Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone

by Will Storr

  I shook Ambrose’s cold right hand and took my plate from him, which was heavy and silly and brilliant. I tucked it under my arm and made a brief attempt at meeting the faces of the cooks, before dipping my chin again and grinning at my toes.

  Beside Ambrose, Mayle stepped forward, flush-faced and wobbly on his heels. He had a Victorian-style pocket watch in his jacket. Its gold chain dangled as he spoke.

  “I’d just like to say a few words to you all, if I may,” he said. “I, like you, used to be a chef in a fine-dining restaurant. I was rather good at it, actually. I worked many long shifts for Ambrose, my business partner. And I have to tell you that I feel right at home being back. I could just dive right in there, right now, and grill off some beautiful filet mignon, sauté some gorgeous carrots in fine French butter, whip on a fresh rabbit stock, get a cassoulet bubbling or a fine lobster bisque.”

  Patrick sniggered. The smile vanished from my face.

  “I suppose, looking at me now, it’s probably hard to believe that the rather podgy old man that stands before you−”

  To my left, Carlos muttered, “Can we go home now?” I tightened my grip on the plate and closed my eyes.

  “−could have been a fine-dining chef in a restaurant of world repute. Even though I have been many years out of the kitchen, it still only feels like yesterday that I was doing double shifts, six days a week in clogs that were two sizes too big for me–”

  Max shifted his weight against the wall and sighed.

  “−not far from here, as a matter of fact, in a little side street just off Piccadilly. Anyhow, I digress. When young Killian here first walked through the door of my teaching kitchen, I must admit, I barely noticed him−”

  I glanced at Max again. He looked back at me. A dark flurry of shame washed down the bones of my back.

  “Great!” I said, placing my award beneath my knees. “Thank you, Mr Mayle!” I started clapping my hands. He stopped talking. Patrick stood upright, a magnificent smile drawing his large, tired face upwards.

  Mayle looked in my direction, as if to say, “What are you doing?” Patrick nodded his encouragement at me. I felt myself swell and rise and puff like a fast-baking loaf. “This is me,” I said, still clapping, “saying, ‘Shut the fuck up’.”

  The brigade ignited into laughter. It echoed off the tiles on the walls and off the suspended lights and the pots and the pans and the sinks and the ovens. Patrick let out a huge, spasmic guffaw and clapped his hands three times over his head. Mayle’s jowls sagged. His fringe sat limp and damp and thinning on top of his sweaty head. His eyes sank to the floor.

  “I also have a few words to say in gratitude to our young winner here.”

  The noise was killed instantly. It was Max.

  “As you know,” he began, his eyes moving around all the chefs, meeting them in turn. He looked thinner than ever, his hands rubbing warmth into themselves in front of him, all bony and crickety and slow. “I do not tolerate disloyalty in my kitchen. I expect, by now, you’ve all heard about the item in t-today’s newspaper. Having conducted a thorough investigation this morning, and having been ably assisted by our talented young apprentice here, I have, this afternoon, dismissed Kathryn Riding for gross misconduct with immediate effect. Moreover, I will do my u-utmost,” he twitched, with force, and stuttered, “t-to ensure she does not find meaningful employment in any serious kitchen again. That’s all I have to say on the matter, apart from congratulations, Killian, for your prize, but more importantly for your brave show of loyalty today.”

  As one, the faces of the cooks in front of me took on a long, hollow quality. For a moment, there was no sound at all. A drip of water bulged from a tap over an empty steel sink; a patina of blue light reflected off the plastic surface of a safety notice; a decapitated duck’s head stared out from the top of an un-emptied waste bin. Someone at the back of the room blinked. For a second, we all just existed. And then, as if there had been a silent signal – bustle; the brigade operating without looking at me; without acknowledging that I even existed.

  I strode down the length of the room and around the corner, into the pastry section. Andy was wiping down the sides of his sink.

  “It wasn’t me, Andy,” I said.

  He turned on the hot tap and the sound of water beating against metal filled the space. I watched as he slowly squeezed out his cloth beneath the stream. His knuckles bulged with the force of it.

