Eating Crow by Jay Rayner Page A

know, a big girl?”
    “Didn’t notice,” I lied. “Irrelevant. Not what I was there for.”
    He sighed irritably. “And what were you there for?”
    “To have my feet done.”
    “Eh?”
    “She’s a podiatrist.”
    “Big Wendy’s a podiatrist?”
    “We each of us follow our calling.”
    “I think that even beats Stefan’s decision to join the army.”
    “Let’s not go there.”
    He reached for his own bread.
    “So, seriously, what are you up to? Should me and Mum be getting you committed?”
    I shrugged. “It feels like the right thing to do, that’s all. Actually, it’s why I invited you here tonight.”
    He leaned back in his chair. Now he was interested. “Go on.”
    Our food appeared and we began to eat. “I’ve thought back over our childhood and, you know, I just want to say sorry. I treated you badly.”
    Now Luke was flustered. He scraped away chunks of meat from the oxtail bones on his plate. “That’s what big brothers are meant to do, isn’t it?”
    “Why should we just accept convention? That day I made you so antsy you almost leapt over the dinner table, for example. It was—”
    Luke laughed. “It was ingenious.”
    “It was horrible.”
    “Does it matter?”
    “I think it does. I feel terrible about it. I’m sorry, is all.”
    He nibbled his lip and looked embarrassed. “How’s your food?” He pointed at my plate of roasted pork belly with pickled plums.
    I laid down my knife and fork and pushed the plate away. “Dismal. The crackling is flabby, the fat hasn’t been rendered. It’s a soggy waste of good meat.”
    Luke narrowed his eyes. “Do I sense a Marc Basset special coming on? How about, ‘The only meat that ought to be inside the Hanging Cabinet is the chef’s’? Something like that. You can have that one for free.”
    I smiled thinly. “I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head. I called for the menu and ordered again, this time choosing the steak and kidney pie.
    “What in god’s name are you doing?”
    “I don’t want to leap to conclusions. Maybe it’s unfair to judge a place on just one dish.”
    “Marc …?”
    “I’m serious. They’ve got a whole menu, and from it we’ve chosen just the pork belly and your oxtail and—how is it, by the way?”
    He looked at his plate. “Fine. It’s braised oxtail.”
    “Good. You see? If I’d judged the kitchen on mine alone it wouldn’t have been fair.”
    “Lynne’s right. You are ill.”
    “Bollocks. I’m merely refusing to accept that everything has to be done the way it’s always been done.” I hesitated. “Anyway, where was I?”
    “Er, apologizing to me for that noise-torture thing which I thought was hysterical.”
    “No you didn’t. You tried to kill me.”
    “Okay. I didn’t like you for it, but I don’t care about that now. It’s called personal history. You can’t rewrite that.”
    “No, you can’t. But you can reassess it. Historians do it with world events all the time. Just wars become evil wars. What looked like a smart policy at the time fifty years later becomes an outrage. Why can’t people revise their own histories?”
    They took away my pork belly and replaced it with the steak and kidney pie, the dark stew held in beneath a golden dome of puff pastry. I cut through the crust, and a burst of steam escaped ceiling-ward. I tried a couple of pieces of steak.
    “Bugger!”
    “What is it?”
    “Gravy’s insipid.” I chewed on another piece of beef. “And the meat hasn’t been in there for long enough.”
    Luke raised his hands. “See? This place is crap. Admit defeat.”
    “Service is good. The bread is fine. And it got a four on the napkin test. That has to stand for something. Pass me the menu.” My brother let out a little whimper, an echo from a Sunday afternoon so many years ago. I chose a sirloin steak, rare, with fries and a béarnaise sauce. By the time it arrived, Luke was sitting with an empty plate in front of him. He watched me hawklike as I cut