‘Rubbish!’ she said. ‘I’m an old crone.’
She smiled again. But what could they eat tomorrow?
2
The next morning they decided to go to the supermarket together. They ate a scrappy breakfast, promising themselves to make up for it at lunchtime. They would buy whatever they fancied. The seafood counter teemed with every kind of fish imaginable, more than they could possibly name. But named or unnamed, they’d tried everything on the display at one time or another. The smell made them feel a bit sick. They scurried away.
The meat counter was the noisiest place in the shop, filled with the rhythmic sounds of chopping as the knives rose and fell. One hefty butcher slammed a whole side of pork on to the counter, and started to hack it to bits. He was broad-chested, big-bellied, bare to the waist — one hundred percent slaughterman. Smoke from a cigarette curled up into his half-closed eyes as he disassembled the carcass, wielding the knife with casual grace. One hand attacked while the other dodged in and out, like two dancers. A virtuoso performance of precision and savage strength. He fizzed with energy, like onions in hot oil.
His knife clanged on to the counter and his big, veined hand picked at something in the meat. A bone. The butcher pulled it off the thigh bone and put it to the side. It was a gourd bone.
My father’s eyes lit up. My mother tugged at his arm. She wasn’t normally demonstrative in public. It took him back 20 years to when they were first married. There wasn’t anything much you could buy as a gift, so he used to go the market and get her a gourd bone — at least that’s what the traders called it.
Meat wasn’t so easy to buy then, you always needed coupons. You didn’t need a coupon to buy bones, but that meant they were always in demand. Thigh bones and pigs’ heads went to people with connections, but they got a relative who was a doctor to give them a certificate so they could jump the queue and get a gourd bone at least. They were usually a bit dry and only had the odd shred of meat on them, but my parents made full use of them all the same. They simmered them and scraped off the bits of meat and drank the broth. When the bones had been boiled soft they chewed on them and sucked out the marrow. They were absolutely delicious.
He looked at her and she looked at him and the flavours came flooding back. She could almost see the meat juices dribbling from the corners of his mouth.
‘I haven’t seen one of those for a long time,’ she laughed. ‘It’s like pigs don’t grow with gourd bones any more. I suppose people think they’re not worth eating, but people miss out on all sorts of good things.’
The butcher didn’t understand what they were after when they asked for a gourd bone. He picked up the thigh bone, thinking they had made some sort of mistake. No one was interested in traditional cuts like pork loin, any more, while the thigh bones kept going up in price.
‘No, that one. The one next to it,’ she said.
The butcher gave them an odd look and chucked the gourd bone over.
She placed it carefully in the shopping basket.
‘How much per pound?’ she said.
Even though they could spend what they wanted nowadays, she always asked.
‘There’s no need to pay,’ said the butcher.
‘No need to pay?’
‘No.’
They couldn’t believe it. The butcher waved them away, as if they were beggars.
‘What can I charge for this?’ he said. ‘You want it, you take it.’
‘What do you mean?’ my father shouted. ‘We just want to know how much it is.’
‘I said. Nothing.’
‘Then we don’t want it,’ she said.
She grabbed the bone out of her basket and put it back in the middle of the counter, like she wanted to go on bargaining. But the butcher just said ‘If you don’t want it, don’t have it.’ He swept the bone on to the floor with his cleaver and carried on chopping meat. They stood there, crestfallen, as the other shoppers elbowed them aside.
3
They fled from the supermarket not knowing what to think, or where to go. They just wandered around the streets. It was nearly noon, and they suddenly became aware that they hadn’t fulfilled their promise to their bellies.
They decided to go to a restaurant. The menu had all the usual things on it: seafood, fish, meat, vegetables, noodles, soup. What kind of soup? Clam and frog soup, three-flavour beancurd soup, pickled mustard and shredded pork soup. What about bone soup?
‘Yes,’ said the waitress. ‘Seaweed and spare rib soup.’
‘No, thank you.’
‘There’s yam and thigh bone soup,’ she added, ‘that has thigh bone in … ’
‘Do you have gourd bone soup?’
‘What?’ The waitress looked blank. It was if the word had become obsolete.
‘The bit at the top of the thigh bone,’ he said, patiently sketching the shape of the bone.
The waitress still didn’t understand and went off to call the cook, who came out with a yellow squash in one hand. My father described the bone, pointing at the squash.
‘We haven’t got that,’ the cook said. ‘No one wants that nowadays.’
‘How come no one wants them?’ she asked.
‘They’re not nutritious,’ sniffed the cook. ‘Now if you get a thigh bone and boil it all day you get lots of nutrition, even if it’s a frozen one.’
‘Add a drop of vinegar,’ he said. ‘That brings the goodness out.’
‘I know,’ the cook smiled, ‘but a gourd bone will never be as nourishing as a thigh bone, even if you add vinegar.’
That really annoyed my father. ‘You don’t know anything about eating!’ he shouted.
‘Well, maybe I just know about making it.’ The cook was getting cross too. ‘You’re the one who knows all about eating.’
‘I certainly do!’ he threw back.
‘Then eat, sir!’ He turned round and headed back to the kitchen.
They left the restaurant in a rage.
‘There’s something wrong with the whole world nowadays,’ my mother said. ‘Did you see the menu? There was nothing worth eating. Just a long list of things with fancy names, all tasting the same.’
‘Not half as good as that rice we used to make with soy sauce and a few dried shrimps,’ he said. ‘Now that was good.’
‘Yes. Why don’t we have that for lunch?’
They had soy sauce at home, of course, so they bought dried shrimps and fried them up with some rice. But the dried shrimps weren’t as good as they used to be — they were too salty — and there was something wrong with the soy sauce as well.
‘It’s probably made of chemicals,’ he said. ‘All these damned scientists. That’s why everyone’s getting cancer.’
He was angry at the whole modern world.
They didn’t talk much after that. When they’d finished clearing up she headed off to the bedroom for a nap and he stretched out on the sofa. But he couldn’t sleep. He kept thinking of the days when they were young and used to eat those gourd bones.
They’d be huddling around the stove as she washed the bone and put it in the pot, adding water and a few splashes of vinegar. Sour fumes from the simmering broth warmed the room, stinging his eyes — it had to simmer a while. Finally, she took the lid off and the fragrance filled their nostrils. The soup didn’t have a lot of fat, all the goodness was in the bone. She took out the bone, scraped off the shreds of meat clinging to it and put them in a bowl, ready for when she was cooking stir-fried vegetables. For the next meal she’d boil the bone up a second time. They’d drink the broth and he’d gnaw on the bone. It was full of flavour. He had good teeth back then, but sometimes he worried about her making a third broth after he’d been chewing on the bone.