  “Did she go home?” I said. “Is she at the flat?”

  He twisted the wet material into a tight spiral. A number of clear, bright trickles burst onto the draining board.

  “She doesn’t want to speak to you,” he said. “Nor do I.”

  “It wasn’t me, Andy,” I said, suddenly wishing that I wasn’t holding an award. “I didn’t say anything. Tell Kathryn. Could you please tell Kathryn? I didn’t say anything.”

  “Yeah, of course you didn’t, mate,” he laughed and, finally turned to face me. “I warned her about you. What is this thing you’ve got about Max? Have you got a crush on him or something?”

  “I just want you to tell Kathryn,” I said.

  “She doesn’t want to see you,” he said. “Do yourself a favour. Piss off back to college. Nobody’s going to want you here any more.”

  30

  I drove as fast as I could in Aunt Dorothy’s old Peugeot, back to Dor. When I reached the cottage, I took the sledgehammer from the shed and tried to exorcise my rage by throwing it with furious strikes against my uncle’s garden wall. I had a suspicion that what lay behind it was the “secret” Dorothy had warned me about.

  It was more resilient than it appeared and the sharp knuckle of pain between my shoulder blades that I’d felt during my first shifts rose again, before spreading out and dropping to my lower spine. My neck stiffened, my arms throbbed, my fingers blistered. As the moon arced over my head and the elms gossiped in the forest around me, I relived all the aches of my six weeks at King, except this time I enjoyed them. Just before five, when the first rumours of dawn were becoming apparent behind the trees, the wall finally gave.

  I stepped over the three-high lip of bricks that were too low to easily knock through. The space between the busted wall and the ancient gate was boggy and filled with a pointy kind of grass that was sticking up in spiny crowns. I pushed at the herb garden door. It was unpainted and of the same design as the one in the cottage, with its square-headed nails and heavy hinges, except these were so rusted they looked as if they were dissolving into the fabric of the wood. I shoved it with my shoulder, which just served to wedge it further into the earth behind it. It took almost ten minutes and all my remaining strength before I was able to squeeze myself inside.

  By now, a blue haze was coming through the trees and the birds had begun their wild chorus. I trod slowly, careful not to let the brambles swallow my foot, and I tried to survey the garden. There was little contrast between the grey light and the thin dawn fog and it wasn’t easy to see much detail. Perhaps it was just the angle I was viewing it at, but everything looked different from how it did before. The dead vegetation was all the same but there seemed to be more of the green shoots, with thick stems and fresh leaves, like flattened teardrops, every one a persuasive, plump green.

  Flies buzzed over the garden, travelling in complex, busy directions. They seemed to inhabit an invisible airborne metropolis, all en route to some essential destination and then turning, immediately, to find another. They seemed convinced of their logic and yet there was a madness about their movements; a randomness and fervour that reminded me how much, as a child, I used to fear them. Waving them away, I rubbed a leaf from one of the plants and sniffed the pad of my thumb. I could only detect a faint earthy smell. Not one you’d necessarily associate with a herb, more a fungus or root. An early lick of dawn wind hit my cheeks as I picked a large leaf and put it in my mouth.

  Immediately, my eyes dropped and I allowed the flavour to sink into my palate – that was the sensation, of it sinking in, so
aking down into the roots of my taste buds, taking over my entire tongue and then gathering strength as it washed with a palpable kiss of pleasure down my throat.

  There was a top note that carried a vague herby sweetness, not dissimilar to marjoram. But the booming, resonant flavours had more in common, in an obscure way, with some of the exotic foods I’d tried with Dorothy, like oysters, truffles and abalone. It was strangely organic, musky, intimate. A secret, adult taste.

  And it was delightful. Incredible. Blissful. Like nothing I’d ever experienced before. Each morsel of leaf contained a complex symphony of pointillist glories that all coalesced into this heavenly whole. The deliciousness was so extreme that your instincts warned you off. It was as if some rogue God had taken the entire palette of gustatory pleasures and combined them for the purposes of mischief. It was a flavour that took ordinary beauty and violently challenged it; that took perfection and humiliated it.

