Rainbow Milk

by Paul Mendez

  He takes out from his tote bag Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, which he’s been reading on and off. Obama, half-Kenyan, was raised by an Indonesian stepfather who treated him as his own and taught him what he would need to survive in this world, and a white American mother who stroked his hair, listened to him, and attempted, at least, to answer his questions, most memorably about a photo-essay in Life magazine he’d chanced on in a doctor’s reception, featuring an African-American man who had bleached his skin into misery and disfiguration, sold on the product’s promise of a happy new life in whiteness. Reading, while at college, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—a novel Owen keeps urging Jesse to read for literary reasons, setting aside the racial controversies swirling around it—Obama writes of the moment he became aware of the ways whites condition blacks to feel about themselves, about how the qualities ascribed respectively to white and black are internalised by blacks and used then as suicide weapons against blackness.

  Obama proved that a black man can be the most powerful person in the world and make the decisions that change the course of history, without being puppeteered. Surely they’ll choose Hillary to replace him, Jesse thinks, although he finds it difficult to understand the paucity of suitable candidates. That table of ten Californians he served last week were certain it’s going to be Hillary. All down my Facebook wall’s blue, one of them told him, the same one who, when she asked him where he was from and got him down to Jamaica, said that she thought he looked like a young East African boy, and seemed to wait for him to change his mind.

  A lot of people get on at Victoria, but the seat next to him is left free. A sweet-looking Japanese girl in a pleated tartan skirt with a Vivienne Westwood shoulder-purse stands over a pair of large Dover Street Market shopping bags, tapping her nail finely on the screen of her panda-eared phone, perhaps a fashion assistant being sent out with returns. A white man with blond hair, wearing a shirt without a tie, carrying a small leather briefcase, gets on, sees the seat next to Jesse, makes towards it then stops himself and retreats, holding the other rail in the doorway. He is around forty years old, and looks like the sort of man who went to expensive fee-paying schools, then looked down at Owen, there purely on merit, when he got to Cambridge. He stands and reads the Metro newspaper, while Jesse tries to concentrate on Obama’s memoir, thinking, maybe he thinks I’m a Muslim. Maybe white men think black men should not be approached. Maybe he thinks I’m going to stab him in the thigh. Maybe he thinks I’m going to tuck my hand between his legs and cup his balls. A very fat man in dirty jogging bottoms squeezes himself into the seat next to Jesse, finally, at Oxford Circus, just for two stops, and though seats become available at Euston, the blond white man remains standing. Jesse gets off at King’s Cross and glances back to the carriage. The white man has taken the seat he vacated and thrown his bag down on the seat next to him, crossing his legs to further discourage anyone from invading what is now his space.

  He gets to work on time for a pre-shift coffee, feeling relatively alert. The Light Café is a whitewashed former warehouse brightly lit, on sunny days like this, through the narrow Gothic-style windows in its roof, austerely supplemented by simple brass chandeliers. All architectural features are exposed and painted white, except the cast-iron stairs to the mezzanine, which are black. The cushionless wooden chairs remain upturned on the square tables; the chessboard floor has been professionally buffed by a contractor. The same core congregation, backed by an evolving parish of food tourists and special-occasioners, has been faithful to this church of cooking for years. He can already identify, by smell, a seasonal menu-in-preparation of fresh fish and shellfish, baked bread, roasting celeriac, tripe steeping in a rich, beefy liquor, and whole bushes of mint and parsley leaves waiting to be picked. The dramatic crashing of bottle bins, full from a busy Thursday night on the bar and now being emptied into a dumpster, can be heard from outside.

  Ben, the bearded head chef, is breaking down some unspecified carcass with a cleaver on a red board on the pass, the clean chops reverberating in the roof beams; there will be little splashes of blood and gore to swab away before service. He trained as an automotive engineer before his wife’s diagnosis with a brain tumour, and had to leave his position at Jaguar to take care of her, during which time he discovered he liked to cook and was very good at it. Because they had no children, when she died he decided he would go to work full-time in a kitchen in Birmingham, then spent two years as a sous-chef in London before coming to the Light Café. The sleeves of his jacket are rolled up, and the top two buttons are open, revealing rugged forearms and an expanse of thick, curly chest hair. He and Jesse nod at each other, and Jesse suppresses a little twitch of arousal as, involuntarily, and not for the first time, his body imagines what Ben’s nakedness might feel like close to his own. Various of his clean-cut, youthful chefs de partie, cast as if from a late 2000s Lanvin menswear show, move around in purposeful silence prepping their sections, with quick, hesitant moves, as they reprioritise their mental to-do lists.

