von Andrea Tallarita (Copyright)
When I first went to University, I didn’t get a place on Campus. I was one of the unlucky ones, those unheard-of minorities, you know, that always appear on papers as statistics. I didn’t get accomodation (allegedly because someone lost my paperwork, although the way my memory works, I’m wondering if I ever sent it at all), so a whole mess happened with my parents getting comprehensibly enraged, and me getting worried and stressed and all the rest, until we sort of sorted out something through a friend of ours in London. She knew a person who knew another person who didn’t mind sharing his house with me.
I moved in around the last third of September, when my course started. It was a bit of a wrecky house, to be fair – looked like the place hadn’t been restructured much since the war, and it was kind of darkish, but why should I have cared? First year of university! Things are just getting out to a new beginning! First time living alone! I went through my mother’s weeping goodbyes and all and said goodbye, feeling a very singular mixture of happiness and sadness, and began getting sorted with university life and all that it implied. Lots of paperwork at first, then lots of lectures, meeting people, getting into societies, doing sports, and so on so forth.
It was a pretty heavy period timewise, although in retrospect, I can see I enjoyed it immensely, and returning to the house at the end of the day wasn’t all that bad despite the place’s squallor. It was, as I said, a darkish house, due to its few windows and their crap positioning, and most of what you saw was in shades of lamplight-yellow, hospital blue or swampy green. Even the furniture wasn’t exactly ideal and the house’s heating wasn’t great (I dreamt I was in Stalingrad, once, and woke up with my fingers and toes completely frigid – that’s when I began going to sleep like I was planning to go to Siberia, with heavy clothes et all).
But I didn’t mind, really. It was just a temporary accomodation. Besides, Paul, the guy with whom I was sharing the house, was a nice guy. He was thin like he’d just come out of a concentration camp, though not pale enough to fit the stereotype of the Polish Jew. He had sparse, thin, balding hair, which resisted in a transparent sheet over his scalp, and blue, watery eyes with lots of skin around them, occasionally bloodshot. He was an all right guy, although his tendency to wear old and shabby clothes, coupled with his thinness, made him look tragically poor. Which he wasn’t, that I know of.
The house wasn’t all bad, what’s more. For one thing, it was cheap. Although its distance from the university implied a moderate expenditure on transport, the overall price was less than what I’d have paid at a shared house or on campus. And the neighbourhood was really quiet. Quiet and peaceful. Except for the cold, I used to sleep like God had come over and slapped me on the head, and said “Sleep, You!”
Anyway, as the course got going, Paul wasn’t really at the top of my attention list. I began working hard, I got lots to read, and I had lots to write too, as the course came in a nice bang-coupling with the creative writing society to keep my fingers and my mind working.
When I first went to University, I didn’t get a place on Campus. I was one of the unlucky ones, those unheard-of minorities, you know, that always appear on papers as statistics. I didn’t get accomodation (allegedly because someone lost my paperwork, although the way my memory works, I’m wondering if I ever sent it at all), so a whole mess happened with my parents getting comprehensibly enraged, and me getting worried and stressed and all the rest, until we sort of sorted out something through a friend of ours in London. She knew a person who knew another person who didn’t mind sharing his house with me.
I moved in around the last third of September, when my course started. It was a bit of a wrecky house, to be fair – looked like the place hadn’t been restructured much since the war, and it was kind of darkish, but why should I have cared? First year of university! Things are just getting out to a new beginning! First time living alone! I went through my mother’s weeping goodbyes and all and said goodbye, feeling a very singular mixture of happiness and sadness, and began getting sorted with university life and all that it implied. Lots of paperwork at first, then lots of lectures, meeting people, getting into societies, doing sports, and so on so forth.
It was a pretty heavy period timewise, although in retrospect, I can see I enjoyed it immensely, and returning to the house at the end of the day wasn’t all that bad despite the place’s squallor. It was, as I said, a darkish house, due to its few windows and their crap positioning, and most of what you saw was in shades of lamplight-yellow, hospital blue or swampy green. Even the furniture wasn’t exactly ideal and the house’s heating wasn’t great (I dreamt I was in Stalingrad, once, and woke up with my fingers and toes completely frigid – that’s when I began going to sleep like I was planning to go to Siberia, with heavy clothes et all).
But I didn’t mind, really. It was just a temporary accomodation. Besides, Paul, the guy with whom I was sharing the house, was a nice guy. He was thin like he’d just come out of a concentration camp, though not pale enough to fit the stereotype of the Polish Jew. He had sparse, thin, balding hair, which resisted in a transparent sheet over his scalp, and blue, watery eyes with lots of skin around them, occasionally bloodshot. He was an all right guy, although his tendency to wear old and shabby clothes, coupled with his thinness, made him look tragically poor. Which he wasn’t, that I know of.
