The Taste of Roses

Stories for Another Day

Gavin was what his mother would call a fussy eater. He thought spinach tasted like dirt, and there was no way his mother could ever get him to eat fish. “It tastes… fishy,” he would say, and refuse to eat it. When the milk was just beginning to go sour, Gavin was the first to be able to taste it. “That milk is off,” he would say. His mother, who couldn’t taste anything wrong with it, would tip the rest away in any case, just to be on the safe side, and many times the family might have been sick except for Gavin.

She had a terrible time trying to get him to eat his vegetables, especially green vegetables like zucchini and broccoli. Sometimes she would chop them up finely and sneak them into pancakes when she was making them. Gavin’s brother and sister, Mettle and Marrian, would happily tuck into the pancakes, but Gavin would nibble the edges cautiously and then say, “You’ve put grated zucchini in this! Yuck!” and fold his arms and refuse to eat any more.

His mother would sigh noisily and said, “Gavin, just eat it! It isn’t going to kill you!”

“You never know,” Gavin would say darkly.

He was always saying things like, “There’s too much coriander in this. And you’ve used the wrong lentils.”

His mother said, “Gavin, lentils are lentils!”

“They’re completely different,” Gavin said. “Red lentils are sort of sweet, and brown ones have a kind of nutty taste, and yellow ones make the back of my nose hurt. Can’t you taste it?”

“No-one can taste it but you,” his mother said, exasperated. “I think it’s your imagination.”

Gavin started making his own food, so that there were never any unpleasant surprises, even though his mother complained that it made twice as much washing-up. But it turned out that being able to taste things other people couldn’t was not such a bad thing after all, as you will see.

One day a stranger arrived in the town, and opened a new shop. He was large, and round, with long, spindly arms and legs. He had lots of dark hair, not just on his head but on the backs of his hands and coming out of his nose and his ears. He called himself Oda.

The strange thing about Oda’s shop was that it only sold one thing, a rosy, sweet-smelling drink that came in large bottles and small bottles, all labelled, “Oda’s Rose-Tinted Syrup.”

To begin with, people just looked into the shop as they passed, without stopping, until Oda started giving away free samples of the pink syrup, to the people going by. As soon as they tasted it, they loved it and wanted more.

“It tastes like roses, with just a hint of honey,” Mettle said, “but there’s something else…” A dreamy look came over his face, just thinking about it. “You should try it, Gavin,” he said.

“No, thanks,” Gavin said. “You never know what they put in these things.”

“Oda makes it himself, in the kitchen at the back of his shop,” Marrian said. “It’s all natural, he says.”

“Dung beetles are completely natural, and so is cauliflower,” Gavin said. “That’s no reason to eat them.”

Oda’s shop became so popular that he added some tables and chairs so people could come with their friends and sit for hours drinking the syrup. It seemed the more of it they drank, the more they wanted. Sometimes they stayed so long, they fell asleep at the tables. They forgot to go to work and they didn’t want to go home to their families.

After some time, Marrian went to Gavin and said, “I’m worried about Mettle. He’s at Oda’s all the time now.”

Gavin said, “He’s old enough to know what he’s doing. We shouldn’t interfere.” He was busy trying to perfect a recipe for spinach pie without the spinach, and he didn’t want Marrian bothering him.

Marrian wasn’t going to be put off. She planted herself in front of Gavin and said, “Don’t you know a man died in that shop the other day? They thought he’d fallen asleep, but he was actually dead!”

“So an old man died in his sleep,” Gavin said. “It’s not such a bad way to go.”

“That’s what Mettle said,” Marrian said, “but I heard afterwards that the man wasn’t old at all. Please, Gavin!”

“All right,” Gavin said grumpily. “But it won’t do any good, you know.”

Marrian didn’t smile. She was too worried. She took his arm and dragged him down to Oda’s shop. Oda was standing behind the counter in the cosy dimness, polishing glasses and smiling at the room full of people.

Mettle was sitting at a table with a dozen friends, and it looked like he had been there all morning. “Gavin!” he said jovially. “Great to see you! Come and join us!”

Gavin sat down, and Marrian sat down beside him. Mettle filled a glass and and pushed it over to Gavin. “Drink this,” he said, “and then tell me if it isn’t the best thing you’ve ever tasted.”

Gavin grunted, but he took a tiny sip of the rose-flavoured syrup. “Mmmff, honey, and rosewater – way too much,” he said, screwing up his face. “Tincture of cinnabar, just a hint, to give it colour, I suppose.” He rolled his tongue around the inside his mouth as if he was trying to remember something he had forgotten a long time ago. “And something else…Faughhh! Spider venom!” He spat ferociously, to get the liquid out of his mouth.

Leaping to his feet, he pointed at Oda. “You’ve been putting spider venom in their drink! No wonder they keep wanting more and more. It numbs their taste buds and slows their brains down and makes them sleepier and sleepier.” He threw his glass on the floor, shattering it into pieces. “You’ve been poisoning everyone with this horrible drink!”

Before his eyes, Oda grew and swelled up like a giant balloon. His long, thin arms and legs doubled and became eight hairy spider legs, holding up his black, swollen body.

Gavin yelled, “Marrian, turn the lights on!” Marrian ran to the light switch. As soon as the lights came on, Gavin could see what had been invisible before: a web of very fine, black threads spreading out from Oda’s body to all the drinkers in the room. The threads wrapped around their bodies and led back to Oda’s mouth, where he had been slowly and surely sucking the life out of them.

“Gavin! The glass!” Marrian shouted. Gavin grabbed a piece of broken glass and sawed at the thread that was wrapped around Mettle until it snapped. Oda screamed in a thin, high voice, but Gavin and Marrian went on cutting and slashing at thread after thread, until everyone was free. Then they turned on Oda and drove him out of the town to the open fields, where the crows made short work of him.

There were those who lamented the loss of the syrup, even poisonous as it was, which resulted in one good thing. To keep them quiet, Gavin opened an eating place in the empty shop, and the food that he cooked and Marrian and Mettle served, was the best and the tastiest in the whole town. But he never made anything with even a hint of roses in it, for if he did, no-one would eat it.