Eating Mammals
John Barlow
Three wonderfully original, linked novellas based on true stories from the winner of the Paris Review's Discovery Award. A new voice from Yorkshire, John Barlow has been compared to Michel Faber and T.C. Boyle. This is his first book.A winged cat wreaks havoc in a Yorkshire workhouse. An autumnal romance between two pork pie makers is celebrated with a donkey wedding. The strange career of Michael 'Cast Iron' Mulligan is revealed by his unlucky apprentice Captain Gusto, both men who eat – and eat anything – for a living. These are the stories that mark the debut of one of fiction's most original and assured new voices. And, remarkably, they all are based on fact.Gypsies, Victorian businessmen, servants, masters and unwise children come together in three gothic and moving novellas of magic and deception. Largely set in the nineteenth century, they combine the satisfactions of the finest novels with a playfulness that does not forfeit humanity. With the comic sensibility of Dickens and a taste for the macabre worthy of Irvine Welsh, John Barlow is a storyteller with a unique imagination who will continue to amaze and entertain us for many years to come.
Eating Mammals
JOHN BARLOW
For Susana
¿Recuerdas dónde comenzó todo esto?
Contents
Cover (#ub54f4206-5e86-57bc-a9ae-cdac6c9502f6)
Title Page (#uc16e995b-9cf5-57a0-930c-95c70df10bae)
EATING MAMMALS (#ub88a6e43-2487-5097-8626-783f1cef4a6e)
THE POSSESSION OF THOMAS–BESSIE: a Victorian melodrama (#litres_trial_promo)
I (#litres_trial_promo)
II (#litres_trial_promo)
III (#litres_trial_promo)
IV (#litres_trial_promo)
V (#litres_trial_promo)
VI (#litres_trial_promo)
VII (#litres_trial_promo)
VIII (#litres_trial_promo)
THE DONKEY WEDDING AT GOMERSAL, recounted by an inhabitant of that place (#litres_trial_promo)
I (#litres_trial_promo)
II (#litres_trial_promo)
ENDPIECE (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
EATING MAMMALS (#ulink_87f5b4cd-0710-57ac-a767-783cfe1ed473)
My career began with two strokes of good luck – fate you might say, because as instances of good fortune none could have bettered them. After the war, towards the end of which I served as a cook in His Majesty’s land forces, I returned to England and, armed with the ability to knock up a wholesome bully beef stew for three hundred, presumed to pass myself off as a chef. In my new, ill-fitting suit (we all got a new, ill-fitting suit) I talked my way into the kitchens of a modest hotel in Scarborough, and several years afterwards found myself working in one of the superior hotels on the Yorkshire coast. I won’t tell you where, because about a decade later, at a moment when I gained some brief, local notoriety for swallowing slugs, my former employer there wrote to beg me never to divulge the name of the place to another living soul. Quite right, of course, although by that time I had completely forgotten the name of the establishment, and his letter served only to remind me of it.
Anyway, whilst I was working at this hotel as third chef, in which role I took charge of breakfasts, I found myself one morning called to the table of a guest in order to receive his compliments. His name was Mulligan, a regular customer, and familiar to us all, not by the frequency of his stays so much as by the dimensions of his body. He was, quite simply, enormous. In his tweed suit he resembled a well-tailored tree trunk, a huge lump of man. One would not have called him fat, although there was certainly more to him than meat and bone. No, not fat. Even as he sat, motionless but for the steady working of his jaws, one could tell that he wasn’t a wobbler, that when he stood up his belly would not flib-flab around in front of him like a sackful of jellyfish. From head to toe he had achieved a condition only dreamed of by the obese, and scorned (somewhat jealously) by bodybuilders everywhere: firm fat. And underneath that magnificent outer layer there resided also an ample musculature, sufficient muscle indeed so that, had he been alive today, Mulligan would have been at least an American wrestler, and at best a great film star.
But as luck (for me) would have it, he was neither of these; he was the fêted Michael ‘Cast Iron’ Mulligan. And that morning, as I picked bits of uneaten bacon from returned breakfast plates, examining them for teeth marks before setting them aside for a quiche, he wanted to speak to me.
At that time I knew no more about him than what I saw, and that included what I saw him eat. On this particular occasion he had consumed enough porridge to fill a bowler hat, ham and eggs sufficient to keep a team of navvies on the move all morning, and half a loaf of toast. But, then again, he had done so the previous morning, and as far as I was aware my cooking had not improved miraculously overnight. So why he wanted to speak to the breakfast chef I could not guess.
I approached his table, where he was sipping tea from a china cup, as delicate as you like. As if to mark my arrival he dropped a lump of sugar into the cup with a pair of silver tongs. Then he looked up at me.
‘So you’re the breakfast chef,’ he said, in an Irish accent which teetered between seriousness and levity, as if everything had two possible interpretations. ‘Well, many thanks indeed for another fine meal. Yes, many, many thanks.’
I accepted his gratitude somewhat awkwardly, not quite deciding on an interpretation.
‘And,’ he continued, pushing a vacant chair towards me and lowering his voice, ‘I am in need of a little assistance, and you look as if you might be the right man for the job.’
I sat down at the table, and noticed that there was a pound note slotted under a side plate. He let me consider its possible significance for a moment, then went on.
‘Today,’ he said, then stopping to drain the last of the tea from his cup, ‘I have a little business, a professional dinner if you will …’
I nodded, still looking at the money.
‘… a rather special affair, for which I am to provide the liquid refreshment.’
I was about to tell him that access to the wine cellar was strictly by arrangement with the manager, having (incorrectly) deduced that he, like many others before him, baulked at the prices on our wine list and fancied some vino on the cheap. But I was a rather timid young man, and before I could summon up a suitably tactful form of words to explain that every thief has his price, and that mine was three pounds a case, he took a small piece of paper from his waistcoat pocket and placed it in front of me. On it was a recipe, handwritten and with no title:
Whisk until all ingredients combine. Leave to stand.
Whisk again and decant into eight pint bottles.
Whatever else he might have been, then, there seemed little doubt that Mr Mulligan was severely constipated. And do you wonder! one might add, although just how constipated a man can be, even a man the size of a tree trunk with the appetite of an elephant, was perplexing indeed. And why the home-made remedy?
‘I see that you find this something of a strange request, but I assure you that it is quite harmless, quite innocent …’
He nudged the plate with the banknote under it towards me.
‘And if you can supply me with the eight bottles by five this evening, in my room, there will be another small gift awaiting you.’
My eyes must have accepted the offer on my behalf, since he sat back in his chair as if the deal was now done. Carefully, I extracted the note from under the plate and stood up.
‘Oh,’ he added, ‘and, please, olive oil; of that I really must insist.’
In those days, not so very many years after the war, and with rationing only just out of the way, oranges enough for three pints of juice was a tall order. Even before I reached the kitchen it occurred to me that procuring wine was a far easier sideline than juicing six dozen oranges clandestinely, not to mention the tomatoes. As for the oil and the honey …
My career as a cook had been touched by the cold, pinching hand of rationing, so without hesitation I set to the question of spinning-out: I pulped the tomatoes and added sugared water and ketchup (for some reason more plentiful than the real thing); I ran to the sink, which mercifully was still piled high with unwashed breakfast plates, and rescued a good half-jug of fruit segments in syrup, not all orange, but at least citrus for the main part; I collected the dregs from two or three dozen glasses, and got more than a cupful of fruit juice, albeit of mixed origin; then, from the fruit store, I grabbed a couple of dozen oranges.
In a corner I got to work, grinding down the fruit-flesh with an ancient mincer (aha! If only I’d known!), sneaking cupfuls of concentrate and the odd can of tomato juice from the stores, pulping and grinding in an anxious frenzy. The oil was a dilemma, but also the making of me. In it went, pure olive oil. There was secrecy in it, and no great abundance in the supply room. And all the time that pound note looked less and less like good value. Curiously, though, I felt a certain pride, almost a reverence for the task, with Mulligan’s words echoing in my ears: Oh, and, please, olive oil; of that I really must insist.
And so it was that, as casually as possible, I stood over a pan of pure olive oil on a slow flame, and carefully stirred in a half-pint of honey, mimicking as far as I could manage the slow arm movements of someone heating milk and eggs for a custard. Oil and honey are at best distant relations and, although once heated through the emulsion had a not unpleasant taste, the oil did tend to rise. However, the job of introducing the sweetened oil to my juice mixture posed more acute logistical problems, and in the end I carried the lot off to my bedroom in a steel bucket. I whisked and whisked until my arm went into cramp. To my surprise, the stuff combined tolerably well, and although one couldn’t have said that it was a tasty concoction, neither was it all that bad.
Then I returned to my quiches and the luncheon preparations, leaving the bucket hidden inside my wardrobe. Six hours later I whisked the mixture again and put it into eight milk bottles.
At five minutes to five I began my furtive scurry through the hotel, the heavy crate of bottles in my arms, avoiding the main staircase entirely, sprinting along old servants’ corridors and up dark, winding stairwells only used in emergencies. When I arrived at Mulligan’s room, sweat had begun to trickle down my forehead and into my eyes, and as he opened the door I was blinking maniacally. Before I had chance even to look at him I had been yanked inside, and the door closed behind me. The room was full of the charming, intermingled smells of cigars and cologne, and in one corner hung a purple velvet smoking jacket, which, since Mr Mulligan was wearing a waistcoat and trousers of the same fabric, I guessed was part of his evening dress.
He fussed around with his cigar, unable to locate an ashtray, and finally popped the burning stub back into his mouth. From the wine crate he extracted a bottle, examined the colour of the liquid against the light from the window, and sipped. He murmured his approval, before replacing the bottle.
‘Not all fresh, especially the tomatoes, but a fine olive oil at least,’ he said, nodding towards a table where another pound note awaited me. ‘And that comes with my sincere gratitude, young man, to be sure it does.’
But I didn’t take the note. I wasn’t going anywhere until I’d had an explanation. Although in retrospect it was pure naivety which led me to such presumptuousness. Michael Mulligan, as I was to learn, was not a man whom one obliged to do or to say anything. If the King himself (the Queen by that time, actually) had desired something from him, it would have been requested formally, as a polite favour. In my ignorance, then, I stood my ground until an amused curiosity crept across his face.
‘I can see,’ he began, sitting down in an armchair and gesturing towards another, ‘that you want explanations, not cash.’
He laughed, not the big belly laugh one might have expected, but a high-pitched, impish giggle. I sat down and waited for him to continue.
