Eating Mammals

For the main part, though, we travelled together with The Machine. There was an endless supply of stories, mile after mile in that old, majestic car. Names and feats which amused, surprised or saddened, like poor Henry ‘Tubby’ Turns, who died in a sideshow tent in Pittsburgh whilst trying to keep two rats down, out of pure professional pride, and even against the wishes of those half a dozen appalled Pittsburghers who’d paid to witness it. Our conversation would also touch on more recent times, to the decline of our trade and the rise of public opinion against us, to arrests and the lack of offers of work from travelling shows, the short-lived interest shown by television and the tragic cases of those who made it big on TV only to find that they were subsequently pursued all the more assiduously by local public health officials eager to stamp out the whole business. He warned me that things would only get worse.

He was right. Since then I have probably spent more time in local jails and courthouses than in hospitals. And hospital is by far the better place to be from time to time. In hospital, you say? Yes! As the mountaineer can expect the odd broken leg, and the tennis player his eponymous elbow, so the eater is no stranger to the stomach pump and the enema bag. Nor does he fear the liquid shakes of gastroenteritis, other than through the loss of income which it implies. No, from experience I can affirm that I would prefer to be bound over by a surfeit of sawdust than by the local magistrate any day of the week.

But, alas, it was the latter which haunted my working days and meant that every trip, every performance, each appearance of Captain Gusto and his Marvellous Mouth required the planning and precision of a bank raid. And this, I need hardly tell you, made the job itself all but impossible. In the end one ingested not at one’s leisure, as the great men did, slowly, drawing the audience in with a series of grimaces and exaggerated, faked gripes, staggering and holding your stomach as if it were about to burst and spill its contents over the incredulous onlookers before you. It was more a matter of gulping the stuff down with one eye scouring the audience, seeking out the blank face of a health department official, and with the other watching out for the approach of the fairground manager, come to tell you that he’s been forced to close you down (although never to return your site fee). Captain Gusto and his Marvellous Mouth have, if I were to tell the truth, scarpered from more places than he (or I) would care to remember, sometimes with the marvellous mouth still chewing.

But back then, in the Rolls with the great man himself, who could have resisted? Could you, sitting right next to Mulligan himself, the tingling anticipation for that evening’s performance already in your stomach, have thrown it all in for a steady job?

Working the fairs did have its benefits. For the main part, what was offered up consisted of the same things which the crowds themselves were eating. Someone would toss me a half-eaten apple, and I, pretending to examine it minutely, would quote a farthing, or the equivalent. The coin would be passed to me, and I would begin munching. If there came giggles from the audience, then perhaps I might discover a worm in it, or that it was rotten pulp on the inside. That didn’t matter, for the humble apple would attract attention, and more pricey morsels would then come my way. Someone would pick up a sausage from the ground, covered in mud, and I would swallow it down for a penny, my mind fixed with hard determination on the thought of Turkish delight or smoked salmon. Once, in eastern France, a whole bunch of hysterical schoolboys passed me their sandwiches and, for a trifling price, I ate the lot, to the great disapprobation of the adults present, who scolded both me and the boys for such a foolish waste of good food. Another time, at a small and somewhat uncivilised country fair in the old East Germany (for the Iron Curtain was invariably lifted in those out-of-the-way border towns, where, to be honest, I have always been most in demand), a group of drunken young men threw me their half-eaten salamis and other, less appetising, varieties of cold meats. I ground the lot up and got it down in no time. That didn’t satisfy them, and they went off in search of more entertaining provender, returning with a couple of ragged, inedible (or so they thought) cabbages, and an armful of dirty, mould-ridden potatoes. They had no more money to offer, but on the understanding that I envisaged absolutely no problem in chomping my way through the vegetables, the lads persuaded a great many of the prurient, grinning bystanders to cough up their loose change until, weighing the money in my hand, I gave a solemn nod and began to grind.

