Season to Taste (11 page)

“It's time, you know?” he said, straightening his back and standing up tall in the porch. “It's just about bloody time. Me.
And Nic. I love her. I'm nervous. It's OK. I'm not good enough, that's what I feel.”

“I think the fact that you can say what you feel will be good enough for her. And good enough for anybody,” Lizzie said, quietly.

He took the cake from her hands and took a deep, clearing breath.

“Are you going to do it in front of everyone, Mike?”

“Yup.”

“Gosh.”

“Nah, man. I'm ready. Ready as I'll ever be.”

“Me too,” she said. “I'm leaving here, I'm putting the house on the market.”

“You're kidding! I love that little house. See it every time I go cycling past and think how much I love that place. A sweet
little home. You know? Wish I could have one of my own. For me and Nic.”

Lizzie tucked the foil back under the plate. Then she looked up at him and her eyes settled longingly on his soft young cheek.

“Perhaps you can,” she said.

“I'll come tomorrow with the money,” he said. She looked down at the heel on his cowboy boots. She'd taken her hair out of
its clip. Now she tried to flick it back with a jerk of her head.

“Good luck,” she said, “and let's speak again.”

She took the steps two at a time, and quickly belted her swollen body into the car. Her stomach was gurgling and her insides
felt very heavy now, as when she'd had too much dairy over a number of days. There was also a thick, oily feeling in her mouth,
which made it hard to swallow. She sipped water, then put the bottle back into her coat pocket. She was getting sick. She
would need to go home and have a cup of tea beside the fire.

She put her headlights on as she drove back up the lane, then flicked them down when she saw the car coming the other way.
She knew it was her neighbors from up at the farm and she looked into the back of the car as it passed by to see if the old
man was there.

By now she was trembling at the wheel. She made an effort to park the car very neatly, very precisely, half in, half out of
the ditch, as it had always been.

She got out of the car and stood in the dark with her hands the same lengths at the sides. She looked up through the trees
and saw not a single star in the sky.

It was remarkable how people managed in life, how they got on without worrying too much about it, she thought.

“Get up and put your lipstick on,” Anne had said, standing tall with her daughter, almost to the ceiling of the rented room
in Hove. “Get up and brush your hair and wash and cream your face as if your life were not as it is but better.”

Lizzie had asked her mother how you creamed your face as if your life were not as it was but better, and Anne had shown her
how to do it slowly, and tenderly, with a look of pride, like someone would if they had all day to go and watch water voles
swimming or play tennis with a friend.

“The thing to remember is: only you know how bad it is. Only we know what we know. Therefore only we see it like that. We
have the power then to pretend it isn't, to smile as if we believe.”

“Pretend until it's better” had been one of Anne's favorite sayings, and Lizzie, born in the dead of winter, 8 a.m. with a
sea view, had learned early on that one had to be practical to get through.

Now she secured the head torch. Kneeling in the dark, she cut the bin liner and peeled it open. She spread the plastic out
on the lawn, and looked. She had used the carving knife to slice under the rib cage and cut above the diaphragm. His chest
had shoulders, but no arms attached: no head. She'd axed the upper arms, leaving the shoulders on, so that he looked like
a Greek bust, with a splendid, prominent cage of ribs.

In the beam of the torch the torso looked very white. She'd been able to get down on the grass and look up through the cage
to the heart and lungs. She'd had to bleed the chest with a clothes peg on her nose, by tilting it into the flower bed by
the shed, and she'd worried, briefly, that the heart and lungs might slip out onto the grass. That hadn't happened, though.
She bent forward on her knees and peered up into his ribs. All the red and purple bits were still in there.

No question the chest would have to be axed open and butterflied. She would be some time at the barbecue. That was fine. There
was enough fuel, and she'd had some wine: she would stand through the night with a bonfire blazing with what was left of the
furniture. She tapped the head torch to bring the bulb back to life, and then crouched down beside the torso, using her fingers
this time to test the skin. She moved her hands all over it, squatting down to get them around the ribs.

His heart was still in there; that would have to be cut out, and eaten separately, if she could manage it, in a recipe of
its own.

