‘This man,’ he boomed, standing behind his victim and draping both his arms ominously over the shoulders of the smaller man, ‘this man, gentlemen, believes me to be a liar.’
Stifled gasps as the dread word rang out around the hall, and Mulligan’s reverse bear hug tightened, so that the little chap’s ruddy cheeks turned purple.
‘A liar,’ Mulligan repeated, emphasising each syllable with a good, solid slap of his hand on the chest of the wilting individual caught up in his embrace. From the shadows at the back of the stage, where I was sitting, horrified and amazed in equal measure, I noted that those most proximate to Mulligan wore concerned expressions, trying with no success at all to treat the whole thing as a joke, whereas those further off appeared to find the scene wildly amusing, nudging each other and sniggering like schoolboys, although their animated delight was for the most part silent.
Then Mulligan’s face lit up. He broke out into the broadest smile and released the short, fat man. Spinning right around on his heels twice in uncontrollable joy, he announced: ‘I have a plan!’
More murmurs now from the tables, some of which seemed to indicate a resurgence of boredom and embarrassment with the act.
‘Sir,’ Mulligan continued, talking to the little man, ‘I cannot eat you’ (amusement all around). ‘No, we all have our standards’ (hoots of laughter), ‘but I can perhaps regain my honour. You will at least permit me that small favour?’
The man in question was too abashed to do anything other than nod. Mulligan cleared away a few plates and glasses from the place setting in front of him and, picking Tubby up like a child, sat him on the edge of the table, his little legs dangling down like a puppet’s. A concerned kind of laughter stirred around the hall, whilst Mulligan fussed about, apparently looking for something. He turned all of a sudden and, tripping over the vacant chair behind him, fell to the floor.
A few wisps of cruel laughter could be heard, and other diners looked on with pity. Further off conversations grew afresh, as if the act were already a rather tiresome irrelevance.
‘This is it!’ came a deafening cry from the ground. Everyone stared, but instead of Mulligan getting to his feet, they saw the chair rising slowly into the air. Then Mulligan stood up, the chair held high above his head. ‘This, my friend,’ he said, and brought the chair down, holding it right in front of the little man’s nose, ‘this is what I will eat tonight! I will eat your chair!’
With that he marched over to the stage, on to which there now fell some light, illuminating not only myself, but also the imposing form of The Machine, which lay shrouded in red velvet.
Inside my baggy dinner suit I prickled with sweat, desperate to get my part right, and at the same time feeling a certain complicity with Mulligan, who even now was tweaking and poking at the audience’s disbelief and mercilessly burlesquing the pity directed towards him only moments before.
‘Gentlemen,’ he shouted, twirling the chair effortlessly in one hand like a toy, ‘although I am twice the man of anyone here today, my teeth are my weakness. Once, in Torquay, I no more than nibbled on a hatstand, and got a cracked molar for my troubles.
‘But,’ and here he swept away the red velvet, revealing what on first sight perhaps most resembled a pygmy combine harvester, ‘I will swallow this chair tonight …’ (chuntering and some giggles from the floor), ‘… wood …’ at which he snapped a leg off with his hands and tossed it to me, ‘… seat …’ ripping a little of its fine gold braid from the edge of the chair’s cushion, ‘… and screws!’ flicking with his fingernails the tacks which held the seat’s ancient cloth in place (only brass, quite thin). Gasps from the floor at the word screws. Many hands dropped down to feel the girth of chair legs; half a dozen men scrambled to put on their glasses and, having done so, stared all the more urgently at Mulligan, and then at the chair they were sitting on. The short, fat man, utterly mesmerised by Mulligan, slipped down from the table, never taking his eyes off the stage, and procured himself a vacant chair from the side of the hall. He retook his place at the table, lit himself a cigar, and settled back for the entertainment, apparently believing that his own ordeal was over – in this he was correct, for Mulligan was no bully – and in addition feeling perhaps just a touch proud of himself.
‘You will, I trust, allow me a little light refreshment?’ Mulligan asked, pouring himself a pint of orange liquid from the Egyptian jug and taking a sip. With that he gave me a nod. I dropped the chair leg into the funnel and cranked the long iron handle. At first nothing happened. The series of gears transposed my efforts into a slow, menacing rotation at the bottom of the funnel, but as fast as I might wind the handle, nothing happened. Then, little by little, the leg in the funnel began to move, turning and twisting, slowly at first but then with more animation, bobbing and dancing in the teeth of the grinder. The handle stiffened as the sound of cracking, splintering wood filled the hall, and the chair leg began its long, painfully slow journey through the mechanism. I worked frantically at the cranking handle, and even from the stage I could sense that there was not a single movement anywhere else in the place, all eyes on the top of the chair leg, which poked up above the rim of the funnel, but was gradually disappearing from view.
Wood moved steadily through the various crushers and grinders, but with more wood always entering from the top the job became harder, and soon I was lunging at the crank handle twice, once to wrench it up towards me, and again to push it back over for another revolution, throwing my body halfway back round with it.
Mulligan laughed out loud.
‘Some day,’ he said, turning to the dumbfounded men before him, ‘this young man here will be as strong as an ox. But it will require work, oh yes, and a very special diet.’
Then he was off again, regaling his audience with more stories: of the time he had eaten a beehive, comb, honey, bees (fried), the lot; and the occasion on which, purely as a party trick in Hollywood, he drank the bathwater of a certain film star’s six-month-old baby.
Was all this true? Was any of this in the least possible? You may well wonder, and from time to time, as I recall the great man’s orations, those most expansive, most outrageous, most boastful claims, I too sometimes wonder. But there, in front of forty-odd men of sound mind, with Mulligan’s sweet, hypnotic voice, and the low grinding of The Machine as it crunched, splintered and powdered solid wood, ready to assuage the gargantuan appetite which this extraordinary man proclaimed of himself, in those circumstances, in that hall, no one doubted a single word he said.
And I ground and I ground.
At last it arrived, the slightest trickle of powder, although really it was more a dry, gritty pâté, which dropped from the pert sphincter of the big, iron digestive tract like pale, crumbly mouse droppings. Only then did I notice where it dropped: on to a large platter, a gleaming oval of fiery, crimson-hued gold, which was positioned directly beneath the grinder’s nozzle. (A present from an ecstatic maharaja after he had witnessed one of Mulligan’s regular appearances in Paris.) The platter was a part of the stage set which he kept concealed until the appropriate moment. On the large shining oval the pile grew fractionally. Feeling somewhat ashamed at my own performance, I redoubled my efforts, and before I knew it Mulligan had thrown another leg into the funnel, to resounding cheers from the floor. However, the cheers soon fell away to nothing as, pulling a golden spoon from his pocket, he stooped down and collected a sample of the chair dust, inspected it for colour and aroma and popped the loaded spoon into his mouth. There he remained, crouched and absolutely still; without thinking I stopped cranking, my incredulous eyes, like those of everyone else besides, on the great man. (Later, he commended me on this little detail, which, I have to admit, did add somewhat to the drama of the moment.) He moved his jaws in a slow, ruminating fashion, and then, after an appreciative mumble, smacked his lips and sprang to his feet. Taking a quick drink,