Vinegar Soup Read online

  Vinegar Soup

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Part Two

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  Copyright

  Vinegar Soup

  Miles Gibson

  And meanwhile the beautiful, the incredible world in which we live awaits our exploration, and life is short, and time flows staunchlessly, like blood from a mortal wound.

  Aldous Huxley, *Jesting Pilate*

  Part One

  Home

  1

  Hazel Pope was twelve years old when she first bared her buttocks for biscuits. It was a hot and dusty afternoon in the summer of 1958 and she had been swimming with the Butcher brothers in a pond of stale water behind the village church. The Butcher brothers, Victor and Bruno, were fat farm boys with clumsy hands and faces brown as potatoes. Victor was eight and Bruno was not quite ten when they bribed the girl to pull down her pants. They had stolen a crumpled bag of biscuits which they rattled at Hazel while they sat on her frock. For a time the girl scowled and shook her head. She was cold and frightened and angry. She crouched beneath her towel and sulked. But Bruno opened the bag and Victor pulled out a brittle star, dusted with sugar and coconut flakes. She sniffed at the star and her dark eyes shone. Her wet hair steamed in the sunlight. And there, on the bank of the pond, hidden by brambles, shivering in her vest and sandals, Hazel took the biscuit.

  The sky was empty. The church was locked. A beard of bubbles broke on the water. The girl closed her eyes and there was nothing in the world but the warmth of the sun and the taste of sugar in her mouth. She crunched the star with her small, white teeth while she felt the sweetness melt on her tongue. And the Butcher brothers squatted in silence, watching her narrow, trembling arse, as if they expected to see her fart crumbs.

  She was fifteen when she let loose her breasts for cup cakes, pushed against a pantry wall, hair wild, mouth plugged with fudge, while a boy called Arthur searched her shirt. She tried to scream but found she could only manage a sigh as she chewed on the wages of sin.

  A week after her sixteenth birthday she learned the price of brandy snaps. She was a simple, solid slab of a girl with vacant eyes and yellow hair that fell in curls against her neck. He was a small, neat man with a pencil moustache and drove the local baker’s van. She was too embarrassed to ask his name. He led her into the back of the van and set her free among the wooden trays, rooting for shortcake and macaroons. He stuffed her with sponge. He poked her with cherries. And when she was properly sugared and spiced, he peeled off her dress with his long, white hands and rolled her out like pastry.

  In 1965 she left home to live in London, serving in a flower shop and learning to type at night-school. Renting a room in a draughty attic. A plump girl with bad skin. Once a week she wrote a letter home to her mother: small pages of spidery writing composed on Sunday afternoons. Her mother replied with weekly instructions: choose flat shoes, wear warm pants, sleep for eight hours every night, eat fresh fruit, beware of men. Hazel followed her advice.

  The owner of the flower shop was a sad little Turk called Freddie Farouk. He was a fat man with a loose, grey face and ears as curly as walnuts. His shoes creaked. His bones cracked. His clothes had a smell of the coffin. His only pleasure was making funeral wreaths, elaborate hoops of doom. He could not endure the bright splash of summer flowers and the shop was draped through all the seasons in bundles of blue, black leaves that dripped with sorrow and darkness.

  Each morning, after Hazel had swept the floor and filled the buckets, stripped stems and trimmed branches, Freddie Farouk would arrive to inspect the display. He liked the poppies and corpse-white lilies, but the sight of roses distressed him, carnations depressed him and violets made him maudlin. He was a glutton for punishment. At the end of his inspection he would wrap his nose in a handkerchief, snort and wag his head. The melancholy seemed to sweat from his skin and make his collar curl.

  ‘You’re a good girl, Hazel,’ he would gasp, slapping his wrist with the handkerchief. And then he would retreat to the back of the shop and sit behind the curtain.

