The Devil's Larder (3 page)

I
F
A
NNA WAS
allergic to aubergines she hadn’t noticed. She was unhesitant in buying them and cooking them and eating them.
On shop display their plumpness and their waxiness were irresistible, though, honestly, the flavour was too tart sometimes. A pinch of sugar helped. But tartness is often the price you have to pay
for beauty. She’d learned that lesson from too many of her friends.

Her symptoms were discreet: a little flushing, possibly a touch of wind, and occasionally – following a dinner party or a late meal out – what her mother called a flighty head, but
nothing sinister or even inconvenient. She did not suffer from rashes or palpitations. There were no seizures. So she had little opportunity to discover that aubergines did not suit her, that
aubergines were treacherous and damaging. They seemed to her too flawless to be harmful, too pleasing to the eye. She liked the aubergine’s affinity with olive oil and garlic, its generous
response to mushrooms or tomatoes. It kept good company. She liked its versatility, just as happy to be stuffed as fried, just as tasty in a moussaka or a ratatouille as in a dip or served as
fainting priest.

Anna took the usual precautions in her kitchen, of course, cutting off the bruises and the sponge, scooping out the pips and degorging the bitterness in a saltwater soak, before she put the
fruit into its saucepan or its dish. She had been told that it was bad luck to slice an aubergine lengthways or peel an aubergine. Good fortune came to those who favoured cubes, or wheels of fruit,
rimmed with blue-black tyres of rind. Indeed, she’d lived a life of good fortune and good health, she thought.

She was well into her seventies before her joints seized up. Then even simple tasks – like cubing aubergines – became a challenge and a cause of pain. She had a walking stick for use
inside the house. ‘You should give up the toxic foods,’ her younger and exquisite neighbour said, ‘or else you’ll stiffen up completely. Your fault!’

What were ‘the toxic foods’? The neighbour listed all the usual suspects – pickles, citrus fruits, bananas, fat milk and cheese, red meat, green meat, tomatoes, coffee,
chocolate, shore fish, cheap wine, rhubarb – and then she raised her knife to stab the little lunchtime stew that Anna, despite her aches and pains, had prepared for both of them.
‘These aubergines. They’re poisonous. They’ll have to go. They’re why your wrists and knees have let you down.’ They left their meal unfinished on their plates.

Anna made adjustments to her life. She never asked her neighbour back for lunch again. The woman was too poisonous, she thought. Despite herself, she cut down on the coffee that she drank. She
ate less meat and fewer oranges. But Anna liked her aubergines too much. She was undisciplined. She meant to give them up, but when she saw them – purple, polished – in the shops, she
soon forgot about her allergy and all the damage it had caused. She scooped and cubed and wheeled until she had to use her stick out in the street as well. She grew old and frail unnecessarily.
Just a little self-restraint, a little less regard for comeliness, may well have kept her younger, quicker, straighter than her years.

W
HENEVER A LINER
or the ferry put in to port, we’d end up at the Passenger Bar to gawp at all the trippers disembarking. Many of them would troop
into the bar for something to calm their sea-churned stomachs and steady their legs. The Passenger was the first safe place that they’d encounter between the gangways and the town. Often,
there were foreign girls whom we could tease and irritate. Sometimes there was a tourist looking for a guide, or a businessman wanting a local to translate for him, or simply someone needing two
strong arms to carry luggage to the hotels. Perhaps – as happened once before, a hundred years ago – one of the older women passengers (a German probably) would pay for sex. Their fees
would subsidize our studies.

So we – the five of us – would leave our work and gather in the Passenger at the funnel blast of every approaching ship. We’d take the large, square table by the door, buy beer
that we could hardly afford, dine gratis on the bar’s salt-glazed, thirst-inducing snacks, and wait for prey. We had a trick to play on them.

My colleague Victor and I had been working all year on the chemical properties of carbonated drinks. We hoped to isolate the tingling discharge on the tongue, the mild but disconcerting
pain-with-pleasure response that follows every sip of sparkling water or fizzy fruit drink or champagne, and create a sweet food coating from which the pain had been removed. Succeed and patent it,
then we’d be rich, we thought.

