyp on his windowsill. He did not
like to part with it, now that the man was dead.

Encouraged by the heat and light and by the purified water, the vegetable grew a pair of tiny yellow horns. Its wrinkles flattened. Its extensions and recessions achieved a kind of nippling
puberty. One horn pinkened, lengthened and uncurled. The old man’s polyp had a shoot. The doctor put it in a glass dish on a bed of damp toilet paper. He watered it each day. He gave it
houseplant feed. Quite soon he had three green shoots and two more horns. Roots as thin as cotton thread clung to the damp paper. He had to pick a greenfly from its stem.

A patient – asked to lean against the windowsill while Dr Gregor checked her damaged vertebrae – recognized it as a tuber. Not a tumour, then?

‘I’ve never grown these ones myself,’ she said. ‘It’s root ginger, isn’t it? Or Jerusalem artichoke? What do they taste like? Does it smell?’

The doctor held it to his nose. The old man’s breath again.

‘You’ll have to pot it up,’ the patient said. ‘It won’t survive on that!’

The doctor sent his nurse out to the shops to buy a pot and some compost. He thumbed the polyp into the soil, and only damaged a couple of shoots. He put the plant outside the front door of his
surgery. His patients dropped their cigarette ends into the pot, or spat into the soil. The soil flourished on bronchitis. It put up three good stems, with heavy leaves, and – in the summer
– three inconspicuous yellow flowers at shoulder height. The old dears coming in for their pills didn’t have to bend to press their noses to the blooms. The yellow petals were busy with
weevils. His patient’s diagnosis was confirmed by some of the many gardeners on the doctor’s list: they were Jerusalem artichokes – or Canadian potatoes as one man called them
– not root ginger.

In September, the three stems and their leaves dried out and died. They broke away, and the pot became an ashtray, nothing else. In November, Dr Gregor found a moment to carry the pot through to
the yard behind the surgery. He turned the soil out onto a plastic bag. He planned to wash the pot and plant a basil in it, or a daphne. Something colourful or evergreen for the steps. There were a
dozen clusters of the old man’s polyps multiplying in the soil, a starchy kilo at the very least. The doctor picked them out and put them in the emptied pot. They smelled of soot. ‘More
trouble than they’re worth,’ his nurse remarked. ‘Except in soup!’

That night, he took the crop to his apartment. He did not peel them or attempt to scrape them. They were too oddly shaped. He scrubbed half of them in warm water. He cooked them au gratin with
bacon curls. His brother and his sister-in-law came for dinner. The Jerusalem artichokes, he said, were the gift of a patient: ‘He grew them himself.’ They tasted bland and floury.
According to his sister-in-law, they would have benefited from a pinch of coriander, say, or more salt.

Dr Gregor was fond of his brother and his wife, but she was far too keen to give advice on what would benefit his life, his work, his apartment, his cooking. More salt. A dab of paint. A
housekeeper. A bit of colour to his clothes. A holiday. A wife. ‘Why don’t you settle down?’ Or, ‘Find a woman for yourself. That nurse of yours is quite a decent
sort.’

The doctor showed his brother and his wife to the door. He let them take the half-kilo of Jerusalem artichokes that had not been scrubbed and cooked. For their kitchen garden.

His guests were a little windy from their meal. Their breaths were damp and earthy. ‘They’re nice, but indigestible,’ his brother said.

‘Are you in any pain?’ Dr Gregor asked. ‘Take warm olive oil, to ease their passage through your bowels.’ He wondered if he should have said more about the artichokes,
how natural, how death-defying and how benign they were.

The doctor’s brother dug the tubers into a trench of flinty earth, amongst the dogged thistles at the bottom of their garden. He put in lime and compost. In summer there were yellow
flowers, and in autumn there were tubers by the kilo. On Sundays he would harvest them and bring his trug of starchy vegetables up into the house. They made the perfect Monday soup, which kept them
warm and bilious in winter.

Y
OU
’
LL NEED
a liturgy and a medium pan, a hen’s egg, some bread, some salt, a knife, a spoon, the kitchen to
yourself. Put the egg in water over a medium flame. Find, at once, the 37th hymn, God’s way of timing eggs, and when the water starts to boil begin to sing. Not too briskly.
Moderato
all the way. Sing all three verses and the chorus lines. The hymn is timed to suit the egg.

Make as much noise as you want. Belt out the words: ‘And on this rock Our church will stand,/A gateway to the Promised Land.’ The final word’s ‘amen’, of course,
two sinking syllables beyond the tune. The amen is the point when yolk and shell and albumen become discrete.

Now spoon the amen egg out of the pan, decapitate it with a knife. You’ll find the flesh is cooked exactly to your taste, the white precisely firm, the yolk still bright and viscous, the
smell of hell and sulphur on the air – as you would wish whenever you sing hymns.

E
ASTER
D
AY
. The village custom was for everyone – even those who would not go to church – to spread a handful of
flour on a stone as an offering. You could expect the flour to be gone within the hour. Rats and birds would have it. Or else the wind or rain.

We have a misplaced stone next to the gate into the orchard. It’s a vagrant, not a local stone – the local stone is silver-grey – but whoever brought it there did so more than
eighty years ago. My grandmother remembers it from when she was young. She used to sit her dolls on the flat top and let them watch her stretch out in the grass and read. They were her guardians.
The colour of the stone, she says, was like material – velvet, mauve. She had a matching dress and she made matching dresses for her dolls.

That flat top was, of course, the perfect place to put our offering, a gram or so of bleached self-raising flour on a tonne or so of blood-red stone.

