by Will Storr
“The same?” he said.
Patrick’s lips rose over his yellow teeth.
“What I mean is, with your background, with your dad and everything with Speedy Sam’s, well, it must have been hard for you to be taken seriously with all that, and you had to fight for it, and I have too, with my mum, you see, she never wanted me to be a chef, she wanted me to get a proper job–”
“You think we’re the same?” he said.
I stopped.
“And we’ve both won the Young Saucier.”
Nothing happened.
“I can cook,” I said. “I can cook really well.”
“He thinks he’s an undiscovered genius,” said Patrick. “He thinks he’s doing us a favour.”
They exchanged a look.
“Not a genius,” I said. “But, I come from… my ancestors… I should tell you about my great-aunt Dorothy, in fact, that’s what I wanted to ask you. I was just wondering if I might be able come in in the afternoon tomorrow. It’s my aunt’s funeral in the morning – her cremation – and my aunt – she’s the one who taught me to cook so – ”
“Stop,” he said, softly. He held his hand up, and his smile took on a form that I’d never seen on the television.
“If Le Patron has really given you another chance, then so be it,” he said. “Bon. I sense that Patrick and I will have a bit of fun, training you up.”
“Thank you, Chef,” I said.
Patrick snorted lightly.
“You’re very welcome,” he said. “But allow me to offer a little advice before it all begins. The trick of being a successful apprentice is to be unflappable, exactingly precise, consistent, hard-working and to never, ever make a mistake. And do you know what the catch is?”
“No, Chef.”
“Non. You say ‘non, Chef’.”
“Non, Chef.”
“The catch is, there is no trick.”
He looked me up and down.
“Bon,” he said, evidently pleased with his little speech. When he turned his back to walk away, I thought I heard Patrick say, “Let the games begin…”
18
I’d never known noise could have an effect like that; I was actually breathless. There was chopping, boiling, scraping, searing, doors slamming, crates dropping, clogs hammering, pots clattering, washing-up splashing and thudding and more and more and more chopping – a thousand blades hammering on a thousand surfaces. And then there were the voices: instructions, blunted syllables thrown like rabbit-punches and the constant calling of “chaud”. I knew that was French for hot, of course, but the chefs let out the warning cry no matter what they were carrying as they passed behind you – plates, pans, produce. Having no windows didn’t help – that feeling of being removed from time and the ordinary order of things. Nor did the continual heat and pressure, nor the smells.
By the time the lunch service was at full power, Max had been in the kitchen for two hours. He had begun the shift in the manner I would soon become accustomed to: emerging silently yet with vast resonance from the passageway at the top of the kitchen, glowing celestially in his starkly laundered whites. He would stand there for a moment, framed by the doorway, hands behind his back, before taking a deep sniff, as if he could detect, with his nose alone, everything that was happening before him.
The most senior staff would greet him respectfully with “Chef” and, if this was to be a good day, he would nod almost imperceptibly. Then came his tour, walking up and down the kitchen, peering over shoulders, picking up bits of produce and sending his inscrutable gaze deep into each piece.
Max’s dominance was such that the kitchen effectively became a part of him; his consciousness extending from his skull and crawling out to encompass the whole space. The power of his presence was so strong that even if you couldn’t see him you’d know when he was there.
We apprentices didn’t move unless we had to. Not an inch out of place. We’d run to the toilet, having held it past the point of pain. Although a simple pasta lunch was prepared for the full-time chefs, for the apprentices food was nibbled on the job. Kathryn quietly let me know that there was a camping shop in nearby Covent Garden where Danno, the washing-up man, would stock up on Kendal Mint Cake and make a small profit dishing it out to the rest of us on the quiet.
That morning, I decided that basil was the answer. I would use it to take my mind off what was happening in that dismal crematorium in Kent. In front of me was a dewy mountain of bunches, each one composed of fifty-odd stems fastened with a red elastic band. My job was to remove each leaf by resting the top of the stem against the pad of my forefinger and cutting through it with a firm push of the thumbnail. The good, large leaves were to be used in a dish – I hadn’t been told which and knew better than to ask – whilst the small and the bruised were to be turned into pesto.
