Eating Crow (6 page)

For Miss Barrington I prepared a more complex dish. Ellen Barrington was our home economics teacher at Northills Secondary and I was her star pupil. She was the kind of round middle-aged woman who had always looked middle aged. She smelled just slightly of coconut—the aroma of a hair product, I think—and called every dish an “amiable attempt,” apart from mine, which were always “the genuine article.” She was unmarried and filled much of her time leading out-of-school activities, the most beloved of which was the Northills Brigade, a team of wannabe chefs who entered interschool competitions. I was, naturally, its captain. In my third year, when I was fourteen, we made it to the English finals, to be held in Birmingham, but the cook-off was scheduled to take place on the same day as a party which I was desperate not to miss because I had been told a girl who was going to be there might, quite remarkably, be willing to kiss me.

I was so certain of my kitchen skills, and so contemptuous of them, that the final seemed a pointless reason for missing the party. The morning of the contest I went into the back garden and, when I was sure I was out of view, smashed my arm against the corner of the garden wall five or six times, until a massive, bleeding bruise marked its length. I went inside and told my mother that I had fallen over. She took me to the hospital where they said it wasn’t broken, but put it in a sling anyway. By then the school minibus had left. Without me there to cook the star turn, an almond soufflé (in which most of the sugar was replaced by marzipan whipped into cream), the team didn’t even make it into the top three. Miss Barrington was, I heard later, distraught, but she didn’t show it to me. The following Monday in school she was genuinely concerned. And I never did get a kiss.

Miss Barrington had retired. I went to her little house in the privet-hedged, mock-Tudored suburbs, where she greeted me with a big hug. She still smelled of coconut. I had brought with me all the ingredients, and there, in her neat and scoured kitchen, with its pristine spice rack and its one-cup French press, I prepared the soufflé I had failed to make so many years before, while explaining myself. She watched me in silence.

When it was finished, the pillow of beige soufflé tumescent above the ramekin’s rim, I placed it on the kitchen table and sat down opposite her. She took one mouthful, pursed her lips, and a single tear rolled down her cheek. “One of the very special things about a life in teaching,” she said, gulping down air, “is seeing those you have shepherded through the confusions of childhood turn into such nice adults.” She reached over and gripped my hand. “You’re a good man, Marc Basset. A very good man.” I’m not embarrassed to say it. I wept too.

At a meeting in a local pub I apologized to Marcus Hedley, whom Stefan and I had taunted when we were just ten or eleven because he once wet himself while listening to the
1812 Overture
during music lessons because, he said, it was so exciting. When I had explained myself, Marcus and I got raucously drunk and sang along to “No More Heroes” by the Stranglers on the pub jukebox.

I apologized to Karen and Richard Brewster, two former colleagues of Lynne’s at the British Council, because I once got so drunk at one of their parties that I quietly threw up into their laundry basket and then didn’t confess. I also bought them a new laundry basket to make up for it.

On the spur of the moment, I even apologized to our garbagemen for having put grass cuttings in the wheelie bin, which contravenes local council bylaws prohibiting the leaving of garden waste for collection. It wasn’t much of an apology, but it did help me to start the day on a little high. It was an espresso of apology. I cut out a picture of a wheelie bin from the local newspaper (which for some reason always contains photographs of wheelie bins) and I added it to the Wall of Shame. Then I stuck a gold star on it, to indicate that the matter had been dealt with.

Lynne tried to be understanding but I could tell she was confused. In the mornings, before going to work, she would stand in the doorway to the living room, silently watching me as I made adjustments to the Wall, sticking up gold stars or adding a new image.

One morning she said, “Are you nearly done, then?”

I laughed. “Done? I don’t think so.”

“Oh.” And then: “Who’s left?”

I was cutting out the photograph of a chef. I had once described him as “the David Koresh of the restaurant world” for the messianic devotion he inspired in his fans despite the generally demented nature of his dishes. (Seared herring fillets in a raspberry vinaigrette, anyone?) “There’s loads of people, actually. This guy, for example.” I held up the cutting. “He might be a truly awful cook, but that didn’t mean I had to humiliate him. The customers would have told him in the end, and if they didn’t, what business was it of mine?”

