Fortnight of Fear (20 page)

Again, that soft collision against the other side of the door.

“Who is it?” he demanded, in a hoarse whisper.

A blurred, breathy sound. Then yet another collision.

“Who is it?” he demanded, his voice tight with fear. “Belinda, is that you? Belinda?”

South Croydon, Surrey

Eric the Pie
was always going to be a story that was right on the very edge of acceptability, and so I chose the most downbeat and mundane setting for it that I could. South Croydon is a cheerless suburb of London, with terrace after terrace of jerry-built Victorian houses, a bus station, several huge and miserable public-houses, and more used-car dealerships than you could drive a second-hand Ford Escort at.

However, I derive an enormous amount of satisfaction from researching places like South Croydon. It's worth stopping, it's worth looking – just to see where people live and how they decorate their houses. Not all fictional characters live in Paris, or Rome, or Bel Air. Sometimes, like Eric, they live in places where net-curtains twitch and real-estate agents fear to tread.

It's a very odd thing –
As odd as can be
–
That whatever Miss T. eats
Turns into Miss T

Walter De La Mare.

Eric's mother always used to tell him that “You are what you eat.”

Eric, seven years old, used to eat up all his ground-beef pie at supper-time and then lie in bed, feeling his arms and his legs, to see if he were developing a crust.

How many ground-beef pies did you have to eat before you yourself turned into a ground-beef pie?

But if you ate Marmite sandwiches, as well; and fishcakes; and sweet cigarettes; and greengage jam tarts; and licquorice hardsticks; and apples; and cornflakes – what did you turn into then?

Eric used to lean on the windowsill of his high attic bedroom and look out over the slated rooftops of suburban south London and try to imagine what you turned into then.

A kind of terrible groaning slushy monster, with eyes like pickled onions and skin as black as haddock, with crusty excrescences of Hovis loaf and appalling soft cavities dripping with gravy and strings of lamb-fat.

One hot afternoon in August, Eric fell over in the playground at school when he and his friends were playing “it”.
He scraped his knee and it bled into his sock. That night he lay in bed feeling the scab form hard and crusty on his leg and thought that he was turning into a ground-beef pie.

He spent hours in his room staring at his nursery-rhyme book. “
Simple Simon met a pieman
” A pieman! There was no picture of the pieman, but Eric didn't need a picture. He could imagine himself what this terrifying creature was like. A hunched, pastry-encrusted beast, dragging himself along with muffled whimpers. A man who had eaten far too many pies in his life, and had paid the ultimate penalty.

A man whose skin had gradually turned into crumbling pastry. A man whose lungs and stomach had gradually turned into ground beef. A pieman!

Eric had gone to bed and had nightmares about the pieman. He had heard the pieman's nasal begging through bubbles of gravy.
Eat me, kill me. I can't bear it any longer
.

For weeks, he had eaten scarcely anything at all. And he had always left his crusts on the side of his plate. His mother had talked to Dr Wilson; and once Dr Wilson had visited the house, and Eric had answered questions to his blue chalk-striped waistcoat and his gold watch-chain.

“Do you dislike your food, Eric?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you worried about anything at school?”

“No, sir.”

“Cough.”

(Eric coughed.)

“Breathe in, and hold it.”

(Eric breathed in, and held it.)

Then, in the brown-wallpapered hallway, next to the barometer that was always set fair, the doctor murmuring to his mother, “He's quite all right, you know. Boys of this age quite often eat very little. But when he starts to grow … well, he'll have to eat to live; and he'll
live to eat. You mark my words, and stock up your larder.”

His mother had returned to the sitting-room, and sat and stared at him; almost as if she were resentful that he wasn't really sick.

“The doctor says you're all right.”

Long pause. “Oh.”

She knelt on the floor next to him, and took his hand. Her eyes were so colorless. Her face was so colorless. “You have to eat, Eric. You have to build yourself up. You have to eat or you'll die. You are what you eat, Eric.”

“That's what I'm afraid of,” he whispered.

“What?”

“That's what I'm afraid of. If I eat too many pies.”

“What?”

“If I eat too many pies, I'll be Eric the Pie.”

