Cover art by Luke Bright

Cover artwork, Luke Bright (Dec 2011). Litro Magazine creative designer, Luke can be contacted at designer@litro.co.uk.Similar Posts:

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Food! Glorious food … we just can’t get enough of it, especially at Christmas time – on our plates, in our dreams, and especially in our books. Every December the latest gorgeously-photographed Jamie, Nigella and Gordon cooking tomes fly off the shelves so that aspirational armchair chefs can fantasise about lavish meals – and at the same time, magazines offer tips to “help you slim into that party outfit”…

Mixed messages? You bet: this time of year might be the season of giving and goodwill, but it’s also become the season of gorging and gluttony. Well, no more: Litro’s putting you on a strict diet of good writing – no junk-food thrillers, no sugary chick-lit and definitely no recipes. Instead, we’ve got a smorgasbord of succulent stories for you to indulge in this month – and the best thing is, you know it’s good for you.

In this issue you’ll find a brilliantly disastrous pre-Christmas dinner party in our extract from Comfort and Joy, India Knight’s latest comic tour de force; Kevlin Henney’s quantum take-away in Schrödinger’s Pizza; a mother and daughter at war over curries in Muslims Eat Meat by N S R Khan, and a restaurant for the lost and broken in S J Butler’s moving, atmospheric The Flotsam Cafe.

We’re also catering for more rarefied tastes with K L Gillespie’s flash fiction Dinner Date, where a young man on a bus succumbs to fleshly yearnings of an unusual kind, and Stuart Snelson’s Tasteless, which explores the world of an obsessive food photographer striving for perfection.

And once you’ve cleaned your literary plate, there’s plenty more on the menu here on the website. Tuck in to audio fiction from Fay Franklin and Luke de Castro, involving a star chef with a guilty secret, and a noirish approach to pancake-making, as well as our online-exclusive Ones To Watch stories, featuring everything from sun-eating to sinister sweet-shops. Just don’t spoil your appetite …

Bon appetit – and have a great Christmas.

Katy Darby
Editor

December 2011

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Laura Nelson

Here he comes, my seventh honey. The others hang on hooks in one of my many spare rooms. The room is awash with blood. He looks so fine, with his Brad Pitt abs and his golden locks that hang to his shoulders. Neither he nor any of his five brothers wanted to marry me. He is the youngest of them all; it took money to persuade him, an offer of five thousand pounds. He was easily bought. He is a country boy, a farmer, destined to become a farmer himself but for fate, in the form of me, intervening.

I am standing at the castle window, watching as he pulls up in the driveway in his silver Mercedes. He steps from the car, walks down the driveway, so innocent, knocks upon my front door. The butler lets him in. The cook has prepared a fine feast for our first dinner together; pheasant with boiled new potatoes and French beans. Crème brûlée for afterwards. I grin my wolfish grin. He looks so good I could eat him.

I descend the stairs and greet him in the hallway, which is hung with portraits of my dead ancestors.

“So glad you could make it,” I say and show him to his room, our room, an ornately decorated boudoir with a circular bed featuring a control panel on the headset, the operation of which can cause the bed to sway gently from side to side or rise up or lower back down or revolve in a circular motion.

“Put your heavy suitcase down in the corner,” I say. “I shall give you a tour of the castle and its gardens.”

I show him through the castle’s many rooms, avoiding, of course, that room, the locked one. The room he shall enter eventually, but not until he is a corpse himself. For now he is fresh blood, a living, breathing hunk of meat. He oohs and aahs over the castle’s many architectural features, the large stained-glass windows, one of which depicts a crucified Christ on the cross, the crown of thorns gouging into his forehead.

He marvels at the gardens, the white garden, with its lilies and baby’s breath, roses and orchids. So pure. And the red garden. Snow and blood. The sun is setting behind the hills, spilling its rosy glow across the evening sky.

We make our way indoors; winter is coming on and there is a chill in the air, so I light the fire and we draw our chairs close in to it and I pour us a glass of port and we begin the process of becoming acquainted with one another. He is, after all, a stranger, picked from the village with the help of my butler. I have acquired, I am afraid, something of a sinister reputation among the locals; a distinct whiff of brimstone. My dark frizzy hair springs up from my head as if I have been freshly electrocuted, my eyes are so dark they may as well be black holes.

And then there are my living arrangements, high on a hill that rises up behind the village, alone, a lone she-wolf, fond of prowling the night. Then there is my taste for murder, of course, and the rumours that circulate regarding this, though nothing has yet been proved. The police are too scared to come up here. The castle is, after all, surrounded by a moat which I have filled with snapping crocodiles and should any unwanted visitor threaten to come near, I can always raise the drawbridge. This one, my new husband, is either brave or stupid or both. Greedy, perhaps, for the money although, after all, five thousand pounds is not such a great sum, not to me anyway, although I suppose it is to him.

After the port, dinner is served. He tucks in with relish, forking in large mouthfuls, slurping back his wine. I am fattening him up, like the witch in Hansel and Gretel. I shall feel his little finger to determine when the time is right. I am most looking forward to the night, when we shall retire and make the beast with two backs. I shall dig my fingernails into his shoulders, wrap my legs around his back, howl like a tortured wolf as the full moon casts its glare through the window. I quietly eat my meal, careful not to drink too much wine, though the butler keeps my husband’s glass fully topped up at all times, as instructed.

We were married last Saturday; a quiet ceremony. I myself have absolutely no friends and few living relatives, my parents having died in a car crash when I was two years old, leaving my now-dead grandparents to raise me in this castle I now inhabit. I have various living cousins and uncles and aunts and so forth, but they all think of me as creepy and weird, and although I sent out several wedding invitations, nobody replied or attended. By contrast, my husband had a plethora of friends and relatives who attended the ceremony, all full of good wishes and love, blessings for our marriage. Many of them cast me sideways glances, wary of my reputation, but happy all the same to bear witness to our union. There was a cake, three tiers high, with two dolls on top, a male and female. It was decorated with white icing and dark red cherries. We danced, my husband and I, turning in time to the music like ballerinas inside a music box when the lid is opened.

Dinner is finished. We retire to the dining room for a nightcap, a sherry. He has two. Mind yourself, love, or performance will be impaired. And then, to the boudoir, where he ravishes me five times as the bed rocks gently and then falls asleep exhausted as I trace patterns across his stomach. Such bliss I have never known.

The morning dawns. The butler brings us croissants and strawberries and champagne. We are still celebrating, after all, celebrating our new love, which surrounds us like a golden cloud, a sparkle of fairy dust or a protective spell nothing can penetrate. We live, we move, inside this bubble. The world cannot touch us. We are in fairyland, up high, up here on this hill, above the common horde of humanity, above the rabble. In the wardrobe hang a number of new shirts and trousers I have bought him. He came to me dressed as a farm boy. I shall transform him, make him over, in an image of my own choosing. When I am finished with him, he will not be ordinary, he shall be spectacular, a prince amongst men, a god. He is raw material, putty in my paws.
The two of us spend the morning roaming the hills, watching the hawks as they swoop and dive, creatures of prey, at home on the air currents.

“I rather fancy that I would like to be a hawk,” I say.

“Lady Hawk,” he murmurs, slipping his arm through mine. “My Lady Hawke. Milady.”

I give a small curtsey, for I am a lady after all, despite my appetite for men’s blood; I was raised to have the best of manners, the finest of clothing, the freshest foods. Raised like a princess in a tower; a tower that at times felt more like a prison. Yes, there is a stench of the penitential about me. I am something that deserves to be set free, yet who holds the key? This man, this boy, with his country air and his ungentrified ways? Will he be the one to unlock, just as he has already defrocked me? Set me free to soar on the breeze, higher and higher, a kite whose string has been snipped? Perhaps, perhaps, we shall see.

