by Will Storr
A couple passed by and Max stepped back. In the instant before he made his elegant way up the stairs and away from me, I saw his face lighten with victory.
Half an hour later I was back up there, forcing the remains of the first wrap up my nose. I leaned back on the wall and slid downwards, staring at the piss drips on the floor, waiting for the effect to hit. It didn’t take long. I pushed myself to my feet and realised that I needed Kathryn.
I found her at the bar, looking more beautiful than I’d ever seen her, ignoring a young Italian man with an expensive watch who was trying to engage her.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” I said, above the sound of the editor of Restaurant Magazine giving out awards on the stage. “Why did you walk off?”
“You were being a cock,” she said. “But luckily for you I’ve since realised this whole building is filled with drunken idiot cock chefs and the prospect of making small talk with them is a very slightly more hideous prospect than listening to you tell the BBC what an amazing genius you are.” She paused and, before I had the chance to respond, said, “God, you look like shit.”
Inside my head, a grand nation of cherubim ejaculated simultaneously.
“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “I think it’s worn off.”
All of a sudden, I felt rather chatty.
“What would your secret word be then?” I said.
“Secret word?”
“You know, what Andy was saying when we went out that night – about the S&M people. They have a word they say for when the pain gets too much.”
“Oh!” she laughed. “Hmm… well, yes… Pippin. My word would be pippin.”
“That’s not very sexy,” I said.
“No, but it’s a lovely word, don’t you think? Pippin. A lovely word and a lovely apple. My favourite kind of apple. What would yours be?”
“If yours is pippin, mine is windfall,” I decided. “I always feel sorry for those windfall apples. They get blown off the tree and then stamped into the ground, with all the bruises and the maggots. But they’re perfectly good apples that have just been ignored by everyone and that’s why they die. So it’s a good word for the pain getting too much, if you think about it. Windfall apples live a life of pain.”
Kathryn nodded wryly. “You’re very much the apple philosopher tonight.”
I pushed my fingertip down inside my collar. I hated this starched, neck-tightening shirt. It was the shirt of a Victorian headmaster; the shirt of a corpse. I took off my tie and stuffed it into my trouser pocket.
“I have to sit down,” I said. “Why is everyone looking at me?”
“They’re not,” said Kathryn.
I unfastened the first three buttons of my shirt.
“Is it because I’m famous?”
She patted my hand. “Yes, dear.”
Finally, the barman delivered my drink. I gifted him my tie, opened my throat and poured down the whisky. A jellyfish of nausea wrapped its tentacles around my stomach. I sniffed heavily and gripped the bar.
“I think this cocaine’s off,” I said.
“Shall we go and sit down?”
A field of coloured prickles shimmered in front of my eyes. Then the sickness passed and a new surge of power charged up my spine like beams of light. That was better. There was no past, there were no problems. There was only me and Kathryn and our jewel of a restaurant and our perfect future. I had done it. I had become magnificent.
“Are you all right, Kill? Your face has gone a bit berserk. Come on, let’s sit down.”
“There’s something I have to tell you,” I said. “I love you. I love you so much. I want to spend the rest of my life with you and, the restaurant – I want to do it properly. I’ve always known I could be a decent chef, Kathryn. But I want to do it on my own terms. I’m going to do it properly.”
She glanced anxiously at the drunken man beside her.
“Pipe down,” she said. “No gooey talk in public. I love you too.”
She kissed me quickly on the chin. I felt it again: the surge.
“I don’t need those herbs to cook, you know,” I said. “I won the Young Saucier. That proves I deserve it.”
“Herbs?” she said, a blade of irritation evident in her tone. “God, what are you on about? Why don’t you shush, hey? Do you want another drink?”
A wave. A slump. A dead wind. I gripped the bar again.
“I think we need to go home,” said Kathryn. “All that cocaine has made you poorly.”
“Hang on,” I muttered.
I felt in my trouser pocket for the second wrap and held it towards her.
