Eating Crow (2 page)

“It’s me. Where are you? What are you doing, you lazy jerk?” My girlfriend, Lynne, calling me as a displacement activity from whatever it was she should be doing. I reached for the phone, but before I could get to it, she said, “Heard anything from Hestridge’s people yet, you vindictive bastard?” There was a peal of rude, throaty laughter. “Call me.” And then a click and a mechanical whir as she hung up.

I withdrew my hand from the empty space above the phone and shoved two of the dense chocolate-covered figs into my mouth in one go.

W
hen I was fourteen I was envied by teenage girls. This was because I had larger breasts than most of them. Naturally I found this infuriating, for while I welcomed the attention, I wished to be lusted over rather than envied. Instead, perhaps because of the familiarity of my shape, they looked to me to be their friend, or even their “special friend.” Essentially that meant lots of long telephone conversations late at night, but no tonsil hockey and no fumbling. This was intensely frustrating because I wished to fumble with every single one of my special friends without exception, and hoped wistfully that they might fumble back. This would not have been news to them. A horny fat boy was hardly a discovery.

A fat girl who was up for it, on the other hand, was a different matter. That was a truly interesting proposition. As far as my mates and I understood, there was only one in our part of North London. Her name was Wendy Coleman and it was generally assumed that each of us, even the ones with breasts, would have a chance. We merely had to wait, and we would comfort ourselves with that thought, sometimes rigorously. My turn came one warm summer’s evening, at one of those parties that seemed to take place every Saturday night at one or another of our houses: cheap cider or Thunderbird, bowls of damp potato chips, and the Clash or the Cure on the tape machine because we wanted to pretend we were tough.

Looking back, I can see that what made Wendy a viable proposition was her pretty face. She had dark, broadly set eyes, full lips, and a curiously small upturned nose. This, combined with the vital intelligence that she was prepared to do more than kiss, was all the mitigating evidence a bunch of cruel adolescent boys needed to offset her size, which would normally have made her no-go territory. I wonder now if she was even that big. Perhaps, in adulthood, we would merely call her Rubenesque, but when we were fourteen we did not hunt around for adjectives culled from the Flemish School.

I don’t recall exactly how it happened. We talked, I imagine. There was always a bit of that. I filled up her plastic cup, probably with Thunderbird, and then she took me by the hand and led me into the shadows in the depths of the garden. I did not look back because I knew every single one of my mates would be watching from the patio, grinning. I simply strolled on, trying to look nonchalant, playing out the scene I had rehearsed in my head so many times. She stopped by a large tree beneath which lay a rug (it was the custom for party hosts to place rugs at the back of their garden specifically for this purpose) and she pulled me down upon it. I remember that she drew me down so that I was forced to sit with my back to the tree, and she lay across my lap. For a while we kissed, slopping each other’s cheeks with saliva. I tried to get my hand inside her blouse, but she batted me away, and then, as if compensating, moved hers to my belt. Soon my jeans were undone and her fingers were flicking about in the folds of my loose shirt. Finally I felt her hand make contact with my skin and tighten.

Her hand stopped moving, as if she was unsure of her next move. We were still kissing at this point, but clearly her mind was on other things because her tongue was stock still in my mouth and mine was rolling around it like a bolus of dirty clothes on a spin cycle. She had a hold on me now and as she squeezed tighter I let out a yelp, the noise smothered by the contact of our mouths. The cylinder of soft flesh she had clasped was not what she was after, but instead a generous fold of my stomach, and now her nails were digging into me from both sides as she tried to gain purchase. Finally she let go and I let my tensed shoulders sag. It was not the only thing that relaxed. Up to the point when she drove her nails home I had been eager for my moment. But the confusion had been so excruciating that my erection had simply retreated.

She found what was left of it and gave me a few desultory tugs. Then she whispered hotly in my ear, “Let’s put the dead man back in his coffin, eh?”

We stumbled back out of the garden and went our separate ways, she somewhere into the house, me into a crowd of my friends still standing outside, awaiting my return. They slapped me on the back and welcomed me into the Wendy club. I made noises full of casual pride and prayed silently that she would not reveal my limp response. (I assumed she would not, using the impeccably flawed logic of a fourteen-year-old boy that it could only reflect badly upon her.) Later, when the Cure’s clanking guitars gave way to Lionel Richie’s “Hello,” slow dances started out on the dimly lit patio. I sat mournfully and watched, as I always seemed to do through the slow dances at the end of parties. Young people swayed and tried inexpertly to slip their tongues into each other’s mouths, without the other one noticing until it was too late. Gently the herd of entwined couples rotated about the patio until one of my closest friends, Stefan, was standing in front of me, his mouth already stuck suckerlike across the face of the girl in his arms. He was my slim, attractive friend, solid and toned even at fourteen, the friend no fat boy should ever have, and standing up, with this girl in his arms, he seemed even more solid. My eyes drifted casually down to where he was trying to clutch her ass, and then, sharply, I looked away because I knew what he would be presenting and I didn’t want to see that. This was the difference between me and functioning males: hardness. Stefan was hard and solid. I was soft.