And so the time passes, though differently up here than it does down at ground level, for the air is finer, more rarefied. My castle is its own time zone. If so desired, I can stop the grandfather clock that sits in the hallway, freeze time, so that we spin up here in eternity, immortals. We make love frequently, we stuff our bellies, we wander up hills and down dales. My beloved seems happy here, with me, and why should he not be? Have I not, after all, rescued him from a life of poverty and despair? Who else would he have married? Some little farm girl with her hair in plaits and her smocked frock, some Heidi or Sophie or Hannah who liked to dosie-doe at the fair of a Saturday? No, he is better off with me. His days are numbered. So are mine.

Today his relatives visit. They are in awe of my castle, my power, my wealth, but I, I do not lord it over them. They come to the door, I welcome them in, dish them up freshly-baked treats, cookies and scones with fresh dollops of cream and jam, and tea, of course, Earl Grey. An English tea. I chat congenially, hiding my sharpened fangs; I am expert in small talk. I can see that I am beginning to allay some of their fears, but then the little girl, the nosey one, Elisabeth, I believe she is called, runs away mid-English tea and goes snooping around the castle and discovers the locked room. She returns downstairs, saying, “What’s in that locked room, what’s in there? Can I have the key, please?”

Fortunately I have my wits about me.

“That’s where I keep my sword collection,” I say. “Most of the blades are made from the finest Sheffield steel. And then we have my pièce de résistance, a Hattori Hanso sword that glistens like a diamond. And nosey little girls will come to no good.”

I mime a sword slashing through the air, Zorro-style. She cowers and hides behind her mother.

“I believe it’s time for us to leave,” says her father and they swiftly make their exit. There will be talk now, speculation about what really lies behind that locked door. They will whisper amongst themselves like the wind rustling in dry leaves. They will not leave it alone, they will come for me, they will bash down the door and discover the awful truth and that will be the end of me, my demise. I must act quickly or I will be doomed. They will sneak in at night, catching me off-guard, before I have time to raise the drawbridge in order to keep them out.

His time draws near. I can feel it in my waters, the time for him to join the others, the dead ones with their staring glassy eyes and their cold fingers like thin sausages and their lank greasy hair, matted with blood.

But O, mercy grips me! I cannot bring myself to thrust the dagger into his chest, for he is mine, and too fine to be murdered like the rest, to join that bloody horde who sojourn in that locked room. He will not join the dead tonight.

This one I shall keep forever, or at least until they make their way back here, full of bloodthirsty vengeance, hoping to make me pay for my many crimes. Until that day, may God keep me safe from harm, up here, in this highest and loneliest of towers. Hear my voice as I sing my song, echoing out across the valley, a love song, a lonesome song, the wail of a banshee on a moonless night.

Laura Solomon

Laura Solomon’s published books include: Black Light, Nothing Lasting, Alternative Medicine, An Imitation of Life, Instant Messages, Hilary and David, In Vitro and the e-book Vera Magpie. Forthcoming works include: The Theory of Networks, Operating Systems and The Shingle Bar Taniwha and other stories. She has won prizes in Bridport, Edwin Morgan, Ware Poets, Willesden Herald, Mere Literary Festival and Essex Poetry Festival competitions. She won the Proverse Prize in 2009 and was short-listed for the Virginia Prize. Her current main publisher is Proverse Hong Kong (proversepublishing.com).

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India Knight

Comfort & Joy is published by Penguin, £7.99 paperback

It’s December 23rd, and Carla and husband Sam are hosting a pre-Christmas dinner party. Guests include Sam’s mother Pat, silver fox Jake and his much younger girlfriend Tamsin, man-hungry but hopeless Hope, and smug Tim and Sophie, parents of their daughter’s schoolfriend.

“We make our own yogurt,” says Tim, quite slurrily, from across the table. “Well, Soph does.”

“Why?” says Tamsin.

“Why do I make yogurt? Well, you know – it’s nice to be self-sufficient, even if it’s only yogurt and bread and growing a few vegetables,” Sophie says. “It’s empowering. And the children love it. Tim and I are great gourmets, you see.” She pronounces the word with a strong French accent. “We really mind about what we eat. We mind passionately. And the kids eat everything we do.”

“Yeah,” says Tim, rather pointlessly. “They do.” He’s quite red, old Timboleeno. He’s drunk.

“That’s great,” I say, which it is.

“My boys were the same,” Pat says. “They ate everything we did. Chips, mostly.”

She hoots with laughter, but I can see Sam practically twitching at the direction the conversation has taken. He is, to all effects and purposes, middle class these days, and he has no issues with most of the aspects of middle-class existence – niggles, yes, but nothing that really tips him over the edge. Except for this one thing: there is a certain kind of approach to eating that sends him absolutely round the bend and that, to him, works as perfect shorthand for everything that is vomit-makingly wanky about the social class he now finds himself occupying. Triggers include: people who say ‘leaves’ instead of salad (see also ‘fizz’, ‘vino’ and every permutation thereof ); people who extol the virtues of X or Y cheese for more than one minute, particularly where they say ‘chèvre’ instead of ‘goat’s cheese’ or specify the variety – sourdough, baguette, focaccia – instead of just saying ‘have some bread’; people who have ninety-five different kinds of vinegar but never the one that you’d want on your chips; people who call chips ‘frites’; people who won’t drink tap water, or – worse – people who will only drink one brand of bottled, because they only like the taste of that one; people with ‘allergies’ who are really on diets; people who order offmenu in restaurants; and any kind of over-thought-out, over-fussy arrangement on a plate. He can’t stand wine bores, on the basis that nobody normal can tell the difference between a £10 and a £20 bottle of wine, ergo they’re just pretending to, like the bourgeois ponces they are. His particular bugbear is people who make too much of the fact that their children are omnivores.

Once, in Italy, we were sitting in a restaurant next to an English couple – overconfident, entitled-seeming, red with sunburn, foghorn voices booming over everyone else’s conversation – who said to their toddler, “Try it, darling, for num-nums. It’s called Parmigiano. Par-meegee-ah-no. That’s right! Come on, try it. You’ll like it. It’s only a tiny bit stronger than Grana Padano, and you loved that, didn’t you? And do you remember the name of the greens you liked yesterday?”

“Puntarelle,” the child said.

Sam grabbed the table, his knuckles white like in a story, and started swearing under his breath – “Get me away from the c**ts, Clara, or kill me. Just kill me.” He’s so good-natured normally that it was quite amusing to see, and I wasn’t as incensed by the display as he was – actually I was rather impressed with the baby’s command of language. But I know what Sam means: there comes a point, with foodie-ism, where you think, “These people are just fetishists,” especially when they see food as the echt signifier of class and social place. There’s a certain kind of eating that basically says, “This is what we do, because we are special and unlike the herd. We are not proles. We make pesto out of ferns and acorns: that’s how evolved we are.” Sometimes we both pine for the days of casseroles and fondue sets, which were a great deal easier to get your head around when you were eating at someone’s house than having to admire people’s perfect, fantastically elaborate recreations of restaurant food – and not just any old restaurant, but ‘fine dining’, if you please. Besides, as Sam points out, he developed his own athlete’s body on a childhood diet of potatoes, tinned food, salad cream and fluorescent fizzy drinks.

“Wouldn’t eat this, though.” Tim points out helpfully. “Spicy. Hot. Hot and spicy.” He leers at Hope as he says this. I silently push the water jug in his direction, trying to catch Hope’s eye, only to find that she’s just as blotto as he is.

“Nice curry,” says Jake. “Quite authentic. I lived in India, you know. For a couple of years, back in the sixties. Man, what a country. What a place.”

