by Will Storr
* * *
Two hours later I was cleaning celery in the between-service lull when Max approached in that severe, mincing way that I had learned to dread.
“Come,” he said.
The corridor filled with the dull thump of clogs on antique carpet as I followed him. There was a boil on the back of his neck, nestling in the creases of yellowing skin, and his manicured nails appeared chewed. He opened the door to a large broom cupboard and nodded for me to enter. It was illuminated by a bare low-powered bulb and there were buckets and gloves and mousetraps and cockroach bait and white plastic bottles filled with cleaning chemicals. The light swung on its wire in response to the sharply closing door; the shadows of the mops and pots around us moving across the walls in an excitable, jeering dance.
In the middle, there was a wooden chair and a pile of sealed Tupperware boxes with a filthy torchon draped over them. Patrick was there, comfortable amongst the darkness and poisons, his smug smile pulled over his nibblish little teeth.
“Sit,” said Max.
I did as I was told.
“Don’t look so worried,” he smiled. “It’s the last day of your stage tomorrow, and this is just something we like to do with apprentices when they reach the end. A bit of fun. A tasting session. A palate test. You should consider yourself lucky, not everyone gets this treatment. Only special apprentices.”
I gripped the seat, feeling the gritty dust on its underside.
“Merci, Chef.”
“Special,” he said, lightly. “And you are special, aren’t you?”
I swallowed, my tongue dry, my throat tightening.
“Non, Chef,” I said.
“Award winner!” he said, loudly. “Very confident young man. Confidence is good. But sometimes confidence can go too far. Tell me, what makes you think you can question me? What makes you think you can defy me in front of my brigade?”
“I’m sorry, Chef. I didn’t –”
Max opened his hands up. The lines that ran across his palms were deep and red and purple against translucent skin.
“Don’t panic,” he said. “Don’t worry. You poor thing, perhaps you misunderstand me when I say that I have never sacked an apprentice. Perhaps you took that to mean that you are somehow trapped here. But you must know – this is not a prison. You can leave at any time you want.”
He looked enormous, looming over me like that. It is how I’d always imagined him – huge and all-powerful. Awesome in his height and presence.
“Do you understand?” he repeated.
“Oui, Chef.”
“Now, I realise that you consider yourself a three-star apprentice and here at King we have cruelly made you wallow in the squalor of two, but still…”
“No, Chef– ”
“Shut up,” he said, his words popping out in a sudden punch of uncontrolled temper. “Now, sit back and concentrate. If you pass this test, Chef Patrick and I will not hesitate to congratulate you. But if you decide that you can’t do it, if you want to leave, that’s just fine. There’s no shame in it. You can finish it at any time. Stand up and go. It really is that simple. Go. But if you do happen to decide to leave, you must not stop until you reach wherever it is you came from. Okay. Bon. So, Patrick’s going to blindfold you.”
I closed my eyes, my fingers gripping my seat ever harder, as the grimy torchon was knotted around my head.
“Tongue out,” he said.
I heard Patrick move to my left. There was the brush of material, the popping of a lid, a chink of cutlery. I flinched as something tipped onto my tongue. It was lukewarm. Waxy. I bit down and felt fat separate from flesh. The flavour was sweaty, salty and hollow and it was so greasy that my teeth slid about on it.
“Bacon,” I said. “Raw.”
Trying not to gag, I used my tongue to push the semi-masticated mush into a ball before forcing it into the back of my mouth and down.
“Streaky,” I said. Then, remembering the style that was used at King. “Oak-smoked.”
“Oak-smoked!” said Max, with a sarcastic laugh in his voice. “Oh, bravo.”
I heard Patrick snigger.
“Bon. Very good. Next.”
Despite the fact that my mouth was coated in a layer of thick slime, I could tell what the next ingredient was the moment it landed on my tongue.
“Chilli,” I said. “Piri-piri.”
There was a silence.
“He’s very specific isn’t he?” said Max, irritably.
