Eating Mammals

‘“My dear Mulligan …” he began, as those around urged him to retake his seat, “… fine, fine, noble son of the Emerald Isle …” at which point he belched, but I took no offence, “… I tonight stand here, a poor man …” (“You’ll make another million, Quentin! Sit down, old boy!” came a shout from someone further down the table.) “… I have made and lost a great fortune. Yes …” he gulped down some port, “… but you, you of the fine orange hair, dumb to the heartless world which you neither understand nor whose vices, my dear sir, could you comprehend …” At which point he rather lost himself … “Err … ehm, but think not of this world, good man!” he rallied. “It is not worthy of your attention. Michael Mulligan, I toast you, and with my final sovereign I invite you to share with me my final dozen oysters.”

‘With this he raised his empty glass and held still, save for some involuntary listing, awaiting my reply. I communicated with my assistant, and indeed this time I really did use a form of secret language, for the message was unusual, and in truth it was rather a rash one.

‘“Mr Mulligan will toast your future success, sir, not with a dozen oysters but with a dozen dozen oysters!”’

Here Mulligan took a long, pensive draw on his cigar, watching the rich smoke spiral upwards from his nose and mouth, spilling out into thin, flat clouds which hung in the air, forming a plateau across the hotel room.

‘That,’ he said wistfully, ‘turned out to be a touch imprudent. A dozen oysters, two dozen, even six dozen, I had swallowed on one occasion. After all, seventy-two oysters are no heavier nor occupy more space inside than seven or eight braised pig’s trotters, or a couple of ostrich eggs. But a gross of the things … Ha! It was the undoing of me, two nights running! And as for the poor Mr Quentin, we never saw his face again. Who knows, perhaps he is paying off the debt to this day.

‘Ah, yes! Paris in the ’Twenties! How much I learned there, how much I learned. How much I ate!’

From his armchair he recounted more incredible tales, of churns of milk in Belgian monasteries, a grilled lion’s paw in Baghdad, sinkfuls of pasta (‘Tubes, my boy, the biggest possible! Pound for pound they look more!’); of a forty-five chitterling marathon in Brittany, ten kilos of roast cod in Bilbao, seven pickled mice for a bet in Marrakech. And he told me also of the people, those fine clients of the hotel, who sought a little extra zest to their dinner parties in Rome, Kabul, Delhi, London, Frankfurt, inviting him to their holiday entertainments in Goa, Rimini, Monte Carlo and Thessaloniki. On a visit to Tokyo he had consumed so much sushi that, in listening to him, one felt as if one were floating on a sea of raw fish; in Constantinople his ability to finish off an entire roast goat in little over half a day had so enthused one of the dignitaries privileged enough to witness the spectacle that Mulligan was presented not only with a belly dancer for the night, but was invited to extract and keep the bulging ruby which adorned her navel. Along the Magreb he had sucked the eyes out of more dead animals than he cared to remember, and the glittering rewards for such fripperies were staggering indeed. To crumbling European castles he had travelled, there to gorge on whatever his noble amphitryon decreed: seventeen pairs of bull’s testicles at the table of the Duke of Alba in Salamanca; inconceivable quantities of sausage for any number of gibbering, neurotic Central European counts; regular sojourns to the seats of the Dukes of Argyll, Dumfriesshire and sundry other Scottish lairds, each one desperate that Mulligan improve upon some or other haggis-eating record, or simply curious to know how quickly their national dish could disappear down the throat of one man. For a time he was in huge demand in the USA, where he set a string of records for chicken and ribs throughout the Southern states; he amazed the Romanian Jews in New York with his evident partiality for ridding any restaurant of all its chopped liver and the relish with which he glugged down whole pitchers of schmaltz as if it were … well, metaphors are hardly appropriate; the Ashkenazim wouldn’t have him, but he didn’t mind, there were plenty of other sects, plenty of other religions, to astound; he even did a promotion for the pro-Prohibition Methodists, drinking the body weight of a six-year-old child in lemonade, presumably to illustrate that purity and excess can coexist. He repeated Americana for countless gatherings of businessmen, and in one particularly prolific afternoon’s work notched up a record of sixty-two hot dogs (even before Babe Ruth’s achievement) at a public demonstration sponsored by Wurtz’s Wieners, a Chicago sausage company owned by one of those immigrants who really wants you to mispronounce his name.

