by Will Storr
“Right,” I said. “Okay.”
As I was putting the phone down, the light turned on – a great scorching yellow burst of it like boiling water.
“Fuck,” I said, squinting at the shadow in the doorway.
“Still suffering?”
It was Andy, leaning against the door frame with his arms folded, his fulsome lips bunched into a smirk, his heavy brows furrowed. I rested my forehead on a fisted hand in a way that I hoped he’d interpret as “fuck off”.
“Bit of a shit service yesterday,” he continued. “Bit of a shit two services, really.”
I ignored him.
“Complaints,” he said. “Food wasn’t the same.”
I couldn’t work out what I hated the most: his nose, his eyes, his mouth or his hair.
“Well, what have you got to say for yourself?” I said.
“It’s not my fault, Killian,” he said, puffing himself up. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
All of it. I hated all of it.
“You know, it’s funny,” he continued. “I followed the recipes in the blue book precisely.”
“Well, you can relax,” I said. “I’m back now.”
I folded my arms, aware of the lump in my apron pocket where a fresh pouch of Earl’s Leaf had been secreted. Andy moved in and perched on the edge of my desk, his large buttock bulging through his trousers, his voice softening into a condescending smear.
“Killian, mate. Level with me. How are you making those sauces? What’s in them?”
“I’m not ‘mate’, mate,” I said. “I’m ‘chef’. And I’m sorry if your ego’s hurting. Obviously I can never have another day off for the rest of my life. Obviously this place needs me more than you realised.”
“Listen, mate,” he said. “Don’t give me that. I know how to make sauces. I’ve been learning this shit for years. Hours and hours, shift after shift, bollocking after bollocking, cuts, burns, aching bones, exhaustion so bad you can’t sleep, years and years and years of it, so much work that your body moulds around it, like they could give you an autopsy and pick out your chopping muscle and your stirring muscle and your bent spine and your eroded fucking wrists and say, ‘yeah, that’s a chef, I guarantee it’. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve earned the right to be here, and I’ve earned the right to tell you what I know – and I know this for a fact. Those recipes are not as you’ve written them down. They aren’t right.”
A shadow moved in from the corridor. Kathryn. She entered with a cautious half-grin. “Remembered how your legs work, have you?”
Her smile faded as her comment clattered, unwelcome, to the floor.
“What’s going on?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said, standing. “I think Andy’s accusing me of something.”
“What are you putting in those sauces?” he said. “Just tell us.”
“Talent,” I shouted. “Fresh fucking talent. Why is it so hard for you to believe that I am a good cook? Don’t you believe any of the reviews? Don’t you believe our waiting list?”
There was no blood in the tips of my fingers. There was no blood in me at all.
“Disloyal cunt!” I shouted. “Get out! You’re fired.”
“You’re doing a very unwise thing,” he said.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said. “You’re not irreplaceable.”
As he rounded the doorway, he muttered, “That’s not what I meant.”
44
I sat down, slowly, behind my desk. Kathryn perched on its corner, where Andy had just been.
“You’re not really going to sack him, are you?”
“If I can’t get loyalty from my most senior chef, what’s the point?”
She glanced at my pot of pens and said, “Loyalty isn’t the answer to all your problems, Killian.”
“It’s the most important thing.”
“But it’s a lie, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s a compromise people make – people who are desperate to be loved. You’re not like that, Killian. You don’t need your arse kissed every day, like Max does. You don’t need team players.” She spoke the words as if they were fouling her tongue. “You need people who want to work hard for their own sake and who’ll be brutally honest with you. And he was only being honest.”
“What’s wrong with being a team player?” I said.
“Team players?” Her face twisted. “Bland, middling, bullshitting, corporate kitchen politicians. You want lone rangers, people who do it for their own ego. Cooks who feel like knifing themselves in the heart if they make a mistake. That’s Andy. You know, there’s a reason communism doesn’t work, Kill. Everybody has to work for the team, so nobody does any work at all.”