Lynne said, “Now you’re beginning to scare me.”

“I’m just saying perhaps there are limits to criticism.”

“Are you planning to apologize to every chef you’ve ever given a bad review to?”

“I’m not sure yet. Maybe.”

“And then? Will you stop?”

“Listen, Lynne, I haven’t apologized to my brother yet.”

I heard her mutter “sweet Jesus” under her breath as she retreated from the room. The front door slammed shut behind her.

O
ne dull Sunday afternoon, when I was eleven, I spent two hours torturing my brother. I cannot now remember why I decided to do it, save that Luke was two years younger than me and that younger brothers, sodden with optimism, deserved to be tortured. Psychologists would say my behavior was born of a festering and deep-seated hostility toward the family member who, by mere fact of birth, had unseated me from my position of primacy within the household. I would have told you that he was an annoying little shit who always managed to make me look like I was in the wrong.

The method of torture was simple and devious but, ultimately, grossly effective. I made a sound at him once every three minutes or so for two hours. It was a kind of high-pitched braying noise, a sharp hee-haw on helium. Mum was out somewhere, but our father was in, working at his desk on another of his suburban chalet designs. We had been told not to disturb him on pain of death, and I knew that Luke could not call upon him to intervene just because I was braying at him like a prepubescent donkey. And so, all that afternoon, I followed him about the house, hee-hawing.

Hee-haw. Hee-haw.

At first, when we were watching TV together—it was an episode of
Hart to Hart or The Pink Panther Show
, something like that—he didn’t appear to be all that bothered. He merely looked over at me irritably from his corner of the settee and sighed at my obvious stupidity. After a while he became more intrigued. He’d say:

“What d’you do that for?”

And I’d say:

“Do what for?”

I’d turn back to the television.

Next he tried ignoring me. He kept his eyes fixed firmly on the screen and barely flinched at each new squeak. But soon his patience gave out, as I knew it would.

“Hee-haw.”

“Shut up, Marc.”

“Hee-haw.”

“Marc!”

“What?”

“Shut up.”

“Hee-haw.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

And onward through that long, gray winter’s afternoon, until the daylight failed and the sound was driving him nuts; until he was trying to punch me and I, being bigger and stronger, was refusing to allow him the feeble pleasure. He pursued me around the house making a sharp keening noise, like a strangled goat, lashing out at me, fists and feet flying. Eventually Dad came roaring out of his office. He stood at the bottom of the stairs staring up at us on the landing, his huge, shoeless feet planted flat and splayed on the parquet.

“What is the bloody rocket going on out here?”

“It’s Marc. He’s …” He looked at me, trying to work out exactly what it was I was doing. “… teasing me.” He knew how feeble it sounded. I did my “I’m just as confused as you, Dad” face.

Our father shook his head. “You,” he said, pointing at Luke. “Grow up.”

“And you, leave your brother alone.” He stomped back to his office and shoved the door shut.

The moment I heard the door close I, naturally, made The Sound. Luke burst into tears and curled up in a tight ball on the upstairs landing carpet. Which was when I stopped. His will was broken. He was mine now. I left him sobbing on the floor.

A few hours later the family Basset gathered in the kitchen for supper. Dad had slow-roasted a shoulder of lamb in red wine flavored with rosemary and garlic and our plates had just been filled when, without looking up at Luke across the table, I made The Sound again; gently, quietly, as if it were no more than a sigh of pleasure.

“Hee-haw.”

Luke screamed, picked up a full glass of water, and threw it at me, glass and all. I ducked so that the glass sailed over my head and smashed against the wooden dresser behind me. He was shouting at me now, throwing cutlery at me, trying to clamber across the table to pull my hair out. André Basset was on him in a moment, grabbing hold of him beneath the armpits and pulling him away bodily from the table and out of the room.