“Have some with me. Go on,” I said. “Every fucker in this room is on it, having fun. But you walk around sometimes like fun is kind of beneath you; like joy is a toy you used to play with when you were a kid but now you’re too grown up for. You shouldn’t look down on happiness. You shouldn’t condescend to it – that’s just such an English thing to do. Happiness, fun, excitement, joy – why don’t you deserve that? Why don’t we?”
“It’s just–”
My words were coming fast now, and from a place I hadn’t accessed before.
“Trying new things. Being foolish. Risky. Fearless. Standing up to the pain and saying, ‘I fucking love the fucking pain’. I mean, pain? What is it? Humans are built for it. We need it. It’s like muscles need to tear so they can grow. Pain is nothing to be frightened of. You go into it, and it’s a bit dark, it’s a bit scary, but it’s just a corridor. And at the other end of the corridor is happiness. It’s always happiness. And that’s life, isn’t it? That’s the whole thing.”
For a second, I forgot what I was talking about. Remembering, I eagerly grabbed Kathryn’s arms and gave her the full sell.
“It’ll be fine. It’ll be amazing. You know, all that stuff you were telling me about going out and taking what you can get? Well what about taking some life? What about doing it now? With me? We deserve it. Don’t we?”
She didn’t respond. I was close and I knew it.
“We’ll look back on this, one day, when we’re old, when we’re at the end. We’ll look back on tonight and it will be the most brilliant memory.”
She hesitated. Then she downed her vodka, plucked the wrap from my fingers and returned fifteen minutes later, looking wary and crafty and thrilled.
“My tongue’s gone numb,” she whispered, her eyes alive with adventure. “It tastes disgusting.”
“So does vodka,” I said, handing her an icy tumbler. “And I’ve got you a triple of that.”
Talking, talking, talking. Running through the crowd, with my hand in hers. Knocking elbows and collapsing in smiles, curled up in a dark corner, laughing until we ached in our stomachs and in our throats. More to drink. Another package from Ambrose. More to drink. To the toilets again. Up the stairs. Falling down. All looking at me. Talking. Turning around at the bar and Kathryn’s lost.
Where did she go? And who is he? Why is he looking at me? Where are my socks? I like being sockless. I like how it feels on my feet. So many intricate sensations. Where is Max? So wrong, Max Mann. He shouldn’t have doubted me. He shouldn’t have hated me, he should have liked me, he should have loved me. I’ll take them off, the shirt buttons, the rest, one, two, three, four, now you’ll all see the scars from the ovens, the scars from the cuts, the scars from the kettle, the burns on my nipples and there, off with the fucking shirt, you can have that, don’t mention it, sir, and now you can see the fresh cuts on my arms, and the cuts on my ribs, all skin and bone, all cuts and love –
A stage. The stage. Beautiful, bright. And there’s that man, that man with the Rocky hair from the magazine about restaurants.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome to the stage the winner of the 1985 Restaurant Magazine Lifetime Achievement award – from the legendary London restaurant King, the Gentleman Chef himself, Max Mann.”
It all goes black. A single spotlight, over the lectern, hard and brilliant and sharp. It’
s waiting for him and they’re cheering. They’re cheering for him. My night. Fuckers, look. I’ll make the fuckers look. Step onto the stage, one, two, three, I’ll make the fuckers look at my skin and my bone and my scars and my love. He should have loved me.
Inside the spotlight. You can’t see anything here. Blinding white on my skin. Smoke in the air. The stage cold and sticky beneath my feet. The lectern. There’s a little support in the lectern. Like a shelf. Like a step. Okay, so, I’ll step on it then. One foot on the lectern. Then the other. All those people. I’m on the lectern. On top! My night. Look at the people, all in their hundreds. Look at them looking at me.
The lectern is shaking. It might fall, into the crowd. My arms out to balance. Now they can see what I am. Centre stage, high up here, the army of black murmurers staring silent, tamed. My arms straight out, the spotlight on me, my skin and my bones and my scars and my cuts and there he is, there’s my own Max, at the side of the stage, and I shout to him, I scream to him, “You should have loved me”, and the lectern falls and I fall.
