Vinegar Soup Read online

  He taught Frank how to slice onions, dice carrots, shred cabbage and make stew. ‘A good stew is like a good sandwich,’ grinned Gilbert as he watched the vegetables boil on the stove. ‘It should always be full of surprises.’ He dropped a frankfurter into the brew and stirred it around with a spoon.

  ‘What else?’ said Frank, searching the floor for scraps.

  ‘Fetch that bucket,’ said Gilbert, waving his spoon at the kitchen table.

  Frank hurried to the table where a big plastic bucket stood among the pots and pans. He tried to reach for the handle. But the bucket toppled and caught his face. He hit the floor with a shout. There was blood! His hand and face were running with blood. His hair was black with blood. There were fat, purple clots of blood slithering slowly under his shirt; evil, wobbling bubbles of blood that felt heavy and horribly cold. Frank closed his eyes and screamed.

  ‘Don’t worry – they’re only pigs’ kidneys,’ shouted Gilbert, running to wipe Frank’s face with a towel.

  ‘They smell,’ spluttered Frank in disgust. It was the first time he had encountered vital organs. He had thought pigs were nothing but bacon and hot, crisp sausages. These were bags of raw flesh that stank of murder, urine and blood.

  Gilbert plucked a kidney from the boy’s collar and gave it a sniff. ‘There’s nothing wrong with them,’ he said with a frown. ‘They’re as fresh as daisies.’

  Frank moaned and shivered with horror. ‘But they’re kidneys,’ he sobbed. It wasn’t right. Olive had kidneys she washed out with water and liked to keep warm in a vest.

  They’re full of nourishment,’ explained Gilbert, rolling a kidney in the palm of his hand. He stared affectionately at the organ and gave it a little squeeze. He couldn’t understand Frank’s fear. ‘I’ve known men who like to swallow ’em raw – Sam used to say they slip down a treat – smooth as oysters.’

  ‘You can’t eat them,’ wailed Frank.

  ‘You can eat almost anything,’ said Gilbert, collecting the kidneys up in the towel. ‘And there’s no waste on a pig,’ he added proudly. ‘You can eat their brains and ears, livers, trotters, entrails, all sorts. It’s a remarkable animal.’

  Frank wasn’t listening. He had staggered away to ask Olive to wash him. There were bloody footprints on the kitchen floor.

  The kidney stew appeared at the supper table but Frank wouldn’t touch it.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Olive.

  Frank shook his head and left the room.

  For a long time afterwards he would eat nothing that came from the slaughter house. He lived on bread and potatoes, fried eggs and toasted cheese. Gilbert anxiously tried to tempt him with soft, white chicken and little morsels of sweet pork pie. But Frank refused to open his mouth and forgive him.

  ‘It’s delicious,’ grumbled Gilbert.

  ‘It’s dead,’ shuddered Frank and the noodle necklace clacked like a chain.

  ‘What have you done to him?’ complained Olive one evening as she waited for Gilbert to climb into bed.

  ‘Nothing,’ snorted Gilbert, pulling at the buttons on his shirt. The shirt gasped open and his stomach bulged. He slapped the bulge with the flat of his hand.

  ‘It was the kidneys,’ said Olive, turning her face to the wall as Gilbert shook out his pyjamas. ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘I told him they were delicious. Gently poached in mustard sauce. Splash of vinegar. Salt. Pepper. Lea and Perrins. I’ve known men who’d kill to get at my kidneys.’

  ‘Well something happened to frighten him,’ sniffed Olive, closing the neck of her nightgown. ‘One day he was perfectly normal. The next day he was a vegetarian.’ She shrank into her pillow, wriggled down, until the bedclothes covered her chin.

  ‘It’s the brain. When they’re growing it affects their brains.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ sighed Gilbert, crawling carefully under the blanket. ‘Try him with a cold sausage – he always liked sausage.’

  ‘He won’t eat it. He says he’s a vegetarian.’

  ‘Hitler was a vegetarian,’ muttered Gilbert, snapping out the light.

  ‘You’re a bad influence on him,’ said Olive, shrinking away from the hands that searched for a breach in her nightgown.

  ‘It’s not my fault,’ wheezed Gilbert. ‘I didn’t turn him soft. I told him. If you don’t eat red meat your teeth fall out. If you don’t drink gravy your blood turns to water. It makes no difference.’