  Hazel worked hard among the funeral flowers. She learned to weave hearts from bunches of holly and make buttonholes for widows’ weeds. But the winter was hard and the days were dark. She couldn’t keep warm in her attic room. The shop was damp and her shoes began to leak. One afternoon she collapsed among the chrysanthemums. When Freddie Farouk discovered the girl she had drained so pale he thought she was dead. He wrapped her in his overcoat, picked the petals from her hair and squeezed her breasts as he felt for her heart. When she struggled he called a cab and sent her home.

  The next morning she had grown too weak to raise her head from the pillow. Her face was burning but her hands were blue. She lay helpless under the blankets and shivered herself to sleep. Rain crackled on the blistered ceiling. The dust in the carpet danced on the draught.

  When she woke again it was almost dark and the room was filled with lilies. Candles smoked in the twilight and through the fluttering light she saw Freddie Farouk. He was kneeling at the end of the bed with his face pressed softly against her feet.

  ‘You frightened me,’ he complained as he studied her with his watery pall-bearer’s eyes. ‘You looked so bad. I closed the shop to visit you. The landlady gave me the key.’ He stood up and wiped his nose. It seemed to upset him to such an extent that, for a little while, he could do nothing but stare at the floor as he snorted and snuffled and cleared his throat.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ croaked Hazel, struggling to speak, but the Turk waved his hand for silence.

  He walked across to the chair where Hazel had thrown her clothes, shook out her dress with a crack of his wrist and neatly sorted her underwear, paying particular attention to a little pair of lace pants which he folded in the shape of a handkerchief and absently placed in his jacket pocket.

  ‘This place is cold,’ he observed mournfully as he sniffed at the rotting pasteboard furniture. The attic room was a pyramid, the floor laid with scraps of carpet and the walls slung with pipes that boomed like drums. A window cut in one of the walls gave a view of a muddy London sky.

  ‘It’s cheap,’ she whispered. She was wearing a Fantasy Dreamgirl nightdress that was cut too tight beneath her breasts.

  ‘It’s not healthy for a young girl to live alone,’ he said as he crept towards the bed, and he licked his lips with a soft, grey tongue.

  ‘I’m not afraid,’ she whispered and drew the blanket under her chin.

  ‘You need someone to take an interest in you,’ he insisted.

  ‘I’m not lonely,’ she whimpered. ‘Sometimes the landlady cooks me a chop.’ Beneath the blanket she was struggling to pull the nightdress more securely over her knees.

  He knelt down and without warning placed a chocolate egg upon the pillow beside her head. Hazel pushed back the blanket and wiped her eyes. It was a beautiful polished egg, dark as treacle and tied with a crimson ribbon. When she pulled the ribbon the egg exploded and showered her face with sugar mice. Tiny, pink mice with silver eyes that scattered into her nightdress.

  Freddie Farouk sat on the bed, snapped the eggshell between his fingers and fed Hazel with fragments of chocolate.

  ‘What am I going to do with you?’ he murmured sadly as he brus
hed the mice from the pillow.

  Hazel tried not to think about it. She tilted back her head and closed her eyes, drugged by the flood of melting chocolate.

  ‘Poor Hazel,’ he sobbed as he slipped his hand beneath the bedclothes and searched for her feet.

  Hazel filled her mouth and listened to the old Turk weep. He wept so hard she was frightened he would do himself a mischief. He wept so long that she wanted to reach out and comfort him.

  But Freddie Farouk was already buried beneath the blanket and rummaging between her knees.

  She tried to struggle from his grasp, rolling in mice, her skin shining with the fragrant sugar. She tried to protest but her mouth had been stuffed with the demon egg. He gave a grunt as he kicked off his shoes, moaned as he fumbled with buttons, and then there was nothing but the sound of the rain, the creaking bed, an occasional trumpet of Turkish delight and Hazel blowing bubbles of chocolate.

  When Freddie Farouk had done his work he crawled from the bottom of the bed, found his shoes, collected up the lilies (a shame to waste them) and tiptoed from the room.

  ‘You’re a good girl, Hazel,’ he grieved as he limped downstairs. She never saw him again.