The house wasn’t all bad, what’s more. For one thing, it was cheap. Although its distance from the university implied a moderate expenditure on transport, the overall price was less than what I’d have paid at a shared house or on campus. And the neighbourhood was really quiet. Quiet and peaceful. Except for the cold, I used to sleep like God had come over and slapped me on the head, and said “Sleep, You!”
Anyway, as the course got going, Paul wasn’t really at the top of my attention list. I began working hard, I got lots to read, and I had lots to write too, as the course came in a nice bang-coupling with the creative writing society to keep my fingers and my mind working.
It was after three weeks, I think, that Paul first brought me over to the Northern Seal. The Northern Seal was an inn, or a restaurant, whichever way you want to call it, which was just at the corner of our house. The place was fantastic; Paul had invited me over to give me a rest from my work, as I’d just passed through a vein-draining week, and I think I fell in love with it right away. From outside it was a mere wooden building, with that typical style that modern restaurants and pubs tend to have, of trying to look old while stuffing the whole place with lanterns and neon insignias. They basically just build a hut in wood like it came out of the middle-ages or out of an Asterix & Obelix comic, and then, even those rare times when it actually does look old-fashioned, they cram it with flashy pink or blue letters.
That was what the Northern Seal was on the outside. On the inside -
It was a new dimension. You had to take a few steps downwards to get into the main eating area, so you had no windows. The place was lit by some lamps, but in great part by actual, authentic fire-light, from many torches, some candles, and one immense fire-place. The warm reds and oranges of the place were exactly that kind of comfortable introduction you’d expect from the country-side or something, and it blended perfectly with the deafening brawl that overwhelmed you as soon as you got in. It was a rustic environment. The tables, the chairs, the cutlery, the wooden glasses, the bottles – everything seemed to have been perfected so as to make you believe you’d entered a tale by Tolkien.
But it was not a rustic environment of the “vulgar” kind. Not that I’m some kind of élitist, I don’t have problems with places of these kind, but I know that some people do, and I can assure you, this was not that kind of place. I’ve never experienced an atmosphere as contagious as that which pervaded the Northern Seal. Normally I feel shyish when entering noisy places as a newcomer, but here all you had to was walk in, and pow – you felt like dancing to Irish folksongs all night. I mean, it was unbelievable.
What really made of the Northern Seal a special place, however, was the food. That’s the least you’d expect out of a restaurant, of course, but the food I used to eat there was something special. It was mainly meat; roasted, boiled, grilled, salted, with wine, with sauce x and sauce y, with mustard, with vegetables, it came under every form and shape. I’d eaten meat in Spain, in the past, and Italian meat too isn’t exactly a thing to be joked about, but nothing matched this. The sheer taste of that stuff goes beyond my capacities of communication. You just pressed the stuff in your mouth and it seemed to melt, you’d chew it and it would be so juicy and tender and tasty – Christ. I don’t even want to think about it now.
Suffice it to say that the meat they served in that place was more than excellent. It was more than superb. It was unique. Breathtaking. I came out of there totally enthusiastic. Such an incredible restaurant! And at barely the throw of a pebble from my gate! I could even see the damn thing’s yard from my window. Better yet, it was cheap. I could have eaten there thrice a week if I had wanted to. This truly was a people’s restaurant.
As things turned out, I did end up going there more often. I began visiting the place regularly. Twice a week, then thrice, occasionally four times a week. Paul always came with me. I wasn’t the only one to think wonders of the little place.
I also began acquainting myself with Maurice Cranston, the proprietor and only runner of the restaurant. It was a small place, so no one else was needed to do the cooking, aside from a few boys working as waiters. Besides, no one would have wanted anyone else as a cook. Maurice Cranston was a small kind of man, with large arms and grizzly hair. His mouth was constantly hidden under a pair of dark moustache, and his stomach under a broad white apron. He was a strange kind of man, to be fair. I’m not sure I liked him all that much. Not that there was anything wrong with him, that he had ideas which I disliked or a look which I thought fastidious. It was just… him. He was silent beyond understanding, for one thing. He’d get done with all the formalities and stuff, and say hello and goodbye and what not, but he answered every question in as Spartan a way as humanly possible, and always looking away from you. I credited this to the fact that he received two hundred thousand questions a day on the way he cooked, and that for this reason he’d grown tired of it, but it was an unsatisfactory explanation and I knew it.