‘That in itself is commendable. Here,’ he said, offering me a cigar.
I accepted it, lit it as one would a cigarette and, for want of knowing better, sucked heavily. All at once my lungs were full of burning rubber and dark, sizzling caramel, and my stomach lurched and tore itself in all directions, my throat near to rupture as I forced repeated vomit-spasms back down. Not only did I avoid vomiting but, to my amazement, neither did I cough.
Mulligan looked on with interest, and as I recovered from my first taste of a Havana, he said: ‘Now that sort of thing I find really quite impressive. You neither coughed nor were you sick, although even your evident pride has not been sufficient to keep your face from turning green. One doesn’t, by the way, inhale the fumes of a cigar. But I digress. Keeping it down! That’s what this is all about, my friend. The mixture which you prepared will help me to do likewise this evening.’
My head swam uncontrollably, and I was too debilitated by my lungful of smoke to make any response.
‘I have a rather unusual dinner ahead of me,’ he continued. ‘And your fine mixture will ensure that not only can I get it down, but that I can keep it down. Tonight, I will be eating furniture.’
I looked at him, but quickly diverted my stare; I realised that I was in the company of a madman. However, the newly-lit cigar in my hand smouldered, and from what I had often seen in the hotel dining room, a cigar of this length and thickness was going to go on smouldering for quite some time. From its tip a fine strand of blue smoke curled off into the air, but too little and too slowly, and I willed the thin ring of ash to speed up, to eat its way down the filthy stick with more visible speed, as a cigarette consumes itself in a gusting wind.
I desired only one thing more than to escape his smoke-filled room, and that was to confirm that he really had said such a thing. With this information I would quite happily have fled, cigar in hand, back to the hot, frenetic security of the kitchens.
‘I am an eating specialist,’ he said, and again I hardly knew how earnest or capricious I was to take him, ‘although, if I say so myself, of a rather exclusive kind. Not an attraction, in the normal sense. I do not actually attract people. My performances are entirely private affairs. But perhaps you have seen something of my profession, or heard of it at least?’
I assured him that I had not, shaking my head vigorously.
‘And in the pub, or at the fair, have you never seen men competing to be the fastest with a yard of ale, to the delight of all around? And have you never heard of the great pie-eating competitions, of tripe-swallowing and the like?’
I had to admit that I had.
‘Well,’ he said, turning his palms upwards humbly, ‘every profession has its amateurs, its quaint traditions and its side-street hobbyists. And every profession has also its experts, its virtuosi, its aristocrats. I, if I may be so bold as to say so, am of the latter category: a gentleman eater.’
And thus he began a narrative which took us not only to fine, seaside hotels in the north of England, but across the great oceans, to places and societies which, even in the depths of despair during the war, I had hardly dreamed existed.
Michael ‘Cast Iron’ Mulligan left Dublin in 1919 and followed many of his compatriots to the New World. A combination of charm and immense size and strength led him quickly into the public relations departments of New York’s finest bars and restaurants; that is, he became a liveried bouncer. However, he began to make a name for himself not through the grace with which he could remove drunks from the premises, nor the unerring discretion with which he could explain to a troublemaker just why he ought to make his trouble elsewhere, but after the evening’s work was done, whilst eating with his colleagues. Here he showed a talent for food and drink which amazed and frightened all around him. At first they thought he was just a hungry boy from the countryside feasting for the first time on good American food. But it continued, day by day, week by week, the quantities growing steadily. In the early hours, when the last of the customers were slamming taxi doors behind them, the band packing away their instruments, the kitchen would fill up with staff – waitresses, doormen, musicians – all waiting for that boy Mulligan to eat.
Such feats soon got him talked about, and not just below stairs. Before long the fine clientele of the restaurants and hotels where he worked got to hear about him, and wanted to see the greedy Irishman in action. However, the genteel nature of these establishments meant that demonstrations of this kind could take place only behind closed doors. Vaudeville, and more especially the freak-show business, was full of swallowers of all descriptions, and no association with such lower forms of entertainment was desired. So, before he knew exactly what he was getting into, Mulligan was performing nightly for enthusiastic private parties of rich New Yorkers, eager for any novel and diverting spectacle.
In those days he was strictly a quantity man. And his act came immediately after an audience had finished dining. That is to say, it came at the precise moment when, to a tableful of gorged, drunken socialites, the very sight of someone eating was in itself revolting. That such a sight involved almost unbelievable amounts of food merely exacerbated the monstrousness of the performance. To Mulligan it was no more than an extension of dinner, and each evening, after the show was over, he would pat his groaning stomach and shake his head with incomprehension, quite at a loss to explain his growing celebrity. Night after night it went on: a basket of fried chicken, a bottle of champagne, a plateful of sausage, a quart of beer, two dozen lamb chops, a trifle (‘a mere trifle!’ as the script went) followed, as if to confound the disbelievers, by another, identical trifle … The act came to its climax when, plucking a single rose from a vase, Mulligan made as if to present it to the most glamorous woman in the party and then, feigning to prick himself, would say: ‘Why, this is a dangerous weapon! I better take care of it!’ With which he would promptly gobble down the flower together with stalk (which he had de-thorned earlier), to the amazement of the city’s finest.
One evening, after a particularly successful show in which he had performed a routine entitled Americana (forty-eight hot dogs, one for each star; thirteen slices of apple pie, one for each stripe; twenty-eight cups of punch, one for each president; and a brandy for Lincoln), he was approached by a thin, fragile man who spoke in a strange accent, and who had the eyes of someone who expects yes for an answer. Laden with a stomach full of borrowed patriotism, yet happy with his performance, Michael listened with great interest to the proposal: Paris, twenty dollars a week, more varied work …
He was soon on a steamer to France, earning enough money through drinking competitions in the lower-deck bars that when he disembarked in Europe, he had more than two hundred dollars in his pocket, which he spent immediately on fine suits of tweed and velvet.
On arrival at his new place of employment – another unmentionable hotel, I’m afraid, since it is still there, almost unchanged they say, although of course I have never set foot in the place – he found a rather different kind of job awaited him. Amid the grand opulence of banqueting halls, their walls covered in immense oil canvases and gilt-framed mirrors, and occasionally in the private suites of the hotel’s more extravagant guests, he no longer ate his way through a fixed menu, but rather devoured whatsoever was requested of him. This, then, was the meaning of more varied work.
‘I was the greatest!’ cried Mulligan from his armchair, pounding his chest with a cannonball fist and laughing out loud. ‘The act was pure theatre, pure spectacle. After dessert was well under way, I would arrive and sit at a place laid for me at the table, this place having remained ominously and threateningly vacated throughout the dinner itself. There I would assume a pose of impervious indifference to those around me, who, I should say, often included not only crown princes, sheikhs and ambassadors, but also the shrieking, guffawing minor nobility of any number of European states, not to mention the greatest actresses of the Parisian stage, to whom clung more often than not one or another chuckling millionaire. Yet, before my steely, unforgiving expression (in addition to my size), these diners usually appeared a touch intimidated, with those nearest to me the most humbled.
‘And here we worked an excellent trick. The story went that I had been rescued from deepest rural Ireland (my red hair, which in those days I wore long, added zest to this detail), where I had been brought up almost in the wild by my grandmother. Moreover, I was profoundly deaf, and could communicate only through a strange language involving tapping one’s fingers into another’s palm, a language known only to my (now deceased) grandmother and the idealistic Frenchman who had brought me to France on the death of my grandma. This man had become my trusty assistant – the young lad was really an out-of-work actor from the provinces, so out-of-work, indeed, that this was his first job in Paris – and each night he acted as interpreter for Le Grand Michael Mulligan.
‘“Ladies and gentlemen,” he would announce after my silent presence had generated its usual disquiet, “Monsieur Mulligan hopes that you have dined well, and will be pleased to consider your suggestions for his own dinner this evening.”
‘Now, a curious thing is that the powerful and highly placed citizens on this earth are frequently the most childlike. Thus, whereas these guests were prone to exaggerated, uncontrolled enthusiasm once they had become excited, it was not unusual at the initial stages of my act to encounter a nervous silence. Eventually, someone, an inebriated eldest son over from England for the chorus girls, or a fat German banker too pompous and drunk to know timidity, would shout out, “A sardine!” to great and relieved hilarity all round. My assistant would tap the message into my palm. In return, Le Grand Michael Mulligan would consider the request solemnly until the laughter had subsided, and would either give a controlled, deliberate nod, in which case the specified item was called for, or would decline with a slow shake of the head, glowering in the direction of whoever had made so contemptible a suggestion.
‘And thus the evenings were enacted. The audience soon lost its coyness, and God alone knew what would come next. “Five locusts!” someone might shout, to the derision of the rest (in fact, we did have a small selection of dried insects, awaiting the order of any guest well known for his generosity), but through the derision an alternative would usually surface. “Well, if not locusts, how about worms?!” At which point my assistant and I would go into a protracted communication, resulting in the announcement, “Mr Mulligan will eat only one worm, since he says that he already has one, and another will keep it company!”
‘That one always got an enormous laugh, but the laughter would turn to screams of horror as a long, wriggling earthworm was placed before me, and I sucked it up like a string of spaghetti.
‘My twenty dollars a week turned out to be good business for the hotel too, since all petitions to Le Grand Michael Mulligan were billed to the requester. A very good business indeed. And in this way, sadly, I managed to bankrupt more than one person with my stomach.
‘I had, very early on, developed a penchant for beluga caviare, which could, as you can imagine, have perilous financial implications. Yes, in this way I turned several of our best guests insolvent, although for the most part I think they probably didn’t realise until the following morning. Yet it is a poor, sad-faced English gentleman for whom I harbour most regret. It happened on a particularly slow night, with no one of consequence (or imagination) in the house. My evening’s work had run to a mere bucketful of cherries, a fox’s tail (from a stuffed animal in the hotel lobby), and a side of pork belly, which I had rather enjoyed. Throughout the evening I had noticed, at the far end of the table, a man in a crumpled dinner suit, whose expression of empty fatigue had deteriorated by stages to one of inconsolable despair. With the mood rapidly leaving us, I was keen to secure one final request. Apart from anything else, I was still hungry, and my paltry menu sélectionné had thus far provided me with but a snack. Finally, the despairing English gentleman drew himself up from the nearly horizontal slouch into which he had fallen, and getting (somehow) to his feet, raised his glass.
