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60 Cheriton Street
East Perth, 6000
Western Australia
by
Bart Alder
Cyril The Spoon Man Edwards was a man whose
appetite for collecting spoons had exceeded the bounds of passion and entered the realm
of scary by the age of twenty.
He’d collected
soup spoons, serving spoons, spoons from expensive restaurants and even plastic
spoons from fast food joints. The Spoon Man had toured America and Europe three
times, yet as much as he admired foreign craftsmanship there was nothing like
the inattentive table service he found at home. In Australia cutlery could
continually disappear from a table all night without remark. He felt safer,
more at home pocketing Australian steel. He loved travel but always came home
for the silverware.
By
the age of thirty, he had rescued and given names to spoons from over three
hundred different restaurants. He looked upon each spoon as a favoured child.
His most beloved spoons changed all the time. Alain the ladle from Maxim’s in
Paris, surreptitiously adopted during a confused stroll through the busy
kitchens, was a beauty. Alain was made of brass and could hold a single serving
of soup. Ivan, a small teaspoon from the New York Library coffee shop was also
a current favourite.
Cyril considered
spoons to be the ultimate eating weapon. He believed that not only was the
spoon the perfect utilitarian device, once claiming there wasn’t anything he
couldn’t eat with a spoon or two, but it was also streets ahead of the knife
and fork in aesthetic appeal. The smooth unbroken curve, the beautifully
distorted reflections on both front and back... luminous, arching curves from
all angles, perfect symmetry right down the middle. A truly three dimensional
piece of eating artillery.
True, he did own
three knives and two forks, but he treated them with disdain, often leaving
them on the sink unwashed for weeks. Their flatter, pronged, pointy,
two-and-a-bit dimensional inferiority was held in contempt.
Having such a
deep and singular obsession, he found women highly resistant to his charms.
Once in her haste to get away from Cyril, having seen him pocket Albert the naughty desert spoon with a
little too much satisfaction, an attractive Sagittarian named Andrea jumped out
of a Melbourne restaurant’s second storey toilet window. Andrea rather unkindly
regarded the resultant broken leg to be a trophy, a memento reminding her of
her courage and coolness under pressure.
The Spoon Man was
not unattractive in his youth and early manhood. His smile was full of nice
teeth, his hair was well behaved, his face looked youthful well into his
thirties. He seemed friendly, or at least stuck to an affable edge of the
world’s gene pool. His eyes smiled, his cheeks were rosy, his voice deep.
But through the
years, his fear of women had multiplied. Firstly with a gentle nudge anxieties
began appearing more regularly, then as the rejections from potential dinner
dates became more powerful and obvious, as his obsession grew, fear rose from
his insides every time he met a woman.
Now in his
forties, his eyes no longer looked too friendly, they lost that serene and
gentle sparkle. His hair now behaved like a heavy metal band in a free hotel
room and the great gene monitor in the sky seemed to want to kick him out of
the pool altogether.
Thus dispirited
by life and feeling doomed to being a genetic dead end, he was totally
unprepared to meet Esmarelda The Fork
Woman Bates at a pub in Prahan. She was skulking in the background, seated
at a table away from the light, ever used to not being obvious, eyes lowered,
shoulders slumped, just another person eating another counter meal at another
pub.
Her food arrived,
a plate of steaming hot chips with tomato sauce and French mustard on the side,
delivered wordlessly with a knife and fork folded in a napkin. Cyril watched
her torturously unwrap the cutlery, touching only the napkin. He saw her push
the knife across the table away from her with a look of abhorrence. She was
using the fork as a prod, shoving the blade away in short jabs until it fell
from the table on to the grimy carpet.
Cyril wondered
what she was doing until he saw her wrap the fork back up in the napkin and
then slide both slyly into her handbag. She started eating the chips with her
fingers dabbing a few into the tomato sauce and then whipping them into her
mouth. Only then, chewing and looking up through a pair of timid brown eyes,
did she look around to ensure that her petty thievery had gone unnoticed.
Their eyes met,
her with two dripping red chips still hanging out of her mouth, one finger
poking them in. She knew from his smile that he’d seen her theft and she was
immediately embarrassed. She turned her eyes away as Cyril wobbled on over,
beer in hand, shaking, spilling over the sides of the glass, a wreck of nerves,
his heart pounding, he spoke:
‘You steal
forks.’ he murmured, his voice betraying completely his nervousness. She looked
at him, alarmed. ‘It’s good.’ he said quickly in reassurance. ‘I do spoons.’ He
pulled one out of his pocket to show her. Esmarelda smiled broadly and pulled
out a seat without saying a word. When Cyril sat down beside her, she even
pretended that she was relaxed about it.
