The Catastrophe

by Ian Wedde

  ‘You horrid little spoiled brat,’ she hissed at him, daring him to smirk. ‘You self-fucking-important little shit. You wanker.’

  His grin began to emerge so she smacked him again, hard, with the flat of her hand, twice, in the middle of the sun-stripe on his ridiculous hairy chest. He yelled and pushed his red bottom lip out, like a child about to cry. But he was laughing, really.

  The Christopher memories. Sucking all the air out of the present. ‘Food is love.’ Try ‘food is shit’ for a change.

  Could we be much closer if we tried

  We could stay at home and stare into each other’s eyes

  ‘You sat there all wrapped up in your own fucking big question moment and let me find my own way back. In the dark. What an utter shit.’

  ‘I did not,’ he purred. He was trying to soothe her, but he was also a bit offended. And his eyes were flicking down at her body under the sheet.

  ‘Don’t even think about it, shit-face.’

  ‘I followed you all the way back here. I hid. I crept from shadow to shadow. You didn’t even know I was there.’

  How could she tell if he was lying? She couldn’t. They lay in silence, staring at each other. He wasn’t smirking any more. He had that serious look she knew. When he licked his lips like that, little flicks of his tongue, she knew what was going to happen.

  Then of course they just rushed together, as usual. He was all over her with his kissy mouth until it was unbearable and she had to scream. Scream! Then they were fucking and he had that expression, jubilant, his whole body laughing not just his face. Laughing and laughing. So he never did apologise for the ‘big question’ quarrel.

  ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ was what Bob said when she told him what had happened after they got back to London. ‘You’re what?’

  ‘We’re getting married.’

  Not as if Bob hadn’t warned her off him the first time they’d met at the magazine’s offices in Thurloe Place. A wide boy, Bob had said, wagging his finger. Watch out. Trouble. They could hear Bob’s latest discovery Christopher Hare rushing up the stairs. He was late.

  ‘South Kensington!’ he exclaimed as he stuck his big curly head around the door of Bob’s office. He was panting from climbing up two flights. ‘This is different. Wow.’

  She recognised the New Zealand accent.

  ‘The Brompton Oratory,’ he said, rounding his vowels mockingly. ‘The V and A!’

  Was he a Maori? He had black curly hair and was either tanned or dark. A bit Maori, as it turned out. The rest was Italian.

  He flopped down in a chair and fanned himself with a magazine. His quick scan of the room took her in – and waited. When Bob introduced them he jumped up clumsily and shook her hand, which was a nice change, after the cheek-kissing craze.

  But when he left after the meeting he did kiss her cheek and made a little plosive sound with it, pop! – quite sweet.

  ‘Lovely,’ he crooned, so matinée-idol. ‘Looking forward to it.’

  He had a slightly leathery smell; she couldn’t place it. Horse sweat? Maybe he went riding? But later she found it was just his smell.

  Wily old Bob had spotted him, a journeyman chef turned ‘junket journalist’. He was getting gigs with travel guides, churning it out for in-flight magazines, doing promos for hotel restaurants. Working miles and miles off the shoulder of the high end when he was on the road by himself on his own budget, getting new places all the time and talking them up – how did he find them?

  That was where his buzz came from, especially around the Ligurian coast. He’d practically rewritten it. With respect and affection.

  But cheerfully taking advantage of the prestige regulars when there was a junket available. She read his stuff – very funny, pithy and shameless – and she’d looked forward to meeting him.

  When he was getting paid to promote he didn’t hide it, he even boasted about the luxury, and when he wasn’t promoting he was fearless. He’d had a field day making fun of Frank Sinatra’s favourite Genoese restaurant Zeffirino, his story filling the place with furtive, superannuated bodyguards whose heads were permanently wrenched sideways watching the entries and exits.

  He described the famed Zeffirino paffutelli as ‘muck’. He told a silly story about Tom Hanks panting up the cliff from a wealthy businessman’s yacht wanting to use the pool at Hotel Splendido in Portofino and being told to vaffanculo!

