Sufficient Battle

MUSIC:

The Beatles, Wild Honey Pie (The White Album)

Nick Drake, Riverman

Nick Drake, Man In a Shed

Content Warning:   (This episode is particularly disturbing. Please proceed with caution. Though its strongest content is tongue-in-cheek and metaphorically suggestive rather than realist in tone, some may still find it objectionable) 

Holocaust theme, content some listeners may find offensive (particularly as it pertains to aging and veganism themes), cannibalism theme, strong bloody horror  

Transcript

Sufficient Battle

 The meeting about department redundancies had overrun and concluded on a decidedly unconclusive note. The meeting had left Dr. Lucy Brook distressed, had left an undesired taste in her mouth and a sense of trepidation in her heart. Two members of the faculty were in their seventies. It seemed right that they should be the ones to accept redundancy packages. One septuagenarian felt eager to do so; the other (Dr. Alice Munday) was proving resistant, stubborn. It was Lucy’s responsibility to encourage Dr. Munday in the direction of voulantry redundancy, gently, forcefully. Lucy didn’t feel good about this. She was torn between feeling guilty about singling out Dr. Munday because of her age and resenting her for what affronted, irksome resistance it was her right to put up.

Not quite knowing what to do with herself but sure that she wasn’t yet ready to face her eldest, house-dwelling son- who was proving moody and difficult and demanding that particular week- she quickly crossed the main quadrangles, passing a few members of the staff and student bodies whom she recognised or knew well, and left the university in her small maroon car to make the twenty minute drive over to her mother’s bungalow in Packton-on-sea, a small East Anglian coastal town. A fork of five geese lifted from the water and flew towards the sun, over the treeline. They left behind them, in the campus pond, a little solitary grebe, submerging itself and resurfacing in the dark blue water, disappearing and reappearing in dejected alternation.    

The world had a forlorn, amber radiance about it. The semester had just begun but the year was nearing its end. For about five minutes, Lucy thought this paradox interesting and pondered it as she drove. Then she found her thoughts dominated by a particularly infuriating student. Lucy had passed her, in fact, on the way to her car. She cursed the vampiric, wearying glumness and even found herself uttering the phrase “Miserable twat”, more than once. 

On the car stereo, she began playing Five Leaves Left, Nick Drake’s debut album, (the popular rerelease for the fiftieth anniversary of his death), but found his gloominess, melodious as it was, by turns oppressive and indulgent. He must have been hell to live with. Driving the car out to the middle of nowhere until it ran out of petrol- needing to be picked up. That quote from the semi-centennial Guardian article about him had stuck with her: “I don’t like it here. [Here being his parent’s house]. But I can’t bear it anywhere else”. Little dark-haired sufferer. Lucy tried to imagine being miserable enough to want to end her life, to take thirty pills at the age of twenty-six. To her surprise, she found that she almost could. She silenced the disc. Gonna tell him all I can abou-      

In its place, she put on the radio. Radio 4. She gradually learned what the voices (both of them female) were discussing, in a plummy back and forth that was only just verging on combative. David Szalay’s latest: exactly the sort of thing the chattering classes are meant to chatter about, the kind of thing someone like Lucy was meant to take an active interest in. She felt that, as a literature professor, she should have her finger on the, so-called, pulse. 

She tried to take an active interest in the program, paying the relatively busy but steadily quietening roads what attention they demanded, but found her mind restless and uncooperative- at least as far as the radio program was concerned. The sky was already growing dark. The amber of October, of the sunset, had had such a sharp, sure promise of darkness about it. As promised, the over-eager darkness was already falling. 

Lucy thought about Dr. Munday. Spouseless, the inescapable reality was that she was facing a life of boredom, a life beyond usefulness, a life whose parameters she would only come to accept with difficulty and with no small sense of surrender and despair. Lucy could see how much Dr. Munday’s work mattered to her, how connected it was with her sense of self, her humanity. Vitality- slipping through her fingers. No-one in the department, least of all Lucy, liked to do this to her, to force her into this position. Such a foregone, forlorn conclusion…that her years made her vulnerable, not least in times of expenditure cuts like these. Lucy envisaged, a little colourfully, Dr. Munday’s last, slow traverse of the university campus. She imagined the old woman arriving home to her empty house, facing it and accepting it, in some significant way, as the new compass and extent of her world.  