Esmarelda had
long been interested in dinner settings. From the age of three she had sat
calmly as her mother, Elizabeth, hovered around the table. Lovingly, carefully,
with poise and calm as though time were created for her to treat as she
pleased, Elizabeth would arrange her elaborate setting. Each plate was placed
just so, each bowl and napkin arranged to create a balance which satisfied
Elizabeth’s highly cultured eye. Candles were preferred as the source of
lighting, adding soft illumination to an interesting, highly sculptured
tableau. Elizabeth’s dinners were her pride.
During her early
adolescence, Esmarelda’s love for her mother’s rather sculptured dinner parties
diminished. Young Esmarelda found interest in boys since they now found great
interest in her. When she wasn’t messing with the minds of young men, she would
sit in silence and read romances. Her declining interest in silverware and
crockery however reversed direction and became a rank obsession the night her
father died.
Ernest Bates was
stabbed to death with a carving knife by his wife. It was the same night Ernest
got fiercely drunk and overtly argumentative with all the guests. In a moment
of blinded foolishness, knowing it would infuriate Elizabeth, he climbed the
dinner table, stood upside down on his hands and feet now waving at the
ceiling, urinated on the tablecloth to prove beyond doubt that what pushed
urine out of the body was abdominal muscle contractions and not the pull of gravity.
With her father
dead and her mother in prison, knives were no longer anything to Esmarelda but
a device of murder, a source of familial shame. Even glancing at the form of a
knife in her peripheral vision caused Esmarelda to feel anger, bitterness,
guilt and humiliation. She decided at that point in time to be a minimalist
diner. She wouldn’t tolerate anything superfluous at the dinner table. A spoon...
well a spoon was for liquids. You could drink all liquids from a glass. Spoons
had to go. That left a plate, a bowl a napkin and a fork. The bowl could also go. No room at the table for a
glass and a bowl. She had always
looked at the fork as being the superior cutlery item and the plate as being
the tops in crockery.
She loved the
general roundness, flatness and elegance of plates, indeed she collected those
too, but it was only the fork which captivated her, compelled her to
kleptomania. Admiring its high sheened, three pronged simplicity, or its four
pronged risqué brilliance, the fourth prong threatening overkill, testing the
boundaries of convention, she was powerless against its charm and she set about
gathering them all.
Excited by glossy
catalogues full of the most ornate and elegant or simplistic and functional
silverware, she would begin her life of petty stealing. First it was one or two
forks a week, then suddenly three a day. Sometimes she would go to university
food halls and grab a handful from the trays when no one was looking.
When she met
Cyril, she felt as though she’d met the perfect man. True, he didn’t understand
the real merits of forks over spoons, but far more importantly he did understand the joys of amassing
cutlery; he didn’t judge her for her
passion, he wasn’t frightened by it and he didn’t run away at light speed when
he saw every wall in her parent’s house covered in forks.
In fact, he
smiled with his eyes for the first time in years. ‘Esmarelda,’ he gasped, ‘this
is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’ That night, as they made love on
the kitchen floor, she cried from happiness. A flood of tears released a life
of agony and solitude, suffering and private fears of insanity.
When
they married only two days later, they held the reception at a restaurant where
every table was set with a spoon and fork. A symbol of their mutual compromise
which was to be tested in the coming years. Nobody turned up at their wedding
reception, a reminder of their isolation - but when they looked at each other
that night their isolation diminished: what they felt was the triumph of their
togetherness. They danced to the hired band, when the band left and the
catering staff began to hang out in the kitchens more and more, they stole all
the spoons and forks and drank more booze than a decent pair of livers could
handle, laughing all the while.
They sold their
separate residences and paid off the remainder of Cyril’s large mortgage and
together bought a little home in a more upmarket suburb. At first it seemed
that there was no problem which could not be solved by a little compromise. Of
course it was not to be so simple.
Firstly they
began to notice that they didn’t agree over the space in the cutlery drawer.
There were three drawers, two of which were duly filled. The third rack, the
one in the middle, was initially reserved for a mixture of spoons and forks, a
compromise on both sides. But then Esmarelda began to notice that there were
almost no forks in the middle rack at all. Too many spoons looked somehow
horrifying to her eyes, as though her beautiful forks were being swamped,
suffocated, so she remedied the situation but not to Cyril’s liking.
‘There are way
too many forks in here.’ he lamented.
