by Jim Hearn
Scotty grabs the mustard and runs back to the restaurant.
‘He’s stressed,’ I observe.
‘He knows what’s coming,’ Jesse says.
‘Yes, he does,’ I acknowledge. ‘And I don’t want to miss it.’
21
I was working at a cafe in Coogee when Alice and I started going out. It was a time of new beginnings for us, and endings for a number of people we knew. In many ways, things got off to an overly serious start; like, I don’t actually know you that well but here we are at another funeral. In fact, we weren’t sufficiently close to go to all the different funerals together—it would have been disrespectful to our families—but we lived through the various grieving processes and got to see how each other ticked.
A couple of junkie mates and my little brother died, as did assorted grandparents and Alice’s previous boyfriend, all in the first six months of going out. It was an emotionally complex time where we kept getting tossed between the highs of falling in love and the lows of dealing with an impossibly long procession of deaths.
During that time, I’d start work at six each morning in the cafe and begin the day by baking off breads, cakes and whatever specials needed to get done for lunch. At about seven Alice would come in to see me and grab a pastry and a coffee before going off to uni. Each day I would forage and search for some new ingredient to use in the baking to impress her. And our nights together merged into one long dream where my mission was always the same: to create some magic flavour that would somehow elevate Alice out of the sadness which was everywhere around us at that time and seemed impossible to escape.
What I realise now and didn’t then is that it’s unusual for two people to have quite such complicated histories, quite so young. Most evenings we’d spend our time going over old ground; me compelled to tell her my ridiculous secrets before she somehow discovered them for herself, and Alice eventually letting me into her secret world and hidden stories, which in their telling seemed to clutch and claw and catch and slowly pull her down.
In order to lure her back to the surface I cooked. My recipes were all the same, involving gas fires and heated pots, oils and spices and garlic and time. While potions boiled and bubbled, I would set the table with plates and bowls and knives and forks and candles and spoons and cups and wait. Slowly I would bring my sweet love home, up from the icy depths, and we’d eat.
I worked in a lot of average kitchens in the early days of our relationship. My ambition at the time had nothing to do with a career in fine dining or write-ups in the newspaper or pats on the back from chefs much better than me. And Alice wasn’t interested in marrying a workaholic cook or famous chef. She wanted to spend her life with a human being: someone she could talk to and share things with; someone who would look after the kids and feed the pets and take out the rubbish and listen.
As the years rolled away and the kids came, we were forced to make do with fate’s hand. And as my energies became once more focused on larger kitchens with brigades of chefs and job descriptions that required obsessive attention to every little detail, it was her turn to listen to my stories. How from nine till noon I would be checking off deliveries and prepping my section; how I’d rotate everything in the coolroom to keep a handle on what supplies were needed. How each chef had to have their section ready for service: fresh sauce, protein, herbs, garnishes, oils, seasoning. And how each chef had to know how many serves they had of everything they were responsible for cooking. How when the lunch bell rang at midday, it was all hands on deck.
At three pm lunch service would end and each chef would break down their section and clean it up and start a prep list for service that night, the maître d’ yelling booking updates into the kitchen every time the phone rang. I told Alice about how I determined which chef would cook a staff meal on any given night; how if there was a section that wasn’t ready for service they would be left alone to get it boxed. How after a quick dinner and the six o’clock call and last-minute preparations and adjustments the adrenaline would surge at the sound of the first order clicking through the docket machine. And I’d tell her how, when I called my first check down the line, my voice would always be a little tight, like until I’d heard the three or four or five chefs on the line all call back, ‘Yes, Chef’ or, ‘Oui, Chef’, I was never sure I wasn’t alone.
It takes a team effort to fend off the chaos of a busy lunch or dinner service in a half-decent restaurant. Kitchen life is a social event in restaurants that require a brigade of chefs to function. It becomes normal to end up spending more time with grungy, blood-splattered chefs and kitchen porters than at home with loved ones. Marriages and partnerships bend and twist from the endless heat and pressure. Some find ways to adapt and mould or cope. Some buckle beyond repair.
