Verbal Magazine

The Recipe

It’s a Friday evening, late February, condensation running down the kitchen windows. Deirdre has dropped in and is leaning against the worktop while I cook. She has had an encounter in the supermarket. I press down the switch on the kettle. Deirdre Steele is what I call ‘brittle’: she drums her bony, ringless fingers on the granite while she waits for the water to boil. There’s not a scrap of spare flesh on her. She hasn’t been in my Department for very long, is generally considered cold at school, doesn’t give much away. I happen to know that her form class call her ‘Steeleknickers’. But her sense of humour appeals to me: her caustic remarks about the Principal’s built-up shoes; her take on the Secretary’s ratty hair extensions. She’s the bitch I’d sometimes like to be. Right now, though, I could do without her: Harry’s just rung to say his thankless sister is coming for dinner and multi-tasking is not my thing. I have my head in the larder trying to remember what it is my sister-in-law doesn’t eat now: pasta, is it, or rice, when I hear Deirdre say, over the rumble of the kettle, ‘… her father used to steal spades.

‘Whose father?’ I say from the cupboard.
‘Cecilia’s, old Denny Johnson, he used to steal spades.’
‘Spades?’ I say in a too-high voice, wondering who Cecilia is. I don’t cook well even when I’m not being distracted. It doesn’t bode well for the meal.
‘Nothing else,’ she goes on, ‘not picks or shovels or rakes, just spades. Everybody knew about it. He kept them in the shed at the bottom of the garden. Anytime any of the neighbours missed a spade, they’d walk over to the house, knock on the door and say, “Denny, would you open the shed?” ’

