Oh… like nothing I’d tasted before, like nothing I’d felt before. Too many times (I fear) in my journalism I’d use the phrase ‘orgasmic’. But that was what this was, it was, it was. I chewed, gasped, writhed in my seat; my whole being concentrated in the hundred effervescing nerve endings in the moist cave of my mouth. I was lost, abandoned, helpless. And when I came to, when the dark room had stopped sparkling and spinning, there was Kurt’s face and his warm hand and his voice saying… oh, so warm and intimate…you spoke the truth but it was not the whole truth, ja…..

“What is it?” I said, when I was once again capable of speech.

Kurt dropped his eyes to the floor.

“I am thinking…I am thinking…”

“Thinking what?” I clutched at him, shameless.

He looked at me, solemnly. I nearly gasped again at his beauty, that golden skin, his crisp hair, the tender play of muscles in his neck.

“Can you keep a secret?” he said.

The freezer door thunked shut behind us. I shivered and my breath formed a steaming cloud in the air.

“What is it?” I said. “Why have you brought me here?”

Kurt moved closer to me and put a hand on my upper arm, just above the elbow joint. The warmth of his hand made me, paradoxically, shiver.

“This is the secret,” he said to me. He was almost whispering. “This is the – the – I do not know the word…”

“The…”

“Cure!” He said it triumphantly. “ The cure, for the illness that you said, that you wrote. This is the only thing left to us, to those of us who love food, who worship that which makes us, that …I cannot think of the words.. that….”

“Nourishes us?” I said tentatively.

“Yes!” His grip on my arm tightened and involuntarily my eyes dropped to his own bicep, the bluish sheen of the muscle pushing against the skin of his arm.

He dragged me forward.

“Here,” he said, hushed again. “This is the only thing that is left to us.”

I looked down at the steel table whose frost-rimmed edge was nudging my thighs. There was a white plastic tray laid upon it, in which where several cuts of meat. I looked at them. A brisket, a loin, a chop – and an unidentifiable cut, a little ragged about the edges. I looked closer. The topside still had the skin attached, pale, freckled, dusted with fine hairs. And something else, a mark, a flaw. I bent closer. A mark, a flaw – I recoiled suddenly, bile rising in my throat. A mark, a flaw… no - the intricate edges of a tattoo, the unfurling petals of a rose and the first two letters of a name ‘M’ and ‘O’…

“It is natural.”

I looked up at Kurt from my kneeling position from the gutter, in the alleyway outside. My latest, guiltiest, most perfect meal steamed before me, regurgitated.

“Natural?”

“Yes,” he said, serenely. “It is natural to react like that. After all, it is not what is –what is the word – intended, is it not? It is not intended…”

“God, no…” I whispered.

Then I looked at him. I looked at his beauty, that molten skin stretched taut over muscle. The muscle laid over creamy fat, the whole of him beautiful and wholesome and healthy. And I thought again of the feel of that slab of meat against my teeth, the way the juices had burst from the crisp edge; how it was the last, the best, the only thing left to taste…

And that’s how it started – the Club. There are more of us out there than you’d imagine. When you hear of a new restaurant opening, of a new celebrity chef touting his latest book, I wonder if it ever gives you pause. Does it ever make you wonder? Because there’s a surprising number of us gourmets out there, you know. And is it really so disgusting? I am the Body of Christ…all flesh is grass… the justification is there, is it not?

And Kurt and I? We opened our first restaurant in Smithfields two years ago. Our second in Mayfair a year later. We appear in the latest Michelin. It’s been a wild, heady ride, no doubt about it. Kurt was happy to take on the public relations part of our partnership and he fulfilled his role so well.

It’s just that, lately, I’ve had to put off his media appearances – it’s too much for one person, sometimes. He’d come home so tired and drawn…he’d lost so much weight and that’s bad for our kind of business, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you. And besides, we haven’t spent much time together lately and that’s bad for any relationship, isn’t it?

It’s still good though – he’s such a sweet boy. When I look at him now, I’m reminded of why I fell in love with him in the first place. Tenderness. That’s what everyone looks for in a lover, isn’t it?

Freedom Fighter

It was going to be a momentous day but of course, he didn’t know that when he woke up. Peter Drewett wasn’t normally aware of much before his first cup of tea in the morning, and so his peace remained unbroken until the middle of breakfast. He was reaching for his second piece of toast when it happened. His fingers closed upon the rigid crust and as he lifted it to his plate, he looked at his wife and thought I have absolutely nothing left to say to you.

That was it, that was all. He made no sound but his eyelids fluttered in shock and the toast dropped onto his plate, unheeded. Peter stared at his wife’s face, the same face he’d seen every morning for the past twenty-seven years. Twenty-seven years! It was a lifetime. And now he had nothing left to say to her - nothing at all.

He reached for his cup of tea, noting with interest and a small amount of panic that his fingers were shaking. His wife, of course, noticed nothing. Mary Drewett was a fat, fair creature, buttoned tightly into the grey woollen cardigan that she habitually wore to breakfast. In the submerged strata of her face could be seen traces of the pert, pretty girl she’d once been. Peter stared at her. It could have been a stranger sitting across from him, despite the familiarity of that awful cardigan. He brought the china mug to his lips and gulped helplessly at the lukewarm liquid within. He felt lost, as if his chair was drifting gently on the current of an unseen ocean, floating him away from his old, tired, unwanted life. He was sure the walls of the kitchen shimmered for a second. The floor tilted beneath the soles of his slippers and he closed his eyes, suddenly dizzy.

Upstairs, under the hot gush of the shower, things were no better. He felt panicky, nibbled by anxiety; as if he’d missed a vital life-preserving appointment. I’m forty-eight, he thought incredulously. Half my life is gone. He stepped out of the shower and waded through the gauzy white sheets of steam that hung in the air. He wiped the mirror over the sink with a trembling hand. Forty-eight. And somehow, his forty-eight wasn’t the forty-eight of those creatures glimpsed in glossy magazines, or the figures who cavorted in the tiny glass compound of the television. His was a much older type of forty-eight. He was almost an old man.

He dressed himself in a daze, clinging to the old routine of his working day. He buttoned his white, short sleeved shirt and pulled on his grey, polyester-wool-mix suit, dull as pewter except for the oily shine of the elbows and knees. Peter thought of the train journey ahead of him, and the office routine ahead of that. He sold advertising space for a glossy car magazine. How many hours, how many years of his life had been spent in that little, grey box of a cubicle, headset clamped to his ears, listening to the oleaginous tone of his voice as he tried to persuade yet another reluctant customer of the need to buy a three centimetre, bordered box in the last five pages of the magazine? He’d never really thought about it before but he suddenly realised he was the one of the oldest people in the office. No, he was the oldest. He had gradually become surrounded by children; children who thought they were adults, strident, spike-haired children in any number of ridiculous clothes. Did they laugh at him behind his back? He reddened with shame as he straightened his tie and smoothed the sparse strands of his remaining hair back behind his ears. He’d always worn a tie to work – Mary bought them for him for his birthday and sometimes for Christmas. Every year he unwrapped another slither of coloured nylon to noose about his neck.