‘“My dear Mulligan …” he began, as those around urged him to retake his seat, “… fine, fine, noble son of the Emerald Isle …” at which point he belched, but I took no offence, “… I tonight stand here, a poor man …” (“You’ll make another million, Quentin! Sit down, old boy!” came a shout from someone further down the table.) “… I have made and lost a great fortune. Yes …” he gulped down some port, “… but you, you of the fine orange hair, dumb to the heartless world which you neither understand nor whose vices, my dear sir, could you comprehend …” At which point he rather lost himself … “Err … ehm, but think not of this world, good man!” he rallied. “It is not worthy of your attention. Michael Mulligan, I toast you, and with my final sovereign I invite you to share with me my final dozen oysters.”
‘With this he raised his empty glass and held still, save for some involuntary listing, awaiting my reply. I communicated with my assistant, and indeed this time I really did use a form of secret language, for the message was unusual, and in truth it was rather a rash one.
‘“Mr Mulligan will toast your future success, sir, not with a dozen oysters but with a dozen dozen oysters!”’
Here Mulligan took a long, pensive draw on his cigar, watching the rich smoke spiral upwards from his nose and mouth, spilling out into thin, flat clouds which hung in the air, forming a plateau across the hotel room.
‘That,’ he said wistfully, ‘turned out to be a touch imprudent. A dozen oysters, two dozen, even six dozen, I had swallowed on one occasion. After all, seventy-two oysters are no heavier nor occupy more space inside than seven or eight braised pig’s trotters, or a couple of ostrich eggs. But a gross of the things … Ha! It was the undoing of me, two nights running! And as for the poor Mr Quentin, we never saw his face again. Who knows, perhaps he is paying off the debt to this day.
‘Ah, yes! Paris in the ’Twenties! How much I learned there, how much I learned. How much I ate!’
From his armchair he recounted more incredible tales, of churns of milk in Belgian monasteries, a grilled lion’s paw in Baghdad, sinkfuls of pasta (‘Tubes, my boy, the biggest possible! Pound for pound they look more!’); of a forty-five chitterling marathon in Brittany, ten kilos of roast cod in Bilbao, seven pickled mice for a bet in Marrakech. And he told me also of the people, those fine clients of the hotel, who sought a little extra zest to their dinner parties in Rome, Kabul, Delhi, London, Frankfurt, inviting him to their holiday entertainments in Goa, Rimini, Monte Carlo and Thessaloniki. On a visit to Tokyo he had consumed so much sushi that, in listening to him, one felt as if one were floating on a sea of raw fish; in Constantinople his ability to finish off an entire roast goat in little over half a day had so enthused one of the dignitaries privileged enough to witness the spectacle that Mulligan was presented not only with a belly dancer for the night, but was invited to extract and keep the bulging ruby which adorned her navel. Along the Magreb he had sucked the eyes out of more dead animals than he cared to remember, and the glittering rewards for such fripperies were staggering indeed. To crumbling European castles he had travelled, there to gorge on whatever his noble amphitryon decreed: seventeen pairs of bull’s testicles at the table of the Duke of Alba in Salamanca; inconceivable quantities of sausage for any number of gibbering, neurotic Central European counts; regular sojourns to the seats of the Dukes of Argyll, Dumfriesshire and sundry other Scottish lairds, each one desperate that Mulligan improve upon some or other haggis-eating record, or simply curious to know how quickly their national dish could disappear down the throat of one man. For a time he was in huge demand in the USA, where he set a string of records for chicken and ribs throughout the Southern states; he amazed the Romanian Jews in New York with his evident partiality for ridding any restaurant of all its chopped liver and the relish with which he glugged down whole pitchers of schmaltz as if it were … well, metaphors are hardly appropriate; the Ashkenazim wouldn’t have him, but he didn’t mind, there were plenty of other sects, plenty of other religions, to astound; he even did a promotion for the pro-Prohibition Methodists, drinking the body weight of a six-year-old child in lemonade, presumably to illustrate that purity and excess can coexist. He repeated Americana for countless gatherings of businessmen, and in one particularly prolific afternoon’s work notched up a record of sixty-two hot dogs (even before Babe Ruth’s achievement) at a public demonstration sponsored by Wurtz’s Wieners, a Chicago sausage company owned by one of those immigrants who really wants you to mispronounce his name.
‘Then the Depression hit,’ he continued, ‘and the profession of gluttony suffered something of a downturn. The rich became preoccupied, and the poor became hungry. Overnight, or so it seemed, no one wanted to see how much more than a normal man I could eat. Now it was a matter of just what I would eat beyond the normal. On its own this was nothing new for me. After all, for the better part of a decade a great many of the things I had sent down to my stomach could have been called food only through a very liberal understanding of the word, or by a desperately hungry person: in Oxford I had feasted on a sturdy hiking boot, prepared in advance, not à la Chaplin, but in vinegar and wine, and then slow-roasted in butter and olive oil; somewhere else (I forget) a mackintosh, curried; a canary in its little wooden cage (I mean, and its cage); a large aspidistra (leaves au naturel, stem and roots flambéed) …’
On he went, and as the list became more and more preposterous, my astonishment and incredulity grew in equal measure. This man, I told myself, was not only mad but also a great fabulist. However, I must tell you, before we go any further, that The Great Michael Mulligan was, in recounting these stories, very far from invention, for the truth was that he had eaten things far more extraordinary, more extraordinary indeed than he dared mention.
But how, you ask, can a man chew his way through a boot, or a raincoat? How, come to that, could he possibly sit down to a chair? Well, you yourself probably possess all that is necessary to achieve such a feat. A mincer, and a good dose of oil is all that you need. Mulligan had begun with a small kitchen mincer, to which he had fitted the finest, most durable blades available, and which was quite adequate for turning all manner of small items into an ingestible mince. With the addition of larger and more powerful machinery, the toughest boot could easily be turned to a leathery crumb. And is that so hard to stomach? Have you never heard of Peter Schultz, or Jean-Paul Kopp? The former ate a Mercedes-Benz, the latter a biplane. Both employed the simple expedient of filing and grinding away slowly at the object in question, swallowing the resulting dust little by little along with a suitable internal lubricant. The aeroplane sounds impressive, no doubt, but it was really only a matter of time, and in the two years it took from propeller to tail fin, Mr Mulligan would have eaten his way through enough household items to furnish a decent sized parlour.
Over the years the great man designed a number of hand-operated grinders, with higher and higher gearing ratios, so that, along with the toughest and best grinding blades available, he was capable of turning wood into sawdust and small amounts of worked metal into perfectly edible filings. He never touched glass (although some did), but he was occasionally tempted by a china cup and saucer, or a particularly fine dinner plate.
‘All of which explains my need for the mixture which you so expertly prepared,’ he said, drawing his story to a close. He examined his pocket watch and stood up. ‘You see, my friend, I really am going to eat a chair this evening. For Freemasons, I’m afraid, dullards to the last, but times are hard. And now I must prepare.’
He smoothed the velvet of his waistcoat down the vast, arcing curve of his stomach and went over to his jacket. I bade him goodnight and, with my head full of the most extraordinary tales of gluttony, as well as the effects of my first cigar, I wandered out of his room. I forgot my pound note and made my way back down to the kitchens quite without knowing which route I took, so immersed was I in a thousand new turns of the imagination.
That was my first stroke of good fortune: a chance meeting with a true king of his craft, a maestro fêted the world over, The Great Michael ‘Cast Iron’ Mulligan.
When I arrived back in the kitchens, I found the place unusually quiet. Dinner preparations were being conducted in a strangely subdued manner: hard beating had become feather-light whisking, brusque chopping replaced by slow, painstaking slicing, all eyes turned downwards. Either someone had died, I thought, or someone had got the sack.
At that moment I heard a crash nearby. I looked down; a metal bucket lay at my feet. I realised, rather too late, that I had abandoned it in my room. Immediately I deduced the source of the abnormal quiet. Chef, from whose hand the bucket had fallen, knelt down and ran his finger around the inside of it. He closed his eyes in mock appreciation as he sampled the sweet, oily mixture. Then he stood up and faced me. He was a big man, but I was bigger. In a kitchen, though, physical size is of little consequence, as well I knew.
‘Three questions,’ he said as a sharp, aching silence fell around us. ‘One: have you by any chance read tonight’s menu?’
Instead of pronouncing the sentence with its appropriate interrogative intonation, though, he punctuated his delivery with a cuff to the side of my head, delivered with the full power of his considerable upper body. My ear crackled and buzzed, and immediately half my head began to numb over. Of course, I had not read the menu, yet I had little doubt that it included recipes proclaiming their citrus content, or their basis in finest Italian olive oil.
‘Two: did you use the whole bottle of oil?’
The singular form sang out ominously for me. I began a forlorn nod, but even as my head dipped for the first time I felt my jaw rocket back upwards, as his forearm swung into my face, my teeth slamming together with a sliver of tongue still between then. I felt no pain, but, incredibly, a slight sense of relief that I had already survived two out of three.
‘And finally,’ he shouted, breaking into an exaggerated goose-step and circling me several times, ‘DO YOU KNOW WHERE THE FUCKING LABOUR EXCHANGE IS?’
He bawled it into my ear from behind me and then, grabbing me by the collar, pulled me off balance and punched me three times in the back of the head as I went down.
Then nothing. And even from the floor I could detect quite clearly the horrified stillness in the kitchen, spatulas sinking unattended into batter, whisks suspended in mid-air, dripping half-beaten egg on to the floor. The blood ran cold from the side of my mouth, almost as cold as the icy floor onto which it trickled, and then the various sites of localised injury began to get their screaming messages through to my brain.
‘We need that veal stock in five minutes, eh!’ Chef called out suddenly, breaking the silence. Back came a clipped reply. And things returned to normal. Some of my colleagues threw me sympathetic glances as they stepped over my crumpled, aching body. But no one offered assistance.
By slow, agonising degrees, I made my way to the door, and got myself to a low crouch. Then, as I stumbled out of the kitchen, a young trainee who I had come to know hopped out after me, making sure nobody had seen him, and asked: ‘What did you do with it? Everybody wants to know, especially Chef. It’s been driving him mad, but he’s too proud to ask. What the hell were you cooking?’
It was a second or two before I recalled.
‘Mulligan!’ I said, more to myself than to my friend.
‘What?’
‘Le Grand Michael Mulligan! I cooked him a chair!’
I reached his room just as he was about to leave. He ushered me back inside and helped to clean my blood-smeared face. I attempted to explain what had happened, despite my damaged tongue, and then, suddenly, as he dabbed my chin with a damp towel, he furrowed his brow as if something striking had occurred to him.
