Just as first semester ended, Alice saw an ad on the art school's notice board: "Holiday job for 3 weeks, £15 per hour. Create original models and silicon moulds of traditional Indian sculptures for Hare Krishna Temple in Soho."
Against the snow, Alice turned up to her first day on the job in a moth-eaten, second-hand, rabbit-fur coat.
"Aah!" the Krishna devotees screamed, "It's a dead animal!" They repeated it up every morning, before starting on the day-long teachings and chanting. A convert wouldn't have to be paid. Alice stayed poker-faced and polite. what what else could she do, outnumbered by such aliens. But the free lunches they served, "prasadam" - yum!
On her second Friday, at 6 am as usual, Alice took her seat on an Underground train. Opposite, sat a girl, maybe 16, near naked in black lace bra, panties, suspenders, fishnet stockings and stilettoes. Black lipstick echoed her dilated eyes. That look, so glazed - as though she hardly saw what was around her! She had alabaster-white skin, one third tattooed, and grey-marble veins on the insides of her elbows, crusted with puncture marks. She crossed her legs, wrapped her arms about herself, and shivered, yet her skin sweated.
Alice watched the girl, felt both the cold of her bare skin and the warmth of her rabbit-skin fur. As the train slowed for Soho station, Alice stood and shook off her coat. The train doors slid open. Alice tossed her coat to the black-and-white girl and left before the girl could refuse. She caught a brief glimpse of astonishment on her face.
Turning up at work that morning, Alice was greeted with cheers for the absence of the coat, yet it took two hours before her chill thawed.
Before catching her train home, Alice thought of Ratatouille with red beans, mushies, brown rice and broccoli. A pressure cooker - she'd need that to reduce the cooking time. Was it the Krishna vegitarianism sinking in? Really? Or was it just the delicious flavours? Braving the icy streets and snow, she detoured through the Soho markets before catching her train back to her one room flat.
Two hours later, Alice heard the warning increase of hiss just in time to dash round the corner into the bathroom.
Explode...
When it was over, Alice slid back into that one room. Red-bean-slime all over the walls. Pressure cooker in shards and dents in the plasterboard. No dinner that night. Hours cleaning up. Saturday spackling the holes and painting.
There was more to this vegetarian thing than she thought. On Monday, she bought a couple of books, Frances Moore-Lappe's "Diet for a Small Planet" and "Recipes for a Small Planet".
In the third week, Alice's bas-reliefs, pillars and sculptures were caste and fixed to the temple walls.
Alice walked away with her last pay-packet, unconverted, but now loving her new life as a vegetarian.