  But oh my God, even with all that gossipy nonsense, when he wrote about the food and the wine you wanted to be there. You wanted to be there with him.

  You wanted to be in his mouth.

  A few words, a little taste of this and another of that, precise, clear, no jargon, how good was the kitchen, where did the prep set its freshness frontier, was the management calm, what would you always remember. And always just a bit naughty. He told jokes. He had fun. He knew what he was writing about. He had the magic tongue. The buds.

  And there was a bit of a cult thing happening with him, as with Kiwi and Australian chefs, and that grassy Sauvignon Blanc when it first turned up.

  And as Bob said, with ‘the colonials’, it was all care and no responsibility for the magazine – take the credit and disclaim the blame if things went bad. With them it was no connections and no loyalty. Just pure naked ambition and greed or better still an attitude. He gave them two years max before they locked in and got too compromised if they were any good.

  A couple of months at most if they didn’t perform.

  But oh, Christopher Hare. A different story.

  Playing Joe Jackson again. ‘Pretty woman out walking with gorillas down my street.’ To drown out ‘Food is love.’

  *

  He was lying on his back and might even have been asleep. In the bathroom mirror she looked thoroughly ravaged.

  The first time it happened was in a crappy cheap six-berth sleeper somewhere along the summer holiday coast from Ventimiglia. Fleeing the dreadful things he did to Robuchon’s caramelised quail in Monaco. A whole family got out of the sleeper and left them to it around midnight, at some little beach-front town with a summer fairground and an illuminated merry-go-round with raucous amplified music and naked coloured lightbulbs along the beach, still going strong that late.

  It had been going to happen for days, it was inevitable. The pressure building. They just jumped on each other as the train groaned and jerked out of the station leaving the little family yelling at one another over suitcases.

  Then they drank two of the sample bottles of Rossese di Dolceacqua they were meant to be taking back to Bob in London and tried again, but he was too drunk and gave up.

  They watched a dreary, flat, light industrial landscape chug past as dawn came up. The wretched Italian thing of rustic scraps and broken-down farm houses surrounded by ugly rubber mat factories or something. Streams of speeding cars overtaking the train, a purple band of nasty smog at the horizon.

  ‘How can a place that makes such great food do this kind of shit?’ He threw another empty bottle out the window with reckless abandon and hurt his elbow on the sill, bled all over the place. She was incredibly happy even though her cunt was sore after his hopeless drunken efforts.

  He looked as though he was, too – happy that is. But really it was hard to tell. His default was ‘be happy’, and maybe that was sad in itself. Maybe his happiness was the saddest thing about him.

  ‘You didn’t!’ scolded Bob the moment he saw her back in the office. ‘You can’t do that!’ He wasn’t referring to the wine.

  But for God’s sake, it wasn’t just Christopher. It was her, too. My God, was it ever. You couldn’t blame Christopher.

  And when Bob had looked at her photographs from that first trial trip he didn’t even pause to think.

  ‘You two,’ he said, but not to Christopher, because you couldn’t trust the bugger. ‘Magic. It’s a book. It’s a fucking small fucking fortune!’

  Magic.

  Back in Venice the morning after the ‘big question’ deb
acle she threw cold water all over her face and head and shoulders and then walked back into the hotel bedroom without drying herself, with her hair dripping soothingly across her shoulders. The band of sunlight had spread and he now lay in the middle of it, as if on display. His long, skinny, impossible legs. He still had one sock on. It had a hole in it with his big toe sticking out. When she bent over him on the bed she thought it was her drips at first, but it wasn’t. The tears were running from his closed eyes into his ears.

  ‘What am I supposed to do about it!’ he sobbed. ‘What am I supposed to do about this ...’ He lifted both hands and whacked himself on the chest once, twice, three times. ‘This ... feeling!’

  When he squawked ‘feeling!’ his mouth sprayed saliva. Something burst inside him and turned his mouth and lips into a fleshy volcano.

