In the Kitchen

by Monica Ali

  * * *

  Gabe watched Chef Albert sigh over a tray of marzipan roses. There was a dusting of what looked like icing sugar on his moustache.

  Hardly daring to say it, Gabe asked if everything was going well.

  Chef Albert regarded him mournfully. ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘no.’ His eyes, ringed by dark shadows, were wells of sorrow. Gabe did not like to look his pastry chef in the eye, lest he drown. ‘How can it be,’ Chef Albert went on, ‘when I have zis muppet for assistance.’ He gestured towards the apprentice, who giggled and lost control of his icing bag.

  ‘But you’ll have everything ready for tomorrow,’ said Gabe. He forced a note of gaiety into his voice as if encouraging a small child.

  Chef Albert planted his hands on his ample hips and executed a Gallic shrug. ‘No, I do not think. I have to begin again with ze meringues and now I see how zees little flowers are …’

  Gabriel shivered and moved away slightly, trying to make his movement invisible by coughing at the same time. He respected Chef Albert’s perfectionism but, like all the self-sacrificing virtues, it was best appreciated at a safe remove. It was cold in here, anyway, particularly standing close to Albert.

  Inclining his head to indicate that he was still listening, Gabe looked over the pastry kitchen. The Rondo machine still had a few scraps of fresh dough clinging between the rollers but everything else was sparkling clean.

  Every pastry chef he had known was lugubrious. It went with the territory, he supposed. There had been one exception, Terry Sharples, down at the Brighton Grand. Terry was always laughing. Until he threw himself off Beachy Head, New Year’s Eve, 1989.

  Gabriel caught sight of himself in the refrigerator door. He had fancied he would look contemplative but his expression was somewhere between dismissive and harassed. He yawned in order to rearrange his face. In Blantwistle people would say, doesn’t he look like his dad, but they said that no matter what. There was some resemblance but you had to search for it. Gabe didn’t have his father’s hard lines. Perhaps if you peeled the flesh back, you would see it: Ted as the prototype and Gabe the end result. He had the hair, though: thick, dark and curling on top, oddly foppish, like a playboy Italian count. Gabe worked his finger into the sparse patch at the crown. He wondered what age Dad had been when he started to go bald. Perhaps, when you lose your hair, that’s when you really know that you’re going to die, just like everyone else. Dad was going to die. An image exploded in his mind: the floor at Rileys, a hundred thundering looms, the battlefield noise, and Dad, striding around like a colossus, taming the machines with his big strong hands.

  Dad would live to see Gabe open his own restaurant. That had to mean something, even if Dad would pretend that it didn’t. Dad had to live long enough to see it. Come on, Dad, exhorted Gabe, as though everything would be fine as long as his father pulled up his socks.

  Gabe glanced back at his reflection. He rubbed his hand across his face.

  ‘Everything is not so good,’ said Chef Albert. He spread his arms. ‘You see for yourself how is all zis mess.’

  Gabe administered a pep talk and fled. Gleeson and Ivan were holding a furtive conference in the passageway that led to the dining room. Why would a restaurant manager need to speak privately to a grill chef? Gleeson pranced on his toes, ready at any moment to cut and run. He had the wind up him all right. Every day, since Yuri’s ‘sad accident’, he’d been a flutter of spite and nerves. Ivan stood fast but he was agitated, plucking at his red bandanna. Loitering at the corner, Gabriel wished he could read their lips. There was one thing he could tell from their body language: they did not wish to be overheard.

  Gleeson saw Gabriel. ‘Ah, Chef, you lost again? Kitchen’s that way, I do believe. I’ve just directed your detective friend – Parks, is it? – to your lair. Try to keep him out of the dining room, would you? We don’t want to frighten the horses.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to stop him, Stanley,’ said Gabriel, beginning to walk away. He smiled back over his shoulder. ‘I think the police go wherever they want.’

  When he reached his cubicle Parks was sitting at his desk. ‘There you are,’ said Parks. ‘I’ve taken your seat.’

  ‘Feel free,’ said Gabe. ‘How can I help?’