We understood the mechanisms, how receptors in the mouth parried the assault of dissolved CO
₂
with their defensive saliva, how legions of enzymes reacted with the sparkle to produce a
complex carbonic acid, our guilty irritant. And we had succeeded in blocking this effect with neutralizing dorzolamides. We’d tested what remained on rats and noted that our tincture, oddly,
made them sneeze. We tasted it ourselves, the merest dab on our tongues. Instead of the familiar fizz and the ambiguous shudder of pleasure, instead of the rodent sneeze, we responded with a
sudden, unearned laugh, real to the ears, but mirthless in its derivation. Every time we tested it, the outcome was the same, an involuntary reflex of laughter, independent of the will. We had
concocted the inverse of an onion, bringing emotionless joy instead of tears. We called our mixture the sternly, scientific-sounding ‘euphrosyne’, after the Muse who ‘rejoices the
heart’.

I must blame Victor for the sin of breaking scientific protocol. He bought some snacks and coated them with fluid euphrosyne. These days, he’d be struck off the register for being so
dangerously unprofessional. But that day, as soon as we were summoned by funnel blasts, we hurried to the Passenger for our first consumer trials. Our snacks, of course, replaced the ones provided
by the bar on our table.

Two Canadian travellers with rucksacks, young men about our own age, were easily tempted to join us. We even bought them beers and were unusually attentive. The volume of their laughter after
they had, almost simultaneously, stretched across to try the snacks was startling. As were their blushes and the disconcerted expressions on their faces. Perhaps we’d overdosed the
euphrosyne. But, certainly, their hoots of unamused laughter briefly halted every conversation in the bar and, even after some minutes of relative silence, the Passenger’s proprietor was
still looking anxiously towards our group. Perhaps it was the five of us, rib-clutching and bent double at the Canadians’ ersatz joviality, that made him shake his head.

It was not long before all the staff and all the regulars in the bar were privy to our secret, co-conspirators, eager for the sudden outbursts of strangers at our table. The hungry, seasick
travellers, no matter how deep their oceanic melancholy, their homesickness, their dislocation, could be counted on to pop a laughter snack in their mouths to thrill us all – and both scare
and animate themselves – with their shocking chemical mirth.

It must have seemed we hosted the jolliest bar table in the world. Sometimes, one of the locals took our dish of snacks and offered it around the bar. Then there’d be a salvo of laughter,
like an erratic firecracker. And once, when the Passenger’s proprietor was absent at a funeral, we filled every dish in the bar with euphrosyne snacks and punctuated that afternoon, down at
the harbour-side, with the intermittent rifle blast of gladdened, triggered customers who had not thought to laugh so readily amongst so many strangers. We never tired of it.

R
EGRETTABLY
, I am not rich. Euphrosyne was widely tested but considered unmarketable. Consumers do not like to lose control. Besides, a food which
causes sudden laughter in company is likely to be expelled onto other people’s plates and jackets. No commercial company would take the risk. And that’s a shame. I feel we could have
made the world a more amusing place. What scientist can claim more?

I always told my children, at times of stress, that ‘laughter is the best medicine’, that one good joke is equal to an hour in the gym. It must have been tiring having a scientist as
a father. So, usually, I bit my tongue to suppress all the tedious proofs and details at my fingertips – the eighty-seven muscles that were employed every time they laughed; the aerobic
exercising of the thorax and the diaphragm; the faster heartbeat occasioned by a simple laugh; the increase of oxygen levels in the blood; and, best of all, the release of endorphins in the brain,
making anyone that cachinnates feel good about themselves.

One day, I’ll dig my student papers out and, maybe, try again with euphrosyne. Not as a gloss for snacks or packaged food. But as a stimulant. I saw enough glad and startled faces in the
Passenger those many years ago to know what unexpected pleasure I might bring to strangers.

I
N THIS PART
of the world, where manac beans grow as commonly and readily as moss, coddled by the salty coastal air and the nipping temperatures of
night, no one with any money would choose to add them to their stews or use their greyish flour in their baking. Manacs are ‘the poor man’s weeds’. That is to say, they’re
food for pensioners, peasants, paupers and livestock. To buy a kilo in the stores is to advertise your misfortune, or to boast the recent purchase of a sow.

