The Devil's Larder

34

WHENEVER SHE ate fish, her eyes puffed up and watered, her nostrils closed, the tissues of her mouth and throat rose like dough, damp and squashy, until she had to gawp for breath, just like a bruised and netted cod, tossed on the deck. Her skin became as mottled as cheap veal and her heart metamorphosed into a moth, flapping and scorching itself against the fevers of her ribcage. The symptoms were not fatal in a woman of her size — though sometimes children died of toxic shock from eating fish — but, obviously, she did her best to avoid seafood, to check a menu carefully, to study the ingredients of any can, to mistrust relishes and pastes, to make sure that anyone who asked her home to eat was warned well in advance. It was nine years since she’d collapsed so comically at the Cargo Restaurant in front of all her colleagues. She hadn’t realized the soup had fish in it until, before the entrée arrived, she’d flushed and paled and slipped down off her chair as if her bones had suddenly dropped into her shoes, as if she had been filleted.

So when she didn’t want to turn up at her sister’s funeral, would rather die than show her face, would rather swell to twice her size than add her small voice to the hymns, she bought herself a piece of fish for supper — two fillets of blue-water mackerel. She had them decapitated, boned and skinned in the shop. Disguised, in fact, so that she wouldn’t gag at just the sight of them. Her uncooked meal looked more like mozzarella than fish.

The flesh was yellowish and pungent in the dish — that lewd and acrid smell of fin and brine — but still it did not seem particularly hazardous. She pasted the fillets with mustard, sprinkled them with salt, baked them for half an hour, ate them in her armchair with a fresh brunette of bread, and fell asleep.

Next morning, after a night of storm-tossed dreams and nausea, she was, as she’d expected, at death’s door, scarcely strong enough to lean across from the armchair to reach the telephone. Her fingers were like woollen sausages. Her lungs were sponge. Her hot and cold sensations had reversed, so that although her hands were scorching the inside of her mouth was dry and wintry. Her lips were tingling at first, then numb. She phoned her brother’s house. She couldn’t come, she told him, not with the best will in the world. She was too weak and too distressed. Her face was twice its normal size. If only he could see how weak she was, how mournful.

He couldn’t see, but he could hear. His sister’s voice was muffled, breathless, tense. She’d have to have the benefit of his doubt.

That afternoon, after the interment, the brother and three other mourners visited her, with flowers and some fruit and a printed copy of the church service. They caught her sitting in the same armchair where she had slept, a box of tissues on her lap. Her eyes were pools of tears. Her nose was streaming and her lungs were drowned. They’d never seen her so beleaguered. They’d never seen a woman so distressed, so changed and damaged by her grief. To tell the truth, they felt ashamed to be so calm and well themselves, to be so full and scrubbed and smart while she was so reduced.

She begged them not to worry. She’d be well. She’d only got a bug, some passing thing. They ought to let her sleep in peace and, in a day or two, she’d phone to say she had recovered and could begin to come to terms with her great loss.