She’d lost me, totally. “That’s different,” I said. “And, anyway, he was calling me a liar.”
“He was asking about your sauces.”
She met my eye and held it. My blood lurched. I refused to look away. There was a clatter, back in the kitchen. I was aware of the reflection of the light in her irises.
“There’s nothing to ask about,” I said.
She paused, and with a tentative look said, “Just talent.”
“I mean, come on, what does he think? That man actually believes that I’m buying pheromones from a sex shop in Soho and dropping them in my food. Have you ever heard of anything as crazy as that? Think about it, though.”
She looked down, apparently examining her thumbs.
“It does seem unlikely.”
“He’s delusional,” I said. “I can’t have someone with delusions working here. Imagine if he cracked completely and came for me with a fucking chopper,” I laughed. “Imagine if he went for you?”
I tried to make her catch my smile, but she wouldn’t.
“What’s up?” I said.
“I just need reassuring, I think.”
“Fucking…” I stood up. “Not you too?”
“Not about that,” she said, quickly. “It’s just, this is the right thing, isn’t it?”
I wasn’t sure what she meant.
“Of course it is,” I said. “The way things are going, we’ll have everything. Max is already halfway gone. I mean, the ‘Lifetime Achievement’ award – everyone knows what that means. He’ll take his retirement, open up a monstrous pit in Las Vegas, cash his reputation in for good. And Ambrose will make me executive chef overseeing both restaurants and that means it’s up to me to appoint the chef de file of King. And that will be you. By this time next year. I promise.”
She glanced into the empty corner. We sat like that for a while.
“I spoke to my mum this morning,” she said, eventually. “She said she’s fallen again. Hit her face. I could tell that someone was listening in, though. I just don’t know what to do. Last time I complained, she told me not to. She begged me not to make a fuss about it. I’m sure they got their own back on her somehow. Seeing your mother frightened like that, it does something to you. I’d do anything–”
I stood in front of her and placed my hands on her shoulders.
“You have to trust me. We’ll get what we want. We have to grab it. Take what we want. And then just pray it all works out. Which, you know, it will. It has to.”
Shortly afterwards, she left the office and an hour later, I gathered the brigade.
“Right, quick announcement,” I said. “Andy’s gone. He’s not coming back. I’ll be carrying on with sauces and I’ll also be running the pass. And a word of warning to you all. I will not have disloyalty in my team. Not a whisper of it.”
I scanned the men as they looked back at me, their limbs arranged in angular discomfort, their faces rounded out variously with alarm, defiance and fear.
“The last time I ran the pass you let me down. That won’t happen today. I want you to remember: every plate that goes out there, every bite of every dish is a judgement on me. It’s my name that’s above the door. It’s my name that everyone wants to fail. When you’re working in my kitchen, you are no longer
you. You don’t exist. You’re my hands, you’re my eyes, you’re my brain, you’re my body. And be warned – I’m not the slightest bit afraid to punish myself, to draw blood, when I get things wrong.”
I let them stand, for a moment, in the weirdness.
“We have made Glamis the greatest restaurant in the country; probably the world. We have a reputation to defend. Any mistakes and we lose it. There cannot be any mistakes. We must take perfection and better it. And if I hear any hint of d-disloyalty, you’re going the same way as Andy. Okay? To work.”
All day and all night, my anger radiated out through the room. At just after nine, I was about to dip my hand into my apron pocket when I was surprised by a presence that seemed to slide up to me, silently. It was our best apprentice, the shy boy from Leeds whose surname – something French or Italian – I could never remember. I only knew him as Marco.
“Don’t fucking look at me,” I told him.
