Be Near Me by Andrew O'Hagan

Author:Andrew O'Hagan [OHagan, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I bought the fish at a little shop in Troon. It all lay there in the window on hillocks of crushed ice—the clear-eyed perch, the pike, eels and carp, the shellfish heaped all orange and black—everything framed not like a haul from that morning's boats, not like a piece of reality standing at the centre of an actual day but like a picture of freshness invented and frozen behind glass: a still life with haggis. I took the credit card from my pocket. 'David,' my mother had said years before when she handed me the card and told me to sign the back. 'Spend whatever you have to in order to be yourself. I don't care about money.'

In the kitchen, I took out a small knife. I sliced the fish into slivers and cooked them in the pan with a dozen small onions. I crushed six cloves of garlic and noticed the clock. The voices in the next room were rising together in soft agreement, giving way to one another, allowing the room's atmosphere to expand into the music coming from the corner speakers, an attempt by Schumann at something blithe. The book was balanced on a perspex stand: Les meilleures recettes de ma pauvre mère by M. Huguenin, a first edition from 1936. I did as I was told and added the butter little by little, after the wine, and I shook the pan and watched the flame and thought of my father's meanness at games. He had that horrible habit of thinking card games were a wonderful test of human character: those evenings in Heysham, he laid the cards out like a man exposing his best instincts. I used to get nervous playing games with him. So did my mother. 'You don't keep your cards in good order,' he said. 'Tidy your cards. Then see.'

The supper was for Bishop Gerard. He sat at the table, using his hands, as usual, to weigh the words he spoke, fondling the air in front of him, shaping their rhyme and reason. He appeared to think all said things were over-said, and no sooner had he come out with something than his hands would knead the words down from their clear, high summit of expression. He would grab the words back, to leaven them, to limit their potential for damage. One imagines the little he spoke was measured well enough before he opened his mouth, but that was never the end of it: he continued to inflect those phrases with his fingers, as if it were part of the body's function, or a bishop's function, to protect the world from the motions of the mind. This was a delicate, parsimonious business, one made odd by the look of the hands themselves: in their ruddy plumpness they showed evidence of some gouging work on the part of his ancestors.

'Now, David,' he said, 'what is this you're giving us?'

'Burgundian fish stew,' I said. 'A favourite recipe. I'm afraid I'll have to insist on you all drinking the wine in the prescribed order.

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