I should have got over this, but I haven’t. The day after I was informed of John Hestridge’s death I went into the office. My editor perched on the corner of my desk, one overtoned buttock clenched about its edge, and yet again I found myself cringing just as I had over twenty years before and so many times in between. Robert Hunter’s muscular frame, the comfort he clearly felt in his own skin, his whole physicality, intimidated me. He appeared to understand something fundamental about maleness that had always eluded me. An American friend once told me that my editor looked like the kind of man who should be out on the Wyoming plains, roping cattle. I often wished he were.

Hunter was not looking directly at me. He rarely looks directly at anyone, in case they ask him for something he might be able to give. Instead he was staring out over the gray ranks of newsroom desks. He too had been thinking about where the Hestridge story might be heading.

“This is exactly where we should be,” he said, with a gentle nod of the head. “Not just reporting the news, but making the news. Ahead of the curve. Forcing the agenda. Putting our worldview out there.”

“You want me to drive more chefs to suicide?”

“Exactly … I mean, no, of course not. Can’t blame yourself. Never do that. Not your fault he was, you know, teetering. Clearly you opened up a fault line in his, you know …”

“Psyche?”

“Psyche. Exactly.” A silence fell between us.

He said, as if quoting an editorial he might be writing, “We do not invite events, but we do have a responsibility to understand and interpret them when they occur.”

“Perhaps,” I said weakly. I flexed my feet within my shoes and felt a sharp, niggling dig of pain where a corn was building on my left little toe. I always look to my feet to deliver me a little agony when I’m nervous, a physical manifestation of my anxiety. It’s a learned reflex.

“No perhaps about it. Definitely,” he said. A newspaper editor’s only currency is certainty, and Robert Hunter’s wallet was full. He stood up and raised one open hand in salute to a young woman approaching us swiftly down the floor in a clack of high heels and a rustle of fine brushed-cotton pantsuit.

“There are my boys,” she said as she arrived. She reached up to kiss Hunter on the cheek and let her hand rest on the nape of his neck a little longer than necessary. He did not shrug it away.

“Marc, you know Sophie, don’t you?” he said, but he did not look at me and neither did she. “From the press office.” They were still staring at each other. I smiled idiotically but did not say anything. I had never spoken to her before, but I knew who she was and that was enough.

“Of course he does,” Sophie said, her eyes fixed on the boss. “And may I say what a fan of yours I am. So funny. So witty.” She turned to me at last. “And this Hestridge business—good for you, I say. Bloody good for you.” She punched me lightly on the arm. I thanked her because I couldn’t think what else to do.

“Sophie’s had a few requests for media with you so I’ll just leave you to get on with it, yes?”

“Of course, Bobby,” she said. He winked at Sophie, ignored me, and wandered away up the office, sniffing the air like a dog looking for sheep to worry.

We were to visit various radio stations and one television studio, Sophie said as we rode in the taxi from the office. I would be asked pointed questions about the death of John Hestridge and I was to be myself. “A certain amount of regret, I think,” she said as she flicked through a pile of papers on her lap, “but don’t overdo it and certainly don’t accept responsibility. Restaurant business is very complicated. You are merely a reporter, offering the consumer help in making a choice. You know the deal.”

And I did. I might have despised Sophie for her professional exuberance and her professional enthusiasm and her professionally glossy hair, but that didn’t mean I had to disagree with her. There was a clear marketing opportunity here and the product was me. I had a responsibility to do the product justice.

In one radio studio a middle-aged man with coffee stains on his sweater and yellow teeth said, “Do you feel like you’ve claimed a scalp?”

And I said confidently, “Not at all. I feel dreadfully sad, for John, for his family, for his friends. But the restaurant business can be very difficult. More restaurant businesses end in failure than success, you know, and in that context, tragedies like this are inevitable.”

“You did suggest John Hestridge deserved to be executed.”

“It was whimsy.”

In another radio studio a woman wearing too much makeup who clearly saw her future in television stared intently at a place between my eyes and said:

“Did you weep for John Hestridge?”

