‘Retire!’ he bellowed straight back at me, gasping under the sheer preposterousness of the suggestion. ‘Retire? And what, might I ask, would The Great Michael Mulligan do in retirement? And where? One of those little retirement homes on the coast? Eh? Those prisons for the wrinkled and the incontinent? Eh? Eh? Perhaps with the occasional biscuit-nibbling demonstration, or championship Grape Nut chewing in the afternoons? Is that what you mean?’
I did not mention it again. But as his performances became more laboured there came a point when not just I but also some of his more enduring clients began to see in his feats of consumption not the old majestic confounding of one’s senses of the possible, but an ageing man in a faded velvet suit eating furniture.
Then one night the inevitable happened. For the first time in his long career, the cruel, ignominious shadow of normality fell upon Michael Mulligan. It occurred during a performance for a bawdy and foul-mannered bachelor party, an evening which the great man had agreed to only as a personal favour to the groom’s father, and which was to include the famous chair-eating routine. Part-way through the act, with two legs and a good section of the chair-back already ingested, he turned to me. His face had gone pale, and threads of sweat wound their way down his forehead. Above the raucous noise of a roomful of young men too drunk to appreciate either his repartee or the feat of ingestion being undertaken for their entertainment, he said to me: ‘I’m full.’
Quite calmly he took a piece of wood which he had been on the verge of throwing into the mincer’s funnel, and held it out in front of him. Then he dropped it. The wood made a muffled thud as it hit the stage, and the sound attracted the attention of a few revellers. There Mulligan remained, staring out at the audience, frozen to the spot, his mouth shut firm. His eyes tripped slowly from one young man to the next, each in his dazzling new dinner suit and claret-spattered shirt. One by one, table by table, their garrulousness fizzed away into silence.
He held their attention for a second or two, nothing melodramatic, but enough to register a kind of paternal authority. Then he spoke.
‘It appears, gentlemen, that you find the act of eating a chair quite ordinary, quite … beneath your contempt indeed.’
Someone chuckled, as if to confirm the fact.
‘What!’ shouted Mulligan, as loud as I had ever heard him, looking straight at the source of the noise. The man in question shuffled; as if in jest, he made to hide behind the shoulder of his nearest companion. But nobody seemed to share his joke, and the truth is that he really did cower. I watched the poor boy’s head drop and his whole body shrink behind the protection of the human shield.
Mulligan turned to The Machine and fished all the loose bits of chair from the funnel, tossing them over his shoulder theatrically, and making sure that one or two smaller pieces found their way into the crowd.
‘Grind her through,’ he said.
I began to crank again so as to empty the contraption; meanwhile, Mulligan fumbled in his pocket.
‘Don’t move a muscle, boys!’ he sneered over his shoulder.
He pulled out a screwdriver. Returning to his audience, he continued.
‘Right, you bunch of drunken morons …’ (some murmurs from the floor at this point, and I too began to worry at his behaviour), ‘… since eating wood is not to the tastes of a roomful of insipid, spoilt children like yourselves …’ (and by now The Machine was empty. I expected the worst), ‘… perhaps you require something a little more piquant?’
He began to unscrew the brass plaque. It was already dangling from its final screw when the first guffaw was heard, but even before he could turn around and face the audience a host of Shhhhes and Quiets! had silenced the guilty one.
The plaque dropped into his hands and he held it up for all to see: Mulligan & Sons.
‘Sixth of an inch solid brass, my good men,’ he said. ‘I would invite a member of the audience to verify the fact, but I doubt whether a single one of you pathetic mummy’s boys has ever set foot inside a foundry, or indeed a workshop of any kind!’
It seemed that he was right, for the mumbling which followed his announcement was tinged with embarrassment. Then, at the back of the crowd, a dark-haired young man stood up, to the applause of those around him. A wave of surprised, rising intonations swept across the room, and Mulligan’s authority seemed to dissipate at once. Towards the stage walked a tall, broad young man in a black suit far too small for him, his eyes cast down towards the carpet, and appearing not to enjoy his moment of celebrity in the least.
He arrived to great cheers, and Mulligan slapped him roundly on the shoulders, as if to confirm his acceptable solidity. The plaque was examined front and back, around the edges, and even through the screw holes. Finally, the young man nodded bashfully at the crowd and muttered something.
‘Speak up!’ someone shouted.
‘It’s brass,’ he responded, but with the force of his nervous voice tailing away almost to nothing before the second word reached the front row of tables.
Mulligan took the plaque and dropped it into the funnel. I knew it was coming, but as it clattered down into the abyss, and with all eyes suddenly on The Machine, a curious, floating sense of panic seized me: it wouldn’t work, it simply wouldn’t, not a piece of solid brass. Yet there I was, poised with crank handle in my hands, the only person (I supposed) who had the faintest suspicion that the grinder had its physical limits, that whereas the occasional thin fragment of metal, a furniture tack towards the end of a performance or a stray hatpin from time to time, was one thing, a block of solid metal was quite another. I might add that as far as the swallowing of the brass itself was concerned I had not the least worry, for Mulligan still had three pints of liquid remaining from his aborted chair-eating, and in any case we would certainly be on our way soon after the last spoonful of brass filings had been swallowed … Nevertheless, I turned the handle with trepidation, as my arms became the centre of all interest.
The mincer caught the plaque in its greedy fingers. Groan of metal on metal. And then I could turn no more. Hard as I tried, jerking the handle backwards and forwards the loose inch of movement which it yielded, I couldn’t make any progress, not with all the weight of my body pushing and straining against the damn thing. Something, I was sure, was going to give. Not the handle, for that was thick, cast iron. Nor, I guessed, the tough steel grinding teeth which lurked at the base of the funnel. What was about to give was my body, which twisted into one tense contortion after another as I struggled hopelessly, trying not to fail the great man, not to bring his final performance to a close on the pathetic note of an unfulfilled claim, a thing not eaten.
But the handle refused to move, as if it too had lost its appetite. And in truth I didn’t blame it, after all the chairs, the plants, the walking sticks, coats and hats, shoes, boots, wallets, the toupee of an embarrassed and very drunk town clerk in Wallasey, any number of rugby balls, each carrying the fond memories of several dozen half-comatose old boys with it down Mulligan’s gullet … Oh! how I winced as his life’s work flashed before my eyes, all the stories and all the stuff I myself had ground for him. I wondered, indeed, whether The Machine was doing him one last favour.
Then I heard muted cheers, and I looked up from my pained hunch over the immobile crank handle to find myself being bustled by Mulligan and the large young man, one of them on each side of me, and both seizing the handle with such purpose that I was forced back between their bodies and clean out of the way. They set themselves against the iron handle, like two enormous ballet dancers at the practice barre waiting for instructions.
They didn’t wait long, though, because between them the two men soon persuaded that stubborn arm to resume doing what it did best, and the room was suddenly full of the snap and thump of grinding metal. The Machine did perhaps begrudge the task a little, corners of the flattened travelling crate which formed its base rising clear off the floor and thwacking back down repeatedly as one and sometimes two of the contraption’s legs veered up in strenuous complaint.