All that Harry Rejekt did was stroll past the woman who stood behind a little display cart in New World. She wore a nice clean red and white striped apron and a chef’s hat in the same gingham material. Gingham? Was that a place like Birmingham? Or did the word denote this particular decorative form? The demonstrator smiled at him, rather too enthusiastically Harry thought, and held out a small piece of something brown and delicious-looking on a toothpick.
‘Salchicha,’ she said. ‘They’re on special this week.’
And without a thought in his head, Harry took the proffered sample, put the very tasty segment of whatever it was into his mouth and chewed with pleasure. ‘Umm,’ Harry said. ‘Ummmm!’
‘Yes, they can be quite ... spicy. But I don’t think they’re too hot for our New Zealand palate.’
‘No,’ Harry said. ‘You may be right.’ Nevertheless, tears began to gather in the corners of his eyes. His nose, too, was on the point of running and – he fumbled in all his pockets – he hadn’t got a handkerchief.
The salchicha lady held out a tissue and Harry turned away from her and blew his nose. You never knew when something really vile might pop out of your nasal regions and exhibit itself publicly. It was better, really, always to blow your nose, prrruppp, in front of a mirror. Then you’d see if you had something objectionable sitting there. A miniature green frog or grey toad. Harry reached out casually and took a large tin of dog food from the nearest shelf. He pretended to read the label and then turned the can end-on. Harry tried to examine his reflection in the tin-plate but he could only make out a blurred pink face that didn’t look like his. He appeared to be ... swollen, porcine. Yes, certainly a trifle piggy. There was an embossed circular message in the shiny metal. ONLY FOOD PET. He turned the can. PET FOOD ONLY. The manufacturers really ought to create messages that you could read in both directions like Napoleon’s palindrome: Able was I ere I saw Elba. But YLNO DOOF TEP wouldn’t mean much to anyone even if it did have a faintly Welsh sound. Or possibly Hungarian.
‘And of course we use only the best quality meats,’ the marketing woman said.
‘Meats?’ Harry said in dismay. How could he have possibly allowed himself to lapse like this? Had he really thought he was merely testing out a slice of compressed Soya burger in a skin? For fuck’s sake – he’d been a vegetarian for ... what? Two years, surely, with scarcely a slip. Just once he’d been tempted to try that special dinner he’d cooked for Sako. All the ingredients had been fit for human consumption, naturally. But they had included some, yes, very large chunks of brisket and other cattle-derived items.
‘Well, pork and beef mainly. And if the one you’ve tried is too hot for some customers’ taste we have another milder line in chicken and turkey.’
‘Oh,’ Harry said. ‘That’s really ... ah ... interesting.’ He wasn’t quite sure what the biggest problem was here. Breaking his vegetarian vows or discovering that the piece of sausage he’d just swallowed was so ... edible. Utterly flavoursome, really.
The sales person smiled at another customer. She held out a salchicha nibble on a toothpick. ‘We have a small goods special running, this week only, sixteen dollars a pack.’
Harry tried to make himself invisible as he nodded and turned his trolley. Somehow or other he’d managed to collect half a dozen cans of dog tucker while he’d thought about this lurch into being a flesh eater again. He’d forgotten why he’d become a vegetarian in the first place though it had something to do with not being able to kill his own hens. Of course he could do that if one were really ill or in distress. But if he had to perform an act of mercy it still didn’t mean he could eat the poor wretch. No. He wouldn’t even cook up the carcass and feed it to Sako. A hen that keeled over with a prolapsed nether-end or faded away with old age was given a proper burial.
The thing was that human beings thought about what they ate. You couldn’t avoid ethical considerations. That bit of Spanish sausage he’d eaten had once strolled around in a paddock or rolled about happily in a sty. And now it was sinking down heavily through all his inner passages and pipes. But an animal like Sako, for example, no matter how sweet-natured and intelligent, was a meat only pet when it came to eating his dinner. The collie never thought that the expired life essence of a pig or a cow came sliding out of a tin when Harry gave him his evening meal. It was just gobble, gobble, gobble and fill your belly as fast as you’re able.
A child, of course, couldn’t be condemned for stuffing cheerios into its mouth at a birthday party. Ethical eating came with maturity. Or it should do. Because a thinking adult couldn’t possibly carry on as a carnivore once they’d driven behind a cattle-truck taking stock to the freezing works. All those crowded sheep and stumbling steers. And pigs were even worse. They had pale eyelashes just like red-haired people and they knew precisely where they were going and what was to happen to them. Oh well. One swallow didn’t make a summer.