He was still shouting “shutupshutupshutupshutup” as Dad dragged him up to his bedroom.

Mum looked at me, genuinely startled. “What in god’s name was all that about?”

I shrugged. “I have no idea. You know Luke. He’s always been a bit”—I leaned toward her and dropped my voice to a whisper—“special.”

She said, “Don’t be so bloody silly.” Then we cleaned the kitchen.

Even now, more than twenty years later, I could not look at Luke seated at a table laid with the rigorous geometry of a dinner setting without seeing him explode across it at me in a shining fury of glassware and cutlery. This evening as I entered the restaurant he merely slipped back in his seat and jutted his jaw upward in greeting. His perfectly carved and shapely jaw. My little brother is me, only in focus: his waistline is narrower, his features more definite and assured, his hair tamed rather than rising up in some spirited revolt. His feet, of course, are shapely and boast a definable arch. Luke is the kind of man who can wear a cheap suit well. Despite this he chooses to wear only expensive ones because he is a distressingly wealthy lawyer and can afford to do so.

As I sat down, he said, “A definite four.”

“A four?” I nodded approvingly. “Chair or table?”

“Chair.”

“A good sign.”

Our father, displaying the Swiss precision he tried so hard to deny, told us when we were boys that the quality of a restaurant could be defined by what it did with your napkin when you left the table to pee. If the waiters ignored it so that it remained in a neglected crumple on your chair, it was a substandard place undeserving of his—or our—attention. If they folded it back into the original arrangement—fan, mountain peak, or, Lord preserve us, swan—and positioned it on your place setting, they were trying too hard. True quality was a single vertical fold, the prepared napkin then laid over the back of the chair, for that presumed the meal to be a work in progress and the napkin a tool. We Basset boys had, in adulthood, adapted the napkin test into a formal competition, awarding one to five points for how intrusive waiters were when performing the act, whether they managed to get the job done before you came back or if they changed the napkin altogether on grounds of staining. It was a remarkably consistent indicator. Very few restaurants that scored four or five on the napkin test served poor food.

Tonight we were in a new place called the Hanging Cabinet, near London’s Smithfield meat market. The proposition: great cuts of perfectly reared organic meat, classically prepared. The décor was pure meatpacker chic: bare brick walls, sanded floors, elegant bare lightbulbs; the kind of understated minimalism that £130 for two buys you in London at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Here hollowed-out beef bones, sealed at one end, were used as vases for a single blood red tulip. Bread was served in the cranial hollow of an upended sheep’s skull that rocked back and forth on its ridged peaks. The Hanging Cabinet was not shy about its intent.

When we had ordered, Luke said, “Lynne called me.”

I jutted out my bottom lip fiercely and dropped my aitches. “You ’avin an affair wiv my bird?”

He grinned. “Yes, of course, but in my youthful foolishness I have let the cat out of the bag by telling you she called me.”

“An elementary mistake.”

“Indeed. I shall learn next time.”

“Does she know about your size problem …” I nodded toward his groin.

He opened his eyes wide. “Yes, she’s afraid she won’t be able to fit all of me in.”

I recoiled in disgust. “Aw, thank you, Luke. That’s a delightful image.”

He scratched the back of his neck and looked away over my shoulder. “Actually, she thinks you’re going bonkers.”

“Yeah? In what way.”

“Oh just, you know, generally. She’s a bit concerned.”

I grabbed a heavy-crusted chunk of bread from the sheep’s skull.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m not worrying about it. I’ve always known you were a maladjusted prick. But Lynne, you know …”

“What did she say?”

Luke shrugged. “That you’re on some major apologizing jag. Saying sorry to everyone. Chefs, teachers, garbagemen. She tells me you even dug out Wendy Coleman. Is that true?”

I chewed my bread and nodded. “It was good to see her.”

“Did she slip her hands down your—”

“Stop it, Luke. Let’s be a little more adult about this.”

He rolled his eyes and I immediately regretted the phrasing. He bowed his head sarcastically and said, “Sorry, big brother of mine.” We were silent for a moment, weighing up the overloaded baggage of a brotherly relationship.