Lucy’s mother, Jaqueline Brook, was eighty-eight. On the other side of bowel cancer and two strokes, she was incredibly frail. She had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s just under a year ago. Her faculties and her body had almost all completely deserted her. Lucy wasn’t at all religious but it really did seem to her like nothing was left but the soul. It shone dully out of her mother’s old, wrinkled face, and it could be felt in her hands, and in sparse, secluded islands on the skin, this very certain and profound and unapologetic tremor of life so sorrily and meekly adorned in her physical being. Jaqueline required, at last, constant supervision. Constant supervision but not constant care, because she lived a very sleepy existence and, now that the guard-rails had been installed, there was no chance of her rolling out of bed (as she had on three separate occasions). While she was asleep- which was for a great deal of the time- the on-duty carer could more or less do as she pleased (all the carers were women)- her simply being in the house was enough. But Jacqueline couldn’t be left unattended for more than very short periods of time. (She was now too fuzzy-headed even to press the panic button right by her bedside, with its enormous red label PANIC BUTTON. The word Panic and the word Button had both, apparently, shed all significance. If she could discern them at all, that is). All ablutions and eliminations required a lot of assistance, and she depended upon outside help for every ounce of her nutrition.      

            Lucy hesitated to call what her mother was currently going through a “demise”. Yes, it was the end of a life but “demise” carried too immediate, too imminent a suggestion of expiry for it to be accurate. This passage of her mother’s life was a long, long, long simmer. Eventually the flame beneath her would be extinguished and all would be still. But, despite her condition, that seemed a long way off to Lucy.   

Lucy parked her car in Packton town square. The sky was not yet dark but it was twilit a blue in which a few stars were visible. They twinkled with an almost sarcastic prettiness. Of course, stars cannot be sarcastic. Maybe they were just pretty.  

There was a noise of hoarse mirth from a nearby pub which Lucy noted but did not react to. She walked up to the closest cashpoint, a hole in the wall between a Tesco Metro and a local stationary store. The wheeze of laughter burst forth again. She cocked her head and saw the broad back of a man wearing what looked like a football shirt- the team she couldn’t identify. His head was round and bald and reddened. He was holding a pint, his sixth or seventh probably. A woman wearing a blue apron emerged from the side-gate of her house. Her apron was powdered with streaks of white, her palms were caked in clay. She was a potter. A long-haired man wearing horn-rimmed glasses, his age slightly concealed by his long beard, moved with a cool, musical, almost post-coital energy. The left of his swinging arms gripped a guitar in a case. He had headphones in. He was listening to The Grateful Dead. 

From the cashpoint, Lucy withdrew £200.00. She plucked the stack of notes (nine glossy twenties and two glossy tens- not rough and sand-papery like they used to be, and all bearing the king rather than the queen’s likeness) from the jaws of the machine. She pocketed the cash and peeled off towards her parked car, just as two vaping, near-identical peroxide blondes, (who were probably about sixteen but were trying to look twenty-three), closed in upon the cash-machine, laughing their groaning laughs and speaking in abbreviations which Dr. Lucy Brook had yet to master and probably never would.

Lucy parked on the street, outside the cul-de-sac. She let herself into her mother’s house. Donna, the most regular and most familiar of Jacqueline’s carers, was on duty. The cash Lucy had just withdrawn was for her. It wasn’t due for two days but Donna was not likely to object to receiving it early. The kitchen curtains were drawn. Donna’s presence was evidenced, with some unintentional fanfare, by her big black Lexus. Lucy wasn’t at all interested in cars but it did offend something inside her- or at least, cause something to stiffen within her- that Donna, a senior care-person, had a bigger and better car than her, a university lecturer. 

            At the threshold, before she’d quite closed the door, Lucy called out and Donna answered. (Right away she could hear the questioning murmur of Donna’s voice and the absurdly clear, almost stentorian answers and words of thanks that came from her mother. Jacqueline spoke quite seldom but when she did she did it fully, and without reserve). 

            “Hello,” Donna said.

            Donna never raised her voice. She spoke with an unchanging lowness that was almost a whisper. Her tone suggested a mixture of perpetual concern and admonishment, she spoke like she was all the time at a séance. How she was able to make herself understood to near-deaf Jaqueline was a mystery to Lucy. Lucy couldn’t tell whether it gratified or chilled her, that her mother seemed to have given up even trying to respond to a lot of what people said to her.

            Donna was a tiny woman, with a childlike physique. Most who encountered her thought she looked underweight. She had a neat crop of pony-tailed coal-black hair, and never wore clothing which would have made her seem any larger than she was. She never wore dresses- only the narrowest trousers and joggers. Outdoors, she would never wear, say, a great-coat, but little jackets and jerkins, exclusively. 

She had a firm, calm, unflappable way about her which made her seem, in general, rather lugubrious but which was, in fact, perfectly suited to medical emergencies and the panicked lamentations of the sick and helpless. Donna and Lucy’s relationship was without warmth or depth but it did have some kind of understanding or straightforwardness, some kind of connective tissue. Donna was appreciated by Lucy, rather than liked. Donna herself was chronically reserved, unknowable- how she felt about Lucy was a mystery. Outwardly, she was a woman without wit or humour or spirit. But it was the weird aura of apology about her, of daintiness to the point of pathology, which Lucy found most noticeable and most hindering in their dealings, a bit like a waitress crippled with shyness- hard work for the customer. 