I have been fortunate over the last fifteen years in that one look from Alice can always bring me undone. A particular mood or cool stare will break the spell of the most manic situation. Not that she does it often. Like most people we negotiate the complexities of life, but if I lose focus for too long and forget what really matters, she’ll say the word and I’ll collect my knives and walk away.
The photos she’s been sending me lately are a warning bell. There’s still a playfulness about them; it might amount to nothing. But along with her efforts in the garden and the heatwave that hangs over everything, things might also erupt in any number of ways. All of which will bring about the end of things for me at Rae’s and a return to her, and us, and our most treasured recipes.
22
Returning to Balmain a couple of years after having worked at Sorrentino’s was a strange experience. I certainly hadn’t plotted my return via Desperate Hour at Kings Cross, but given it had happened my sole responsibility was to put all that out of my mind and start again. The thing I was most happy about was that Sorrentino’s had disappeared from the neighbourhood. Last I’d heard, Doug had sold the business after taking the whole branding thing too far down-market. Which was liberating for me; it meant an aspect of my past had been erased. This also meant I could walk down the street without crossing the road or ducking under umbrellas in the sun. I owed Doug and the Italians some money and no end of goodwill, but I was a little short on both.
I went to a couple of interviews in the neighbourhood and ended up taking a job that was all about the money. It was another pasta joint and incredibly busy. The chef-owner had just sold the business and part of closing the deal was that they had to find someone who could do the four days he worked in a similar fashion to him. No one was too worried about what it might cost because the job was difficult. The kitchen was so small it made most domestic settings look five-star. Physically, there was only enough space for a chef and a kitchen hand. The joint sat just twenty-five people but ninety percent of the trade was takeaway. The phone would start ringing around five thirty and wouldn’t stop until nine. It was insane; someone was employed just to answer the phone and write up orders.
Each pasta dish was individually cooked in a frypan, which was different to the Barracks and the Pasta Man in that there was no pasta sink and pots of sauce. It was à la carte, which meant if we did two hundred covers during a service, there were two hundred frypans to clean and bucket-loads of mise en place to prepare. I had a large pot of water at my feet where I dropped the pans after I plated up a dish. As I ran out of clean pans, I would rinse off the dirty ones in the pot and start again. As a system it was rudimentary. The original owners had set up shop in a Victorian terrace on Darling Street and assumed they’d make a living. What they ended up making, in the five years they owned it before selling, was a small fortune.
They’d tried a few people out before I started at Darling Street and none of them had stuck, which meant no one was expecting me to either. But they weren’t to know how desperate I was, and after doing a week and proving I had the chops for the job, I asked for a grand a week and they decided to pay. It was a lot of money back in the day and the request didn’t endear me to the new owners.
But on the upside, it got the old owners out, the new owners in, and if they wanted to think of me as the transition guy, well, fine; I’d take the money now and move on later. Same as it ever was.
The days were long. I started at eight in the morning and went through until ten or eleven at night, four days in a row. Every morning I had to start doing pastry section, which meant making one or more of the five dessert items on the menu. Then I would have to get the pots of sauce on and start cooking off pasta. It wasn’t just multi-tasking; it was an utter shit-fight every sunrise. I had never seen so much food produced out of such a tiny space. And the reason they didn’t mind paying someone so much money was that the job was basically one person doing all the sections of a busy little cafe-cum-restaurant. If the physical space had room for two or three chefs they would have employed more people, but it didn’t and as the joint got busier and busier, they had just adapted the space to cope with the extra workload.
Initially things went really well. Just like in every other place I’d ever worked, they loved me and I shut up and did the job. I was enjoying being on the pans in such a dynamic way; very few places get to use frypans with anything like the rapid-fire way we did at Darling Street. And it was rewarding to be able to survive one shift let alone a week. The main stress of the job was turning up each morning and literally having to start over, prepping everything from scratch before the phones started ringing. It was intense but it did keep my mind off other, less productive pursuits.