  The fruit of this curious encounter was a boy called Frank. At first he was no more than a question mark, a crumb of life, a tiny shrimp floating in Hazel’s vital juices. Hazel felt nothing. When the fever had passed she was too ashamed to return to the flower shop, so she found work in a supermarket filling a freezer with fish: grey blocks of Atlantic cod, hake, haddock and lobsters’ claws. She was tired but the work was hard and she hadn’t fully recovered her health. She took a tonic for the blood but somehow couldn’t stomach the taste and after breakfast sometimes she was sick. She was worried, of course, but she blamed her problem on the smell of the fish.

  Frank was the size of a kidney bean before Hazel knew she was pregnant. At first she tried to ignore the signs as if, by some feat of concentration, she could reverse the magic and flush the intruder from her system. She couldn’t believe it. She wouldn’t believe it. But her stomach grew hard and the veins rose in her breasts.

  She never forgave the little Turk but she blamed her disgrace on the chocolate egg, sugar mice and all the other sweet and sticky gobstopping trifles that had ever led her into temptation.

  The weeks turned to months and Hazel counted them. Her mother continued sending instructions, warnings and recipes for soup. But Hazel stopped writing letters home and soon the recipes were replaced with complaints. What was wrong? What was happening? Was she eating? Was she sleeping? So many questions. Her daughter tied the letters in bundles and pushed them under the bed.

  During the summer Hazel inflated until she felt ready to burst her frock. Her legs ached. Her breasts creaked. She was fat and tired and constipated. While, under her skin, Frank yawned and stretched soft bones, a wet and wrinkled goblin. During the day he floated upside down in the warm gravy, deafened by the gurgle of Hazel’s intestines. At night he anchored beneath her ribcage, eyes closed, face crumpled in concentration, anxiously trying to grow.

  August brought a cruel heat that settled on the city like fog. Hazel stopped work on the fish freezer and then lost the strength to stray from her room. She wallowed naked on the groaning bed, bloated, bewildered and drenched in sweat. Beneath the hump of her belly Frank was already complete: a savoury pudding of heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, stomach, bladder, skin and bone.

  Storms in September rattled the attic and cracked the glass in the window. Frank rolled and paddled his feet. He pushed and kicked until his head was wedged into Hazel’s pelvis and he found he couldn’t escape. Hazel crawled shivering under the blanket and tried to ignore the complaints of her prisoner. Fat, frightened and wrapped in a shrinking bag of water, Frank was fighting for his life. At the end of October he was kicking so hard that Hazel went to the hospital and begged to have him removed.

  It was a cold and wretched morning. A day fit only for funerals. She wrapped some soap in her best pyjamas and ventured from the safety of the attic. She was so big that she brushed the walls as she staggered downstairs. The streets were wet, the sky black with a blizzard of leaves. It took her a long time to walk as far as the hospital and when she arrived they tried to send her home. What was the name of her family doctor? Where were her parents? Who was the father? Without her medical history they wouldn’t touch her if she dropped down dead. Hazel was too frightened to answer questions. So she threw back her head and howled. She bellowed. She bawled. She rolled off the chair and tried to give birth on the floor.

  A doctor came running and nurses stood shouting. They carried her into an empty room and used their scissors to cut off her clothes. They pressed their ears against her belly, cleared out her bowels, bottled her urine and measured her blood.

  ‘You don’t deserve this sort of treatment,’ muttered a nurse impatiently as she scraped at Hazel with a razor.

  ‘It’s a miracle you’re both alive,’ declared a doctor, searching for Frank with his fingers.

  Hazel screamed. The pain spread and burned through to her bones. Is this how it was going to end? Had God planned creation to disembowel women? She screamed again. The ritual slaughter of innocence. She screamed until she fainted and fled back to the Butcher brothers twisting like trout through their pond of green water. Standing naked in the long grass. Bare buttocks. Broken biscuits. Shaking crumbs in her clenched fist.

  The pain continued. At midnight, in a glare of light, surrounded by strangers, for the first and last time in her life, a man opened Hazel’s legs without closing her mouth on a lump of sugar. Frank’s world was collapsing around his ears. He tried to resist the slippery slope but nothing could save him. An hour before dawn he slithered on to the table in a puddle of blood and tripe. He blinked. He steamed. Then someone picked him up by the feet and slapped him around so he screamed.