Donna was incredibly pernickety when it came to money. For every penny she spent on food while Jacqueline was in her care she demanded reimbursement. She would count her money no sooner than it had changed hands.      

On Jacqueline’s plate, there were two cut-up strips of bacon, bacon of an unusually dark, deep red. It was a thing of agonising pity and heartbreak to watch her feebly and endlessly stab at pieces of meat with her fork and push them around her plate, apparently lacking the strength to penetrate them.                                           

            “Do you need some help, Jacqueline?” Donna said.

            Jacqueline did not reply for some time. Her glassy, unseeing eyes did not seem directed at anything in particular. She clucked spittle a few times and then smiled, showing her browned, undependable teeth.

            “I’m not doing sufficient battle with these…er…this….” she couldn’t name what it was she was failing to do sufficient battle with. She meant the bacon, of course. Donna intervened promptly.  

It was a surprise to Lucy that Jacqueline said such a thing. And yet it was quite characteristic of her way of speaking; it smacked of the quirky, learned formality of a different era. Lucy smiled and was about to express some of her thoughts aloud. But she didn’t. She could tell that Donna had no interest in such things. Language, words. She hadn’t heard what Jacqueline had said. She was attentive to the situation but not to what Jacqueline actually had to say.

            “Do you mean for your teeth, or for your fork, mum?” Lucy said.

            “She means her fork,” Donna deadpanned. “It’s vegan bacon, it’s not as chewy. She can chew it better than normal bacon.”

            “Oh, okay,” Lucy said, not thinking much of it. “By the way, Donna, I’ve…brought your money”. 

            “Okay.”

            Donna never used Lucy’s name. It made her way of speaking seem very shorn and cold to Lucy. 

            Lucy took the bundle of notes from her pocket and gave it to Donna. Her hands received the money cooly, with a kind of concealed thirst. 

            “Thanks ever so much,” Donna said.

            “Not at all,” Lucy said. She waited for Donna to begin leafing through the notes and was surprised when she put them in her purse without counting them and returned to helping her mother eat her dinner. 

            Lucy hadn’t eaten lunch. She was hungry and went to the fridge in search of some cheese. She knew that there was a packet of cream-crackers- (Jacob’s of course)- in the biscuit-cupboard. There was a pack of margarine on the countertop, in front of the stainless steel bread-bin. It was so shiny and polished that it doubled the margarine. From the clean, reflecting steel, twin stared at twin. 

In the fridge, Lucy discovered the vegan bacon. It was laid on top of the long, empty egg tray, a simple white box of the bacon, about as thick as a bar of chocolate, with a transparent, cellophane panel and in bold, black, bubble text, a smirking statement of fact: IT’S NOT BACON. 

Lucy discovered, with relief, a small, flat pack of Cathedral City Cheddar. But instead of the red-toned MATURE, or the black-belt EXTRA MATURE, there was a very different caveat: white lettering on a slender block of green: PLANT-BASED. She didn’t fancy that at all. Her heart sank. She had a few minor scruples about the carnivorous lifestyle but plant-based cheddar was another thing altogether. She replaced it where she took it from but didn’t close the fridge door. She kept searching, unsure what she was searching for.  

Then Lucy glanced over her shoulder at the kitchen table. There her white, wrinkled mother was, dressing-gowned, wheeled tightly up to the desk of the table, Donna beside her, patiently forking and offering up dry, cooled bits of the odd not-bacon. Lucy watched, she even darkly savoured it- as though she were witnessing something that might never be witnessed again- as her mother’s old, trembling jaws yawned open, and the ragged, slightly yellowed tongue received whatever fare was placed upon it, a kind of communicant. She continued to gaze, unnoticed in her gazing, at her mother’s blank expression, the mysteriously glazed glass of the eyes, the look of hard-won, contented indifference, indifference to such things as meat-free bacon or plant-based cheese. And yet, somewhere- though it was nothing more than the smallest, subtlest detail, it was present, in her mother’s face: an inexpressible, ineluctable, unlocatable displeasure at what was in her mouth, a dissatisfaction which she could not express but which her daughter, thankfully, could.

Lucy kept all this to herself for a while. She lingered in the warmly-lighted kitchen while it got dark outside, unsure, now that the money had been dispatched, why she was even here, in her mother’s house. Love, she supposed, though she didn’t feel it much. When Donna went to the toilet leaving Lucy briefly alone with her mother, Lucy bent and touched her nose to her mother’s scalp. She inhaled the signature lavender smell of the scalp. In so doing a kind of dominance was expressed, not just over the old woman herself but over all those who cared for her as well, all those who were not her daughter, her flesh and blood.        

“The thing is, Donna,” Lucy began, in the corridor, “mum isn’t vegan- in fact she’s actually quite keen on her meat- and…erm…I think we should respect that.” This was later, as Lucy was leaving. She would say her piece before leaving. 

            Donna thought for a minute.

            “Alright,” she said. 

            And, until the next time it happened, that was that.  