  ‘I don’t like it. He’s got such queer ideas in his head,’ complained Olive. She found one of Gilbert’s hands between her knees and carefully extracted it.

  ‘I taught him everything he knows,’ muttered Gilbert as he turned away.

  ‘Sometimes I think he knows too much,’ yawned Olive. ‘You’ll make him unhappy – filling his head with nonsense.’

  Gilbert grunted. What nonsense. He had hardly begun to explain the world to Frank. Olive didn’t understand. Her world was the size of the Hercules Cafe. He wanted to tell Frank about the desert at night, stars as big as grapefruits, dogs wailing, the scuttle of scorpions, the smell of smoke from a scrubwood fire. He wanted to tell Frank about the forests, black with shadows, milky with steam, where monkeys sang in the rafters and fish, ugly as gargoyles, were hauled from the mud of yellow rivers. He wanted to tell Frank about the pure, carnal pleasures of life. There was so much pork and crackling in the world. Olive didn’t understand. He wasn’t going to let a spot of kidney trouble stop him.

  But Frank was stubborn. Despite Gilbert’s encouragement, he continued to refuse red meat and survived on bowls of biscuit and fruit. And this lack of gravy did nothing to stunt his growth. He was growing so fast that Olive had trouble finding clothes for him. His shoes, which had once seemed so big that no human foot would fill them, were splitting at the seams. His shirt sleeves looked too short for his arms and his head wouldn’t fit his favourite hat. He was sprouting in every direction and as he grew bigger so Olive seemed to shrink. She was dwarfed by the saucepans and kettles, smothered beneath mounds of sandwiches and exhausted by the weight of food she carried between tables on her great metal tray.

  Frank came to her rescue and when he wasn’t in the kitchen, listening to Gilbert, he was out in the dining room helping Olive take orders, clear rubbish and sweep tables. But Olive always looked tired. Her hair had lost its curl. Her face was grey. She shuffled and sighed and forgot to darn her underwear. Frank and Gilbert watched her grow old in the heat of one short summer. As the days lengthened the sunlight made her sweat like a cheese, warped her legs and twisted her hands. Steam rose from her skull. The colour was boiled from her skin. When she dried out she shrivelled into an old woman. Her teeth looked too big for her mouth. Her bones clicked when she walked. The days darkened and the rains arrived. It was October. Frank was ten years old.

  Gilbert baked a cake the size of a dustbin. Frank wore a fresh noodle necklace and for a few hours Olive came back from the dead. She wore a clean apron and danced around the kitchen, laughing and clicking her bones.

  ‘We’ll eat until we explode,’ said Gilbert cheerfully. While he opened a bottle of sherry Olive hacked the cake to pieces with a bread knife.

  ‘Give him a small glass,’ scolded Olive as she watched Gilbert slosh the sherry into tumblers. ‘He’s only a boy.’

  ‘It’s his birthday,’ boomed Gilbert. ‘Boys are always sick on their birthdays.’

  Frank grinned. They sat at the table and began to stuff themselves with cake and sweet sherry. For a little while Olive seemed restored but on her second slice of cake she started to moan and blow crumbs.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Gilbert, frowning at the ruined cake. He gave it a nasty prod with his spoon.

  ‘Oh dear, I feel as drunk as the Lord,’ wheezed Olive. She threw up her arms and bandaged her eyes with her hands. Her elbows hit the table and rattled the plates. The sherry bottle jumped in surprise, fell over, rolled across the table and splashed between her knees.

 
Frank looked appalled. He stood up, sat down, stood up, sat down and looked to Gilbert for help. Olive had crumpled and was slowly sinking under the table.

  ‘Catch her arms!’ cried Gilbert. He kicked away his chair and tried to snatch at Olive as she disappeared from view.

  Frank peered anxiously under the table and watched Gilbert crawl around on his hands and knees. ‘Is she hurt?’ he whispered into the shadows.

  ‘She fainted,’ said Gilbert. ‘It must have been the excitement.’ It certainly wasn’t the drink – she had barely raised the glass to her lips.

  He dragged Olive out by her feet and arranged her in the middle of the kitchen floor. She lay there with her mouth open and her eyes closed. Her apron glistened with sherry.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ whimpered Frank from the safety of the larder. He sat down and stuck a thumb in his mouth for comfort.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ sighed Gilbert. ‘She’ll be fine.’ He smiled across at Frank. ‘We’ll soon have her in bed.’

