by Will Storr
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I have to make this sauce.”
She sighed, deeply, as she carefully lifted the last of the mango sticks with the blade of her knife and pushed them into the tub. “Fuck’s sake,” she said. “There’s no paprika. And definitely no Worcester sauce.”
“You’re joking,” I said, accidentally back to normal speaking volume. Kathryn winced.
“I’ve got to go to the shop. If Patrick asks, could you tell him I’m still upstairs?”
She closed her eyes and, shaking her head, said: “Be quick.”
10
I already knew it, as I sprinted out of Stephen Mews, my chef’s clogs slipping on the cobbles: I didn’t have enough money. I had dropped 15p into my pocket that morning – enough for a sausage roll in the event that lunch wasn’t provided. And yet to prepare the sauce I’d created, I’d need extra ingredients that would cost me… one pound? Two?
Even as I ran past the newsagent’s on Charlotte Street, I knew what I was going to do. I ran into a branch of Mace and hunted out the paprika and the Worcester sauce. The decision to do what I did next had arrived, predetermined, the moment Kathryn told me there was none in the kitchen. Once it came, I had a vague sensation of ordering myself not to think about it any more, just to go into automatic, to keep any conscious processing to an absolute minimum, lest it trigger doubt or fear or conscience. I hid at the end of an aisle, holding the ingredients down by my side. Checking in the large security mirrors that noone was watching, I slipped them into my pocket. It was easier than I had imagined. I was almost shocked, as I exited the shop, that nothing happened. The world didn’t jump; sirens didn’t flash; my reflection didn’t change.
Kathryn was preparing the staff lunch when I arrived back in the kitchen. I fired up the burner next to her, fried off some shallots and crushed garlic, added beef stock and port, brought it to a simmer, reduced the heat and stirred in four tablespoons of tomato purée, some Worcester sauce, ground fennel, paprika and began to reduce it down. Soon, it began to release its sweet, rich and aniseed aroma.
Kathryn and I didn’t speak as we worked. I had just started to peel and chop the potatoes for the mash, when I heard her whisper, “No!”
I paused with my knife and frowned in her direction. “Fuck, Killian. You need to boil the potatoes with the skins on and peel them afterwards. Otherwise they’ll take on too much water and won’t absorb enough butter. Ambrose – if you give him watery mash, you might as well start making enquiries at Garfunkel’s right now.”
“Hello?”
It was Patrick. A flutter of alarm moved through Kathryn’s face and body.
“Sorry, Chef,” she said.
He walked towards us with a steaming ladle.
“We’ve got time to stand around and gossip, have we?”
“Non, Chef,” she said. “Sorry, Chef.”
Patrick mimicked Kathryn. “ ‘Non, chef’,” he said, pecking at her forehead with the hot ladle. He peered into the bubbling pot of basil and tomato sauce she was preparing for the staff lunch.
“Is this the family meal?”
“Oui, Chef,” she said.
He stood upright and called, “Brigade!”
Slowly, one chef after another stopped what they were doing and shuffled towards us. They hung back from the scene with their pale, greasy faces and their smiles of anticipatory pleasure. Patrick picked up a spoon, took some sauce, tipped a drop between his teeth and pressed it to the roof of his mouth. A crusted ball of matter hung from a net of little black hairs in his right nostril. It wobbled there, as he considered the flavour. Finally, he gobbed Kathryn’s sauce out through a curled tongue. It fell to the floor with a distant splat.
“Fucking disgusting.”
He passed the spoon to a lanky chef next to him. “Perhaps Chris can give us a second opinion.”
Chris spat his taste at Kathryn’s feet and shook his head with an exaggerated grimace. As every cook in the gang tasted and spat, the whites of Kathryn’s eyes shattered with red.
“You,” said Patrick, addressing me. “AIDS.” He nodded towards the pan. “Why don’t you have a go?”