As she drove home to him, through the night, Lucy thought about her son. She was glad he had not been with her when she had discovered the fake bacon and the plant cheese. (Didn’t Breaking Bad begin with a scene about meat-free bacon? Yes it did…veggie bacon, that was it. Eat’cha veggie bacon). She was glad that her son, Adam, wasn’t with her, in a more general sense, because he could be and often was a complete monster. But she was particularly glad that he hadn’t been with her when she discovered Donna’s vegetal bacon because he could get himself so worked up about things like that. When he got into a horrible, hateful tizz about, for example, the vegan habits of someone he barely knew, she couldn’t be sure what exactly she was in the presence of. Was it monstrousness or desperation, genuine political or petty personal animus, theatricality or savagery? How evil was the little bastard? that was the million-dollar question. She often pondered what she had done wrong but could arrive at nothing convincing, let alone anything conclusive. He was obsessed with violent movies. Fictive spectacles, blood and guts. She supposed that that was alright, natural. Blood and guts are interesting.   

            She thought about the books in the bookshelves, her father’s books, most of them. For some obscure reason, she connected the books in the bookshelves with the holocaust. Education- the only thing they couldn’t take away- her step-grandmother had said. Like the books, the holocaust had been a thing her father had acquired, which had accumulated within and around him in the course of his life journey. Maybe it was, simply, the stacked, silent quantities. Her father had never seen the inside of a concentration camp but his mother had. So had his step-mother. While the woman who would later become his step-mother survived the camps, his biological mother did not. 

Lucy wondered what shrill surprises her son would have in store for her when she returned. What new obsession would he find himself in the grip of, what would that evening’s bee in the proverbial bonnet be? Lucy mentally sifted through the titles in her father’s bookcases. Novels by Updike and Atwood and Rushdie and McEwan. No Marquez. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass. A History of the Jews in Europe- (she couldn’t recall the author). Biographies of Hemmingway, Wilde, T. E. Lawrence, Eamon de Valera, and Gertrude Stein. Golda Meir, naturally. Photobooks of Canada, Isreal, Austria, Scotland. Art books. Rembrandt’s old and vivid faces; Van Gogh, naturally; Rex Whistler; the reproduced flowers, objects, places, and mindscapes of Georgia O’Keefe. No poetry, that was all in Jacqueline’s room. Auden, Spender, Isherwood, MacNeice, and every volume published in Larkin’s grumbling, hexagenerian lifetime. 

            Lucy imagined a conversation with Donna, the sort of lifeless dialogue she was sometimes forced into. Had Lucy read David Szalay’s latest, she might well have agreed with the women on the radio that the prose was spare. If she were to say “Well, Donna, the latest book by David Szalay is very economically told. The style is all bone, the prose very spare”, she conjectured that Donna probably wouldn’t understand what she meant by “spare” prose, nor would she ask. She’d grunt the bare minimum of acknowledgment and then change the subject. And why such a thing was of interest she probably had even less of a grasp, nor would she enquire. Maybe the prose style of David Szalay’s latest book really was as contemptibly tedious a subject as Donna made it seem. Except she didn’t and she hadn’t. This colloquy had not yet occurred, Lucy reminded herself.

            Driving home through the quiet, darkened world, the car headlights threw a sure, secular beam onto the road ahead. The forms she passed were vague and vacant and uncertain. In the dim blue-black, the cylinders and summits of a particular quarry she passed looked more like the turreted towers of a Medieval castle. The moon was out: a half-moon, clinically severed. She should like to be given the other half, Lucy’s mind whimsically rhapsodized, and keep it in a drawer. 

            She passed a wide wheatless field where many cattle were standing. They were standing with a withdrawn, human boredom. They did not seem to be “grazing”, Lucy thought. But, because she was driving, her look at them was only brief. It was then, just as she bore left onto the street, at the other end of which her suburban semi was located, that she thought of that not-bacon in her mother’s fridge, that she pictured the white, goading packet, (and its big black words), with a sudden soar of loathing. Meatless bacon. Silly plant cheese (that forlorn band of green with white writing). It was a new and involving occupation and she would keep intent and scrupulous watch over the situation, making sure that nothing but genuine flesh (chicken, sausages, beef, bacon) and bona fide milk and cheese and butter passed her mother’s lips. Eggs too. Actually, not butter. She preferred margarine. Healthier.  

Meatless meat and plant-based cheese did not leave Lucy’s mother’s fridge. Donna was, of course, free to consume whatever she wanted. 

But just four days later, Lucy observed Donna quite flagrantly cutting up the plant-based cheddar cheese and putting it in a sandwich for Jacqueline. Donna did this with an uncommenting expression, right in front of Lucy. While Lucy’s aged mother was present, Lucy did not say anything, so as not to embarrass Donna or undermine her authority. She was fairly certain that Jacqueline would understand nothing of what was said but still she kept quiet. Donna’s face was not readable. There was no trace of combat within it. She must have forgotten Lucy’s instructions- (hard as Lucy found this to believe. Experience had taught her that Donna forgot almost nothing). 