Later. Outside. A man with his arm around my shoulder. Asking about me. Friendly but not friendly. Asking about secrets; about secret ingredients. A journalist.
Shouting. I punch him. I’m kicked. In the ribs. In the head. In the back. I curl into myself. I need to sleep. I can’t. Stuff. I need some more of that stuff.
Alone. Cold.
And then someone reaching down. Pale hands. Shaking fingers. A face. Her. I lift my head from the concrete and all I want to say, as she takes me in her arms, is windfall, windfall, windfall.
42
I didn’t sleep at all that night. I lay on Kathryn’s sofa, empty of life. At around half past four in the morning I couldn’t stand it any more. I tried to cry. I tried to force a break in the solidity that I had carried with me for years. But it wouldn’t crack. I wanted tears. I wanted rupture. But I ended up just barking these ridiculous dry sobs that bottomed out into a thin, wounded cat whine.
I wanted to be clean again. I wanted purity for me and for Kathryn. This couldn’t go on, this cheating. It was exactly what Aunt Dorothy had warned me about, and I’d failed her. Tomorrow, I would throw my pouch of Earl’s Leaf away. As soon as I had the chance, I would burn the herb garden. And if that meant the end of Glamis, then that would be what it meant. Perhaps Kathryn would come with me to south-west France, where we would quietly continue our training. And we’d return to London in maybe five or six years and Ambrose could fund a new opening. Smaller than Glamis. Humble and simple and honest. I smiled as my plan unfolded itself. I felt a kernel of returning warmth in my chest.
I manoeuvred myself to a sitting position and thought about watching the television. The remote was nowhere to be seen and I didn’t fancy the trek to the other side of the coffee table to switch it on. Besides, it would probably only be Ceefax or the Open University at this time of the morning. There was a pile of magazines near my feet. They looked like issues of Restaurant Magazine. Urgh. Just beneath the latest edition, though, there seemed to be something else. I pulled it out. A brochure.
Ten Pines House. It looked like a beautiful place. A gloried country mansion in a world of green and blue. I stared at the picture. I wished I could wake up in Ten Pines House. I could tell, from the broken spine and the state of the paper, that the booklet had been read often. One of the pages had had its corner bent over. I opened it up to see a nurse in angelic white assisting a woman who was climbing out of a swimming pool. Another picture showed a huge vase of colourful flowers sitting in a sunlit window and, just visible in the corner, a precisely made-up bed. The pillows looked plumply inviting, the sheets gentle and new. There were some numbers on the page, drawn in biro. Kathryn had written: £2993 p.a. and underlined it.
For her mum. This must be where she wants to send her; her plan for when she earns enough money. You’d need to be the boss of somewhere, to afford that. Chef de file. The warmth in my chest vanished. I tried to stand but a wave of fizzing weakness struck me and I fell, helplessly, back onto the sofa. Once recovered, I crawled on my hands and knees into the bathroom.
Using the sink to pull myself up, I opened the medicine cabinet, found a pink razor and, gathering as much force as I could muster, crushed it on the floor with the heel of my hand. Picking the blade out from the shards, I swiped it into the side of my stomach and watched the long lips of skin open up and begin to dribble. I swiped again, the adrenaline and the endorphins making me feel comforted and powerful.
There were only a few sheets of toilet paper left on the roll. I groaned at the realisation that I had to somehow make it to the kitchen and back with a tea towel. Staggering, leaning, crawling, I finally managed it when I noticed the sickly dawn light slithering through the bathroom blind and up the dirty white walls. I wondered what Dorothy would say if she could see me now. I pictured her, here with me. “Oh, Kill, my love, my darling, what’s happened?” and she would soothe me and she would understand.
There were footsteps coming from Kathryn’s bedroom. I felt as if my heart was too strong for my body; as if the power of its beats might shatter the rest of me. The rattle of the door handle sounded unnaturally loud. The lock, I noticed, was broken. I managed to throw myself against it, just in time.
“Killian?” she said. “Is that you?”
“Don’t come in.”
“Are you on the floor? What are you doing on the floor?”
“Go to bed.”
