Read The Devil's Larder Online
Authors: Jim Crace
The Devil's Larder
Praise for
T
HE
D
EVIL
’
S
L
ARDER
‘One subversive, lyrical banquet. Disquieting yet somehow affirming, this is poetic manna for the imaginary soul, and if not from heaven, then from
an even more tempting, voluptuous recess’
Observer
‘Clever and original . . . fanciful, poetic . . . wholly convincing’
Independent
‘Peculiar, funny, blunt and sad all at the same time. Crace writes with a passion and a slinky quirkiness which he sustains throughout this
collection of twisted tales’
List
‘A literary dish fit for the Gods [and] all discerning readers. Beautifully written, witty ... It is a feast’
Herald
‘Deliciously written’
Arena
‘Crace constructs modern riddles, fables, fantasies, jokes, tragedies and comedies out of food’
New Statesman
J
IM
C
RACE
is the author of
Continent, The Gift of Stones, Arcadia, Signals of Distress, Quarantine
(winner of the 1998 Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize),
Being Dead
(winner of the 2001 National Book Critics’ Circle Award),
The Devil’s Larder,
Six,
and
The Pesthouse.
His novels have been translated into twenty-six languages. In 1999 Jim Crace was elected to the Royal Society of Literature.
A
LSO BY
J
IM
C
RACE
Continent
Gift of Stones
Arcadia
Signals of Distress
Quarantine
Being Dead
Six
The Pesthouse
THE DEVIL’S LARDER
PICADOR
First published 2001 by Viking
First published in paperback 2002 by Penguin Books
This edition first published 2008 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2008 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-0-330-47386-6 in Adobe Reader format
ISBN 978-0-330-47385-9 in Adobe Digital Editions format
ISBN 978-0-330-47387-3 in Mobipocket format
Copyright © Jim Crace 2001
The right of Jim Crace to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic,
digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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There are no bitter fruits in heaven.
Nor is there honey in the Devil’s larder
Visitations 7:11
If you must ride with Hunger as your horse
then trust in Nature to provide a course.
Suck marrow from discarded bones.
Dine on the sauces of the thorn and gorse.
Lick salt on stones.
Horseman, let your reins fall light,
and ride the slow digestions of the night.
M
ONDAZY
(translated by the author)
Contents
S
OMEONE HAS
taken off – and lost – the label on the can. There are two glassy lines of glue with just a trace of stripped paper where the
label was attached. The can’s batch number –
RG2JD
19547 – is embossed on one of the ends. Top or bottom end? No one can tell what’s up or down. The
metal isn’t very old.
They do not like to throw it out. It might be salmon – not cheap. Or tuna steaks. Or rings of syruped pineapple. Too good to waste. Guava halves. Lychees. Leek soup. Skinned, Italian plum
tomatoes. Of course, they ought to open up the can and have a look, and eat the contents there and then. Or plan a meal around it. It must be something that they like, or used to like. It’s
in their larder. It had a label once. They chose it in the shop.
They shake the can up against their ears. They sniff at it. They compare it with the other cans inside the larder to find a match in size and shape. But still they cannot tell if it is beans or
fruit or fish. They are like children with unopened birthday gifts. Will they be disappointed when they open up the can? Will it be what they want? Sometimes their humour is macabre: the contents
are beyond description – baby flesh, sliced fingers, dog waste, worms, the venom of a hundred mambas – and that is why there is no label.
One night, when there are guests and all the wine has gone, they put the can into the candlelight amongst the debris of their meal and play the guessing game. An aphrodisiac, perhaps:
‘Let’s try.’ A plague – should they open up and spoon it out? A tune, canned music, something never heard before that would rise from the open can, evaporate, and not be
heard again. The elixir of youth. The human soup of DNA. A devil or a god?
It’s tempting just to stab it with a knife. Wound it. See how it bleeds. What is the colour of the blood? What is its taste?
We all should have a can like this. Let it rust. Let the rims turn rough and brown. Lift it up and shake it if you want. Shake its sweetness or its bitterness. Agitate the juicy heaviness
within. The gravy heaviness. The brine, the soup, the oil, the sauce. The heaviness. The choice is wounding it with knives, or never touching it again.