I took the spoon, dipped it in the pot and tipped a few drops in my mouth, just as the others had. It was a roasted tomato and basil sauce, with some chicken stock reducing in it and, I thought, a small amount of honey. How could it not be delicious? I glanced over the faces of the cooks who were watching me, impatient for my verdict. In their pallor and in their burns and scabs and cuts I could sense their dedication; their talent. They were the men of King. Max’s men. They were here. With me. Waiting for me to join them.
Kathryn moved her gaze from the floor to my face. One of her cuffs had slipped down, unrolled. It was covering a part of her hand. She’d need to roll that back up, I thought. She’d need to sort that out, if she was going to cook any more today.
I met Patrick’s eyes and took a steadying breath.
“It’s fine,” I muttered. “It’s good.”
I swallowed dryly. Patrick blinked. Immediately, his attention shifted to the stitching on my whites that Dorothy had carefully completed at the weekend.
“What does that say?” he said.
“Killian, Chef,” I said. “My name.”
As he pushed his nose up to mine. I could smell his faecal coffee breath and the overwhelming damp salami stench of his skin.
“You,” he said, “do not have your name on your jacket. You’re just a fucking apprentice.”
He picked up a cleaver, pinched the blue cotton stitching between two nubby fingers and pulled it towards him. With a sawing motion, he sliced it off, the red tomato juice soaking from the blade into the white fabric. It dropped into a small foamy puddle on the floor.
“Max has a rule. You probably know it. Never sack an apprentice. It’s a bit of a shame that Max isn’t here this morning, isn’t it?”
He gave a leery sniff and rubbed the hanging matter from his nostril with the back of his hand.
“Go on, you little weirdo. Piss off. I don’t want to see you in this kitchen again.”
Every emotion and every sensation left me.
“Go on, then! Let’s have one last demonstration of your award-winning skills,” he said. “Show me how to fuck off in under thirty seconds.”
I turned slowly and walked down the room, past the rows of apprentices in their clogs and whites, past the empty stations where Kathryn and I had worked so briefly together and out towards the flat grey light of Stephen Mews with its pigeons and cobblestones and high walls, their stoic magnificence humbled by a hundred-year layer of dirt. The door closed behind me with an underwhelming clunk. I was gazing at it in shocked silence when it opened again with a rattle.
“Killian?” Kathryn looked smaller outside the kitchen; tender and hesitant and pale. “I just wanted – thank you.” She’d sorted her sleeve out now. She’d rolled it back up. Ready to carry on cooking for Max. Ready for the rest of her life. “I have to get back in,” she said. “But… you know. Thanks.”
She’d be fine now, with her sleeves all rolled up properly. She’d be fine going back in there and cooking with Max Mann. A cold wind blew through the hole in my tunic.
“I have to go back to Tonbridge,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. I’m saying sorry.”
“I never even got to meet him.” I heard myself whimper. She put her hand out to touch my arm and I threw it back.
“Don’t touch me,” I said.
Her elbow hit the door. It clattered angrily with the impact.
“Fucking twat,” she replied. And without pausing to look back, she disappeared into the kitchen.
11
I allowed myself to be pulled by the current of the crowd as it drained towards Charing Cross Station. As I drifted past the Hippodrome and the eastern fringe of Chinatown, I made the decision to leave it as long as possible before telling anyone of my dismissal. I imagined standing in front of everyone, absorbing
their reactions: my aunt’s sadness, my teacher’s disappointment, my mother’s sour amusement. And then what? Back to Tonbridge, back to college, back to a life of routine smallness.
Arriving at Bridgewater Close, I walked past the near-identical buildings, past the Houses’ place with their large extension, and turned into the path that ran up my front garden – an unremarkable rectangle bordered with pretty flowers and shrubs that rang, somehow, with an almighty sense of emptiness. My door key slipped into place with its familiar run of clicks and bumps, I walked through to the kitchen and, for the first time in my life, suddenly understood father.
