Read an extract from Stella Prize shortlisted book Feast by Emily O'Grady.
ALISON
Alison kneels beside the rabbit. Its right hind leg is clamped into the trap and it takes quick, shallow breaths, heart pumping, lungs expanding and contracting. The surrounding field is thick with pale tussocks and crispy heather, the neighbour’s cottage and the road to the village just beyond the hill. It is early still and Alison is out here in the cold because last night she dreamt of her mother, who served her three chanterelles on a dinner plate. In her dream, the mushrooms glowed, and when her mother—looming like a cast-iron statue in the centre of a colonised city—opened her lips to speak, the grotto of her mouth glowed also, her tongue orange and bulbous and radiating light. When Alison woke at dawn, she rose and went out to search the woods. She found no mushrooms, but she did find this, the rabbit. She applies pressure to the levers of the trap until the steel jaws open and the rabbit’s mangled leg is freed. A hissing sound escapes its mouth as she presses her palm to its throat. She does not speak to it or soothe it with soft, maternal clucks. It stares up at her, eyes pink as tourmaline, but doesn’t struggle until she presses down with the same swift motion she uses when cracking Patrick’s back on the bedroom floor when he comes to her, weary and tense after a long day hunched over piano keys.
She gathers the rabbit by its back legs and rises. The joints in her own legs are stiff and she rolls each ankle. Usually, it feels good to walk, early and in the spring, when it’s no longer cold enough to preserve a corpse, but she is too warm in Patrick’s shearling coat and sweat dampens her chest. Though home is only a short walk past the woods and the stables, she’s hit with the inexplicable fear she has strayed too far and won’t be able to find her way back again. The illogical ache of home-sickness, of feeling far from where she is safe. She closes her eyes and imagines herself suspended in a bubble of liquid, gummy and unthinking as a jellyfish. She tries to leave her body and hover above the feeling world, but her brain is hot and swollen, its weight gluing her to the earth. When she opens her eyes to find she’s still earth-bound, a gush of vinegar surges up her throat and she leans over to be sick. She hasn’t eaten breakfast and a viscous puddle coats the rocks at her feet. Forty-eight years old and pregnant for the first time. For her entire life she’s been nothing but careless and until last week, when the test she ordered arrived in the post, assumed she’d been blessed with sterility. The baby is a girl, she can feel it. Not that it matters. She’s not going to keep it.
Alison brushes hair from her eyes. With the rabbit knocking against her calf she tramps through the brambles, the wild thistle, the velvet grass towards home, where Patrick will be waking up, wondering where she’s gone.
They live outside a small village north of Edinburgh, Patrick and Alison and, as of two months ago, Patrick’s daughter, Neve, who is on a gap year after graduating high school last November. Alison bought the house for her mother, Frances, almost ten years ago now. It is solid, grey stone, three storeys high and severe. Even with the heating on, it’s always cold inside; the geriatric parts rubbing up against each other sound like the breathing of something ancient. Yet for all that, it’s not so grim. In the summer, raspberries burst from ragged bushes in the garden, dense and sweet. The landscape is lush and crisscrossed with trails. (Sometimes, a pair of enthusiastic walkers will wander off path, trudge down the hill with their hiking poles and ergonomically designed backpacks. Alison does not enjoy small talk with strangers—or with anyone, really—but if Patrick is around he greets them warmly and nudges them in the right direction, recommends the better pub in the village while waving off occasional looks of recognition.) They own a very impressive car but only Patrick drives it. Both their appetites are enormous and they eat and drink constantly and with gusto. Because he is the better chef, Patrick does most of the cooking, but once a week or so he’ll go into town and return with a parcel of fish and chips and a tray of oysters. If they don’t keep track of the days he’ll go on a Monday by mistake and return with a curry because the chippery is closed, which is fine, Alison thinks, but not as nice. Her irritation is as gentle as a gland swelling, retreating. She hasn’t felt real anger in years.
After crossing the driveway lined with pines, she cuts through the garden. The grass is getting long and scratches at her ankles. She makes a mental note to remind Patrick to call the gardener. Patrick is a useful person and takes care of all things practical, almost like a housekeeper, but one she is extremely attached to and does not pay a wage. She descends the steep set of steps, enters the house through the side entrance that opens to the kitchen. She scrapes the peat from her boots on the doormat and forces the stiff door shut behind her. The sky is breaking, dusty light filtering through the higher windows and spotlighting the table. Patrick and Neve sit at opposite ends. Patrick is slathering blue jam on toast, and there’s a plate of scrambled eggs in front of Neve. They wear the matching tartan dressing-gowns Patrick bought Neve as a welcome gift when she arrived from Sydney at the beginning of February. They are hideous and Alison has been meaning to steal both from the laundry and set them alight. She strides towards the deep copper sink. The mammal smell of musk and urine is beginning to ripen, but now that she’s home her stomach has settled. She slaps the carcass down on the benchtop and turns to Neve. ‘Does your mother like rabbit?’
Neve looks up from her eggs. An ellipsis of pimples dot the crease in her chin and the colourless tangle of hair is bird-nested atop her head. Like her father, she is tall. With her dressing-gown and bad posture she gives off an air of malnourishment and resembles a shrivelling pensioner, like Patrick perhaps will in twenty years. ‘Did you kill that?’ she asks. Her expression is characteristically inscrutable and Alison can’t tell if she’s revolted by the rabbit or deeply uninterested.
