Free Eating Crow by Jay Rayner

to see me through,” but would nevertheless patrol our kitchens like a customs officer angling for promotion, sniffing out animal products. This infuriated me.
    One night I made her a minestrone soup using a rich veal stock as the base. I waited until she had eaten two bowlsful before telling her. She screamed and ran out the front door. I chanted “baby-cow juice, baby-cow juice” at her as she threw up into some tired rosebushes. Then I took from the oven the spare ribs I had prepared in anticipation of her departure and ate the lot.
    I took her the white bean and tomato soup in a cobalt blue pottery tureen that I had purchased especially for the occasion. She stood at the front door of her mansion block in deepest South London, where she now practiced as an aromatherapist, with her arms crossed, and said, “Why should I trust another bowl of soup from you?”
    “Because it would be bizarre for me to repeat the stunt again after nearly fifteen years.”
    “And this isn’t bizarre?”
    I shrugged and bowed my head. “You don’t have to accept my apology. I just wanted to make it. I’m really sorry. I was not respectful of your views.” I placed the tureen on her step. We both stared at it.
    I said, “Are you still a vegetarian?”
    “Yes, but I eat fish now.”
    I nodded. “I like fish.” She smiled thinly, picked up the soup, went inside, and closed the door. It was, to be honest, only a division two apology. My genuine sorrow at what I had done and relief at having atoned for it were undermined by my deep-felt hatred of vegetarians. I noticed that she was still wearing rubber shoes, although I didn’t hear them squeak. Still, I stuck a gold star on Marcia Harris’s photograph to indicate that she had been dealt with.
    For Miss Barrington I prepared a more complex dish. Ellen Barrington was our home economics teacher at Northills Secondary and I was her star pupil. She was the kind of round middle-aged woman who had always looked middle aged. She smelled just slightly of coconut—the aroma of a hair product, I think—and called every dish an “amiable attempt,” apart from mine, which were always “the genuine article.” She was unmarried and filled much of her time leading out-of-school activities, the most beloved of which was the Northills Brigade, a team of wannabe chefs who entered interschool competitions. I was, naturally, its captain. In my third year, when I was fourteen, we made it to the English finals, to be held in Birmingham, but the cook-off was scheduled to take place on the same day as a party which I was desperate not to miss because I had been told a girl who was going to be there might, quite remarkably, be willing to kiss me.
    I was so certain of my kitchen skills, and so contemptuous of them, that the final seemed a pointless reason for missing the party. The morning of the contest I went into the back garden and, when I was sure I was out of view, smashed my arm against the corner of the garden wall five or six times, until a massive, bleeding bruise marked its length. I went inside and told my mother that I had fallen over. She took me to the hospital where they said it wasn’t broken, but put it in a sling anyway. By then the school minibus had left. Without me there to cook the star turn, an almond soufflé (in which most of the sugar was replaced by marzipan whipped into cream), the team didn’t even make it into the top three. Miss Barrington was, I heard later, distraught, but she didn’t show it to me. The following Monday in school she was genuinely concerned. And I never did get a kiss.
    Miss Barrington had retired. I went to her little house in the privet-hedged, mock-Tudored suburbs, where she greeted me with a big hug. She still smelled of coconut. I had brought with me all the ingredients, and there, in her neat and scoured kitchen, with its pristine spice rack and its one-cup French press, I prepared the soufflé I had failed to make so many years before, while