  2

  Frank’s first memory was the smell of food: fried eggs, bacon, potato, hamburger, hot pies, boiled soup and good, sweet tea stewed to the strength of molasses. The smell was blue and thick as smoke, it billowed beneath the ceiling, clung to the walls and rolled in hot and heavy gusts about the floor. Frank sucked at the smell and laughed. He was sitting in a nest at the bottom of a shopping basket. The nest had been made from Hazel’s pyjamas. The basket was hidden under a table. Frank was twelve weeks old.

  Hazel had left the hospital as soon as she had found the strength to walk. The doctors had insisted that she take the child. She had called him Frank in memory of a boy she had once known who had fed her slices of marmalade cake and asked for nothing in return. The name appeared on the birth certificate but the father was marked Unknown. Hazel wanted to forget the sad, little Turk with the creaking shoes and funeral eyes. She wanted to forget Frank but Frank wouldn’t go away.

  For the first few weeks she sat in the attic with Frank held by suction against her breasts. She filled him with milk and watched him render it down to a soft, yellow turd. With his mouth open, gulping food, and the turd always hanging beneath him, Frank resembled a monstrous goldfish. Hazel nursed him but could not love him. She dreaded his tantrums and feared his silence. And sometimes, at night, he roared until he woke the house.

  ‘It doesn’t worry me what you do with your life,’ declared the landlady one night, standing at the door and peering into the grubby room. She stared in disgust at the piles of soiled linen and the purple-faced creature struggling at its mother’s breast. ‘It’s your life but I’ve got my reputation to think about. Mrs Giltrap in the room underneath has been complaining about the noise. She’s nearly seventy. She deserves to rest in peace.’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ said Hazel, forcing her thumb into Frank’s wet mouth. ‘I don’t know how to stop him.’

  ‘You should have stopped him before he was born,’ sniffed the landlady. ‘It doesn’t worry me but Mr Archer down the hall says the smell gets into his room and clings to his clothes. He says they’ve started to talk about him at the office.’<
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  ‘What can I do?’ moaned Hazel.

  ‘I’m sorry but you’ll have to make other arrangements. We can’t have infants in the house. It’s not natural.’

  ‘But I can’t sleep in the street,’ wailed Hazel.

  ‘Has it got a father?’ inquired the landlady, nodding at the bundle of misery that kicked in Hazel’s arms.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Surprise him,’ suggested the landlady and slammed the door.

  The next morning Hazel sat down and wrote to her mother. She had no work. She had no money. She wanted to come home. A week after she had posted the letter she wrapped Frank in a shopping basket together with his feeding bottle, birth certificate and a note of introduction. She carried her suitcase to the railway station. She left the shopping basket beneath a table at the Hercules Cafe.

  Frank lay in his nest and peered up at the shadows surrounding him. The smell of food had begun to evaporate. It was growing cold. There was silence. He kicked his feet and started to cry. He was tired and frightened and hungry. And then there was the sound of a woman’s voice, the shuffle of feet and a face pushed through the gloom.

  Frank stopped crying and blew a bubble of pleasure. She was a young woman with a soft, round face and hair as curly as kale. Her mouth was open and she smelt of polish and soap. For some moments they stared at each other in surprise. And then the woman whistled, snatched the scrap of paper that was pinned to the basket and carried it away to the light.

  Her name was Olive Ethel Bean. She owned the Hercules Cafe. She was thirty years old when she found Frank but already she moved like an old woman. Her knees were stiff and her feet never left the ground, so that when she walked she shuffled and dragged the soles from her shoes. Her father, Jumping Jack Bean, had died of the drink and left her the cafe for her twenty-third birthday and it was work, they said, that had worn her away. She started at dawn with the soup of the day and finished at night by scrubbing the floors. But some women are never young. Olive had been an old woman fresh from the womb. A pale and serious child who hoped for nothing and feared the worst.