Philippa Tucker

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A Taste

The end had come like so many things: slowly, slowly, then suddenly and all at once. She is the only one left now to remember it. But they want to hear not the end, no, they want her to talk about the before. The part where the tide had been lapping at her feet—hers and everyone else’s—but with such a gentle sloshing, a teasing spray, that it had been easy to dismiss as an oddity, almost a charming little quirk, oops-a-daisy, whip-off-your-shoes and move a little further up the shore to continue the party.

The before gives her some status and assures her continued place. Her days are undemanding but she keeps herself useful just in case. Innately, she is drawn to the infants, those delicate little things with their too-large eyes and tentative tongues and jerky limbs, but her value lies more with the older children and she is astute enough to ensure that she maintains her presence in their circle. After all, she had been of age when it all happened, which confers a certain complicity in the eyes of many. This feels a bit unfair. Hadn’t she watched with envy as others flew overhead while she caught the bus—an electric bus—five days out of every seven? Hadn’t she stood for eight hours on each of these five days under a bar of artificial light at a counter, listening to the steady drone of ailments and pains, dispensing sympathy and advice and syrups and pills until her every fibre thrummed with the strain, not just her poor feet? She had seen the white streaks from the bus window, thinking of them as a kind of farewell flourish, like a trailing scarf, although now when she remembers they are a tear. A scratch in the sky. A scar.

The children just want to hear about the food. They don’t care about the things of before, they want her to tell them about its flavours, its taste. She tells them again and again about getting in the box on wheels, drawing a flat-woven strip of nylon across her lap and torso and securing the latch with a click. About the whirr and whizz of all the other boxes doing the same, and how loud these were when they still had combustion engines and were fed with the pungent sludge of diesel or petrol. By now the children would all be starting to fidget, so she’d gloss over the glass doors that would open by themselves when you approached the place, and instead she’d head straight to the shelves of food that were laden with every flavour that could possibly be found or synthesised. Of course, she is careful to add that much of it was not in fact ‘food’, not in its strict sense of physical nourishment. It was more like, well, edible fun. And in truth ultimately it brought sickness; even fortified, it weakened. But, no matter what else has happened, the children are still human—they know nourishment. That what the body wants is not merely what the body requires. That the mouth is made to taste.

So she tells them about the brightly coloured boxes and plastics, which of course were bad, although she skips over the part about absorption and phthalates and endocrine disruptors and the link between all that and the low sperm counts and then, later, the general lack of babies and the strangeness of the ones that did manage to be born. All the pieces that were missing or arrived in the wrong place. No, she goes back to the novelty of the times, when food was a matter of convenience and greed—for consumer and corporation both. Since this coincided with her childhood, it is not hard to replicate the sense of excitement and wonder, the sheer deliciousness of it all.

She recalls the mornings, pouring from box to bowl a gentle clatter of rainbow loops that she would splash with a thin, blueish-white milk from another box. How these would crunch between her molars—yes, a little like grasshopper, she nods—and how then, to finish, she would slurp the leftover liquid, the milk turned rainbow too. But how to explain meat? Protein they know. Flesh, they do not. Generally now she steers clear of that one. Although her mouth remembers: the bite, the chew, the slight metallic tang of the blood. The satisfaction. The fullness. She skips to confectionary. Cotton candy is their favourite. In truth, she had never been that keen on the stuff. All that stickiness. Not to mention the clumps that would harden in the crevices between her teeth. But she leans forward and lowers her voice so that they lean forward too, and she describes again the drums of spinning sugar, mimes the plastic wand dipping and dancing and then—voila!—it is swaddled in the sweetest cloud you can imagine. Slowly, slowly, then suddenly and all at once.

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Banner Art:
Photograph by Devils Apricot, Pixabay, 2015