‘Then the Depression hit,’ he continued, ‘and the profession of gluttony suffered something of a downturn. The rich became preoccupied, and the poor became hungry. Overnight, or so it seemed, no one wanted to see how much more than a normal man I could eat. Now it was a matter of just what I would eat beyond the normal. On its own this was nothing new for me. After all, for the better part of a decade a great many of the things I had sent down to my stomach could have been called food only through a very liberal understanding of the word, or by a desperately hungry person: in Oxford I had feasted on a sturdy hiking boot, prepared in advance, not à la Chaplin, but in vinegar and wine, and then slow-roasted in butter and olive oil; somewhere else (I forget) a mackintosh, curried; a canary in its little wooden cage (I mean, and its cage); a large aspidistra (leaves au naturel, stem and roots flambéed) …’

On he went, and as the list became more and more preposterous, my astonishment and incredulity grew in equal measure. This man, I told myself, was not only mad but also a great fabulist. However, I must tell you, before we go any further, that The Great Michael Mulligan was, in recounting these stories, very far from invention, for the truth was that he had eaten things far more extraordinary, more extraordinary indeed than he dared mention.

But how, you ask, can a man chew his way through a boot, or a raincoat? How, come to that, could he possibly sit down to a chair? Well, you yourself probably possess all that is necessary to achieve such a feat. A mincer, and a good dose of oil is all that you need. Mulligan had begun with a small kitchen mincer, to which he had fitted the finest, most durable blades available, and which was quite adequate for turning all manner of small items into an ingestible mince. With the addition of larger and more powerful machinery, the toughest boot could easily be turned to a leathery crumb. And is that so hard to stomach? Have you never heard of Peter Schultz, or Jean-Paul Kopp? The former ate a Mercedes-Benz, the latter a biplane. Both employed the simple expedient of filing and grinding away slowly at the object in question, swallowing the resulting dust little by little along with a suitable internal lubricant. The aeroplane sounds impressive, no doubt, but it was really only a matter of time, and in the two years it took from propeller to tail fin, Mr Mulligan would have eaten his way through enough household items to furnish a decent sized parlour.

Over the years the great man designed a number of hand-operated grinders, with higher and higher gearing ratios, so that, along with the toughest and best grinding blades available, he was capable of turning wood into sawdust and small amounts of worked metal into perfectly edible filings. He never touched glass (although some did), but he was occasionally tempted by a china cup and saucer, or a particularly fine dinner plate.

‘All of which explains my need for the mixture which you so expertly prepared,’ he said, drawing his story to a close. He examined his pocket watch and stood up. ‘You see, my friend, I really am going to eat a chair this evening. For Freemasons, I’m afraid, dullards to the last, but times are hard. And now I must prepare.’

He smoothed the velvet of his waistcoat down the vast, arcing curve of his stomach and went over to his jacket. I bade him goodnight and, with my head full of the most extraordinary tales of gluttony, as well as the effects of my first cigar, I wandered out of his room. I forgot my pound note and made my way back down to the kitchens quite without knowing which route I took, so immersed was I in a thousand new turns of the imagination.

That was my first stroke of good fortune: a chance meeting with a true king of his craft, a maestro fêted the world over, The Great Michael ‘Cast Iron’ Mulligan.

When I arrived back in the kitchens, I found the place unusually quiet. Dinner preparations were being conducted in a strangely subdued manner: hard beating had become feather-light whisking, brusque chopping replaced by slow, painstaking slicing, all eyes turned downwards. Either someone had died, I thought, or someone had got the sack.

At that moment I heard a crash nearby. I looked down; a metal bucket lay at my feet. I realised, rather too late, that I had abandoned it in my room. Immediately I deduced the source of the abnormal quiet. Chef, from whose hand the bucket had fallen, knelt down and ran his finger around the inside of it. He closed his eyes in mock appreciation as he sampled the sweet, oily mixture. Then he stood up and faced me. He was a big man, but I was bigger. In a kitchen, though, physical size is of little consequence, as well I knew.

‘Three questions,’ he said as a sharp, aching silence fell around us. ‘One: have you by any chance read tonight’s menu?’