I spent a moment trying to generate enough spit so that I could wash some of the intensity of the heat away. I heard the rustle of a packet as a film of feverish sweat soaked onto my brow and the water in my eyes threatened to well.
“No, don’t cut it,” I heard Max say. “Put it all in.”
This one was even easier. These were my dad’s favourites. Patrick was pushing it in quicker than I was able to chew. I was on the verge of choking, but luckily my saliva glands had been prompted to fire a wash of pre-vomit spit. I pumped my teeth on it as quickly as I could manage and smushy clags began to spill from the corners of my mouth and fall to my lap. The texture was the worst thing, like something verminous that had decomposed to the consistency of mash. There was an undeniable farty note in the background, which hung beneath the dominant flavours of fat, offal and old grey meat.
“Sausage,” I said as soon as I was able. “Pork. Wall's.”
It was the act of saying the name out loud rather than swallowing the thing that finally induced a gag as wide as a lion’s roar. Strings of gastric phlegm hurled out and fell, splatting coldly down my chin.
I could do this. I had to.
“Ten out of ten so far,” said Max.
If I could pull this off and just speak to Max; just make him understand; sit him down and explain how much I had loved him; tell him about the pictures on my bedroom wall. We could talk about what’s happened, forget it all, reset it all…
“Next!”
I smelled the next one coming. The fact that my sinuses had been cleared out by the piri-piri meant that the savage bang of the old fish entrails entered my nostrils in a wave that was almost overwhelming. Patrick shovelled a heaped dessertspoon full into my mouth and they squished out into my cheeks, each slippery node, tube and lump picked out in vile detail by my tongue. It felt as if the tastes and textures were filling my head and I had to clamp my hand over my lips to force my system not to reject them and their flavours of stale blood and gut rot.
I wretched, twice. A layer of chilled sweat formed just below my eyes.
“Entrails,” I said. “Herring.”
“A little something to wash it down with?” said Max. “Purse your lips.”
At first I thought it was olive oil. Then I felt the layer of carbon, tiny particles of black, and the flavours of scorch, fat and grime hit the back of my tongue.
“From the extractor fan,” I said.
There was a silence.
“The extractor fan above the meat station.”
Neither of them responded for a moment.
“Is that blindfold on properly?” Max asked.
Patrick gave the knot a sudden tug that threw my head back painfully.
“Looks like it.”
“Hm,” said Max. “Well, I suppose if you’ve been raised feeding from the trough, you are going to be familiar with the tastes of its fruits.”
Patrick smirked. I became aware of more activity by the Tupperware near my feet.
“Don’t bother with all that other stuff,” Max said to Patrick. “Go straight to that one. No, not that. No. Right. Did you get some?”
“Yeah,” said Patrick.
My stomach lurched as Max addressed me again.
“Tongue out, flat,” he said. “No – flat. Flatter. Flat like a tray.”
Somebody’s fingers clamped my nostrils shut with a sharp pinch.
“Oh, God that’s revolting,” Max muttered. “Oh, you didn’t…”
There was a hesitation.
“Go on,” said Max.
“Yeah?” said Patrick.
“Go on.”
I gagged once, twice, three times.
“No,” I said, trying to block it by waving my hands to and fro.
“Oui,” said Max, gripping the sides of my jaw with his thumb and forefinger. “Oh, oui, oui, oui. Tongue out.”
A cheese biscuit was laid on my tongue. I pulled it in and crunched, barely believing this was happening. There it was, this gritty paste. Warm; the temperature of blood. My nose was released. I chewed. It stuck on my teeth. It was the particles that tipped me over. I felt a seed-like nugget, then something – a kernel of something – burst open.
The sounds that came from me then were not of my voicebox but from my gut. It was primal.
My nostrils were released. I heard them move out of the way. Cold, fizzing spasms ran up my cheeks and down my neck and I could feel sweat on my wrists. The vomit, when it came, was wetter than I expected and hot from the chilli.
“Uhh, the dirty fucking animal,” said Patrick. “He’s got it all over himself.”
