Season to Taste (15 page)

Lizzie used her long legs and ran into the garden. She left the back door open and the dog came running after her. She bounded
over the mud on the turfed-up lawn and leaped over the wall. She cracked twigs underfoot and pushed through the bracken. She
stumbled over branches, heard the dog bark. She wasn't the gentle pale woman who slipped out of things anymore, but a tougher
thing of bone and sinew smashing through the woods. Everywhere she looked there was dark and damp; and dripping, seething,
slimy wood life growing over cracks and dark and green moss.

She tripped and fell, got up and pushed herself to run faster, thumping her stomach with her hand as she went. Fifty-five,
and a garden spade.

What was left for her, then, was the moment-by-moment construction of a life without feeling, of not, for one moment, holding
an eye; of not looking at that which would show her what it was to be base, which was cruelty, and hatefulness, of a deep,
terrifying, battering rage that came out of nowhere and turned on its own. She had failed to civilize. She had not known enough,
had enough, to become gracious and elegant and wise. Now there was only life left living on the edge, eking something out
that felt manageable without feeling. That was it now, forever.

Lizzie ran through the trees and burst into an open field where she kept her mouth shut and the air in as she ran, feeling
her lungs constrict as she tried not to breathe. She ran through the wet grass, flicking mud behind her heels, and didn't
stop for the stitch in her side or the aching breasts juddering in an old, gray bra. She pushed forward with her thigh muscles
and with her neck, and with her lips pursed and all the blood filling her face so that she looked truly mad, truly red with
human blood and rage and a stomach full of her husband's flesh, and behind her, excited, the dog ran and barked and together
they made it up onto the common where Lizzie fell down and sat, straight-legged, back on the thin grass.

It was over. It was too much. It had beaten her. Of course it had. The only thing she could do now was go home and get in
the car and drive to the police station in Farnham and wait to be seen.

She would walk in, up the steps, past the little blue lamp on the right side of the door, and take a seat in the waiting room.
There was no rush, after all; it certainly wasn't an emergency and there was nothing she'd be able to do about the people
in the future screaming her name.

She'd go to prison for the rest of her life, and it wouldn't matter what anyone did to her there. They could spit and kick
and beat and punch. They could come at night and knife her in the side while she was sleeping. What did it matter? Of course
she wouldn't be able to use her skills as a practical person to make life better for herself there. Sooner or later there
would come a time when she was ready to die, but doing that to herself now, committing suicide, and leaving half of him in
the freezer, and the back door open with the dog wandering around, seemed not just silly, and selfish, and messy for everyone
to cope with, but far too frightening, requiring will and energy she was sure she didn't have.

The neighbors would want an explanation; Nic would come back and she and Mike would want to know about the woman behind their
cake, and poor Tom Vickory, who'd sat in the kitchen with Jacob Prain's heart in the oven, would need to be told something,
would need to have someone who could explain.

I've come to make a confession, she'd say to the woman at the desk. I've come to confess a crime. Whereupon the woman at the
desk would most likely roll her eyes and take in the white face and jeans and the waxed green jacket and turn to her colleague,
also at the desk, and mutter something only the two of them would be able to understand. They'd have a code word. So many
people came in with wringing hands and a sense of guilt these days. So many people out of work and wondering what to do with
their lives. People getting stuck and fighting with each other, smashing things, or quietly, meanly, turning away. And Lizzie
would be standing there knowing she'd murdered him, knowing she'd eaten him, and was waiting now to tell this to the woman
with the orange face and rolling eyes whose colleague was leaning over helping someone who'd lost her bag or had it nicked
to fill in a form, and Lizzie would have to wait to tell them. She'd killed her husband one morning in March and had eaten
most of him.

They would say: Wait! What would they do? Who would call the supervisor? Would it suddenly get very hot in the police station,
very hot, very strained? Would it go quiet, or loud? How long before she was cuffed? Would the lights go out around the station
as people inside tried to keep calm?

