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  I cut my losses and drag the bag (turned neatly inside out–a boy has his pride, doesn’t he?) all the way back home with me.

  When Solomon comes in (with his current main-squeeze; a fantastically ferocious, too-skinny, bespectacled, headscarf-wearing poetess called Jalisa–American, originally, but who currently ‘brings rhyme’ to the schoolkids of Bermondsey–somebody has to, eh?) he finds me seated in a deep meditation at the kitchen table.

  I am attempting to commune with the culinary Aphra. So who she?

  Well, you tell me…

  We have the whitest, moistest, de-boned, de-skinned, de-everything-ed steamed chicken (flavoured, Solomon later tells me, smacking his lips, joyously, with handfuls of fresh bay). We have an intense green mango and shallot salad, dripping in lemon and dotted in mustard seeds. The most finely chopped (this girl must have a degree in manual dexterity…Ho-Ho) coconut, cucumber and coriander concoction.

  Then there’s this–frankly, unbelievable–savoury dish made out of large, fat, fresh gooseberries, a series of chutneys, relishes and salsas–carrot and ginger, tomato and chilli–some tiny multicoloured worm-like slithers of grilled mixed peppers, two types of curry created principally out of mung beans, a side dish made from roasted yams, some fat, sloppy, deliciously singed tomatoes baked in spice, a huge tub of finely grated raw beetroot and lemon juice, another tub filled with the most delicately handmade filo triangles packed with spinach, onion and marinaded tofu. A quarter-portion of nut, seed and heavy-heavy-herb soda bread.

  Then, the desserts: half an apple pie (which Solomon later informs me is made with quince, cinnamon, and sultanas dipped in rum), and a phenomenal rice pudding–cold, thick, imbued with nutmeg, coconut milk and crunchy cashew nuts fried dark brown in butter…

  ‘Wha tha?’ Solomon asks, pointing at the assortment of plastic bowls which lie colourfully arrayed on the table before me.

  ‘Aphra,’ I say.

  He cocks his head, ‘Oh yeah?’

  He turns off the radio (Zane Lowe’s Radio One show, featuring a Strokes interview, which I was actively enjoying) and bangs on a CD by the unbearably tedious tub-thumping mystic Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan instead. Once he’s effortlessly dismantled my angry-pimple-ridden-street-kid-style ambience (you think this shit comes easy to a boy from north Herefordshire?), he approaches the table.

  ‘Hmmn,’ he hmmns, picking up one of the containers and sniffing at it, quizzically. ‘Dusty girl she make picnic for we?’

  I say nothing. He takes off his coat. Jalisa produces a bottle of wine and goes off to locate the corkscrew.

  ‘How long you sit here?’ Solomon enquires.

  I check my watch.

  ‘Hour,’ I say (Yeah. Two can play at that game).

  ‘So what’ve we got?’ Jalisa asks, returning to the table with the wine and three glasses, setting them down, sitting down herself, pushing her spectacles back up her nose again and leaning greedily forward on her pointy elbows.

  ‘Feast,’ Solomon opines, removing a stray pistachio from one of the aromatic salads.

  ‘Stop that,’ I say, ‘We can’t eat. It’s here for safe-keeping.’

  ‘Pity,’ Solomon opines.

  I glance up, sharply. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because how better to get to the heart of this girl’s messed-up, stalkerish, beaver-baring psychology than through the delicious repast she’s prepared, eh?’

  ‘Really?’

  He nods.

  I frown. ‘But can’t we do all that simply by looking?’

  Solomon shakes his head. ‘No way. That’d be like singing a song without knowing the melody.’

  ‘Oh.’

  My face drops, disconsolately.

  Solomon sighs.

  ‘Okay then,’ I retract, ‘just a tiny taste. A tiny taste.’

  (God, am I this boy’s patsy, or what?)

  Solomon pads off to grab a muddle of cutlery–we each select our weapon of choice–and he’s just about to dive in (the yams. He loves yams), when I raise a warning hand…

  ‘One possibility,’ I murmur, ‘worth bearing in mind, is that it was no accident she left this behind today.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Spiked.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  Solomon withdraws, then he whistles, then he peers down, fondly. ‘Bud will know,’ he says, reaching out a tender hand to the savage beast’s muzzle, ‘he’s a ludicrously fussy eater.’

  ‘Talking of hunger,’ Jalisa says, sipping on her wine as Solomon slowly waves tiny portions of Aphra’s food in front of Bud’s twitching snout, ‘I heard someone attacked Blaine today.’

