Reviewed
by Brinda S Narayan
According to the author, Walter Mosley, ‘A good
short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our
beliefs. A good short story asks a question that can’t be answered in simple
terms. And even if we come up with some understanding, years later, while
glancing out of a window, the story still has the potential to return, to alter
right there in our mind and change everything.’
Rebecca’s Lloyd’s achingly beautiful story, Finger
Buffet, evokes the dark forces that fracture the East End in London,
creating rifts between the young and old, between the violent street gangs and
its more peaceable inhabitants, between the foreigners and the ‘old-timers’.
Its narrator Arthur Runel, increasingly disoriented inside a place that once
operated by ‘rules’, starts clinging to the cacophony of birds he once
despised. Any sound, however raucous or unmusical, that reminds him of the
older times is welcome. After all, both he and Alice can no longer comprehend
the destruction and mutilation that has started stalking their neighbourhood.
Arthur always expects the forces to get to them as
well. He almost seems to invite a direct confrontation, to face them and maybe
overpower them even. But it enters their household in a form that discomfits
even the tough Arthur. After all, it’s Alice who sees a beaten-up form on the
road, a body whose face is gashed, and whose hand no longer has fingers. Lloyd
slips in Alice’s encounter with the dead boy like it’s just another everyday
happening. To emphasize perhaps that this has become a neighbourhood where
murders are now banal. On the surface, nothing seems to have changed, but of
course, for the Runels, everything has shifted. Alice Runel’s memories of that
traumatizing encounter start slipping into conversations, with more and more
gory details emerging over time.
The narrator Arthur himself had a violent past, one
that he deliberately misremembers. As his sharp wife, Alice, whose hold on reality
seems stronger than Arthur’s, points out, Arthur was once the East End hard
man, someone who bashed up a gentle piano player’s fingers with a mallet. As
Lloyd dispassionately shows us, the violence in the neighbourhood is not new.
It has merely changed form. And it will change again, when the Bangladeshi
gangs start confronting the incoming Somalis. Maybe, it does seem to be getting
worse, more frequent, more vicious or perhaps, it was always this bad, since
the present always carries greater menace than the past.
While charting the forces that are changing the
neighbourhood, Lloyd also sensitively portrays the subtle ways in which a
long-married couple both shape and reshape each other. For instance, while
Arthur prefers to dwell on a hallucinatory glorious past when ‘things were
black and white,’ an undeceived Alice points out: ‘You make them sound glorious
when they weren’t.’ But she also indulges her husband’s delusions, both about
himself and others. He asks her to make him finger food for his meeting with
the street boys, where he plans to show off his weight-lifting medals from his
glory days and also teach them the ‘rules’. She cooks him the finger buffet
though she already seems to intuit that the eventual meeting between the street
boys and Arthur will not grant him the payoffs he expects.
In her afterword, the author Lloyd remarks that she
draws her stories from real-life incidents. With Finger Buffet, one can
see how Lloyd’s portrayal of the forces that produce street violence and the
manner in which they can ripple into surrounding households is in some senses,
a more truthful account of the world we inhabit, than mere newspaper reports. Through
Lloyd’s finely-crafted, complex characters, we confront our own ambivalent and
often hypocritical responses to such cultural rifts and ongoing frictions that
mark many global cities.
Reviewer Brinda S Narayan's story @ The Shanghai Tea House appeared in Out of Print June 2013.
