Faces of Fear (16 page)

At last, the double doors opened, and Craig appeared, in immaculate whites. Behind him, the Mexican servant was pushing a long trolley, more like a paramedics' gurney than a serving wagon.

Craig recognized at least two of the guests as customers from the Burn-the-Tail, and a famous face from one of the movie studios. They must have recognized him, too, but they gave no hint of it. Their eyes were fastened on the long trolley, with its covering of highly-burnished silver.

Craig said, “I want to welcome you, on behalf of Mr Xawery, who has spent eleven years of his life preparing for this moment, when
The Secret Shih-Tan
becomes more than a book of recipes, but a reality, which you can eat.

“I always thought
The Secret Shih-Tan
was nothing more than the ultimate cookbook. But, you know, it's very much more than that. It's a book of thought, and justice, and devastating truth. Yuan Mei never intended that any of its recipes should ever be cooked. He just wanted us to understand what we are – that we are foodstuffs, too, for anybody or anything who finds us good to eat. He wanted to put us in perspective.”

Craig beckoned the manservant to wheel the wagon right up close to the end of the table. Even though the lid was tightly closed, the fragrance of flesh and herbs was overwhelming, and one of the guests was salivating
so copiously that he had to cram his linen napkin into his mouth.

Craig said, “I learned about life, cooking this meal. I learned about death. I learned about ambition, too; and vanity. But most of all I learned about love.”

The studio director said, “Shouldn't we wait for Hugo? This is Hugo's moment, after all.”

Craig took off his chef's hat. “We don't need to wait for Hugo. Hugo's already here.”

With that, he rolled back the shining cover on top of the wagon, and there was a human body–glossy, plump, gutted of every organ, braised, fried, steamed and poached, and restored to its original shape. The greatest recipe that man had ever devised. It smelled divine.

Craig laid his hand on the body's belly. “Do you see this? It was my uncle who first told me about
The Secret Shih-Tan.
It was my uncle who gave me the clue to what it meant. Cook your meal, he told me, and do it justice. And this is what this is. Justice.”

He turned, and beckoned, and Xanthippa appeared, wearing an impossibly short linen dress, a black bandana tightly braided around her forehead. She stood beside the body but she wouldn't look at it.

“This is my new
sous-chef
,” said Craig. “She gave me the inspiration to cook this meal; and help in preparing it; and she also gave it the spiritual meaning that Yuan Mi demanded. Not just an eye for an eye, but a heart for a heart, and a spleen for a spleen, and a liver for a liver. She was the last person to make love to Hugo Xawery, and here she is, to serve him to you. Enjoy.”

Three weeks later, he took her to China with him, to Shanxi Province, where the Huanghe roars and froths
between two mountainous, cloud-swathed peaks, called the Dragon Gate.

It was a chilly, vaporous day. The skies were the colour of slate. Xanthippa stood a little way away while Craig climbed right to the very edge of the river, carrying the book.

He looked around him, at the mountains, and the clouds. Then he ripped the pages out, six or seven at a time, in clumps, and threw them into the river.

He had almost expected them to catch fire, to burn, to leap in the air. But the Huanghe swallowed them and swamped them and carried them away. He tossed in the book jacket last of all.

“Are you satisfied now?” she asked him. She was wearing a pink ribbed rollneck sweater and tight blue jeans, and she looked almost good enough to eat.

“I don't know,” he said. “I don't think I ever will be.”

“Aren't you going back to Burn-the-Tail?”

“What's the point? Jean-Pierre is as good as me, he'll keep it going. Once you've cooked from
The Secret Shih-Tan
, how can you cook anything else.”

“But what will you do next?”

“Try to understand you.”

She touched him, and gave him an enigmatic smile. He could never forget that she had been willing to be eaten.

“What about the human meat that Hugo hid in your freezers?” she asked him. “What are you going to do about that?”

“Well … I looked for it, and I couldn't find it, and I think that Hugo was lying. But even if he wasn't lying, it doesn't matter. Human meat is the very best there is. It's one thing to eat an animal. It's another thing
to eat an animal which you can talk to, and make love to.”

