Chapter Two
Tissett
It was a squat, stone pub with window boxes full of drowned pansies. On a patch of grassy mud beside the car park, four blackly sodden picnic benches sprawled with their legs in the air, like cows with rigor mortis.
At three o’clock on a wet autumn Sunday the pub, though open, was almost devoid of life, apart from the pinch-faced middle-aged barmaid, and a lone drinker moodily watching football on the TV in the corner.
The barmaid took an affronted, hissing breath. “You’ll be the chef,” she accused us. “Brendan! They’re here!”
A barrel-shaped man burst through from the kitchen with a smell of gravy and damp tea-towels.
“Brendan.” The landlord shook my hand vigorously. In his late thirties, he had fading curly blond hair, developing jowls and small, sunken eyes. He was nervous: not a usual state for him, I guessed, watching him rub his hands down the tea-towel tucked into the belt below his belly. Not as big as landlord’s bellies often are. Or it could have just been that the rest of him was broad to match.
“You’re Charlotte,” he said confidently to her, pumping her hand, “can tell Hugh’s sister,” and to me, more doubtfully, “Elanor?” I saw his eyes were drawn to my nose. People’s eyes always were.
“Lannie.”
“Lannie? Not heard that one before.”
I smiled and said nothing.
“You’re from Salford, right?”
“Originally.” Elanor wasn’t a Salford name. Too saintly and sensible. My mother had ideas above her station, once upon a time when she was still capable of having ideas at all. My little brother Karl re-christened me Lannie when he was two and I was six. Only my mother had called me Elanor, maybe in an attempt to keep some sort of ownership over me. She had little enough else, God knows, when I was running the household, doing her shopping and cooking and cleaning. I’d been forced, against my will, to be both saintly and sensible. I hadn’t enjoyed it.
“Lannie. Let me show you round.” He began to bustle, slowly. There wasn’t a huge amount to show: one largish room and one tiny one, with tobacco-yellow walls and unforgiving bench seats. A photo of the pub in 1912 suggested not much had changed since then.
Brendan wheezed faintly as he talked. “Bar. Lounge, toilets, that’s the snug. Lads only. By tradition, not law, but they get narked if… That’s the dart-board. This is Frank. Jesus, Frank, what are you watching?”
“One of your old tapes,” said the man in the corner, gazing at the TV with resigned intensity. The score was 49 nil. Probably not football, then, though there was a lot of running and falling over. I guessed some species of rugby.
“Jesus, Frank,” said Brendan with exasperation, “the tour from hell? Why?”
Frank, distant and blunt-featured, took his time. “Because it happened.”
“It shouldn’t have.”
“But it did.”
Brendan plunged at the control and paused the video. “Frank! There’s a perfectly good grand slam in that cupboard. Ireland 2003. Or what about the ninety-seven lions? Do you a world of good. Or the Sydney world cup final–”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“Well, all right. But what about the semi? Uruguay, for Christ’s sake!”
Frank shook his head, cradled the remote, and fast-forwarded. The score went up to 56.
“Jesus,” muttered Brendan. He motioned us on. “Come and see the kitchen. Mind how you… Frank’s a bit, um,” he added once we were through the door. “Well, you’ll get to know him. Good lad. He’s a regular.”
“This is nice,” said Charlotte to the kitchen. “Isn’t it nice, Lannie?”
I was still looking. At least it was clean: a big plus there. But after Tzabo, with its acres of top-of-the-range brushed steel, huge grills like the snarling mouths of Hell and stations all separate, all equipped, two yards of white Formica and a trio of domestic gas cookers didn’t qualify as nice, even if one of them was a pretend range. There were two microwaves and a chip pan on a shelf.
“You don’t use that?” I said. Chip pans give me the heebie-jeebies. The old memory came whoomphing back like a punch bag heading for my stomach. The stink of burning fat, the clinging pall of oily smoke.
The stench had woken me in the night and dragged me downstairs to find the chip pan on fire in the kitchen, and my mother snoring on the living-room floor. The kitchen was full of smoke. Oil had bubbled down the sides of the pan and was burning all over the stove. I switched the electric off at the wall, doused tea-towels in the sink and smothered the flames as I’d learnt in Food Tech. There was a stain like a huge black petal on the wall behind the cooker. I heaved my mother into the recovery position, as taught in Health Ed, crept back to bed, and lay there shivering with fear and anger. I was twelve.
