Age Before Beauty

His shirt collar felt starchy, stiff as cardboard, and it dug into Marcus Golding’s neck the way only a freshly pressed garment could. The outfit that surrounded it was equally uncomfortable: a too-thick suit, a blue tie that choked his throat. And the shoes, they pinched at the toes, and squeaked when he walked. No-one said anything about dressing up for the interview, but when you’re sitting in front of Lydia Mallender, as he was, you think twice about looking anything but your best.

“Is it okay if I put this here?” Marcus couldn’t stop his voice from cracking as he held up his portable voice recorder. An expected tool of the trade, but he wanted to be polite, and so thought it best to ask.

Lydia’s only response was a nod, imperceptible, and a smile of her red-rose lips.

He felt so out of place. Marcus Golding, fresh out of college and trying to wash off the smell of zero industry experience by getting a byline to his folio. Trying not to curse himself for leaving it too late, trying not to think about his peers chasing The Huffington Post or BuzzFeed. Trying not to think about his bottom rung of a no-name blog with an embarrassing readership. Everyone starts somewhere — that’s the thought he used to push all that out of his mind.

And what better way, he’d figured, than with an interview with Lydia Mallender.

“Before we start,” said Marcus, “I was just wondering. Why me?”

Lydia gave a curious smile, the way she looked when her tiramisu cake was perfectly balanced. “What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s just that… this is your first interview in, what, eight years?”

“Nine.” Another smile.

“Nine years. And amid the book sales and the product endorsements, you’re famous for refusing more interviews than you give. So of all the websites and magazines and morning shows you could be speaking to right now… why me?”

He didn’t want to draw attention to his inexperience, but it nagged his mind more than the shirt at his neck. Lydia Mallender, celebrity chef — the short-hand way to sum up the woman whose face was seen on billboards for reality TV cooking shows, on glossy magazine covers syndicated worldwide, on Instagram posts regularly liked by her millions of followers. The numbers flowed to the fourteen cookbooks to her name, all best-sellers, and the countless dollars her brand alone made in sponsorships and commercials. 

Lydia Mallender, culinary superstar. And here he was — him of all people — sitting at a table that had to be solid oak, in a kitchen with marble benchtops and stainless steel utensils, glistening and pristine. He was in her house! This kitchen, it was the one he’d seen in the videos — countless pies and cakes had been brought to life here by her practiced hands. He could almost smell the butter in the pastry, or the sizzling of spiced chicken.

“Let me start by asking you a question, Mr Golding. How old do you think I am?”

That starchy feeling again. He felt it as he looked at her flawless complexion which was looking right back at him. Those high cheekbones, pink with just a hint of blush. And not a strand of jet black hair out of place. Those magazine shoots didn’t need much Photoshop with Lydia Mallender. 

“It’d be rude of me to presume a woman’s age,” said Marcus. Despite his own relative youth, he knew enough not to tackle this with anything but evasive politeness. 

“Guess.”

She was going to get an answer out of him, but he was still unsure why it was necessary. Ballpark it. “I’d say… late twenties, early thirties?”

Lydia smiled. “How wonderful,” she said. She leaned forward, hardly creasing her black polka-dot dress. “Why you? I guess you could say I can see myself in you. A point of inexperience, wanting to thrive in the world. Everyone starts somewhere, don’t we Mr Golding?”

“Please, call me Marcus.” He cleared his throat, and it went down like cement. Perhaps she had intended her words as flattery, but they struck him as an admission of self-serving chicanery. He was a sympathy interview. A charity case. She was probably only doing this for the PR angle: Famous chef helps young nobody.

Pen poised over his notebook, Marcus avoided the eyes of the woman who had agreed to his request. He didn’t actually expect it to happen — just one of a dozen emails he’d sent out, fishing really, hoping for a bite. None did.

None except Lydia. 

So, whatever. Go ahead and be charity, if charity is what’ll get your name on this interview. 

He grew aware of the silence that hovered between them, as she sat there patiently waiting for his first actual question. Marcus forced himself to the bullet-point list in his notebook. “Let’s start with the big one,” he said, and made sure the little light on the voice recorder was on. “What made you want to cook?”

