Free Cooking With Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson Page A

stiffly, but not before I’ve noticed through the window the grand new panorama left by the privy’s demise. This sends me quite cheerfully to my bed of convalescence. My methods may have been a little crude but the end has been achieved – a thought that enabled even the Creator to take a day off.

13
    By the time Marta calls round next morning at ten I have long since been up and about. We Sampers bounce back. I have the piratical makings of a black eye, presumably where the edge of the hard hat caught me, and I am covered with raw scrapes and contusions as well as having a large purplish bruise beneath one armpit. But the damage is all superficial and I don’t believe any ribs are cracked after all. I also have a light headache as a reminder that I was knocked silly in the fall. Otherwise I am in fine if stiff fettle.
    ‘Gerree!’ she cries, and certainly her voice has no connection whatever with music. It goes right through your head like a bullet, leaving a track of gross tissue damage. ‘You are not bedding! Is very good. Look, I bring a break-fast. Yes. Is Voynovian food for dying.’ She produces what looks like a ball of putty wrapped in a sock. ‘Is kasha .’
    Kasha , I remember, is Russian buckwheat or bulgur or something. I associate it with that vegetarian restaurant chain in London where the bread is dark and dense, the flans look like coconut matting and flapjacks fall like paving stones to the pit of the stomach where they lie for a week fermenting. For days afterwards one’s underwear smells of silage. I raise the ball gingerly to my nose. It is covered in her fingerprints. Molasses again. And … can that be linseed oil? Maybe it really is putty.
    ‘Is very good with cream. We boil like that.’
    Ah. A sort of Voynovian haggis for terminal invalids. Just what I need.
    ‘It gives very strength to stiff body.’
    Once again I would swear there was a leer. Surely she can’t mean …? Even in Voynovia could there be such a thing as an aphrodisiac for convalescents? This woman is terrifying. I am below par this morning and before I can utter a squeak of protest she has barged to the cooker,plonked the ball in a pan of cold water and lit a burner under it. Then she opens the fridge and appears to make a scornful inventory. Eventually she picks out a pot of cream which she sniffs suspiciously. I admit that its pretty buff colour is deceptive. She is not to know that I have doctored it with cinnamon for a fabulous baked pears in cheese sauce recipe I’m perfecting.
    ‘You have no good food, Gerree,’ she says, slamming my fridge door shut. ‘Of course you are weak. You not eating food to make you strong with good meats. Is everything delicatessen food.’ This comes with real contempt.
    ‘Not enough kasha and shonka ?’ I suggest satirically.
    ‘Is right.’
    She nods vigorously and particles of this and that fall from her mop of hair. Insects? Really, it’s all too much. It isn’t right for the survivors of crashed privies to be bullied in their own kitchen. She’ll pay for this, I swear. It’s obvious that to a person with her peasant’s interior a mere gallon of garlic ice cream is like a mouthful of bread or a coffee bean: something with which to clear the palate before going on to the next dish. I shall have to devise an offering that even she will interpret as the cuisine of contempt. Cuisine mépriseur . How can we have managed without this category for so long? But for the moment I’m saved by the bell (‘below par’, ‘saved by the bell’: you can see what writing about sport heroes does to one’s style). I mean the phone rings and it is Frankie, my agent in London. Given they’re an hour behind over there it’s bright and early for him and suggests urgency.
    ‘Do you know Nanty Riah, Gerry?’
    ‘It’s an Indonesian scuba resort?’ I hazard. ‘A disease? A dish?’
    ‘He’s the founder and lead singer of Britain’s number one boy band. Freewayz. Even you must have