A Particular Man by Glaister Lesley

Author:Glaister, Lesley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloodhound Books
Published: 2024-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

18

STARLING

Gorge rises in his throat as he stares into the greasy cavity of the goose. Inside Edgar’s slippers his toes clutch at flattened fur. The way she’s sucking in smoke as if it’s oxygen makes him queasy. She stands in front of him, too close. Is she flirting or just being natural? Think of the skin under the pyjamas. A girl’s skin, a girl’s forked body. The chair hurts the bones of his pelvis. He stands, moves away from her, goes to the stove, a massive iron thing, squats down with his back to it. The warmth presses into his spine and his hips sigh with relief. He slides further down into a froggy squat, hoping to Christ he doesn’t fart.

‘You all right down there?’ She hands down his plate with its scraps of goose, his whisky.

‘We got used to squatting or sitting cross-legged,’ he says. ‘No chairs.’ And as if to demonstrate, he sinks right down and crosses his legs, Buddha-like.

‘Golly. Yes, you see that’s just the sort of thing I want to know.’ She drags her chair closer and sits down. Her slippers are velvet, smart, red and gold. He thinks of Celia’s tatty ones. Celia the pretty fox. Lucky Horace, with her to come home to. Aida looks more like a hawk, the way she’s peering at him over her beaky nose. A hawk hovering over a shrew.

She offers him a smoke, but he shakes his head. She lights one for herself. ‘What were the rations like?’ she asks.

‘Not much… Rice, lizard…’

‘Lizard!’ she almost shrieks. ‘Lord!’

He blinks at the memory of the weevilly rice mixed with shreds of whatever they could get: snake, slug, monkey, bits of the greens some men managed to coax from the ground. Tiny amounts in their shrunken guts.

‘Eddie used to eat like a horse.’ She blows out smoke, begins to gnaw her thumbnail.

‘Fruit sometimes,’ he says, ‘the Nips gave us fruit and veg now and then, bamboo shoots. They were starved too so most things they kept. Sometimes guava, yam, jungle spinach. But in the end there was nothing but filthy rice.’ He runs his tongue round the inside of his mouth, still scarred from vitamin-deficiency ulceration.

‘Poor Eddie.’ She’s almost whispering. ‘My poor brother.’

They stay quiet for a bit. She’s hunched over her knees, hair hiding her face as she gnaws a nail. ‘Thank you,’ she mumbles. ‘I do want to know this.’ When she crosses her legs, her knees are too close to his face, and he shuffles a bit further away.

‘Your turn,’ he says. The stove is like a warm body behind him. Did Edgar ever sit like this, on the floor, feeling this same warmth against his spine? He liked the kitchen he said, he liked Linda, the housekeeper. The starved cat curls into his lap, its purr a warm buzz against his bones. He strokes its triangular head, feeds it a shred of goose. It licks the grease from his fingers, tongue rough, purr loud. Aida stays quiet, unusual for her.

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