“I didn’t know that,” says Tamsin, smiling at him. “How cool. You’ve done such cool stuff, Jake.”

“I know,” says Jake. I suppose when you get to his stage – he must be in his late sixties, though we’ve never been given a straight answer to the question of his exact age – there isn’t much point in modesty or self-deprecation. “I’m rock ‘n’ roll, baby.” This is also true: he is wearing leather trousers, for starters. They’re quite nice, as it happens. Worn in, not all stiff, a description that could, from what I hear, also apply to Jake.

“We should go,” Jake says, putting his hand on Tam’s thigh. “To India. Me, you and Cassie. Take her out of school for a bit. Let her travel. See the world.”

“Broadens the mind,” says Pat, who has travelled to England, Greece (once, with us), Calais and to the bits of Spain where you can get a Full English.

“Exactly, Pat,” says Jake. “Broadens the mind. Very good for children.”

Pat beams at him. “India!” she says. “It’s that far away. Mind, you’d have to watch out for the monkeys.”

“How long would you take your daughter out of school for?” This is, of course, Sophie.

“I don’t know – what do you think, Jake? Three months or so?”

“Three months,” nods Jake. “And if we liked it we could stay longer. Or move on somewhere. Go with the flow, you know.” He is beaming too now, his lined, weathered face split into a leathery, trouser-matching grin. Have I mentioned Jake’s teeth? He has the most improbable gnashers, a full set of crazy, blindingly white, immaculate veneers, purchased at vast expense and a great deal of discomfort shortly after he met Tamsin. It’s like a bathroom showroom every time he smiles – white porcelain as far as the eye can see.

“Three months!” says Sophie.

“No point going for less,” says Jake. “Maybe we should go for longer, Tam. Maybe we should go for, like, a year. Hang out.”

“Cassie’ll turn into a little monkey herself, so she will,” says Pat fondly. “A little brown monkey, like a whatchamacallit, a gibbon.”

I’m not sure I entirely love the juxtaposition of Indian people and monkeys, but I know from long experience that this is a losing battle. There aren’t any brown or black people where Pat comes from, and she marvels every time she takes Maisy to school with me at the multiculturalism on display. Or, as she puts it, the number of ‘darkies’. We had our first row about this, many aeons ago. “Don’t mind me,” Pat had said. “I don’t mean any harm.” And she doesn’t. However.

“I don’t think gibbons are little brown monkeys,” says Tamsin.

“What are the wee brown ones called?” Pat asks.

“Marmosets?” Sophie suggests, looking confused by the turn the conversation has taken.

“No,” Pat says, frowning. “Ah, come on, the wee brown ones. Agile, like. They always remind me,” Pat starts, chuckling affectionately, “of Clara’s friend …”

“Sam!’ I shout across the table in despair. “Sam. Darling. Please.” I flick my eyes to Pat.

“So,” Sam says, bang on cue. “Who’s coming to see my show on the 27th? I’ve offered you all tickets, right?”

“He was a lovely wee dancer when he was a boy,” Pat says to nobody in particular, her mind having – mercifully – wandered away from primates. She takes a genteel sip of her vodka and lemonade. “Loved it. Absolutely loved it. His da and I used to joke that he was a pansy, didn’t we? Oops,” she laughs. “Not a pansy. Oh, it’s that hard to keep up with how you talk in this house. What would you say – a gay? We used to think he was a gay.”

“So you did,” says Sam. “And I’ve always thought you’d secretly like it if I had been.”

“Ooh yes,” says Pat, nodding violently. “I’d have loved it. Well, not then – I’d have been that ashamed. I wouldn’t have been able to show my face. Oh, I’d have died. It was bad enough having to take you to dance classes – I used to cry about it sometimes. The shame, you know.” Sam rolls his eyes, having heard this all his life, though the other people round the table look mildly astonished. “But I’d love it now. Like in Sex and the City! All the gays. Oh, they have fun, don’t they? They have great fun. They’re that colourful.”

“Do you know anyone gay, Pat?” asks Tamsin.

“No, my darling, I don’t,” Pat says, looking pretty cut up about it. And then, seamlessly, “You’d like a gay, wouldn’t you?” she asks Sophie. “One of your kiddies. I can tell. A wee mammy’s boy. A wee gay dote.”

“I …” says Sophie. “Good Lord, what an extraordinary thing to say. I wouldn’t mind a … gay. A gay child. I wouldn’t mind at all. But that’s not to say …”

“Aye,” Pat says. “I knew it. For company.” As I was saying, Pat occasionally has piercingly acute flashes of insight. This particular one has the welcome effect of temporarily silencing Sophie. Tim, meanwhile, is now howling with laughter – an oddly feminine sound – at something Hope, whose breasts are falling out of her dress, has said, and I feel the first twinge of pity for Sophie. The horrible truth of the matter is, you can home-make all the yogurt you want, but it’s not going to stop your husband’s eye wandering.

“Have we finished eating?” asks Jake. “Because I think it’s time for a little smoke. A little doobie. A little blow. Mind if I skin up, Clara?”

I don’t know what’s happened to my supper.

India Knight

India Knight was born in in 1965. She is the author of two novels for adults, My Life on a Plate and Don’t You Want Me?, a non-fiction collection of essays The Shops, and a book for children called The Baby. India also writes a column for the Sunday Times, alongside other newspapers and magazines. She lives in London E8 and is a mother of three.Similar Posts:

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S J Butler

She came to the sea because she had nowhere else to go. She packed one bag and walked out of the door and she just kept on going. She bought a ticket as far as the line would take her and when she got there she stepped off the train, leaving its dusty seats and gritty-eyed windows, Kasey4Con finger-written in the grime, and she walked out through the ticket barrier and the once-white-tiled underpass, past the pound stores and the pale people with tight faces who surely never saw the sea and its light from one month to the next, and she kept on going until the light, the light just opened everything out and there was the sea, as wide as her arms could stretch, as far as her eyes could see, and further. So she sat down on the pebbles and she watched it.

The sea breathed slowly in and out, grey surface smooth, almost unwrinkled, some membrane holding it tight fit to burst. Or maybe there was nothing there, she thought, nothing left to make it move; the sea had come to the edge like her because it too had nowhere left to go and then it had sat down and watched.

But she was wrong, there were tiny movements, flickers where a whip of water skipped up for a moment, white against the metal greyness, then let go of the air and fell back to the smoothness. And where it fell back into itself it became a frothiness gliding away from the sky, towards her, sheening sideways, not looking where it was going till it reached the pebbles.

She put a hand down, let it pick a pebble, felt its heft, its smoothness, the pit in one side like a hole dug out of a potato – dug out of cold solidity. She flung it overarm into the smoothness and it dropped, circles spreading out from its brief centre, and vanished, back to the sea floor beneath the water.

For the first time she felt the cold and the drizzle and she hunched into herself, knees tight against her chest, arms wrapped round them, head low into her shoulders. She wasn’t ready to go yet.

She waited for the tide to come in to her, for the edge of the sea to touch her shoes, and by the time it did the sky was darkening, a faint stain of orange on the greyness out on the horizon to the west. She pulled herself to her feet, stiff from the knobbles of the beach that had pressed itself into her. She walked along the water’s edge, pacing the tide line before turning up the steepness of the beach, pulling herself up the shingle bank. Pebbles rattled as she dislodged them, creaked where her feet crushed them together. At the top, she climbed the weed-covered concrete steps to the promenade and for the first time looked about her.