His mother had laughed. Her laugh like fragments of broken mirror in the summer bedroom. Bright, sharp, slice your nose off.

“No you won't. Food gives you life, that's all. If you eat life, you'll have life. It's like an equation. Life in, life out.”

“Oh.”

Eric understood. Suddenly the pieman was nothing but a story. Pieces fell off him. Crust, base, lumps of kidney. Suddenly the pieman was nothing but pie. Eric had grown up. Now, at last, he understood the mystery of human existence. It was like an equation. Life in, life out. That was all. Nothing to do with ground-beef pies; nothing to do with fishcakes; or greengage jam tarts. It was simple. If you ate life, you stayed alive.

Next morning was sunny and suffocatingly hot. Eric, bored, and tired by the heat, sat on top of the coal-shed swinging his legs, a pale elf-faced boy with huge brown eyes and protruding ears. He had no friends to play with.
Everybody at school called him “Mekon” and bullied him. He was no good at football and when he tried to play cricket he was always out for a duck.

In the yard at the back of Eric's terraced suburban house there was a strong smell of elderflowers and cat's pee, because next door's cat used to slink into the coal to relieve itself. Eric's mother had just hung out her laundry and it dripped intermittently on to the concrete path. Above Eric's head the sky was as blue as washable writing-ink, and thinly streaked with cirrus clouds. High up, to the west, a Bristol Britannia airliner caught the sunlight. The Whispering Giant, the newspapers called it. Eric thought the idea of a whispering giant was rather sad and rather sinister.

He watched a woodlouse crawl across the hot tarpaper roof of the coal-shed. It reached his cotton shorts, and then began a long and painful diversion along his thigh.

Eric picked it up between finger and thumb. Immediately, it curled itself up into a gray armored ball. Eric threw it up a little way, and then caught it. He did this two or three times. He wondered what it was thinking about, as he tossed it up. Was it frightened? Or didn't it have enough brains to be frightened?

It was alive. Alive enough to crawl across the coal-shed roof. So it must think
something
. He wondered what it would think if he ate it. The woodlouse's life would become part of his life. His big life and the woodlouse's tiny life would be irreversibly combined. Perhaps then he would know what the woodlouse was thinking. You are what you eat, after all.

He popped the pill-like woodlouse into his mouth. It rested on his tongue. It must have thought it had discovered some damp, warm friendly niche in the coal-shed somewhere, because it unrolled itself in the cleft of his tongue, and began to crawl down his throat.

For a moment, Eric was seized by the urge to gag. But
he calmed himself, restrained himself. The woodlouse was joining his life by its own volition, and he liked the idea of that.

It crawled to the back of his throat and then he swallowed it.

He closed his eyes. He wondered how long it would take before the woodlouse's consciousness became part of his own.

Perhaps it was too small. Perhaps he needed to eat lots more woodlice. He jumped down from the top of the coal-shed and searched around the yard, picking up bricks and stones and poking in the dampest corners of the wall. Each woodlouse he found, he popped into his mouth, and swallowed. In less than a quarter of an hour, he found thirty-one.

His mother came out with another basket of washing and began to peg her slips and stockings on to the line. “What are you doing, Eric?” she asked him, one eye closed against the sunlight.

“Nothing,” said Eric. While she pegged up her clothes, he quickly ate four more woodlice. They crunched between his teeth.

That night in bed he stared at the ceiling and he was sure that he could feel the woodlice's lives weaving in and out of his body and his mind. He felt stronger, more alive. If you eat life, you stay alive.

On his eighth birthday his mother gave him a bicycle. It wasn't new, but she had cleaned it and painted it blue and Mr Tedder at the second-hand car showroom had fitted new brake-blocks and a blue hooter with a rubber bulb.

He cycled up and down Churchill Road, which was as far as his mother would let him go. Churchill Road was a crescent, safe and quiet, away from the main road.

One gray afternoon he came across a pigeon, limping
and fluttering in the gutter. He stopped his bicycle close beside it and watched it. It stared helplessly up at him with a beady orange eye. Every now and then it dragged itself a few inches further away, but Eric followed it, the wheels of his bicycle tick-ticking with every step.