The olive oil is beginning to smoke and I push the pan off the hob. I spoon coffee into a mug, my eyes beginning to water from the burnt oil. I say: ‘Did no-body ever report him?’ And still I have no idea who we’re talking about.
‘Why would they?’ she says. ‘It was harmless. Denny would lift the key from below the holy water font in the hall, walk down the garden, open the shed and the neighbour would go in, pick out their spade, say, “Cheers Denny”, like he was lending it to them, and Denny would lock the shed on all the other stolen spades.’
‘It seems odd,’ I say, which is not adequate, but I’m thinking about the oil and whether I should throw it out and start over again. I hand her the mug of coffee, black, unsweetened, and she takes a sip and says:
‘Yes. And that’s what really annoys her.’
‘Well, it would,’ I say.
‘Not that he did it,’ says Deirdre.
‘No?’
‘It’s that I know about it. It annoys her to see me at all because seeing me reminds her of her family, and of the spades, and of Grangemore. She’d like to forget that that’s where she came from. She doesn’t want to be traced.’
‘I see,’ I say, which is true. I do see, but I don’t know why she’s telling me this. I’ve decided not to risk the oil and I’m pouring it down the drain and wiping the pan with kitchen paper and putting fresh oil in, with butter this time so it doesn’t burn again. And I’m thinking I can make something stew-like with chicken; that we can eat it with pasta or rice, or potatoes, or bread even. I’ll have Harry to listen to if I don’t produce a carbohydrate of some description. And I gather myself and say: ‘What did she say?’
Deirdre grunts, a noise I haven’t heard her make before. ‘You want to have seen her face when I came round the corner of the aisle. She had Mrs Givens, you know, who’s married to the dentist, pinned up against the olives, and she’s saying, “Oh yes, a country girl at heart,” and you can see Mrs Givens thinking horses and gymkhanas which is what she wants her to think. Far from the country club was she reared! She’s invented a whole fable about herself and when she caught sight of me she didn’t know who to be. She turned tail and ran, straight into the discount aisle.’
This is the longest speech I’ve ever heard Deirdre make. She’s clearly ruffled. Her face, beneath her sculpted dark bob is pale. There’s a little smudge of lipstick on her chemically whitened teeth. I’m peeling the paper skin off an onion and carefully I say: ‘Did you blow her cover?’
‘No,’ says Deirdre. ‘Not this time. But she’d better not come all Madam Butterfly with me or she’ll get her come-uppance. They didn’t get an inside toilet till she was six. She never had a stitch to wear that hadn’t been round half a dozen of her cousins before her.’
I look at Deirdre’s nails, at the French-manicured, toughened half moons that never seem to chip on the keyboard in school. And I look at mine, chewed and ragged, smelling now of onion. Deirdre doesn’t do chopping. Deirdre does microwave-ready meals-for-one.  She seems to like it that way. I’ve never heard her mention a man. Jim Riley swore there was something between her and Sam Mulholland at the Christmas do: they shared a taxi home, dropped Jim off first. But Sam’s a married man with two kids in college; he’s only just made Head of Department. I can’t see it. Not that she would tell me. Not that she would tell anyone. ‘You knew her well, then?’ I say.
‘We were at Primary school together.’
‘And you lost touch?’
‘You could say that. Where we lived, you didn’t choose your friends. You just played with whoever was there: “kick-the-tin”; “boys-after-the-girls”. She was very good at conkers, I remember; smashed mine to a pulp.’
I’m trying to imagine Deirdre with a conker, but the image is too difficult to summon. I’ve got the onion in the pan and I’m pushing it around with a wooden spoon and there’s something bothering me, something from further back. ‘What did he do with them?’ I say. ‘The father. What did he do with all the spades?’
‘He used them.’
‘Was he a gardener?’
‘He was a gravedigger. He was trying to get the best one for the job. He said a straight-sided grave was a great comfort to a grieving family. He was always looking for the perfect spade.’
I turn the heat down under the pan and say: ‘Imagine if that was your job: digging holes in the earth to put dead people in.’
Deirdre’s blue-black eyelashes flicker. ‘Somebody has to do it. And old Denny took pride in his work. He was a local historian, really. He was the only one who knew where people were buried; what was an unmarked grave and what was an empty plot; how many bodies there were in the ground. He used to say,’ (Deirdre lowers her voice) ‘ “I’m the biggest boss in the townland. I have three hundred men under me.” ’
I laugh, smash the flat end of a knife on to a garlic clove, scoop the mess in with the onion.
Deirdre stares into her cup. ‘I never liked to see them open a grave,’ she says. ‘If it was a family plot, they’d often have to do that. And if the weather was wet, or the grave was in a bad place, on a bit of a slope, the sides could collapse, uncover a casket that was already there. Sometimes it would be broken, from the weight of all that earth, and the years it’d been down there. You never knew what you were going to see.’
I look at her. ‘Did you spend a lot of time in the graveyard?’
Deirdre shrugs: ‘There wasn’t much to do. Even a burial was an event. The graveyard was a shortcut, if the weather was dry enough, between the houses and the shop.’
I start to scissor some chicken; am gripping a slippery fillet, nicking off fat and gristle when she says: ‘This one time, in the summer, bored out of our heads, we were messing about, a crowd of us on our way to buy sweets. We were at that stage, when you’re not really into boys, but you’re desperate to impress them; act like you’re one of the gang. And we went through the graveyard and we could see that down towards the bottom end, under the yew tree, there was a mound of earth where the men had left a grave open: the diggers must have gone over to the Parochial House for a drink of tea. It was the part of the graveyard that they said was unconsecrated: where they used to put unbaptised babies; suicide victims; somebody told me people were buried there that had died in drink. We went down to have a look. The side of the hole that Denny and the men had dug had collapsed a bit. We could see a little pine box with the side out of it, something white lying in the clay. We were all standing, lined around the edge, staring down at it. And after a minute Cecilia said, “I dare you, Deirdre, to jump in and see what it is!” and all the boys started chanting, “Dare or die! Dare or die!” and Cecilia said, “Go on, we’ll help you get back out again.” So I jumped in, right into the grave in my Moses sandals, and got down on my hunkers, and scraped back the earth, and it was the bones of a tiny hand, the smallest I’d ever seen. I leaned back against the wall of the grave, looked up at the dark faces of Cecilia and the boys, at the clouds going past slow above them and I could smell the damp of the earth and for a second or two, no-one spoke, everything seemed very still. I could see where the roots of the tree were coming through the grave, white where the men’s spades had cut them clean, and I could feel the clay squeeze in between my toes. And then Cecilia (it was definitely her) picked up a clod of earth and threw it, straight at me and shouted, “Sucker!” and ran, and the rest of them all ran after her and left me in the grave.’
Deirdre presses her finger into a line of crumbs on the worktop, scrapes them off with her thumbnail, picks them back up again. I’m looking at her, scissors in hand. ‘How did you get out?’
‘I got a foothold high up on one of the roots but I couldn’t hoist myself up. I knew the men wouldn’t be away long. I knew I’d be killed if they got me there. I had to put my other foot on the coffin lid, where it still held solid. I managed to haul myself out on to my elbows. I felt the lid give way just as I pushed up. I didn’t look back.’
‘And Cecilia…?’
‘I never broke breath to her again. It’s years since I saw her. She trained to be a nurse, did the classic: nabbed the first doctor she got a hold of, got pregnant, got married, job done! From council house to Victorian detached in one fell shag! Last time I saw her was at old Denny’s funeral. It’s a wonder she showed up at all. It must have cost her something to bring the doctor up Church Road.’
I consider the contents of the pan, wonder whether I should add tomatoes or olives, call the whole thing ‘Tuscan rustic’. I’m still looking at it when something occurs to me. ‘The grave,’ I say, putting a lid on the pan, ‘the father’s grave. Do you think the sides were straight enough for him?’
Only a slight smile from Deirdre. ‘They were,’ she says, ‘dead straight.’ She puts her cup down with a chink and reaches for her keys. She has to go, she says, she’s only keeping me back, she’ll see herself out. Then she turns at the door and says: ‘I won’t be in on Monday. I have to go to England for a couple of days: a medical thing, routine. I’ve cleared it with Sam.’ Her voice cracks a little. ‘I’ll be back by the end of the week.’
I stare at the pan. The dinner’s a mess. ‘Ok,’ I say, without turning my head, without looking her in the eye, and she pauses for just a second and then she leaves me, with the pan bubbling gently, and little wisps of steam escaping from under the lid.

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