Lucy suffered, soundlessly, for two tortured, interminable bites of the sandwich. Her mother’s puny, shaking hands gripped the sides of sandwich with amazing softness, and her small, skinny arms lifted it to the tentative, problematic mouth with yet more tremor and difficulty. 

Unexpectedly, with unexpected haste, Lucy found it an unbearable sight, and the fact that it wasn’t real cheese, layered flatly in suspiciously smooth, synthetic-seeming yellow panels between the slices of thick white bread, made it more unbearable, made her mother’s physical acts, so bewildering and strenuous, all the more unacceptable. Lucy wanted to pick up the plate, with the sandwich on it, and hurl it at Donna. The urge mercifully fled and she motioned to Donna to join her out in the corridor. She went and Donna followed.  

            “Donna, as I’ve said, my mother is not vegan. I don’t want her being slipped vegan products without her consent.” 

            “I explained to her that the cheese was plant-based,” Donna replied.

            “I don’t think she’s really capable of being informed about such things.”

            “I felt that she understood, that when I explained she understood and that it was something she was quite willing to eat.”

            At last, Lucy reacted shortly. 

            “I don’t care, Donna. You’re not to do it again, you’re not even to ask. My mother eats dairy, and my mother eats meat. I don’t want your dietary choices, as ethical and healthy as they might be, enforced on my mother. Do you understand?” (Since her mother preferred it (and, while she was still capable of her own shopping, had bought it herself for many years), margarine was the notable exception to Lucy’s stipulations. However, Lucy neglected to mention this).

            Lucy’s sharpness went over Donna’s face like a slap. The sharpness left a stiff shock, paling and visible in the small, narrow face. 

            Lucy strode quickly over to the fridge. She opened it and the door swung open revealing the fridge’s stacked white grills and ledges. It had a salubrious, virtuous odourless-ness about, lit everywhere by that butter-coloured, refrigerator light. What Lucy discovered inside was infuriating. No milk, no eggs, no cheese, no ham. Instead, more packets of not-bacon, a pack of veggie sausages, and three little tubs, filmed and packaged, of dairy-free vegetable lasagne.

            Sure that Donna was looking, Lucy demonstratively placed a twenty-pound note on the counter. 

            “Buy some cheese, please, and some meat. Margarine’s fine because mum prefers it.” After a brief hesitation, she added, finally and truculently: “You can keep the change.”  

            Lucy gave her mother a quick kiss and left.

A week later, Lucy was in a small café, Lucia’s. It was owned and run by three Polish women, three generations: an old, ginger-haired mother, her cedar-haired daughter, and the daughter’s dark-haired daughter. None of them was named Lucia, which puzzled Lucy. Lucy had two free hours before her first class. She had only a little marking to do, and a lighter load of admin than normal. Upon arriving there, her little office had seemed to her a claustrophobic, hostile space. She had sought out this café because she liked it, preferred it to the noisy popularity and industrial toasties of Costa and Café Nero with their perpetually changing staff membership. 

While wating for a plate of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, she looked over the minutes from the previous day’s departmental meeting. But her eyes kept lifting from the bullet pointed PDF on her little phone screen. She found herself touching the tall, glass salt and white-pepper sellers with her gaze; she re-read the laminated menu and discovered that a plate of smoked salmon and scrambled eggs was actually thirteen pounds fifty, not nine pounds twenty five as she had first thought. Too much to spend on breakfast, she thought, but too late to duck out now. The eggs were sizzling in the pan. Her eyes wandered around the café, taking in the red-and-cream chequered table-cloths, old framed photographs of tram-  and trolley-bus-filled Warsaw on the walls, a wooden Catholic crucifix over the door, the slanting, weary Christ-face unusually vivid and clearly featured. Naturally, this most striking of ciphers made Lucy think of the church it represented, and of the fact that that church’s central ceremony was a kind of beautiful cannibalism, both symbolic and literal- both literally symbolic and symbolically literal. 

Lucy’s salmon and eggs arrived. The youngest woman, about her son’s age, brought them to her table. She had huge, brown eyes, a definite beauty wrapped in an unbeautiful, pock-marked skin. For a short, shameful second, Lucy imagined this young woman and her son copulating.  

            Perhaps she- rather than her mother or her mother’s mother- had cooked the eggs. They were not as smooth and runny as Lucy had hoped and expected them to be but they were still good. Lucy peppered them, the salmon strips too. This meal of golden, creamy egg and red, almost translucent fish, lay before her, artfully and straightforwardly piled on buttered toast. She ate it, steadily, and with attentive relish, rarely mixing its component parts. She ate the eggs, then the salmon she had put to the side, then the toast. Her gut filled with these spoils, spoils of the land and the sea. It was good to eat life itself. 

