The Devil's Larder (8 page)

Mondazy, incidentally, wrote in his last year, aged ninety-two, this little
jeu d’esprit
for his great-grandson:

I
AM A PIMP
of sorts. I have a team of girls. When school is finished and it’s low tide, they work for me. I arm them with a bucket and a bag of
salt, and send them out onto the flats, between the rock spine and the bar, to hunt for razor clams. They’re not paid much, but then the task isn’t very difficult. All they have to do
is walk barefooted on the rippled sand, on the lookout for the comic, tell-tale squirt of water, which reveals the hiding place. They bend or kneel, peer into the opening of the clam’s
burrow, drop in a pinch of salt, and wait. No one is sure if it is love or hatred of the salt that makes the clam momentarily protrude its twin valves by half a centimetre and extend its pink and
fleshy siphon, as if gasping for light or oxygen, or – given what it most resembles – something lewder.

My girls are quick. They have to seize the brittle upper shell and snap the clam clear of the sand before ‘the sea dick’ disappears again or, digging with its muscled foot, slides
free from their gripping fingers. ‘Prick-teasing’ is their name for salting clams – though none of them is older than twelve.

Sometimes, between the lunchtime sittings at the restaurant and the early evening customers who come for Sunset Snacks, I sit on the terrace by myself with my binoculars and watch the girls.
They have no concentration. In between short bursts of work, I see them kicking loops of sand and water at each other. I see them arguing. I see them playing tag, or writing libels in the sand, or
squatting on their haunches, so very far from any bush, to urinate. I have to keep an eye on them. If there’s a racing tide or heavy winds I have to call them back. The flats are hazardous.
Once in a while, I catch them waving at me from afar. They’re out of salt. And then I ride out on the quad bike with a fresh supply. They know I’m watching them.

It is the teacher from their school who bothers me. She’s come into the restaurant at night several times, with different men. She loves my clams, however I present them, whether
chowdered, steamed with seaweed and a freshener of lemon, grilled with garlic, butter and oregano, tenderized for
zuppa di cannolicchi
, ground up with crumbs and spices and then frittered or
simply boiled and flattered with a sauce. They are, she tells me, ‘sweet’. My heart stands still for her when she says ‘sweet’.

She also tells me, every time she sees the bill or spots the prices on my menu, that I am exploiting her young pupils, abusing them, that, at the very least, I ought to pay the hunters a quarter
of the menu asking price. ‘I’ll have to organize a strike,’ she says.

Last week, she went down with my team when school was closed to try prick-teasing for herself. She splashed along the beach towards the flats just like the rest, barefooted, her skirt tucked up,
her bucket heavy with a half-kilo issue of rough salt. And on her back, a bag of pickings from her kitchen, some sachets of cinnamon and cayenne pepper, tubs of curry powder, twists of jam and
pickle in greaseproof paper, a vial of vinegar, packets of sugar and flour, mustard seeds, a bottle of pop. She explained she’d set her girls a project. The usefulness of salt for teasing out
clams was, she said, ‘unproven’. The pupils had to carry out experiments to understand why clams would pop up so recklessly for salt. Why salt and nothing else, when they were living
‘up to their necks’ in salt anyway? You might as well hunt rats with air.

I told the teacher how people from the coast had been catching and cooking clams for centuries, and they’d always used salt. It smuggled its flavour into the flesh. They can’t all be
wrong. ‘Indeed they can,’ she said. She thought her girls, my team, could prove that a pinch of anything, a drop of anything, was good enough to tease the siphon from its shell. Not
just salt would do the trick. She could smuggle other flavours in.

