Free There's an Egg in My Soup by Tom Galvin Page A

starving in those days.
    Vegetables were okay when you could get them. They sat in big baskets on the floor of the grocer’s shop. But in winter they were harder to come by and, as they were caked with frozen muck, it was hard to distinguish between them. They were all just brown – beetroots, potatoes, turnips, all just brown lumps. At least you could tell a carrot from its shape.
    Meat was almost always bought on the bone, which meant having to hack it up yourself. If you wanted a couple of pork chops, you were shown the full spine of a pig. You indicated how much you wanted and an axe was promptly cracked down on the bone. Coming home with half a pig’s back wrapped in newspaper does nothing for the appetite. Sawing through it with a penknife is particularly unappealing. But asking the butcher to do it for you was the greatest of all evils in Poland. The butchers, for some reason, felt they had done enough once the beast was swinging in the window. What you did with it after that was none of their business.
    Having visited all the butchers in my town, I eventually gave them separate titles, to amuse myself. There was Butcher Nice, Butcher Nasty, Butcher Nervy and, finally, Butcher Nephritis. So, here goes:
    Butcher Nice is a big, broad lump of a woman with a small but profitable business among the locals. She greets you with a smile as large as a rasher and almost always gives you a few ‘extras’, with a wink and a slygrin. I imagine that, although her trade dictates it, she weeps nightly at the slaughter of all the poor animals that go under her knife. I even suspect she keeps a pet cemetery hidden away in the orchard somewhere, memorials of all the beasts sent to the great butcher shop in the sky. She is my favourite of the quartet, and the one most likely to win an award. Although she does oblige when you ask her to cut up the meat, this is the shop with the biggest queue, so I don’t visit it as often as I would like. The word for ‘cut’ in Polish is a bit of a tongue-twister, not worth risking in front of the natives.
    By contrast – and what a contrast – comes Butcher Nasty, who works in the ‘delicatessy’ that I visit the most. This woman is to animals what Satan is to God-fearing Christians. Mean and tight and with a stare that would stop a cuckoo emerging from its clock, she cuts cold meats using a cheese-wire and a ruler. I recall one day when I wanted to buy a chicken breast, but being so nervous in her presence mistakenly asked for a chicken instead. When she came out with a whole, freshly slaughtered fowl, I apologised and pointed to the breasts sitting on the tray. The torrent of abuse I received nearly made me wet my pants with fright. I only once requested that she cut the pig’s back into chops for me, and never did so again. She wrapped them in a newspaper with the headline ‘Murder’ on one of the pages, and followed me with her eyes when I was leaving the shop.
    Next up is Butcher Nervy, who has to be watched carefully. Butcher Nervy is a schizophrenic. Although she works alone, I distinctly heard her talking to her ‘assistant’ one day when I asked for a pound of sausages. She also gave me a pile of dodgy ribs and when I brought them back she blamed her ‘assistant’, telling me she would be severely punished. The type of character that would have floated around the mind of Hitchcock, Butcher Nervy wields the knife in a callous and brutal, yet disturbingly calm, manner, hacking away at the meat like a dysfunctional schoolboy dissecting a frog. The meat she gives out tends to vary in colour when cooked – a bit like those rainbow gobstoppers you ate as a kid – and I often have guessing games as to whether it originated on the ground, in the sky or even in the sea. Still, she’s not the worst of them.
    That prize goes to Butcher Nephritis. Nephritis is, of course, a digestive disorder, in the gallery of disorders