Yet my neighbour’s daughter tells us that the well-heeled ladies who often drive past the farmers’ market, where she works, on the way up to their villas in the hills have started
stopping off for bags of manac beans. ‘That’s really slumming it,’ she says. ‘Next thing, they’ll be having all our turnip tops. Our pigs’ll have to swill on
caviar.’

I think I’ve guessed the actual motive of these women, though. They’re poisoning their husbands, in a way. They’re looking for a break in their routines. About two weeks ago,
driving into town, I heard a radio report on livestock infertility and impotence. Stud animals, it said, would not perform reliably if fed on feeds which were rich in iogranulates. They’d
suffer from fibrous swellings in the urinary and reproductive tracts. Even though their testes might swell to twice their normal size and the penis could enlarge appreciably, they would have
problems with presenting an erection. Feeds to avoid in excess were brassicas, root grass and certain pulses.

I hardly paid attention, until I heard the radio presenter’s final words. Medical records from the famines and recessions of the thirties, when manac beans became a staple foodstuff, he
said, showed a tripling of impotence referrals and genital swellings amongst men from humble backgrounds. Manac beans, he warned, were ‘marginally addictive’ and contained the highest
concentrate of iogranulates in any vegetable.

My neighbour’s daughter, obviously, is overjoyed to hear my explanation for the sudden vogue for manac beans. She says it’s brightened up her day. She’s keen to play her part.
She carries produce from her stall to the curled-down windows of the cars, looks down onto the nyloned knees, the painted nails, the bracelets and the little skirts of women from the hills, and
passes over bags of toxic, regulating manacs. As evening comes and she is packing up her stall, the husbands hurry home in their long cars, their cocks enlarged, their testicles like coconuts, and
with nothing to present to their ever-patient, ever-thankful wives except a firm and growing appetite for beans.

H
ERE, AFTER MIDNIGHT
on the seventh floor, room service is provided by a refugee. Her name – unlikely consonants, and then too many vowels –
is printed on an apron tag. Her face is fiery, peppered by the many sweets she sucks from ‘late till six’, as she sits on her hard chair at what the waiters call the bus station. It is
her job to collect the ordered trays of food and drink from the service hatch and take them down the corridors – now reeking of cigars, cheap scent and cannabis, and far from silent with the
clatterings of one-night stands and thoughtless television sets and arguments – to restless, needy men who ought to be in bed asleep. A man, awake beyond midnight, is unpredictable.

The refugee – let’s not attempt to say her name – is only meant to place the tray outside the room, knock lightly on the door and disappear. Those are the rules. Wise rules. A
dark hotel is ruinous. No close contact between the bus girls and the guests is tolerated. No touting for gratuities. No entry to the rooms. No extra services. They have to come and go unseen,
discreet and tedious as nuns. Before the rules were imposed, a girl had been attacked, and many had been bribed or groped or compromised. One girl, on the second floor, had been a part-time
prostitute. She’d tucked her business card into the napkin on each tray and done quite nicely for herself. Another one had sold thin reefers to the regulars. A third, invited into rooms for
God knows what, had stolen watches, wallets, credit cards. A fourth, just for the hell of it, had helped herself to shoes and dropped them down the lift shaft for rats to eat and ghosts to
wear.

Sometimes, of course, the bus girl on the seventh floor cannot avoid the guests. They have to pass her as they come and go. Or else she finds them waiting at an open door. And then she says
good morning
, and
goodnight, excuse me, thank you, please, goodbye
– but that is almost all she says or understands. She has, however, learnt the menu words for those occasions
when the men don’t use their telephones but come along the corridor and try to order food through her.
Club sandwich
comes out almost perfectly. The choices of coffees, beers and
snacks are quickly recognized.
Champagne. Fish chowder. House burger and a side of fries. Rice salad with a pork brochette.
She can recite a list of fourteen whiskies. She’s tasted all
of them.

But ask her anything about herself and she will turn a deep and helpless red. She cannot understand, she cannot say, she cannot tell her story, what has happened to her home, her village and her
family. She shakes her damaged face at these late men but nothing tumbles out. There are no words inside the pepper pot except the words for hotel food.