Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone

by Will Storr

  “Goodbye!” he said.

  I moved across the room and reached for the handle of his door. Just as my fingers made contact, Mayle spoke again.

  “Oh, er – Killian?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Don’t you want to know where you’ll be apprenticing?”

  I turned.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, you’ll be working your stage up in London.”

  “London?”

  “Yes, you will. London.”

  London. I wondered where. A bank, maybe. A train station café. A cinema, a theatre, an opera house.

  “Okay. Great. London. Thank you, sir.”

  I turned, once more, to leave.

  “At… um… a place called… ”

  I looked around again. Mayle made a show of carefully examining a sheet of paper on his desk.

  “Ah, that’s it. You’ll be working at… ”

  He met my eyes and grinned.

  “King.”

  5

  London has a grey-blue tinge to it in the hour after dawn. That’s what I remember most about my walk, on that first morning, to the restaurant – the grey-blue tinge as I hurried from Charing Cross Station and how it seemed exactly right, somehow. It was the colour of the empty streets; the colour of frozen air; the colour of the thinness of the world as it is at six a.m. before it becomes bloated by life. I wasn’t exactly sure how to find the right place. All I knew was that it was somewhere in the tall maze of streets that runs east of Tottenham Court Road. Back then, it was all discount sex shops, broken pubs and nameless outlets with chipboard doors that sold knock-off T-shirts and posters. An unlikely place to find the chicest eating establishment in the country, I thought, naively, as I strode past an open entranceway, behind which was a staircase and a paper notice that announced the presence of a “model” on the first floor. It was a lesson I’d learn soon enough – filth is inherent to glamour; sin its silent promise.

  It was the first time that I’d been to London without Aunt Dorothy, and the city seemed dirty and overwhelming without her. I remember its gigantic indifference, as if the huge stone buildings were turning their backs on me as I walked between them. I had in my back pocket the piece of paper Mr Mayle had passed me in his office. There was no need to look at it, as it contained only scant information: the address, 32 Gresse Street, and the time I was expected – seven a.m.

  King was almost exactly as I’d imagined, except for the fact it was next to a pub called the Bricklayers Arms and that it smelled. The dustmen hadn’t yet done their rounds, and the restaurant was wearing this rotten beard of rubbish bags. It didn’t bother me in the slightest. Neither did it matter that I was nearly an hour early. I was content just to stand on the lowest of the five steps that Max Mann and his customers walked up every day and to breathe the same air.

  I peered, open-mouthed, through the glass door. As my eyes became used to the light, I could just make out the famous black walls decorated with mirrors, the matching black tablecloths and the orchid centrepieces. I stayed like that for at least five minutes, drinking in all the details, before studying the incredible menu that was displayed in a small illuminated case next to the door: mousseline of quail livers flavoured with port and cognac and served with a trio of fruit jellies; guinea-fowl in a caramel glaze with fresh mangoes; champagne-poached sweetbreads; golden mousse of foie gras topped with diced foie gras and served with supreme of pigeon in a sauce of meat juices with halves of grape…

  The previous weekend, Aunt Dorothy had given me a set of packet-fresh chef’s whites. She’d even gone to the trouble of stitching my name into the breast in neat blue cotton. I reached into my little backpack and found the toque, which I placed on my head. I looked at my reflection in the small gold plaque on which the name of the restaurant had been engraved in luxurious script. I looked warped and indistinct, my outline fuzzy, my face an empty oval.

  On the pavement nearby, one of the bin liners had been left untied. I picked yesterday’s edition of The Times out of it and flipped through its damp pages. Scargill and Sellafield and Star Wars and Thatcher enthusiastic about chemical weapons against the Soviets and Israeli jets battering Palestine and one million pounds being spent on fences at Greenham Common. The news was the same as all the other days. None of it held the importance of what was about to happen for me, right here, at 32 Gresse Street.