Harry reached out and selected an extra-large bag of rolled oats. If Shelly ever came to stay for the weekend he certainly didn’t intend to find himself in the bare-cupboard embarrassment of this morning. Yes, he’d lay in extra supplies of dried peas, lentils, black beans. All those things that made not the slightest murmur of protest when they were harvested.
But hang on. Shelly might actually eat steaks and lamb stews and sausages. He’d never shared a meal with her. And there were people in this world, quite nice individuals in other ways, possibly very attractive women who enjoyed reading serious poetry, women like Shelly for instance, who might sit down two or three evenings a week to a plate of cooked offal. Liver! Kidneys! Imagine a long and perhaps exploratory kiss. A taint of urine on the loved one’s breath. The very thought of it made Harry clamp his teeth together.
Bleugh! That was a terrible thought. But what did he truly know about Shelly? There’d been that very first meeting at the Brian Boru pub in Thames when Harry had gone there with his mother and father for St Patrick’s or someone’s birthday. And he’d been somewhat under the weather. Distinctly so. Completely out of his skull, actually, but Shelly had said she’d like to see him again even if she hadn’t given him her address directly. But he had found her house in Te Aroha and left her a letter.
Then he and Shelly had exchanged cards though they were a little shy with each other. Discussing Keats and the other
Romantic poets, however, could usually get them out of any difficult patch. They’d met once recently in Hamilton and seen a film that Harry had not liked. Some foppish English actor who kept pushing his hair away from his eyes. Though he’d thought the American actress was very nice. Harry was always impressed by good teeth and ... who was she? He couldn’t remember. Anyway, she seemed to have at least forty-two examples of perfectly white incisors and molars when she smiled.
So even though he and Shelly hadn’t actually sat down together and eaten a meal they were talking about the possibility of making a trip to Raglan or Taupo or somewhere together. His idea really, he had to admit that. But if it came off they’d certainly have to have several joint meals. Not joint. Shared. Then there was this other idea, floating in outer space it seemed, that Shelly might spend a weekend at his place. Actually, that too had been his tentative suggestion like going to see a film together. But the immediate plan was for him to go to Charlotte’s wedding. Not that he and Shelly would be having anything like a tryst. He was going to have to stay in a cabin at the holiday park in Te Aroha because Shelly’s house was only a goldminer’s cottage and it would be packed to the brim with family members.
Would they even be able to have breakfast together on Saturday morning? Or Sunday? Fresh eggs with heaps of thickly buttered toast and, possibly for Shelly, rashers of crispy bacon. Somewhere, Harry had read that it was especially important for women to keep up their iron intake and you couldn’t always do that with spinach and porridge.
So, if things went well on the wedding weekend, and if Shelly ever came to spend a day or two with him in the cottage, he could actually manage to cook her a meat dish without too many qualms. And it might be convenient, really, if he slipped over to the delicatessen and bought ... what? Possibly two packs of those salchicha while they were on special. They could go in the freezer where he’d almost never have to see them.
And when Shelly had used that phrase ‘family members’, people staying in her goldminer’s cottage, sleeping in her spare beds or on her settees, did that include the two ex-husbands?
Harry crossed the parking area to his car. All the windows were open and the radio was on. Sako sat primly in the passenger seat. Harry put his shopping in the boot. He slid in behind the wheel. Sako stared at him.
‘What’s up?’ Harry asked. The dog leaned towards him and with great delicacy he sniffed at Harry’s breath. Sako itemised every ingredient in the small nugget of sausage that Harry had inadvertently eaten.
‘It was just a tiny piece,’ Harry said weakly. Sako appeared to nod and smile. The dog was prepared to forgive anything. After all – this newly carnivorous man once had the humane curiosity and decency to stop his car in the road, two years ago was it? ... and check a tied sack that was lying there. When Harry cut the string there was this Border Collie puppy. It really was a bit like a Caesarean birth. So there you go – man and dog had been inseparable companions ever since.
He fastened Sako into the canine safety harness, an invention that Harry was still proud of. He turned the ignition key. The Triumph started with its usual ringing cough. Well, Harry thought, there may be many a slip between cup and lip but ... but what? There was no use crying over low-fat spilt milk. Or guzzled sausage.
Done. Shopping put away. Sako had eaten his two-biscuit lunch and was eyeing the long-legged parasite wasps that lifted and settled, floated and crouched, against the warm wood of the veranda. If he could snap them out of the air quickly enough he could kill them and eat them without getting stung. On the other hand, wasps might taste like burnt marmalade so maybe it wasn’t worth bothering.
