Nor All Your Tears by Keith McCarthy Page B

level at the base of which was a small window of thick glass; the constable grasped his key ring but looked into the cell through this before selecting a key.
    He said suddenly, ‘Oh, Christ!’ and began fumbling in earnest for the correct key.
    â€˜What is it?’ I asked.
    He didn’t reply and I was in the metaphysical dark until I followed him as we hurriedly entered the cell. There was a body, face down on the floor by the side of the bunk; the feet were near the slop bucket but thankfully they hadn’t made contact with it. There was vomitus on the floor under the head. ‘Get out of the way,’ I ordered, feeling some enjoyment at being able to boss him around. He obliged at once and I was able to lean down beside the body, although there was precious little room. I felt around the side of the neck for a pulse and, albeit with some difficulty, found one. I said, ‘Help me turn him.’
    The constable took a moment to react, but then squeezed in beside me. Together and with some difficulty in the cramped space, we turned the man over. It was George Cotterill.

FIFTEEN
    â€˜ H e died shortly after we got him to Casualty.’
    I was cooking. For my A-levels I had done chemistry, biology and physics, and got A grades in all of them, much to the delight of my father. It had always seemed to me that cooking was just the practical application of these three academic subjects and, moreover, most cooks, no matter how bright, were not particularly academic. The logical corollary of this was that I should have been a brilliant cook, since I was both bright and knew the theory.
    How wrong I was.
    My father had had occasion in the past to pass adverse comment on some of the products of my culinary experiments that had passed the frontier of his false upper-plate gnashers. The first time that this had occurred, I had laughed it off as mere envy, but the years had gone by and he had been joined in adverse commentary by most of the people who had summoned the courage to partake of my cuisine. One of my early girlfriends had once left the table while I was dishing up the dessert only to be heard throwing up in the toilet.
    Max’s problem, though, was that she was completely incapable of any kind of cooking at all. Until she met me, I think she was quite cheerful about it, not seeing it as a particularly major problem; she had a career as a vet and, presumably, she thought she would either meet a man who could cook any matter of delicious repast at her whim, or she would soon be earning enough to live her entire gustatory life in restaurants. Unfortunately, she ended up with me. She had yet to regurgitate my attempts (at least within my earshot or eye line), but there had been times when even I, a man with the social sensibilities of a rhinoceros, could see that things were proving a strain.
    On this particular Sunday, I was preparing roast beef. I would say ‘with all the trimmings’ but all I had been able to manage was roast potatoes, carrots and cabbage. I had just opened the oven door to discover that the cookery book had lied yet again and what should have been a nicely browned rolled silverside looked more like an incinerated dinosaur turd; thankfully, all I could smell was charcoal. Add to that the fact that I had previously over-boiled the spuds and now they were rapidly becoming over-roasted potato sludge, the carrots had been on for nearly an hour and were still slightly less hard than my grandmother’s wooden leg and the cabbage had turned to soup as soon as it had hit the water, and all in all I could sense that I was building to a repast of climactic awesomeness.
    Max was sitting in the garden, unaware of what delights were heading her way, enjoying the arid, waterless delights of my own personal slice of desert, whilst drinking deeply of a glass of Black Tower. She said, ‘That poor man. What a horrible place to spend his last hours on earth.’
    She could have been