Lydia shifted her body from one composed arrangement to another. Her expression changed to something resembling nostalgic wonder. “Now that is a big question indeed.” She thought about it. “I guess you could say it started with my mother.”

He wrote the word down. It had the elements of an answer that was not altogether unexpected, but he wanted to keep his hands busy.

“I was a little girl, maybe four or five, when there was a fire. I watched my mother die. I saw her burning, heard her screaming, and I couldn’t understand any of it. Nor could I understand anything afterwards. Nothing made sense in a world without her in it. My mother taught me so much, even at such a young age, and to suddenly not have her there…”

“I’m sorry,” said Marcus. “I didn’t know.” And it was the truth — nothing in the research he’d read, the scant interviews that existed online, hinted towards a family tragedy like this. My mother taught me to cook — that was the expected answer. But my mother burned to death? This was the start of something interesting. Did he just gain an exclusive info nugget already? He saw a new angle for his piece — family drama, tragedy, rising above adversity, fulfilling a legacy — and decided to take it. “You wanted to carry on your mother’s legacy? Is that it?”

“It was more than that. She was gone, and I wanted to bring her back. Her alchemy books and equipment fell to me after she passed, so I knew there and then that I would dedicate my life to returning hers. She taught me so much despite my age, but even that foundation was not enough. I spent close to twenty years trying and failing, but there are some things that the laws of nature do not permit. It seems that the undoing of death is one of them.”

“Undoing of… death?”

“You seem surprised. Which surprises me. Surely you know humankind has sought such a wonder since life itself. Imagine living beyond the end. To defy death. It is indeed the ultimate spell, but one that has remained, and shall remain, beyond reach.”

“I’m sorry, but…” Marcus trailed off, couldn’t find the words that would satisfy the curious gaze his reaction brought. This was a derailing train, and he was letting it happen. He had to tell himself: you’re the interviewer, get your subject back on track. Lydia stared at him, her expression seeking clarification. And then his words came: “Sorry, but you make it sound like you’re some kind of witch.”

He followed it with a brief chuckle, because it was absurd.

Lydia didn’t laugh. She only nodded.

“A witch,” he said again. She didn’t seem to get the reference. “Spells, pointy hat, broomstick?”

At that, Lydia offered a dismissive wave of a manicured hand. “Forget about the hat, and the broom, and the flying monkeys, and whatever other ideas you might have about the notion. I dress how I want, I’ve had a car for as long as they’ve been invented, and the only way I’ll make monkeys fly is if I push them out of a plane without a parachute. Reality is much different from fantasy, Mr Golding.”

Please, call me Marcus. The distant part of his mind battled to keep the honorific, battled to keep things casual, twisted over itself at whatever the hell was going on — she was saying she was a witch? Somehow managing to keep her face straight as she said it? She might have seen him as a charity case, but if she wasn’t going to take this interview seriously, then Marcus would find a new angle for his article: Lydia Mallender, manipulative bully. 

“You can also forget about the ingredients you think you know,” said Lydia, as if addressing a question he had thought to ask. “There’s no eye of newt, no toe of frog. But spells do occasionally call for the unorthodox. And sourcing such ingredients, as society has evolved through the ages, has become increasingly more problematic. Used to be you could go down to the swamp for a handful of reeds. Now? That swamp is a parking lot. Those reeds are getting choked out by climate change.”

“You could try eBay,” said Marcus, without knowing why. Perhaps he wanted to humour her. Or throw the absurdity of her words back into her face.

“I could. If I wanted every order inspected by sniffer dogs and customs fining me for importing foreign flora every three weeks.” Her look was stone, but Marcus withstood it, and it softened soon enough. “Save for my most important spells, I had no choice but to abandon many of my alchemy practices. But the urges to mix and create, those remained, and they burned fierce. And so I found myself moving away from swamp reeds and leeches and more towards grains and eggs. Less bugs, more bacteria. Yeast. I learned how to make breads. Then cakes.”

“You turned to cooking,” said Marcus.