There it was, right in front of me: defeat in the form of a forty-seven-year-old margarine factory worker. He was looking down in concentrated silence at the salad cream sandwich he was preparing, wearing a tight blue V-neck jumper with a Bell’s whisky logo above the heart. There were grease-gummed crumbs of dandruff glued into the hem of the V and the skin between it and where his hair started was a dull waxen yellow. Everything was forever drawn down with my father – his mouth, his chin, his shoulders, even his flat feet gave the impression that the gravity of life was too much for his narrow bones. I stood there looking at him with the surreal sensation that my emotional self had somehow leaped from my physical body and decided to spread salad cream on some bread with the back of a teaspoon.
From where I was standing, I could hear the television in the lounge next door.
“Been at college?” said Dad, his Irish accent hardly having weakened at all in spite of his thirty-one years in Kent.
“Work experience today,” I said. “In the best restaurant in the world.”
“That’s nice.”
He squinted as he worked the unctuous spread into the very corners of his Mighty White.
“Make us a sandwich, Killian,” came a shout from the lounge. “Hellmann’s and turkey.”
“Okay, Mum.”
I prepared it carefully, with the halved cherry tomatoes and the pile of salt and vinegar crisps on the side, just as she liked it, and took it to the lounge, on the way quickly rearranging the telephone receiver into a position where it wouldn’t ring – I didn’t want any awkward calls from college asking what had happened. Mum hadn’t turned the light on, and was sitting in her armchair in the dark awaiting the beginning of Grange Hill.
I laid the plate on the arm of her chair and, without looking at me, she said, “You’re not in London on Saturday night are you? I told Felicity you’d baby-sit.”
“I was going to visit Aunt Dorothy on Saturday,” I said.
“That’s fine, then. Visiting’s five to six,” she said. “You’ll be back by seven o’clock.”
“Visiting?”
She tutted and rolled her eyes.
“Bloody hell, Killian – hospital. Visiting’s over by six. You’ll be at Felicity’s for seven, easily.”
The words she was saying bumped around in my head, trying to make sense of each other. As they did – slowly – my mother became visibly delighted. She had that aggressively teasing look; the expression that overtook her when the world proved, yet again, to be crueller and much funnier than she had given it credit for.
“Didn’t anyone tell you? She had a fall, a couple of days ago. She’s broken her hip.”
She was beaming.
“Look at you!” she laughed. “Oh, what a picture!” She sighed contentedly, tutted and went back to the screen. “You and that bloody woman.”
“How is she?” I asked.
She shuffled her bony legs, irritably.
“She’ll be fine.” A pause. A grip in her blood. “She’s ninety-two, for God’s sake! She should’ve been put into a home years ago. The stairs in that cottage. Let’s be honest, she had it bloody coming.”
12
I ran to the station and took the next train to Tunbridge Wells. When it pulled in, ten minutes later, I tore across the lonely triangle of common, under the imperious glare of the Victorian hotels that lined Mount Ephraim like so many bankrupt yet still-haughty duchesses, and then paced, breathless, along London Road towards the Kent and Sussex Hospital.
My day looked to be getting even worse when the receptionist informed me, with a kind smile, that I was two minutes late for visiting. I put my hands on the counter and decided to have a try at pleading.
“Please,” I said. “I’ve only just found out what’s happened to her.”
The receptionist thought for a second.
“I don’t know. No harm in seeing,” he said, quietly. He adjusted the telephone with the tips of two fingers so it was in perfect symmetry with his desk-pad, before dialling a four-digit number and having a short conversation, the receiver shielded by a tightly cupped hand.
“Thought so,” he said, placing the phone softly on its cradle. “Your aunt’s on Bev Cowan’s ward. Bev’s one of the nice ones. She said you can go up as long as you’re quiet.”
It took me another ten minutes to find Ward 10; running through high corridors and up and down empty stairs that twisted around lift-shafts, only to find myself back where I’d started. When I eventually found the place, I entered silently.
The ward’s brick walls were painted a puce white. Pipes ran in all directions. Tall windows, their glass murky with the dirt of a thousand rain storms, looked out onto the black bones of winter trees and a sky erased by cloud. A feeling of déjà vu lowered itself darkly into the room. Rows and rows of strangers lay in steel beds, in all the mess of their vulnerability. I tried not to look. I was aware, though, of clear tubes up noses and ancient lips quivering like a young bird’s and a man with what looked to be some sort of yellow discharge or ointment around his ears.