  He scooped her up in his arms and kissed her tenderly on the nose. For a moment he looked as old as Olive. His face sagged and his dark eyes were full of fog. Then he threw her over his shoulder like a dead lamb and carried her up the stairs. She wasn’t heavy. She felt warm and loose in his hands. During the ascent her slippers broke free and somersaulted into the darkness. He didn’t turn to retrieve them. He manoeuvred her through the bedroom door and laid her to rest on the bed. She started to snore. He untied the wet apron, peeled off her dress and teased her from her underwear. It was the first and last time he saw her naked. He covered her with a blanket and made her comfortable. When he went back down to Frank he found the birthday boy had been sick in the sink.

  The next morning Gilbert opened the cafe and Frank had helped him cook a dozen breakfasts before Olive came down to the counter. She looked exhausted. Her face was creased and her eyes were swollen. She shuffled back and forth like an ancient sleepwalker. When the customers called her name she ignored them.

  ‘How do you feel today?’ asked Frank, relieved to see her risen once more from the grave.

  ‘Why?’ frowned Olive, fighting with her apron.

  ‘Gilbert had to put you to bed.’

  Olive dragged the apron over her head and peered at him suspiciously. ‘I must have come over queer,’ she said absently. ‘I’m sorry if I spoiled your birthday.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Frank. ‘We saved you some cake.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You looked terrible,’ ventured Frank. ‘We thought you were dead.’ He gathered up her apron strings, drew them gently around her waist and fashioned a clumsy knot.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ said Olive.

  ‘I was as sick as a dog,’ said Frank proudly. But Olive had already turned and lurched away.

  ‘We’ll have to get some help,’ declared Gilbert as Frank returned to the toaster. ‘Poor old Olive can’t manage alone.’

  ‘Me!’ volunteered Frank. ‘I’m good at tables. I’ll be a waitress.’

  ‘Thanks, Frank, but you haven’t finished growing.’ Frank looked disappointed. He stood and scowled at the smoking toast. He wasn’t a child. He was ten years old.

  ‘And, besides, I need you in the kitchen,’ added Gilbert gently. Frank nodded. It was true. Gilbert couldn’t be expected to keep the kitchen working without him. The toast curled and burst into flames.

  ‘We need some fresh blood in the place,’ murmured Gilbert. ‘Someone young and strong.’

  ‘Who?’ coughed Frank.

  ‘I don’t know. We’ll advertise,’ said Gilbert, pulling the plug on the toaster.

  But when Gilbert explained his plan to Olive she didn’t like the sound of it. ‘I work hard,’ she barked, slapping her apron. She cocked her head and glared at him. ‘I don’t need your help.’

  ‘You deserve a rest.’

  ‘I can rest when I’m dead. Help costs money,’ she growled, dismissing him with a flap of her hand.

  ‘But we can afford it,’ argued Gilbert.

  ‘What will I do with myself?’

  Gilbert was silent. He blew out his cheeks and frowned. He shrugged. It was a very difficult question. ‘You like to watch television,’ he said hopefully.

  ‘I haven’t seen it for months.’

  ‘You never miss the wrestling – I’ve heard you shouting at Giant Haystacks.’

  ‘I can’t spend the rest of my life watching television,’ said Olive fiercely. ‘It sends you daft.’ She rolled her eyes and crouched against the wall, her head full of terrible phantasms. ‘If it’s not a lot of Jessies jigging around to music it’s a lot of adverts shouting at you about all sorts of stuff you don’t want. They think you’re ignorant. Damn nonsense. They dress up as tubes of toothpaste and doughnuts. I’ve seen them.’

  ‘Nobody watches the adverts,’ growled Gilbert. ‘You’re just trying to be difficult.’

  ‘Well, when they’re not singing about dog biscuits there’s a man in a wig on the news telling you about bombs and murders and babies lost in fires and planes crashed in the sea. It frightens you to death. One moment there’s a woman with a duster in a bathroom the size of a ballroom and the next moment there’s an earthquake. You don’t know what to believe.’

  Gilbert had regarded television as an innocuous sedative for the bed-ridden and feeble-minded. Olive looked like she needed an exorcist. ‘Forget the television,’ he exploded. ‘You don’t have to watch it.’