On that occasion, as on many others, I had to ask myself, ‘Well, did you think I was going to sleep with that lot inside me?’ The problem here, though, lay in making a sufficiently swift exit after consuming that item which one most desired to see coming out the same way as it went in. It was a matter of orchestration, of balancing the need to tread the ground of the astonishing, to excite and amaze, to encourage the proffering of extravagant objects; of balancing this with the requirement that, in general, a thing really worth the distasteful task of consuming was, by definition, the last thing which one would want to eat that evening. Afterwards, it was simply a matter of vacating the place as quickly as possible.

Meanwhile, the number of Mulligan’s own appearances dwindled. One began to perceive in his comportment the slightest flutter of arrested fatigue. His appetite remained strong, but he strained under the effort of summoning up that visible relish which was always the most striking feature of his act. Without a doubt he wanted a rest, although the word ‘retire’ I mentioned to him only once.

‘Retire!’ he bellowed straight back at me, gasping under the sheer preposterousness of the suggestion. ‘Retire? And what, might I ask, would The Great Michael Mulligan do in retirement? And where? One of those little retirement homes on the coast? Eh? Those prisons for the wrinkled and the incontinent? Eh? Eh? Perhaps with the occasional biscuit-nibbling demonstration, or championship Grape Nut chewing in the afternoons? Is that what you mean?’

I did not mention it again. But as his performances became more laboured there came a point when not just I but also some of his more enduring clients began to see in his feats of consumption not the old majestic confounding of one’s senses of the possible, but an ageing man in a faded velvet suit eating furniture.

Then one night the inevitable happened. For the first time in his long career, the cruel, ignominious shadow of normality fell upon Michael Mulligan. It occurred during a performance for a bawdy and foul-mannered bachelor party, an evening which the great man had agreed to only as a personal favour to the groom’s father, and which was to include the famous chair-eating routine. Part-way through the act, with two legs and a good section of the chair-back already ingested, he turned to me. His face had gone pale, and threads of sweat wound their way down his forehead. Above the raucous noise of a roomful of young men too drunk to appreciate either his repartee or the feat of ingestion being undertaken for their entertainment, he said to me: ‘I’m full.’

Quite calmly he took a piece of wood which he had been on the verge of throwing into the mincer’s funnel, and held it out in front of him. Then he dropped it. The wood made a muffled thud as it hit the stage, and the sound attracted the attention of a few revellers. There Mulligan remained, staring out at the audience, frozen to the spot, his mouth shut firm. His eyes tripped slowly from one young man to the next, each in his dazzling new dinner suit and claret-spattered shirt. One by one, table by table, their garrulousness fizzed away into silence.

He held their attention for a second or two, nothing melodramatic, but enough to register a kind of paternal authority. Then he spoke.

‘It appears, gentlemen, that you find the act of eating a chair quite ordinary, quite … beneath your contempt indeed.’

Someone chuckled, as if to confirm the fact.

‘What!’ shouted Mulligan, as loud as I had ever heard him, looking straight at the source of the noise. The man in question shuffled; as if in jest, he made to hide behind the shoulder of his nearest companion. But nobody seemed to share his joke, and the truth is that he really did cower. I watched the poor boy’s head drop and his whole body shrink behind the protection of the human shield.

Mulligan turned to The Machine and fished all the loose bits of chair from the funnel, tossing them over his shoulder theatrically, and making sure that one or two smaller pieces found their way into the crowd.

‘Grind her through,’ he said.

I began to crank again so as to empty the contraption; meanwhile, Mulligan fumbled in his pocket.

‘Don’t move a muscle, boys!’ he sneered over his shoulder.

He pulled out a screwdriver. Returning to his audience, he continued.

‘Right, you bunch of drunken morons …’ (some murmurs from the floor at this point, and I too began to worry at his behaviour), ‘… since eating wood is not to the tastes of a roomful of insipid, spoilt children like yourselves …’ (and by now The Machine was empty. I expected the worst), ‘… perhaps you require something a little more piquant?’

He began to unscrew the brass plaque. It was already dangling from its final screw when the first guffaw was heard, but even before he could turn around and face the audience a host of Shhhhes and Quiets! had silenced the guilty one.

The plaque dropped into his hands and he held it up for all to see: Mulligan & Sons.

