The bone lay on the plate, long and smooth and bare. I had roasted the 1.95kg leg of lamb to perfection and made it last over two nights with lunch in between, and now that it was picked clean, the bone sat around, as big as a club. It looked kind of foul but there was also something tender and beautiful about it. I thought of a sentence by John Updike, describing a character who arrives in Russia in winter as an honoured guest: “They met him with arms heaped with cold roses.” The bone looked like a winter blossom. I put it in the freezer.
The bone whispered to me through the freezer door over the next few days. “You can’t just keep me here forever,” it said. “You’re going to have to think of something.” I promised that I would. It had come to this – a conversation with a leg of lamb – but one of the guiding concerns of my life is what to do with waste, how best to recycle it, and the idea of just chucking the bone into landfill was repugnant. It would take forever to decompose. It would never decompose. It would only decompose, I continued worrying, when the Earth goes up in the flames of the apocalypse. It was then that I realised what I could do with the bone.
The bone was white as a tooth when I pulled it out of the freezer. It felt like I was shaking hands with it, the living and the dead holding onto each other. In the meantime, I had feasted on two lamb chops and half a dozen chicken wings; I was now in possession of quite a few bones. Jeffrey Dahmer had been this way, too. As a boy, he collected animal bones and kept them in a bucket. The family called them his “fiddlesticks”. That didn’t end well for the Milwaukee cannibal but my purpose was noble.
The bones rattled inside a plastic bag, which I swaddled in an old shirt, lay on the driveway, and went at with a hammer. The sound of cracking bones was very satisfying. I emptied the pieces into a pot of water, and got it boiling on the stove. But the smell filled the kitchen with a sweet and disgusting scent of death, so I transferred the pot to a gas cooker on the porch. The death stink now invaded the neighbourhood. I rent in the most expensive suburb in New Zealand. The millionaires were probably gagging in their mansions, but I was on a mission and boiled the pot for another two hours.
The bones were now excellently softened. There was one final step. In Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, Caitlin Doughty’s great book on what it’s like to work at a crematorium, she writes that Romans built cremation pyres in the first century AD: “The mourners collected the bones, hand-washed them in milk and placed them in urns.” I made a pyre of pinecones and the first fallen leaves of autumn in the base of my Weber barbecue, and threw in the bones. I kept the fire going for another two hours. Wind carried the smoke and house prices continued to plummet. Later, I scooped up the ashes, and dug them into the garden. All that potassium, phosphate and calcium put to good use. “Thank you,” whispered the bones, deep in their grave. “Cheers,” I replied. It had come to this – dialogue with ashes beneath dirt – but I felt sure the exercise had made the world a better place.