  One part of her thought he was being a dickhead, loathsome, melodramatic and pathetic. The other part put her hand over his bubbling mouth and lay down beside him. Long and cool and pale. His Thé Glacé if that’s what he wanted. It didn’t really matter.

  ‘For God’s sake, Christopher. It’s okay. Stop being such a wet. I’ll be your Thé Glacé if it’ll make you shut up. Can we stop the performance and get some breakfast?’

  He was gazing at her with a weak, grateful grin, blinking teary eyes.

  ‘TG for short, okay? Can we start with a Campari Spritz? It’s traditional. Then scrambled eggs with salmon.’

  You couldn’t blame Christopher. She mixed the drinks. They sat with no clothes on by the window in the sunshine, cracking jokes, knowing there was going to be another crisis to get through somewhere just a bit further along from where they were, probably not very far. Believing they could do it. Live for the moment.

  The eggs arrived and he opened the door and collected them, no tip, still naked. She could picture his grin.

  But then he didn’t eat them. He drank the coffee in a gulp and started writing in his Moleskine notebook, making funny chewy expressions with his mouth. She got dressed and went out to take some pictures of fish in the Rialto market, leaving him to it. Quite probably he was writing about the mediocre risotto nero in the dump where they’d had their ‘big question’ row, and the eggs he’d only tasted and fiddled with. Making up a story with something silly like Lord Byron’s favourite hangover cure in it – which was hock and soda, but –

  ‘... of course you know that. Yeah, Thé Glacé, she knows everything about everything. Don’t you, TG, you little crème brûlée?’

  She thought about him as she took the photographs – his maddening combination of indifference and excess. She photographed a glistening pile of little cuttlefish sheaths with tentacled mouths. There were piles of bright-eyed sardines and anchovies, arranged facing the same way like a shoal. Once it would have been their pattern that attracted her – their design. Now it was their urgency.

  The flushed colour in a tray of red mullet was almost hectic; it seemed to be coming from inside, under pressure. A shouting man dumped a sack of black hairy mussels into a bin in front of her, splashing her camera with seawater. Later she would see his wet bare arms reaching into her picture as if to embrace her.

  She forgot about Christopher and went on taking pictures. She ate a paper plate of fritto misto with a glass of rather turpentiney white wine because she was hungry, which meant quite a lot of time had passed since breakfast.

  Then she saw Christopher’s head in his faded red baseball cap bobbing above the crowd. He was periscoping around, looking for her. That unmistakable little jolt in her groin, a kind of thickening in her throat.

  She’d been doing something different, taking the photographs, and along with the sexy feeling when she saw Christopher came another ping of excitement, maybe related, maybe not.

  He saw her and pushed through the crowd to where she was standing by the fritto booth. Looking a bit sulky, he reached across and took a helping of the fries. As usual, he waited until they were in his mouth before talking to her.

  ‘Having fun, are we?’

  ‘As a matter of fact.’

  He took a sip of her wine and grimaced. ‘How can you drink that shit?’

  But next he was grinning again, of course, his lips oily from her snack. His cap was perched on top of those thick curls. They stuck out over his ears. When she didn’t play he looked alarmed. She could tell that he was about to apologise again.

  She took his picture – looking indecisive, with a kind of default grin, needing a shave, his eyes a bit watery. His mouth had begun to form a word, ‘sorry’ probably, but the photograph stopped it before he could speak, freezing his lips on a pout.

  Behind him was a blurry crowd of people in the market, glimpses of coloured fruit and vegetables, splashes of sunlight. The noisy place seemed to have gone quiet, its bustle motionless like a sudden, surprising thought.

  It was obvious. The photograph of Christopher marked the moment when she asked herself her own ‘big question’. The answer was in the photographs she took at the market, or the way she took them. That had something to do with Christopher, his effect on her, how she looked at things, something instinctive. He freed it up.

  But then, as well, it didn’t. It also didn’t have anything to do with him at all.

  ‘You’ve gone off somewhere. What are you thinking about?’

  ‘Sensation,’ she replied. He wasn’t going to understand that and she wasn’t going to help him. She could see that he was casting about for a gambit.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ she said, finishing the wine he hadn’t liked very much.