  ‘They did, too,’ I confirm, ‘climbed right up the Support Tower. Pilfered his water. Tried to yank out his colostomy bag…’

  ‘Hardcore,’ Jalisa whistles.

  ‘I was there,’ I continue excitedly, ‘on site, when it happened, but I didn’t actually see–’

  ‘Ah,’ Solomon solemnly interrupts me (Yeah. Try and say that in a fast wind), ‘blinded by the stench of pussy, were we?’

  I accord this comment all the credit it deserves (none–the mixed-metaphor is a dubious device at the best of times. I mean blinded by a stench? I ask you) and from here on in I dutifully address all further conversational snippets to Jalisa, exclusively. ‘I was having a chat with this fruit-loop–just a few minutes before the attack,’ I say, ‘who was labouring under the illusion that the whole anti-Blaine thing is actually a mask for widespread anti-Jewish feeling…’

  ‘Anti-schmanti,’ Solomon grumbles.

  Jalisa grins. ‘Poor Solomon’s worried,’ she goo-goos (almost tickling him under the chin). ‘He guards his Social Oppression jealously, in case there isn’t quite enough to go around…’ (Solomon shows his irritation by clucking his tongue at Bud, whose nose–he suddenly decides–has drawn slightly too close to a tub).

  ‘Anyhow, Kafka was a Jew,’ Jalisa casually continues.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Kafka,’ she repeats (not a little patronisingly), ‘Franz Kafka. The writer. His short story, “A Hunger Artist”, was the inspiration behind this entire thing.’

  It was?

  ‘You didn’t know that?’ she purrs, then tops up her wine, smugly.

  ‘Isn’t Kafka German?’ I ask (struggling to disguise my furious bemusement–I mean I saw Orson Welles’ cartoon version of The Trial when they played it on Channel 4, late-nite. Shouldn’t that be enough for this harpy?).

  She rolls her eyes, ‘German Jew, dumbo.’

  ‘He lived mainly in Prague, I believe,’ Solomon boredly interrupts.

  We both ignore him.

  ‘And I don’t know if you happened to catch his earlier TV shows,’ Jalisa continues, warming to her theme, ‘but the whole Jewish angle is definitely significant in Blaine’s general psychology. He used to have this–frankly kinda strange–“radical-rabbi” look (was well into it: black clothes, black hat)…And when I saw him on the news the other week and they asked him how he was preparing for his ordeal, he said something like, “My biggest inspiration has been reading the work of Primo Levi. Those people went through real trials.”’

  She pauses. ‘Those people,’ she explains, as if to a dim 4-year-old child, ‘The victims of the Holocaust…’

  She pauses again. ‘The Jews?’

  (Yeah. Thanks. Think we just about sorted that one out.)

  Bud (as she rattles on) has given his seal of approval to at least 70 per cent of the dishes at the table (all credit to the animal and everything, but I’ve actually seen him devour other dogs’ shit in the park, so forgive me if I don’t consider fastidiousness his watchword). He tips his head (somewhat ironically) at the bowl of green mango. Solomon pushes it aside.

  ‘You seem very well informed…’ I fight back manfully (yes, I’m eaten up with rage-I mean overanalysing Blaine is my hobby, isn’t it? How dare this haughty faux-African queen muscle in on it?). ‘A big magic fan, are we?’

  ‘Her?’ Solomon sniggers. ‘This is Jali
sa, man. She only became interested in Blaine when he pulled his Art Trousers on.’

  Art Trousers?

  Art Trousers?

  (So who exactly designs those unwieldy sounding garments?)

  ‘Here’s another irony,’ Jalisa continues, pinning Solomon to his chair with a Death-Star smile. ‘Harmony Korine is filming the video, yeah?’

  I nod, smugly (now this I do know…). ‘Talented director of the legendary Julien Donkey-Boy…’ I swank.

  ‘Did you see it?’ she asks.

  Uh…(damn, damn, damn her).

  I slowly shake my head.

  ‘Well it’s basically a film about family dysfunction,’ she explains. ‘The lead is this young kid–Julien–who’s a little simple, I guess. But the star of the show is no less a man than Werner Herzog…’

  She pauses, as if waiting for the significance of this fact to utterly pole-axe me (I remain politely unpole-axed). ‘The legendary German film director,’ she clucks. ‘You know…Nosferatu, Cobra Verde, Fitzcarraldo?’

