Come to Harm

thirty

Monday, 25 November

Mrs. Poole did not look terrified, Keiko thought, as she watched her. She had cracked open the kitchen window to clear the rice steam, and she looked out when she heard the scrape of the slaughterhouse door. She saw Mrs. Poole emerging. The woman looked the same as ever: head down, shoulders slumped, plodding listlessly up the yard with her buckets.

But something was different. It niggled at Keiko while she sat at her desk trying to concentrate, and it was only minutes before she was back again. There it was! Mrs. Poole hadn’t closed the door this morning when she was finished. It was still was ajar and that wasn’t all. Drifts of steam were curling out. Someone was in there.

She let herself out and trotted down the stairs. Murray and Malcolm were nowhere to be seen. Mrs. Poole stood behind the counter, unsmiling.

“What can I get you?” she asked Keiko. “Or if it’s Murray you’re after, he’s at home today.”

“A hundred grams of lean beef for frying,” Keiko said. She couldn’t quite admit that she had come to ask questions of this woman, with her stony face. “What is Malcolm doing in the slaughterhouse?” she added. “He told me it was never used.”

“Only on special occasions,” said Mrs. Poole. “The back shop does for most things, but this time of year Malcolm does things we don’t need to see.”

What could she mean? Keiko thought. Malcolm described cleaning tripe and brought kidneys to trim as though it were a side-show. He played the skin on roasted meat like a snare drum and wanted to tell everyone the different ways of adding fat to a turkey. What worse thing could there possibly be?

“On the other hand,” said Mrs. Poole, handing her the bag of meat, “you’re interested in food, aren’t you? Why don’t you go and watch? Save him coming up to the flat and trying to persuade you.”

Keiko took the bag and left but paused outside her own door, then started off again. Up the street, right and right again at the top around the Bridge Hotel, until she was standing at the mouth of a narrow lane, bounded by the brick walls of the shop yards on one side and the stone walls of the big house gardens on the other. It was fringed with weeds at the edges but there was a well-trodden path down the middle that led in a straight line right to Poole’s Butcher, and she could see one lurid pink corner of Mr. Byers’s place at the end of the block. Still swinging the bag and with a fresh, out-for-a-morning-stroll look fixed on her face, she ventured off the pavement and into the shadows.

The pattern of window and gate, window and gate repeated itself and she looked with interest as each pair passed. The peeling paint and cobweb-choked glass of the Bridge was followed by a wrought-iron gate and a newly glazed window belonging to the Imperiolo’s Chinese take-away, the Dragon Pearl, where a whirling fan blew steam from a funnel on the outbuilding roof, to be snatched away by the wind. She passed McLuskie’s Bakery with the morning wash of hats and oven mitts just visible on a clothesline, and then Mrs. Watson’s grocery, where the window was rubbed shiny even though the building was used only for storing boxes, and finally the back yard of the butcher shop. The spot in the wall where the little window should be was a square of newer bricks, looking faintly grotesque, like a blind eye sewn shut or a mouth taped over. The gate was closed, as she knew it would be-the padlock on the other side was visible from her windows-but she tried the handle anyway. It turned. She let go in surprise and watched as it continued to turn and the gate opened silently on oiled hinges.

“Keiko,” said Malcolm. He neither advanced nor retreated but stayed planted on well spread feet, blocking the gateway completely. “Can I help you?”

“I’m being nosy,” she said, thinking rapidly but stumbling over the words a little. “What are you doing? Your mother thinks I won’t want to see.”

“Making hough,” said Malcolm.

Keiko blinked at the unfamiliar sound, like a choked-off sneer. “What is hokko?” she said, doing her best with the sound.

He didn’t answer, just smiled and beckoned her into the slaughterhouse.

The little room had walls blindingly white, running with condensation, and the scrubbed painted floor was beaded with it too in the corners, slick and shining anywhere that Malcolm’s feet had been. The whole place was filled with steam, a few shapes rising out of it. She breathed out hard and slow and the air shifted, clearing her view, showing her a hulk of a grey metal stove with two rings and a work table of the same scoured plastic as the cutting benches behind the shop counter. Two huge high-sided pots of the same dull grey, as big as barrels, were bubbling on the stove; it was these giving off the lazy vapour. Keiko sniffed and the cocktail of smells made her dizzy. The steam was peppery and sweet, but there was new paint here too and strong soap, chlorine bleach, disinfectant-they mixed into something choking and pungent, unlike anything she had ever smelled before. She opened her mouth and drew the heavy air in that way.