I found myself rocking back and forth very slightly against the countertop. I was soothed in a small way by the knowledge that, despite everything, my parents were going to attend the short service at the Kent and Sussex Crematorium up at Benmall Hill Road. I thought back to the last time I had been there – when my grandmother died. I was about seven years old and I remembered feeling horrified at myself for not being more upset. My Nan was dead and I knew that the required emotion was devastation. But I felt nothing but a faraway calm when my mum yelped in distress as the coffin disappeared behind the curtain. And then that sensation of feeling utterly baffled by grown-ups: the sight of my mum and Uncle Paul sharing a joke in the car park at the very moment their mother’s body was burning. They were laughing about something under that terrifying black finger of smoke and I wondered, then, if we might all be monsters.
As I chopped, I felt an urge to run to the toilet and let the tears out, like some shameful act of defecation. But I hadn’t cried for almost a decade and I certainly wasn’t about to start today. I looked around for a hot spoon or anything that I could press onto my skin to shock me out of the hurt.
I jumped as Patrick moved in behind me, so close we were almost touching. He pulled at the plastic tub that contained the rejected basil leaves; the ones I’d decided were good only for being crushed for pesto.
“Good enough, good enough, good enough,” he said, stacking the leaves into a precarious little pile. “Do you have any idea how much basil’s costing us at the moment? Are you trying to bankrupt us?”
I couldn’t understand what he meant; couldn’t believe that some of the leaves he was rescuing were good enough for King. There was what appeared to be a small semi-circular slug-munch out of one of them and a dark, wet bruise on another.
“Non, Chef,” I said. “These I didn’t think were perfect…”
He was so near that I could smell his reply as it came out of his mouth, meaty, rotting and sour.
“If this happens again, I’m marching you down the TSB and you can draw out the cash to cover the wastage. Do you know there are kids dying in Ethiopia? There are millions of bloated little fuckers who would claw your fucking eyes out for a lovely bit of basil. Don’t waste it, you wasteful fucking racist.”
“Oui, Chef,” I said. “Sorry, Chef.”
He walked off and I began gathering the leaves back up. Then, he stopped, waited and walked towards me again.
“Are you a racist?”
“Non, Chef,” I said.
Shaking his head, he turned towards the grill station.
I dropped Patrick’s basil in the “keep” box and tried to concentrate hard on the difficult logic of this new selection criterion. Ten minutes later, I felt the presence of Max as he moved in beside me. I watched his perfect fingernails sifting through the leaves. I couldn’t believe it. He was helping me. He was helping me.
He tippedup the “keep” box and began to slowly, deliberately place all the leaves side-by-side on the steel surface.
“Tell me,” he said, eventually. “Which culinary school have you joined us from?” He had made four rows by now, each one ten leaves in length.
&nbs
p; “It’s not really a culinary school, Chef,” I said. “It’s a college. West Kent. In Tonbridge.”
He placed another leaf down.
“Your father. Employed?”
“Oui, Chef,” I said.
And another leaf down.
“Has he always been in work?”
And another.
“Oui, Chef.”
And another.
“Mother?”
And another.
“Oui, Chef. She’s a social worker. My dad works in a factory. Margarine.”
A pause.
“Money’s tight?”
“Sometimes, Chef.”
And another.
“I’m attempting to fathom your motives,” he said. “What I’m wondering is, is he jealous? Is that why he’s trying to sabotage my food? Perhaps he’s jealous of the people who can afford to eat here?”
My hands were shaking, the black-green juice from the herbs staining my nails.
“Non, Chef,” I said.
Silence again. He began straightening the leaves with his manicured fingers, so that all their stalks were at a perfect ninety degrees to the edge of my work surface.