  She quickly and efficiently tucks a stray frond of hair into her headscarf. ‘I mean if you actually stop and think about it, there’s quite a fascinating intellectual art-link here…’

  (My face–for your information–is a picture of total bewilderment at this point.)

  She turns to Solomon, almost excitedly, ‘Remember Fitzcarraldo?’

  Solomon nods, boredly.

  (Solomon remembers it? He does?)

  She turns back to me again. ‘Basically it’s this wonderful story about a rich madman–played by the superlative German actor, Klaus Kinski–who has this crazy idea to build an opera house in the middle of the Amazonian rainforest. The film is about his futile attempt to fulfil his dream. The project turns into an absolute disaster when the river they’re using to transport all their materials dries up (or something- I don’t entirely remember the details) and they end up dragging this huge, huge boat, full of wood and building equipment, over a massive hill. People are crushed and killed. It’s a total catastrophe…’

  She pauses for a moment, thoughtfully. ‘And when you’re actually watching the film…’ she eventually continues.

  ‘Does it have subtitles?’ I ask (she immediately delivers me the kind of look which could easily maim a small child).

  ‘When you’re actually watching the film,’ she repeats, ‘it’s almost difficult to believe that the disaster isn’t really happening, you know? It’s kind of like the film itself is part of the catastrophe…’

  She smiles (at her own genius, no doubt). ‘And the fact is that it was. Herzog got a guy called Les Blank to make Burden of Dreams–which is a documentary–about the making of Fitzcarraldo, to illustrate this point. I mean Herzog’s a kind of madman, too, just like his main character–he’s equally obsessed. The entire project was wildly over budget, the locations were virtually unreachable, it was incredibly dangerous, and the whole production spiralled into terrible chaos…’

  Out of the corner of my eye I see Solomon ‘taste-testing’ one of Aphra’s prodigious gooseberries. He swallows and his face actually inverts (like Schwarzenegger’s does at the end of Total Recall).

  ‘Hang on.’ Solomon finally gains control of his juiced-out tongue again. ‘So where’s the actual irony here?’

  ‘I’m still working it out,’ Jalisa snaps, ‘if you’ll just give me a moment. And anyway,’ she continues, ‘I didn’t say it was ironic, I said that there were signs of some kind of interesting art legacy…’

  (For your information–and so you don’t need to backtrack to figure out this girl’s inherent duplicity–she did mention irony before…

  What?

  Bitter?

  Me?)

  ‘So?’

  Solomon tears off a piece of herby soda bread, and dips it into a mung-bean curry.

  ‘This is just high-spirited speculation,’ she says, ‘but the powerful parallel between Blaine’s “stunts” and the sense of physical extremity in Herzog’s cinematic oeuvre seems more than self-evident to me…’

  As she talks she tucks into a mouthful of chicken.

  ‘Nope.’ Solomon is obdurate. ‘I’m not linking the dots.’

  ‘Well so far as I’m aware,’ Jalisa continues doggedly, ‘Herzog totally had Korine down–Korine, remember? Blaine’s best mucker–as the man who was going to change the face of modern cinema (after Gummo, this was). He talked the big talk about him all over the media. He made his admiration for Korine widely known…’

  She sucks up a thin slither of mixed pepper.

  ‘So what does Korine do? How does he go about thanking him? He casts this eccentric German monomaniac in the part of a monstrous, frustrated father figure in his film, thereby both celebrating and diminishing him. If you ever get to see the film,’ she glances my way, witheringly, ‘you’ll almost be able to taste Herzog’s fury and frustration, both at the role, and at the direction the film seems to be taking…’

  ‘’A dodo?’ I ponder.

  ‘Let’s just say,’ she grins, ‘that it asks quite a lot of the viewer.’ She shrugs. ‘But then that’s not necessarily any bad thing, huh?’

  I commence scratching at my head like a wild dog with eczema.

  ‘And the Jewish factor?’ Solomon asks.

  ‘I dunno.’ She dips her fork a second time into the bowl of grilled mixed peppers. ‘But it does seem strange that Korine symbolically belittles Herzog in the film, because–intellectually speaking–it’s kind of like, “Kill the Father”, if you know what I mean…’

  (I don’t.)

  ‘…or in this case, “Kill the German Father”, which resonates at an even deeper level, actually…’

  ‘It’s a film,’ Solomon says, ‘a fiction. The meta stuff’s all just fanciful conjecture.’

  ‘Don’t be so fucking pedantic,’ she growls, ‘the performance art aspect is definitely important. Fitzcarraldo–Herzog’s masterpiece (and remember, this was pre-Dogma)–was both fact and fiction. Blaine–via Korine–has used Kafka’s story, a fiction, to underpin a real drama.’