  The kitchen porter, Oleg, a tightly packed, chain-smoking Ukrainian who looks about fifty but probably isn’t, wishes Jesse good morning, pausing to bump fists as he carries two armsful of clean utensils across from the main kitchen towards the pastry section, where bread and cakes are on sale to the public. He’s been in the country more than ten years yet his English remains limited, understandable given that most of his time is spent alone on the pot-wash, or at best, working in tandem with another KP from Brazil or DR Congo, also speaking their second or third language. Jesse has often wondered what Oleg does about sex. He gets horribly drunk every Friday night and hits on every off-shift female staff member he sees, knowing from the start he is going to be rejected.

  Someone from the kitchen has already made themselves coffee, possibly a round for their colleagues, spraying milk everywhere and leaving it to dry into a crust on the steam wand. The grounds inside the portafilter are sloppy and muddy, as left by someone who doesn’t know how to extract espressos. Whatever they were drinking, Jesse imagines, was weak, bitter and wishy-washy with too-hot milk and little black grains of burnt grind on top, the sort you get on train platforms in provincial towns, identically undrinkable regardless of whether you order a cappuccino, latte or flat white. The dominion of bad coffee even in London baffles him. Every café he visits, he listens out for how the milk is being steamed; if it gargles like an old Ford diesel, he turns around and walks straight back out.

  He bangs out the blackened mess into the coffee-waste drawer and switches on the grinder (which sounds like a chainsaw in this space), rinsing out the portafilter in boiling water from the machine and using it to shake loose any grind left clinging inside the group head. He hooks the clean portafilter into the housing beneath the grinder chamber as it comes to a stop, and pulls the lever twice until it clicks, yielding the perfect amount. He compacts it with the stamp and wipes off the excess with the side of his hand, thoughtlessly transferring it to his—luckily, black—trousers where normally his apron would be, kissing his teeth and digging out a J-cloth from the nearby drawer to wet and wipe them clean. He inserts the portafilter into the group head, takes down a cup from on top of the machine, fills it to a third with boiling water and positions it, pressing the button to extract a double espresso. Within a second or two, drips of golden brown, waxy coffee start to stain the water, steadily gathering into a pour the thickness of a mouse’s tail. Within half a minute, the extraction is complete, topped with a layer of stripy crema. He takes a sip. He appreciates the slightly chocolatey, then smoothly apricotty, flavour.

  He walks over to the computer and gasps. There are ninety-one covers on the book. That’s more like a December lunch than August.

  “Ninety-one!” he calls out loud, his voice carrying high up into the beams; then he experiences a moment of panic that he might be looking at the wrong day, so checks the date in the top right corner. August 12th.

  “Ninety-on
e?” repeats Ben. Two or three of his underlings turn their heads and echo him. “It was seventy-three when I walked in this morning.”

  “What’s going on? We’re supposed to be dead. Everyone’s supposed to be away at their other house in Provence or Somerset or something. Fuck’s sake.”

  “Brexit panic,” shrugs Ben. “Are you on your own, this morning?”

  “Veedub,” says Jesse, and Ben pulls him a commiserative face. “Melania’s in at eleven.”

  “Oh that’s good news!” Ben says, as he turns to sweep the grim waste off his board into a bin. Jesse has always been rather jealous of Ben and Melania’s slow-flirt, the fatherly way he addresses and listens to her.

  Think of the money is the usual maxim. Being short-staffed, and so busy, means a greater proportion of the tips and service charge, but only if the quality isn’t compromised, resulting in more covers spending less and leaving smaller amounts in gratuities. It is getting on for ten past ten. The chairs should be down and the tablecloths going on by now. The list of things more depressing than having to set up a restaurant by oneself is short, especially to start a twelve-and-a-half-hour slog of a double, and Georgia won’t lift a chair or do anything with such commitment as might endanger her nails. She is always late, and no one ever picks her up on it. It is expected, yet she is the first to complain if any of her colleagues turn up after her.