I sighed deeply and said, “I’m not embarrassed to say yes, I did weep a little.”

“Out of guilt?”

A light breathy laugh, of the kind I had heard politicians produce. “Not at all.” Back to serious voice. “For the loss of a life, cruelly ended by the vicious realities of the restaurant trade.”

“Are you one of those vicious realities?”

“I’m just a reporter, there to represent the consumer. I have a duty to report as I find.” I reckoned I was doing pretty well and Sophie agreed with me.

In the studios of a late-night news program which was recording an interview for broadcast later that day, powder was applied to my shiny forehead. I shuffled in my seat in an attempt to pull down my jacket so that it wasn’t rucking up about my shoulders and squinted at the lights to distinguish my shadowed surroundings. Just before the recording began, the presenter, a whippet-thin man in a suit designed to disguise the fact, leaned toward me, squeezed my knee, and hissed, “Love your column. So nasty. So vicious,” before swinging back immediately to camera for his introduction.

“It’s being called the New Vitriol, a form of newspaper criticism so aggressive and violent it may even have the power to kill. Two days ago the renowned chef John Hestridge committed suicide. He blamed his despair on the restaurant critic Marc Basset, who the day before had called in his column for Hestridge to be arrested, tried, and executed for crimes against food. And Marc Basset joins me now.”

My face was fixed in a completely inappropriate grin. “It was whimsy,” I muttered, just loudly enough for the microphone to pick it up.

“Is that what you said to his widow and child?”

“I, er, haven’t heard from them yet, but obviously—”

“Let’s hear from them now.”

I followed the presenter’s line of sight to a television monitor sitting on a trolley just behind one of the cameras. Hestridge’s wife, Fiona, appeared on the screen, looking pale and red-eyed. A small girl of perhaps five or six was on her lap. The girl was wearing a shaggy white woolen cardigan decorated with little woolly sheep and she had a mess of long dark hair that no one had helped her brush for a couple of days. She looked like a tangled ball of wool.

“Cooking was his passion,” Fiona Hestridge said in answer to an unheard questioner off camera. “That’s all John wanted to do. It was all he ever wanted to do, and now …” Her voice cracked, her eyes closed, and she pressed one loose fist against the bridge of her nose as though she might somehow be able to stanch the coming flood of tears with the ball of her hand.

The wild little girl looked up from her perch on her lap. “Don’t cry, Mummy.”

And cut.

“So, Marc Basset, how does it feel?”

S
ophie smiled warmly and tipped her head to one side. “It went fine, darling.”

“You think so?”

“Absolutely. How’s the pork and clams?” I looked at my plate. We were in a new Portuguese place behind the TV studios.

“It’s good,” I said, distracted.

“Really?” She looked disappointed.

“No. I mean it’s great. Punchy sauce. Great tender pieces of meat. The seafood’s fresh.”

She curled up her nose and looked at my plate in disgust. “Oh dear.”

“How can that interview be fine?”

She looked back at me and waved one manicured hand over her shoulder as if shooing away a fly. “Because nobody remembers the beginning of television interviews. They only remember the end.”

“The bit where I said the stuff about responsibility to the consumer?”

She pointed at me as though I were a promising student who had stumbled on the answer to a particularly difficult question. “Exactly that.” She leaned forward as if to sniff my plate. “Are you sure you like it?”

I nodded. “Really. Yes. It’s a good rustic dish, well executed. Authentic, my kind of food …”

She tutted and her glossed lips slipped into a delicate pout. “I was hoping you’d hate it.”

“Why?”

“In your column, when you like something, you get a bit … I don’t know … serious,” she said as she toyed with the herbaceous border of arugula salad in front of her.

“I take food seriously.”

“But you’re so funny when you hate.” She looked up at me and I could swear she was suddenly salivating in a way that she had not done over her lunch. “You have a particular way of communicating disdain which is very special, very
now.”
She spat the last word out, as if pleased to be rid of it. “What was it you said a few weeks ago about that Italian-Chinese fusion place?” She was squinting into the middle distance as if trying to focus on the memory. She looked back at me triumphantly. “That the food would taste better coming back up than it did going down.” She grinned.

“Something like that.”

“And the new fish restaurant in Margate where all the waiters wear full waders and big yellow oilskins like they’re deep-sea fishermen—do they really dress like that?”

“They really do.”

“What was it you said that time?”

“Er, it was as if the entire staff were dressed for an exceptionally safe sex party,” I said, quoting myself with a shy grin.

“That’s it. Fabulous.”

