by Craig Melvin
Charlie may have run a tight ship, but he was getting a touch of the piratical about him, too, borrowing his mum’s gold hoops, having his Michelin star tattooed between his thumb and forefinger and wearing the skull and crossbones scarf given to him by Keith Richards as his chef’s neckerchief. Franco offered to get Charlie a parrot to complete the look and wondered if he, Tony and Gordon were the only folk in Ship Street still wearing a suit.
17 May 1997
Midday
Tick-tock, tock-tick. Labour won a landslide. Charlie held onto his Michelin star. Lulu moved in with Quaglino’s head waiter. Johnny spilt soup on Bill Clinton, leaving a nasty stain, and was deported. Janet charmed Charlie’s pot-wash boy up four flights to her bed. Franco had palpitations. A new dawn had broken, had it not?
INVITATION
A RECEPTION for MUSIC AND
ENTERTAINMENT BUSINESS SUPPORTERS
10 DOWNING STREET
FROM: TONY BLAIR PM
TO: CHARLIE SHERIDAN +1
DATE: 29 May 1997
TIME: 6.30pm–8.30pm
DRINKS & CANAPES
DRESS CODE: SMART CASUAL
NO DRUGS
Dear Charlie, Thanks for agreeing to cater this reception. Noel Gallagher and his wife are coming and I’m hoping that you’ll be able to tear yourself away from the kitchen and keep him from trashing Downing Street. Do bring a guest, Cherie and I would love to meet her.
Tony
‘A what?’
‘A refrigerated van.’
‘Who do you think you are, a fucking butcher?’
‘I need one, Franco. With Number Ten and the Good Food Show coming up, there’s no way I’ll get the lobsters up there and keep them fresh.’
‘Get them up there, they sell lobsters in London and Birmingham, don’t they?’
‘Yes, but not my lobsters. It is all about provenance, Franco. Like France. You can’t have Lobster Belle Hotel with Brummie lobsters.’
‘Look, I’ll get onto Brampton and Sinker and see if we can borrow one of their vans.’
‘No. I want a new refrigerated van. With Belle Hotel on the side. I notice that your new Jag has turned up. All I’m asking for is a van.’
‘Bet it’ll cost as much as the Jag, too.’
‘No, we lease it.’
‘What? Lease it? Over my dead body. Everything you see here, including the bloody Jag, is paid for. Leasing, my fucking God. Leasing.’
Charlie drove, squeezing his two best chefs, nicknamed Fish and Meat on account of their jobs, on to the two seats beside him. Charlie kept whacking Meat’s knee with the gearstick, accidentally at first. Then on purpose.
The three chefs cheered as they whizzed, London-bound, past the welcome to Brighton posts.
The press, who’d been permanently camped outside Number 10 for over a month snapping the comings and goings, went into shutter overdrive as Charlie pulled up outside the famous black door and started to unload the stuff for the party. That’d shut Franco up about refrigerated van costs, the Belle Hotel van splashed all over the front pages.
They loaded in and soon had the bottles of Krug chilling in plastic boxes filled with ice and water. Tony’s people had rung to make sure that Charlie took away all the bottles with him and always served with the labels covered by a napkin.
Charlie laid the cold canapé bases out on rows of plastic sheeting he’d brought and stapled to the trestle tables, also brought. He and Fish went down the line, scooping quenelles, drizzling sauces and popping garnishes on top. Down below, Meat fired up the ancient Downing Street ovens to warm through his stuff. All tricks learnt at the knee of Roux Outside Catering, since disbanded, and, already knackered with a night’s work ahead of him, Charlie began to understand why.
Charlie went to brief the Downing Street waiting staff on the way he wanted things served and, on the way back bumped into Noel Gallagher.
‘All right, man. What you doing here?’
‘Cooking.’
‘Cool.’
‘What you doing here so early?’
‘Tony and Cherie invited us up for a livener and a look round the flat. They’ve got an ironing board up there, for fucksake. Prime Minister and he’s got an ironing board. Mad.’
At that moment, Meg came out of the toilet. The one that Charlie had been instructed not to use. On account of it being the Queen’s privy, for the use of HRH only. Charlie thought he’d better appraise Noel of the fact.
