Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone

by Will Storr

  “So anyway, I was worried about you,” she said eventually. “After yesterday? You dashed off after work – your arm.”

  “I just wanted to get down here.” I shrugged and lifted my bandage towards her. “It’s fine now. Got some Savlon on it. It’s just throbbing a bit. I quite like it when it throbs.”

  She glanced into the distance. “Why did you do it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just wanted Max−”

  “I don’t know why you’re so in thrall to him.”

  “Because he’s the best.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  When I thought of the Max that I used to love, and the Max I had known in recent weeks, I saw separate people. My image of him was like a double exposure, two not-quite-there men, neither fully resolving.

  “I just want him to know I’ve got what it takes,” I said.

  “But, Killian, you don’t need to … It’s like you don’t think you deserve your place in the kitchen. But you wouldn’t be there if you didn’t. You know, in this industry, you don’t get anything unless you deserve it – jobs or customers or good reviews or stars. Whatever you get, you deserve.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t think you do.”

  She stopped and stood in front of me.

  “You’re going to be a huge success, Killian. You’ll get a job, even if it’s not at King, you’ll get one and you’ll become a head chef. What you did yesterday –” She began walking again. “Have you ever done anything like that before?”

  “Not really.”

  “What about your finger that time? Was that on purpose? When you put it in the sauce?”

  My mind felt crowded with answers, and yet it presented me with no answer at all. I wondered if we’d reached it now; if this was it, actually happening right as we were walking: the moment Kathryn realised that I was some sort of freak and stopped liking me.

  “You don’t need to impress anyone, you daft bastard,” she said, eventually. “We can all tell you’re talented. You’ve got the knife skills, the speed and it’s… oh, you know, it’s just the way you are around food, the way you touch it, the way you look at it, the way you talk about it, the way you pile those basil leaves so bloody perfectly in their bowls, the way you talk to those blackcurrants under your breath when they’re not behaving. It’s obvious. Anyway, you should be pleased. Max is giving you extra attention.”

  I felt a sudden lightness in my knees.

  “Do you think so?” I said.

  She started laughing.

  “No,” she said. “Not really. You’re probably fucked.”

  We turned right onto the long castle drive, past the green domes of the observatory and on towards the magnificent pomp and portliness of Herstmonceux Castle. We talked about food – how, like me, she adored creamy sauces and four-hour stews prepared with whole bottles of red wine. It was the cooking of the ages that we loved: fat, alcohol and blood.

  We meandered through the formal gardens and on towards the visitors’ centre, on the outside wall of which was a mural that listed Herstmonceux’s previous owners. I stopped and silently read down it: Idonea de Herst; Ingelram de Monceux; Maud de Monceux; Sir John Fiennes; Joan Dacre; Sir Richard Fiennes; Margaret Fiennes.

  “You interested in all this?” Kathryn asked, her feet pointing in the opposite direction.

  “Not really,” I said. “My great-aunt – the one who died – she had this story about how the cottage was built hundreds of years ago for the cook of the castle’s owner.” I squinted at the list. “I’m not sure if I ever believed it. I can’t remember what she said his name was, but it wasn’t any of these. She might have been mistaken. My mum doesn’t even think the cottage is that old. It’s made of brick, you see.”

  “But so is the castle,” said Kathryn.

  “Yeah, and the castle was rebuilt in 1910. It feels old, the cottage. It definitely has that feeling about it. But maybe it isn’t. I don’t know.”

  Kathryn looked back at the castle, her nose squished with disappointment. I followed her into the small visitors’ room where we browsed the photos and information in a half-bored silence.

  “Here, Killian, look at this,” she said, shortly.

  I followed her nod to a small typed notice, on the green baize board in the corner.

  “It was not until the middle of the 15th Century that a large building constructed wholly of brick appeared in Sussex: Herstmonceux Castle. Its sheer size necessitated making the bricks on the spot.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “It is old.”

  Nearby, a typewritten list on white A4: “Owners of the manor of Herstmonceux”.

  I leaned into the small black type, scanned it carefully and stopped when I felt a thud, like something trying to break out of my chest.