  My tongue, I realised, had actually begun to tingle. My palms were wet. I felt a gluey lurch of nausea and the dew of sweat on my forehead. Just as I was trying not to panic, the sickness in my belly lifted to be replaced by an effervescent heat that began to gather itself about my hips and pelvis.

  And that’s when it happened; this terrible sexual craving. I had never felt the pull so suddenly or so overpoweringly. There was very little I could do to satiate myself. I ran to the house and bolted the front door. Finding the bathroom, I did everything I could to relieve the maddening urge that had came over me.

  I was eight again, at the foot of the stairs. Mary Dor was at the top. On the third step, in the centre, a clean, cold cup of milk. I reached for it. There was something in it; silvery, alive. I watched it for a moment. Struggling, whirring in circles, dancing its own death. I put the cup to my lips and drank. Mary watched. I felt the silvery thing crawling and buzzing as it went down.

  Mary spoke. “Now it is done, so. Now you will no longer know the difference between God’s miracles and the Devil’s.”

  And she showed me her hands and her wrists were bound, tightly, with rope.

  Up in the roof, I saw all the parts, the yellow, the red, the green and the black. Out amongst the elms, I could hear the children singing: “Earl’s heart and earl’s leafs and earl’s lusts abounding. Earl’s fires and earl’s grace and earl’s witch is burning.”

  And I knew that I was King of the Wastelands, King of the Hunger, King of the More and I knew that I could never stop them barking.

  The old trouble, the quiet trouble, louder now, big and terrible and close.

  31

  As I drove up the A21 towards London that morning, the fatigue and the strange night combined to make the world seem two-dimensional, as if it was all a projection that was running both too fast and too slow. As I drifted dazedly onto the M25, I couldn’t stop thinking about the unbelievable flavour of that odd herb. If there was any way to harness it, to remove it from its goblinish effects, just imagine. I could make the most incredible sauce. And as for Dorothy – well, perhaps the long years in the cottage surrounded by all that sensed history had made her grow overly superstitious. The plant had some carnal, aphrodisiacal effect, some active component − that was obvious. But it wasn’t magic. It was a product – and one which I would be fascinated to experiment with. First, though, I had to push through another day.

  I walked into the locker room to find it choked full of silence. Everyone gave the impression they were concentrating extremely hard on what their fingers were doing: untying laces, fastening buttons, zipping up bags, sliding clogs onto feet. I dropped my rucksack onto the floor as Patrick passed by. “You’re back, are you?” he said.

  I didn’t quite now how to respond.

  “Still haven’t had enough?” he continued.

  “Of course not, Chef,” I said.

  “You’ve got a pair of bollocks, I’ll give you that. You’re hardly Mr Popular round here at the moment, you realise. Not after what happened with Kathryn.”

  “That was nothing to do with me,” I said.

  He gave a quick, powerless snort and walked away.

  The previous week, I’d been charged with a new job: preparing the citrus for Max’s signature dish, his deer and tangerine pie. Every morning, a new bag of thirty tangerines was delivered, twenty of which had to be juiced, the other ten segmented, deseeded and peeled for use in the garnish. Before they were squeezed, each piece of fruit had to be rolled with pressure on the chopping board, in order to loosen the summery liquid inside.

  I’d just begun this process when Max walked up to me, the lid of his daily brand-new biro sticking like a medieval knight from the breast pocket of his dry-cleaned tunic. I instinctively looked at my hands to make sure there wasn’t anything I could possibly be doing better.

  “You,” he said. “Stock rotation.”

  All the warmth from the previous day had evaporated. I placed the tangerine firmly on the chopping board so it wouldn’t roll off and headed for the heavy, storm-coloured freezer door, where I found the protective coat and gloves to be missing from their hook.

  “Does anyone know where the coat and the gloves for the freezer are?” I shouted into the kitchen.