And it wasn’t only that. He also had a ghastly stare in his eyes which, the few times that he’d actually look at you to speak, would make you wish he hadn’t. And he was pale, for Chrissake. That moustached, puffy face was white like death, like all the colour had been drained some time or other. And I’m not even going to begin on the way he wouldn’t close his mouth and stand there gaping, the mouth a fissure under the hair.
It was, really, the only thing that bugged me out of what were otherwise splendid nights out. I tried to avoid it, but what the hell, these things come back at you. I managed not to care most of the time until one day I saw him extend his arm to take a plate and his shirt-sleeve slide all the way down to the elbow – his forearm was spiderwebbed with cuts the length of my index finger, deep purple and red against the white of his skin. I shuddered and went pretty pale myself, and looked away as Maurice went on talking about whatever he was talking about.
Self-inflicted? Looked like it. I wasn’t an expert, but they didn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d get in an injury. I watched him as he handled his large butcher knives, and I began massaging my forearms as if to check they were all right.
That was the last drop. I just had to ask Paul what the hell was going on with that man, and I did so on our way home. What was with all the white skin? With his silence? And, in case Paul had not noticed, with his cuts?
It wasn’t a particularly pleasant chat, but gossip tends not to be of great difficulty for most human beings, so he began.
Apparently, Maurice hadn’t always been like this. He’d been a jovial, nice sort of fellow, a long time ago. And he’d never been such a fantastic cook – he was mediocre at best. But he’d owned the Northern Seal ever since his father had left it him, and he managed it with enthusiasm, not least thanks to the support of his wife, Therese. Therese was a small, modest woman herself, with black hair and a radiant smile. She was kind and gentle, and very popular amongst the customers at the Northern Seal, where she’d cook together with her husband. They’d been a fantastic couple with a nice little business, and it didn’t take long before they decided to have a child.
Therese was declared pregnant on the 6th of March, and Maurice, as exhuberant as ever, had ran down the entire street in joy, telling everyone he met “She’s pregnant! She’s pregnant! She’s pregnant!”
Therese gave birth to a daughter, Ellie, but things did not go well. The most tragically unfortunate coincidence resulted in the poor child suffering from haemophilia while at the same time being born with a genetic mistake in her eyes. Asymettry something-or-other, I think, but what it came down to was that the baby’s eyes were immensely delicate. Not only was she likely to go blind well before the age of ten, but the tissue was impossibly easy to break. It was almost capable of collapsing on its own. This, coupled with the haemophilia, was going to mean significant chances that the child should die.
The doctors said this in as soft a way as possible, but this was no thing to be taken easily. The baby would not live. There was no way it could. But Therese, who’s simplicity of mind could not grasp the notion of a failed motherhood, resisted this with soul and body. She said that she would keep the child and do her best, and bleed herself – kill herself – to keep it alive and as healthy as possible.
Her motherhood was hell. The child would wake up at every hour of the night and of the day, screaming her throat sore for an incomprehensible pain in her eyes, and Therese – and Maurice – had nothing to do but to stay up for hours, lull the baby, try to sooth her, while she screamed and screamed and screamed. It went on for months. It went on and it was heavy – and yet perhaps it would have been possible to withstand it, had it not been for the chilling exterior effect that the combination of the child’s two misfortunes had. She couldn’t stop bleeding, and her eyes couldn’t stop getting torn apart.
As a result, the baby cried blood.
All the time the little thing would cry, she would be incessantly pouring a stream of red from her eyes – from those beautiful, large blue eyes – over her cheeks, a thin dark finger that drippled onto her neck and that would not stop for hours after hours after hours, despite all the bandages that the parents tried to put together.
All of this, all of the bloodloss, meant one thing alone: The baby was dying. Every day her little body seemed to become a little more white. Purple stains appeared on her skin at the slightest touch. She gradually lost all vitality, and began moving less and less. Even her screaming was becoming weaker.
The effects of this were too much on as simple a person as Therese. She was a normal, modest person, not a woman of steel, and she did what many would have done in her place: She began going mad. The nerve-shattering requirements of waking up at impossible hours, the knowledge of the baby’s approaching death, and those eyes incessantly bleeding red, pleading through blood, day and night, night and day…
It was obvious to all that her mind was gradually slipping away, and his husband saw this as well as everybody else.
What happened after that was somewhat unclear. The baby died, in the end, and Therese disappeared soon after that, on the 12th of December. Maurice, almost falling to folly himself, gave his soul to his business and quickly became the cook he was.