Harry was working in the spare room and he’d tuned the big Ambassador to the National Programme. The announcer was featuring the hit songs from ... when? Harry missed the date because he’d begun punching in the nails in the top, actually the fixed lid, of his new oak chest. Simon and Art Garfunkel were singing ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ so this must be the early seventies, Harry decided. He was ... twenty-odd then. Well, he wasn’t all that much older right now in his head because the mind doesn’t seem to age. It just fills up with more ... things. And all this stuff, that you’ve done, what you’ve listened to and read, hangs about simultaneously in the present. That’s how the brain works. Getting sand in your eyes at Mission Bay when you’re five is bumping softly, plop, plop, against a piece of salchicha sausage when you’re aged fifty something. So really, in his head, he could step through the door of that rotting house in Freeman’s Bay where he’d rented a damp room, his pad, in 1972, hang a left into this spare room where Angharad had slept and turn down the Ambassador radio. Like so!
Harry turned the volume knob on the wireless until he could barely hear the music. He’d never liked this song. There was something wrong with the way it was recorded and it hurt Harry’s ears.
Now – a dab of this matai wood filler in each hole and he could say the job was finished. Harry sniffed at the plastic pot. Whew! Alcoholic pear drops. The brown putty smelled a bit like one of Thomas Wessen’s most exotic schnapps – the Beurre Bosc pear and quince concoction with a splash of aniseed. Actually, he ought to go and see his environmentalist friend soon. Pink-flowering field bindweed was running rife in one corner of Harry’s section and Thomas might know of an organic spray that would kill the climbing weed.
Harry smoothed the filler into the last hole. There. He had to say that this chest was one of his more successful ventures into carpentry. Or should that be cabinet making? Though he’d definitely have to look out for some kind of rug to cover the slightly folky appearance of this new piece of furniture.
Perhaps Joseph could scout around tomorrow or Friday when he went on his antique and junk finding expeditions. He might come across a Peruvian blanket. Something in natural alpaca colours. Brown. Black. Off-white. Though Bartleby’s excursions were a little odd. Joseph might arrive back just as Harry was closing up and yet there wouldn’t be anything in the back of the little Bradford van except for that quite nice spring interior mattress that had appeared ... when? Three weeks ago after one of Bartleby’s buying trips. Harry had offered to help carry the Sure-To-Rest into the shop but Joseph had simply smiled and said, ‘She’ll be right.’
It wasn’t really his place though, to question what Joseph was up to. It was patently obvious even to someone as innocent as ... who? Well, perhaps someone like Sako ... that Bartleby was involved in some kind of covert sexual shenanigans. To be brutally explicit about this mattress business – Joseph Bartleby was driving somewhere with a lady-friend on a Thursday and a Friday, pulling up in a lay-by, and then they were wriggling together like a pair of earthworms. And Harry Rejekt didn’t desire in any way to uncover the intimate details of his friend’s cavortings.
Really, all that Harry wanted to know about Bartleby’s doings was how he moved his relationships with women onwards towards connection. How had it come about that the big fat man was so fortunate, so blessed, so bursting with sexual grace, that he was bobbing and bumping on the second-hand mattress in the back of his van, more than once a week? At the very least. Whereas he, Harry, had had a single not very satisfactory moment with a Swiss woman in Thomas Wessen’s back garden. And that was almost two years ago.
Therefore, putting it as concretely as possible, how was he going to get into bed with Shelly who was a woman he regarded highly? Shelly had the same liking and respect for poetry as he had. In all those ways they clicked. But their relationship would be so much more ... vibrant, yes, physically thrilling if they could connect. But still – he didn’t want to turn Shelly merely into an object of desire like the girls in the Alma-Tadema painting. No matter how much … Harry tugged at his jeans and adjusted his, well, yes, no point in being mealy-mouthed about it, his penis, which had a distinct life of its own these days. So no matter how much he wanted the pair of them to get into bed with their clothes off and invent together the most outrageous postures and mutual movements, he wanted their first parachute descent into the pleasure gardens of the body to happen without a disastrous landing. Exactly. He wanted each of them to slip into and over each other like a tailored silk-and-mohair garment. Grogram – that was the word.
Or they could be – Harry Rejekt smiled at the thought – like a rhyming couplet. Each person, or line, requiring the other and chiming amazingly.
He is half in love with Shelly.
She is very fond of Harry.
Pinggggg!