Rather than shrinking back, as I had expected, he firmed up his shoulders and stepped towards me. Without thinking, I pushed him back, with both hands, and he fell against the steel unit behind him. He stood again, his face pinked, and balled his right fist. It was a blur; a mess; a panic; too quick for rational thought. Somehow, instinctively, I reached back for my paring knife. For a terrible moment, my fingertips touched the steel handle. I only realised what I was doing when I saw Marco’s eyes widen. I pulled my arm back – as shocked as if I’d accidentally stuck it in the burner – then turned and announced to the kitchen, “No one fucking looks at me when I’m cooking. Do you understand? No one looks at me.”
“Yes, Chef!”
That night was to be my finest service yet.
* * *
It was these days at Glamis that made me realise how badly my teacher, Mr Mayle, had been mistaken. Perhaps it said something about his failure as a chef that he believed the secret ingredient of unforgettable food was “humanity”. My time at the restaurant also added depth and light to something I’d been thinking about for a while. It started after I’d seen a child psychologist on the Nine O’Clock News discussing the effects of spanking: “You must remember that every two-year-old, if they had the physical strength, would be a killer,” she said. “They know they’re dangerous – unconsciously, of course – and this can cause them great fear and distress. This is why all children need order and discipline. It’s reassuring for them. Rules make them secure and therefore happy. And this doesn’t really change as we grow into adults.”
This made sense of so much for me. We are constantly in a state of internal war, our wants battling our needs. When we’re young, our wants are so powerful that they terrify us. But if we’re parented strictly and well, we learn that we’re not alone in our fight against them. We have back-up. Our instincts for greed, selfishness and egotism will not be allowed to catch and ignite into murder, vandalism and chaos. To the most primitive part of our minds, there is nothing more reassuring than being told what to do. It may be unsatisfying in the moment to hear the word “no”, but on a deeper plane, no music is more soothing.
I had realised that what separates humankind from the animals is an incendiary combination of imagination and obedience. These are the qualities that built civilisation. And the mortar that holds them together – the infrastructure, the pipes, the circuitry – is loyalty. It takes someone with imagination to lead the masses into disciplined self-sacrifice, and if those masses are sufficiently loyal to him, the end result is progress, genius, magic; the end result is everything good about the world.
A correctly functioning kitchen is the human struggle in microcosm; ideal society in excelsis. Every cook in there wants to be the chef de cuisine, the man with the imagination. They want to depose him. But at the same time they are violently devoted to him. Their fidelity is felt in the most primitive way. They are in the sphere of a strong, powerful leader, a man of vision and control, a man who they instinctively know could make a difference to humanity, and so billions of years of human evolution kick in and they slot into place. They bend their necks, raise their eyes and say, as one, “Yes, Chef”.
And through this subservience they become incredible cooks. Through this loyalty, self-sacrifice and pain, through the force with which they battle their wants, one or two might eventually prove themselves hardy enough to become like their leader. This is how it operates: accomplishment through loyalty, happiness through struggle, freedom through work.
So now I knew where Mayle had got it wrong, with his happy proclamations about humanity. I had been taught a lesson I swore never to forget, the hidden truth of all the Michelin kitchens in the world. The secret ingredient of unforgettable food is suffering.
45
Driving home that night, I found myself taking risks I never had before. My foot taunted the accelerator pedal as I barrelled past junctions and lorries and around tight country corners. I was playing lightly with danger and it made me feel free. I would go faster and faster. I would take risks. And if the ground wasn’t there to catch me, so be it. Notions of safety, of looking after yourself, of creeping through life constantly obsessing about arranging things just so that everything will always come out best for you – it all suddenly seemed so timid.
I pulled up outside Dor and walked through the tall, curling gates of the physic garden. The Earl’s Leaf was surging forward in erect, willing clumps, and the other two herbs seemed to be doing better than ever, the snaking stamens of the Hindeling licking the air hungrily and the purple heads of the Cauter nodding in the wind. Flies zoomed madly here and there, a mathematical chaos of legs and wings and unfathomable purpose.
