Vinegar Showers

Bao was underfed, so I suggested his favourite sausage in batters in one of the chip vans on the way home.  I was in the mood for one myself, so my suggestion was not to be mistaken for the fairy godmother’s, all be told clearly. 

‘Oh, I’ll miss my sausage in batters,’ Bao blubbered.

I never expected to see the day when a Chinese man would be standing in front of me whimpering over sausage in batters.  China, with its rich history of colourful and balanced cuisine –  the pickled delights and meaty goodness of the North, the sweet nibbles and enticing seafoods of the East, the glorious spices of the Southwest – was trailing behind the wonderfully disgusting and vinegary takeaway foods we had to share with the world.  But, as Bao reported to me before, it was the heavy street snacks of Taiwan that easily enabled him to enjoy his sausage in batters.  What was striking about his love for them was his penchant for the malt vinegar, a condiment not commonly applied in Chinese dishes.  I’d seen Bao perform tender ceremonies with the stuff, treating sausage in batters to vinegar showers of reverence that even the most putrid latenight scumbag wouldn’t have carried out.

We left the spiritual shed, its groggy heads and groaning ceol lessening, falling to memory as we met the chilly air again.  The punch had left my Chinese chum as we made our way along the mellow streets of Seatown towards the centre of town.  Usually mouthing off like Spring Festival fireworks, he was now numb and tardiloquous, answering me with delayed grunts whenever I addressed.  There’s a limit for every man.  The bed was conceivably a better alternative for him, but I kept with him, and hoped the takeaway would be of some assistance.

When we arrived at the town square and the chip van that served Bao’s favourite sausage in batters, the time was right for the clatter of street entities.  The pubs had all closed and Clanbrassil Street was a show of barking and hooting and tolerable repugnance.  Squeaky goblins on MDMA starting ructions with swaggering bellicose ogres while their rotund other halves slipped and fell nearby in the flowing runnels of piss and phlegm.  The heart of the town at night.  We’d arrived.  The heart sank.

A chap guffawed and slobbered curry chips as his newly acquired lover vomited over the shutters of Lorraine’s Hair Salon.  I didn’t want to eat after that, so stood back and had a cigarette as Bao waited for his beloved sausage in batter.  A new group had lined up at the van to participate in the great grease gala.  They caught my attention as they were the ones I’d seen in the Spirit Store at the end, the two couples, with the young man who’d been staring at me as though I was trying to nick his woman.  He didn’t see me now, so I just stood further back in the stumbling shadows of fools.  Objectively, a reluctant battler and civilised man of the world – subjectively, a coward of the first order.  A squad car nee-nawed past on the road to heighten a sense of sneaking dread growing inside me.  It was like there was a film director around somewhere with a megaphone, ‘Okay, make him scared on this take.  Ready?  Cue terror.  Cue chickenshit.  Action!’

‘Hey.’

‘Huh?’

‘You.’

‘Who, me?’

The young man was in my face.  He’d seen me skulking through the drunks, nervously toking on the ciggie.

His face was delivered to me in that instant.  That face I couldn’t place.  The bad dream.  About a duck and Emer.  That dark evening about a year ago that presaged our end.  This young fella was Duck, who attacked us with his friends after that night in McManus’s, and who was fought away in powerful fashion by my gallant wife.  He looked different from before.  He seemed taller.  He’d been taller than me back then also, but now that height felt more resolved.  Like a long-developing tower block that had now been completed and rose over me with precocious arrogance.  Fear the young, O lucky man.  But he was also older, more mature.  Much older than a single year would indicate.  Maybe the girl changed things for this young man, who knows.  Maybe there wouldn’t be a confrontation after all. 

‘Remember me?’ he asked.

‘No, not really,’ I said, with a trim.  ‘We met before?’

‘Yeah, right,’ he laughed.  ‘You remember.  I can tell in your face.  You’re fucking shitting your kacks right now.’  I kind of was.

His face grew red and gnarled at that moment, his jawbone appearing to jut outwards and hang over me like an olympic diving board as a passive antagonism took hold; my own jaw trembled and sunk in.

‘Hey, Mac,’ called one of the girls at the van.  ‘Quick.’  (I thought she said Quack)  ‘Your chips.’

Duck shut off his menace for a bit and rejoined his crew at the van.  He gave me another choice look of malevolent intent just before he grabbed his chips and the ketchup bottle and I was saved by the obvious distractions lent by these nasty edibles.

I watched as all of the people at the van enthusiastically went to their slop.  Sauces dripped, teeth gnawed, gobs spat, Jesus wept.  I once more craved the muck myself.  Bao returned with his sausage in batter, grinning ear to ear, zombified by the hellish hunger of it, dying to get stuck in.   

‘Come on, let’s get a move on,’ I said.

We walked off from the chip van and the scent of war.  Cuchullain’s home.  A hamlet of strength, rarely associated with peace in its history.  By day, however, this place had charm and a kind of innocence.  Both Bao and myself were aware of that now as we made tracks from a scene of every sensible nation’s nightmare.  It was a cynical charm perhaps.  People with the spirit of the underdog.  It fuelled their conversations when they bumped into each other on a sunny afternoon outside the post office.  As warm and gregarious a community as any.  Not so very deep down, these people were quaint in their comings and goings.   But you’d be hard put to use the word quaint on such an evening as it was. 

Escape the heart of the town at night.  I beg you.  Always, from now until the end.  Skip the adventure.  Ditch the sightseeing.  Run from the heart of the town at night.  The crazy eyes of temulency and the unpredictable ends of their stories.  The terrors on hobbled foot.  The sluts and fuckers in the lanes.  The mannequins in the shop windows with permanent looks of unease, only witnesses to the street ghouls and their nightly destruction of deference.

‘Vinegar will kill me,’ said Bao, slimily chomping away at his battered prize.  ‘This is the life.’

And on we walked.  We wouldn’t be battered tonight.  Souls were comforted.  Mannequins heartened.