Instead of pronouncing the sentence with its appropriate interrogative intonation, though, he punctuated his delivery with a cuff to the side of my head, delivered with the full power of his considerable upper body. My ear crackled and buzzed, and immediately half my head began to numb over. Of course, I had not read the menu, yet I had little doubt that it included recipes proclaiming their citrus content, or their basis in finest Italian olive oil.

‘Two: did you use the whole bottle of oil?’

The singular form sang out ominously for me. I began a forlorn nod, but even as my head dipped for the first time I felt my jaw rocket back upwards, as his forearm swung into my face, my teeth slamming together with a sliver of tongue still between then. I felt no pain, but, incredibly, a slight sense of relief that I had already survived two out of three.

‘And finally,’ he shouted, breaking into an exaggerated goose-step and circling me several times, ‘DO YOU KNOW WHERE THE FUCKING LABOUR EXCHANGE IS?’

He bawled it into my ear from behind me and then, grabbing me by the collar, pulled me off balance and punched me three times in the back of the head as I went down.

Then nothing. And even from the floor I could detect quite clearly the horrified stillness in the kitchen, spatulas sinking unattended into batter, whisks suspended in mid-air, dripping half-beaten egg on to the floor. The blood ran cold from the side of my mouth, almost as cold as the icy floor onto which it trickled, and then the various sites of localised injury began to get their screaming messages through to my brain.

‘We need that veal stock in five minutes, eh!’ Chef called out suddenly, breaking the silence. Back came a clipped reply. And things returned to normal. Some of my colleagues threw me sympathetic glances as they stepped over my crumpled, aching body. But no one offered assistance.

By slow, agonising degrees, I made my way to the door, and got myself to a low crouch. Then, as I stumbled out of the kitchen, a young trainee who I had come to know hopped out after me, making sure nobody had seen him, and asked: ‘What did you do with it? Everybody wants to know, especially Chef. It’s been driving him mad, but he’s too proud to ask. What the hell were you cooking?’

It was a second or two before I recalled.

‘Mulligan!’ I said, more to myself than to my friend.

‘What?’

‘Le Grand Michael Mulligan! I cooked him a chair!’

I reached his room just as he was about to leave. He ushered me back inside and helped to clean my blood-smeared face. I attempted to explain what had happened, despite my damaged tongue, and then, suddenly, as he dabbed my chin with a damp towel, he furrowed his brow as if something striking had occurred to him.

‘My word!’ he said, patting first the top of my head and then his own, ‘you’re almost my height! Not as broad, naturally, but, by Jiminy, you’re no stripling either!’

With that he dashed over to the wardrobe, pulled out a black dinner suit and threw it at me.

‘Put that on, my boy, and forget your woes. You’re coming with me!’

With not a moment’s hesitation I changed into the suit. It hung about me like an untethered tent, but the length was not too far off the mark, and all in all it lent me an almost eccentric aspect.

‘The car’s ready,’ he said, lighting another cigar and consulting his watch. ‘Tonight, you will be, let’s see … Captain Gusto! Yes, that’s it! Captain Gusto, assistant to The Great Michael Mulligan!’

And that was the second stroke of good fortune to befall me that day: to be beaten senseless by a furious chef and, as a consequence, to be invited by Mulligan, the great man himself, to share the stage for his most enduring act.

The car was a shining Rolls-Royce. I climbed inside, and Mulligan backed his ample frame in through the opposite door and on to the driver’s seat, which had the appearance of being rather flatter and less bouncy than the others in the car, somewhat like an over-egged sponge that has risen enthusiastically and then turned sad in the oven.

He reached behind him and took one of the pint bottles from the crate on the back seat.

‘Care for some?’ he said, before polishing off half its orange contents. ‘I have a long evening ahead,’ he added as way of explanation.

On the way to the event I tried to get him to elaborate upon the stories he had told me earlier that afternoon. At last, perhaps somewhat exasperated by my incessant questioning, he said: ‘My art is something which really must be observed. No manner of description will suffice. Have patience, and you will see …’

‘Seeing is believing,’ I chuntered, as an errant strand of incredulity wrapped itself around my thoughts and introduced doubts not only as to the true nature of his act, but also about where this monster fruitcake was taking me.

Mulligan brought the car to an abrupt halt, right there in the middle of a twisting, coastal road. I lunged forward, sliding to the edge of the shiny leather and getting halfway to an involuntary squat in the footwell. His wry, twinkling eyes had turned dark, all fire, and stared menacingly into mine.