“You know, you mustn’t envy successful people for the lives they’re able to lead. That’s the way nature works, whether you approve of it or not. Some people just happen to possess admirable qualities. Some are born bright, brave and resilient. Others are born stupid, useless and poor.” He paused. “As you well know. We all get what we deserve in life. It’s no accident that the wealthy are the wealthy and the poor are the poor, no matter how much you or I may wish it otherwise.”
I watched him pick up a damaged leaf – the one from earlier, with the slug munch in it – and put in the “reject” tub, where it had been in the first place, before Patrick had intervened. He lowered his voice to a menacing hiss.
“You are going to make my basil, grape and sweetbread salad look and taste disgusting,” he said. He leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “You’re going to make my food taste like filthy, dirty, cremated old women. Is that what you want?”
“Non, Chef,” I said.
He left. When he reached the pass, I heard Patrick let out a single laugh, like an auditory punch. Fifteen minutes after that, the chef de cuisine was back again. He tipped over my “reject” tub and picked out a leaf.
“The nasty little racist, I don’t believe it: he’s still trying to fucking bankrupt us.”
And so it went. On and on and on. First Max then Patrick, then Max again. And as the kitchen worked harder and harder around me, as everyone else moved from job to job to job, they had me sorting and resorting basil, their threats and abuse becoming more pungent with every round.
Four hours into it, Max walked up to me and stood there, staring coldly as the silence slipped out of his mouth and wrapped around my throat. He slammed his fist, first into one pot and then into the other. I jumped both times, the noise so loud it cracked right through the racket that permeated the room. He stared some more, his thin lips lightly quivering with all the rage. It was then that I realised why Kathryn wore such a curious smile when she’d agreed with me that he never shouts. He didn’t need to. Max Mann was an expert with silence. He used it like a master torturer, to create squirming, sweating, groaning discomfort; to generate the unique agony of the mind turned against itself: all the insecurities and monsters contained within it suddenly animated and growing with every empty second that passes. I felt like taking up the paring knife and drawing it across my arm, just to prove to him that I could take it. Behind him, Patrick’s face was that of a six-year-old watching the climax of a magnificent firework display.
“If you don’t get this right the next time,” he said, “I will have you in the yard, polishing the cobblestones all night and back in here to start again first thing in the morning. Do you hear me?”
“Oui, Chef.”
I turned and picked up the leaves which, by now, I knew intimately. I felt dizzy as I worked; faint. Speckles of yellow and red and blue flashed up before my eyes. I hadn’t eaten in eight hours and hadn’t drunk any water in three and the noise was like a waterfall of concrete blocks. I wanted to go home. I wanted my aunty.
My eyes darted to the water-filled pot in front of me in which there was a collection of knives. An idea presented itself to me. I could do it, too. I’d done it before, in times of far less distress than this. I had never seen it as “self-harm” – as an act of weakness. Rather, I’d got the idea during an RE lesson in which we were taught about a Catholic priest called Father Jean Vianney who used to fortify himself against temptation by wearing a belt of spikes and whipping himself with a metal scourge. My teacher, Sister Maria, proudly told us that Vianney’s housekeeper would have to take a step ladder and mop the walls every single morning as they were splattered high with fresh spurts of blood. He was the strongest man I’d ever heard of. How could I not be impressed?
Nobody was looking. Nobody would notice. I picked out a paring knife and laid it casually on my chopping board. I pretended to trim a few stalks with it. Then, holding the tip of the blade between thumb and forefinger, swiped it into my arm. I felt my skin part and the sting as the tip touched into the flesh beneath it. Pulling my sleeve back over the cut, I dropped the knife back into the pot.
Half an hour later, Patrick came up with a fresh stock of basil and asked Kathryn to pick and sort it.
“Pathetic,” he said to me as Kathryn started working through the new leaves, quickly and surely. “First day, easiest job, and you’ve set the whole kitchen back. The worst apprentice I’ve seen in five years, easily.”