  I sat down on the steps that led to the door. I waited. I spat on my finger and rubbed off a smudge that had appeared on my tunic. A strange temptation began to crawl over me. I found myself going over to one of the bin liners and tearing a small hole in it. A couple of shallot ends and asparagus off-cuts poked out. I took a green, woody stem and rolled it between my fingers. I had this idea, this compulsion, to put it in my mouth and chew down on it – my saliva mixing with this King ingredient, this incredible artefact – it becoming part of me and me part of it.

  Just as my teeth were pressing into it, the door opened. I turned to see a chef in his mid-twenties with a black moustache and full, cracked lips, looking at me with all the bewildered fascination I probably deserved. I palmed the stem and dropped my hand down by my side.

  “I’m Killian, Chef,” I said quietly. “Apprentice. First day.”

  His expression sagged into one of damp contempt.

  “Fuck’s sake,” he said. “Staff entrance is round the back. Stephen Mews.”

  With a tilt of his head, he motioned to the alleyway that ran down the side of the restaurant. I thanked the man and ran.

  Stephen Mews was a dingy and greasily cobble stoned dead end, surrounded by unpainted four-storey walls. There was an open double fire door, which was framed by a grubby clamour of plastic crates filled with empty bottles of Moët, Perrier and Coca-Cola, a confetti of discarded ring-pulls flattened into the ground around them. A squall of pigeons, perched in the window frames high above me, looked on as I wished myself luck and walked into the golden rectangle of light.

  The kitchen was smaller than I was expecting, and fuller. There were twelve chefs, most of whom were busy checking the contents of the morning deliveries. I gawped at the logos and labels on the packages that were stacked on the clean steel surfaces. They were the most thrilling ingredients from all over Europe. There was Valhrona Grand Cru de Terroir chocolate, Xeres vinegar, Beluga caviar, pata negra ham from Iberian pigs who’d been fed purely on acorns, cheese supplied by the lauded Philippe Olivier – even the salt had been imported from the West coast of Sicily. And then, being rushed past me on a large red trolley, I saw something curious. Boxes and boxes and boxes of fresh, delicious, world-renowned Echire butter.

  Unloading all of this were the chefs themselves: serious men with careful eyes and conjurers’ fingers, awesome in their black clogs and robeish whites. Gods. Dogs.

  I stepped deeper into the room and paused to take in the moment. This was it: his world; his kingdom. This was where Chef Max Mann himself worked every day and made his reputation. These were his burners and strainers and sinks and pans and produce.

  Directly to the right of the door were four other young apprentices, all lined up along the cold pass, counting out bunches of basil, chervil, parsley and rosemary, trays of mangoes and kiwis and punnets of raspberries, then ticking off the quantities against delivery notes. Their necks were bent at precisely the same angle, their arms and fingers moving in strange synchronicity. I was surprised to find this sight the most beautiful thing of all, even more than the smells and the deliveries of impeccably sourced ingredients. They formed a machine, bent into shape by the will of the kitchen, but they were also something better than that. Because nothing made from cogs or circuit boards, no matter how advanced, could achieve what even those trainees could. It was just as Mayle had once told the class: perfection is out of reach of the automatic. The secret ingredient of unforgettable food is humanity.

  The Gentleman Chef wasn’t in the kitchen that morning. Perhaps, I thought, he’d arrive closer to lunch service. The ch
ef de cuisine appeared to be a man in his thirties, with red hair and acne on his cheeks like gouges made by a peeler. He was busy with something, up amongst the meat, fish and sauce stations where, during service, the chefs would toil at perfection over searing flames, before sending their food to Max Mann at the pass. As I approached him, it registered for the first time how quiet everyone was. I had expected shouts, banter and laughter – those big noises of camaraderie that act as buoyancy aids for packs of men under pressure. But nobody spoke. Nobody even looked at me. “Excuse me? Chef?” I said.

  He was leaning over a stove, writing something on a yellow clipboard.

  “That’s me,” he said.

  He had nearly-blond eyelashes and the grease in the skin on either side of his nose reflected the light from the ceiling. His chin was a pebble of shininess that marked the base of his head, and it looked as if someone had started there and, with the heel of their hand, pushed upwards. His scarlet ears stuck out of the side of his skull like babies’ fists. As I’d observe him over the course of the coming day, I’d be constantly aware of his tongue. It was forever making itself known, whether it was wetting his lower lip or appearing as an arched pillow of slimy muscle as he laughed or coughed. Whenever I stood close to him, I’d get a powerful smell of salami.