She rocked the torso about on the plastic and saw how bits of soil and turf from the dug-up lawn leaped on. The dog was barking
in the kitchen, and Lizzie switched her head torch off and sat very still in the garden for a moment while the sound died
down.

The agent would say: “We're not entirely sure why they decided to dig up the garden. Something to do with wanting to plant
a meadow, we think.”

That night, while the bust of her husband was defrosting in the garden, Lizzie sat at the kitchen table in her nightie. She
had her coat around her shoulders and a glass of white wine in her hand. She opened up the laptop.

She signed her name. Then she went back and deleted it. She pressed send. She went to his sent items and read the email through.
An email came back with a ping. Under the table Lizzie tucked her foot under the dog's stomach.

Lizzie read the email through. It had come back unbelievably quickly. She tried to run a hand through her hair. She looked
around the little kitchen and lit a cigarette.

Thank you,
she wrote. And sent.

A reply bounced back at once:
No problem.

Lizzie felt her heart skip a little. She wrote:
I hope you don't mind.

Lizzie sat and massaged her jaw.

Lizzie began to chew on a fingernail. She didn't respond. Joanna sent another email.

Lizzie wrote:
No.
She didn't know what Chat was. She wrote:
Goodbye.
Then she put
sorry
and deleted it because it made her sound foolish. She didn't even know what she was sorry for. She hadn't wanted a conversation
with this woman in the first place. “Wasn't I perfectly all right without?” she said aloud, and she shut the computer down.

By now Rita was lying at the top of the stairs with her belly sticking out like a football. As Lizzie came up the stairs Rita
opened an eye and made a low whining sound.

“I know, Rita,” Lizzie whispered, as she stepped over her and went on into the bathroom.

By two the following afternoon the barbecue was once again lit.

Lizzie was sitting some way off from it on the end of a garden chair. The axe was at her feet.

She was drinking black tea, and smoking a cigarette, the ash of which she simply flicked into the grass. Her red lipstick
was smeared now. The dog was lying at her feet, stomach still distended.

There was a bad smell all around them, and the day was gray and bleak.

In the kitchen, the lettuce was washed; it was in the colander, crisp, white and clean. Lizzie had cut two tomatoes into quarters.
The rest of the cucumber had been sliced. She'd run out of dressing, but that didn't matter. She was much too full of fat.

In the garden she put the axe in the air and brought it down right in the middle of his chest. It made only a dent. Gripping
the handle, she knelt down on the grass; she looked at the sky.

Her mother had said: “You're tall. You're not going to fit in anywhere. Making art forces you to be different. You have to
be. You can't be the same as anyone else.”

She didn't have talent for drawing. She hadn't wanted to express herself. She'd found a job instead. And a house. He'd asked
her to move in. She'd asked him if she could move in.

She had liked taking care of him.

They had walked in the woods, side by side.

Like a little girl taking care of a doll. On the lawn she looked in and up, and cut out the heart with the fruit knife.

Then the lungs came out. They were dark, purple jelly: two slippery pale sacs. She held them in her hands and then laid them
on the grass before they were bagged and labeled and put in the freezer.

Split in two, his chest was still huge, like wings, and red with blood. She lifted his left side onto the barbecue.

She put her hands in her pockets and walked away as the barbecue caught and flamed. She smelled it. She turned around and
looked at her feet and she looked at the gray light on the garden, and over the wall towards the trees, but there wasn't anything
to see or feel.

Marriage had been marriage—nothing more or less than what it had been—but the persistent feeling in Lizzie Prain had something
to do with time wasted, seeing them both through their various depressions with food and the preservation of everyday life
according to the body's needs. Very little had been got for it. So, going to prison for manslaughter felt like more waste,
she thought, tipping a bottle of rib sauce onto the side sitting on the barbecue. She watched the flames leap up and catch,
and the air filled with the smoke. She feared the people in the prison as much as she feared the hours in a cell. She knew
there were activities and projects for prisoners—initiatives launched by well-meaning citizens on the outside—but the idea
that someone in prison would be able to use their pragmatism to any effect seemed too far-fetched. Lizzie lifted the ribs
with tongs and an oven glove and carried them over to the picnic spot she had laid out on the cold grass.