I harvested a fresh armful of Earl’s Leaf and when I was back under the dull light of the kitchen, I noticed how much this room – the feeling of it – had changed. Whereas I used to remember the height and madness of the shelves and cupboards as tantalising and mysterious, now they seemed to loom in threat, casting great columns of darkness upon each other in some silent war of shadows. The jars and bottles lurked and plotted, spying down from their ceiling-bound eyrie; the mad contraptions had the air of torture devices. Perhaps the most dramatic shift of all, though, was in the disappearance of the warmth that had once seemed so unvanquishable. It was as if the chill that inhabited the stairs had leaked out and spread itself everywhere. The flies, at least, seemed to like it. They danced beneath the light, picked their way confidently over the table top and watched me with a jittery intensity from the cracks in the beams and in the mortar.
My task for the night was baking. I wanted to learn how to incorporate Earl’s Leaf into a dessert. I knew, of course, that Dorothy’s “Dotty Cakes” had softly bewitched the Herstmonceux villagers in the seventies, but I couldn’t imagine how she’d done it because the way that Earl’s Leaf worked with flavour seemed inherently savoury. There was a technical question too. It was one thing for the delicate plant to be added to a sauce right at the end of cooking, but dumping it in a dense, sticky dough and baking it in a hot oven? It would kill it off, surely.
I made twenty simple cupcakes, adding a little bit more of the herb into each. The first had a large crumb, about the size of a match-head, the last a dangerously powerful dose of five finely chopped leaves. After an impatient wait, I took Dorothy’s old holly-patterned oven gloves, which were frayed and covered in scorched bruises, and pulled the trays out, allowing the fragrant steam to rise from the cracked, moist domes before breaking a nibble-sized chunk off the edge of the weakest cake. The taste was so incredible that I couldn’t help but laugh. The Earl’s Leaf had simultaneously lifted and darkened the complex vanilla, saffron and caramel flavours of the sponge. The plant also kept its aphrodisiac effect: I could tell that if I wanted to avoid problems, I should probably eat no more. It was amazing – the correct dose, it seemed, was just half a match-head.
I yawned so deeply that my jaw gave a painful click. Conscious, suddenly, of something indistinct in the silence, I looked around. A fly took off from a crack in a beam. The
n, I heard a noise.
Tap, tap, tap.
I stopped. I heard it again.
Tap, tap, tap. A voice. “Killian?”
It couldn’t be.
“Kathryn?”
I paced through the darkness of the kitchen and the lounge and turned the key in the old door. And there she was – her head cast down, her shoulders raised defensively against the weight of serious night that she’d just made her way through. Strands of loose hair were picked out by the weak light of the hallway. Her nose was wrinkled in distress, her arms folded in her favourite ski jacket, its pink and pale-green triangles of colour looking jarringly modern against the gruff brick and mean ceiling of the cottage’s dwarfish entrance.
“Sorry to come, but I really want to talk to you,” she said.
I followed her into the kitchen and she sat at the table, looking carefully into the darkness – by chance, towards the exact spot that Dorothy used to stand and stir and treat me to her amazing lessons. I pulled out the chair beside her.
“What happened today, with Marco,” she said. “I don’t like it, Kill. I don’t like what’s happening. Not just to you – to both of us.”
I stood up.
“I’m running my kitchen, that’s all I’m doing,” I said. “I’m controlling it. I’m doing a good job. I’m getting excellence out of those cooks. I’m doing it for you.”
She didn’t respond. She just sat there, staring at the void that Dorothy had left. And then, very quietly, she said, “You’re becoming a bit like him.”
“Him? What?”
“Like Max.”
“How could you even say that? That’s like, the complete reverse of the truth. I’m the one who’s standing up to Max. I’m the only one who can serve justice on that bastard. What don’t you understand about that? He’s a bully and a fraud. He doesn’t care about food. It’s all about his stars. His fame. His celebrity. And I’m going to take them all off him, because that’s what he deserves, and put you in his kitchen. That’s what justice is. That’s a good thing. And if you’re not going to help me, if you’re going to be so disloyal as to…”