‘T
HIS IS FOR
the angel,’ Grandma used to say, tearing off a strip of dough for me to take into the yard. ‘Leave it somewhere he can
see.’ Sometimes I left the strip on the street wall. Sometimes I draped it on the washing line. Sometimes I put it on the outside windowsill and hid behind the kitchen curtain beads to spot
the angel in the yard.
Grandma said I wouldn’t catch him eating the dough. ‘That’s only greedy birds,’ she explained. ‘The angel comes to kiss it, that’s all, otherwise my bread
won’t rise.’ And, sure enough, I often saw the birds come down to peck at our strip of dough. And, sure enough, my grandma’s bread would nearly always rise. When it didn’t
she would say the birds had eaten the strip of dough before the angel had had a chance to prove it with his kisses.
But I never saw an angel on the windowsill. Not even once.
The thought of angels in the yard terrified my girls and so, when we made bread – in that same house, but thirty years along the line and Grandma long since gone to kiss the angels herself
– I used to say, ‘To make good bread I need an angel in the kitchen. Who’ll be the angel today and kiss the dough?’ My girls would race to kiss the dough. I’ll not
forget the smudge of flour on their lips. Or how, when I had taken the scarred and toppling loaves of bread out of the oven, they’d demand a strip of hot crust to dip into the honey pot or
wipe around the corners of the pâté jar. This was their angel pay. This was their reward for kissing.
Now there are no angels in the kitchen. I’m the grandma and the girls are living far too far away to visit me more than once or twice a year. I’m too stiff and out of sorts to visit
them myself unless I’m taken in a car, but I don’t like to ask. I stay in touch with everyone by phone. I keep as busy as I can. I clean, although the house is far too large for me. I
walk, when it is warm and dry, down to the port and to the shops and take a taxi back. I keep plants in the yard in pots and on the windowsills. I eat mostly out of a can or frozen meals or packet
soups.
This afternoon, I thought I’d fill my time by making bread. My old wrists ache with tugging at the dough of what, I think, will have to be my final loaves. I tore a strip off for good
luck, kissed it, put it on the window-sill. I warmed the oven, greased the tins, and put the dough to cook on the highest shelf. Now I’m waiting at the window, with a smudge of flour on my
lips and with the smell of baking bread rising through the house, for the yard to fill and darken with the shadows and the wings.
N
O ONE
is really sure exactly where the restaurant might be, though everyone’s agreed that the walk to reach it is clandestine and punishing but
hardly beautiful. There will be hills and scooping clouds and sulphur pools to menace us. A ridge of little
soufrières
will belch their heavy, eggy breath across our route. Our eyes
will run. Our chests will heave. We’ll sneeze and stumble, semi-blind, with nothing but the occasional blue-marked tree trunk to guide us on our way.
But still we want to risk the walk. The restaurant’s reputation is enough to get us out of bed at dawn. We have to be there by midday if we want to get back safely in the light. The five
of us, five men, five strangers united by a single appetite.
We take the little taxi to where the boulder track is beaten to a halt by the river, and then we wade into the water and the trees. We’re wading, too, of course, into the dark side of
ourselves, the hungry side that knows no boundaries. The atmosphere is sexual. We’re in the brothel’s waiting room. The menu’s yet to be paraded. We do not speak. We simply wade
and hike and climb. We are aroused.
The restaurant is like a thousand restaurants in this part of the world: a wooden lodge with an open veranda, and terraces with smoky views across the canopy towards the coast. There is a dog to
greet us, and voices from a radio. An off-track motorbike is leaning against a mesh of logs. But none of the twenty tables, with their cane chairs, are as yet occupied. We are, it seems, the only
visitors.
We stand and wait. We cough. We stamp on the veranda floor, but it is not until the Austrian, weary and impatient, claps his hands that anybody comes. A woman and a boy too young to be her son.
She is well dressed, with heavy jewellery. We would have liked it better if the waiter were a man.