“Hough,” said Malcolm, with a declamatory sweep of his arm over the stove. “It’s a fair old guddle. Makes sense to use this place for it-keep the mess and heat out of the shop, eh?”

She stepped up beside him and peered over the rim of one of the pots. Under the curling steam, a thin grey liquor spat up small bubbles to burst on its surface. She looked at him inquiringly.

“It’s a plain enough dish,” he said. “Only it takes a good six hours, so it’s only worth it if you’re doing a load at once. Maybe that’s why it’s made at New Year’s, when a lot of folk are gathering.”

“What is it?” Keiko asked.

“Meat,” said Malcolm. “Beef traditionally, but it doesn’t have to be, boiled in water with a knap bone.”

“Knap?” said Keiko.

“Knee,” Malcolm told her. “The bone makes the jelly. You should have shreds of meat in a good clear jelly, set firm, but I’ve seen it made by folk who don’t know what they’re doing and it comes out cloudy, like a mousse.” He was warming to his subject.

“This would be a very popular dish with the Japanese,” said Keiko, although she could not imagine ever eating a morsel of anything that smelled this way. “We’re not… silly about ‘eat this but don’t eat that.’ And texture’s very important in our cooking. Many of our greatest delicacies have a jellied texture.”

“Is that right?” said Malcolm, stopping stirring for a moment to take this point in. “Well, the secret of a good jelly is nothing more than standing over it and skimming off the scum.” He swiped a flat, pierced ladle up in one fist and swirled it across the pan just under the bubbling surface. When he lifted it out again, it bore a mound of foam, streaked grey and brown and instantly forming a skin as it cooled. Malcolm tilted the ladle over a jug until the dollop of scum plopped in on top of what he had already gathered.

Keiko swallowed and returned her attention to the cooking pots.

“Yep,” said Malcolm, “it doesn’t matter what you make it with.” He peered into first one pot and then the other with a rapt smile on his face. He was pressed hard against the stove, his stomach jutting out and filling the gap between the cooking pots and she could see the damp on his apron front where his chest bulged over their edges into the path of the steam. He turned slightly to include her in his grin. “It makes no odds at all what you make it with. As long as you’re willing to spend the time and skim the scum.”

“And it’s a feast dish for the New Year?” she said. She was beginning to feel uneasy. Just the heat, probably. And the smell.

“That’s right.” Then he gave an unhappy laugh that ended as a sigh. “But people are starting to lose the old ways. Getting more-what did you call it?-silly about what they’ll eat and what they won’t. And here’s another thing: sometimes I think they can’t appreciate food unless it’s expensive.”

“Is hough cheap, then?” asked Keiko. “I would have thought it would be a great delicacy. If it has a whole knee bone in it.”

Malcolm nodded again, very solemn as if weighing her words carefully, and gazed down into his pans, rivulets of what might have been either sweat or condensation running over the swell of his cheeks and dropping from his jaw.

“It should be, eh? But knap bones are dirt cheap even though there’s only two to a carcass.”

“Four,” said Keiko, without thinking.

“No,” said Malcolm, still looking into the pan. “Just two.”

Hot as she was, Keiko now seemed to feel the cold of the floor in her feet, tiles over stone. “But you said beef,” she said, the cold creeping up her legs, slowly.

“No,” said Malcolm again. “I said meat. It can be beef.”

“What-what is that?” The cold was rising farther through her body, washing the thought towards her head.

He struck one of the pot edges with a dull clank, the sound driving out more of Keiko’s fading steamy stupor, forcing the knowledge up as far as her throat. “That’s beef in there right enough. But this one is a speciality of mine.” He plunged the ladle deep down into the other pot, dug it in under something, and started to lift it with both hands.

Keiko was at the end of the yard before she heard the splash of it dropping back into the pan. She tried the gate to the yard next door and was into the back of Mrs. Watson’s shop, out through the front, up her own stairs, and crouched at the kitchen windowsill just in time to see Malcolm plod into the back lane. He stood for a minute or two with his hands on his thighs craning one way and then the other, wheezing, before he turned around and ambled back through the slaughterhouse door again.