  ‘Paperwork,’ said Parks, pointing at the piles on the floor and the files poking out of the overstuffed drawers. ‘Bane of all our lives.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When I’ve got a file open that should never have been opened in the first place … and it’s all about crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s, no real police work …’ He trailed off. ‘Not that I’m blaming the sergeant. Though someone else might have called it different, of course.’

  ‘Was there something in particular?’

  ‘Well, we’ve not managed to notify the family. Ran the usual immigration checks and naturally it’s a false name. Usual story. You don’t happen to know … of course not. Apart from that, I’m just checking back to make sure nothing’s occurred to you, nothing out of the ordinary, before I start wrapping it up.’ He referred to his notebook. ‘One employee we haven’t spoken to, another kitchen porter, I think.’

  Gabriel nodded. ‘She’s not shown up again. If I can get to my files I can tell you which agency she came through.’

  ‘I’m guessing your porters come and go all the time.’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘So unless there’s any particular reason … I think we’ll leave it at that.’

  ‘OK,’ said Gabriel. ‘Fine.’

  Parks put his notebook in his pocket. ‘Oh, there is one other thing.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gabriel, tensing.

  ‘My wife says she wants to go to a really good Italian for our anniversary, it’s our twentieth. Had our honeymoon in Venice. Now, where would you recommend?’

  Throughout the dinner service, Gabriel stood at the pass, checking plate by plate, adding garnish, wiping rims, admonishing waiters, sending back the overcooked, underdone or sloppily constructed with a pinch of encouraging zeal ground up with a measure of scorn. The tempo had been building from six o’clock and by half past eight the kitchen was in full swing. Gabe replated a chicken fricassée, and turned to look at his team.

  Nikolai, the Russian commis, chopped salad onions with heartbreaking deftness and speed. Suleiman hovered by the Steam’N’Hold, waiting for his soufflé with evident anxiety, as though it were his first-born son. Victor moved between the Bratt Pan, wilting off spinach, and the combi-oven, loading up potato röstis and cubes of butternut squash. A commis dropped a bowl of peelings and everybody clapped. Benny ran over to help him and ran back to his station, wiping his hands. A spit of fat from a wok hissed in the blue burner flame. In Ivan’s empire the air pulsed with heat so that the grill chef appeared hazy, as though he were a mirage. He slapped a couple of steaks on the charcoal grill and took a hammer to a third, the sweat darkening the back of his white coat.

  Victor sauntered over to the stockpots, threw a mock punch at one of the commis, moved him aside and lifted a lid. Steam rose in a column and dispersed, like an idea that can find no words. The extractor hoods roared momentarily and dropped back to their usual thrum.

  ‘Hey,’ said Victor, tossing his head at Damian who was standing, pigeon-toed, feeding noodles into a metal vat. ‘Hey, come here, let me see.’

  Damian pretended not to hear. He spilt noodles all around.

  Victor took hold of the younger boy and pushed his chin up to inspect his neck. ‘Wooo,’ he screamed. ‘What is this? Damian got a girlfriend. Everyone see this big, ugly thing? Love bite!’

  The cooks beat on the work surfaces with whatever implement they had to hand. There were whistles and a couple of catcalls, all dissolving into laughs.

  ‘I offer my congratulations,’ said Suleiman.

  ‘He’s getting married?’ said Victor, pantomiming shock. ‘Man, he kept it quiet.’

  ‘In my country,’ said Benny enigmatically, ‘the bride price may b
e no more than a case of Heineken and a slaughtered goat.’

  ‘Well, that’s way more than a commis can afford.’ Victor banged Damian between the shoulder blades. ‘Looks like you’re choking, dude. Listen, I’m gonna give you a tip. Next time you wanna get dirty with this old bird of yours, ask her to take her teeth out first.’

  The laughter was shrill but not hostile and even Damian giggled along.

  Gabriel gave Benny a hand to make up more portions of bass and scallops en papillote. It was selling faster than Gabe had anticipated; perhaps because he had asked the waiters to snip the packages open at the table. It created a little drama which other diners were keen to reconstruct.

  Benny worked quickly and neatly, wiping his station down almost every time he turned about. He was a small man who somehow gave the impression of being a larger man who had been condensed down to this size – something about the height of his buttocks or the spread of his shoulders or the way his head seemed a little too large. The whites of his eyes were yellow and his teeth were salty white. A jagged scar ran from the bridge of his nose almost across to his ear. Gabe thought about asking him which country he had left behind.

