Too Cold For Snow

meat dry.
    Cuy is a pretty adaptable ingredient. Broiled or boiled. Fry one after first hammering the meat as if you mean it, exacting revenge on it, beating seven kinds of merry hell out of the flat escalopes of flesh.
    Make a broth if you fancy, use snow melt from Ubinas and herbs only the old women in the market know about. Create a consommé so thin it looks like dew. Taste it with a precious spoon. A silver cuy spoon from Potosi.
    Meanwhile, in one of the northern suburbs of the city, a man was waking up. He was Marty’s nemesis, and their paths were soon to cross.
    He’d known rough mornings-after-the- night-before but nothing like this. Not one where he ended up with a human foot in the sink. A bloody foot in a bloody sock in the fucking sink. Brennan stood there, transfixed by the stump, with the sheer anatomy lesson of it, the veins, the dangling tendons. He dry retched, then splashed his face with water. He had the mother of all hangovers which required a high cholesterol breakfast. Food helped him think, nursed him through the occasional crisis. And this was a crisis. Brennan thought there was nothing like a good pan full of fat to get him on his feet again. Kidneys. Hash browns. Cumberland sausages, plump with the wrong sort of fats. The biggest looked like a big toe. Which brought him back to the foot again. It wasn’t going to simply walk away. He would have to do something about it. But not without fortifying himself with another bacon bap. He owed himself that much at least.
    Where had he been the night before? He must have gone to the Green Parrot, because he always went there at the start of a bender. It was always Happy Hour down the Parrot, giveaway prices for cocktails. He’d had a Scrum Five, without the grenadine. (His mother had once told him that pomegranates were the devil’s own fruit so you’d do well to steer clear of them.) After that he’d gone down the Meat Quarter, to goose some biff, but the biff wasn’t what you might call easy pickings. There was an octogenarian disco-queen in a PVC top, her breasts squashed like fried eggs in the strobe lights. She danced as if a surgeon had removed the part of her brain responsible for co-ordination. And there was a scar, just beneath her hairline, which looked as if it was the place the neurosurgeon had tried to push left-over matter back in.
    Brennan downed a few pills. He’d bought them from The Lizard, a man with skin like a crocodile handbag. Born on a toxic waste dump, that sort of complexion. There was a pink and white one and a sort of buff-coloured one. He took them both, not feeling in the mood for careful experiment, more in a wanton mood. He took to the dance floor, avoiding eye contact with the go-goer, lest she ensnare him in that familiar plot which would result in a kneetrembler in the bogs. Maybe they’d been temporary lovers in the past? He couldn’t remember.
    The DJ was transporting the dance floor to Ibiza. A girl was swinging her head in time to the strobe lights. Tiny droplets of sweat sprayed off her hair, an electric mist.
    The pills kicked in quick and loving warmth coursed through the cartography of his veins. The nightclub walls closed in on him, vectoring him back into the womb. He felt snug in his own skin. It was during the next twelve-inch club-mix of some saccharine-laden eighties disco shite that he passed out. Brennan had no recollection of what happened to him. Alien abduction, maybe? With Bolivian cosmonauts, in aluminium foil suits. One thing was certain: he had a foot as a souvenir.
    When Brennan left his flat, with the foot neatly wrapped and carried in an Adidas bag, Muggs was waiting for him. Muggs worked for Luther, the head of Cardiff’s mafia, known jokingly by some as the Taffia. Brennan knew better. Knew them to be hard as marble and bereft of scruple.
    ‘Put your foot in it?’ asked Muggs.
    That fazed Brennan, mixed up his brain mash.
    ‘It’s a fine day. Let’s walk.’
    Luther was poolside at the house with a peroxide floozy called Tristar having just applied a lot of her lipstick to his joystick. He was still flushed by his minor exertions, fussily pulling up his trousers
    ‘Take a seat Mr. Brennan. Can we offer you a drink. Maybe you could do with something after last night’s visit to the horror shop.’
    ‘I can’t remember what happened last night.’
    ‘We filmed it all, don’t worry: the chair, the power tools, close ups and cutaways. We followed all the basic rules