I watched with my binoculars. I watched them bend and kneel and hunt for razor clams with all the products from their teacher’s bag. The girls, for once, were working hard. A new project
is always fun. They seemed to be more lively on the flats than they had been for weeks. Their buckets, I could tell, were getting full. I could not drag myself away and go to work while they were
there. The teacher held me by my brittle shell. I could not take my eyes off her. I would have watched until my eyes were sore, except – too soon – I shamed myself with my binoculars
and had to flee, red-faced and fearful, from the terrace. I’d gone too far. I’d caught her squatting on the flats, her skirts held up, her underpants pulled clear, the urine sinking at
her feet. The clams for that night’s customers were springing up between her legs. And she was beckoning her girls.

She came that evening, of course, to taste her spoils. I shucked and cooked for her, no charge, as payment for her efforts on the beach. I’d not exploit her as I had the girls. She waited
in the kitchen, at my side with a beer, while I took my clam knife to her catch, rotating its flat blade between the razor shells to sever the upper muscle. I rinsed the clams clean, showed them to
the steam for half a minute and let her eat them on the half-shell, raw. They tasted just like prawns, she said, but not as salty. She liked the satisfying chewiness and swore she could detect the
jam, the cinnamon, the pop, and many things besides.

T
AKING DOWN
the rucksack in the spring for our first outing, we found the undiscarded detritus of last year’s final picnic, the chocolate wrappers
and the little Thermos flask, the balls of foil that had been used to wrap sandwiches and a plastic box with half a cake inside, vermilion with age. From deep in the rucksack we retrieved an
undiscovered element harder than a curl of tin, which once had been an orange peel, and (looking almost perfect, five months on) a white hen’s egg boiled in its shell.

We cracked it open on the window ledge, pulled off its shell and cut it lengthways into halves. The albumen looked curiously transparent, though edible, despite its age. The yolk was greenish
brown and fibrous. The smell was subtle and unnerving.

Our dog would not accept the cake, but she seemed glad to eat the egg. She did not mind the colour or the smell, or care about the months of darkness and neglect. Besides, she liked to see the
rucksack and the Thermos flask. There’d be a picnic and some exercise at last.

Y
OUR GRANDFATHER
was not a modern man. He thought a woman’s business was waiting – first on her father, then on her husband, then on their
sons – not dressing up in coat and lipstick and going out with friends, like Parisian wives. He made that clear when he was courting me. I found the prospect charming in a way, because
I’d loved my father and I wanted sons.

One afternoon – the most shaming day of my life – when we’d been married about ten months and I was hardly pregnant with your eldest aunt, he came back early from the
warehouse, wanting to be fed. But I’d gone out with my cousin to the little restaurant, where the pharmacy now is. I’m glad that restaurant has closed. It made me blush to even pass
it.

Your grandfather, he tracked me down that afternoon – and naturally he made a dreadful scene, showing off in front of all the women there. You could hear the little coffee spoons rattling
on their saucers, he was so loud. I told him why I wasn’t in the house when he came home, as quietly as I could, although I trembled as I spoke. My little cousin had called, and we had
strolled down to the corner for a conversation and some cake. I wiped my mouth to hide my face from him. There was a smudge of pastry cream reddened by my lipstick on the back of my hand.

Well, as you must have heard from your mother, nothing could silence the man once he’d had a lunch-time drink, particularly on this occasion, with his unexpected audience of captive women,
their fingers glued to their coffee cups. He loved an audience of women.

‘Am I unreasonable to want her in whenever I come home?’ he asked. ‘To want her there, to cook for me? To want meals on the table a mere three times a day, like other men? It
is the principle. The perfect wife would lay three meals a day on the table even when her husband was not there.’

I pushed my cake and cup away, stood up and, nodding farewell to my cousin, began to walk out of the restaurant. It took too long. He said, ‘My wife has dined, I see. Her husband goes
without.’

Now that he has died and I am living in the empty house, I have become the perfect wife at last. I am at home for him. I cook my meals and, just for company, lay out an extra, unattended plate,
with his wine glass and with a knife and fork wrapped in a napkin, as he liked. Of course, if someone calls, one of our daughters, say, or my pretty niece, then there is already a place set for
them at the table. I live in constant hope that even you might come one day. But usually I am alone. I have myself only to serve. I do not tremble. And I do not have to hide my face. These are the
joys of widowhood. Again I dine. Again my husband goes without.