  I didn’t see Patrick when he responded. I could only hear him.

  “Fucking get on with it, dipshit.”

  I pulled down the steel lever and slid the door open. The shelves were filled with sacks of ice which was to be crushed and served in a bowl beneath the chilled melon soup. Above those were frozen peas and the steel tubs of sorbet and ice cream that I’d have to sort through and rotate, so the freshest was at the back. The light had a hollow, metallic quality and the place smelled of cold beef and rubber. The air in front of the recessed light was thick with cold. How could I possibly do this without gloves?

  I crouched and began to pull the tubs onto the floor with my bare hands. There were glaces of nougat and walnut, Armagnac ice, sorbets of prickly pear, blackcurrant, acacia blossom, three types of apple and citrus – which was served in a halved and hollowed-out lemon.

  The pain wasn’t long in coming. It began as balls of low hurt deep inside my knuckles before spreading through the bones of my hands. My fingers started to sting as they stuck onto the icy metal containers; there was a constriction in my nostrils and a hardening in my sinuses that began to swell as if something was trying to break out of them.

  The job took nearly twenty agonising minutes. All I wanted to do as I walked back into the kitchen was curl up in the toilet and push my hands between my legs for warmth, but I was desperate to know if someone had covered me on the tangerines, which should have been done by now. When I arrived back at my station, what I saw was Patrick stirring a small copper pan with his usual bullish intensity, wearing the thick orange freezer coat and black workman’s gloves.

  A crumble of laughter went through brigade and apprentices.

  “You’ve got them…” I said. “You fucking…”

  Patrick turned and pointed at me with his hot teaspoon which bled a quick trickle of sauce onto his clogs. His nose had reddened in the heat whilst the rest of his face remained the colour of beef dripping. His eyes looked tiny, as if they’d been shrinking away from the heat of the flames.

  “Something you wanted to say, grass?”

  I retreated back to my tangerines and picked up my knife from where I’d left it on the board. Something wasn’t right. It was the quantity. There were supposed to be thirty pieces of fruit and… I made a quick count. Twenty-eight. I looked back towards Patrick. He’d gone – probably to take off the coat. I was aware of members of the brigade glancing at me; I could feel their flickers of attention like intermittent sparks of light.

  Lunch service went by in a swimmy slick of time, the loss of Kathryn in my vicinity feeling ever more boundless with each hour. I managed to remain invisible until just after two p.m.

  “You there,” said Max.

  I turned to see him standing at the top of the kitchen, the yellow glow from the pass ca
sting cruelly over his cheekbones and sunken temples. He was holding up a large square black plate with the King logo on the side of it. It was smeared with a drying crust of reddy-brown sauce and there was something else on there as well: a dark nugget in the corner.

  Max beckoned me with his manicured finger.

  As I loped towards him, I could see it was a pip. A fresh, nearly-white tangerine pip.

  “You have ruined my signature dish.”

  His tongue ran over his lower lip.

  “Do you know who this plate belongs to?”

  “Non, Chef.”

  He growled with bitter menace.

  “Zsa Zsa fucking Gabor.”

  He jabbed a finger into my chest.

  “Do you think you’ve made it, now that you’ve won that ridiculous prize? Do you think you can do what you like now?”

  His fury generated a kind of electric field; a livid haze of energy through which his ugliest features became yet more grotesque.

  “Non, Chef.”

  “Non, Chef, non, Chef…”

  I stared back at him. I fixed all my muscles in place.

  “Why did you sack Kathryn?” I said, quietly, my breaths becoming rapid and shallow. “Why did you do it?”

  They were listening, the other chefs. They were pretending that they weren’t, but they were.

  “She was disloyal.” His nostrils thinned. “Just as you told me.”

  “I didn’t−”

  He threw the plate at my feet and it smashed against my right ankle. I couldn’t remember seeing him this furious before. His upper lip was quivering and lifting at the sides. He was actually baring teeth. When he spoke again it was in a whisper.

  “You disgust me, do you know that? You make me feel unnerved.” And then he left.