And then: “Is she still, you know, a big girl?”

“Didn’t notice,” I lied. “Irrelevant. Not what I was there for.”

He sighed irritably. “And what
were
you there for?”

“To have my feet done.”

“Eh?”

“She’s a podiatrist.”

“Big Wendy’s a podiatrist?”

“We each of us follow our calling.”

“I think that even beats Stefan’s decision to join the army.”

“Let’s not go there.”

He reached for his own bread.

“So, seriously, what are you up to? Should me and Mum be getting you committed?”

I shrugged. “It feels like the right thing to do, that’s all. Actually, it’s why I invited you here tonight.”

He leaned back in his chair. Now he was interested. “Go on.”

Our food appeared and we began to eat. “I’ve thought back over our childhood and, you know, I just want to say sorry. I treated you badly.”

Now Luke was flustered. He scraped away chunks of meat from the oxtail bones on his plate. “That’s what big brothers are meant to do, isn’t it?”

“Why should we just accept convention? That day I made you so antsy you almost leapt over the dinner table, for example. It was—”

Luke laughed. “It was ingenious.”

“It was horrible.”

“Does it matter?”

“I think it does. I feel terrible about it. I’m sorry, is all.”

He nibbled his lip and looked embarrassed. “How’s your food?” He pointed at my plate of roasted pork belly with pickled plums.

I laid down my knife and fork and pushed the plate away. “Dismal. The crackling is flabby, the fat hasn’t been rendered. It’s a soggy waste of good meat.”

Luke narrowed his eyes. “Do I sense a Marc Basset special coming on? How about, ‘The only meat that ought to be inside the Hanging Cabinet is the chef’s’? Something like that. You can have that one for free.”

I smiled thinly. “I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head. I called for the menu and ordered again, this time choosing the steak and kidney pie.

“What in god’s name are you doing?”

“I don’t want to leap to conclusions. Maybe it’s unfair to judge a place on just one dish.”

“Marc …?”

“I’m serious. They’ve got a whole menu, and from it we’ve chosen just the pork belly and your oxtail and—how is it, by the way?”

He looked at his plate. “Fine. It’s braised oxtail.”

“Good. You see? If I’d judged the kitchen on mine alone it wouldn’t have been fair.”

“Lynne’s right. You are ill.”

“Bollocks. I’m merely refusing to accept that everything has to be done the way it’s always been done.” I hesitated. “Anyway, where was I?”

“Er, apologizing to me for that noise-torture thing which I thought was hysterical.”

“No you didn’t. You tried to kill me.”

“Okay. I didn’t like you for it, but I don’t care about that now. It’s called personal history. You can’t rewrite that.”

“No, you can’t. But you can reassess it. Historians do it with world events all the time. Just wars become evil wars. What looked like a smart policy at the time fifty years later becomes an outrage. Why can’t people revise their own histories?”

They took away my pork belly and replaced it with the steak and kidney pie, the dark stew held in beneath a golden dome of puff pastry. I cut through the crust, and a burst of steam escaped ceiling-ward. I tried a couple of pieces of steak.

“Bugger!”

“What is it?”

“Gravy’s insipid.” I chewed on another piece of beef. “And the meat hasn’t been in there for long enough.”

Luke raised his hands. “See? This place is crap. Admit defeat.”

“Service is good. The bread is fine. And it got a four on the napkin test. That has to stand for something. Pass me the menu.” My brother let out a little whimper, an echo from a Sunday afternoon so many years ago. I chose a sirloin steak, rare, with fries and a béarnaise sauce. By the time it arrived, Luke was sitting with an empty plate in front of him. He watched me hawklike as I cut into the caramel-browned meat. It yielded softly to the knife, folding back to reveal its glossy purple innards. It was a fantastic steak. Finally the cow had been given a reason to die.

“See?” I said, carving happily. “I knew this place could do good.”

“It’s a steak. They grilled you a steak and you want to give them a medal?”

“The simplest things are the hardest to get right.”