Lights glittered from the seafront shops, running out into the puddles on the pavement. A glass door opened, welcome sign swinging on its string, and an elderly couple stepped out, arm in arm, followed by the clatter of cups and spoons. She crossed the road and peered in through the steamed-up window. Yellow formica tables, cruet sets, vinegar bottles, a skinny woman thin-mouthed behind the counter, lifting and wiping under a dish of pink and white iced buns. A laminated menu sellotaped beside the door, ‘Flotsam Café’ it said, ‘Fish and chips and a cup of tea £3.50′. She went in and sat down at the table by the counter, nearest the heater on the wall, clasping her bag on her lap.

“Can I help you love?” The woman’s voice was softer than she’d braced herself for. She put her bag by her feet and closed her eyes while she waited for her food, listening to the sizzle of the boiling fat as the chips went in, and the spurt of water from the urn as the woman filled the teapot and placed the cup, clatter upon the saucer.

Heat and steam woke her, rising from the mound of fish and chips the woman had placed in front of her.

“You look frozen,” the woman said, and she nodded yes, no words coming. She seemed to have left them behind, forgotten to pack them. She smiled her thanks and began to eat.

She took her time, putting off the moment when she would have to pay and leave the warmth of the café.

“Another tea, love?” the woman suggested, and she almost said yes.

“It’s on me – there’s a couple of cups left in the pot, and I’m having one myself before I close up, so don’t you worry. We’ll share the pot.”

And the woman slid into the chair opposite and poured them both a cup, raising an eyebrow to check if she wanted milk and then sugar, and stirring them in for her.

“You look like you’ve had a hard day”, she said. “Got far to go?”

*

And that was how she came to stay in the room above the café, washing up for rent, mopping the floor, emptying the fryer, drinking tea each evening with Maureen who was on her last legs, running the place on her own these days.

Every day the same people, in and out like the tide. Tommy, shaven-headed, love and hate tattooed across thin scabbed knuckles, first at the counter every morning, calling her Miss and looking at the floor. Whispering Miss Greenhow, a tiny wren-like bundle inside her brown woollen coat, hopping from foot to foot. Tea and a biscuit, please dear, the only things she ever said. Lara, yellow-white skin and ill-bleached hair scraped tight, dark rings below her eyes. They rarely came in at the same time, and kept themselves to themselves, sitting alone at their tables, slowly drinking a single cup of tea over an afternoon, or gazing out of the window at the passers-by while a coffee grew cold in their clasped hands. Yet she felt they knew each other.

She once asked Lara where she was from, but Lara just looked back at her blankly, and in this way she began to know the rules of the Flotsam Café – everyone was welcome, and you never asked a direct question unless it was “Tea or coffee, love?” or “Milk and sugar?”.

There were other customers, of course, but most of them were visitors, come to walk on the beach in the winter wind and take photos of the fishermen and then go home, back inland. Sometimes the fishermen themselves came to pass the time of day with Maureen, solid men who stood to drink their mugs of tea by the counter, trading jokes and gossip before striding back out to the beach and their boats.

In the lull before the lunchtime trade she too would head for the beach, cutting between the net sheds and finding a line through heaps of plastic crates, rusting tractors, floats and winches to the top of the shingle to watch, if she was lucky, the boats come in.

Drawn up on the beach, the small boats’ fat bellies and stumpy sterns were foolish. But out in the surf their sides were strong, buffeting their way through to the deep water, nets hanging from the spars, the ragged black flags of the buoys flapping in the wind. And who wouldn’t want such a boat when coming home to land meant rushing at the shingle beach through the churning waves, as though fleeing a demon, aiming her bow straight at the strand – no safe harbour here – and crashing her into the pebbles, into the arms of the waiting winch boy on the stones below?

It never failed to move her, the meeting of boat and beach and the men who leapt into the water and onto the shingle, from sea to land and back.

And when the boat had been towed up across the pebbles and away from the edge she would walk along the high water line tracing the lacy fringe of flotsam that wandered along the beach, rising and falling with the winter’s tides: plastic bottles, tresses of orange and blue rope, nylon, severed tangles of bladderwrack, scatterings of strawberry blond crab shells, cork, polystyrene, masses of polystyrene always, shoes, once a lifebuoy, the name of its boat scrubbed to greyness by the sea. Hidden in amongst, slivers of timber, shaped, softened and exposed by the waves, the sand and the wind to perfect smoothness. She left the big bits. In her pocket each morsel of wood was snug in her hand as she stroked off the last particles of sand, her fingertips finding stilled growth rings, nail holes, the curves of tree fish carved by the sea. She carried them back to the café, arranged them along the windowsill, and gradually, other flotsam appeared, shards of misty glass, fishing floats, a cluster of cuttlefish bones, brought by Tommy, Miss Greenhow, Lara, those others who came to drink their tea while looking out to sea.

And so her days passed between beach and café, café and beach and the year turned. The days grew longer, and the café no longer lit the pavement when they opened the door to sluice out the floor bucket at the end of the day and to let in the fresh air and the evening light.

At night, she dreamt of sweeping in with the crunch and gurgle of the waves as they ran up the shingle, and of wriggling back down with them through the deep pebbles, seeping out and into the ocean.

As March drew on, though, the spring moon grew and shone into her bedroom window and she slept less and less. Each night the moon became more vast in the sky, the tides grew higher, and by month end she lay nightly swollen, restless and awake as the sea lapped closer and closer to the promenade wall.

Finally, on the twenty-third, the full moon rose. The spring equinox, Maureen said, the highest tide of the year, a night to put out the sandbags if the wind blew from the south.

All day she felt the moon waiting behind the clear blue sky until the sun went down, waiting to draw the sea, to lift it up and up, tighter and tighter, higher and higher. She waited too, and just before midnight, she crept down the stairs and out into the huge moon’s strange brightness.

There was complete silence. The trippers were gone, the fishermen slept. Even the sea was quiet.

She walked across the promenade, bare feet soundless, and looked out. The beach had gone, covered in a gleaming sheen of almost motionless water. The sea had come to her, silver, satin, vast. She watched it, breathing with its slow swell. After a while, a small wind rose and lifted the very edge of the water up and over the promenade, a delicate veil draping her toes as it trickled back down over the wall. The sea was quiet again. Then another gust, another net of water rising softly into the air and falling back, and again and again, a subtle rhythm, its beat building as the wind grew and the tide continued to rise, and sea began to chafe at the wall below her, rubbing against it, rushing back and forth in little sallies, as wind and the tide rose in concert, churning, broiling, a desperate mass, that built and built and in one great burst exploded over her. Water ran through her hair, her ears, her eyes, into her mouth, smothered her, and fell, rushing with a roar back over the wall.

As it drew itself up for another rush she looked along the wall and through the spray saw Miss Greenhow, quite close, standing still for once and clasping the promenade rail, her coat glistening with water droplets in the moonlight. Ten yards further on Tommy was gazing fiercely out to sea, Lara further still, perched on the curve of the wall beyond him. Behind her, and far into the distance, figure after figure stood, waiting for the waves.

S J Butler

S J Butler lives and works in East Sussex. Her first short story, The Swimmer, was published in The Warwick Review in December 2010, and then in Salt’s Best British Short Stories 2011. She blogs somewhat random stuff at underthebookshelf.blogspot.com.

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N S R Khan

The rule had always been “Eat first, complain later”.

Eileen’s cooking was like good intentions that paved the way to Hell’s Kitchen. Her kitchen. She was a diabolical cook. Not “diabolical”, as in a fond, standing family joke about burning soup. But “diabolical” as in an obdurate refusal to combine ingredients in any way that resembled human sustenance. Her cooking was not just witches’ brew. It was apocalyptic.