  ‘What else can I do?’

  ‘You could finish your knitting.’

  ‘It hurts my fingers.’

  ‘Ask Frank to find you a book in the library. There are millions of books in the world. You could learn something.’

  ‘Books!’ laughed Olive bitterly. ‘I don’t trust books. They’re not healthy. They give those library books to people in bed with nasty diseases and then the germs get on to the pages and when you open them the germs rub on to your fingers. You could catch anything. You never know what you’ll find in a book.’

  ‘There must be something you can do with your time,’ insisted Gilbert. ‘We’ll just have to find it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I want you to relax and enjoy yourself.’

  ‘I enjoy the work,’ she shouted impatiently. She couldn’t understand why he wanted to replace her on the counter. She was only forty. He must be fifty but thinks I’ve forgotten just because he doesn’t look it.

  But Gilbert was determined to find some help. He placed a card in the cafe window.

  WAITRESS WANTED. GOOD FOOD. OWN ROOM. APPLY WITHIN.

  The first girl to respond to the advertisement was a tall German with a leather suitcase. Her eyes were blue and her fingernails were red. She sat at the table beneath the window and listened in silence while Gilbert explained the position. She nodded and smiled and stared into the street. She didn’t understand the half of it. She thought he was trying to rent out a room.

  ‘Thank you,’ she announced while Gilbert was describing the history of the Hercules Cafe. ‘Now I think, I will look at the room.’

  Gilbert was puzzled. He hadn’t explained her duties. But he took her upstairs and led her to a room at the back of the house.

  ‘It has a bad smell,’ she complained, striding through the door and throwing her suitcase on the bed.

  ‘Well, I’ve not cleaned it out,’ confessed Gilbert as he watched her kick off her shoes. He’d imagined that whoever he lured would need a few days to make arrangements before she settled into her quarters. This one came complete with a suitcase. Wouldn’t be surprised to find an apron under her coat. Big girl. No complaints. Huge hands. Frighten the customers.

  ‘Where is the bathroom?’ she demanded.

  ‘The green door at the end of the corridor,’ he said, walking from the room and pointing a finger into the gloom.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said and shut the door in his face.

  ‘Is she the new waitress?’ asked Frank when Gilbert
returned to the kitchen.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Gilbert nervously.

  He waited for an hour and then returned to the room. The door was locked.

  ‘What’s happening in there?’ he shouted through the keyhole. ‘We’re waiting for you downstairs.’

  ‘I am asleep,’ bellowed the girl.

  ‘Are you decent?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Parlour view on glaze?’ roared Gilbert.

  There was a long pause. ‘I am asleep,’ the girl shouted again. Gilbert swore beneath his breath. ‘We want you to come downstairs,’ he bellowed, shaping each word slowly enough for her to catch the sense of it. ‘We want you to look at the kitchen. We always wanted a waitress who can’t speak English.’

  ‘Kitchen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No, I shall eat in my room tonight, I think. Bring me some cold meat and salad. Do you have German beer?’

  ‘No, I don’t think you understand. We want you to look after the customers,’ Gilbert shouted. He was growing impatient. He slapped the door with the flat of his hand.

  ‘Customers?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was another long pause. ‘Men?’ the girl asked suspiciously.

  ‘Yes, some of them are men. Customers. You can meet them.’

  ‘My God!’ shrieked the girl. ‘Some of them are not men?’

  ‘Men, women, dogs, children, all sorts,’ shouted Gilbert.

  ‘I am asleep! You are mad! My boyfriend is a policeman! I am asleep!’

  ‘Who sold you that damn phrasebook?’ Gilbert exploded. He wrenched at the lock until the handle came apart in his fist.

  ‘Keep out! I have a pistol! I have a German passport!’ screamed the girl.

  When Gilbert broke through the door he found the room empty and the window open. His new waitress, half-naked and clutching a suitcase, was scrambling to freedom over the rooftops. Gilbert couldn’t understand it.

  The second girl to approach Gilbert was a frazzled dwarf who claimed to have served in some of the worst hotels in London. Her name was Ivy Murdoch but her friends called her Speedy. She had been a skivvy in the first Britannia and slopped out rooms in the old Palaestra. She had lost her teeth and one of her thumbs. She looked old enough to be Olive’s mother.