I looked at the pile of sorry herbs on the chopping board in front of me.
“What should I do next, Chef?” I asked.
“Sort your fucking leaves! Sort them and sort them again until you’ve worked out how to do it, you ugly fucking racist.”
“Oui, Chef,” I said.
He strode back towards Max at the pass, his words disappearing into the noise. “He’s truly, properly useless this one, Chef. Maybe we should test him. Palate test.”
So I began all over again. Soon I began to feel so faint that I wasn’t sure I could carry on. Kathryn moved an inch closer and slowly, gently placed her pale, freckled hand on the back of mine. She squeezed just once, before pulling it back again. She didn’t look up or give any other clue to anyone that she was comforting me.
I had to stop, momentarily, to gather myself.
* * *
At the end of service, when almost everyone else had cleaned down and dragged their wilting bodies home, Kathryn and Patrick remained, him finishing off some paperwork and her mopping down the floor over by the grill. As soon as Patrick had slunk towards the changing room, I stopped what I was doing and leaned against the countertop, rubbing the pain from my wrists. Kathryn left her mop and bucket where they were and approached. My focus hardened so that it was rigid on the floor.
“Is there something you wanted to say to me?” she said, leaning back, next to me, on the pass.
There were about a million things I wanted to say to her.
“Sorry,” I said.
She put her hands behind her, onto the steel edge, and looked out into the dark, empty kitchen.
“Sorry?” she said.
“About hurting your elbow the other day. I didn’t mean to.”
“I was thinking more about how I finished your sauce and served it to Ambrose. He thought it was all right, you know.”
“All right?” I said.
She touched her bottom lip with her tongue and looked away.
“That’s what he told me.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Thank you for doing that.”
I looked at my clogs; at how narrow my ankles looked inside them. Skin and bone.
“I wish I could say he thought you were a culinary genius and wanted to drive you down to Michelin HQ to insist on immediate delivery of three stars and a little badge with your name on it,” said Ka
thryn. “But, you know, ‘all right’ for Ambrose is pretty good. You should be pleased.”
I had been watching Kathryn. As far as I could tell, she never talked to anyone, not even when Max and Patrick weren’t about and you could get away with it. Nobody really talked to her either.
“What’s he like? Ambrose?” I asked.
“He’s like a schizophrenic ghost, haunting himself.”
“…”
“No?” she said, for once looking a little vulnerable. “He’s obsessed with his own youth, that’s what they say. Can’t leave it alone. He grew up in France, after the war. That’s how he got into his Grande Cuisine – the full Escoffier. Got a taste for it in Lyon, then made it fashionable in London in the fifties – late fifties. He was quite famous. Bit of a playboy. Everyone says he’s a snake, but he seems decent enough to me. I heard he’s been a bit grumpy about that new place in Charlotte Street. Rue St Jacques. It’s all classic Parisian and it’s looking like it’s going to get starred. Andy, the pastry chef – he told me that Ambrose is planning something new along those lines. More traditional. Read into that what you will. If you ask me, it’s not a bistro he’s trying to build, it’s a bloody time machine.”
A tide of fatigue passed through me and I gave a deep arcing yawn. She watched me with a kind smile.
“Don’t take it personally, what happened today,” she said.
I remembered her hand on mine. It didn’t seem possible.
“I couldn’t work out what I was doing wrong,” I said. “I tried. I tried so hard.”
Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I had imagined it.
“But you weren’t doing anything wrong, Killian. It’s just what they do here. It’s like I told you – it’s a sport for them. They love to bully apprentices into quitting. That thing they say about never sacking any of us – it’s like an in-joke. They don’t sack us because they don’t need to. I just – don’t take what they do personally, okay? You seem like a nice guy and they appreciate ‘nice’ around here about as much as they appreciate Hawaiian pizza.”
“But Max Mann.” I said. “He wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t for a reason.”