“It’s all the same principles. Measuring, mixing. Producing a new product from raw ingredients. Incorporating those ingredients in a process designed to give them more form and function than the sum of their parts. What is cooking if not another form of alchemy?”

“I guess,” Marcus said. He didn’t write anything down.

Lydia sat back in her chair. “The years turned to decades, the decades to centuries, and I cooked throughout them all. Soon it became I was cooking and baking for longer than I’d been practicing alchemy and witchcraft.” She offered a wry laugh at her own words. “People talk about recipes handed to them through the generations. Try doing that with the chef. When you’ve lived for as long as I have, you find yourself with plenty of time to try the unusual, and even longer to hone it to perfection. You ever think to add vinegar to a chocolate cake? Milk to roast pork? Turns out I learned enough to make it into my career. As my career, I believe, can demonstrate.”

“From witch to chef,” said Marcus. He hoped she picked up his flat tone. She really was going down a screwball path. 

“As I have done for more than four hundred years. All the while learning and studying. Learning how to understand ingredients and techniques, and also people. People like you.”

“Like me?”

“Times change,” said Lydia, “but people are always the same. They think they know it all, and they demand that you prove otherwise. And I can see it in you. I know what you’re thinking.”

It wouldn’t have taken much to guess — Marcus wasn’t trying to hide the skepticism his face was broadcasting to the room, even though he knew he should be hiding it. The reasonable part of him thought: Be impartial. Give her a nod, a thoughtful mm-hmm, get it all on the recorder and then, when you’re back at your computer, let your article reveal her as the lying lunatic she seems intent on portraying herself. 

Instead, he spoke. “What I’m thinking,” said Marcus, “is that you’re wasting both of our time.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“I’m sure you do. I came here to learn about Lydia Mallender, the celebrity chef known around the world. I came here to know about you and your life and your cooking, and instead you’re giving me a bum interview — and you know it’s a bum interview, don’t say you don’t — just because I’m not as amazing or as famous as you.”

He surprised himself with his outburst, and her too, for Lydia stared at Marcus with unblinking eyes, her body very still. There was a silence between them. Marcus fought every urge to break it. Let her make the first move towards treating him with respect.

“Everyone starts somewhere,” she said. Her hands in her polka dot lap, they fidgeted. 

Marcus noticed that — the fingers wringing together, movement breaking the otherwise composed stature the rest of her body obeyed. He had gotten to her. Broke through that image. Good, he thought. Maybe this is a start.

Lydia stood from her chair, turned towards the kitchen that surrounded them. She went to the kitchen island, put both hands on its cool marble surface. Closed her eyes. It seemed to calm her. The change in location had put her at ease: Lydia Mallender, celebrity chef and manipulative bully, composed in her element.

Marcus stood too, because he wanted to know: what did she mean? Everyone starts somewhere — was that aimed at him, or herself? He went to her at the bench, those pinching shoes of his squeaking on the tiled floor. 

“I’m glad you came here today,” said Lydia. “And I’m glad you listened. It’s only fair you know my truth before it happens.”

“Before wha—”

But Marcus was silenced with the knife to the throat — had to be a long blade, 13 inches from the Mallender Professionals range, and she thrust it in deep, moved it fast, and something hot and wet splashed his hands and spilled down the front of his suit. He looked down in dumbstruck awe to see her other hand placing a mixing bowl below, the teal blue one from the Lydia at Home set, and he watched his own blood spurt out with streams that matched his pulse, watched it collect in the bowl that was filling fast, too fast.

“There is no undoing of death. I learned that. But existing life can be stretched and strengthened along the way. Renewed by those who have the years to give. Tell me, Mr Golding, how old are you?”

He didn’t know why he had to answer, but something worming in his mind forced the last vestiges of his breath to push out the words to meet her demand. “Twenty… three…”

“Twenty-three.” The words played out of her mouth. The knife went deeper. “How wonderful,” she said.

The world turned black.

“I believe twenty-three will suit me just fine.”

‘Age Before Beauty’ appears in Phantasmagoric: A Collection of Short Stories from Australia and New Zealand Authors. Visit Amazon to buy the ebook or Goodreads for further information.