But as per the house rule Saleem and Sadia would eat the tripe which Eileen told them was fish, the broiled chicken with the gizzard and innards intact, her attempts at Desi cooking, “curries” drowning in coconut milk and overflowing with raisins which would offend not just any North Indian palate, but anyone with a palate at all. Contrary to the house rule, however, there was never a “later”. Never a time for Sadia to complain about her mother’s cooking.

Tension would build during each meal. Sadia’s mother’s ego was on the plate. With each reluctant mouthful Eileen felt rejection not of her food but of her very self. Pre-emptive tears would roll, like a child who thinks it will avoid a telling off if it cries before the telling off. But there never was, and never would be a telling off. Saleem may have hated his wife’s cooking, but he did love her; “Come on dearie, it’s not so bad. Every day there is an improvement.”

Sadia also hated her mother’s cooking. That was all. There were no other emotions devoted to Eileen. Packed lunches with Weetabix smeared in marmalade, not sandwiches. Crisps dipped in Marmite. Sour milk offered to her friends, “Just like lassi!” All these had done for love. As long as Sadia had been eating, her mother had been feeding her thus. No nurture, no love.

In other Pakistani households there was noise, laughter, parties, biryani, tandoori murgh, gulab jammin. But theirs was not like other Pakistani households. In theirs was Eileen and her witches’ brew. In theirs, nothing, no-one. What guests could you bring? What could you feed them? Even Eileen’s cups of tea were fraught with trauma. Her only acceptable culinary offerings were salads. Admittedly, salads well before their time: long before Jamie Oliver, Eileen injected colour and interest to her vegetable platters filled with fibre, GI foods and dried fruit. Her salads were like her; eccentric, revolutionary, out of place. And completely wasted on Saleem and Sadia. How could you feed your extended family on ghaspoos, rabbit food, as Sadia’s Uncle Mubeen, called it, “We are Muslims, we eat meat!”

Meat was a symbol of Muslim militancy. Muslims ate meat and Hindus ate grass in pre-Independence, pre-Partition India. Saleem, a student at the time, had attended a predominantly Hindu college. In the dinner hall, there was one Muslim table to every nine “‘cow worshippers’”. And if there was one thing that would offend those Ramayana boys it was the eating of large amounts of cow, of goat, of lamb, of chicken, in every possible way, for as long as possible, and indeed, until the cows came home. Saleem and his Muslim compadres would order pound upon pound of meat to be cooked and then eaten in front of their “fellow” vegetarian students. Meat dishes, relished slowly, eaten to excess and over hours, second and then third helpings ordered, to the offence and disgust of the students on the nine other tables.

Sadia always thought this story a little suspect. Her normally gentle, tolerant father would have a partisan, parochial glint in his eye. But the story had a bitter irony. Saleem was now himself more vegetarian than anything else, surviving as they did on Eileen’s salads, supplemented, yes, by take-aways ordered from the local Bengali restaurant. But Saleem would only buy the vegetable dishes. “I hate that adulterated generic curry sauce they smear on the meat!”

Eventually the salads and the bhindi and the bhaighan bhaji from the Bengal Lancer became too much for them. And Sadia, now tall enough (using a wooden stool) to stand by the hob, began to cook. The first recipe she learnt from her father was the family tarka dhal. She realised, when she thought of it, that the recipe must have been centuries old. It was uncharacteristic of other North Indian food in that in relied on only two spices (well maybe three, if you included the chilli for its flavour rather than its heat). It was the best dhal of any that Sadia had ever tasted and would ever taste. She mastered this dish and surpassed Saleem in her abilities.

Soon, they had exhausted Saleem’s basic repertoire of peas pilau, chicken korma and keema matar. Saleem and Sadia, now ambitious in their quest for taste, ordered from Pakistan the Mrs. Beeton’s of the Indian cookery world.

The book was written in Urdu script. But this was the forbidden language. Another house rule: No Urdu in front of Eileen: “Your mother must not feel an alien in her own home.”

In most British South Asian homes parents spoke in their native tongue to their children, then were heartbroken to hear the reply in English.

“Beta, kuch khana chahiye?”

“No, mum, I do not want any food. Leave me alone.”

In their house, no gentle mother to offer food. No mother tongue. Sadia hungered for anything that separated her from Eileen. Spoke to her father vigorously and often in his native tongue, only for him to reply in English, “Sadia! English, please! But yes, I will help you with your homework.”

Urdu and all things Pakistani became their dirty secret. Saleem took her every Saturday to the mosque for Quran class. Eileen was told Sadia was attending the Brownies. Saleem even purchased a uniform to reinforce the lie. And on Sunday he would dutifully accompany his wife to her po-faced, albeit well-meaning, ecumenical church; pulling the reluctant Sadia at his side. She sat at the pews, holding the hymn books, hating the rows of grey-haired pious women who were her mother’s friends.

Saleem’s family questioned why Eileen had not converted. He argued that Islam allows a Muslim man to marry a woman of the Book. And Eileen was oh so of the Christian book! No-one could fault her religious and charitable credentials. He reassured his brother Mubeen, “Don’t worry, Sadia is being brought up as a Muslim. Nothing else matters.”

And yes, Sadia each morning offered her prayers on her janamaz, kissing the Quran. And then hid the prayer rug and the holy book far from her mother’s crying eyes. Her father’s excuses, ever present: “Sadia, your mother is a very gentle woman. We do not want to exclude her in her own home.”

So that she would not feel “excluded” Saleem encouraged Eileen to practice her faith as she felt best. Each Thursday evening and Sunday afternoon Eileen would invite her church members for a pot-luck dinner; the luck being that it was Sadia and Saleem who cooked. Cooked for the predominantly vegetarian congregation. Saleem innovated with vegetable pilaus and dishes with paneer. Admittedly, Eileen would also contribute one of her legendary salads.

Sadia wondered how it was possible for vegetarians to eat with such rude gusto. Slurping dhal and fragrant rices: “Oh Saleem, no one can make a curry like you. You are so clever!”

“Sady, can you top up the plate of sauce?”

And Sadia would begin to explain that her name was S-A-D-I-A not … “Don’t worry darling,” Saleem would caution, “All that is important is that you know who you are.” She did. But did her mother?

One summer, Saleem had an unexpected bereavement trip to Pakistan. Sadia and Eileen were alone together for two uncomfortable weeks. The first Saturday, after Saleem’s departure, Eileen asked Sadia if she could cook for her an English breakfast. With bacon and black pudding, “You know what I’m like with frying.”

“Mummy, I don’t eat pork. I can’t touch it. I’m a Muslim.”

As Eileen unpacked the devil’s meat; “Don’t be silly Sadia, you’re not like them. Your father doesn’t want all that for you.”

The stench of bacon hung around the kitchen for weeks, long after Saleem’s return. Neither he nor Sadia spoke of it.

As years went by, Saleem and Sadia continued to excel on the Desi cooking front. But they were continually defeated by chapattis. Cooking chapattis cannot be learnt from a book, and this was long before the days of YouTube. Saleem’s sister, Tahira, was summoned from Pakistan.

She was delighted by the invitation. Eileen was the thief who had stolen Saleem from home. Sadia was a soul to be saved. Tahira was also disgusted by Eileen’s apparent domestic failures. “Come, Eileen Bhabi, I will teach you as well as Sadia.”

Sadia sat at the kitchen table opposite the hob, watching Tahira.

“Look closely, Sadia, at what I am doing. Maybe when I am gone you can help your Mammi?” Tahira put the gas on, placed the dome-shaped cast iron tava over it. She formed a dough ball, flattened it, then rolled it thin. Beat it out in her hands, making the comforting flapping noise of dough on floury skin. It became, bigger, thinner, rounder, beautiful.

“Now Eileen Bhabi, you put the roti on the tava when it is hot enough.”