It was alive. It had a much larger life than woodlice (which he had been eating by the handful whenever he found them; and ants, too; and spiders; and moths.) If he ate it, maybe he could experience just the briefest flicker of what it was like to fly.

He looked around. The crescent was deserted. Three parked cars, one of them propped up on bricks, but that was all. Nobody looking. Only the distant sound of buses.

He left his bicycle propped against a garden fence and took the wounded pigeon into the alleyway between two terraced houses. It struggled and fluttered and he could feel its heart racing against his thumbs. He pressed its hard pungent breast against his mouth, and bit into feathers and meat and sinew. The pigeon struggled wildly, and uttered a throaty scream that excited Eric so much that he bit it again, and then again, until the pigeon was thrashing bloodily against his face and he was biting into bone and sinew and things that were bitter and slimy.

For one ecstatic instant, he felt its heart beating on the tip of his tongue. Then he forced its breast even deeper into his mouth, and killed it.

An elderly woman was watching him from an upstairs window. She had suffered a stroke not long ago, and she was unable to speak. All she could do was stare at him in horror as he wiped the ragged bloody remains of the bird around and around his face; and skipped while he did; a pigeon dance; a death dance.

When he got home, Eric had to sneak in by the back door, and wash his face and hands in cold water in the scullery. Blood streaked the white ceramic sink. He felt
elated, as if he had learned how to fly. He heard his mother calling, “Eric?”

When he was eleven, he crouched in the fusty-smelling coal-shed, waiting for the neighbors' cat. When it came in, he caught it, and tied its mouth tight with fishing-line, knotted tight. The cat struggled furiously, hurling itself from side to side, and scratching at his face and hands. But Eric was ready for that. He chopped off its paws, one by one, with a pair of gardening shears. Then, when it was still struggling and writhing with pain, he hung it up from a cup-hook that he had screwed into the low wooden ceiling. He was covered in blood. The cat sprayed blood everywhere. But Eric liked the blood. It was warm and it tasted salty, like life.

He buried his face in the hot tangled fur of the cat's belly and bit into it. It crunched and burst, and the cat almost exploded with pain. Eric licked its lungs while they were still breathing. There was air inside them; life. Eric licked its heart while it was still pumping. There was blood inside it; life. Eric took the cat's life in his mouth and ate it, and the cat became Eric. You are what you eat. Eric was an insect, a bird, a cat, and scores of spiders.

Eric knew that he could live for ever.

Not long after his sixteenth birthday, Eric went to stay with his grandparents in Earl's Colne, in rural Essex. Hot summer days, glazed like syrup. Hallucinatory hay-fields, dotted with bright-red poppies.

Eric found a brown-and-white calf, down by the river. The calf had become entangled in barbed-wire, and was crying in pain. Eric knelt down beside it for a long time and watched it struggle. Butterflies blew by; the afternoon was so hot that it almost seemed to swell.

Eric took off his jeans and his T-shirt and his underpants and hung them up on the bushes. Naked, he approached
the calf, and touched it. It licked his hand, and twisted pitifully against the barbed-wire.

Eric picked up a large stone in his right hand broke the calf's legs, all four of them, one after the other. The calf dropped to the ground, bellowing with pain. Eric forced the stone between its jaws so that it couldn't cry out any more. He was panting and sweaty and his penis was rigid, with the foreskin drawn tautly back.

He mounted the calf and raped it. Black flesh, pink flesh. While he raped it, he bit into its smooth-haired chest, and tore lumps of bloody meat away. It kicked and fought, but Eric was too strong. Eric had too much life in him. Cats' lives; birds' lives; dogs' lives. Eric was life itself. He ran the tip of his tongue over the calf's living eye and the eye slickly quivered; so Eric bit into it, so that a clear gelatinous gobbet of optic fluid slithered down his throat like a prize oyster; and at the same time he ejaculated into the dying animal's bowels.

He spent almost an hour eating and retching and smothering himself in blood. By the time he had finished, he was surrounded by swarms of flies. The calf quivered, just once. He kissed its bloodied anus, from which his own semen glutinously dripped. He said a prayer to all that was terrible, all that was wonderful. The power of one life over another.