‘Seeing, my friend, is comprehending. Seeing is understanding.’

And with that, his eyes still fixed on mine, he reached behind him for the half-finished bottle, and proceeded to empty its contents down his throat.

We resumed our journey, and my apprenticeship began. From that day on I began my education in the lore and history of our trade. Mulligan would talk about the distant past, of old, famous, forgotten names: The Great Eusebio Galante, Franz ‘Fledermaus’ Pipek and Rocco ‘La Rocca’ Fontane; of Sammy Ling (‘He’ll eat anything!’) and his predilection for neckties; of who’d eaten most; of scandalous, illegal records set in the back streets of hardly remembered Bavarian towns; of the rotten and the rancid, eaten and (allegedly) digested for a bagful of the local currency; of the unfortunate demise of Henry ‘Tubby’ Turns; of the great American masters like Nelson Pickle, who at the height of his powers had eaten a grand piano (baby, no frame) in little over nine weeks as a promotion for a new Detroit music store – those were the Prohibition days, great times for professional gluttony! – poor Nelson, who came to Europe to give eating demonstrations at the great German beer festivals and died of alcohol poisoning after assuming that beer was beer the world over and drinking a keg of Belgian Trappist in a single weekend for a bet.

That night was also to be my first appearance on stage with Mulligan. The evening began inauspiciously. After a long drive we finally turned into the forecourt of a large, somewhat podgy Edwardian building. He smiled and said, ‘Well, Paris it’s not, and it’s no palace. And, I assure you, there will be no crown princes in the audience! But this, for tonight, is work.’

We unloaded some heavy wooden crates from the car and wheeled them around to the back of the building. A cheery but nervous man in a tight-fitting dinner suit greeted us, a glass of gin in his hand, and led us into a large, modestly elegant dining hall. The place smelt of Sunday school, but with the added aromas of overcooked meat and aftershave. Forty or fifty place settings announced, by means of the sorry array of cutlery at each, a rather strained attempt at luxury. The man with the gin pointed to a small semicircular stage at one end of the room.

‘Everything is as you requested,’ he said to Mulligan, looking around the hall a little anxiously. Mulligan himself surveyed the tables, and then turned his gaze to the stage.

‘Yes, yes indeed. All appears to be in order. Quite acceptable. So, there remains only that small transaction which my accountant constantly reminds me must never be overlooked …’

The gin man stared down into the glass.

‘We do … you know, it was rather felt that, that … that that would normally come after …’

His voice tailed off. Mulligan said nothing. The three of us stood there, a very distant murmur of cocktail chitchat in the background, Mulligan’s amenable, matter-of-fact smile fixed on his face. After a handful of long, cringing seconds, the poor chap reached into his breast pocket and drew out a brown envelope.

‘You’ll find it all there,’ he said in a soft, defeated voice.

‘Ah, splendid!’ said Mulligan, bursting into activity. ‘I’ll make you out a receipt—’

‘No, no, that won’t be necessary,’ the other replied, hitching down his jacket and turning away. ‘If you could begin after coffee and be finished by twelve,’ he said over his shoulder as he started out towards some elaborate double doors at the other end of the hall.

Mulligan opened the envelope, smirking.

‘The people one meets in this job! I don’t know! Get me another bottle of the mixture, would you?’ he said, quickly thumbing through what appeared to be a considerable wad of banknotes.

Our preparations that evening were meticulous. On the little stage we erected the apparatus, each of its separate cast-iron pieces removed one by one from the crates and taken from their wrapping of soft, oily cotton cloth. I assisted where I could in the assembly of the main frame itself, a four-legged structure which bolted down on to the bottom of the largest crate, which itself unhinged on all sides to become a sort of stabilising floor for the machine. From then on I was useful only in passing the maestro one greasy rag bundle after another. He pushed, slotted and clamped such a number of cogs, grinding cylinders and levers on to the growing contraption that I began to wonder if he was going to attach wheels and a petrol tank and drive off into the distance.