Xanthippa linked arms with him, and kissed him, and together they walked back down the hillside to the waiting tourist bus.

In the Burn-the-Tail restaurant that evening, Morrie Walker, the restaurant critic from
California
magazine, ordered the seared liver with celeriac. He jotted on his notepad that it was ‘pungent, strange … a variety meat lifted to a spiritual level … almost sexual in its sensuality.

‘Without being blasphemous. I felt that I was close to God.'

Ystrad Mynach, Wales

Though Polish by birth, my wife Wiescka was brought up in South Wales, and that was how I first grew to knew the coal-mining valleys of the Rhymney River. By the time I came to know it, the mines were all but abandoned, and the infamous slagheaps were landscaped with trees. These days, the winding-gear has all been demolished, and the valleys are dotted with computer factories and superstores and light engineering facilities.

The Rhymney used to run black with coal dust. Now you can clearly see the stones on the riverbed. The only place where you can see a real mining cottage is in the Welsh Museum near Cardiff.

But toil and suffering always carry an historical resonance. The mines may have gone, but the work that was done has not been forgotten; neither have all the traditions that went with it, not yet. This story presents a different face of fear – the fear of passing time, and the fear of losing everything that we hold dear.

He was approaching the bar in the Butchers Arms to buy himself another pint of lager when he saw Ellis Morgan walking past the window. He felt a split-second's delight. Good old Ellis! But then he dropped his glass onto the floor so that it smashed, and stood totally still, staring at the window with his mouth open.

“Can't even hold a bloody
empty
glass, that one,” called out Roger Jones.

“Aye, aye, David, breaking the place up, are we?” said John Snape, from the other side of the bar.

David turned slowly around at stared at his friends. The Butchers was small, low-ceilinged and crowded and filled with cigarette smoke. It had originally been rough and plain, with yellow gloss-painted walls and no carpet, but everything was different these days. The brewery's marketing men had turned it into a bijou mock-Victorian pub, with flowery wallpaper and brass lamps and framed sepia photographs of people whom nobody in the pub had ever known. They even had women in the Butchers these days. They even had women on a Sunday dinnertime, when they should have been home cooking. That's how bloody different things were.

“I saw Ellis,” said David, in a voice as transparent as water.

There was a roar of derision. “How many pints
have you had this afternoon then, eh?” shouted Billy Evans.

“No, no! I swear it! Clear as daylight! He just walked past the window!”

“You're bloody daft, mun,” said Roger Jones. “What was he doing then, walking past the window? Coming in for a quick half, was he?”

“Ellis Morgan,” David repeated. “Clear as daylight. Had to be him. He was even wearing his red scarf.”

Through the frosted glass door panels, a dark shadow appeared outside, a man in a cap. The door handle sharply rattled, and for a long moment, all conversation stopped, and all heads turned around. The door opened, hesitated, and then old Glyn Bachelor walked in, the schoolmaster, with his overfed dachshund Nye.

Everybody sucked in their breath, and then burst out laughing.

“Gor, you gave us a turn, then, Glyn,” said John Snape.

“Frightened the life out of us, mun.”

Old Glyn Bachelor looked around the bar, bewildered by all the amusement. John Snape was already pouring him his usual half of Guinness. He poured the slops into a bowl for Nye. “David thought he saw Ellis Morgan outside.”

David was down on his knees, brushing his broken beer-glass into a funneled-up newspaper with a beermat. He was a big man, with dark curly hair and fiery cheeks and intense blue eyes. He wore a cheap grey rollneck sweater that was a size too small for him, and huge jeans. In spite of his size, his voice was high and soft, and anybody in the Butchers could have told you that he wouldn't hurt a fly.

“They can laugh. I saw him clear as daylight. Red scarf and all.”

Old Glyn Bachelor creaked over to his usual seat and everybody shifted over to let him in, lifting their chairs without taking their bottoms off them, like children. Old Glyn Bachelor always sat in the corner between the fireplace and the window, because he was schoolmaster, and it overlooked the whole bar. Most of these lads had been taught by Old Glyn Bachelor when they were juniors. In those days they had called him Mr Whippy, because of the Mr Whippy ice-cream vans that came around the estates, and because he liked to whip their legs with the thin, thin cane that he used as a board pointer.