It was only because the weather was good and my spirits unusually low that I spent so much time, that Easter, out of doors. Otherwise I might not have witnessed what occurred beneath the canopy
of fruit trees. I have to tell you what I saw with my own eyes, something defying science and good sense, in order to convince myself, not you, that sometimes simple things – like flour,
sunlight, stone – can break the rules.

I knew that there were rats around. There always are in orchards. I could hear the fretful, constant scurrying of rodent feet. And there were nesting birds for whom the flour ought to provide
easy foraging. But, possibly because I was settled in the grass a metre from the stone, engrossed by the music on my Walkman and by a soothing glass or two of beer, the wildlife kept away on that
first day. And when I got up in the afternoon to go back to my parents’ house, greatly rested and tranquillized by my half-sleep, I noticed the flour was untouched. Indeed, it seemed to me
the volume of the flour had increased, as if it had drawn from the air or from the sun a fortifying trace of heat and moisture.

I do not know what made me turn my empty glass upside down and place it over the flour. I can’t imagine that I wanted to protect it from the dew or deny the birds and rats their easy meal.
I cannot claim I had an inkling of what might happen overnight. I was just curious to see how long our offering would last if I protected it.

Again, I was not sure when I returned next day if the actual
amount
of flour had increased as it appeared to have done. The
volume
had, of course. The offering had swollen by a
centimetre. Anyone could see it had. The risen flour pressed against the sides of the glass. And when I lifted up the glass, its contents were as rubbery as dough, and round. You might say it most
resembled a communion wafer.

That second day, encouraged by the unseasonal heat, we both – the offering and I – baked in the sun. Each time I looked, the dough suggested that it had proved itself a little more.
Certainly, by lunchtime, the wafer had thickened and enlarged. By late afternoon, when the shadow of our roof and chimney pots was stretched across the chilling grass, the wafer had become a ball
of dough. The flour must have located airborne yeast, I thought. What other explanation could there be?

I brought my mother’s glass salad cover from the pantry and put it on our mauve stone to cover the ball of dough and save it once again from animals. I dropped a pinch of table salt onto
the mix. A blessing of sorts. A petition for good luck. A prayer to end the cruel disruptions of my family life. My parents walked down to the orchard, arm in arm, and laughed at me, my pinch of
salt, my simple faith in signs. I’d had too many beers, they said. I was too stressed, too fanciful, I was upset. They’d seen mushrooms, bigger than my dough, spring up in half an hour.
Nothing to get excited about. ‘Nature’s odder than you think. Things grow.’

That night, of course, I had the oddest dreams. Who wouldn’t dream at times like these, my marriage on the rocks and me, a refugee from home, reduced to staying in the same bedroom where I
had slept when I was small? Who wouldn’t dream?

The earth was baking in my dream. It proved to be the hottest day of all, sub-tropical. You had to wear a hat. I was walking down to the orchard gate, fearful, doubting, full of hope. The stone,
flattered by the warmth, trembled like a heated coal. It glistened like volcanic jewels. The smell was not volcano, though, not sulphur and not ash. The smell was bread, fresh baked. I lifted up
the glass protector from the flat top of the stone and touched the crust, the split, chestnut turban of a finished loaf, fresh bread baked out of nothing on the hotplate of the stone, our risen
offering, my answered prayer. Beyond the odour of the bread there was a hint of aloe and of myrrh. In my dream I covered up the bread with linen. And then I ran down to the village for the priest
to come and witness what I took to be a miracle. That risen loaf’s a sign, he said, that everything is well. Our blighted pasts are taken from the cross and rubbed with spices and with oils.
Our futures are uncrucified. Things grow.

On the third day, I woke exhausted by my night of dreams and went a little sheepishly down to the long grass by the orchard gate to read and think about the battles and the custodies ahead. My
mother’s glass salad cover had somehow fallen to the ground and smashed. A disappointment and a shock. The stone itself had shifted too, I thought. A touch displaced.

The day was chilly, damp, not tropical at all. Any trace of resurrected dough had disappeared, of course. My dreams had been misleading, mischievous. There was no evidence. The rats and birds
had come and knocked the salad cover to the ground. The rats and birds had dined.

My little daughter, five years old, has come today to rescue me. She puts her dolls up on the flat mauve stone and they guard over us while we stretch out a metre from the orchard gate and stare
into the pages of our open books. And if I turn and sniff the air, as country dwellers always do when weather’s on the move, I fancy I can smell a bakery – though, let’s be
honest, an orchard always smells of bakeries. There’s yeast in rotting fruit. There’s dough in mulching leaves. Tree bark and fungi stink of bread.

O
UR STRANGEST
restaurant, the Air & Light, survived five months before its joke wore thin.

We’re not immune in this small town to global trends. So when the food and healthcare magazines were full of stories from Japan about a prana sect that did not eat or drink but lived
instead on ‘atmosphere’, two of our lesser artists, tired of paint and canvasses, installed the front part of an empty shop with tables, chairs and blinding lights. It was, they said,
the world’s first prana restaurant. Their friends dressed up as customers and waiters. There was a pompous maître d’ and pretty tablecloths. Orders were taken. Empty glasses,
dishes and plates were delivered to the tables. Passers-by could look through the shop’s front window to watch nobody eating anything. It was live art. It was, as well, the liveliest and
smartest place in town.

It wasn’t long, of course, before outsiders – students mostly – came into the restaurant and filled the empty places, keen to play their part and not be fed. There was a queue
of volunteers. What isn’t clear is how the perpetrators, instead of closing down after a day or two as they had intended, began to charge for admittance to the Air & Light, a modest table
fee at first. But then something much more complex, listed on a bill, including details of the ‘atmosphere’ provided, quantities of prana consumed and a local tax of 12 per cent.