The Devil's Larder Read Free Page B

lunchtime stew that Anna, despite her aches and pains, had prepared for both of them.
‘These aubergines. They’re poisonous. They’ll have to go. They’re why your wrists and knees have let you down.’ They left their meal unfinished on their plates.
    Anna made adjustments to her life. She never asked her neighbour back for lunch again. The woman was too poisonous, she thought. Despite herself, she cut down on the coffee that she drank. She
ate less meat and fewer oranges. But Anna liked her aubergines too much. She was undisciplined. She meant to give them up, but when she saw them – purple, polished – in the shops, she
soon forgot about her allergy and all the damage it had caused. She scooped and cubed and wheeled until she had to use her stick out in the street as well. She grew old and frail unnecessarily.
Just a little self-restraint, a little less regard for comeliness, may well have kept her younger, quicker, straighter than her years.

9
    W HENEVER A LINER or the ferry put in to port, we’d end up at the Passenger Bar to gawp at all the trippers disembarking. Many of them would troop
into the bar for something to calm their sea-churned stomachs and steady their legs. The Passenger was the first safe place that they’d encounter between the gangways and the town. Often,
there were foreign girls whom we could tease and irritate. Sometimes there was a tourist looking for a guide, or a businessman wanting a local to translate for him, or simply someone needing two
strong arms to carry luggage to the hotels. Perhaps – as happened once before, a hundred years ago – one of the older women passengers (a German probably) would pay for sex. Their fees
would subsidize our studies.
    So we – the five of us – would leave our work and gather in the Passenger at the funnel blast of every approaching ship. We’d take the large, square table by the door, buy beer
that we could hardly afford, dine gratis on the bar’s salt-glazed, thirst-inducing snacks, and wait for prey. We had a trick to play on them.
    My colleague Victor and I had been working all year on the chemical properties of carbonated drinks. We hoped to isolate the tingling discharge on the tongue, the mild but disconcerting
pain-with-pleasure response that follows every sip of sparkling water or fizzy fruit drink or champagne, and create a sweet food coating from which the pain had been removed. Succeed and patent it,
then we’d be rich, we thought.
    We understood the mechanisms, how receptors in the mouth parried the assault of dissolved CO 2 with their defensive saliva, how legions of enzymes reacted with the sparkle to produce a
complex carbonic acid, our guilty irritant. And we had succeeded in blocking this effect with neutralizing dorzolamides. We’d tested what remained on rats and noted that our tincture, oddly,
made them sneeze. We tasted it ourselves, the merest dab on our tongues. Instead of the familiar fizz and the ambiguous shudder of pleasure, instead of the rodent sneeze, we responded with a
sudden, unearned laugh, real to the ears, but mirthless in its derivation. Every time we tested it, the outcome was the same, an involuntary reflex of laughter, independent of the will. We had
concocted the inverse of an onion, bringing emotionless joy instead of tears. We called our mixture the sternly, scientific-sounding ‘euphrosyne’, after the Muse who ‘rejoices the
heart’.
    I must blame Victor for the sin of breaking scientific protocol. He bought some snacks and coated them with fluid euphrosyne. These days, he’d be struck off the register for being so
dangerously unprofessional. But that day, as soon as we were summoned by funnel blasts, we hurried to the Passenger for our first consumer trials. Our snacks, of course, replaced the ones provided
by the bar on our table.
    Two Canadian travellers with rucksacks, young men about our own age, were easily tempted to join us. We even bought them beers and were