Eating Mammals. John Barlow
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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.
His discourse ran on and (it must be said) on. By subtle increments, though, he began to challenge even the most credulous before him, with tales of monstrous extravaganzas of consumption, of quantities measured not in numbers, but in numbers of crates and sackfuls.
The first snort of disbelief was heard quite suddenly, from the back of the room, and was followed immediately by the shuffling sound of an audience losing all faith in the act, the sound of embarrassment as a magician’s illusions are seen through, of a comedian’s jokes becoming hopelessly predictable. Mulligan played on this, indeed he appeared to relish it, and the louder the (still somewhat muted) cries of derision, the louder he talked above the noise, and the prouder and more outlandish his stories became. He laced his performance with a finely judged pathos. Waiting. Waiting for it.
‘Nonsense! Codswallop!’ came the full-voiced cry of contempt from some way off. Mulligan, caught mid-sentence, stopped and looked around to identify the source of the outburst. The room fell dead quiet, as forty-nine pairs of eyes watched one enormous, silent face move from shock to a hurt, childlike indigence, as if the Irishman had been found out, and his pathetic lies derided as the vulgar stuff of a fairground sideshow.
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