  ‘Sensational.’ He was trying very hard, but she had him worried. ‘That I understand, my little icecream.’ He had that beseechy expression, he got it when she was being cool.

  There were some places it was better not to go, and others you couldn’t stay away from, but at least you could keep the curtains drawn.

  Six months out of rehab again when she and Christopher first met at Bob’s office, and late autumn in London was just utter shit, the beery yobs on the Underground made her flesh creep and so did the nasty muddy banks along the river by Wandsworth Park when the tide was out, filthy old barges, slime, beer cans. Dishevelled, malignant rooks being bored on the tidal mud-flats or croaking in the dreary trees, panicky ducks sticking their heads into the dirty Thames.

  She walked and walked. What else was there to do but get high? Stupid old dogs shitting all over the grass, rich young Putney bitches running around and around in expensive gym shoes.

  She was having a coffee in the High Street and looking out the window when she saw a happy young woman hurrying past with a huge wobbling cluster of coloured helium balloons advertising a Play Centre. She shocked even herself with the loud sobs that made her run into the street and hide around the corner, pulling her parka hood over her face.

  What was she supposed to do? The thought of food revolted her and, as Bob said, she was taking pictures of it that looked about as appetising as wiring diagrams.

  Taking pictures of people was even worse. She hated all of them. Their confidence and grooming, how they treated her like some kind of employee. Which she was.

  If she stopped taking her Prozac she hated them and herself even more and longed for a decent taste. And if she took the wretched stuff she couldn’t care less what the photographs looked like.

  Of course, she could always trust dear old Bob to have a brilliant idea. Waving a clipping from the Sunday Times colour supplement at her. So what about a feature on those YBA artists showing at the Royal Academy? The Sensation exhibition? Didn’t she go to art school with some of them? Their favourite restaurants maybe? Weren’t they all filthy rich already?

  Oh, right, she told Bob. That was going to make her feel ever so much better. The tragic one who ended up photographing the table settings at Peter Gordon’s hot new Sugar Club in Notting Hill. Where, as it so happens, she saw Marcus Harvey being lavish with the collector Charles Saatchi and a bunch of old art school mates from Goldsmith
s. Her not included. She used to party with Marcus, not long before she graduated, about ten years ago. Now, he didn’t recognise her. Or pretended he didn’t.

  But she went along to the exhibition. The work everyone was making a fuss about, aside from Damien’s pickled shark and Tracey Emin’s fuck tent, was Marcus Harvey’s portrait of Myra Hindley. The ‘child killer’. There she was, her mugshot reproduced using hundreds of childrens’ hand-prints, blonde and beautifully groomed under the weird helmet-like hairdo, high cheek-bones, that elegant, slightly smiling mouth, those candid eyes.

  It was like looking into some kind of ghastly mirror.

  No, she told Bob. She knew she hadn’t made it. She was photographing the food not ordering it. But she wasn’t going to rub her own face in the fact. Forget it. Not a chance.

  ‘Well, we have to do something to buck you up.’ Then, good old Bob, she saw him have another thought. The happy lightbulb went on behind his serious editor expression.

  Christopher Hare. Christopher who?

  By then it was nearly spring. Everyone seemed to be noticing that. There was a new season’s edition to put together in time for summer. Bob had that last chance look. Hers, not the magazine’s. The magazine was going through the roof.

  But when she looked down into the viewfinder of her Rollei something heavy in the front of her skull slid forward and made her feel sick. When she looked straight ahead into the Nikon she either hesitated and shot, knowing she’d missed the moment, or she shot without thinking and knew the result would be dumb.

  She was doing product-placement interiors and settings with Garnier Thiebaut table linens. Yet another authentic fucking vinegar crock with a spigot. A wine rack you can customise for that handy space under the stairs in Mayfair. Chromed meat hooks to hang your pots off and de Buyer pots to hang off them. Easter celebration ideas. Outdoor Entertaining, and chasing away the winter blahs.