            Sipping the rest of her tea, her thoughts returned to the minutes. Redundancies. Dr. Munday: no progress there. Gender neutral department toilets: undesired by most of the faculty, hard to refuse on financial grounds. Newly lodged complaint by student regarding “The Displaced Person” by Flannery O’Connor: Southern gothic. Specialism of Dr. Gareth Edwards, taught as part of his Key American Authors module. Hard to replace, or displace, ironically. (Lucy had made that joke in the meeting and no-one had laughed). Complainant not a student of colour so fairly easy to ignore. Certain very vocal voices in the Student Union still feel that the curriculum needs to be decolonised: handling and discussion of the character Queequeg from Moby Dick was found to be inadequate; one student suggested that her arguments, citing and developing arguments from the Nancy Fraser book Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet were marked very unfairly and dismissively by the marker of her recent essay. The marker? Dr. Gareth Edwards. Lucy respected him immensely. He had been known, in the past, for being inappropriate around female students. Other female students, those to whom he was not attracted or who were perhaps attracted to him and felt dismayed by the disdain he was quite capable of demonstrating in his marker comments, often complained about him. If any such student ever came too close to seriously damaging Dr. Edwards’ reputation, Lucy had promised herself that she would kill them and she would eat them.          

            The bell rang and a new customer entered the café. It was a dark-skinned, thinly-bearded man wearing a feminine, flowered hat, a woman’s deep-blue great-coat, and high-heels. He was acknowledged immediately, requested a flat white, and sat. He had a languid energy about him, a voice he didn’t bother to project.

            When his beverage came he asked what sort of milk was in it. I’m vegan, he said. Can you make it with dairy-free milk? Soya, okay? Yes, that’s fine. Sure. The women of Lucia’s were, all of them, very polite. 

            How presumptuous, Lucy thought. To fail to specify your own preferences and then act like the fault isn’t with you. Wantonly draining time and resources. Of course, in this case, the figures are negligible but the figures aren’t the point! It’s the principle, the principle! She felt her anger awaken like the kraken, and arise, she thought, like a great, horned, vertical sea-beast. For a moment her anger felt very real to her. But she quickly realised that it was as silly and as insubstantial and as threatless as anything she could compare it to. She paid for her fleshy meal at the counter. As the old, ginger-haired woman returned the change, it seemed that Lucy was radiant with a satisfied glow, with the vitality of what she had consumed. And that feeling was enough to diminish all that dogged her, to diminish all those that irritated her and pity them.

The following day. Late afternoon. 

“Alice,” Lucy began to Doctor Munday. “You need to accept the redundancy package you’ve been offered. As severance pay goes you could do a lot lot worse. Not to mention your pension. The department respects you enormously and appreciates everything you’ve done. But if you don’t voluntarily take it then another redundancy will have to be made on some other basis, and we’ll probably have to accept reduced wages across the board. I could accept that for myself but I don’t want to put the rest of the staff through that- some of them have big living expenses, commuter expenses, marital money worries, er…mortgages to pay off. I’m sorry but I’m now telling you, as your superior, that this is what needs to happen.” She then added, very drily, fully aware that her comment was so facile that it could not be taken any other way except comedically: “Don’t worry. Things have a way of working themselves out.”

It was understood that the old woman was facing an existence without work, without purpose as she had understood it up until now. As she saw it, this institution had finished with her, and it had finished with her quicker than it had finished with so many others because of her age, because she was old and they were not yet old. And, of course, she knew perfectly well that she stood no chance of securing a similar position in any other British university. It came as no consolation to her that she was unwilling to up sticks anyway. 

She responded, at first, with typical steeliness. But about an hour later, Lucy discovered Dr. Munday in the staff-common room with her back to the half-open door, sobbing softly. 

At home, Lucy discovered her son on the sofa, cross-legged and catatonic in front of the television, watching something violent, typically bloody. He did not react when she entered the room, when she tried to speak to him. He didn’t react to his own name as it was sounded, as though he had forgotten that it was his. She asked him what he wanted for dinner and he only shrugged. 

            “Did you eat today?” she said, with an adjustment to her tone that told her son she wasn’t leaving without an answer. 

            “Ham sandwich,” he grunted.

            “A ham sandwich. So you did eat something?”

            “Yep. Most exciting thing that happened all day.”   

She couldn’t quite tell whether what he was watching was comical or serious. She eyed the screen, with a moment’s half-interest, as the masked figure left his latest victim bound to the chair into which she had been roped some time ago, staggered outside his cabin where a wood-cutting axe was lodged in the stump of a tree, took it up in his gloved, gorilla hands, and went back inside. She didn’t see or hear what came next. If the captive had been or was to be mutilated, decapitated, dismembered, butchered, (killed- in a word), by her beefy, masked assailant, Lucy sincerely hoped that it was for a good reason, though as what that might be she couldn’t think. She made tea. 