‘Oh, she wasn’t taking a piss. Just doing a line. Charlie?’
Never one to turn down a toot, Charlie slipped in while Noel stood guard. Meg had wiped down Her Majesty’s toilet seat as a courtesy to the next user and Charlie made sure that he did likewise.
‘Madferrit,’ he said, coining a popular phrase. Noel accepted the proffered twist and popped in after Charlie. Charlie went back to the kitchen to change into his clean chef’s jacket and go and meet his plus one at the Downing Street gates.
He saw her coming before she saw him. She took his breath away. Lulu had thought long and hard when she’d got the invite from Charlie. She put the invite in the drawer of her bedside cabinet and then into the bin and back again. Five times. Bloody Charlie. She had a life, thank you very much. A great life. A life that involved fishing a rectangle of cardboard from tangles of hair, spent tissues, Tampax wrappers and laddered tights at 2am on a Saturday. Right, decision time, she thought, plucking a dried blob of bubble gum from the back of the invite and flicking it back into the bin. Obviously, she hated Charlie’s guts, obviously, they would never, ever be an item again, and, obviously, she would not be turning this opportunity down. Her father would kill her.
Lulu took a pilgrimage to Joseph on the Fulham Road the Saturday before during her break. Previously the scene of the most successful purchase of Lulu’s life to date, and sod it that it had cost her a week’s wages, the black trouser suit that hugged her behind just so and bagged her the head waiter, not that he was that fickle, like Charlie, but he’d said she looked just, superb, and with his French accent, she just couldn’t help folding it up carefully at the end of his bed that night after service and shagging the life out of him.
It was in the window when she’d bought the trouser suit. Women were stopping to look, causing a traffic jam on the pavement that rivalled the one on the road. Lulu chained her bike to the railings outside the shop, heart beating a little as much from what she was about to do, as from the uphill bit by Harrods.
Five hundred and fifty quid, for a piece of black-and-white material that was no bigger than a pillowcase. But what a pillowcase. Lulu tried it on and knew she’d be wearing it to Downing Street. She’d have to go into her overdraft – Roger had always believed in protecting her from his wealth, as he so eloquently put it – but what the hell. Lulu freewheeled through Knightsbridge with the Joseph bag flapping from her handlebars, feeling like she was in a French movie until her sunglasses flipped from her head and clattered into the gutter.
‘My God. You look—’
‘Hello, you. Don’t touch me. You’ll no doubt have greasy hands and this is dry-clean only, not to mention the fact I’m about to meet Tony Blair. Charlie, wheeeee. I am a bit excited.’
She leaned in to allow him to give her a peck on the cheek.
‘Charlie, you’re sniffing. Have you been at the marching powder? Godsake, Sheridan. You’ll be arrested.’
‘Honest, Lu, it was just a little toot, to be polite.’
‘To who? Cherie? Oh, don’t tell me. Are people already there? Come on. I don’t want to be the last.’
Lulu wasn’t the last. She wasn’t even the last in that Joseph dress. Once her twin and her had got over the shame, they’d had quite a lot of fun swapping partners as the Blairs went round high five’ing everyone.
Tony had people eating out of his hands, especially when he took a spin round the room with a tray of angels on horseback. Lulu had to shield her eyes from the flashbulbs of the cameras when Tony stopped to chat to Noel. He wa
s only there for about five seconds, but the press got their front page right there and then, bumping Charlie’s van to the graveyard of page two.
‘Oi, Charlie Sheridan. How are ya? All of them toimes we harmonised till dawn.’
‘Fuckin’ hell. Tom. Me ole buskin’ mucker. What’re you doing here?’
‘Oi was in Westlife for a week. Boyzone for a day and after a little dust-up with Louis Walsh, I’m going solo. Here with me new manager, Simon Cowell. He’s crap, but I’m gonna be the next Robbie Williams. Apparently.’
And later, when Meat and Fish were passing the gates back into Brighton, Charlie asked Lu up for a nightcap in his Johnny-provided suite at The Savoy.
‘Forget it, Charlie Sheridan. You’re lucky you got me back to The Savoy. You’ve a snowball in hell’s chance of getting me up to your room.’