‘No,’ she replies. ‘It was caught in one of Gareth’s fox traps. Already dead.’ She flips over its body and stretches out its limbs. ‘Patrick can make a stew for tomorrow night, when your mother arrives. Something nice and stodgy.’
‘Mum doesn’t eat meat,’ Neve says. She fiddles with her phone, places it screen down on the table. The case has rubbery cat ears protruding from the top and its bulging, panicked eyes watch Alison from across the room.
Patrick snorts. ‘Since when?’
‘Since forever.’
Alison watches Neve take in the rabbit. According to Patrick she’s a genius, but Alison is yet to see any evidence of that. Twice a week she cycles to her part-time job at Gareth’s cafe in the village, returns with stale bread and pastries. She constantly burns coffee grounds and sheds her hair throughout the house like a husky. As a teenager herself, Alison had no interest in teenage girls. She still has no interest in teenage girls, but that cannot be helped.
‘I can take you hunting, if you like?’ Alison says to Neve, because yesterday Patrick had again reminded her to make an effort to bond.
Neve shakes her head. ‘I could never kill an animal.’
Alison shrugs out of Patrick’s coat and slings it over the back of a chair. ‘But you eat meat?’
‘Eating an animal is different from killing it.’
Patrick interrupts. ‘Neve’s a Buddhist.’
Neve sighs. ‘I’m not a Buddhist,’ she says. ‘I’m not anything.’
‘If you insist.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Did you know Alison’s a pagan?’ he asks Neve. ‘She descended from druids. That’s why she’s so . . .’ He magics his fingers in the air, trying to snatch up the right word. ‘Esoteric.’
‘I’m not a pagan,’ Alison says, opening the refrigerator. ‘And I descended from gamblers and drunks.’ She picks through the top shelf: thick wheels of soft, pungent cheeses, a container of shaved ham, a depressed loaf of brown bread. Craving something sweet, she takes out the rhubarb she stewed last week.
‘Remind me to go shopping on the way back from the airport tomorrow, both of you,’ Patrick says. ‘The menu’s confirmed with the caterers for the party, but we’ll want champagne as well as wine, obviously. A proper feast.’
‘We can just go out to eat or something,’ Neve says. ‘It doesn’t have to be a big deal.’
‘It’s already planned, Neve,’ Alison says, opening the container and spooning up a mouthful. ‘Your mother is expecting a party. And Gareth’s boy. What’s he calling himself now? Estrogen? Epigraph?’
‘Elixir.’
‘It’s your eighteenth birthday,’ Patrick adds, clinking his mug of green tea against Neve’s coffee. ‘We want to celebrate properly, your mother and I. And Alison.’ He glances her way, raises his eyebrows. ‘Think of it as your official welcome party.’
‘Five people isn’t a party,’ Neve says.
‘An intimate soiree then. Much more sophisticated.’
Neve picks up a crust. ‘I just don’t want you to go to any trouble.’
‘It’s not about you,’ Patrick teases. ‘We haven’t let loose in ages.’
Alison picks up Patrick’s coat from the back of the chair, bats off the grass and rabbit fur.
‘You’re right, Patrick. I’ve never understood why we insist on making birthdays all about the child.’ She gives the coat a final shake and hooks it to the back of the door. ‘The mother is the one who goes through the agony of childbirth, yet it’s she who has to buy the gifts and organise the celebration and bake a cake. We should be throwing Shannon a party.’
Neve slumps further in her chair. The sleeves of her dressing-gown are long and she flaps them in front of her face in exasperation. ‘You don’t have to bake me a cake.’
‘Of course there’ll be cake,’ Alison says.
‘Just as long as there’s drink and dancing,’ says Patrick, draining the dregs of his tea.
‘No dancing,’ Neve says.
‘If there’s Shannon, there’ll be dancing.’
‘I don’t even know why Mum’s bothering,’ Neve says. ‘It’s only been a couple of months.’
‘She’s your mother, Neve,’ says Patrick. ‘She misses you.’ Neve shrugs.
There’s a scatter of crumbs on the table and she gathers them into a small, neat pile with her fingertip. As Alison spoons rhubarb onto Patrick’s plate, Neve points to her hand and grimaces. ‘You’re bleeding.’
There’s a red smear across two of Alison’s knuckles, puffy with arthritis. She glances back at the rabbit lumped on the bench. Other than a broken neck and leg, its body is plump and immaculate. As Alison moves towards the sink, she is aware of Neve watching her. There’s something penetrating about her gaze, as though she’s lapping Alison up. Alison hasn’t told Patrick how uncomfortable Neve makes her feel, always watching, staring; that it’s not been easy to have her here, and she is self-conscious now of the way her body smells after the strenuous walk, the faint smell of rancid food scum wafting up from deep in the sink. They used to have a cleaner come once a week, a pretty girl Patrick found from the village, but she fell ill and they haven’t got around to replacing her.
Alison looks towards the window. The top of the earth is level with her eye line. Though the ceiling is high and the furniture spare, it feels cramped with too many morning bodies, unwashed, cruddy with sleep. Patrick’s cough is hacking, like a crotchety old man, though he is younger than Alison. She turns on the tap to wash her hands. The plumbing is ancient and the pipes inhale. The water is ice. It is a peculiar sort of agony when her hands go cold and then numb.
Feast
By Emily O'Grady
A witty, profound and painfully relatable debut novel exploring solitude, desire, and the allure of chasing something that promises nothing.
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