With one hand Tahira held the uncooked chapatti. With the other she took Eileen’s. Held it for a second, then placed it on the tava.

“But you must first see that it is really hot enough,” nodding her head for emphasis, pressing Eileen’s hand, flat down, on the burning cast iron dome.

Before the scream, before the tears, before the realisation of the assault, in that second, before the sky was rent with Eileen’s pain; in that one second, Tahira held Sadia’s gaze. There was the slightest, tiniest, nod of heads. Aunt and niece in agreement. Although a second later they would both rush in with sympathy and Savlon, neither truly felt sympathy, guilt, compassion. Neither cared. Sadia’s only wish was that Tahira would take her back to Pakistan, far away from Eileen’s tears. Her only consolation was that Eileen suffered mild post-traumatic stress disorder at the very mention of Indian breads thereafter.

Sadia finally left instead to go to university. Eileen encouraged her with “See Sadia, if your father was properly Muslim he would not have let you leave home to study.”

Sadia’s missing her father was trumped by her loathing of vegetarian cuisine. Her visits home were infrequent and truncated. She always attempted to avoid the bi-weekly prayer and pot-lucks. She had grown intolerant of “Oh Sady, don’t you look sweet in your Asian pyjama suits? Not really you though.”

Until she noticed a certain hesitancy in her father’s step. A joking, “Oh Sadia, I feel as I may be in the departure lounge.”

And then, oddest of all, the relaxation of the no-Urdu rule. Requests for Sadia to read the Quran to him, (in her terrible anglicised Arabic accent) and a desire for Urdu poetry; the ghazals of his youth.

Sadia found herself reading Islamic texts for what must be done when a Muslim dies (not that they, Saleem and her, ever spoke of death):

The body to be washed by the nearest male relative. What male relatives? All gone in Pakistan, no relatives here. All driven away by salads and saag.

The community to bear the body, to bury. The community being a gathering of Muslim men. There was no community here.

Sadia wondered what to do. There was no broaching it with Saleem. His only wish was the repeated “I do not want your mother alienated. You must look after your mother. Give her everything she wants.”

It came quicker than she thought. The doctor who signed the death certificate indicated that her father had been ill for many months. Saleem must have known for a long time that his life would be over soon. Eileen looked completely lost; like that child in mother’s form, who had cried tears at meal times. Saleem and Eileen’s love had been a rare and special one. Sadia, almost, maybe, for a moment, had some heart for her.

“Mummy I’m sorry. I must phone the Imam now and the mosque mortuary. Daddy’s body needs to be washed. He must be taken to the mosque. The burial must take place soon.”

The tears, the screams, “I don’t want that! I want him here. I want him in the sitting room until we bury him. My father’s body was kept at home. No mosque, Sadia.”

That afternoon, Saleem’s body was taken and embalmed by the Co-op funeral directors. They returned him the next day to reside in a coffin in the sitting room, until he was buried almost a week later. The only friends informed of his death were her mother’s prayer group. They all agreed, “It’s what your father would have wanted.”

His funeral was at least secular rather than Christian. Sadia couldn’t even call Mubeen or Tahira in Pakistan, so ashamed was she of this unclean burial. They might as well have boiled Saleem in bacon.

For the wake, Sadia cleaned the house till it sparkled. Filled it with jasmine and tuberose. Burned sandalwood joss-sticks, agarbattis. Found an amp and speakers used for festival events and blasted recitations of the Quran in every room. And prepared the food.

She went to the halal butcher, confiding only in him her father’s passing. He helped her lift kilogram upon kilogram of lamb, hard hen and mincemeat into the car. The only vegetables in sight, coriander and onion; the tomatoes were, after all, truly fruits. She asked him if he knew of any recipes where you combine different types of meats in one dish. The butcher laughed and said that he would ask his wife. She ordered from him a goat’s carcass to put on a spit roast in the garden. It would be placed in its entirety, head, eyes and all, on the table later.

“Sadia,” the butcher asked, “any vegetables from the front of the shop for salad?”

“No Uncle. No salad today.”

When the funeral guests arrived every surface was covered in stainless steel dishes with meat kebabs, bhuna, lamb and chicken korma, keema mince meat: the only green, a casual garnish of coriander. Even the rice dishes were biryanis brimming with chicken and lamb. Not one dish catered for the vegetarian palate. Even fish was banned. If Sadia could have put a dead animal in the tea, she would have.

The po-faced churchgoers arrived.

“Oh Eileen, Saleem was a prince among men.”

“Oh Eileen, what a beautiful service”

“Oh Eileen”, “Oh Eileen”, “Oh Eileen”.

“Oh Sady, you must look after your mother”. “Oh Sady, you must …”

And as they proceeded to the (flesh-laden) tables “Oh, we will miss those lovely vegetable curries Saleem made for us.”

“No one could cook curry like Saleem.”

And as they took in the spread, the spit roast goat almost baa-ed at them.

“Sady” (using sharp tones, surely not appropriate when speaking to the bereaved?)

“Sady, there is nothing here we can eat. There are no vegetarian dishes.”

“I know,” was the only unapologetic reply.

It was the final year of Sadia’s degree, but Eileen showed no signs of coping with independent living. A promise to a dying father is still a promise. Muslims are enjoined to care for even the most unjust of parents. The degree could wait. The cooking could not.

Each day a different dish.

“Oh Sadia, this dhal tastes almost authentic. As good as any restaurant.”

“Yes, Mummy. Do you want a chapatti with that?”

N S R Khan

N S R Khan is of Scottish and Pakistani parentage. She was a criminal defence barrister for several years. Her first short story is published in Too Asian, not Asian Enough edited by Kavita Bhanot. A further story was performed at the South Asian Literature Festival 2011. This has been adapted for radio and will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2012.

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Stuart Snelson

In retrospect, he was surprised that it had taken her so long to leave, that she hadn’t packed the car with bare essentials, scuttled the children into the back seat and driven off years ago.

*

At dinner parties, strangers were politely delighted by his response to career enquiries. A food stylist? That sounds fascinating, they would say, before allowing him a seemingly endless opportunity to prove that it was not. He could talk at length, deliver soporific lectures, upon the best methods for depicting the potato in its manifold forms. He had found, consequently, that social engagements began to dry up.

He was a food fluffer, as some disparagingly referred to his work, a term borrowed from pornography which failed to imbue what he did with a great deal of dignity. Exclusively, he prepared and photographed food for refrigerated ready meals; had somehow generated his own niche.

At the start of his career, as he artfully arranged his inedible tableaux for their photographs, he felt he should have been doing other things, would lose afternoons assessing what had brought him to this juncture. To amuse himself he had played games within the strictures of his remit. Adopting Arcimboldo’s aesthetic, he concealed lascivious shapes within his photographs, smuggled suggestively phallic images onto the supermarket shelves. He awaited a product recall, some observant prude objecting to his culinary obscenities. He waited in vain. Had his peers in the trade noticed his subversions?

Eventually he tired of such childish interventions, applied himself wholeheartedly to his work, would attempt to exhaust the possibilities of his creative outlet. He wouldn’t be doing it for long, he conceded, so may as well make the most of the situation. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg started out together as window dressers, he eventually tired of telling people by way of explanation regarding his sidelined artistic plans. He didn’t imagine that they stuck with it for ten years though.

With the arrival of children, time started to slip away. He became attached to the role out of financial imperative – it put food on the table – and dreams of leaving to pursue a purer artistic path began to pass. He attempted to take his craft upmarket. To this end he played with composition and light, let art history inform his decisions. Throughout his life he had shown alarming levels of devotion to the most innocuous work, an all-consuming diligence completely out of proportion to the task in hand. His neglected aspirations reared their head, and a misalignment of his creative drive witnessed a focused, tunnel-visioned pursuit of excellence in the field of disposable packaging. Did he really think his work would find an appreciative audience?