Through the window-glass of the kitchen door, she looked out at the dying garden, the autumnal season tardy but in evidence nonetheless. She sipped her tea in little, quickening sips. There was a contained madness in the way she sipped at her tea. She was drinking it from a particular cup, a cup from the Guinness factory  in Dublin: it showed a waddling pelican, his farcical, opened mouth full of stout-bottles, like the strangest teeth. 

Watching the wind patterns going over the grass of the garden in quick ripples and gusts, Lucy thought of her husband. She tried not to, because it caused her pain. But something in the world, something in the mood and sadness and mortal fallibility of everything around her, suggested him to her in such a way that she could not free herself from his image, from his looming memory, from red and dark thoughts of that terrible night when she had killed and cut him up and cooked and eaten him. 

            A cloud, dark but temporary, descended upon this moment of her life. For a while, she found herself caught in an unwanted shade, a darkness she could only characterise as the misery of the middle classes. Middle class misery. It was so prevalent, so ubiquitous, so rampant. Something she was aware of so acutely but from which she felt powerless to free herself. 

            And what exactly was this misery, what was its character? It was being in possession of money but never quite enough somehow; being condemned to financially support your children through much of their adulthood- some liberation or umbilical severing between parent and child that never quite seemed to happen in the way that it used; having an accent and manner that made you seem posher than you were (even though you felt just as at sea among the posh as you felt among the poor); being constantly tired and over-worked- the work fussy and fiddly; having a shared, tailored awareness of- (and fondness for)- particular books and TV series; a guilt about just about everything, what you thought about DEI, where you stood on transgender rights, what you put in your mouth…    

“I’m going over to granny’s,” Lucy said. “I need to take Donna her money.”

            “Can’t you transfer it?” her son answered. “Don’t you have banking apps?” How she hated that tone of criticism in his voice.

            “She prefers cash.”

            Sotto voce, her son muttered something, something she didn’t catch. But its acidity was undiminished even so. 

At the local cash-point, a queue had formed. She joined the back of it. She thought briefly of all the queuing during the pandemic, all the lining up, social distance. What even was the distance, she couldn’t remember. Two metres? She thought that that was probably correct. She looked at the person in front of her. She couldn’t be sure how far ahead of Lucy she was, how far Lucy was from her, from the fluffy rim of the big, back-hanging hood. The queue moved on one space. A little old man shuffled off, pocketing his notes. But the next user of the cashpoint took even longer than the little old man who had preceded her and Lucy lost patience and she left the queue. She returned to her car and thought about driving home. She was quite sure there were sausages she could fry and potatoes she could mash. 

            She sat in the front of the car, not turning the key in the ignition for some reason. With quiet glee, she envisaged surgically snipping the rubbery bonds between a string of four or five sausages, and then listening to the harsh, burning sizzle as they landed in the heated skillet and began to cook, producing a juice in which they cooked more, more flavourfully. She thought of her mother’s white, sad, pathetic agedness and it practically brought a tear to her eye. She discovered an anger, and a strength proceeding from that anger. She discovered that she was actually very curious to know whether or not her instructions were being obeyed by Donna. Donna’s sudden vegan regime was a new irritation, a new resentment which didn’t continuously gnaw at Lucy but which did have a way of creeping up on her and magnetising her mind to its green, plant-coloured prickle. She decided to make the drive over to her mother’s house in Packton-on-sea, no bank notes in her pocket or her purse. She turned the key in the ignition, and reversed out of the carpark. 

She parked the car in the street. She walked up the cul-de-sac and entered her mother’s house. It was early evening but already as dark as the middle of the night. 

            What happened next all happened very fast. Lucy walked over to the fridge on quick, scissoring legs. To Donna, instead of a greeting she offered something like: Just making sure you’re not starving my mother. Lucy’s mind was restless, it was venturing all sorts of places at speed, dwelling curtly on one subject then growing quickly dissatisfied and moving on to another. One Christmas Day, her mother had told a story at the table about her father’s step-mother. She’d stolen an extra leek- or was it a parsnip?- from the Bergen Belsen mess hall and hidden it in her drawers. She’d carried it around with her all day, while she did her digging or labouring or washing or whatever it was the Nazis had her doing in there. By the time she was on her own and able to eat the vegetable, she realised that she’d wet herself, with fear or perhaps cold. The leek- (or parsnip)- was absolutely soaked in urine.

            In the fridge, there wasn’t a square centimetre of meat, an ounce of dairy. Lucy, numb with anger, said that she was going to the toilet. She deftly lifted a knife from the magnetic knife rack on the wall. 

            She went into the bathroom and stood before the mirror. There was something about herself that she admired, something enviable which the knife she was holding helped elicit and express. She exited the bathroom and approached Donna, approached her head of kempt black hair, the pony-tail almost motionless but not quite- her back was to the corridor. Lucy’s white-haired mother was in profile, sorry and familiar in her wheelchair, peripherally blind. 