  Right now, though, my attention was fixed on his arms which were covered in a galaxy of burns, scabs and scars.

  “I’m…”

  “Late,” he said, pushing his biro behind a shrivelled ear. “Fucking hell, pal, I can tell your tenure’s going to be brief. What’s that on your head?” He grabbed my toque. “Good God. Take the hat off and he’s even uglier.”

  He looked over at the nearby chefs, clapped twice and said, “All right, chaps, the AIDS delivery’s arrived.”

  I looked at him; at his eyes and mouth, as he raised his colleagues in a giggle. Those eyes had seen Max Mann. That mouth had spoken to him.

  “All right, first job of the morning. Fetch me a bucket of steam.”

  “Where–”

  But by then he had turned around, his great hunched back bending towards me as he leaned over the steel pass. I walked past two chefs who were unloading fish that had just been wheeled in, in an unsteady tower of ice-filled polystyrene crates, and began searching for a bucket. I wondered what it was for; what delicate Nouvelle technique I was about to learn. I knew Max Mann preferred to season his food with herbs rather than salt. The steam, I guessed, would be used to very gently blanch some rare and fragile leaf.

  I looked in the wash-station at the back of the kitchen, inside the garde manger where the vegetables were stored, in the cloakroom with its broken lockers and its wooden clog-shelves that were now filled with derelict trainers, inside all the cabinets, underneath all the cabinets. I opened a door beneath a sink and pushed my head in.

  I would not ask for help, I decided. Self-sufficient and reliable, like when I was cleaning for Mum. That’s what I needed to be. A toiler. A machine.

  “Where’s my bloody bucket?” came a shout.

  There was an empty space at the end of the cold pass, next to the door that led to Stephen Mews. Beside it, a young woman cut celery into elegant spears with perfect mechanical rhythm.

  “Is this my station?” I asked her.

  She nodded quickly, unsmiling, concentrating on her work. But as I was walking off, she whispered, “Bucket of steam?”

  I stopped and marvelled, momentarily, at her eyes and wrists and hands which worked together, de-stringing, spreading and cutting perfectly identical fingers from these things that started off as ugly, misshapen limbs. She had freckles on her fingers and a small pink lip-shaped burn on her right wrist, its size and position suggesting it had been inflicted by a hot oven shelf. Up the back of her neck, spilling out of her collar, was a pale-red birthmark.

  “Are you actually this stupid?” she whispered. “Or are you just pretending?”

  “…”

  “A bucket. With steam in it,” she continued. “A bucket of steam.” she said, again, looking at me blankly. “It’s a wind-up. Obviously.”

  “But what should I do?”

  She had brown hair, tied in a bun, unusually long eyelashes and freckles across her face like a fine spray of milky chocolate.

  “The way I see it, you have three choices,” she said. “Option one, get a bucket from over in pastry, hold it over some boiling water and see how long it takes Patrick to stop you scalding your fingers.”

  “Is Patrick–”

  “The one that smells of salami?” She nodded. “Option two, save him a job and just walk out of that door because, let’s face it, you’ll probably not last the day anyway. Option three, kill Patrick.”

  “But… ”

  “I have a knife… ” she offered.

  I looked at the top of the kitchen in disbelief. When I turned back, the girl had already gone back to her chopping.

  “And, by the way – stop bloody talking,” she whispered. “We’re not supposed to be talking.”

  6

  The bucket was cheap red plastic and I held it upside down above a stock pot filled with water. It was boiling hard, its bubbles rising in an insistent panic. Patrick turned leerily towards me with his hands on his hips, the scars on his ruined arms like gang tattoos.

  As my fingers began to burn, I watched him catching the eye of all the other men at the grill, sauté and sauce stations. One by one, they stopped lifting, counting and chopping and began to snigger, each of them checking with Patrick every few moments: checking he knew they were joining in; that they were a part of the gang; that they were all devoted bricks in the wall that was about to collapse on me. Eventually, he approached in a slow, slouching shuffle. He leaned an elbow on the side of the stove.