“Actually, some of the fish was okay. It was just the tacky theme I hated, which was the point I was trying to make in the—”

She waved me away. “And of course, the brilliant one you did of that Soviet-themed café in Manchester.”

“Uncle Joe’s Kitchen?”

“That’s the one. Didn’t you say that you finally understood why the Soviet Union had collapsed?”

“Sort of. I said a bit more than that, actually. It was more of a general critique of Eastern European cuisine which—”

“Oh I know, darling, I know. You say an awful lot. You’re terribly brilliant and clever. It’s just that certain things you say stick in the memory more than others.”

“You really do remember what I write?”

“Of course. How could I not?” She leaned forward conspiratorially and whispered, “You do hate better than any other newspaper columnist in Britain.”

I nodded slowly because I knew what she was saying was true. I had always preferred writing a bad review to a good one. A good review was a drudge, a desperate struggle for diverting hyperbole. A readable column needs a strong narrative, and nice experiences in great restaurants don’t make for good stories. There is no definable beginning, middle, and end, just a constant wash of pleasure. A bad restaurant, on the other hand, is stuffed full of character and intrigue and plot. Terrible places, and the suffering they cause their customers, make for good stories, and so I had begun to seek them out. I had become the high priest of hate.

That evening I managed a little restraint. I ate only two squares of the Manjari and just one of the tobacco truffles while watching the interview air. Lynne sat next to me on the sofa, unnaturally still, holding my free hand, not daring to look at me in case she grimaced.

When it was over she reached very deliberately for the remote control, switched off the TV set, and after a moment’s silence said, “Well, that was okay.”

“It was a disaster.”

She nodded wisely. “It was an okay disaster.”

“I came off as a cynical bastard.”

She grinned, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “He’s a good interviewer, isn’t he?”

“That’s not funny.”

“It is, quite.”

“I’ve got a reputation to think about.”

“Lighten up, Marc. You’re a restaurant critic. Not the bloody archbishop of Canterbury.”

“He made me look like a self-serving prick.”

“Maybe, but you were still the prick that I love. Anyway, I thought you looked rather dashing.”

Silence.

“Look, there was no way you could have come out of that looking good. You were set up. Everybody will be able to see that.”

“You think so?”

“Definitely. Trust me. It will all be fine.”

It will all be fine: one of the most comforting sentences in the English language. No drama. No tension or bathos. Just a gentle, rhythmic reassurance. If I were asked to identify what it was about Lynne McPartland that bound me to her, it would be the way she could say those five words in her low, calm voice and make them certain and true. I needed a woman who could make me believe her, and Lynne was the one. She had been from our very first night together.

By which I mean our
real
very first night, not the actual one, of which I have no memory at all. We were at university together and moved in the same hormonally charged crowd. We must have met at some point early in our first year and become friends in the careless way one does at that age, which is to say without identifying any good reason not to be. I recall her then as imposing, though not as tall or broad. She simply seemed to fill more than her own share of space, by standing still. She was the kind of person who would always get served first at the bar, however crowded it was.

After we graduated I went to London, she went abroad for a few years, and we lost contact. She ended up working for the British Council in Prague, and when she decided to come home, returned to a position in the literature department at their headquarters near Trafalgar Square. Her job was to arrange tours of gloomy Scottish writers to places like Belarus and the Czech Republic which had done nothing to deserve the punishment. She had just started working there when we met, by chance, in a coffee shop on the Charing Cross Road. The thick black hair was longer, but other than that she was exactly as I remembered her, down to the lush lipstick and the habit of only wearing black or gray and the mocking smile. She seemed so relieved to come across someone she knew, and so enthusiastic, that I invited her for dinner the next day even though, I realized, we didn’t really know each other, not as adults.

That was our real very first night together. She sat at the pine table in the kitchen of my Maida Vale flat, the flat we would eventually share, sipped delicately from a glass of ballsy red wine (I think I was going through my Rioja phase), and asked me questions I didn’t want to answer.

“So you haven’t made like everybody else and settled down?”

“What do you mean?” I was at the stove, heating a little olive oil and butter in a roasting pan ready for a lovely fillet of Welsh lamb that I had marinated in garlic, juniper, olive oil, and a dribble of lemon juice.

“There’s no Mrs. Basset?”

The first wisps of smoke began to rise off the oil and I dropped the meat into it. It fizzed and whistled and contracted a little in shock.

“There is. Her name’s Geraldine, she lives in Northwood, and she’s my mother.”

“Very funny.”

“Thank you.”

“You know what I mean.”