  ‘Goal!’ shouted Victor, chucking a romaine lettuce in the air and heading it on to a shelf.

  ‘Give me strength,’ muttered Gabriel. He picked up a scallop and sliced off the muscle tab.

  ‘I know, Chef,’ said Benny quietly, ‘but that is the way he is made. Every one of us made differently.’

  ‘Really?’ said Gabe, flatly. ‘Guess it’s not his fault, then.’ Oona was another one: it ain’t suppose to be. A nice trick to have up your sleeve.

  ‘If you don’t mind, Chef,’ said Benny, ‘I’m going to sing a little now, keep going at the work and sing.’ He sang, very low, in his own language, the words bubbling thickly like a rich and spicy stew.

  Gabriel ran a mental checklist on the preparations for tomorrow’s Sirovsky event. Some of the dips and sauces would be past their best by tomorrow night. They could be freshened up with a squeeze of lemon, a sprinkling of chopped herbs. He would have to go up to Blantwistle and see Dad. Dad and Nana. After tomorrow he’d be less busy. He’d think about it then, make a plan. He hoped Chef Albert wasn’t going to ditch the marzipan roses. Not that they’d get eaten anyway, it was all about the show. Dad and Nana. Who’d have thought it? God, it made him laugh; to think they’d ended up together, those two.

  It had begun, Gabriel supposed, by Nana visiting more often after they had moved to Plodder Lane. She couldn’t say anything against the house, unlike the one in Astley Street, except it didn’t have double-glazing. Her nemesis, Mrs Haddock, had double-glazing and since she, on a widow’s pension, couldn’t afford any for herself she felt that the least her son-in-law could do was to have it installed at number 22.

  ‘You’ve to shop around, mind, for the best price. But there’s a lot of cowboys out there, as’ll part a fool from his money.’ She sat primly at the edge of her seat, knees pressed together. ‘Or her money,’ she added, significantly.

  Despite his promotion, Gabe and Jenny were given to understand, their father was somewhat lower down the social scale than Nana. This was on account of her husband having been a clerk at Rileys, who went to work in a shirt and tie rather than a pair of overalls. Dad was a tackler. They weren’t called overlookers, not in Blantwistle, even the foreigners knew that. Dad was proud of his job. The people in the office, Dad said, didn’t know warp from weft.

  ‘I could never sit of an evening, not with shirts waiting to be ironed.’ Nana was fond of mentioning shirts.

  ‘A tackler,’ said Dad to Gabriel, ‘earns twice what a clerk gets. That’s a fact.’

  Gabriel believed him, but there was no withstanding the force of Nana’s insinuations, insinuations being particularly hard to disprove.

  ‘I’ve never seen such waste,’ said Nana, arriving one bonfire night with a sticky black slab of parkin in an old Quality Street tin. ‘Perfectly good clothes those Beesley children have put on their guy. Their mother should be ashamed.’

  Mum was stirring vinegar into the black peas and staring into the kitchen window, from where she stared back at herself. ‘Nobody’s wearing straight-legs any more.’

  ‘Sally Anne,’ said Nana, touching the crisp curls of permanent wave around her head, ‘I’m perfectly aware of that.’

  Wasting money, in Nana’s book, was vulgar. There was no higher sin. Those who had no money were also vulgar. Vulgarity took many forms and few in Blantwistle escaped its taint.

  Gabe knew her for a snob while he was still a child. But for a long time it was impossible for him to see how anyone could be a snob unless they were also at least a bit posh.

  When she moved in, it was Dad who encouraged it. Mum said, ‘It’ll be the death of me. Is that what you want?’

  ‘This is what I mean,’ said Dad. ‘The way you get worked up. You’ve always been calmer when she’s around.’

  ‘But you hate her,’ said Mum, wheedling.

  ‘Aye,’ said Dad, ‘that’s as may be.’

  Nana moved into Gabe’s room and Gabe had a camp bed in the sun porch at the back. He was at catering college by then, on day release to the Jarvis at Manchester Piccadilly. Nobody expected him to stay around for long.