“That’s just for ourselves,” said Brendan. “Makes better chips than that thing.” I saw, with relief, a catering-standard deep fat fryer in the corner.
“I presume you don’t object to chips?” said the stroppy barmaid.
“Of course she doesn’t, Rhoda.”
“The cookers have been serviced,” she told me indignantly. “We passed our inspection in May.”
I realised that she was Brendan’s wife, and that she didn’t want us here. She was younger than I had at first supposed, with a taut, angry face and thin hair starched into paralysis. Her nose was as sharp as her manner: she looked down it fiercely and made curt corrections as Brendan introduced the fridges and freezers in the draughty lean-to, the veteran dishwasher, the pans (not bad) and the knives (not good, but that didn’t matter since I had my own.)
“What do you think?” asked Brendan. He sounded anxious, though I couldn’t see why. He was doing me a favour. I was the one needing sanctuary.
“It’s all quite brilliant!” said Charlotte as loudly and enthusiastically as if it were Jamie Oliver’s kitchen complete with TV crew.
I said, “Can I see your menus?”
Brendan hovered nervously while I studied Steak and Ale Pie, Breaded Haddock and Cajun Chicken. The highlights were Lamb Shank with Autumn Berries and Scotch Salmon with Baby New Potatoes. Tedium leached from the paper.
“It all sounds lovely,” said Charlotte valiantly.
“The salmon’s very popular,” said Brendan.
“Baby New?” I queried. “In November?”
“Most of our clientele are happy with chips. The main meals are in the big freezer. The other’s starters and puddings.”
“What sort of puddings?”
“Sticky toffee’s favourite at the moment, and chocolate fudge. You’re a pudding person, right?”
“I’m a pastry-chef.” I didn’t say patissier, since Rhoda disapproved enough as it was.
“But you think you can do the job?” persisted Brendan. “Hugh said you could turn your hand to pretty well anything.”
“Pretty well. I’ve done it all at Tzabo’s,” I said, not strictly correctly, for I’d never been allowed on the grill except once in time of flu. Not woman’s work. But I’d run the grill, and everything else, at the White Duck before I reached the scary, exhilarating heights of Tzabo for those few short months until events kicked me out.
“He made out you were Wonderwoman,” said Rhoda sardonically.
“Not quite.” Hugh must have laid it on a bit thick. I suppose he felt he owed me for that time I helped to rescue him, five years ago: now he was doing his good-natured best to rescue me in turn.
“So you can make sticky toffee pudding?” asked Brendan.
“Yes.” I could make croquembouche, bourdaloue, pithivier and gaufrettes. I knew a fleuron from a friandise and a ruifard from a rigodon. Sticky toffee pudding, no problem. My problems were stickier by far...
The ghostly image stamped upon my retina reappeared as it had so often in the last two weeks: the boy in the white T-shirt leaning on the chippie counter, while I waited in the queue. I never learnt his name, though I’d seen him hustling on street corners. Now he slumped
against the tiles, his white top slowly blossoming to carnation red, his chips all over the floor. The three men in balaclavas stared round at us, daring us to move. None of us did. “Last time you’ll rip us off,” hissed one, before they all slammed out. He was only a bag-man who’d tried to cheat the dealers. That was nothing compared to what I’d done.
My hands were sweating, but the rest of me felt as cold as clay. I took a long breath and tried to drag my attention back to Brendan.
“Me and Rhoda will help, of course,” he was saying. I heard a noise like a snort from Rhoda. “And there’s a girl comes in at weekends. Rhoda used to run the kitchen but the bar’s taking all her time now, isn’t it, Rhoda?” There was an appeal in his voice.
“If you say so.” Rhoda turned on her heel and marched back into the lounge. Brendan looked after her helplessly.
“She’s,” he said, “she’s. Um. This is her spot. Was. Her domain, you know? It’s not easy.”
“I see.” I wondered if Brendan had invented this job for me in order to please Hugh. Surely not.
Brendan said, “Hugh told me Tzabo wasn’t doing so well?”
I shrugged. “Manchester rents. They had to cut staff.” Tzabo had been doing fine. If I hadn’t been dead meat, Klaus would have happily kept me on. It was small consolation.
“You might find it dull here.”
“Oh, no, it’s lovely and peaceful,” said Charlotte. “Isn’t it, Lannie?”