But what some people say they’ve seen – and here Paul looked at me as if he’d said “some people” only to prevent himself from saying “me” – what some people say they’ve seen, has been Maurice going down into his yard at the darkest hour of night with a shovel and a bundle of rags, and digging under the tree and depositing the rags there. That was the night before Therese disappeared. Some say it was the baby he was burying.
The story, of course, didn’t make me feel much better as far as going to the Northern Seal was concerned. Not to mention that, in what I suppose must have been the hollywood side of my mind, I was dying to ask whether anyone thought it possible that Maurice had killed the baby, instead of it dying by natural death, to stop his wife and himself from going absolutely crazy. I knew it was ridiculous, but it was just a persistent idea, of the kind that bug you all the time until you get them out of your head. I didn’t ask of course. It was way too daft an idea. Daft, that is, until the context changed.
I had kept going to the Northern Seal despite the not-so-nice story that Paul had recounted. The place was just so attractive. And the food was just so good. You can’t understand what that food is until you try it. Anyway, I was having my usual night at the Northern Seal this one time, when I felt something crunch under my teeth. I stopped chewing for a second – it was a lamb chop – and spat out whatever fragment I had bit on. It was a small, white bone in the shape of a hook. Its size was insignificant; it lay in my palm like a banana would in the middle of a large room.
How curious. What kind of bone was this? Surely it didn’t look like a lamb’s. Or was it? Did lambs have little hooks inside them? What kind of animal at all has little hooks inside it? The thing piqued my curiosity, and I tried to work out what the bone was by myself, until I thought “to hell with it” and returned my dedication to the lamb chop. But by the time I’d finished, the bone was still there on the table. I looked at it again. What on earth was it? It was just so small. Perhaps it was the kind of lamb version of those little bones we have in our ears, but how the hell would it end up in a lamb chop?…
It was one of those hateful little questions which I just knew would bugger me for the rest of my life if I didn’t find an answer, so I pocketed the bone (placing it inside my wallet so as not to lose it) and brought it to a friend of mine in the Biomedical Sciences school. The guy was a South Korean undergraduate with whom I’d shared a common friend’s party, which ended up with us exchanging e-mail addresses. I sought him through msn, then met him at the pub and gave him the little thing.
“What is it?” he asked, scrutinizing it.
“That’s what I’d like you to tell me. I found it under a bush one day, and I was wondering what kind of animal’s it could be.”
“Hm. I don’t know if I’ve got time for this.”
“If you can’t make it you can’t make it. But give it a minute if you ever meet a professor who knows something about bones.”
He didn’t seem too enthusiastic about it, but I knew I’d tickled his curiosity. I crossed him four days later, while going to the library, but he hadn’t found out anything. Then I met him after another week, and he’d found the answer.
“It’s a kitten’s,” he said, obviously proud of his discovery.
“It’s what?” I exclaimed, staring wide-eyed at the little thing in my palm.
“It’s a kitten’s nail, more accurately. Front paw. Probably no more than a few weeks old. Perhaps a month. At this age, they seldom stay away from their mother. If you found this under a bush, chances are the kitten’s death was caused by his mother’s death in the first place. Had you searched a little more, you’d have found the remains of the mother and a whole bunch of kittens.”
I didn’t bother to ask him how he’d managed to find out. I excused myself and left, headed for the closest bathrooms. They happened to be the pub’s. I went in slamming the door, almost running to the toilets, and vomited half my soul. Someone passed by, but pretended not to notice me. I knelt there, gagging, and finally got up. I went to the mirror and saw that my face was pale, and my eyes had little gray bags under them. All of my hair was standing straight on my scalp. I was about to wash my hands, when I felt something in one of them, and opening it, I noticed the kitten’s nail. I hadn’t let go of it all this time. I’d clutched it tight into my fist even as I retched into the toilet. I stared at it for a moment, my mind hollow. A kitten’s nail. Probably no more than a few weeks old. And I’d eaten it. No, worse; I’d probably eaten the entire mother and family, because I was very hungry and a kitten would not have sufficed. I had eaten… I began thinking about the kittens, I began figuring the cat family in my head, the mother, those tiny little things, the way they suckled the milk… then I began thinking about myself scrubbing all that meat off my plate like a pig, and I felt sick again.
I bent over the sink, feeling as if I could barf one more time. I saw the kitten’s nail once again and threw it down the drain.
