Primordial Soup

Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback

PRIMORDIAL SOUP

Christine Leunens was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the daughter of an Italian mother and a Belgian father. Her grandfather was the Flemish artist Guillaume Leunens. After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill she went to live in Europe with the intention of becoming a writer but ended up a fashion model, working for Givenchy, Pierre Balmain, Paco Rabanne, Nina Ricci and making tv commercials for Mercedes-Benz, Suzuki and the House of Fraser.

Her success enabled her to give up modelling for horse breeding in Picardy, where she wrote her first play in French, Tu N’As Qu’A and her second Porcelain White in English. She received an award from the Centre National du Cinema for her screenplay Maux D’Amour.

Christine Leunens now lives in Normandy and combines writing film scripts and fiction with the occasional modelling job.

CONTENTS

Title

Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Copyright

CHAPTER 1

“Eat, you!”

“But it won’t go down …”

“You jus’ put in de mouth an’ swallow!” my mother yelled.

I added another finger width of leprosy-stricken banana into my mouth and wished she’d stop staring at me like that. It joined the stagnant reserve which I moved from right to left to show her I was trying.

“I don’ wan’ to see de cherry.”

“De cherry,” to which she alluded was the pouch for storing unwanted nutrition in my left cheek. She seized it and twisted until the saliva-softened food seeped back onto my palate.

“How long i’ take?”

“I’m chewing.”

“You wan’ I count three??”

She had concluded there was nothing to chew. Leprous pus could, according to her logic and the laws of physics, slide down any inclined surface with ease. I wished it were the kitchen sink tube and not my own.

“One. Two …”

I drove my finger into the flesh and began to carve out the soft brown spots someone had the big idea to name bruises, all the while trying my hardest to stop imagining the banana was Mir’i·am’s forearm and what I was sapping were the undrained sores under her scabs. What I considered a bruise, my mother considered consumable flesh. The banana was drawn out of my hand and thrown in my face, which I turned aside in time.

In less than a week, I could not walk straight any more than could a drunken sailor. I complained to my mother about it; she measured my legs, told me to eat more. I was carrying in groceries, when I fell down and chipped my front tooth on the driveway. She left the papaya, the fennel and the half-priced bags of whole-wheat flour where they were, and checked my polio vaccinations.