‘We need to sort this thing out.’ they said
to each other endlessly. But nothing seemed to work. It just got worse. Next it
was the competition for wall space.
‘You already have
half of your spoons up and look at this, I’ve got crates of forks just waiting
to go.’ her voice was pleading, verging on the desperate.
‘That’s not my
fault.’ Cyril would say. ‘It’s not a competition.’ Even though it sort of was
and they both knew it.
Sometimes their
conversations would get vicious. It was hard for them to remember that they had
so much in common because all they saw was how little they suddenly seemed to
share. Then one day, after one of their better nights, when they ate out and
cleaned a table set for a party of ten of cutlery, they made love and
Esmarelda, to her astonishment, conceived a child.
Things improved
for the two of them almost immediately. One night in a fit of generosity, Cyril
had taken every last spoon out of the middle rack, giving it to Esmarelda for
making him a father to be. A gesture he would later regret and resent his wife
for accepting so easily.
She was to begin
to assume that the cutlery drawer would stay that way, two thirds of it filled
with glorious forks. Cyril couldn’t take his half of the drawer back without
feeling like he was trying for a hostile take-over of the cutlery rack.
Esmarelda, quite wrongly, cultivated this fear in him, accusing him of being
petty enough to want to take her beautiful gift away from her.
But Cyril was to
learn a few techniques of his own for getting his way. He’d taken to
threatening her with leaving. ‘Who are you going to meet out there? David ‘The
Knife Man’ Jackson?’ The allusion to the evil knife made Esmarelda flinch every
time. She had never told Cyril about her father’s death or her mother’s
violence. She was far too frightened that he might see the same potential for
violence in her. The thought of being alone terrified her suddenly. She saw how
much she needed him and how little he seemed to need her. She hated him for his
cowardly threats.
When Steven was
born, however, their hearts sang together for a while. They laughed at their
belligerent adversity, they admonished themselves for being so focused on their
own lives and needs. They found in their son a reason to co-operate and fall in
love again.
On Steven’s first
birthday, Esmarelda gave Cyril back his half of the third drawer. It was a
critical moment in their lives and it stopped Cyril from making his grand and
lunatic threats of abandoning her.
Steven Edwards
grew up in a strange family and he knew it. Every restaurant he went to seemed
to have extra eating utensils. Ones which were removed from the table or pushed
on to the floor before either of his parents would eat. He was fully aware of
the cutlery rift between his parents. He was careful to side with his mother
about wall space and with his father about drawer space. His mother did like to
add her forks to the middle drawer, and his father did have the lounge and the
master bedroom covered in spoons.
It was therefore
the knives which fascinated Steven. They came to represent the unusual, the
exotic. When he started collecting knives it worried him deeply. Soon it was a
private obsession and like all private obsessions it could not remain long
undiscovered. It was a shocked Esmarelda who found three plastic bags full of
knives under his bed, concealed in a box under piles of pornographic magazines.
He was aged fifteen at the time.
Steven had snuck
through the house and had hidden in the toilet in fear when he’d come home and
had seen three of his six covert knife collections on the kitchen table. But
neither of his parents had minded in the least. They claimed that he had now
provided them with the opportunity to see again. What Cyril and Esmarelda
suddenly saw were not forks, knives and spoons but cutlery.
‘Allow me to
introduce you to Gertrude.’ said Steven pulling out his greatest prize, a huge
stainless steel cleaver he’d lifted from an expensive Chinese restaurant in
Queensland. The mood was so light that even Esmarelda managed a laugh.
Esmarelda slowly overcame
her fear of knives, even using them to cut sandwiches occasionally. Soon she
could happily eat with a knife set at her place, even though she still refused
to use it frivolously, the sight of it in the corner of her eye became
progressively less annoying.
Cyril managed to
find it within himself to use all three eating irons when he scoffed his dinner
and although he said differently, he never believed the spoon to be anything
but the king of cutlery.
Steven stopped
stealing and hoarding knives but he did go on to become a knife thrower at a
circus and marry a Chinese acrobat named Chen Li, who ate everything using only
chopsticks.
Steven and Chen
had a boy named Alain who became a highly acclaimed Chinese chef and some years
later a daughter, Jane, who made millions in her mid twenties by designing
elegant plates and bowls, later diversifying into glassware. Jane recently
moved to Los Angeles and married a frighteningly tall woman named Gertrude who
made wrought iron candleholders.
And so the
culinary patterns flowed and ebbed through the generations of what, in our
haste to make some fragile sense of these rather complicated people, we like to
call their lives.