After that, I obviously stopped going to the Northern Seal. It suddenly made sense that my road should be so silent, and that I should never see a cat or a dog in the surroundings. What disgusted me the most was that I suspected Paul and almost everyone else who went to that place knew about what was going on, and they did not care. I mean, I understand how intoxicating the atmosphere was in there and how wonderful the meat was and all, but how can you eat something when you know it’s a cat, or a dog?…
I suppose I should have done something about it, told the police or something, but I didn’t. I don’t know why. I guess I just didn’t want to get involved in other people’s business, and what with my studies and all, I had plenty of my own thoughts to take care of. Things went on quite smoothly until I spoke with a guy who lived on my street, and whom I met on the bus. He too knew the Northern Seal, and he too went there regularly. He was a fat, short guy with a blue cap that clashed horribly with his yellow jumper.
According to him, on the night of the 12th of December, one day after the baby had been buried, Therese had indeed disappeared, but not without being seen one last time. In the middle of the night she had ran into the yard, half-naked and all, crying her eyes out and screaming something along the lines of “Bastard! Murderer!” and other things of the sort, she kept repeating “You killed her! You killed her!” and would not stop. She was running in circles and crawling on the floor, occasionally stopping to dig here and there with her hands, cracking all of her nails and scraping the skin off her fingertips. It seems she disappeared right after that.
“What,” I asked, “locked up?”
“No,” he answered, trying to get some stupidly deep voice. “That’s what people said, but it was just a cover up. But we all saw it, at night. It was pouring a bloody rainstorm and it was dark like the winds of hell, but we all saw it because at that moment a flash of lightning cracked through the sky and illuminated the yard like it was day.”
“Ok, ok,” I nodded, growing annoyed, “so what the hell was it you saw?”
“The guy was there. He was standing at the door, facing his wife, and he was holding a butcher’s knife the size of an axe.”
I’m not a total retard so it’s not like I even thought about believing him for a moment. I nodded and said “yeah, yeah, sure” like we all do in these situations while he insisted that it was all the truth. He swore on his mother’s soul that it was true and that precisely that night the cook’s fantastic skills in the kitchen had begun. He said he’d sliced his wife into bits and served her to his clients as beef meat. That way he had disposed of the corpse in one night and without leaving traces. I told him I wasn’t born yesterday, and as a matter of fact I almost felt like telling him to fuck off. His story was disgusting, not funny.
I left the guy and that was more or less it. For the rest of the year I never really heard of the Northern Seal again, and as I’d stopped going, the place ended up in that kind of shelf that we all have in our minds, where we keep the stuff that we don’t forget but that we never really think about. The rest of the year passed pretty nicely and were I to recall memories of my first trimester at uni, I think they’d all be happy. I was in the American Football Team and in half a ton of societies. I had a brief story with a girl called Lucy which ended by common accord. I got back my essays for that period and got a 2.1, which wasn’t bad as a way of starting the year.
All in all, it was pretty nice, and at the end of the trimester, with only two days to go before taking the plane back home for Christmas holidays, the only thing left for me was to choose which end of term party to go to. I decided to pass when Lucy invited me to follow her at a house-party, as I didn’t want thoughts of her to interfere with my having a good time, and I ended up going with a friend to some apartment full of people I hardly knew.
It was a fun night and all that. I got drunk, tried to make out with a nice-looking girl and failed miserably, and finally took a taxi home.
It was twenty to four a.m., and I was drunk beyond recognition and even more tired. I crawled all the way up the stairs to my room after fighting with the key-slot to get the thing to work, and there I began undressing without bothering to brush my teeth. Halfway through I thought “to hell with it,” and I decided to sleep with all I was wearing. I went towards the bed and was about to sink into it, when I remembered the date: It was the 12th of December.
Curiosity came into me a bit like a syringe, and I turned towards the window. That I didn’t go to sleep in the first place is my greatest regret.
The window was just next to the bed. I peered out, knowing that it gave directly onto Maurice Cranston’s yard, but it was dark like hell. The moon was drowned by black clouds, and even the lamp-posts seemed dim.
Until all of a sudden the clouds shifted away from the moon and the moonlight shone through the night like it was made of sunbeams, illuminating the whole place like it was broad day, allowing everything to be seen. And in the yard indeed was Maurice Cranston, kneeling in his underwear and night-shirt and looking pleadingly up to the sky, his face contorted into a mask of grief, he was holding an immense butcher-knife and weeping like a baby, his wrists were slit and bleeding freely into the soil, forming a puddle of tears and blood, his arms were covered in blood and black under the moonlight, he was speaking through sobs and though I was too far away to hear anything, I distinctly noticed his lips mouthing the name:
“Therese.”