I shook my head. “No Mrs. Bassets. No potential Mrs. Bassets. Never likely to be.”

“Why not?”

I swigged from my own glass of wine. “Firstly,” I said, waving my meat fork at her, “point of principle: I can’t imagine any sensible women willingly taking that name and if they wanted to do so I wouldn’t be interested in them. And secondly, a practical point which makes every other consideration academic: I have displayed a marked inability to get myself laid.”

“Unlucky in love?”

“I don’t even get to lust.”

She wrinkled her nose. “What’s all that about?”

I turned the heat down on the meat and began to spoon the hot oil and butter over the raw upward-facing side. “I don’t know,” I said, lying. “I’m just not, you know, fanciable.”

“Oh for god’s sake …”

I shrugged and turned to her. “Come on. Look at me. All of me. Women do not want…” I held my arms apart, the meat fork reaching upward to the light fixture, and looked down at myself: the enormous chest with the nipples in different time zones, the rounded belly, the heavy thighs and thick calves; the body that made shopping for clothes a nightmare, that made airplane seats a torture, that as a kid had forced me to sit alone so many times at the end of parties through “Sexual Healing” or Spandau Ballet’s “True” or something equally irritating by Phil Collins. At the overall hugeness of me.

“… this.”

“What total bollocks.”

I turned back to the stove to flip the lamb for a minute or two. The room smelled of garlic and hot, smoky butter. Perfect. “I can only tell you as it is.”

“You’re not even that big.”

“I have a forty-inch waist.”

I saw her eyebrows rise involuntarily. She rolled her glass between the palms of her hands as if warming it and said, “You don’t look it.” She slugged the wine and swallowed, quickly.

“Thank you.”

“Just stating a fact.” And then: “There must have been women.”

“Oh, sure.”

“So what happens?”

“You really are intent on interrogating me, aren’t you?”

Lynne raised her hands in surrender. “I can shut up …”

I clattered the pan into the oven. It would need about fifteen minutes if it was to stay the right side of pink within. “No, it’s all right.” I picked up my glass of wine and leaned back against the sink. “We spend one night together, maybe two. And then something happens and—”

“You can’t believe a girl fancies you so you do something to screw it up.”

“Christ. What are you like after
two
glasses?”

“I’m just guessing. Is that it?”

“Never been good at self-analysis.”

She drained her glass. “The way you describe it, you make it sound like a miracle you ever lost your cherry.”

“Almost was.”

“Oh yeah? How old were you?”

“You’re so smart. You guess.” Despite myself, I was starting to enjoy this. Normally there would be nothing I would like to discuss less than my heroic failures. But Lynne made it feel almost like sport, and in sport, heroic failures have virtue. It was liberating.

She wrinkled her nose again. “Obviously has to be quite late. Eighteen?”

I jutted my chin upward to say “higher.”

“Nineteen?”

“Guess again.”

“Older than that? Bless—”

“I was twenty.”

“You were at college?”

“Yup. All that time when I should have been shagging around and I didn’t sort it out until my third year.”

“Anybody I know?”

“Jesus.”

“Oh, come on. You know you want to tell me.” She grabbed the bottle and refilled her glass. I rolled a mouthful of my own wine over my tongue and swallowed.

“Jennie Sampson.”

“Jennie Sampson? Jennie Sampson?” Beat. “Jennie Sampson! I remember her. She was gorgeous. Quiet but gorgeous. Always carried her books against her chest as if she were trying to hide behind them.”

“That’s the one.”

“Shy, though.”

“You mean you never talked to her.”

“Perhaps. So what happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“What happened? How long did it last? Was it love? Did you propose? Or did you screw that one up too?”

Oh yes, I thought to myself. I screwed that one up. Boy, did I screw that one up. “It just … fizzled out,” I said quietly.

She tipped her head to one side, looked me up and down, and said, “The only problem is you. You’re a very attractive man, my dear. Dark, big, substantial …”

I snorted with derision and stared into the depths of my glass.

“No, really. Who wants thin men with their little hips and their pigeon chests? Not me. Give me heft any day, something to get your arms around.”

“You’re being very kind.”

“Jesus Christ.” She pulled mockingly at her thick black tresses, as if trying to rip them out. “How am I going to get through to you?” Suddenly she stood up, slammed her glass down on the table, and said, “There’s only one thing for it. I’m just going to have to have sex with you. Come on.” She strode out of the kitchen and I, obediently, followed, helpfully calling in a small voice, “Second room on the left.” In the doorway to my room I hesitated. She turned to me, raised one hand to my cheek, and said, “It will all be fine.”