  He prints off a list to set up each table with the right number of chairs. The only way he can complete a menial job with a hangover is to plug in his earbuds and just get on with it. Uninspired, having exhausted Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, the two masterpieces of the year—and not in the mood for anything else in particular, all his playlists predictable and formulaic—he shuffles his library and straight away comes on “My Love” from Mary J. Blige’s What’s the 411? Remix, one of her earliest hits. Big tune, he whisper-shouts, falling into a Mary J.–like shoulder-rolling, head-nodding, finger-clicking dance move. For years he didn’t even know “My Love” was Mary, because she sings it in such a cold, dispassionate way.

  He wakes up, and it only takes a couple of minutes to athletically pull down and position a hundred chairs, before he runs round with a pile of tablecloths, throwing them onto the tops like boys on BMXs do newspapers on lawns. The external line visibly rings. Even though it’s right next to him, someone in the office, probably the manager Terry, picks it up.

  Georgia jiggles in presently, wearing a Mary Quant–style red polka-dot button-through summer dress and red patent leather espadrilles—not an outfit anyone expects to shift furniture in—and with her highlights up in a topknot.

  “J’arrive,” she says, blandly, flicking on the grinder and throwing her black leather handbag down on the waiter station.

  “Morning, Georgia.”

  “Morning,” chorus all the chefs, far more brightly than they’d done for Jesse. Oleg, bringing in a delivery of fresh salad vegetables, purses his lips as if to wolf-whistle but thinks better of it.

  “You look nice,” Jesse tells her.

  “Babes, it’s so fucking hot. What’s the book like?” she asks him as she clicks two shots of ground beans into the portafilter.

  “Ninety-one,” Jesse says, as he billows out and floats down a four-top tablecloth.

  “Ninety-one?”

  She has her hands on her hips.

  “There’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “Who’s on with us?”

  “Melania, at eleven.”

  That time-slot corresponds to the runner’s shift.

  “Ninety covers and just two waiters? Who writes this fucking rota, and who made coffee without cleaning the steam wand?”

  “Not me, and not me.”

  “Morning, Georgia,” says Terry, striding in to finalise the menu with Ben, his pink face and black/grey hair still messy from helmet sweat. “Morning, Jess, how are you?”

  “Morning, I’m good thanks. You?” They shake hands. Jesse’s been working there for three years now but Terry’s grip only seems to get firmer, as if to reassert his heterosexual masculine distance. He was a promising actor, but his career never took off the way it was supposed to. As a consequence, he could never quite give up his waiting job, and as a family friend of the Somerset-based owners of the Light Café, ended up being their interim general manager before recently accepting the offer on a permanent basis.

  “Melania’s boyfriend just rang to say she’s still ill, and nobody else is answering their phones, so it’s just going to be you and Georgia for lunch, though I’ll be here to help, and I’ll get someone from the bar to run drinks and help keep an eye on food.”

  “Oh, I was looking forward to seeing Melania,” says Ben, cleaning down his pass with hot, soapy water. “Would’ve made my day.”

  “She’s still not ready, he said,” says Terry.

  Georgia says nothing, just shakes her head while steaming her milk.

  Jesse checks his phone, and wonders why Melania didn’t text him to say she wasn’t coming in. Georgia, having plugged in her earbuds, her phone hanging precariously in a flimsy pocket of her thin cotton dress, struts around the restaurant with a high pile of folded white napkins clutched to her cleavage, and lays them in position in front of the straightened chairs.