‘Sixth of an inch solid brass, my good men,’ he said. ‘I would invite a member of the audience to verify the fact, but I doubt whether a single one of you pathetic mummy’s boys has ever set foot inside a foundry, or indeed a workshop of any kind!’

It seemed that he was right, for the mumbling which followed his announcement was tinged with embarrassment. Then, at the back of the crowd, a dark-haired young man stood up, to the applause of those around him. A wave of surprised, rising intonations swept across the room, and Mulligan’s authority seemed to dissipate at once. Towards the stage walked a tall, broad young man in a black suit far too small for him, his eyes cast down towards the carpet, and appearing not to enjoy his moment of celebrity in the least.

He arrived to great cheers, and Mulligan slapped him roundly on the shoulders, as if to confirm his acceptable solidity. The plaque was examined front and back, around the edges, and even through the screw holes. Finally, the young man nodded bashfully at the crowd and muttered something.

‘Speak up!’ someone shouted.

‘It’s brass,’ he responded, but with the force of his nervous voice tailing away almost to nothing before the second word reached the front row of tables.

Mulligan took the plaque and dropped it into the funnel. I knew it was coming, but as it clattered down into the abyss, and with all eyes suddenly on The Machine, a curious, floating sense of panic seized me: it wouldn’t work, it simply wouldn’t, not a piece of solid brass. Yet there I was, poised with crank handle in my hands, the only person (I supposed) who had the faintest suspicion that the grinder had its physical limits, that whereas the occasional thin fragment of metal, a furniture tack towards the end of a performance or a stray hatpin from time to time, was one thing, a block of solid metal was quite another. I might add that as far as the swallowing of the brass itself was concerned I had not the least worry, for Mulligan still had three pints of liquid remaining from his aborted chair-eating, and in any case we would certainly be on our way soon after the last spoonful of brass filings had been swallowed … Nevertheless, I turned the handle with trepidation, as my arms became the centre of all interest.

The mincer caught the plaque in its greedy fingers. Groan of metal on metal. And then I could turn no more. Hard as I tried, jerking the handle backwards and forwards the loose inch of movement which it yielded, I couldn’t make any progress, not with all the weight of my body pushing and straining against the damn thing. Something, I was sure, was going to give. Not the handle, for that was thick, cast iron. Nor, I guessed, the tough steel grinding teeth which lurked at the base of the funnel. What was about to give was my body, which twisted into one tense contortion after another as I struggled hopelessly, trying not to fail the great man, not to bring his final performance to a close on the pathetic note of an unfulfilled claim, a thing not eaten.

But the handle refused to move, as if it too had lost its appetite. And in truth I didn’t blame it, after all the chairs, the plants, the walking sticks, coats and hats, shoes, boots, wallets, the toupee of an embarrassed and very drunk town clerk in Wallasey, any number of rugby balls, each carrying the fond memories of several dozen half-comatose old boys with it down Mulligan’s gullet … Oh! how I winced as his life’s work flashed before my eyes, all the stories and all the stuff I myself had ground for him. I wondered, indeed, whether The Machine was doing him one last favour.

Then I heard muted cheers, and I looked up from my pained hunch over the immobile crank handle to find myself being bustled by Mulligan and the large young man, one of them on each side of me, and both seizing the handle with such purpose that I was forced back between their bodies and clean out of the way. They set themselves against the iron handle, like two enormous ballet dancers at the practice barre waiting for instructions.

They didn’t wait long, though, because between them the two men soon persuaded that stubborn arm to resume doing what it did best, and the room was suddenly full of the snap and thump of grinding metal. The Machine did perhaps begrudge the task a little, corners of the flattened travelling crate which formed its base rising clear off the floor and thwacking back down repeatedly as one and sometimes two of the contraption’s legs veered up in strenuous complaint. But Mulligan and his new assistant stuck at it, despite the heavy labour it clearly cost them.

Eventually, a fine golden-brown powder began to trickle out, and the assembled audience broke into excited jabberings. As soon as I saw the familiar pyramid of dust begin to grow on the gold platter my anxiety lifted. Mulligan had only to wait for a convincing mound to build up and then flick the supply switch. Three spoonfuls of metal filings would hurt no one and, let’s be honest, do you know how much powder a solid brass plaque makes?