As the years passed, he found himself gaining a reputation within the industry and went freelance, overseeing every element of the creative process in his own studio. He would assess the product, and then elevate it to the next level, an attempt to realise the meal’s dormant potential. For him it was a transformative process, making these stodgy convenience foods look more appealing than they actually were, whilst still reflecting, plausibly, the carton’s contents. He viewed it as akin to a makeover, in a similar vein to those people who spent small fortunes on professional studio sessions generating airbrushed enhancements to hang in the hall, portraits of someone who didn’t exist. He knew that none of these meals stood a chance of looking remotely like the highly stylised images that he created. There was an increasing disparity between the packaging and its contents. These meals would struggle to achieve palatability, let alone emulate his photographs. He thought it unlikely that purchasers would analyse in depth their meal and its representation, imagined that these were meals rarely savoured, often devoured. Cooked in three minutes, eaten in two. Convenience was all. There would be no time for comparison between scalding mouthfuls.

If customers had high expectations, they were fooling only themselves. As their meal bubbled and sighed in the microwave, through what alchemy would they anticipate banquets? Why would two piercable compartments provide them with something approaching a desirable meal? He was never told how many complaints were received, how many missives were sent bearing accusations of false advertising. Where would they find the time to lodge a complaint, these people who could only spare five minutes towards the creation of their evening meal?

*

By turns, the work slowly swallowed him whole. In supermarkets he became entranced, an unsavoury lurker in the food aisles. Upon seeing his work in situ, he would swell with pride as he noted how markedly better it was than those of his contemporaries. Through oblique techniques, he attained a glistening succulence his rivals failed to muster.

He could spend hours in the aisles assessing packaging, would lose himself in these images in the way others lost themselves in galleries. In silent contemplation he searched for nuances and idiosyncrasies in the style of others. How many other fine arts degrees were concealed behind these images of cheap cuisine? Outperforming his brief by some degree, his was a madness tolerated for the desirability of his results. Transfixed by these images, he despaired of the low-level artistry displayed by some of his peers, the point-and-shoot perfunctoriness of their images. Did they take no pride in their work?

He observed not only the packaging but people’s interaction with it; became fascinated by how choices were made. His ultimate goal was to entice the indecisive. He would often have to prevent himself from canvassing for opinion, to mingle with his public, the buyers of his work, approaching bored browsers with a series of questions, an attempt to get them to justify their purchase. His creeping presence found him on disagreeable terms with several local security staff. Was this how he would end his days, lost in rapture in the ready meal aisle, lead away by kindly medical staff as he refused to snap from his reverie?

Whilst his artistic ambitions went unfulfilled, he consoled himself with his mass audience, an exhibition of his work in every supermarket. He was perhaps the only one to look upon these boxed meals with a curatorial sensibility.

In his studio he created a small laboratory testing out different finishes and sheens. He sourced substitutes for the real ingredients, unusual replacements that photographed more convincingly, that would present them, falsely, in a more flattering light. These were not meals for human consumption. Even the ravenous would have little joy with his set-ups.

At the supermarket he graduated from obsessive browser to obsessive purchaser. He would prowl with his trolley, picking up any new additions. He bought food he never ate simply for the packaging, a car boot full of ready meals he would never consume. In the process he would throw away the unpalatable meals and preserve the cardboard sleeve they came enveloped in. Slowly he built up the dullest depository, amassed complete groupings of packaging, every supermarket given its own shelf space.

Surprising him one night at his studio, it was his wife who had, ultimately, been surprised. She had not witnessed the extent of his endeavours. As he flipped through his anodyne archive she felt sanity slipping away from him.

If he had started an ironic packaging blog perhaps his mania would have been tolerable, viewed as just another eccentric enclave of the net. Once shared and uploaded, his collection would have become interactive. Through inviting comment, his acts would seem less like madness and more part of an ongoing debate. The same endeavour, undertaken in unmonitored silence, however, seemed somehow more troubling.

What to do, upon his death, with such an amassment? Leave it perhaps to the Design Museum, an unwelcome bequest, a donation, he imagined, they would politely decline.

He was aware of the other options open to him but chose to stay within his unloved field. He would not succumb, as many had, to the lure of recipe book photography. Not for him their airbrushed concoctions, unattainable glories for the amateur’s sloppy efforts to feel inadequate beside.

Was he working towards some ineffable goal? A dream, perhaps, of some eureka moment, the pièce de résistance of food photography, customers powerless in the presence of its ravishing beauty, unknown meals dutifully deposited in baskets. To his wife, to his friends, his work seemed a waste of aesthetics.

He suspected, in the future, that all this work would be created digitally, entirely synthetic, images of ethereal food without substance. He envisaged a bank of hunched conjurors summoning pixellated platefuls.

His wife had watched as he became lost in his singular pursuit, the search for perfection in a world of transient forms. Certainly, he had had his interests, his peculiarities, when they had first met but they had not been so all-consuming. Initially she had admired his integrity, but by the time his obsession had advanced, as he began to talk, at length, of capturing the personality of carrots, the essence of broccoli, she began to question his sanity. Did others go to these lengths? She imagined not.

Is this not enough for you? she had slowly intoned, at which point an expansive fan of her hand attempted to take in all that his world encompassed. But he was already lost. Like his children, he spent mealtimes playing with, rather than eating, his food.

One night as, yet again, he worked late in his studio, she shepherded the children from the house, ushered them away from their monomaniacal father.

You need help, she had said shortly before she left. And he conceded that he might. If he was going to explore international markets, global variations, was to undertake expeditions overseas to accumulate food packaging, then he may well need help.

Stuart Snelson

Stuart Snelson is a writer and former bookseller, having worked as fiction buyer at both The Pan Bookshop and Crockatt & Powell. He is currently working on his second novel whilst trying to find a home for his debut, Drinking Up Time. He lives in London.

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K. L. Gillespie

Their eyes meet across an overcrowded bus on a rainy October night.

Heather is in her late twenties, strawberry blonde hair, chocolate brown eyes and milky, smooth skin.

Samuel is a couple of years older, dark hair, tanned skin and hungry blue eyes, just Heather’s type.

His clothes scream good catch and he isn’t wearing a wedding ring. Heather smiles to herself as she opens a book from her bag that she has no intention of reading.

Samuel can’t take his eyes off her; she is making his mouth water and by the first stop he is familiar with every curve of her body.

Heather knows he is watching her, so she lowers her eyelids coyly before looking back up and making eye contact with him again. His gaze never wavers and he looks at her hungrily.

She smiles.

He winks.

She blushes.

He licks his lips.

She is attracted to his cocksure confidence.

He is attracted to her frail vulnerability.

They are a match made in heaven, a perfect concoction.

She hopes he fancies her.

He knows he wants her.

She wonders what it would be like to be held in his arms.

He wonders if she would taste better with onion gravy or a béarnaise sauce, roasted or fried.

Her stop arrives and as she gets up to ring the bell he takes hold of her wrist. “Dinner, Friday night?” he asks.

She blushes furiously.

He swallows anxiously.

She nods.

He smiles.

The bus stops and she hands him her phone number.

K. L. Gillespie

K. L. Gillespie writes about masturbating surrealists, blind fantasists, sadomasochists – life, death, sex – lost minds, lost love and lost ways… Her work has previously been published in 3AM Magazine, TANK and The Erotic Review and her latest book, Unlost is out now.

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Kevlin Henney

“I don’t accept that you have to resort to animal experiments for explanation.”