“You all right?”
The nurse appeared from behind a screen holding her hands in front of her, her fingers stretched out as if they were wet.
“Miss Moran,” I said, and was about to explain that I had permission to be there when she interrupted me. “Down at the end. She’s a little sleepy. Painkillers. She’s had quite a nasty break.”
“It’ll mend okay, though?” I asked.
She moved her head from side to side, unsurely.
“Well, the doctor says it either needs pinning or replacing and she’s very old. It’s very invasive, that kind of operation. If you ask me, though, she’ll be fine. She’s been complaining about the food, and that’s a good sign. It was spag bol last night and she suggested that we might want to try cooking the spaghetti for ten minutes less. She was very nice about it. Has she got much family?”
“Never married,” I said, and I was about to add, “She never had much of a personal life,” but a memory stopped me: my mother saying with an almost proud sneer, “Don’t let Dorothy fool you. She might look like a sweet old dear, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have secrets.”
“Well, try not to be too long with her,” said the nurse. She hurried away, presumably to wash her arms. I watched as she disappeared, long before the echo of her footsteps.
The lights appeared dimmed. It was that gloomy, early-dusk time, when there’s not yet enough darkness for the bulbs to shine against. I found Dorothy in the bed at the end of the room, the glow from a green fire escape sign not doing her complexion any favours. It was only later that I considered it notable that she wasn’t doing anything when I saw her. She wasn’t reading one of her large-print Jeffrey Archer books, she wasn’t doing a crossword, she wasn’t sleeping, she wasn’t listening to the radio or one of her cassettes. She was just lying there, gazing out at the ward.
I sat on the chair beside her bed and waited for her eyes to connect and for her smile, but it took a long time for her life to find her body; as if the levers and dials were some distance away and she had to struggle to get there.
“Hello, Kill,” she said, at last. “What a lovely surprise. You really shouldn’t have come, you know.”
I was taken by how little space her legs took up under the sheets. And her face: it looked different – diminished in a way that I could
n’t quite decipher. It somehow wasn’t the explosion of meaning a healthy face is. Her arms were laid gently upon herself, one frail hand on top of the other, a tissue scrunched lightly between two fingers. Her left arm, I noticed, appeared to be shaking.
“It was my own silly fault, Kill,” she said. “My doctor, Dr Sanjeev, he always says I shouldn’t be using the stairs in the cottage. He’s been telling me for years and I’ve not listened. You know me, Kill, I just can’t bear to leave that bedroom. It’s the sun in the morning. It’s so lovely.” She looked down towards her hands, but without her glasses I wasn’t sure she could actually see that far. “The doctor here, he’s not so nice. A Dr Graham, or something. Says I’ll have to walk with an aid of some sort. No more stairs for me. It’s my own silly fault. But no matter. I’m just happy to see you.” She pulled her chin back and rallied a little, relieved to be pushing the attention away from herself. “So, come on! Tell me how it went at King. They let you out early, then? Not on my account, I hope.”
I moved my chair forward in an attempt to squeeze as much hospital out of it as possible.
“I’m just on lunch service in my first week,” I lied. “They like to start apprentices off slowly.”
“Well,” she said, with a satisfied nod, “they sound like very nice people.”
“They are,” I said.
The lift of her smile finally became evident in the thick creases around her eyes.
“Here, do you think they’ll keep you on once the apprenticeship is over?”
“I reckon,” I said. “Guess what? I’ve won the Young Saucier of the Year award. They told me today.”
And that’s when she came fully alive; became my wonderful great-aunt Dorothy. She rolled her eyes in the mock-crazy fashion she always used to and opened her mouth in a comic exaggeration of awe.
“Oh marvellous, Kill,” she said. “Oh, that’s bloody marvellous, that really is. Well done you. And did they like your outfit?”
“They were all very jealous.”
She studied me closely. Her pencilled-on eyebrows took a small dive.