‘My word!’ he said, patting first the top of my head and then his own, ‘you’re almost my height! Not as broad, naturally, but, by Jiminy, you’re no stripling either!’
With that he dashed over to the wardrobe, pulled out a black dinner suit and threw it at me.
‘Put that on, my boy, and forget your woes. You’re coming with me!’
With not a moment’s hesitation I changed into the suit. It hung about me like an untethered tent, but the length was not too far off the mark, and all in all it lent me an almost eccentric aspect.
‘The car’s ready,’ he said, lighting another cigar and consulting his watch. ‘Tonight, you will be, let’s see … Captain Gusto! Yes, that’s it! Captain Gusto, assistant to The Great Michael Mulligan!’
And that was the second stroke of good fortune to befall me that day: to be beaten senseless by a furious chef and, as a consequence, to be invited by Mulligan, the great man himself, to share the stage for his most enduring act.
The car was a shining Rolls-Royce. I climbed inside, and Mulligan backed his ample frame in through the opposite door and on to the driver’s seat, which had the appearance of being rather flatter and less bouncy than the others in the car, somewhat like an over-egged sponge that has risen enthusiastically and then turned sad in the oven.
He reached behind him and took one of the pint bottles from the crate on the back seat.
‘Care for some?’ he said, before polishing off half its orange contents. ‘I have a long evening ahead,’ he added as way of explanation.
On the way to the event I tried to get him to elaborate upon the stories he had told me earlier that afternoon. At last, perhaps somewhat exasperated by my incessant questioning, he said: ‘My art is something which really must be observed. No manner of description will suffice. Have patience, and you will see …’
‘Seeing is believing,’ I chuntered, as an errant strand of incredulity wrapped itself around my thoughts and introduced doubts not only as to the true nature of his act, but also about where this monster fruitcake was taking me.
Mulligan brought the car to an abrupt halt, right there in the middle of a twisting, coastal road. I lunged forward, sliding to the edge of the shiny leather and getting halfway to an involuntary squat in the footwell. His wry, twinkling eyes had turned dark, all fire, and stared menacingly into mine.
‘Seeing, my friend, is comprehending. Seeing is understanding.’
And with that, his eyes still fixed on mine, he reached behind him for the half-finished bottle, and proceeded to empty its contents down his throat.
We resumed our journey, and my apprenticeship began. From that day on I began my education in the lore and history of our trade. Mulligan would talk about the distant past, of old, famous, forgotten names: The Great Eusebio Galante, Franz ‘Fledermaus’ Pipek and Rocco ‘La Rocca’ Fontane; of Sammy Ling (‘He’ll eat anything!’) and his predilection for neckties; of who’d eaten most; of scandalous, illegal records set in the back streets of hardly remembered Bavarian towns; of the rotten and the rancid, eaten and (allegedly) digested for a bagful of the local currency; of the unfortunate demise of Henry ‘Tubby’ Turns; of the great American masters like Nelson Pickle, who at the height of his powers had eaten a grand piano (baby, no frame) in little over nine weeks as a promotion for a new Detroit music store – those were the Prohibition days, great times for professional gluttony! – poor Nelson, who came to Europe to give eating demonstrations at the great German beer festivals and died of alcohol poisoning after assuming that beer was beer the world over and drinking a keg of Belgian Trappist in a single weekend for a bet.
That night was also to be my first appearance on stage with Mulligan. The evening began inauspiciously. After a long drive we finally turned into the forecourt of a large, somewhat podgy Edwardian building. He smiled and said, ‘Well, Paris it’s not, and it’s no palace. And, I assure you, there will be no crown princes in the audience! But this, for tonight, is work.’
We unloaded some heavy wooden crates from the car and wheeled them around to the back of the building. A cheery but nervous man in a tight-fitting dinner suit greeted us, a glass of gin in his hand, and led us into a large, modestly elegant dining hall. The place smelt of Sunday school, but with the added aromas of overcooked meat and aftershave. Forty or fifty place settings announced, by means of the sorry array of cutlery at each, a rather strained attempt at luxury. The man with the gin pointed to a small semicircular stage at one end of the room.
‘Everything is as you requested,’ he said to Mulligan, looking around the hall a little anxiously. Mulligan himself surveyed the tables, and then turned his gaze to the stage.
‘Yes, yes indeed. All appears to be in order. Quite acceptable. So, there remains only that small transaction which my accountant constantly reminds me must never be overlooked …’
The gin man stared down into the glass.
‘We do … you know, it was rather felt that, that … that that would normally come after …’
His voice tailed off. Mulligan said nothing. The three of us stood there, a very distant murmur of cocktail chitchat in the background, Mulligan’s amenable, matter-of-fact smile fixed on his face. After a handful of long, cringing seconds, the poor chap reached into his breast pocket and drew out a brown envelope.
‘You’ll find it all there,’ he said in a soft, defeated voice.
‘Ah, splendid!’ said Mulligan, bursting into activity. ‘I’ll make you out a receipt—’
‘No, no, that won’t be necessary,’ the other replied, hitching down his jacket and turning away. ‘If you could begin after coffee and be finished by twelve,’ he said over his shoulder as he started out towards some elaborate double doors at the other end of the hall.
Mulligan opened the envelope, smirking.
‘The people one meets in this job! I don’t know! Get me another bottle of the mixture, would you?’ he said, quickly thumbing through what appeared to be a considerable wad of banknotes.
Our preparations that evening were meticulous. On the little stage we erected the apparatus, each of its separate cast-iron pieces removed one by one from the crates and taken from their wrapping of soft, oily cotton cloth. I assisted where I could in the assembly of the main frame itself, a four-legged structure which bolted down on to the bottom of the largest crate, which itself unhinged on all sides to become a sort of stabilising floor for the machine. From then on I was useful only in passing the maestro one greasy rag bundle after another. He pushed, slotted and clamped such a number of cogs, grinding cylinders and levers on to the growing contraption that I began to wonder if he was going to attach wheels and a petrol tank and drive off into the distance.
Mulligan’s concentrated industry began to yield results. The nascent iron structure slowly grew into The Machine – the very largest hand-cranked mincing machine you could possibly imagine. If, I told myself, just if he really does plan to eat furniture this evening, just if, then at least he has something which is of potential use. I peered down the funnel and saw huge, menacing teeth poised like bunches of iron knuckles, ready to pound raw granite to a crumble, or so it seemed; I peeped around the back at the intricate system of gears mounted around a series of progressively smaller grinding chambers; I studied the tiny opening from which the mince would emerge, hardly bigger than a bottle neck. The Great Michael Mulligan, then, was going to eat a ground-up chair.
Still in shock, and for the first time truly believing that such a thing could be done, I looked around the hall, wondering where the chosen item had been positioned. Surely, but surely, it would be a special chair, its legs partially hollowed out, or made of balsa wood. Meanwhile, Mulligan put the final touches to The Machine and gave the plaque bolted to the funnel a brisk polish. Mulligan & Sons it read, gleaming brass against racing green. Later I learned that his father, the owner of a Dublin foundry, had disowned his son Michael on learning of his new career as a ‘bloody glutton’. The plaque had been sent secretly from Ireland by a brother.
Mulligan stopped and admired the plaque for a moment, and then came up to me and stood by my side.
‘Now, Chef, why don’t you select a nice, plump chair for me?’
For the duration of the dinner itself we sat in a back room, glad not to be partaking of the paltry feast which four dozen Freemasons were busy praising through grinning, shiny faces, each one of them eager no doubt to disguise their disappointment. Mulligan decanted six pints of the orange liquid into a tall, vaguely Egyptian-looking jug, and took occasional sips from the one remaining bottle. He explained the part I would play: I would be dumb, although only for effect, not as a stated disability. To this I had no objection, since I am by nature a retiring person, and of course my tongue was still throbbing. I was also beginning to feel unwell, although I would later recognise this as stage fright.
The rumbling, masculine conversation out in the dining hall turned by degrees to a controlled, middle-class raucousness. They sang a song, or perhaps it was a hymn, it was hard to tell, and there were a few short speeches which were greeted with hearty approbation. Then The Great Michael ‘Cast Iron’ Mulligan was introduced, to a combination of polite applause and a good deal of muttering.
Suddenly, perhaps for the first time in years, the sundry magistrates and bank managers, the police officers and provincial lawyers assembled to celebrate their collective worth, were confronted with a man whose most evident baggage was a bunch of superlatives, enough to pour scorn on the very loudest boasts of English Freemasonry: the biggest man they had ever seen, almost certainly, and without doubt the handsomest giant; the most outrageous suit, and the most booming yet also the sweetest voice; the most confident, the most endearing, perhaps even the wittiest man they had ever encountered. And, of course, the most intimidating, whose great strength and power manifested itself at each moment, evident in the very slightest detail of his movement, in the way he would stand behind someone’s chair and rest an enormous hand delicately on that poor soul’s shoulder, and in the way he had of running his eyes casually up and down a whole row of men, as if to register in passing how, even en masse, they might consider it prudent to grant him their most careful respect. He was also, as far as any of them knew, the richest man in the room; not one of them would have failed to notice the Rolls-Royce outside, as they climbed out of their Morrises and Austins in twos and threes, or strode up from the bus stop, dicky bows peeping out above the collars of well-worn overcoats.
He began by praising his hosts for the splendour of their banquet, in that same lyrical tone which edged back and forth between seriousness and whimsy, and which, little by little, drew each diner up in his chair, stiff with expectancy, enthralled and rather embarrassed, yet unable to take his eyes off the great man. Mulligan himself wandered amongst them, stopping here and there to pluck a sugar lump from a table and pop it into his mouth. He recounted some of his more modest feats of ingestion, keeping it simple, letting each man present believe that he too could, just possibly, have eaten his way through a whole suckling pig, or four brace of pheasants; keeping it also within the bounds of human consumption, the six dozen oranges somewhere or other, the ninety-nine sardines, the gross of oysters (although he omitted the aftermath). I think for the main part he made these stories up; the Great Mulligan was no more likely to go to Seville to eat a paltry seventy-odd oranges as he was to go to the barber’s for a shoe shine. But he knew how to start, how to create atmosphere, taking and manipulating the assembled Masonic consciousness, running and developing it around the tempting notion of all-encompassing gluttony, as a great maestro takes a single theme and weaves from it a mesmerising sonata.
His discourse ran on and (it must be said) on. By subtle increments, though, he began to challenge even the most credulous before him, with tales of monstrous extravaganzas of consumption, of quantities measured not in numbers, but in numbers of crates and sackfuls.