A great deal. The plaque made a great deal of powder, because Mulligan did not turn off the supply. On the contrary, his grinding became increasingly spirited, until the unfortunate fellow at his side began to cast nervous glances at him, as if some strange mania had taken hold. In the end nothing more than the odd wisp of heavy dust dropped from the nozzle of the grinder, yet Mulligan went on and on, the handle flying round like the pedal of a speeding bicycle. Ominously, the platter boasted a substantial mound, and it seemed that only the great glutton himself was oblivious to the fact, for even the young man who had assisted him in the grinding had turned to stare at the curious product of his efforts.

Out came the spoon and, of course, you know the rest.

Only it wasn’t quite the normal end to an evening with The Great ‘Cast Iron’ Mulligan. After the last of the plaque had been ingested, Mulligan found himself with a still-mesmerised bunch of drunken youngsters in front of him. Mesmerised, that is, but still a bunch of arrogant fools.

‘Is that it, Mully?’ someone shouted, to which a few equally intrepid souls added their dissatisfaction. Mulligan, for once entirely lost for words, stared at the offending stripling for a handful of seconds. He took up his Egyptian jug, which thanks to the unusually short programme still contained a full pint of the sticky orange liquid, stepped up to the lad and covered him in it, head to foot.

What followed I recall only as a series of blurred, fragmentary images. Two or three young men hanging on to Mulligan’s shoulders … a fist slapping into a surprised chin … legs flying up like brandished hockey sticks … contorted, grimacing faces shouting. Then a red-faced Mulligan was struggling to shake off half a dozen violent revellers and, once he had done so, launched his forearm with great precision towards the small, blond head of one unfortunate youngster, whose body immediately crumpled under the weight of the blow. He was laughing out loud as one by one his assailants flopped down to the carpet, or withdrew from the affray shaking their heads in confusion.

‘The Machine!’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘Pack The Machine!’

The crates were soon packed. Those few partygoers with any remaining belligerence looked around them and, finding nothing but pain and cowardice to back up their next assault, shrugged their shoulders and wandered off to the bar.

The young man who had helped with the grinding snuck out with us through the back of the stage to help load the crates into the Rolls. Then, opening one of the crates, Mulligan found the gold platter, wrapped it in a large, oily rag, and presented it to the young man.

‘Here, my boy. I won’t be needing this any more. Take it, with the gratitude of Michael Mulligan.’

The fellow appeared pleased enough with the gift, until he felt its weight and deduced its composition. His big, boyish face turned from surprise to disbelief, and he made some mime of protest, offering to return the valuable plate.

‘Nonsense!’ said Mulligan, brushing the idea away with his hand. ‘No need of it now, you see. None at all. I have,’ and here he cleared his throat rather dramatically, ‘retired.’

We bade the young man goodnight, and off he went. He had only spoken two words to us all evening: It’s brass.

The drive home that night was unusually tense. We said nothing, and we made no stop along the way.

The next morning he presented me with The Machine, and announced that he was going home to Ireland.

Some years later, Captain Gusto arrived in Poland. A tiny border town in the west of the country, all consonants and drizzle. Twice before I’d stopped off there, only a few miles from the point where Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany met. Whilst the money I made hardly paid for my transit to the next place, there was always enough interest in my act to draw a decent crowd.

When I got there it was midday, raining, and I set up in a muddy corner of the fairground. My stand consisted of an old Morris truck, the side of which opened out to create a small stage, on which The Machine stood. As I secured the little feet of the stage in the soft ground, I got the feeling that the fair was permanent, that it had been there for months, years, and the locals had lost interest. The faces of the other stallholders were as grey as the sky, and their solemn frowns warned me to expect slow, slow trade. As the afternoon progressed I saw why. The odd loner mooched dispiritedly around, tempted by nothing, reaching into his pocket only to pull out a crusty handkerchief. The manager of the fair, who as always had provided me with a handwritten sign explaining the nature of my act in Polish, assured me that things would improve. I handed him the site rent and hoped he was right, for I had not a zloty more to my name.