It was dull. But dull was good. “I’ll start tomorrow if you like,” I said.
“Ah, no, no food on Mondays. That’s your day off. Not much on Tuesdays either. Start Wednesday. Give you time to settle in somewhere. Got a place to stay?”
“I’ve got a tent,” I said. “Is there a campsite handy?” I assumed that being in the Peak District, the place would be littered with campsites.
“I don’t think so. Arthur across the way might lend you a field,” said Brendan doubtfully. “Not the weather for it though, is it? You’d be better indoors. We’d put you up here, if, er–”
I could almost hear Rhoda’s hissed, No, we wouldn’t, through the kitchen wall.
“Haven’t got room,” said Brendan apologetically. “The two lasses sharing as it is. We would otherwise.”
“That’s all right. Did you say Arthur?”
“Madderlow Farm. I’ll give him a bell.”
He led us back into the lounge and used the bar phone with Rhoda glaring at him. Charlotte and I listened, raising eyebrows at each other meaningfully – though what their meaning was, I for one, didn’t know – while Brendan negotiated with the offer of a couple of free pints and a free dinner, yes, for the wife as well, no, not the dogs, you cheeky bugger, for me to camp in the paddock in front of Arthur’s farmhouse.
“You can use our facilities,” he told me as he replaced the phone. “For now. Have to see about getting you somewhere else. Frank!”
“He won’t,” said Rhoda.
“He might. Frank?”
On the TV, one of the teams was cheering. The score was 76-0. Frank switched it off.
“I’m done,” he said.
“You still in your Nan’s house, Frank? Aren’t you moving in with your young lady?”
Rhoda snorted. A definite snort, this time, that I could see Frank hearing and phlegmatically ignoring.
“Not quite,” he said, returning his glass to the bar.
“Well. Just a thought,” said Brendan. His eyes followed Frank’s stocky figure to the door with a wistful, worried expression.
“You know he won’t,” said Rhoda. “It’s that bloody motorbike.”
“Now, Rhoda. Girls, you’d like, um? Coffee?” asked Brendan unhappily. Rhoda gazed at us stonily, willing us to refuse.
“I’ll go over and pitch my tent while the light’s good,” I told him. “Then I’ll come back this evening and help out. Stack the dishwasher and that. Work out where things are.” I remembered, belatedly, what I ought to say. “Thank you for all this. Thank you.”
I dived out into the drizzle with Charlotte behind me.
“You’re not going to camp now, are you? Lannie, come back to my place till Wednesday!”
“No, I can’t.” I began to haul my stuff out of her boot, and she helped me lug it over the road and up the drive of Madderlow Farm to a slurried yard that echoed with the yelps of unseen dogs. I knocked at the front door, causing a furious peal of barking, until a wizened head in a woolly hat poked out of a barn door and yelled, “Camp where yer like. And shut up, yer daft buggers.”
So I did. Since everywhere was squelchy, I picked a spot at random and we pitched the tent, with some difficulty despite my practice session the previous day on Fletcher Moss playing fields.
“This doesn’t seem fair,” said Charlotte as we crouched, shivering, on the smelly groundsheet inside the green cocoon. “You shouldn’t end up here just for simply doing what’s right.”
I winced. What I had done had seemed right at the time. But maybe I had been wrong. “Better here than the mortuary.”
“Don’t say that, Lannie! Do you want me to stay? I’ll stay a bit.”
“You go. You’ve bread to make,” I told her. “You’ll be up at five tomorrow morning.”
“I know. You don’t mind, Lannie? I’ll ring,” she promised, and crawled out backwards. I waved her off, then crept back into my new home to unroll my musty sleeping bag and sort out my things. It didn’t take long. The tent smelt of rubber. I felt an unexpected surge of longing for that holiday with Dave, my almost-father, so far away and long ago, now so completely unattainable.
I could do with an airbed. The ground was cold and pitted. So what? I was dead anyway. Why should a little extra cold bother me? I shouldn’t even need the groundsheet between myself and the muddy earth.
Rolling over on the sleeping bag, I reached into the holdall and picked up my knives, lifting them gently from their cloth one by one, contemplating their weight and sharpness. They were a small, pure comfort: perfect, familiar things.
I lay back, crossing my arms against my chest, a knife in each hand, and stared up at the tent’s bowed roof. I wondered how long I would survive being dead.
Mud Pie Page 2