The first snort of disbelief was heard quite suddenly, from the back of the room, and was followed immediately by the shuffling sound of an audience losing all faith in the act, the sound of embarrassment as a magician’s illusions are seen through, of a comedian’s jokes becoming hopelessly predictable. Mulligan played on this, indeed he appeared to relish it, and the louder the (still somewhat muted) cries of derision, the louder he talked above the noise, and the prouder and more outlandish his stories became. He laced his performance with a finely judged pathos. Waiting. Waiting for it.
‘Nonsense! Codswallop!’ came the full-voiced cry of contempt from some way off. Mulligan, caught mid-sentence, stopped and looked around to identify the source of the outburst. The room fell dead quiet, as forty-nine pairs of eyes watched one enormous, silent face move from shock to a hurt, childlike indigence, as if the Irishman had been found out, and his pathetic lies derided as the vulgar stuff of a fairground sideshow.
The chap who had voiced his doubts looked down into his coffee cup and shook his head, aware that, slowly, and without another word, the great man was approaching him. As luck would have it, the author of those first outspoken criticisms was a short, tubby fellow, rather red in the cheeks, and a true wobble-pot of inflated self-importance. When Mulligan got up to him, he bent down and whispered something in the man’s ear. Tubby got to his feet, cowering under Mulligan’s huge bulk.
‘This man,’ he boomed, standing behind his victim and draping both his arms ominously over the shoulders of the smaller man, ‘this man, gentlemen, believes me to be a liar.’
Stifled gasps as the dread word rang out around the hall, and Mulligan’s reverse bear hug tightened, so that the little chap’s ruddy cheeks turned purple.
‘A liar,’ Mulligan repeated, emphasising each syllable with a good, solid slap of his hand on the chest of the wilting individual caught up in his embrace. From the shadows at the back of the stage, where I was sitting, horrified and amazed in equal measure, I noted that those most proximate to Mulligan wore concerned expressions, trying with no success at all to treat the whole thing as a joke, whereas those further off appeared to find the scene wildly amusing, nudging each other and sniggering like schoolboys, although their animated delight was for the most part silent.
Then Mulligan’s face lit up. He broke out into the broadest smile and released the short, fat man. Spinning right around on his heels twice in uncontrollable joy, he announced: ‘I have a plan!’
More murmurs now from the tables, some of which seemed to indicate a resurgence of boredom and embarrassment with the act.
‘Sir,’ Mulligan continued, talking to the little man, ‘I cannot eat you’ (amusement all around). ‘No, we all have our standards’ (hoots of laughter), ‘but I can perhaps regain my honour. You will at least permit me that small favour?’
The man in question was too abashed to do anything other than nod. Mulligan cleared away a few plates and glasses from the place setting in front of him and, picking Tubby up like a child, sat him on the edge of the table, his little legs dangling down like a puppet’s. A concerned kind of laughter stirred around the hall, whilst Mulligan fussed about, apparently looking for something. He turned all of a sudden and, tripping over the vacant chair behind him, fell to the floor.
A few wisps of cruel laughter could be heard, and other diners looked on with pity. Further off conversations grew afresh, as if the act were already a rather tiresome irrelevance.
‘This is it!’ came a deafening cry from the ground. Everyone stared, but instead of Mulligan getting to his feet, they saw the chair rising slowly into the air. Then Mulligan stood up, the chair held high above his head. ‘This, my friend,’ he said, and brought the chair down, holding it right in front of the little man’s nose, ‘this is what I will eat tonight! I will eat your chair!’
With that he marched over to the stage, on to which there now fell some light, illuminating not only myself, but also the imposing form of The Machine, which lay shrouded in red velvet.
Inside my baggy dinner suit I prickled with sweat, desperate to get my part right, and at the same time feeling a certain complicity with Mulligan, who even now was tweaking and poking at the audience’s disbelief and mercilessly burlesquing the pity directed towards him only moments before.
‘Gentlemen,’ he shouted, twirling the chair effortlessly in one hand like a toy, ‘although I am twice the man of anyone here today, my teeth are my weakness. Once, in Torquay, I no more than nibbled on a hatstand, and got a cracked molar for my troubles.
‘But,’ and here he swept away the red velvet, revealing what on first sight perhaps most resembled a pygmy combine harvester, ‘I will swallow this chair tonight …’ (chuntering and some giggles from the floor), ‘… wood …’ at which he snapped a leg off with his hands and tossed it to me, ‘… seat …’ ripping a little of its fine gold braid from the edge of the chair’s cushion, ‘… and screws!’ flicking with his fingernails the tacks which held the seat’s ancient cloth in place (only brass, quite thin). Gasps from the floor at the word screws. Many hands dropped down to feel the girth of chair legs; half a dozen men scrambled to put on their glasses and, having done so, stared all the more urgently at Mulligan, and then at the chair they were sitting on. The short, fat man, utterly mesmerised by Mulligan, slipped down from the table, never taking his eyes off the stage, and procured himself a vacant chair from the side of the hall. He retook his place at the table, lit himself a cigar, and settled back for the entertainment, apparently believing that his own ordeal was over – in this he was correct, for Mulligan was no bully – and in addition feeling perhaps just a touch proud of himself.
‘You will, I trust, allow me a little light refreshment?’ Mulligan asked, pouring himself a pint of orange liquid from the Egyptian jug and taking a sip. With that he gave me a nod. I dropped the chair leg into the funnel and cranked the long iron handle. At first nothing happened. The series of gears transposed my efforts into a slow, menacing rotation at the bottom of the funnel, but as fast as I might wind the handle, nothing happened. Then, little by little, the leg in the funnel began to move, turning and twisting, slowly at first but then with more animation, bobbing and dancing in the teeth of the grinder. The handle stiffened as the sound of cracking, splintering wood filled the hall, and the chair leg began its long, painfully slow journey through the mechanism. I worked frantically at the cranking handle, and even from the stage I could sense that there was not a single movement anywhere else in the place, all eyes on the top of the chair leg, which poked up above the rim of the funnel, but was gradually disappearing from view.
Wood moved steadily through the various crushers and grinders, but with more wood always entering from the top the job became harder, and soon I was lunging at the crank handle twice, once to wrench it up towards me, and again to push it back over for another revolution, throwing my body halfway back round with it.
Mulligan laughed out loud.
‘Some day,’ he said, turning to the dumbfounded men before him, ‘this young man here will be as strong as an ox. But it will require work, oh yes, and a very special diet.’
Then he was off again, regaling his audience with more stories: of the time he had eaten a beehive, comb, honey, bees (fried), the lot; and the occasion on which, purely as a party trick in Hollywood, he drank the bathwater of a certain film star’s six-month-old baby.
Was all this true? Was any of this in the least possible? You may well wonder, and from time to time, as I recall the great man’s orations, those most expansive, most outrageous, most boastful claims, I too sometimes wonder. But there, in front of forty-odd men of sound mind, with Mulligan’s sweet, hypnotic voice, and the low grinding of The Machine as it crunched, splintered and powdered solid wood, ready to assuage the gargantuan appetite which this extraordinary man proclaimed of himself, in those circumstances, in that hall, no one doubted a single word he said.
And I ground and I ground.
At last it arrived, the slightest trickle of powder, although really it was more a dry, gritty pâté, which dropped from the pert sphincter of the big, iron digestive tract like pale, crumbly mouse droppings. Only then did I notice where it dropped: on to a large platter, a gleaming oval of fiery, crimson-hued gold, which was positioned directly beneath the grinder’s nozzle. (A present from an ecstatic maharaja after he had witnessed one of Mulligan’s regular appearances in Paris.) The platter was a part of the stage set which he kept concealed until the appropriate moment. On the large shining oval the pile grew fractionally. Feeling somewhat ashamed at my own performance, I redoubled my efforts, and before I knew it Mulligan had thrown another leg into the funnel, to resounding cheers from the floor. However, the cheers soon fell away to nothing as, pulling a golden spoon from his pocket, he stooped down and collected a sample of the chair dust, inspected it for colour and aroma and popped the loaded spoon into his mouth. There he remained, crouched and absolutely still; without thinking I stopped cranking, my incredulous eyes, like those of everyone else besides, on the great man. (Later, he commended me on this little detail, which, I have to admit, did add somewhat to the drama of the moment.) He moved his jaws in a slow, ruminating fashion, and then, after an appreciative mumble, smacked his lips and sprang to his feet. Taking a quick drink, he announced: ‘The chair, gentlemen, is exquisite!’
Shrieks and hoots greeted the announcement. Mulligan held up his hand for silence.
‘Compliments to the chef,’ he said, turning and giving a solemn bow in my direction.
More howls, and great applause. I returned to the crank handle, and Mulligan set to breaking up the rest of the chair. By the time he had got down to the seat, I had ground a tolerable amount, perhaps something more than a whole legful, and the pile of sawdust had grown to a dusty pyramid which covered half the platter.
He indicated that I stop grinding. With plate in one hand and spoon in the other, he shovelled the stuff into his mouth. He made as if to masticate for a moment, then put down the spoon and took a long draught from his glass of liquid. And swallowed. The audience chuckled, as if to say, Yes, yes, that was funny, you really did swallow a mouthful of the stuff. But he followed it with another mouthful, and then another, eating greedily, swilling it down with the sickly orange liquid, until nothing remained on the golden surface but a powdery film, turning the warm glow of the metal dull.
I recommenced grinding, and he, after refilling his glass, strolled amongst the tables in the hall, exaggerating, boasting, joking, until the next course was ready.
By the time he came to his fourth plateful, both his eating speed and the enthusiasm of his audience were on the point of waning. A true master eater, though, is not simply one who can swallow, but one who can make that swallowing an entertainment. So, he descended with his golden platter into the audience and offered some of the fare to a tall, elegant-looking gentleman near to hand. The man declined, but the one next to him dipped his tongue in, and through his expression alone confirmed that it was indeed no more nor less than sawdust. Another gallant offered to eat a whole spoonful and, attempting to follow the example of Mulligan, poured a full glass of port into his mouth to accompany the dust. He chewed and chomped, and with great industry tried to swallow the mixture, but to no avail; the whole lot came back out and was deposited into a large, white handkerchief which, curiously, he stuffed straight into his jacket pocket. Another, less sober individual thought he might upstage Mulligan’s comic performance, and took a pinch as if it were snuff, but succeeded only in half choking himself.