It had begun to drizzle with rain. It was the afternoon. There was darkness and then there was light. Each moment could be
isolated. She saw the cows in the distance, and spoke softly, calling the dog's name.

She tugged the collar of her coat up against the cold and went round the edges of the field. Images of Jacob as he had been
in the beginning, gentle with her, nice to her, came in like butterflies and disappeared. Thought didn't cling to the images—and
her head was without voices. She wouldn't be going to Scotland. She wouldn't need to eat anymore. The car would get her to
the police station and she would walk on in. It felt better. She kicked the ground with her boot. She put her hands in the
pockets of her coat, then took them out and folded them across her breasts.

She looked at the cows, and the church spire in the distance. It was a wet, gray day, but the countryside around here was
beautiful. The dog scurried and dashed about with its tongue lolling pink and huge from its sopping mouth.

This was freedom. This was what it felt like.

She closed her eyes.

She watched the dog and felt very quiet in the air at the top of the field. Her decision was made. She took a deep breath
and whispered her relief to the clouds on the horizon. She stood up and put her hands in her pockets. Then she backtracked
into the woods, going a different path to get home. She felt like a different person. She'd let go of the struggle, she'd
surrendered to prudence and now her conscience might make a tentative return.

She was almost at the farm. She cut through the trees and joined Tubford Lane, turning left to walk the distance home. There
were bumps and puddles in the lane. She saw two bikes disappearing round the bend ahead of her, and she peered into the gray
light after them.

The car was up ahead in the lane, parked as usual, where it had been for years. The piece of paper had been taped to the back
windscreen, with masking tape, the black-and-white picture was grainy, but Jacob's face and form were clear. He was grinning,
with his teeth exposed. She put a hand out to the boot and leaned her weight against it as she stared at the pitiful poster
and the photograph of her husband. She read the word:
MISSING.
Then underneath that, printed in red:
CIRCUMSTANCES MYSTERIOUS AND POSSIBLY SINISTER.

Lizzie ripped the paper off the back of the car. She went into the house through the front door and walked in her boots to
the kitchen, crushing the paper and tape into a sticky ball. She pushed it far down into the bin with the onion skins and
the carrot peelings and the haricot beans she hadn't used. In the garage she fed the dog and filled the bowl with clean water.
Then she sat at the kitchen table carefully peeling the skin from an apple with a fruit knife.

The left arm and the right arm went into the microwave, one after the other. She shaved them on the sideboard and then bent
them on the baking tray so that they looked like boomerangs. She lifted one off and tried fitting it into the microwave in
an acute triangle. Between wrist and shoulder stump there wasn't much. It would work. She took the joint back out to prepare
it.

She was in her apron again, oven on, radio on. She cracked black pepper, sprinkled salt. She sloshed with olive oil and tucked
some garlic cloves underneath the elbow joints. She chopped an onion and threw it on: five minutes in the microwave, ping,
then into the oven, and from the freezer she lifted the remaining thigh.

Out in the garden she chopped with the axe. The bits of thigh were split in two. Each could go in the microwave, like the
arms, pale, stuffed in; the microwave would be useless after all this: it could be thrown on the bonfire and exploded with
a bit of meths and a match.

Boom!

She wiped the kitchen surfaces with the lemon spray till all was sparkly clean. On the sideboard the bits of thigh were piled
up under a tea towel.

She took his arms from the oven and cut them into the rings she'd make of a baguette, using the serrated edge of the bread
knife. The hairs had singed; they stank. Even the marrow inside his bones would be eaten now she was back in the mood; and
there wouldn't be any more thinking of silly things like running off to the police station to tell someone, or reaching out
to make friends.

She was absolutely back on course. And she knew that her eyes were fixed open; she wasn't blinking. She'd ripped that poster
off the car.

She sat at the table and ate the meat, using a steak knife to cut the flesh from his upper arms away from the bone, and then
using a teaspoon to scoop out the funny-tasting marrow, which was a little muddy, and dry.