“Have you quite finished?” Max asked.
“It’s shit,” I said. “On a Ritz cracker.” I took a guess. “Chef Patrick’s shit.” There was a surprisingly strong additional flavour, separate from that of the cracker. “And he’s been eating cheese. Blue cheese. Roquefort?”
There was another silence.
“How the fuck did he know?” said Patrick.
Nothing seemed to happen for some time. There was a sound of movement, then material being moved about. It hit my chest first. Then Patrick adjusted himself and the hot, salty tasteless spray of urine hit me. I squeezed my mouth shut and closed my eyes hard behind the torchon. When it died down, after maybe ten seconds, I sensed that only Patrick was in the room.
“We can’t have you in the kitchen in that state,” he said. There was a hesitation. And when he spoke again, an undeniable tremor of concern in his voice. “Piss off home. Sort yourself out.”
Having changed and washed my face, I took the bus to Brixton and knocked on Kathryn’s door. Nobody answered. I might have been freezing and filthy with cloying vomit and urine, but I wouldn’t give up. I sat there on the step, my bony knees raised up to the level of my chin, and watched the people coming to and from the nearby market as the train rattled angrily across the bridge above us all. That peculiar man, the homeless painter, was busy beneath the lamp post just outside her door. I began to rock gently back and forth, my teeth clenching and releasing painfully on my tongue and my right heel bouncing up and down. I sat there, getting up every now and then to knock, for more than an hour.
Finally, the door opened an inch.
“Go away,” said Kathryn.
I pushed and the chain scraped against the wood, the brass bolt clanking in its housing.
“I have to speak to you.”
A ribbon of dull light fell on her nose. Her eyes were in darkness. I wanted to put my hand through the gap. I wanted to feel her.
“Why don’t you go and sit on Max’s doorstep?” she said. “You seem the stalkerish type. He lives in Chelsea, I think.”
I moved my head about in an attempt to get a clearer view of her. “Kathryn, I didn’t say anything. He’s lying.”
“No, it’s my fault. I knew your career would always be more important than me. That’s fine, you know, you go and be a good, loyal, successful boy. Just leave me the fuck alone whilst you’re doing it.”
She would see that I understood her, and that she understood me and the accident of us finding each other was something like a miracle. I had to make her know.
“But listen to me, we both want to be great as much as each other,” I said. “We both want to be executive chefs at King or somewhere. We’d both do anything for it. It’s like, you know…” I tried to think of an example. “Like when you work a double shift instead of seeing your mum. I understand it, I get it.”
“Cunt!”
The door slammed.
“No!” I kicked it. The sole of my shoe left a scuff of black rubber on the paintwork. “No! Kathryn!” I kicked it again and again. “Kathryn!”
I waited for another hour or so. There was nothing much to do, except to watch the homeless man. He was oddly dressed for a vagrant, in a mangy tweed suit with a bow tie over an old white shirt. I began to wonder what he was up to. He was sitting in a picnic chair, leaning forward under the homemade awning that he’d fashioned from some opened-out bin liners he’d taped together. Whatever he was working on, under there, he was evidently doing it with considerable care.
I examined him, from my place in the shadows. Suddenly, he looked directly at me.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just – ”
“Drawing,” he said.
The whites of his eyes had a yellow tint. There were three teeth missing from his lower jaw.
“I’ve seen you here before,” I said.
“Every day, oh yes, indeed.”
He looked proud; delighted to be in conversation.
“What do you draw?”
“Precious stuff. W-where we met,” he said. “My wife and I.”
“That’s what you draw? Every day?”
He smiled wide and it was wet and foul – greys and browns and blacks and livid swells of red. More like an infected wound than a mouth.
“Oh yes, indeed I do,” he said. “Oh yes, indeed, very much I do, oh yes. Every day and every night. Always here, yes, indeed. Keep trying. Keep drawing. Never give up. Never never give up. Please,” he gestured to what I now understood to be a covered easel. “Look.”