They’d rocked up at The American Bar on a high. A high that not even Johnny with his long face could dampen. Johnny was still sulking after having to beg for his job back at The Savoy after his ignominious return from the States.
Apart from a slap on the back, Charlie barely acknowledged his father, who nursed a still water while Charlie ranted on and on about himself, slinging back the old-fashioneds in a style he was accustomed to, knowing that it would all be comp’ed by Johnny in the morning.
On one of Charlie’s over-long trips to the loo, Johnny leaned in and told Lulu a secret. The kind of secret that families like the Sheridans kept. He told Lulu quickly, glancing towards the door as he spoke, voice calm, resolute.
‘Of course you know if you tell him it’ll break him. All that “born a chef” stuff. And if Franco knows I’ve told you he’ll disinherit me. Probably has already. But I can’t keep it a secret any longer. All that shame. Had to tell someone. I hope it explains some of why Charlie is being such a dick. Secrets do that to a person. He knows something’s wrong between Franco and me, even though he doesn’t know what it is, and it disturbs him. Always has.’
Lulu nodded and touched Johnny on the arm. She felt a wave of sympathy for Johnny. For Charlie, too. If only she’d asked Madame Eva for a bit more information, she might not be sat here, suddenly feeling like giving Charlie a sympathy fuck. What other hotels or restaurants began with the initials BH? Maybe she should open one? Other men wore blue-and-white check trousers, too, not just chefs. Maybe she would buy Thierry a pair?
Johnny excused himself at midnight, giving Lulu a kiss goodbye and a squeeze on the arm for luck.
Charlie was back, oblivious and warming to his theme.
‘That’s enough of me talking about me. Why don’t you talk about me for a bit.’
‘Pig.’
‘That it? Seriously, Lu, what a mega night. And having you there at my side, just made a mega night perfect.’
Charlie slipped a hand around the back of the sofa and pinged her bra strap.
‘Get off, you old charmer. I’m taken. Thierry. Remember. T-H-I-E-R-R-Y. And even if I wasn’t, you wouldn’t stand a chance.’
The Thames-struck sun woke Lulu and she instinctively reached for her sore head. Then she noticed other sore areas and let out a long groan. Charlie, asleep naked on the rug at the foot of the bed, looked up and smiled.
‘How the fuck did you do that?’
‘What?’
‘Get me up here and do what you did to me without—’
‘The old Charlie charm, Lu.’
‘You bast—’
‘Though it might just have been the brandy, always got you going. You weren’t half knocking them back after Johnny fucked off.’
Lu flopped back on what she noticed for the first time was a very comfortable bed.
‘What the hell am I going to tell Thierry?’
‘That he’s chucked. That you’re coming back to Belle Hotel with me. That we’re going to live together happily ever after.’
‘That I stayed out all night with my new Joseph dress twin and you went back to Brighton in the van. Honestly, Charlie, this is never happening again. Correction, this never happened.’
‘Never happened,’ said Charlie to his cock, flopping it from side to side on each syllable, ‘any chance it could never happen again in a minute? You look gorge on that bed.’
Lulu didn’t deign to reply, instead she toured the room, picking up her smalls from the lampshade, bra from the back of the sofa and dress from the pelmet of the curtains, how the hell did it get up there?
She locked herself in the bathroom and turned to face her disgrace. Ten minutes with the Savoy moisturiser and cotton balls and a quick slash of lippy and Lu looked lobby fresh. If it had been night-time. Instead, Lulu had to totter across a sunlit lobby looking every inch the hooker she felt.
Charlie waved goodbye to the slammed door, rolled over and went back to sleep.
When Lulu got back to the flat, Thierry had already left for work. A one-mark note was propped up on the bed:
?
Even with Thierry’s limited English, he’d managed to communicate his feelings very clearly. It was over, Lulu knew it. Charlie had managed to ruin another good thing in her life. For what? There was no way she’d be going back to Belle Hotel. She had a good job and a good life with Thierry in London. Had a good life with Thierry in London. Working together was going to be awkward. Damn her vanity in accepting the invitation. Damn her for lending Johnny a sympathetic ear and then Charlie other sympathetic orifices. The sex had been good, she had to admit, now she remembered it. But, oh, the shame. One Sheridan step forward, two steps back. She stuffed the dress in her dry-cleaning bag, binned the stretched knickers and went to take a very long shower.
