“The article…?”
“In the last month, the last issue.” He stumbled over his words for a moment. “It was most – most enlightening. What you wrote – it is so true, it is the truth. You spoke the truth.”
My word. If he were as passionate as this about an article, what would he be like… well… I smiled at him, encouragingly. He didn’t smile back. I could see tiny pearls of sweat beading his hairline.
I had written an article for the aforementioned magazine some months before. In it, I bemoaned the fact that, to the true gourmet, the real epicure, there was literally nothing left to eat. There was no taste sensation that hadn’t been documented a thousand times; no dish that hadn’t graced the palates of a thousand restaurant reviewers before. Porcini, pasta, olive oil, truffle, saffron, sushi, jus, mash, noisettes, julienne, shitake, salmon, frites…it was all there, all laid bare; masticated, pontificated, gorged, forged and puked. There was nothing left; no taste sensation remaining that hadn’t already been plundered, lauded, laid out for the masses.
“So you think,” said Kurt. For the first time he had a smile on his face, his cheekbones showing faintly blue-white though his golden skin. Again, I felt the tug of lust and something else, something beneath it. Intrigue? Curiosity? Fear?
“My dear boy…”
He smiled again. “Wait. I will show you.”
That was how I found myself in some godforsaken hole in Smithfield’s Market, the butcher stalls braced with cages of iron, newspapers plastered up against the walls, the smell of old blood ground into the ancient bricks. Kurt looked at me, grinning slightly as I stood hunched in the street, like a well-dressed, priapic tramp.
“In here,” he whispered and ushered me forward. It was a dank little hole, ill lit and odd smelling. Surely not a restaurant? He took my hand and led me along a long, dark corridor which opened out into a large room, wood-panelled, lit only by the embers of a dying fire.
“What is this?”
I wanted my voice to come out strongly but the dark robbed it of any firmness. There were others in the room, I saw dimly; just glinting eyes in the darkness and the shuffle of quiet breath in the corners of the room.
“What is this?”
I could feel my voice becoming higher. Kurt looked back, and smiled again, that heartless, Teutonic grimace.
“Stay here, Geoffrey, and I will cook you a feast.”
I was slightly reassured by the sound of my name. I sat on a hard wooden bench, slotting my legs beneath a roughly hewn table, the shadows folding themselves around me. I listened to the barely perceptible sound of breathing. My scalp was tingling, my bowels were loose and trembling within me. The shadows lengthened. There was a murmuring, in the darkness, a soft undertone in the shadows. I felt the softest touch on my neck, a finger sliding down the tendon of my throat. I jerked and nearly screamed.
Looking back into the black cavern of the room, I saw nothing, nothing in the darkness. The mere tickle of a cobweb… I brushed at my neck, shivering. What in God’s name was I doing? Where was I? I sat, clenching my fists… surely, time to go…but there at the end of the room, moving like a blonde angel soaring wingless through the darkness was Kurt, a white china plate gripped in his big, capable hand. He came up to me and I breathed out, more relieved than I could say to see him. He held the plate out to me, smiling and I looked at it, mesmerised. Steam rose from the slab of meat laid upon it.
“What is this?” I said softly, as he laid it in front of me.
He smiled.
“It is good.”
From nowhere a knife and fork had appeared on the table before me. I reached out as if in a dream. The steam rose from the meat, writhing in the darkness. I looked, pressed, cut. I lifted the fork to my mouth.
Oh… like nothing I’d tasted before, like nothing I’d felt before. Too many times (I fear) in my journalism I’d use the phrase ‘orgasmic’. But that was what this was, it was, it was. I chewed, gasped, writhed in my seat; my whole being concentrated in the hundred effervescing nerve endings in the moist cave of my mouth. I was lost, abandoned, helpless. And when I came to, when the dark room had stopped sparkling and spinning, there was Kurt’s face and his warm hand and his voice saying… oh, so warm and intimate…you spoke the truth but it was not the whole truth, ja…..
“What is it?” I said, when I was once again capable of speech.
Kurt dropped his eyes to the floor.
“I am thinking…I am thinking…”
“Thinking what?” I clutched at him, shameless.
He looked at me, solemnly. I nearly gasped again at his beauty, that golden skin, his crisp hair, the tender play of muscles in his neck.
“Can you keep a secret?” he said.
The freezer door thunked shut behind us. I shivered and my breath formed a steaming cloud in the air.
“What is it?” I said. “Why have you brought me here?”
Kurt moved closer to me and put a hand on my upper arm, just above the elbow joint. The warmth of his hand made me, paradoxically, shiver.
“This is the secret,” he said to me. He was almost whispering. “This is the – the – I do not know the word…”
“The…”
“Cure!” He said it triumphantly. “ The cure, for the illness that you said, that you wrote. This is the only thing left to us, to those of us who love food, who worship that which makes us, that …I cannot think of the words.. that….”
“Nourishes us?” I said tentatively.
“Yes!” His grip on my arm tightened and involuntarily my eyes dropped to his own bicep, the bluish sheen of the muscle pushing against the skin of his arm.
He dragged me forward.
“Here,” he said, hushed again. “This is the only thing that is left to us.”
I looked down at the steel table whose frost-rimmed edge was nudging my thighs. There was a white plastic tray laid upon it, in which where several cuts of meat. I looked at them. A brisket, a loin, a chop – and an unidentifiable cut, a little ragged about the edges. I looked closer. The topside still had the skin attached, pale, freckled, dusted with fine hairs. And something else, a mark, a flaw. I bent closer. A mark, a flaw – I recoiled suddenly, bile rising in my throat. A mark, a flaw… no - the intricate edges of a tattoo, the unfurling petals of a rose and the first two letters of a name ‘M’ and ‘O’…
“It is natural.”
I looked up at Kurt from my kneeling position from the gutter, in the alleyway outside. My latest, guiltiest, most perfect meal steamed before me, regurgitated.
“Natural?”
“Yes,” he said, serenely. “It is natural to react like that. After all, it is not what is –what is the word – intended, is it not? It is not intended…”
“God, no…” I whispered.
Then I looked at him. I looked at his beauty, that molten skin stretched taut over muscle. The muscle laid over creamy fat, the whole of him beautiful and wholesome and healthy. And I thought again of the feel of that slab of meat against my teeth, the way the juices had burst from the crisp edge; how it was the last, the best, the only thing left to taste…
And that’s how it started – the Club. There are more of us out there than you’d imagine. When you hear of a new restaurant opening, of a new celebrity chef touting his latest book, I wonder if it ever gives you pause. Does it ever make you wonder? Because there’s a surprising number of us gourmets out there, you know. And is it really so disgusting? I am the Body of Christ…all flesh is grass… the justification is there, is it not?