I stood and peered carefully under the awning, and squinted at his pad. It was in pencil, and it was immediately clear that he had sketched the same scene countless times, one version over the top of the other. You could just about see two people in the middle of it all, in some sort of embrace. He’d drawn the lovers so often that they had become monstrous, dark lines scored onto dark lines, their eyes a torment of black layers. In several places, the pencil had gone right through the thick paper, leaving great gashes and rents.
“Oh yes, you see,” he said, putting his head close to mine. “Perfect, you see. I do it again, all again and again and all over again. I have to make it perfect. Perfect, you see? Always and never, nothing else than perfect.”
32
I returned to Dor to find storm clouds boiling darkly, stretching in all directions over the elm forest. The whole place cowered under an atmosphere of bluster and hectoring. I couldn’t remember ever seeing rain before in Dorothy’s little sun-trap, and as I stepped over the lip in the wall and squeezed into the herb garden, I felt the first fat tears of what promised to be a dramatically wet few hours.
“Christ,” I whispered to myself when I realised what had happened.
The cloud of flies had thickened and maddened. Their movements were too fast for the eye to follow and they seemed to have been attracted to and excited by the herbs. Hundreds more leaves had grown over night. Tribes of plants pushed themselves up through the spaces between the darkness. They rose with proud, keen and wobbling heads. I entered the humming zone of insects and began to pick. Flies hit my face repeatedly. After perhaps fifteen minutes, I felt a gust of warm air and the weather broke. I ran into the kitchen and, without stopping to remove my sodden coat, reached under the sink for some red onions and began chopping. As I was unscrewing the cap on the tawny port, the telephone rang.
“Killian?”
“Mr Mayle?”
Could it be him? The voice shared my teacher’s biscuity timbre, but it seemed so graspless, so removed.
“I’m having to call now, because you haven’t had the courtesy to get in touch,” he said.
“Okay?”
“Well, it’s your final day at King tomorrow and I don’t yet know whether or not you’ll be back at college on Monday. I contacted Ambrose but he wasn’t much help. He had yet to speak with Max about it so was unsure. But I can only assume, as
you’re not there at the moment, that we will be seeing you?”
“I’m in,” I said.
“You are?”
I gripped the receiver. “Of course,” I said, with a lightly insulted laugh. “Max just gave me the afternoon off as a reward. A treat for all my hard work.”
There was a moment of quiet.
“Well, congratulations,” he said. Some of his warmth returned. I heard it and I felt it, too, lifting through my body. “I’ll be sure to tell the class the good news. They’ll be delighted for you.”
I experienced a sudden and almost overwhelming fondness for him.
“Thanks for all your help, sir,” I said. “It’s all because of you.”
I wished he was there with me now. I wished he could help me.
“Yes, well… Killian. Be careful. Don’t…”
The drenched wind swiped at the roof above me. Glass shook in the panes. I stood there, alone.
“Yes,” I interrupted him. “I know.”
I finished preparing my sauce. This time, though, I added just half of the small, teardrop-shaped leaf. At the moment it reached the correct consistency, I dipped my teaspoon in the sauce and blew on it. I was in such a state of urgency that extra space seemed to have been pushed between the seconds. I was actually aware of the time passing between the stuff hitting my tongue and the taste being detected.
My eyes were the first to go and then the back of my throat – a feeling of release as the pleasure of it caused muscles to involuntarily relax throughout my body. I groaned and grabbed onto the kitchen worktop as if to support myself. The most curious thing about it was that if you weren’t looking for the herb, you wouldn’t know it was there – this earthy, corrupt hum which was somehow redolent of young, intimate, sweated skin. It rang through all the sauce’s extant layers, drawing out in each previously unknown depths of flavour. The port sang new hymns of cherries and strawberries; the tomatoes became prouder and juicier, the Worcester sauce took on a cavernous spice and tang. The whole thing become three-dimensional. It seemed to drench the palate and the lust it generated for more was thrilling; magical. But then, disaster: the heat and then the brutally gathering sexual urge.