Johnny stared at Charlie’s cocktail bill and shook his head. The boy certainly didn’t get it from him. How was it possible for two people to drink eight hundred and fifty pounds’ worth of cocktails? Even with his staff discount, Johnny would be paying this off for months. Add to that the damage bill for the suite and Charlie’s ‘visit’ had taken Johnny well and truly to the cleaners. All the staff were talking about Johnny’s son, the rock ’n’ roll chef. That accolade had done him no good; Johnny was ashamed of Charlie and wanted to disown him, for the time being. Johnny was glad to be out of the whole bloody thing; Franco had used him to get what he knew he couldn’t get for himself. Family business brought nothing but trouble. Look at the spoiled brat Charlie had become. Johnny tutted. Maybe if he’d been a better father, been more involved. Fat chance of that with Franco ruling the roost. At least Johnny had shared the secret.
The ungrateful boy had not even popped his head in to say goodbye before he left. When Johnny was his age, he had responsibilities, a kid to bring up and Franco to gofer for. When was Charlie going to grow up? Johnny put the boy to the back of his mind and went back to the rooming list.
‘Charlie.’
It was Franco, yelling from reception. Damn, Charlie thought he’d be able to creep by and get some more sleep in before service.
‘Oh, hi Franco.’
‘Charlie. The van.’
‘What about the van?’
‘You know what about the van. I’ve already hauled Fish and Meat over the coals, took me the threat of taking it out of their wages for them to confess.’
‘Ah, that about the van.’
‘They say you clipped the Downing Street gates on the way out.’
‘Sort of. Yes.’
‘The Downing Street gates?’
‘I guess so, yes.’
‘Did you stop?’
‘No chance, I was pissed. We burned up Whitehall a bit and I swapped seats with Meat.’
‘Oh, that is good news.’
‘We’ll never hear from them. Don’t worry, Tony will sort it.’
Ministry of Defence
Whitehall Branch
London
7 July 1997
Bill for repairs to Downing Street Gates.
£4,350.00
Payment Terms 30 days
12 September 1998
1.30pm
&
nbsp; Tick-tock, no time to stop.
Charlie executed a near perfect handbrake turn on the seafront.
‘Now leg it down to Sinker’s and get the lobsters. And do it quick, we’re running late.’
Fish and Meat piled out of the van and set off at a trot for the fishmonger’s. They had to be at the NEC in Birmingham for a four o’clock show and the sun was already past the yard arm.
Gary Rhodes’ ever-so-nice assistant had telephoned Charlie the night before, just to check.
‘Just to check if you need anything else? We’re rather excited to be having you on the Good Food Show. It is a super turnout for day one and our Supertheatre will be rammed as always. Bring along any music you’d like to play.’
Which gave Charlie an idea.
Franco had been checking his watch from seven and was up to boiling point by the time they’d finally loaded the van. He flipped his lid when Charlie set off down Ship Street, screeched to a halt and reversed back to ask for directions.
Franco jangled the coins in his pocket, rocked back on his heels and spat forth the travel orders.
‘M23, M25, M40. Now go, or there’ll be no food show, good or bad.’
He tutted them into the distance and then welcomed young Dawn from the allotments who had a lovely box of veg for him to serve with that day’s lunch.
By the time they’d been on the M1 for over an hour it was too late to turn back, so Charlie had to hazard a guess as to when they’d reached about the middle of the country and turn left. As the van veered off the motorway exit, a suspicious swing, scrape, thud noise emitted from the back of the van. A noise that continued with mildly alarming regularity every time the van took a turn.
They’d found the NEC all right, with twenty minutes to spare, no problem. Problem was in the back of the van. Or wasn’t.
‘Fuck.’
‘Oh, no.’
‘Where’s it all gone?’
The Edgbaston Echo would be reporting a plague of lobsters the next day. Charlie had a problem, one that standing there bickering wouldn’t sort.