Then we had the evening’s tough. Permit me here to indulge in a little amateur psychology. I have, over the years, observed many gatherings of men (women, for some reason, are seldom to be found in great numbers at these events), and it is unquestionably the case that whenever groups of men congregate there is a tendency for one man to emerge as the tough, the hard type. Unlike the playground tough-boy, the adult version is seldom the leader of the group, and never at the centre of things. He may in fact say and do very little. Often he is neither the richest nor the most powerful; neither the most respected nor the most heroic; he is in fact more often than not the dullest, and his presence is only ever really valued if trouble erupts and reliable fists are needed. Anyway, in the company of Mulligan, even in sight of him, the local tough would often disappear from view completely, receding further than normal into the anonymity of the group. However, over the course of an evening, these types invariably sought some means of proving themselves in face of a seemingly harder, bigger, greater man. Let us say that in this respect Mulligan, quite without wishing it, constituted an unfortunate stimulus-to-act for these men.
On this occasion the fellow in question was a tall, grim-looking thug in his mid-fifties, not unlike Mulligan in build, but a degree or two smaller in all departments. A scowl had adorned his face all evening and now, just as Mulligan made to return to the stage, this man stood up, to a variety of rumblings, mutterings, and not a few sit down!s. But he stood firm, a pudding spoon at the ready, held down at his thigh, inadvertently, I believe, although it looked for all the world like a deholstered pistol. He stared straight at the platter.
Mulligan was not one for humiliating people, no matter how disagreeable they were, but this chap had certainly set himself up for a rather large slice of humble pie, although in this case of a rather unusual recipe. Mulligan had no desire to crush the poor man’s infamy, yet what could be done? He marched over with the golden plate and, rather obviously half filling his spoon, offered it to the new challenger. Not to be put off with insults, the man brushed Mulligan’s spoon aside and grabbed the platter, spilling a good deal of dust down his suit in the process. He dug his own spoon into the pile and brought it up to his mouth, spilling about half its load. Having tipped what remained into his mouth, he repeated the operation two more times, both times resulting in significant spillage, although at least proving beyond doubt that his mouth was indeed full. After returning the gold plate to Mulligan, he strode over to the stage, slowly and with his chest out in front, and took a long draught from the Egyptian jug. The liquid ran down his chin, staining his collar a salmon pink. When he could absorb no more liquid, he returned to his table, stood face to face with Mulligan and swallowed. Three times. After a period in which his hard face turned red, and then white, he took up his glass of port and drank that too.
Mulligan led the tumultuous applause. With the platter held out in front of him, he shook the man’s hand vigorously, managing to spill a good cupful more dust down the front of the chap’s jacket without anyone noticing. Then, more as a joke than anything, he offered the plate again. Somewhat gingerly, Tough then helped himself to a more modest spoonful. To cheers all around, he slugged down someone else’s wine greedily and, after another long and protracted swallowing, sat down, bringing his diverting cameo to a close. However, his contribution to the evening’s entertainment really only ended some twenty minutes later as he was dragged out of the hall, groaning the word mother.
Then we were down to the seat. Somehow I didn’t expect him to eat it, horsehair, brass tacks and all. But in it went, Mulligan tearing bits of cloth and stuffing from the main structure and dropping them into the funnel. The grinding became easier, and even the brass tacks, which were the very final items to go in, seemed to cause no problems.
As soon as the last remains of the seat had disappeared down the funnel, Mulligan made a furtive adjustment to The Machine and whispered: ‘Carry on turning!’
He had cut off the supply, with a good deal of the chair still inside the grinder. Within seconds no more of the fine, wispy grounds of horsehair and velvet accumulated on the gold plate. Nevertheless, I continued cranking, and he made an elaborate pretence of ensuring that everything had been minced up, and that the last crumbs of chair were ready to eat.
Whilst munching them down he delivered some amusing observations on the nature of horsehair, it being but inches away from real meat etc., and once or twice, in great pain, removed a mangled brass tack from his mouth, holding his jaw in agony, and then offering it to a nearby member of the audience. Of course, the tacks from the chair were all by now ground down to a fine powder, or, indeed, were still inside The Machine. The mangled ones were from a supply of such items secreted in his jacket.
As the last spoonfuls of chair went in and, with much apparent effort, went down, I became alarmed at the great man’s obvious discomfort; he walked ponderously, and held very still whilst, with a slow, tense concentration, he attempted to swallow. One felt that he was bunged up solid with sodden dust, and that each new mouthful found its way no further down than the back of the throat, where it lodged itself, tickling the uvula and impeding the flow of his breath. By this point his stomach was so distended that he appeared to be in constant danger of toppling forward; I am convinced that, for one horrific moment, every person watching believed that Mulligan was about to perish there on the stage, as his huge bulk ground to a final halt. The sawdust, it seemed, had set firm inside him.
And there he remained, utterly still, his eyelids drooping heavily like those of a man passing quietly from drunkenness to unconsciousness. Finally, his head turning painfully slowly towards the silent ranks of dinner suits, he said, in a quite unconcerned manner: ‘I think I need a drink.’
After innumerable pats on the back, and calls of Bravo! and Good show! he finally opted for a place next to the small, tubby man, who grinned like a delighted child. He accepted a glass of brandy, and nibbled at the few petits fours which were left, in evident high spirits and answering the questions thrown at him with the best humour he could: Have you ever eaten a horse? (‘Yes, but I made sure it was a filly!’) What about an umbrella? (‘The spokes get in one’s teeth!’) Snakes? (‘By the sackful, my man! Nothing better!’) A window? (‘Let’s draw the curtains on that question …’) The complete works of Dickens? (‘Not to my literary taste, but I did sample the pulped score of The Pirates of Penzance, and found it rather toothsome!’). Et cetera, et cetera.
Thus, my introduction to the art of eating had been, by preposterous good fortune, the very best possible. Mulligan stayed at the table with the Freemasons just as long as it took for everyone to realise, with incredulity still framing their thoughts, that this man really had ingested, had dined on a chair. Just long enough also to confound the widespread suspicion that he would dash straight off and expel the contents of his stomach down the lavatory. Indeed, he was eating again, and accepted at least three glasses of port from the excited company around him.
At last, with beaming, happy faces bidding him goodnight, and several dozen earnest handshakes and garbled declarations of his damned brilliance duly acknowledged, we began to dismantle The Machine. The process was over almost as soon as it was begun, since (as I subsequently discovered, to my eternal gratitude) the contraption was designed not so much for its compactness in transit as for the speed with which it could be returned to its crates. We were packed up and ready to go even before the last, drunken stragglers in their crumpled jackets and cock-eyed bow ties had staggered from the premises. The low-growling Rolls-Royce carried us away from the Masonic hall and into the darkened streets and lanes of northern England.
And it never occurred to me to wonder where we had been, east, west, city, town, village. The single point of reference I can offer is that, a good many miles from the place in question, behind a hedge on a secluded country lane, someone deposited a curious mound of damp, orange-coloured sawdust.
‘Did you think I was going to sleep with that lot inside me?’ he said, rather superciliously as he climbed back into the car and we headed off into the night.
For the next seven years I accompanied Mulligan around the world, although by this time his world had reduced in splendour and opportunity considerably. He never replaced the car, or the suit for that matter. But he kept going. And with the maestro’s approval I undertook some freelance appearances of my own, during the increasingly long breaks between his own performances. Having neither the reputation nor the contacts which Mulligan could rely on, my own career began not in the homes of crown princes and cinema actresses, of shy millionaires with glamorous Riviera villas, but in obscure towns, unheard of village fairs, mostly in dark, faceless corners of Europe, and at the odd German festival where a hushed-up sideshow of bizarre and illegal acts would be organised for those of perverser mind than the sausage munchers and beer swillers.
Captain Gusto (for, after my impromptu baptism by Mulligan, I felt no urge to change the name) specialised in a modest eat-all programme. He would invite those assembled to offer up items for consumption, at a price. With each object offered he would state the cost of its ingestion, inflating the amount beyond the perceived pocket of an individual when disinclined to consume, and keeping it reasonable when the thing was more manageable. In return I paid a site rent to the fair, circus or freak show in question. I was, if you like, an itinerant beggar to Mulligan’s aristocrat. But we both ate.
For the main part, though, we travelled together with The Machine. There was an endless supply of stories, mile after mile in that old, majestic car. Names and feats which amused, surprised or saddened, like poor Henry ‘Tubby’ Turns, who died in a sideshow tent in Pittsburgh whilst trying to keep two rats down, out of pure professional pride, and even against the wishes of those half a dozen appalled Pittsburghers who’d paid to witness it. Our conversation would also touch on more recent times, to the decline of our trade and the rise of public opinion against us, to arrests and the lack of offers of work from travelling shows, the short-lived interest shown by television and the tragic cases of those who made it big on TV only to find that they were subsequently pursued all the more assiduously by local public health officials eager to stamp out the whole business. He warned me that things would only get worse.
He was right. Since then I have probably spent more time in local jails and courthouses than in hospitals. And hospital is by far the better place to be from time to time. In hospital, you say? Yes! As the mountaineer can expect the odd broken leg, and the tennis player his eponymous elbow, so the eater is no stranger to the stomach pump and the enema bag. Nor does he fear the liquid shakes of gastroenteritis, other than through the loss of income which it implies. No, from experience I can affirm that I would prefer to be bound over by a surfeit of sawdust than by the local magistrate any day of the week.
But, alas, it was the latter which haunted my working days and meant that every trip, every performance, each appearance of Captain Gusto and his Marvellous Mouth required the planning and precision of a bank raid. And this, I need hardly tell you, made the job itself all but impossible. In the end one ingested not at one’s leisure, as the great men did, slowly, drawing the audience in with a series of grimaces and exaggerated, faked gripes, staggering and holding your stomach as if it were about to burst and spill its contents over the incredulous onlookers before you. It was more a matter of gulping the stuff down with one eye scouring the audience, seeking out the blank face of a health department official, and with the other watching out for the approach of the fairground manager, come to tell you that he’s been forced to close you down (although never to return your site fee). Captain Gusto and his Marvellous Mouth have, if I were to tell the truth, scarpered from more places than he (or I) would care to remember, sometimes with the marvellous mouth still chewing.
But back then, in the Rolls with the great man himself, who could have resisted? Could you, sitting right next to Mulligan himself, the tingling anticipation for that evening’s performance already in your stomach, have thrown it all in for a steady job?