            The act took place and Lucy’s mother did not turn to witness it. She carried on chewing, oblivious. On the plate before her were blobs of hummus, a few manageable cubes of plant-based cheese, and three round water crackers.             

“You’re…you’re an evil woman,” Lucy said, the words stuck in her throat at first. She had to cough, a little forcefully, to get them out. She had wanted to say it while Donna was still alive but worried that it might jeopardise the killing, if Donna were to turn and look at her.     

            Donna lay there, bloodied and emaciated and pitiful and very evil. 

            Lucy carried her corpse to the shed where she stripped it, and then decapitated and dismembered it with an electric saw. She removed a section of calf from both legs and severed all of Donna’s fingers except the two thumbs. From the torso she cut away the tiny, dangling breasts, and removed a saucer-sized section of stomach (about an inch thick). She cut a juicy piece from the neck, too. She severed Donna’s nose for some reason, put it in her pocket. It left a horrible, nasal mess behind. 

She made some entrance wounds in the skin of the lower torso. She glimpsed the fast-fading glisten of the digestive system, but was too timid to root around in there with a knife, extract any of the internal organs. That teetotal liver might have been good, or the non-smoker lungs. (Or the vegan colon, of course). She put the neck, stomach, calves, breasts, and fingers in an old builder’s hat. She left the headless, limbless cadaver in the shed and did not return to it, she didn’t even bolt the shed door. She took the meat to the kitchen, placed it in a bowl, and put the bowl in the fridge so it wouldn’t spoil. There was a certain satisfaction to be taken from this moment. She would have liked to feed Donna to her mother, but it was a point of principle for Lucy that she did not make her confused mother eat things which she did not wish to eat. Besides, with Jacqueline's teeth being what they were, Donna would probably have been too tough for her to eat. Furthermore, Lucy wanted what little meat there was for herself. It had been so long. Too long.

            Lucy cleaned up the blood with a sponge. Her mother had no understanding of what was happening. Once or twice, as her daughter sponged up the blood from the tiles and went over the reddest patches again and again with a cleaner cloth, she looked at Lucy with poignant, half-aware tenderness. In the sink, Lucy washed the knife she had used to do the killing. Then she replaced it on the magnetic knife rack. There was a satisfying suction and it stuck, with a clunk.  

            Lucy wheeled her mother off to bed, lifted her into it, and kissed her goodnight. This did not take place quickly.

            Impunity did not interest Lucy. She no longer had any desire to kill or eat human beings with impunity. She wanted to be caught. But, somehow, she never was. As obvious as they were left, as little as she did to conceal her crimes, somehow she was never punished for them. She went back to the shed to retrieve Donna’s car-keys from her trousers only to discover that they had been on the kitchen counter the whole time.

            As a final act, Lucy fried some not-bacon. She was curious, now that she had won the argument, to taste the source of their quarrel. While it cooked, she cut a small triangle of plant-based cheese from what was left. She masticated the un-cheese and then spat it out everywhere with savage theatricality. Shreds of reviled cheese and spittle lay on the floor and table. She turned the not-bacon over in the pan but hardly understood why- since it had never been part of a real pig. She put the rasher in her mouth and chewed. She spat it out in three long, successive expectorations and blew loud raspberries. She quickly cleaned up the mess.      

            She clingfilmed the bowl of meat and carried it to Donna’s car. She got into Donna’s car and put the crude cuts of its previous owner on the front passenger seat. The car was hers now. In it, she drove home. 

Once home, she fried as much of the meat as she could stomach. She ate it, with an Argentine Malbec. Her son even had a few fingers and his mood improved. He commented on his mother’s new car and she told him that she’d purchased it from a work colleague at a very reasonably discounted price. 

            Her previous car remained in Packton-on-sea, parked outside a house a few houses down from the cul-de-sac entrance, in the moonlit street. 

Lucy went to bed early, full of wine and homo sapiens, and dropped swiftly into an exhausted, contented, tranquil, post-frenzy slumber. 

She was in her happy place, enjoying its most somnolent season, and she would not be disturbed. Donna had been due to look after Jacqueline for another two and a half days. Well rested and well fed, Dr. Lucy Brook BA, MA, PhD would willingly fill in for Donna in her absence. As to what family she had, who might come looking for her, Lucy had no idea because Donna never said.    

Lucy continued sleeping. She was not woken by the approaching sirens, by the police-cars as they cast their blue cones of emergency light, as the headlamps threw their red and white discs of illumination onto the pale walls of the living-room where her son was watching The Cook, the Thief, the Wife, and Her Lover (his favourite picture besides Silence of the Lambs). Her son sensed the assembling mob of figures, the approaching steps and voices, saw the silhouettes in the light. He cowered behind the sofa. Lucy stirred from her bed, with amazing, relaxed unhurriedness, as they broke down the door and jogged up the stairs, the officer in front calling her name at the top of his lungs.