After a few weeks at Darling Street I had some cash behind me and had spent enough time away from Kings Cross to imagine things hadn’t gone quite so badly last time I was up there. The desperate hour after the bus trip from Brisbane, although only a few weeks ago, had been filed away somewhere deep and very dark. You might even say I was on top of things. No one thought I’d be able to do the job and yet here I was, carving it up. I’d improved things, tweaked systems and got it running smoother. And pretty soon the three days off I had each week started to feel like an opportunity rather than a window of respite. So one night, after my fourteen-hour Sunday shift, I caught a cab up to the Cross and did the business.
Because I’d ripped off one of the working girls during my Newtown days I was always a little careful when I revisited the Golden Mile. One thing that worked in my favour was the fact that the Cross is a very busy and dynamic place. The names and faces change pretty regularly even if the song stays the same. I imagine they’re still playing Tina Turner’s ‘Private Dancer’ in a few of the clubs. Many people, for a multitude of reasons, are called to the Cross and everyone gets a speaking part straight off the bat. It’s an egalitarian cultural space and if you have the necessary moves to last a few weeks . . . well, you’ve probably earned a rest somewhere quiet. And even if there are bars on the windows when you get to that restful place, it’s going to be a relief after putting in such a physically demanding performance.
So the odds of being recognised in Kings Cross for my one lousy crime against the working class were strictly for the speculator. But if anyone had taken the hundred-to-one on that particular evening they would’ve been rolled in clover, for as I was walking up one of the laneways towards the main strip someone came out of the shadows and yelled, ‘Hey!’
I didn’t even bother turning. I was getting on and I figured the distraction wasn’t any of my business. But when a burly little gangster grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around, I saw the girl I’d slipped the five dollars to before running off with her fifty dollars worth of smack.
I didn’t feel like a villain, though. I was scared. Perhaps never more scared in my life than in the moment when our eyes met again. The thing about using smack is that the time between tastes doesn’t actually exist when you’re using. It feels like it does when it’s happening, when you’re working away, on the straight and narrow. But it’s an illusion, like a field of potential that your mind recalls in the moments when you’re putting your next shot away; like déjà vu. It’s like the time between ripping off a prostitute some months ago and the present, which finds her boyfriend holding on to my arm, is no time at all. It could have been yesterday, and as far as the angry little chimpanzee squeezing the sinew of my shoulder is concerned, it was. And the chimp, who had been let out of his cage for a brief reign of terror and pain, was in his element. He wasn’t in jail or eating scraps out of a bin or taking it up the arse in some shithouse work-for-the-dole scheme. Right now, he was the fucking man.
‘You dirty little tip-rat.’
‘That’s him, Joey. That’s the little cunt.’
‘You fucking little cunt.’
‘Five fucking dollars he gave me.’
‘You cheeky little cunt.’
And soon I was going to have to start speaking, but before I could Joey started pushing me back down the dark laneway, away from the neon glow of the strip, away from a taste or a tickle or a fix, and into darkness where these things lie.
‘Open the fucking boot, Betty,’ said Joey, fumbling around with his keys.
And I propped and pivoted, hardened the fuck up.
‘Fuck off, cunt. It was only a fucking tickle.’
‘Yeah, but you admit ripping Betty off, you little cunt.’
Bang! He clocked me in the side of the head. And I was expecting that; I was happy enough getting a touch-up, but I wasn’t hopping into any fucking boot. Not conscious or alive, anyway.
‘Don’t fucking play with him, Joey. Get him in the fucking boot and shoot the little cunt.’
‘Oh yeah, right, you old slut. You’re gonna shoot a bloke for half a fucking stepped-on shot,’ I said, full of indignant bravado.
‘That wasn’t stepped on. That was off-the-fucking-boat fresh, you little cunt.’
‘Open the fucking boot, Betty. Don’t just stand there yelling and screaming.’