  “There he is,” I said, pushing my finger against the line: “ ‘1662: His son, Thomas Lennard, Lord Dacre, Earl of Sussex, 1654 – 1715’. That’s the one my aunt told me about. Thomas Lennard. He had my ancestor burned as a witch.”

  It felt, suddenly, as if there was something prickly in the room with us. I looked over my shoulder and straightened up.

  “Shall we go back and have some tea?” I said.

  We spent the afternoon baking and half-watching videos – Trading Places, Kramer vs Kramer, some Kenny Everett rubbish. That night, I prepared one of my favourite ragus: the one Dorothy claimed was Catherine de Medici’s preferred preparation: beef, pork and soffritto browned until it’s all crackling angrily, then cooked until nearly scorched with a couple of tablespoons of tomato puree, then the milk, which the parched sauce always drank down with desperation, and then white wine, lemon juice and then another hour or two in a lazy oven with cinnamon, coriander, nutmeg and cloves. We ate in bleary silence and drank through three bottles of wine.

  After the pasta, I plated some freshly baked rock cakes and sprinkled icing sugar over their golden, still-warm tops.

  “I can’t believe how beautiful this place is,” said Kathryn, taking a bite of the cake and gazing at the beams on the ceiling. “I’d love to live somewhere like this. You’re so lucky.”

  “I know,” I said. “I feel a bit bad. My mum was pissed off that she didn’t get it. I wonder if I shouldn’t just let her have it, sometimes.”

  “But it was left to you..?”

  Something distracted me. I looked down at my rock cake. Beneath the snow-like layer of icing sugar, something was twitching, lazily. I dismissed it. It must be nothing.

  “My aunt had a thing about this place,” I said. “She was convinced there are all these family secrets here. Things to do with the witch stuff. Dangerous stuff. I’m not sure what she was going on about. But this is definitely a weird place. You do get the feeling there are… sort of… I don’t know. You probably think this is all nonsense, though? You don’t believe in anything like that?”

  Perhaps unconsciously, she touched the small silver crucifix around her neck.

  “Well, I do pray, if that counts,” Kathryn was saying. “I pray every night. You’re not allowed to laugh at that, by the way. Laughing is not okay when I’m telling you things like that.”

  The surface of my cake shifted again. Peering down, I brushed the jerking powder away. There was a raisin there, beneath the icing sugar. It was moving. I pulled the cake apart, a little, with the edges of my thumbs. It had red eyes and a silver body. A fly. It was there, in my cake, sliding its front legs against each other in a grotesque knitting motion.

  “You’re a Christian?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Kathryn. “I suppose so. My mum, a long time ago, studied theology. She taught me a lot of stuff that helped me understand it. Religion’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Organised religion, I mean. The Church – it has an amazing history. In a bad way. Horrible. Murder, genocide – the kind of stuff they don’t really go into on Songs of Praise. But that’s not to say I don’t believe.” She paused and shook her head dismissively, as if throwing t
he subject clear of her mind. “Anyway,” she said. “These witch secrets or whatever they are. Why do they mean your mum didn’t get the house?”

  Gingerly, I put the cake back on the plate.

  “She wanted to sell it and my aunt wouldn’t let that happen. My mum was brought up in a pretty wealthy family but she married a working-class guy and I don’t think she’s ever got used to living on less. I think she only married him to piss my grandad off. Bit of rough, you know. But now they’ve run up debts, so they need money. But Dorothy seemed to think that selling Dor would be dangerous or something. I don’t know why. To be honest, I think she was going a bit senile for a while there.”

  “What’s she like, your mum?”

  Kathryn had the most beautiful mouth; thin at the sides, her top lip gathering gently into a lovely, heavy, pink cushion of flesh. I wondered what my mum’s mouth looked like when she was young. Had it been as pretty as Kathryn’s?

  “She’s,” I smiled uncertainly. “She’s a social worker. You know, kind. Kind-hearted. Given-up-her-life-to-help-other-people sort of thing. She can be very, very loving, but she doesn’t take a lot of shit from me or Dad. She’s a bit like Max, in a weird way. She can get pretty angry.”