  ‘Do you provide study notes with this lecture?’ I ask.

  They both ignore me.

  ‘I think you exaggerate Korine’s influence,’ Solomon growls (through a mouthful of the ‘poisoned’ mango).

  Jalisa shakes her head. ‘When Blaine and Korine first met,’ she tells him, ‘Blaine’s desire to impress the film-maker was so intense that he spontaneously climbed into a pizza oven.’

  ‘What?’

  Now I’m agog.

  She nods, scooping up some yams with her fingers. ‘The old fashioned kind. The sort that takes hours to cool down. And apparently he remained in that oven for literally hours.’ She grins. ‘It was a total–what would you Brits call it?–wank off? I mean if you were related to either of these two men, you’d seriously really want to keep an entire continent between them. They’re plainly a horrendously bad influence on each other.’

  ‘It was probably just a trick or a scam on Blaine’s part,’ Solomon debunks her (through more herby bread filled with chicken and topped with chilli salsa). ‘Either that, or part of some carefully constructed “imagined” history they’ve since invented, which cunningly serves to fire the so-called myth of their “partnership”, in order that people like you–and simpletons like Adie–can jack-off all over it.’

  (Oh. Thanks.)

  ‘I certainly don’t have Blaine down as an intellectual,’ Jalisa says, ‘or even as a radical. He’s an entertainer, a performer. He’s very commercial. Korine, on the other hand, is totally art-house. He’s self-destructive. But he’s extremely clever. This is basically an Art/Celebrity union of the highest order. It’s a powerful partnership, but it’s a destructive one. Korine’s agenda–to his mind–is plainly better acted out on an international tabloid stage, rather than on merely an Art one. Art wasn’t enough for him. And the mystery of magic, i.e. bullshit, was obviously wearing a little thin for Blaine. This recent stuff is a real challenge. A real
mystery. But Korine’s definitely the intellectual. He’s definitely the spur…’

  Solomon performs a–frankly offensive–wanking gesture with a triangle of filo in his hand.

  ‘Korine had a long-term film project,’ she calmly continues (while devouring yet another portion of the mung-bean curry), ‘in which he walked around the streets of New York, provoking people of different racial and cultural backgrounds to get into physical fights with him. And he filmed each encounter.’

  ‘Hang on,’ I say. ‘Now just hang on…’

  ‘The guy has no sense of self-preservation,’ she shrugs. ‘He’s chaotic. He does everything to excess. But even he had to rein in a little. I mean he’s only small. He’s quite puny. There’s only so many Czechoslovakian bricklayers you can provoke into punching you in the larynx before things start to turn kinda nasty. So what does he do? He turns to Blaine. The Big Man.’

  ‘How convenient,’ Solomon intervenes, ‘that the stooge was so accessible.’

  ‘And so rich,’ I say.

  ‘All the “doing stunts” stuff definitely comes from Korine,’ Jalisa fights on. ‘Think about it. The stunt is arbitrary. It’s uncontrolled. Magic, as such, is about setting things up, about meticulous pre-planning in order to create the mere appearance of arbitrariness…’

  ‘It’s a fucking love affair,’ Solomon trills.

  ‘You could just be right there,’ Jalisa smiles, ‘and I certainly get the strong impression that when Blaine does these “stunts” of his–you know, standing on that ninety-foot pole, packing himself in ice, all the rest of it–he’s completely neglecting to research into the likely consequences of the things he’s doing. They represent a kind of leap into the darkness. A leap of faith. But also an act of total nihilism. And that’s Korine’s influence. Blaine wants to impress Korine. He wants to embrace Art. I’m certain.’

  She pauses. ‘Is that dessert?’ she asks, reaching for the apple and quince pie, and taking a big spoonful of it. ‘I do think we’re dealing with a generation of young Jewish men,’ she muses, ‘who are, at some very fundamental level, acting out the pain and the guilt they feel at perhaps not loving life quite as much as they think they should do after all the sacrifices made by those who went before them…’ She gradually peters out. ‘Or perhaps they’re clinging on to the…the drama…’ (she’s re-energised by another mouthful of pie), ‘or to the sense of belonging…’ she swallows, ‘or perhaps this is a fundamental uncertainty which they’re now experiencing as a direct consequence of Israel’s current belligerence which makes them feel this overwhelming urge to rediscover their victimhood. I mean, ‘Don’t let those damn Muslims take it away from us…’