  “Are you a cook?” he said. “Or a cock?”

  I felt the wet burn driving deeper into the skin of my fingers and over the backs of my hands. I looked Patrick in the eye.

  “A cook, Chef,” I said.

  He spoke louder this time, and slower, his neck bending towards me like a chicken examining a strange new thing. His blunt, acned head took on an expression of exaggerated confusion.

  “But you don’t look like a cook,” he said. He came closer and swiped some sweat off my forehead with an extended finger. “And you are leaking piss.” The laughter of the brigade burst over me. “So what are you?”

  “A cook, Chef,” I said.

  My hands began to shake with the pain, my fingers becoming redder, my nails feeling as if they were swelling so much that they might pop off. I looked at Patrick’s mouth. How much of Max’s food had passed through it? Had he eaten the entire menu? It was amazing to think that I was only a couple of feet away from a throat that had swallowed every dish prepared at King. Every dish!

  In my hands there was a pure kind of white-blinding agony. I didn’t move. As the seconds squeezed past, the smile slowly vanished from Patrick’s eyes.

  What was the last thing that mouth had said to Max Mann? How many words had it told him? Patrick’s face turned paler. I was vaguely aware that the brigade around me had fallen silent. I imagined myself licking his lips. Kissing them. Sucking the Max right out of them.

  Patrick shook his head and said, almost under his breath, “Fucking nutcase…”

  As he spoke, a fly landed on his upper lip. It was narrow; silvery grey, with rust-red eyes.

  “Urgh!” He swiped it away, spitting in disgust. It circled back, returning once more to his lip.

  “Argh!” In the confusion, someone took my arm, very softly, from behind. It was the apprentice who’d told me about the wind-up; the girl with the eyelashes and the chocolate freckles.

  “You’re on stock take in the walk-in,” she said, pulling me away.

  “Fucking hell,” said Patrick. There was a slight catch in his voice. “Here we go – weirdos of a feather, flocking together. That’s right, petal. Have fun with the cock. No doubt it’s the first one you’ve handled.” As he turned, he ch
untered, “Fucking dyke.”

  The huge, coffin-like freezer door slid open with a smooth crunk. We walked together into the grainy light.

  “You know what you’re here for, don’t you?” she said.

  “To cook.”

  “Oh dear,” she said. “Apprentices don’t get to go anywhere near the stoves, not unless they’re cooking for the staff. We do the grunt work. You do realise that? Everything possible is done by hand in a place like this. Chopping, peeling, squeezing – everything. Believe me, if they could find a fire-breathing boy to lie with a boiling stockpot on his face for ten hours, he’d be out there.” She gently kicked a large brown cardboard box with a delivery note on top of it. “Right, first job. There should be 188 bags of frozen peas in there. You need to count them out. When you’ve done that, do the veal bones, beef bones, rabbit carcasses. Then, stock rotation. Start with the sorbet.”

  There was an instant of silence that followed her last word, during which she could have left. But she paused unnecessarily. She watched as I pushed my throbbing fingers deep between the large sacks of peas and exhaled silently with the relief of it.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m Killian, by the way.”

  I felt as if she was studying me, for a moment; making some quiet judgement.

  “Kathryn.”

  The sleeves of her tunic were too long. She had had to fold them over themselves into large, pillowy cuffs. I imagined her having to do it every morning. Pushing her arms in and then neatly rolling up the material, slowly exposing her expert fingers and delicate wrists.

  “So who taught you how to cook, anyway?” she asked. “Josef Mengele?”

  “My aunt,” I said.

  “She was tough, was she? Your aunt? Some sort of torturer? You should probably think about looking after your hands a bit better than Aunty Pinochet taught you. There’s a chance you might need them.”

  The merciful numbness was now spreading towards my knuckles.

  “Oh, I see…” I began. “No, my aunt taught me to cook, but my mum – she’s the one who always taught me to sort of take the pain, if that’s what you mean.”