Working the fairs did have its benefits. For the main part, what was offered up consisted of the same things which the crowds themselves were eating. Someone would toss me a half-eaten apple, and I, pretending to examine it minutely, would quote a farthing, or the equivalent. The coin would be passed to me, and I would begin munching. If there came giggles from the audience, then perhaps I might discover a worm in it, or that it was rotten pulp on the inside. That didn’t matter, for the humble apple would attract attention, and more pricey morsels would then come my way. Someone would pick up a sausage from the ground, covered in mud, and I would swallow it down for a penny, my mind fixed with hard determination on the thought of Turkish delight or smoked salmon. Once, in eastern France, a whole bunch of hysterical schoolboys passed me their sandwiches and, for a trifling price, I ate the lot, to the great disapprobation of the adults present, who scolded both me and the boys for such a foolish waste of good food. Another time, at a small and somewhat uncivilised country fair in the old East Germany (for the Iron Curtain was invariably lifted in those out-of-the-way border towns, where, to be honest, I have always been most in demand), a group of drunken young men threw me their half-eaten salamis and other, less appetising, varieties of cold meats. I ground the lot up and got it down in no time. That didn’t satisfy them, and they went off in search of more entertaining provender, returning with a couple of ragged, inedible (or so they thought) cabbages, and an armful of dirty, mould-ridden potatoes. They had no more money to offer, but on the understanding that I envisaged absolutely no problem in chomping my way through the vegetables, the lads persuaded a great many of the prurient, grinning bystanders to cough up their loose change until, weighing the money in my hand, I gave a solemn nod and began to grind.
On that occasion, as on many others, I had to ask myself, ‘Well, did you think I was going to sleep with that lot inside me?’ The problem here, though, lay in making a sufficiently swift exit after consuming that item which one most desired to see coming out the same way as it went in. It was a matter of orchestration, of balancing the need to tread the ground of the astonishing, to excite and amaze, to encourage the proffering of extravagant objects; of balancing this with the requirement that, in general, a thing really worth the distasteful task of consuming was, by definition, the last thing which one would want to eat that evening. Afterwards, it was simply a matter of vacating the place as quickly as possible.
Meanwhile, the number of Mulligan’s own appearances dwindled. One began to perceive in his comportment the slightest flutter of arrested fatigue. His appetite remained strong, but he strained under the effort of summoning up that visible relish which was always the most striking feature of his act. Without a doubt he wanted a rest, although the word ‘retire’ I mentioned to him only once.
‘Retire!’ he bellowed straight back at me, gasping under the sheer preposterousness of the suggestion. ‘Retire? And what, might I ask, would The Great Michael Mulligan do in retirement? And where? One of those little retirement homes on the coast? Eh? Those prisons for the wrinkled and the incontinent? Eh? Eh? Perhaps with the occasional biscuit-nibbling demonstration, or championship Grape Nut chewing in the afternoons? Is that what you mean?’
I did not mention it again. But as his performances became more laboured there came a point when not just I but also some of his more enduring clients began to see in his feats of consumption not the old majestic confounding of one’s senses of the possible, but an ageing man in a faded velvet suit eating furniture.
Then one night the inevitable happened. For the first time in his long career, the cruel, ignominious shadow of normality fell upon Michael Mulligan. It occurred during a performance for a bawdy and foul-mannered bachelor party, an evening which the great man had agreed to only as a personal favour to the groom’s father, and which was to include the famous chair-eating routine. Part-way through the act, with two legs and a good section of the chair-back already ingested, he turned to me. His face had gone pale, and threads of sweat wound their way down his forehead. Above the raucous noise of a roomful of young men too drunk to appreciate either his repartee or the feat of ingestion being undertaken for their entertainment, he said to me: ‘I’m full.’
Quite calmly he took a piece of wood which he had been on the verge of throwing into the mincer’s funnel, and held it out in front of him. Then he dropped it. The wood made a muffled thud as it hit the stage, and the sound attracted the attention of a few revellers. There Mulligan remained, staring out at the audience, frozen to the spot, his mouth shut firm. His eyes tripped slowly from one young man to the next, each in his dazzling new dinner suit and claret-spattered shirt. One by one, table by table, their garrulousness fizzed away into silence.
He held their attention for a second or two, nothing melodramatic, but enough to register a kind of paternal authority. Then he spoke.
‘It appears, gentlemen, that you find the act of eating a chair quite ordinary, quite … beneath your contempt indeed.’
Someone chuckled, as if to confirm the fact.
‘What!’ shouted Mulligan, as loud as I had ever heard him, looking straight at the source of the noise. The man in question shuffled; as if in jest, he made to hide behind the shoulder of his nearest companion. But nobody seemed to share his joke, and the truth is that he really did cower. I watched the poor boy’s head drop and his whole body shrink behind the protection of the human shield.
Mulligan turned to The Machine and fished all the loose bits of chair from the funnel, tossing them over his shoulder theatrically, and making sure that one or two smaller pieces found their way into the crowd.
‘Grind her through,’ he said.
I began to crank again so as to empty the contraption; meanwhile, Mulligan fumbled in his pocket.
‘Don’t move a muscle, boys!’ he sneered over his shoulder.
He pulled out a screwdriver. Returning to his audience, he continued.
‘Right, you bunch of drunken morons …’ (some murmurs from the floor at this point, and I too began to worry at his behaviour), ‘… since eating wood is not to the tastes of a roomful of insipid, spoilt children like yourselves …’ (and by now The Machine was empty. I expected the worst), ‘… perhaps you require something a little more piquant?’
He began to unscrew the brass plaque. It was already dangling from its final screw when the first guffaw was heard, but even before he could turn around and face the audience a host of Shhhhes and Quiets! had silenced the guilty one.
The plaque dropped into his hands and he held it up for all to see: Mulligan & Sons.
‘Sixth of an inch solid brass, my good men,’ he said. ‘I would invite a member of the audience to verify the fact, but I doubt whether a single one of you pathetic mummy’s boys has ever set foot inside a foundry, or indeed a workshop of any kind!’
It seemed that he was right, for the mumbling which followed his announcement was tinged with embarrassment. Then, at the back of the crowd, a dark-haired young man stood up, to the applause of those around him. A wave of surprised, rising intonations swept across the room, and Mulligan’s authority seemed to dissipate at once. Towards the stage walked a tall, broad young man in a black suit far too small for him, his eyes cast down towards the carpet, and appearing not to enjoy his moment of celebrity in the least.
He arrived to great cheers, and Mulligan slapped him roundly on the shoulders, as if to confirm his acceptable solidity. The plaque was examined front and back, around the edges, and even through the screw holes. Finally, the young man nodded bashfully at the crowd and muttered something.
‘Speak up!’ someone shouted.
‘It’s brass,’ he responded, but with the force of his nervous voice tailing away almost to nothing before the second word reached the front row of tables.
Mulligan took the plaque and dropped it into the funnel. I knew it was coming, but as it clattered down into the abyss, and with all eyes suddenly on The Machine, a curious, floating sense of panic seized me: it wouldn’t work, it simply wouldn’t, not a piece of solid brass. Yet there I was, poised with crank handle in my hands, the only person (I supposed) who had the faintest suspicion that the grinder had its physical limits, that whereas the occasional thin fragment of metal, a furniture tack towards the end of a performance or a stray hatpin from time to time, was one thing, a block of solid metal was quite another. I might add that as far as the swallowing of the brass itself was concerned I had not the least worry, for Mulligan still had three pints of liquid remaining from his aborted chair-eating, and in any case we would certainly be on our way soon after the last spoonful of brass filings had been swallowed … Nevertheless, I turned the handle with trepidation, as my arms became the centre of all interest.
The mincer caught the plaque in its greedy fingers. Groan of metal on metal. And then I could turn no more. Hard as I tried, jerking the handle backwards and forwards the loose inch of movement which it yielded, I couldn’t make any progress, not with all the weight of my body pushing and straining against the damn thing. Something, I was sure, was going to give. Not the handle, for that was thick, cast iron. Nor, I guessed, the tough steel grinding teeth which lurked at the base of the funnel. What was about to give was my body, which twisted into one tense contortion after another as I struggled hopelessly, trying not to fail the great man, not to bring his final performance to a close on the pathetic note of an unfulfilled claim, a thing not eaten.
But the handle refused to move, as if it too had lost its appetite. And in truth I didn’t blame it, after all the chairs, the plants, the walking sticks, coats and hats, shoes, boots, wallets, the toupee of an embarrassed and very drunk town clerk in Wallasey, any number of rugby balls, each carrying the fond memories of several dozen half-comatose old boys with it down Mulligan’s gullet … Oh! how I winced as his life’s work flashed before my eyes, all the stories and all the stuff I myself had ground for him. I wondered, indeed, whether The Machine was doing him one last favour.
Then I heard muted cheers, and I looked up from my pained hunch over the immobile crank handle to find myself being bustled by Mulligan and the large young man, one of them on each side of me, and both seizing the handle with such purpose that I was forced back between their bodies and clean out of the way. They set themselves against the iron handle, like two enormous ballet dancers at the practice barre waiting for instructions.
They didn’t wait long, though, because between them the two men soon persuaded that stubborn arm to resume doing what it did best, and the room was suddenly full of the snap and thump of grinding metal. The Machine did perhaps begrudge the task a little, corners of the flattened travelling crate which formed its base rising clear off the floor and thwacking back down repeatedly as one and sometimes two of the contraption’s legs veered up in strenuous complaint. But Mulligan and his new assistant stuck at it, despite the heavy labour it clearly cost them.
Eventually, a fine golden-brown powder began to trickle out, and the assembled audience broke into excited jabberings. As soon as I saw the familiar pyramid of dust begin to grow on the gold platter my anxiety lifted. Mulligan had only to wait for a convincing mound to build up and then flick the supply switch. Three spoonfuls of metal filings would hurt no one and, let’s be honest, do you know how much powder a solid brass plaque makes?
A great deal. The plaque made a great deal of powder, because Mulligan did not turn off the supply. On the contrary, his grinding became increasingly spirited, until the unfortunate fellow at his side began to cast nervous glances at him, as if some strange mania had taken hold. In the end nothing more than the odd wisp of heavy dust dropped from the nozzle of the grinder, yet Mulligan went on and on, the handle flying round like the pedal of a speeding bicycle. Ominously, the platter boasted a substantial mound, and it seemed that only the great glutton himself was oblivious to the fact, for even the young man who had assisted him in the grinding had turned to stare at the curious product of his efforts.
Out came the spoon and, of course, you know the rest.
Only it wasn’t quite the normal end to an evening with The Great ‘Cast Iron’ Mulligan. After the last of the plaque had been ingested, Mulligan found himself with a still-mesmerised bunch of drunken youngsters in front of him. Mesmerised, that is, but still a bunch of arrogant fools.