“But no real animals are involved, let alone harmed! It’s an example to reason through, a thought experiment.”

“I don’t like your thinking. It’s unnecessary, not to mention cruel and unusual. There’s nothing reasonable about putting a cat in a box with a vial of poison and a lump of radioactive material, then wondering whether it’s dead, alive or caught in some weird zombie state between the two, further prolonging its torment by pondering the philosophical meaning of it all instead of opening the damned box and rescuing the poor cat! Thinking it is not much better. I’m sure Mr Schrödinger –”

“Professor. Professor Erwin Schrödinger.” OK, that didn’t help. Jen’s glare confirms it. The argument is slipping away from me. Not that it was supposed to be an argument.

Jen came round an hour ago for what’s becoming our ritual end of weekend wind-down. Sunday night in after Friday and Saturday – and probably Thursday – nights out … Beer, pizza, TV and my flat to ourselves.

“Nice T-shirt,” she said when I opened the front door. “What does it mean?”

Wanted Dead and Alive – Schrödinger’s Cat is a favourite of mine, and this kind of geeky T-shirt has become my trademark in the physics department. I guess Jen hadn’t seen this one before. A sure way to kill a joke is to explain it, but not explaining would be worse – apparent elitism and a sure-fire romance killer.

The discussion started out well enough. I managed to talk around subatomic particles and metaphor my way through wave functions without Jen’s eyes glazing over. Quantum mechanics is now, however, threatening the evening, having somehow picked a fight with ethics and animal rights. Beer on empty stomachs is doing little to bridge the art–science divide.

“I’m sure he could have come up with something more humane to make his point,” Jen continues.

“The fact it’s a cat is not important –”

“I disagree.”

I’m boxed in and more in need of rescue than any gedanken cat.

The doorbell goes.

“Ooh, pizza!” Jen’s mood has found new prey.

“I’ll get it.”

They’re quick tonight – I’m only halfway through my second beer. I ordered the pizza en route to the fridge for more bottles. I grab some cash, go downstairs and return, pizza in hand, as the scooter whines off into the night.

“What did you order?”

“A large one, for sharing.”

“Well, duh. What kind?”

I pause. Pick up the conversation again or let it go?

“Schrödinger’s pizza.” Clearly something within me favours the risky option. “The box is closed and you can’t tell exactly what’s inside, right? It’s pizza, and smells generically of pizza, but you can’t be sure of the topping. You’re probably wondering whether it’s got pineapple or not. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. Fifty–fifty. What’s the state of the box? Pineapple or no pineapple? Or both? Dead or alive, or dead and alive?”

I love pineapple on pizza. And the morning after, fresh from the fridge? Throw in coffee and sex and that has to be the perfect start to the day. For me. Jen prefers herbal tea and pizza without pineapple. Pizza in the morning is simply not on the radar. But the sex is good.

“If you loved me, you’d order without.”

The L-word catches me off guard. Jen hasn’t used it before. Not about us, not about me, not about anything – sex is sex, not making love. We’ve been playing around and playing along, having fun, nothing more. Just a summer thing, a summer fling. In September Jen is heading off to South America for a year and that’ll be it. We both understand that … or I’d thought so. Neither of us has actually said as much. On the outside it’s improv. But in this case I thought we were both sneakily reading from the same prepared script, nothing hidden.

“But I’m just the narrator! I’m outside the experiment.”

“No you’re not. And I’m not sure I appreciate being part of an experiment –although I guess it spares the cat … smart move.” A smile. I’m not totally out of favour.

“You said earlier that this Schrödinger paradox raises the question of observer-created realities,” Jen says. “As narrator, there’s no question: you ordered the pizza; you created the reality. You know the outcome. The pineappleyness doesn’t manifest itself one way or the other simply because I open the box.”

“In theory, but I don’t know if they got the order right. So at this point, like you, I guess I’m just an observer. The contents of the box are in a shimmering state of uncertainty, a superposition of different possibilities. Until we open the box, there’s no better description of the pizza than simultaneously topped with pineapple and without. And, if you imagine these possibilities played out across parallel universes, there’s one universe where the pizza has pineapple, another universe where it doesn’t and –”

“Don’t forget the universe where I thump you. In case you were wondering, teasing me with physics while withholding my half of the pizza, shrouding it with an air of undecided pineapple? Not a winner.”

“But at least it’s not pepperoni,” I say, trying desperately to regain favour.

A couple of weeks after the end of the summer term, the pepperoni discussion had not gone well. But I guess it had helped clarify some things. We’d been in the kitchen, having a beer, thinking about getting a takeaway or seeing if Niall, my flatmate, had left anything useful in the freezer.

The doorbell rang.

“Who’s that?” Jen asked.

“Don’t know. I wasn’t expecting anyone.”

I went downstairs to find out and came rushing back up.

“It’s a pizza delivery!”

“But we didn’t order pizza.”

“I know. It must be for one of the other flats. Hungry?” I grinned, grabbing some change.

“But it’s not ours!”

“I know. It’s probably for upstairs. And when it fails to turn up in half an hour, they’ll ring up and get the free pizza they’re entitled to for late delivery. It’s win–win!”

“Hugh, you’re bad,” she called after me as I disappeared out the flat door.

“Pepperoni!” I returned in triumph, mischievous grin on face, pizza box in hand.

“I’m vegetarian,” Jen replied.

I’d known that, but it hadn’t really registered as something I needed to care about. That was about to change. “You could pretend it was, err, fish?”

“First, I’m not going to pretend. This isn’t a case of being clever by being naughty. I’m not a vegetarian because someone else told me to be – it’s my choice. Second, vegetarians don’t eat fish.”

“Some vegetarians do. Niall says he’s vegetarian and he eats fish.”

“People who eat fish are not vegetarians. Just because some of them say they are doesn’t make it so. Mental hospitals are filled with people who claim to be Napoleon, Jesus and Elvis. Doesn’t mean they are.”

“You never know.” I smiled. Jen glared. “OK, if they’re not vegetarians and they’re not omnivores, what are they?”

“Pescetarians or fishetarians, take your pick. Anyway, I saw Niall eating bacon the other morning.”

“So what am I supposed to call him?”

“A hypocrite.”

Niall being away for the most of the summer is good for everyone.

I’m spending a lot of time in the lab at the moment, trying to get sensible results out of my current experiment. Low-temperature physics gives you easy access to helium, and where there’s helium there’s always squeaky-voiced fun to be had. The week after most undergraduates had gone home, Niall had dropped by my end of the building for mid-morning coffee and downtime.

“Hi, I’m Jen,” he squeaked. “I like Spanish, media studies, kittens and postgrads.”

Anything in a Mickey Mouse voice is funny, even jealousy. Jen standing behind him as he did this? Priceless, albeit unfortunate. Niall stumbled a high-pitched apology, a mockery that only dug him a deeper hole. Jen then suggested a sudden and intimate relationship between kittens and Niall she would be more than happy to arrange – one severely at odds with her moral stance this evening.

“Dead or alive?” I push the pizza box across the table to her.

“If it’s pineapple, you’re dead to me.”

She opens the box, smiles, leans over and kisses me. It’s an eight-slice pizza. Four with pineapple, four without.

“I love you too,” she whispers in my ear.

Kevlin Henney

Kevlin Henney writes words and code and words about code. His fiction has appeared online and on tree, including stories with New Scientist, Dr. Hurley’s Snake-Oil Cure, Fiction365, and an audio piece in Litro (Remembrance of Things Past). His writings on software development span a couple of books and many articles.

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Cover art by Luke Bright

Cover artwork, Luke Bright (Nov 2011). Litro Magazine creative designer, Luke can be contacted at designer@litro.co.uk.Similar Posts:

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