He didn't look much different today, like a young, old child, with curly white hair, and a button nose. Starched shirt, county-council tie. He was dressed in layer after layer of green cardigan and brown herringbone tweed, to keep out the damp. The Rhymney Valley could be fatally damp in the winter.

He sipped his Guinness, and brushed the froth from his lips with the back of his hand. “That's the second one, then,” he said. He leaned over so that he could dig in his coat pocket for his cigarettes, Players untipped, almost impossible to get hold of these days.

“What do you mean, the second one?” asked Roger Jones. He was another tubby lad, with cropped fair hair and an ear-ring. Brilliant fullback, clumsy car mechanic. Even his thumbs had thumbs.

“Kevin Williams up at the Fleur-de-Lys curry house said he saw his da.”

“Never! When was this?”

“Last Friday afternoon, just when it was getting dark. He was crossing the river under the viaduct and he saw his da walking along the road to Ystrad. Just glimpsed
him, mind, so he could have been mistaken. But he said he was carrying his old khaki Army bag, the one he always carried his sandwiches in.”

“Didn't he go after him?” asked David.

“He said he started to, but then he stopped. He said that if it
weren't
his da, he didn't want to make an idiot of himself by running after him, see? But if he
were
his da, he definitely didn't want to meet him. Not eleven years dead.”

David finished sweeping up his glass and gave the newspaper to John Snape so that he could empty it in the bin behind the bar. “Give us another, John,” he said.

“What, in a paper cup?” John ribbed him; but David wasn't listening. He went to the front door, and opened it, and stepped out onto the wet grey asphalt of the car-park, and looked around, and listened. The November air was raw and foggy, and there was that smell of damp that never seems to leave the valleys, and coal-fires, and petrol fumes.

Across the street, five or six kids were kicking Tizer cans around the pavement, and one of them was sitting on the steps of the launderette smoking. If that was my boy I'd thrash him, thought David. What's the point of getting out of the pits if you're only going to smoke. David's father suffered from lung disease, and even if he didn't go to chapel any longer, David was evangelical about lungs.

He turned around, looked the other way, across the valley: toward the high, gaunt railway viaduct which spanned the Rhymney. It had once carried coal-trucks and a regular passenger service, but now it was nothing more than a silent monument to Victorian engineering. Deep beneath its arches, its banks overgrown with dripping ferns, the Rhymney river flowed, with a sound like forgotten people whispering. The river had run black once,
with coal-dust. Now Markham Colliery was closed, and Pengam, and Aberbargoed, and the men were working in carpet warehouses or electronics companies or (mostly) on the dole, and the only way you could get to see a real Welsh miner's cottage was to visit the Folk Museum just outside Cardiff.

A bird fluttered on the wall.

“Ellis?” David called out. “Ellis Morgan, is that you?”

But the car-park was deserted, and the only voice that replied was Roger Jones, shouting, “Shut that bloody door, mun, it's bloody freezing in here!”

As he went back inside, though, David looked back toward the shops and thought he glimpsed somebody in a grey coat and a red scarf, climbing the steep angled road that led up through Maesy-Cwmmer. Somebody in a grey cloth cap, with a satchel around him, walking fast, the way that Ellis Morgan always used to walk. David had never been able to keep up with him, when he was younger. You had to walk three paces and run the next three, and by the time you reached the colliery gates he had you panting.

“Ellis Morgan,” he whispered.

And just as he whispered it, the figure in the grey coat and the red scarf stopped on the corner of Jenkins Street and turned around and lifted one hand in a slight, affectionate wave.

It was too foggy and the figure was too far away for David to be able to distinguish who he really was. His face was nothing but a pale smudge; and before David could focus his eyes any better, he had turned the corner and disappeared. But why had he stopped and waved, if he hadn't been Ellis Morgan?

He went back inside the Butchers and closed the door
very quietly behind him. His pint was waiting for him on the counter. He looked toward Old Glyn Bachelor, sitting in the corner in the photographic daylight. Old Glyn Bachelor looked back at him, and his face was serious, knowing; as if they had just shared a secret.