  After a frosty start to their relationship, when Jesse felt bullied by Georgia and refused to talk to her for three months while having a fantastic time with everyone else, they finally bonded over Beyoncé’s self-titled 2013 album and its accompanying music videos for each track, agreeing it was a return to form after the indecisive double LP I Am…Sasha Fierce. Then, the following summer, there was an incident. He’d walked in at ten o’clock to find her locked in a furious argument with Terry in the office, presumably over a complaint that had been made by a customer, and knew that he would have to manage her mood for the whole double shift, mainly by staying out of her way. It was the first day of the asparagus season, and Ben had shown him how he wanted it to be served, with a fish knife placed horizontally on the table to tilt the plate so that the melted butter would drain down to the tips in front of the customer. When Jesse set up the mise en place, only for her to run the food for that table and throw down the asparagus any old way, storming off in a huff, he took her to one side and asked her if she knew how the asparagus was supposed to be served. She’d been working there for five years by then.

  “Bitch, don’t fucking talk to me like I came down in the last fucking shower,” she spat, and spun away. “Just fuck off.”

  Jesse hooked his index finger to summon her back.

  “Georgia…”

  That led to another three months of enmity, during which Jesse almost left, though as he enjoyed virtually every other aspect of his job, it felt a real shame. A thirty-hour week as a waiter at the Light Café, rather embarrassingly, returns the same average salary as a full-time London nurse, excluding cash tips of on average £70 a week. Melania convinced him to stay. Don’t leave me alone with her, babes, please, she’d pleaded.

  It may not even be a bad thing that Melania’s called in sick. Working with the two of them at the same time can be like being in that room where the spiky walls are closing in. Georgia will be forced to actually pull her finger out, even if she’ll dispatch her customers as disdainfully as Serena Williams does her early round opponents. On her day, she’s a charming, fast waiter who makes fantastic tips for the pot, which is why the management won’t sack or even discipline her, and why her colleagues—Melania included—won’t push them to. If she’s pissed off with the general air of the place everyone will feel it in their pockets, and that is why her histrionics are tolerated. On a good day, her standards are high and her napkins and cutlery will be parallel and perpendicular with those beside and opposite, but today her forks look like they’ve been laid by a toddler.

  Jesse goes round with the knives
, straightening the forks at the same time. He follows with wine and water glasses; Georgia with sideplates and salt and pepper pots. There’s the toilets to check—three full rolls in each cubicle, all the hand-soaps required to be full, the mirrors to be wiped. There’s the inevitable remaining cutlery from last night that his darling colleagues won’t have bothered to polish, each one of them seeing the thought Jesse’s in first thing flash subliminally through their minds. After that, the butter pats, the oil-and-vinegar pots, all need to be freshly made up and stored or distributed to tables. The service fridge has to work hard when the weather’s like this. Then there are the weekly jobs, a different one for each day, like watering the plants or dusting the chair legs, which often get signed off without being done, though Jesse is always too scared that he’ll be the unlucky one who lies and gets caught when Terry randomly pulls the service fridge in the middle of a conversation before checking the clipboard and finding Jesse’s initials. So he pulls the fridge, sweeps and sanitises, just as Zac, one of the cute blond chefs de partie, places his huge, steaming cauldron on the staff table. Even Jesse groans at the idea of winter-warmer food on such a hot day, but understands the benefits of its slow-release energy.

  “What is it?” calls Georgia, cynically plucking out one of her earbuds. “Broad bean and black truffle risotto again? Ugh!”

  * * *

  —

  In a restaurant with no music, the pre-service silence can be ominous, and the first chatter of diners meeting in the bar for a gin and tonic or glass of champagne gathers like a murmur of strings beneath the percussive interventions from the kitchen. He doesn’t recognise any of the surnames on the booking sheet, but that won’t mean he hasn’t seen their faces before. It is front-loaded with tables from midday onwards, so there’s no chance of being lulled into an inadequate rhythm that it’s hard to pick up from, and without a runner, more has to be done from the outset. Giant loaves of sourdough have to be pre-sliced and covered with a dampish cloth so that they won’t dry out; it is sensible to prep several baskets before service so that Jesse and Georgia won’t be left flat-footed by the early arrivals. In they come, just as Georgia finally emerges from the dressing room in her uniform, white, like Jesse’s, but cut for curves. Georgia picks the back of the restaurant, of course, so Jesse is left with the front, where all the niggly little tables of two are, but her choice comes with the caveat of being the auxiliary runner, as her section will be less busy.