‘Wait a fucking minute. I’ll fix you up. I’m sorry, all right? I fucked up but here.’ I reached into my pocket.
And the whole time he was dragging me down the street I’d been doing the sums on how much was in this pocket and how much was in that pocket; what it was going to cost me, with interest, to shut the door on this unfortunate youthful misadventure.
‘Two hundred fucking dollars doesn’t cover it, cunt. You can’t go running around ripping off hard-working girls and expect to get away with paying a few bob interest.’
‘Some of that interest is mine, Joey,’ old put-upon Betty whined in the background.
Joey spun around and backhanded her across the face. ‘Shut up, you fucking idiot. If I want to hear from you I’ll whistle.’
Then Joey pushed me down onto an old bench, which like the one in Newtown was riddled with graffitied histories. It was scary how little time seemed to have passed between benches; how in Newtown I’d leapt off one and run down the stairs to the train station and then alighted at Kings Cross and ripped off Betty. And it wasn’t like I hadn’t paid my dues in the meantime for that most despicable of crimes. Fuck me, life had caught up with me in other ways but . . . well, now probably wasn’t the time to indulge in any of that.
‘Empty out your pockets,’ said Joey, looking around as he pulled back hard on my collar, choking me further down onto the seat.
‘Go easy. It was a fucking tickle, you cunt,’ I managed to cough out.
And Joey popped my lip and bent back one of my top teeth. Which seemed to give way pretty easy. Maybe I wasn’t getting enough calcium.
‘All right! All right, you fucking pricks.’
And now it was my time for a little show-and-fucking-tell. I ripped his arm off me and stood up, angry, making a scene as I emptied out my pockets.
‘Why don’t you fucking rob me blind, you cunts? Here you fucking go. Take everything I fucking got . . . take the fucking . . .’
And as I’m tipping coins and cash into the gutter, a police car squirts out a short siren.
And faster than a gutter-rat, Betty scooped the eighty or ninety dollars off the road and scurried into t
he shadows. Joey was already gone; he was up two hundred and didn’t have to rely on Betty to come good for another couple of hours. And me . . . I stayed and chatted with the cops about the unfortunates who just robbed me. A young bloke on his way to a club; a young bloke with a busted lip and a sore head who can’t remember what anyone looked like or sounded like or even what they wanted other than his money. And no, thanks for the opportunity, but I didn’t want to make a statement.
I’d been at Darling Street for a few weeks and wasn’t really paying rent at my brother’s house, so I still had plenty of cash and managed to score that night. And to ease the pain I bought a weight rather than a tickle, with all the good intentions of any junkie at the start of another habit who buys a weight, telling myself it would last a few days. The imagined upside was that I wouldn’t have to race back up to Kings Cross to score for at least a week. That was the theory anyway. Frankly, I wasn’t keen on another visit any time soon, even though I couldn’t see Joey staying out of prison for longer than another forty-eight hours. Joey had that hungry look, the one that was under no illusions; the one I had in Newtown and was keen to avoid again.
Living in a garage which belonged to my brother and his family who lived upstairs did present some problems, the first of which was that there was no toilet in my corner of the world, and to get around this problem I had taken to pissing in empty alcohol bottles. On rainy nights I’d slip outside and empty the full bottles of urine into the rain-filled gutter. But given the vagaries of the weather, the times between rainy nights got so stretched for a while there that the joint started to smell and they had kids and were good hard-working people, so I cut a deal and moved out.
I’d always liked Annandale. It was quiet and leafy and had some great little continental pockets without being culturally overwhelming for a poor white renter. So I optimistically signed a six-month lease on a four-bedroom terrace which ate up about half my pay. I really felt like I needed some space and, besides, I thought I’d be able to let some rooms out to help pay the rent. I also wanted to limit what I could do with the money I was earning by spending as much as I could on things like rent, food, motorbikes and clothes before I spent money on drugs. And it was a noble plan. But you know what happens to the best-laid plans . . .
