Stygian Aperitif
I have found that much can be achieved by merely alternating longer with shorter passages. The reader is not a steady wind, to lend infinite suspiration to long, winding tracts, or sustain at full stretch an armada of words – she must be allowed to breathe, pulled up by the wayside, left to dwell in peace awhile upon some signal object, a tomb, a television, or else some pretty figure of a man, who shall ‘study deserving’ –
And so I give you Thopas, the pot-bellied chef and handyman of
Rasputin. His sleeves peremptorily rolled to display soft, assertive
forearms. Dark, moon-calf eyes with long lashes, and cherubic lips. A full flaxen head like the head on a lively pint. Elbows out, stubby hands which are forever busy shelling nuts, skinning garlic or unravelling knots, so that the impression you take away with you is of these busy instruments (particularly the little fingers, which are held daintily aloft) and perhaps a contemptuous look he shot you once, when you mistook a courgette for a cucumber. Thin-skinned with fine black hairs. The conceit labours, I’ll admit, but let us compare him to a lone hawthorne straddling a wall, toying with brambles and nettles while older, wiser trunks crowd at a distance, older yet than his chef’s cap of blossom will give you to think, but not so well rooted as he likes to think, and hence regrettably ripe for the cropping, lopping, and so on.
Wherever a tap leaks, leek sprouts, wound weeps, is Thopas. You will catch him jogging from room to room, eyes on the wall or ceiling, his mind adrift in an ethereal realm of pipes and circuitry, or plumbing the roots of dandelions like a ferret after rabbits. It being a Tuesday (a poor day for idleness) you will glimpse him at the far end of the turbine deck, elbow-deep in something or somebody, those nifty fingers operating without hazardous recourse to his brain and the froth of higher functions, sanctity, human decency and so forth. Don’t fret though – no bloody business today.
His apron is a regular United Nations of pockets, each fraught with
implements and materials – cloths, pencils, blue tack and ribbons. His collar and cuffs are impeccably neat. He seizes a handful of Maiden’s Hair, Our Lord’s bedstraw while he lay in gilded destitution like a candle-flame, less gaudily employed to stuff mattresses and coagulate cheese, or as a decoction to refresh the weary feet. With this he will sweeten a minced onion (‘always start with an onion’), then stir in egg white, chaff and the ashes of better men. He will shallow-fry little cakes of the stuff for five minutes a side, looking down his nose at the pan and cursing it softly, almost tenderly. Once cooked to satisfaction he upends the lot over a clay
platter garnished with kennelworth ivy, dusts it fastidiously with parsley, thumbs the intercom, grows impatient, recalls that both waiter and waitress are on their holidays, calls down imprecations on their absent heads, then whisks the dish off himself to the boiler room and Buster, who receives it with a ponderous ‘Nice, Thopas’, swallows a few pieces and yelps at the ritual savagery thus perpetrated on his insides.
What does he think of his employment? So young and able a man as he, to willingly surround himself with danger and death! His face sours as he considers which of several pithy answers will suffice – a taut banality ‘It fills time between one place and the next’, or something in a satirical vein ‘It suits me, sir, as one not without penetration, who would rail upon the sin within the skin’ – the milk he is steaming for his lunchtime cappuccino takes advantage of his distraction to leap, like an affectionate tomcat, into his lap. ‘And you’re here what, for the good of your health?’ he barks, flapping at himself with a pink handkerchief. ‘It’s work, and varied work.
That’s enough for now.’
Page(s) 10-11
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