  “How angry?”

  Memories flashed through my mind. Stills. Images.

  “Oh,” I shrugged.

  I saw the backs of my mother’s hands; the tips of her fingernails. With a mock-dismissive shake of the head, Kathryn asked, “She doesn’t ever hit you or anything?”

  I saw my mother’s ankles as she walked away, their thin framework of muscle and sinew and vein.

  “She doesn’t mean it. She can be nice – she used to be nice, when I was a boy. And she always says sorry. Always. And I know why she does it – her dad used to beat her mum around and what with that and all the shit she sees in her job, it means she just doesn’t like men very much and you can kind of understand her point. I mean, I don’t want you to think – she’s a good mum. She used to stick up for me when I got bullied. You know, she’s so loyal, she’d do anything for her family. She just finds it hard to cope, that’s all. And she’s right about my dad – he’s useless. When I was growing up, I had to take the slack with housework and everything, because my mum was always working and – I’d get things wrong and I’d be punished a bit sometimes. But it’s done me good, in the long run. I’d never be able to cope with working at King if I hadn’t been toughened up a bit.”

  I’d become so absorbed in what I was saying that I hadn’t noticed that Kathryn’s eyes had gone elsewhere. I’d lost her. But it was more than that. I could sense, in the tiny combinations of her muscles and mouth and breathing, that a kind of sadness had come into her. And then I remembered.

  “Sorry,” I said. I put my hand out to comfort her. I was deciding whether to touch her knee or arm or shoulder, but I just placed it down again, on my lap. “Your mum…”

  She closed her eyes.

  “I just miss her,” she said. “She had a kind of a breakdown after my dad died and now she’s sick with this fucking thing. She can’t do anything. She can’t go out. I try to see her when I can, but the hours – since I’ve been at King, I’ve hardly been able to visit her at all. She has bruises, sometimes. They say she falls and I know, sometimes, she gets violent with them. But you should see it – it’s awful. She has to share a room with four other people and it stinks. It’s filthy. I can’t bear it. I asked Max if I could visit her, one time, when there was a problem, and he went crazy. Gave me this big fucking speech.”

  I put my hand out, tentatively, towards her. She took it, squeezed my fingers and placed it on her leg and then laughed bitterly. “I can’t believe I’m letting you see me like this. I’m sorry if it’s boring or anything, it’s just−”

  “Once, years ago, when I got upset, my aunt Dorothy told me I should close my eyes and paint a picture of heaven,” I said. “It’s obviously kind of childish, cheesy. But it works. I still do it sometimes. For years I imagined myself running a restaurant. Running King, actually.”

  “I still do,” she smiled.

  “You want to run King?” I asked.

  She said. “Somewhere like that. Somewhere starred, at least. I can’t think of any other way I can get Mum out of that place. To go private, it’s hundreds of pounds a month.”

  “But you’ll make it,” I said. “Some day you’ll be able to afford it.”

  “It’s going to be years before I’m the executive chef of anywhere. And by then…”

  Carefully at first, I put my arms around her. I felt her tears crush between our cheeks. “Do you know what upsets me most of all?” she said. “I can tell my mum thinks cooking is this shitty, nothing job. She’ll never get to see where I’m working – how amazing it is. She’ll never get to taste my food. And you should see the dirty shit they feed her on.” She broke into soft sobbing and I held her as still as I could manage. She tightened her grip around my waist and I could smell her neck. I moved my nose towards it, towards the little mole that sat in the dusk of her creamy, shadowed shoulder and the lines in her skin, so fine that even Kathryn had surely never seen them, never been this close, never studied the curve of the back of her neck and that birthmark, so strange and sad, that disappeared down beneath the hem of her shirt and I was closer and closer –

  She pulled away from me and said something that made this a moment for the stars.

  “You’re very special to me. And that’s all I’m going to say.”

  I led her to the spare room and I left her to sleep, happily, alone.