‘Is that it, Mully?’ someone shouted, to which a few equally intrepid souls added their dissatisfaction. Mulligan, for once entirely lost for words, stared at the offending stripling for a handful of seconds. He took up his Egyptian jug, which thanks to the unusually short programme still contained a full pint of the sticky orange liquid, stepped up to the lad and covered him in it, head to foot.
What followed I recall only as a series of blurred, fragmentary images. Two or three young men hanging on to Mulligan’s shoulders … a fist slapping into a surprised chin … legs flying up like brandished hockey sticks … contorted, grimacing faces shouting. Then a red-faced Mulligan was struggling to shake off half a dozen violent revellers and, once he had done so, launched his forearm with great precision towards the small, blond head of one unfortunate youngster, whose body immediately crumpled under the weight of the blow. He was laughing out loud as one by one his assailants flopped down to the carpet, or withdrew from the affray shaking their heads in confusion.
‘The Machine!’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘Pack The Machine!’
The crates were soon packed. Those few partygoers with any remaining belligerence looked around them and, finding nothing but pain and cowardice to back up their next assault, shrugged their shoulders and wandered off to the bar.
The young man who had helped with the grinding snuck out with us through the back of the stage to help load the crates into the Rolls. Then, opening one of the crates, Mulligan found the gold platter, wrapped it in a large, oily rag, and presented it to the young man.
‘Here, my boy. I won’t be needing this any more. Take it, with the gratitude of Michael Mulligan.’
The fellow appeared pleased enough with the gift, until he felt its weight and deduced its composition. His big, boyish face turned from surprise to disbelief, and he made some mime of protest, offering to return the valuable plate.
‘Nonsense!’ said Mulligan, brushing the idea away with his hand. ‘No need of it now, you see. None at all. I have,’ and here he cleared his throat rather dramatically, ‘retired.’
We bade the young man goodnight, and off he went. He had only spoken two words to us all evening: It’s brass.
The drive home that night was unusually tense. We said nothing, and we made no stop along the way.
The next morning he presented me with The Machine, and announced that he was going home to Ireland.
Some years later, Captain Gusto arrived in Poland. A tiny border town in the west of the country, all consonants and drizzle. Twice before I’d stopped off there, only a few miles from the point where Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany met. Whilst the money I made hardly paid for my transit to the next place, there was always enough interest in my act to draw a decent crowd.
When I got there it was midday, raining, and I set up in a muddy corner of the fairground. My stand consisted of an old Morris truck, the side of which opened out to create a small stage, on which The Machine stood. As I secured the little feet of the stage in the soft ground, I got the feeling that the fair was permanent, that it had been there for months, years, and the locals had lost interest. The faces of the other stallholders were as grey as the sky, and their solemn frowns warned me to expect slow, slow trade. As the afternoon progressed I saw why. The odd loner mooched dispiritedly around, tempted by nothing, reaching into his pocket only to pull out a crusty handkerchief. The manager of the fair, who as always had provided me with a handwritten sign explaining the nature of my act in Polish, assured me that things would improve. I handed him the site rent and hoped he was right, for I had not a zloty more to my name.
By early evening things had picked up a little. Groups of twos and threes wandered aimlessly about, still the crusty hankies, still no zlotys. Something had happened to the town, its former dour, humourless expression had turned to certain misery. A young man, eager to engage me in conversation to practise his English, explained that several local factories had been scaled down or closed altogether after a spat between the local administration and the central government. Times were hard and, as the young man said, with a curious boisterousness: ‘Nobody love to give her sausage you now!’
I pondered my ill fortune. What would Mulligan have done? No sausage, no zloty. No zloty, no go anywhere. In the past I had always managed to wangle a tankful of petrol during my brief excursions behind the Iron Curtain. It was far cheaper there, and the fairmen seemed to have access to it. For that reason I had left German soil and meandered through northern Czechoslovakia with hardly enough fuel to get me halfway back to the safety of the West. I feared what might happen to The Machine if I couldn’t make it quickly back over the border, for these Polish folk had always impressed me as harbouring an imprecise shadow of cruelty within their deep-throated laughter. Had I known then just how cruel, I most certainly would have left the Iron Curtain securely drawn across that particular place.
So, dreading the idea of what might become of me if insufficient raw material found its way into my stomach that evening, I threw Captain Gusto into a bold display of self-publicity. As you might imagine, drumming up business for an eat-all sideshow without the aid of language was as trying for the Captain as it was puzzling for those onlookers whose attention I managed to catch. Not quite sure of what exactly was written on my sign, I nevertheless did my best to reflect the description of my act in a comical mime. Everything within reach I pretended to eat, from my own shoes to the caps of half a dozen onlookers. Confused yet intrigued, people shuffled up closer, read the sign, and fell into disgruntled conversation with their shrugging companions before wandering off, apparently none the wiser. The boy was right, nobody loved to give me her sausage now.
The night closed in, and slowly the crowds grew. I persuaded a young couple to part with a bagful of toffee wrappers, but it was a vain gesture, and as I gobbled them down straight from the bag, without even bothering to grind them up, they looked on with expressions of pure bewilderment, as if to say, Why would you do such a thing? As they walked away, embarrassed I think, I wanted to chase after them and make them read my sign. But I was too shy. Mulligan would have marched up to the young man and broken the sign over his head, whereas Captain Gusto was simply left there looking ridiculous.
Drunks hobbled by, the odd group of teenagers stopped and giggled, and one or two small offerings were accepted, ground and ingested. For pitiful amounts. After several hours of this I had garnered barely enough coins to run my idle fingers through as I waited, hands in pockets, next to The Machine.
Then a straggle of men approached. They were all middle-aged, dressed in rough, old donkey jackets, and each one had a cigarette hanging from his bottom lip. They eyed up my sign mischievously, and from the way they bundled and shoved into one another I could tell they were interested in a bit of fun.
‘At last!’ I said to myself, breathing a long sigh of relief as I prepared to launch into the long ritual which Mulligan, on hearing of my fairground style, had once mockingly named The Belly Auction. Proudly, I strutted up and down in front of The Machine, stroking my stomach with feigned pride, and began to sip from a beaker of the orange liquid which I always carried with me. Then I strode arrogantly up to them and held my sign in front of their noses. They were a dirty-looking bunch, and the smell which radiated from them I can recall still, a damp, earthy mixture of raw pastry and tobacco. But I knew how to get the best from a bunch of drunks. So, choosing the man with the shortest cigarette stub poking from his lips, I stepped up to him, plucked the smouldering butt from his mouth, snubbed it between thumb and forefinger too quickly to be seen, and popped it into my mouth. As usual, it provoked mild amusement, and also caused each of them to re-examine the extravagant claims which my sign announced. They went into conference and I, well accustomed to the inevitable course of the little drama, withdrew a couple of yards and resumed my boastful prowl.
At last one of them was pushed forward by the group, a look of confusion on his ugly face. In one hand he held a pencil, and in the other a single coin. I made as if to mock the item and, snatching both the pencil and the coin from him, returned to The Machine to commence grinding. In half a minute the thing was ground up and swallowed down, along with one or two drafts of my sweet, lubricating liquid.
By now a modest crowd had gathered, attracted by the noise which the drunken men made. I strutted more outrageously, working hard at a look of contempt which, in truth, I never felt quite comfortable with. But it worked. Another impromptu conference, and one of them, having been pressed with sundry coins, offered his cap. The cap in question was not an inconsiderable thing in itself, and I began to think of large payments and early to bed. However, the palmful of coins which came with it was, even by my desperately low standards that night, insufficient. In any case, I thought I might be able to improve on it. So I took the cap and tossed it back in the chap’s face, making my dissatisfaction with the money evident. The growing crowd around us burst into laughter, although my would-be clients themselves found the act rather less amusing. Instead of augmenting their offer, they seemed to lose interest.
As they were about to leave, I grabbed the cap again and, waving my arm around as if boasting about the size of a fish I had allegedly caught, tried to indicate that my appetite was altogether more substantial than anything the size of a mere cap would satisfy. The crowd seemed to get it, for a range of encouraging and humorous-sounding comments came from all directions.
The middle-aged men themselves suddenly burst into activity. Whilst two of them made exaggerated gestures that I was to stay where I was (as if I was about to move), the others rushed off.
‘Oh, a couple of cabbages! Let it be vegetable!’ I wailed inwardly, rejoicing in the easy way that I had ensnared the lot of them, and already thinking of leaving the miserable place. Or turnips! I would have settled for half a dozen turnips, in whatever condition. The pulp of a rotting turnip is far less trouble that one might imagine.
There were by now something approaching a hundred people gathered there watching me, and each one appeared to have an opinion as to what the men would bring for me to eat. I kept up the strut as best I could, but this was not a comfortable moment, for as the anticipation grew so too did the difficulty with which I might be able to refuse any item proffered.
Then a few of the men returned, empty-handed, and a murmur went around the crowd as they began to circulate, whispering in ears and grinning stupidly. From where I was stood I could just make out the furtive gestures of money changing hands, and I realised that the men were collecting a coin or two from everyone present. This went on for several minutes until, when the collection was complete, a hush fell over us.
The other men now returned. They pushed their way through the crowd and strode up to me, a dark tarpaulin suspended between them. They dropped it and stood back. One of the money collectors stepped forward and on the tarpaulin he placed a cap heavy with coins. I got to my knees and weighed the cap. It was very heavy. Keen to maintain the tenor of the performance, I admired the money extravagantly. Then I pulled back the top of the tarpaulin.
A dog. A dead, half-rotten mongrel. Something between a Yorkshire terrier and a Labrador pup. Eyes dull and sunken, its flanks matted with the dried blood and pus of recent decay. Just for a second I tried to believe that it was a fake, part of an elaborate joke. But I touched the carcass, and it was real enough. It had begun to stiffen, and odd patches of fur had fallen away, revealing grey-fawn skin already dry and tight around hardening flesh.
The men drew closer. Their faces twitched with pride as they smiled their satisfied smiles at me. I stood, sickened more at their grotesque faces than at the sight of the dog, and spoke out over their heads.
‘You people are too foul and loathsome to throw me your cruel orders!’
An attempt at something Mulliganesque. But I was wrong. I had heaped too much derision on these poor, dispossessed people. And derision cannot be withdrawn, especially not when one has no words with which to do it. I was condemned, in the plainest sense, to the consequences of my own actions. So I ate the dog.
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