  Nana said she couldn’t sleep in Gabe’s old bed. She kept spraying it for bedbugs. Gabe came home at one, two, three in the morning and found her roaming in her nightie, support tights and Hush Puppies, making cups of tea that she left, half drunk, all over the house. She was partial, it transpired, to a glass of sherry, just a small one, now and then through the day. Exhausted by these and her night wanderings (on account of which Dad had slapped the ‘shapeshifter’ label on her) she was often back in bed by noon. When she needed something fetching – the newspaper, her bifocals, her medicine, two ounces of humbugs – she banged feebly but insistently on her bedroom floor and Mum growled and muttered before running up the stairs.

  It was, supposedly, on ‘account of her health’ that Nana moved to Plodder Lane; yet it was only after she’d lived there for a while, as far as Gabriel could remember, that there seemed to be anything wrong. As was to be expected, her illnesses were refined in nature. Coughing she deemed to be vulgar, but breathlessness, from which she suffered, was not. When she had back pain it was sciatica, and most definitely not the lumbago of which any common labourer might complain. She had arthritis in her knees, which compared favourably to Mrs Haddock’s varicose veins. Dr Leather was a frequent if somewhat reluctant visitor, though he seemed to spend less time in the bedroom with Nana than in the kitchen with Mum.

  ‘She’ll be the death of me,’ said Mum, when Gabe got back, from time to time, from Glasgow, Scarborough, Lyon, wherever he happened to be. Perhaps, thought Gabe, she was. A heart attack at fifty-four. All that running around Mum did after Nana.

  Nana was eighty-seven and still going strong.

  From the corner of his eye Gabe caught sight of Damian holding his hand in the air and gurning while blood ran down to his sleeve.

  ‘First-aid box, Damian. In my office, bottom drawer.’

  Damian licked his finger and smudged his nose with blood.

  ‘Doc,’ called Benny. ‘Take a look. Damian, let Doc see your hand.’

  It was the crew’s name for Nikolai.

  Nikolai wielded his knife. ‘The finger cannot be saved. I shall have to amputate.’

  Damian laughed and waggled his finger but disappeared rapidly, nonetheless, into Gabriel’s office.

  Nikolai set down his knife. ‘I propose a silence,’ he said.

  Everyone stopped working and turned to look. Gabriel wanted to object but he too was held in suspense. Nikolai was only a commis but he was older than the chefs de partie. He didn’t say much, he worked hard, and when Gabriel wanted to put him in charge of a section Nikolai had turned him down. He had carroty hair and his face was bloodless as a veal chop, no colour in his lips or lashes. When he spoke it was with authority and sa
dness, like the gallows oration of a deposed king.

  ‘Friends and colleagues,’ said Nikolai, ‘it has been a week since Yuri’s death. I know how sad we all feel about this terrible accident. I would like everyone, with Chef’s permission, to join in one minute of silence as a mark of respect to Yuri.’

  Gabriel bowed his head. Why now, he thought, why in the middle of service, when every minute counts?

  He counted off the seconds. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘back to work.’

  The silence hung about like a bad smell, until Victor broke wind.

  ‘May I remind you,’ said Suleiman, laughing, ‘that this is a confined space.’

  Victor went over to Suleiman and burped right into his ear.

  ‘In Moldova, this is a sign of love. Am I correct?’ Suleiman retreated a couple of paces on his little bow legs. Gabe smiled at the way he made his enquiry with apparent seriousness, as though he would inscribe the answer on to an official form.

  ‘Too right, baby,’ said Victor, attempting to grab Suleiman by the balls.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Gabriel called, ‘we’re not in the fucking playground. Eyes down, go to work.’

  ‘Yes, Chef,’ said Suleiman. ‘Chef? Extractor hood has a malfunction.’

  ‘Report it to maintenance in the morning. Can’t do anything now. Who’s done this trout? Well, come and get it and do it again. Never mind “done”, lad, put it in the sink and watch it swim.’

  ‘In the morning, OK, I will make a report,’ said Suleiman. ‘When Yuri was here he used to fix always, very fast.’

  ‘Right,’ said Gabriel. ‘There’s your problem. You don’t let the porter mess with things like that.’

  ‘Oh, Yuri was an engineer also. Full qualifications. He understood very well the machines.’