T
HE RUMOURS
started when – a rare event – one of the prison guards was spotted shopping in the square where Jo and his forebears had kept
their bakery since 1841. It was the evening before the execution. The next day a murderer was due to die in the correction facility, two kilometres out of town. Too close for comfort. Everybody was
on edge. The air seemed thin and aromatic with the prospect and proximity of such a death.

Old baker Jo was bald and staid, and not the most progressive of men. ‘Don’t waste your sympathy,’ he said. But George, his son – the one who runs the bakery today and
has become the mirror image of his dad and just as difficult – was a libertarian. He wore long hair tucked up inside his baker’s cap, and spent any time when he wasn’t slaving for
his family in the cake, bread and pastry business at the far end of the quay, with his guitar and some unlikely friends. I used to watch them smoking pot with my binoculars and wish I had the
courage to saunter down and join them. He was our only hippie then. And he wore flour in his hair.

It seems the prison guard had drawn attention to himself that evening by buying a suspicious assortment of foods. Some freshly shucked oysters, from the basket girl. Two strawberry milkshakes
from the cafeteria. A slab of coffee chocolate. A piece of pummelled beefsteak. Nectarines. It wasn’t long before the whispering began. These items had to be the condemned man’s final
meal, they said. His choices had Death engraved all over them.

Then, of course, when the prison guard was spotted talking to George at the rear door of the shop and money was seen to be exchanged for a bakery bag, any fool could guess what was going on. No
doubt about it. The bag contained some of young George’s Magic Cookies or Sister Mary Mix or Lebanese Red Loaf or Sweet Dream Biscuits or whatever it was that George provided for those
longhaired travellers who queued a touch too patiently each evening amongst the locals waiting for their bread. The murderer, for his last meal, had found a way of dining on oblivion. Good luck to
him.

I don’t believe that anybody slept too late the following morning. Baker Jo was standing in the street by 8 a.m., affecting an inspection of his window display but really with his eyes
fixed on the grey woods high above the town where, at that moment, as they thought, that boy, that man, that murderer was sitting down with plastic plates and plastic cutlery to oysters, milkshake,
chocolate, nectarines and beef to fortify his final hour on the earth. He’d save his magic pastries till the last. We all knew that. He’d want to fly away. Surely George’s baking,
his sorcery, would let the man break free.

The hour struck. Some drivers sounded their horns. An emergency congregation spoke its prayers outside the church. Somebody clapped, but mostly people shook their heads, checked their watches
for the umpteenth time, and went about their lives with less than half an eye fixed on the heavens.

I watched the execution through my binoculars from our top room. They pulled the prison buildings into town. I could see the detailed silence of the place, the dead, parked cars, the office
doors ajar, the tiny windows of the block, the clouds as solid as the hills. The only movement was a hardly stirring flag. I watched for almost fifteen minutes afterwards. Then the prison came to
life again. The yards were quickly filled with exercising men. A van backed up. The winds began to lift the flag and shift the clouds. And, for an instant, I swear, the sky went pink with melody,
not death. But I was sentimental in those days. The rumours that I’d heard the evening before had made me ready for, and keen to glimpse, transcendence with a pair of human wings.

G
EORGE AND
I have not been friends for many years. I was, I am, too dull for him. But he was unusually friendly when we met at the far end of the quay
today. I recalled how I used to spy on him with my binoculars and how I used to wish that we were close. So, while we smoked our cigarettes and looked out across the ocean at the ferries and the
tankers, I reminded him of those uncomplicated days. Did he remember how he used to play guitar to foreign girls? He smiled at that. Did he remember those hashish cakes and drug-laced biscuits that
he used to bake behind his father’s back? He laughed. They’d made him rich. And were they true, those rumours that we heard, about the executed man and what he ate for breakfast?