“Let me in.”
She shoved the door, hard. The handle hit the back of my head and I cowed away. She was barefoot, the faint blue light from the window shining ghost-like off her plain white nightshirt.
“Oh my God, Killian! Is that blood?”
It looked black, instead of red, in the dawn’s haze.
“I was going to clear it up.”
She crouched down to look at my cuts.
“What have you done?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry. I was going to clean it up.”
She reached out and tenderly touched my wounds. Fascinated by what she was seeing, she asked, “Does it hurt?” She wobbled, slightly, and I realised that she was still drunk. “You’re crazy,” she said, smiling. She picked the blade up from the floor and touched it with her thumb. Staring at it, she quoted me from earlier: “And at the end of the darkness, there’s always happiness.” And then, “I want to try it.”
“No,” I said. I tried to take the blade from her but she pulled it away.
“You’re right about me,” she said, with a smile of vaguely cruel defiance. “I need to be more fearless. Pain is nothing to be frightened of.”
“Don’t,” I said.
The fastest struggle and then “Ach!” She’d done it. I clasped my hand tightly around her wrist.
“No, Kathryn,” I said. “Please don’t do that. Please don’t ever–”
Dropping the blade, she touched the place where she’d used it. She looked intense and detached and fascinated. She brought her fingers back and studied the translucent red stain on their tips. Then she put her hands on my jaw and kissed me, lowering me gently onto the tiles and the blood that had pooled on them. Running her hands down the scars on my torso, she groaned gently and then lifted her nightshirt over her head. Her breasts pushed softly onto me; her perfection pressing in on my ruined skin. She rolled, slightly, deliberately, into the blood, so it was on her: on her arms; on her ribs; on her breasts. I breathed slowly; exhausted; weightless in the pleasure, as she kissed down my neck and stroked with her tongue and her fingers across my scars. Not a single blemish was left without her gentle attention; not even the fresh ones.
She moved down further and further still until, eventually, she slid my boxer shorts down to my knees. I stared towards the ceiling as her mouth worked between my legs, my eyes unfocused, my hands gripping and releasing in an attempt to modulate the bliss. When she was finished, she pulled her nightshirt on, her back to me to hide her toplessness, before walking with a drowsy, con
tented slouch towards the kitchen.
“Go to bed,” she instructed. “I’ll sort the bathroom out.”
43
BAD BOY OF COOKING IN AWARDS UPROAR.
I moved the newspaper up to hide my face, grateful that I was in the hazy smoking carriage of the early-morning commuter train to London.
Fiery Protégé of Chef to the Stars Max Mann Steals ex-Boss’s Big Moment.
My hands were shaking even more than they had been before I’d seen the huge picture of me on page 3 of the Daily Mirror. I looked deranged in the photo – topless, scarred, mouth half open, spotlit in the blackness of the Café de Paris stage and moments away from falling into the crowd from the lectern that I’d climbed, arms stretched out like some ghoulish, self-harming Jesus.
I’d spent the previous day in bed, back at the cottage. Earlier that morning, I’d forced myself to eat breakfast, following a long night in which I was still too strung out to sleep. I let myself in through the back door of Glamis and sat in my office for ten minutes with the light off, trying to turn all the noises and directions in my head into one firm and steady stream of awareness. When the phone rang, I jumped.
“Aha! The bad boy of cooking returns!” said Ambrose. “Bravo, Killian. Very well done. Excellent work. Bookings have gone wild. I know I told you to work the old image but, by golly, you have really excelled yourself.”
“Thanks,” I muttered, repetitively smoothing my eyebrow with my thumb.
“And the BBC have been on the phone. The Food and Drink people want to take you up on that offer. When can they come in to film? What shall I tell them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Fantastic opportunity. They’re going to send Russell Harty. Good old Max for suggesting it. But, listen, I have to tell you – he is rather sore that you chose his moment for your little stunt. He’ll get over it, but be kind to him, won’t you? We’re all on the same team, after all, and at the end of the day, you have a lot to thank him for.”
The rage prickled down the back of my neck in fearful detail.