  28

  Behind my station, underneath the butchery block, was a row of four grouchy-looking polished-steel fridges. The door on the second fridge was broken. In order to close it properly, you had to pull it up on its hinges before pushing it to. In all the motion and ferocity of the kitchen, the chefs and apprentices frequently forgot about this uppity little eccentricity and simply dealt with this door as they did all the others – with a light heel-kick, at which point it would hit the frame with a thunk rather than a click.

  The next morning, I was cutting the stalks off the blackcurrants when, deep beneath the layers of the chopping, clanking and sizzling, this dull clunk sounded. Without thinking or even moving my neck, I said, “Fridge door.”

  I heard the chef in question mutter, “He’s got eyes in the back of his bloody head.”

  It was the apprentice Malcolm. He was standing there, with a tray of butter, looking at the door which was slowly gliding open as if compelled by a mischievous ghost. For a moment, I had no idea how I knew Malcolm hadn’t shut it. But as my fingers and blade worked accurately and automatically on a blackcurrant, I realised that the cacophony that had made me so breathless on the first day had slowly come to make sense.

  The menu might have looked like nothing more than a solemn list, but each one of those dishes had its own unique and violent song that had been filling the ears of the brigade for hours. Those songs combined to create a symphony; a secret music that every kitchen has its own version of, but which is possible to decipher only by total immersion. I could hear it now. There was the scrape and knock of the lamb racks being French-trimmed; there was the shik-shik-shik of the trout being de-scaled; there was the splash and clatter of Danno the pots man washing the bread tins in the sink. All in order; all in time; all correct and comforting. I’d developed the ability to hear the song of the kitchen using all my senses. I could smell the sweet herby richness of the rabbit stock reaching its simmer; feel the increase in heat as the grill station was fired up; sense the texture of the pressure in my gut and so read the mood of the kitchen. Now, after nearly six weeks of apprenticeship, my nose could tell me the time of day, almost to the nearest minute.

  It wasn’t long after this that I became aware of a silence that was overwhelming the top of the kitchen. Peering between the shelves, I could only see Max’s back bending down to meet the face of one of his brigade.

  “You’ve burned your f
inger?” I heard him say. “What am I supposed to do with a cook whose fingers don’t work? What use is that to me? Do you think, when I pulled you out of that trough of mediocrity that is our apprentice brigade, that I did so because you were clumsy?”

  I put my knife down and walked around the corner for a better view.

  “Clearly, you need some supplementary training. Bon. Bon. You will have some. Let’s have your tunic.”

  I could still only see his back. But Patrick – Patrick was looking down at the target of Max’s ire and leering greedily, that spitty, pointed tongue resting on the inside edge of his lip.

  “I’m sure you don’t believe that I’ll treat you differently because you’re a girl,” said Max. “This is, after all, the age of sexual equality.”

  I pushed past the apprentices and walked up behind Max, aware that the music of the kitchen – now slowed and loosened – was on the verge of collapsing since the conductor had become distracted. In the gap, between Max’s arm and the tall steel wall, I glimpsed Kathryn slowly, defiantly, unbuttoning her tunic. Behind her, Patrick’s tongue worked in little pumps, pushing out at his lower lip. The brigade threw excited glances between their work and the action.

  She was doing it with the edge of her thumb, popping one white button out and then the next. I wondered which finger was burned. I wondered if she was in pain. The blue flames hissed and the hair on the back of Max’s head was thin and wiry. Little white crumbs of dead skin hung inside it, here and there.

  Max would stop her in a moment. I knew he would. Max wouldn’t allow this to happen. He was testing her.

  Then the bottom button was released, and Kathryn, chin down, cheeks blood-red, opened up her tunic. Patrick’s tongue was free, half an inch of it poking from his mouth, his cigarette-stained teeth pushing down on it; his slimy taste buds like fur, like wet, grey velvet. The tunic hung from the end of Kathryn’s fingers.

  I’d never seen her stomach before. Her beautiful shoulders; the prominent mole on her right arm. I’d never seen the shape of her collarbone; her belly button, the soft curve of the peak of her hipbone. And now Patrick and Carlo and Simon and Chef Max Mann, they were all seeing my own Kathryn, standing there in her smallness and her secret perfection and her white, wash-dulled bra and the smooth weight of the tops of her breasts.