Mulligan’s concentrated industry began to yield results. The nascent iron structure slowly grew into The Machine – the very largest hand-cranked mincing machine you could possibly imagine. If, I told myself, just if he really does plan to eat furniture this evening, just if, then at least he has something which is of potential use. I peered down the funnel and saw huge, menacing teeth poised like bunches of iron knuckles, ready to pound raw granite to a crumble, or so it seemed; I peeped around the back at the intricate system of gears mounted around a series of progressively smaller grinding chambers; I studied the tiny opening from which the mince would emerge, hardly bigger than a bottle neck. The Great Michael Mulligan, then, was going to eat a ground-up chair.

Still in shock, and for the first time truly believing that such a thing could be done, I looked around the hall, wondering where the chosen item had been positioned. Surely, but surely, it would be a special chair, its legs partially hollowed out, or made of balsa wood. Meanwhile, Mulligan put the final touches to The Machine and gave the plaque bolted to the funnel a brisk polish. Mulligan & Sons it read, gleaming brass against racing green. Later I learned that his father, the owner of a Dublin foundry, had disowned his son Michael on learning of his new career as a ‘bloody glutton’. The plaque had been sent secretly from Ireland by a brother.

Mulligan stopped and admired the plaque for a moment, and then came up to me and stood by my side.

‘Now, Chef, why don’t you select a nice, plump chair for me?’

For the duration of the dinner itself we sat in a back room, glad not to be partaking of the paltry feast which four dozen Freemasons were busy praising through grinning, shiny faces, each one of them eager no doubt to disguise their disappointment. Mulligan decanted six pints of the orange liquid into a tall, vaguely Egyptian-looking jug, and took occasional sips from the one remaining bottle. He explained the part I would play: I would be dumb, although only for effect, not as a stated disability. To this I had no objection, since I am by nature a retiring person, and of course my tongue was still throbbing. I was also beginning to feel unwell, although I would later recognise this as stage fright.

The rumbling, masculine conversation out in the dining hall turned by degrees to a controlled, middle-class raucousness. They sang a song, or perhaps it was a hymn, it was hard to tell, and there were a few short speeches which were greeted with hearty approbation. Then The Great Michael ‘Cast Iron’ Mulligan was introduced, to a combination of polite applause and a good deal of muttering.

Suddenly, perhaps for the first time in years, the sundry magistrates and bank managers, the police officers and provincial lawyers assembled to celebrate their collective worth, were confronted with a man whose most evident baggage was a bunch of superlatives, enough to pour scorn on the very loudest boasts of English Freemasonry: the biggest man they had ever seen, almost certainly, and without doubt the handsomest giant; the most outrageous suit, and the most booming yet also the sweetest voice; the most confident, the most endearing, perhaps even the wittiest man they had ever encountered. And, of course, the most intimidating, whose great strength and power manifested itself at each moment, evident in the very slightest detail of his movement, in the way he would stand behind someone’s chair and rest an enormous hand delicately on that poor soul’s shoulder, and in the way he had of running his eyes casually up and down a whole row of men, as if to register in passing how, even en masse, they might consider it prudent to grant him their most careful respect. He was also, as far as any of them knew, the richest man in the room; not one of them would have failed to notice the Rolls-Royce outside, as they climbed out of their Morrises and Austins in twos and threes, or strode up from the bus stop, dicky bows peeping out above the collars of well-worn overcoats.

He began by praising his hosts for the splendour of their banquet, in that same lyrical tone which edged back and forth between seriousness and whimsy, and which, little by little, drew each diner up in his chair, stiff with expectancy, enthralled and rather embarrassed, yet unable to take his eyes off the great man. Mulligan himself wandered amongst them, stopping here and there to pluck a sugar lump from a table and pop it into his mouth. He recounted some of his more modest feats of ingestion, keeping it simple, letting each man present believe that he too could, just possibly, have eaten his way through a whole suckling pig, or four brace of pheasants; keeping it also within the bounds of human consumption, the six dozen oranges somewhere or other, the ninety-nine sardines, the gross of oysters (although he omitted the aftermath). I think for the main part he made these stories up; the Great Mulligan was no more likely to go to Seville to eat a paltry seventy-odd oranges as he was to go to the barber’s for a shoe shine. But he knew how to start, how to create atmosphere, taking and manipulating the assembled Masonic consciousness, running and developing it around the tempting notion of all-encompassing gluttony, as a great maestro takes a single theme and weaves from it a mesmerising sonata.