vampyrichamster

This year, I decided to make Jamaican fruit cake for Christmas instead of my usual kind. I got fascinated with the stuff after the local Grocery Outlet brought in a pile of German ready-made loaves. The German ones were really more of a chocolate cake with orange and rum notes. Great flavour for a cake, but not a fruit cake. It turns out the key difference between Jamaican fruit cake and the English kind is that Jamaican fruit cake blends its fruit into the batter. The Jamaican version also makes liberal use of rum and fortified wine, which makes immense historical sense in the Carribbean. Incidentally, this cake is called Jamaican black cake in its native locale, where it is used as the standard at weddings and other life celebrations. This also makes historical sense because the traditional English wedding cake is a fruit cake, and fruit cake celebrates the wealth of families with its rich preserved fruits and sugar. The cake is in fact black, as the batter is coloured with a liberal dose of basic caramel syrup, a lot like Malay beehive cake.

The recipe I tried results in a cake with a density resembling an English boiled pudding. It's intensely moist from the fruit puree and gets even heavier after aging, again with rum and fortified wine, preferably. The taste is somewhere between a very traditional fruit cake and a red wine-flavoured fruit leather. Next time I make this I might try to harmonise it with the German version by adding substantial cocoa powder to balance out the red wine/red fruit. This is one of those weird cases where the mulled wine spices that go into the cake somehow got swallowed up by the rum. My idea is to use the chocolate to bring out the inherent spiciness in the rum (if you know me, I don't skimp on spices in cake, I double them; imagine a fruit cake flavour so overwhelming it cancels that out). In more acts of heresy, I might even only blend half the fruits so there's more textural variety.

On a late night with crackers and a warm cat, I decided to re-watch Memories of a Murderer: The Nilsen Tapes, which I think I first saw a couple of years ago and thought was good. Dennis Nilsen was a British (more accurately Scottish, even if he killed in London) serial killer from the early eighties, who famously got found out when his neighbour reported a clogged pipe and they found bits of flesh in the sewage. He targeted young, at-risk men, many of whom were homeless or drifters. As the documentary's name suggests, it has actual snippets of Nilsen discussing his biography while in prison. Hearing his voice again, I realised I was listening to what my late cat Dorian would have sounded like if he were human being. Nilsen has a droll, actually rather polite personality on tape. He tries to come off as a sort of tragic gentleman outcast with a black sense of humour. Very matter-of-fact about killing. Not quite trying to be an edge lord, really, more like a sort of imitation literary man, perhaps the type prone to consumption? At one point, he critiques the prison curry, which he tries to better with "West Indian sauce". He comments on how the local cooks probably don't know what they're doing and how the meat is textured soy protein, eventually conceding the curry is "not bad, actually", probably due to the West Indian sauce. There was a while where we were under-feeding Dorian when we first got him without realising it. The poor boy would eat anything in sight, even breaking into bowls of instant ramen while we were out. He developed a taste for people food, which he kept all his life. For about thirteen years, he taste-tested all my curries. Well, he taste-tested virtually everything I ate. You couldn't convince me he wasn't testing it for quality. I'd eat a kimchi katsu sando and he'd be on the other side nibbling it with me--and no, not because I allowed him to! That Food Inspector Cat would very much comment on prison curry if he could, passing judgment on the kitchen and hot sauce while he was at it.

If Dorian were to describe himself, I could see him describing himself as a sort of dark gentleman gourmand, possibly prone to a little thuggery. He would narrate his tales with a grandiose air if pressed, very politely, while going out later for a bit of night air and backstabbing. Before he was caught, Nielsen hid bodies under his floorboards at his first flat prior to burning them in his backyard. Police would later sift bits of bone out of the garden soil as they struggled to identify his victims. Out of potentially fifteen victims, only eight were ever identified. Dorian initially brought hom these terrified, catatonic little mice I would calmly pick up and set free out of sight. Eventually, he concluded rather than have his hard-earned prey released, he'd bring then to us dead. During his hungry phase--which was utterly our fault and I'll never stop feeling guilty about it--he ate a fairly large rat I walked in on. I wouldn't at all be surprised if he ate his kills relatively often. During the winter possibly a year or two after we adopted him, I found a couple of stiff rats tucked under fallen leaves in the backyard. While he was around, the gardener who came to rake our yard would frequently complain about finding dead rodents. We will never know Dorian's true kill count nor where all the bodies are buried. Dorian was a quiet and discreet murderer.

Watching the Nilsen documentary wasn't all random reminiscing about my dear, sweet cat. The reason Nilsen could kill as indiscriminately as he did for some five years in London without anyone noticing was the same reason quite a lot of serial killers got away with it during their golden age--he targeted people the cops and public were more likely to ignore. In Nilsen's specific case, his victims consisted of down-and-out youth left behind by a poor economy. He deliberately went after men who had problems or knowingly engaged in risky behaviour to survive. The documentary is clear that his victims were in their circumstances hardly of their own will. Specifically in Nilsen's case, he also took advantage of the fact being gay in late seventies and early eighties England was primarily a closeted affair. People at the time clearly would rather not see or talk about the fact gay people lived among them. Victims, commensurately, were ignored by police when they survived and reported something was wrong. It's one of those things I appreciate in balanced documentaries. Not the salaciousness, rather, the social environment of the place and time that enabled a killer to go unnoticed. We say serial killers are rarer these days because awareness of basic safety has improved, people are more suspicious of strangers and surveillance tech is everywhere, but this is not universally true. Even armed with the knowledge of a modern city dweller, the fact remains people who fall under the radar are still being targeted by people with the mind and means to do so. For example, Bruce McArthur was active between 2010 and 2018. He targeted mostly South and West Asian men in Toronto's gay village--men who were migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, quite a few of who were closeted at risk of ostracism to their conservative Muslim communities. Toronto police at the time faced criticism in being slow to notice a serial killer in the gay community and slow to connect a string of disappearances involving brown-skinned men. At least, the Toronto police were subject to several internal and external reviews and eventually formed a dedicated missing persons unit.

The world we live in now is kind of oddly swivelling itself back towards darker times that many of us were hoping had finally improved since we were children. I am honestly rather weary of how people who until recently were easy targets for discrimination are once more being called out to distract us from the important problems happening around us. It seems like whenever a whiff of something serious comes up; a widening poverty gap; a bad job market; inflation; extralegal military action on foreign targets; some hired goon in the wings has to shout, "Look out! It's the gays!" or "Men are wearing skirts and women are wearing trousers!" or "Baby killers!" to draw away attention. It's an effective distraction. It's absolutely lame if you thought about it. But well, if we thought about it. In the meanwhile, the "people over there" who get pointed out are effectively re-traumatised in the public spotlight for no wrong they did. This is the problem. We need to be constantly aware that this is a distraction. It's a tactic. It's not the real issue. That's how you get rage from stuff you read on social media while you were trying to tell the news from the alarmists.