by Monica Ali
‘What did you make of him?’ said Charlie. She was undressing in that languorous stripper’s way of hers.
‘Not much,’ said Gabe.
‘Not much?’
‘It’s up to you,’ said Gabriel. ‘But if you ask me, I think he’s slime.’ He had no reason to think so. In fact, he didn’t really think it at all. But at that moment he was looking at her with such unspeakable and piercing desire that he had no option but to banish him instantly, this unknown other man.
It turned out the guy was a sleazeball, he’d ripped off a friend of a friend. ‘You’re acute,’ said Charlie. ‘I’ve got to say I thought he was totally straight.’
‘Not as cute as you,’ said Gabe, losing his hand in her hair.
She still said he was a good judge of character. You see people. Well, there’d been nothing to prove her wrong. He’d go along with that. And she liked that he held back a little, wasn’t a prattler like her previous boyfriend, on and on, she said. When they lived together she’d probably grow to hate it, this thing about him that she loved. Why do you never talk to me? And he’d tease her and she’d toss her head but she would laugh, and they would be fine together, the two of them – the three of them – they would be just fine.
He came to the old facilities office. The light was still on, the naked bulb dangling like a suicide, casting fear and gloom. Gabriel went to the back wall and knelt. He counted, four from the right and seven up. The brick was loose. Prising it away he caught his fingernail and sucked on his finger until the throbbing died. Gingerly, he poked at the cavity.
Nothing there. Maybe he had got it back to front. Seven from the right and four up from the ground. He scratched at the mortar, using his other hand. Perhaps she said left, not right. He checked the positions and then stood up and watched the purple bruise spreading under his nail.
Who could have taken the money? Presuming there was any. Why should he believe a word that she said? Perhaps Yuri himself had stolen it, she rushed to confront him, pushed him, felled him, manslaughter they called that. What if there was someone else, someone else who came down here? And was Lena having sex with Yuri? It was none of his business. She might have offered it, like she offered it to him. Sex for a bed for the night, was that it? Well, it was her body, she could do with it what she liked.
* * *
He grabbed leftovers from a bread basket and ate two energy bars he found in his desk drawer. He wasn’t really hungry, felt like he’d been grazing on this and that all day. When the new place opened he’d institute a ‘family meal’, the floor staff and kitchen staff sitting down for something decent and home-made, not the slops and defrosted burgers they dished up on a pound-per-head budget here in the staff canteen. They’d have chicken stew, or meatballs; Charlie would be there, he could see her, checking her make-up in a compact mirror, wanting to look good for the front-of-house. She had a kid on her lap; that was him, their son, their first. Gabe would take him into the kitchen, he’d have to be a little older, how old would he have to be and what would he tell him, what would the first lesson be?
He’d been no more than eight or nine when Dad first took him to Rileys, in through the wrought-iron gates, across the smooth-rubbed flagstones in the yard, past the twist and cloth warehouses, pointing out the pale stone quoins and copings over the dull red of the brick, taking a detour to the engine house to see the original coal-fired boiler inscribed with Yates & Thom, ushering – no, pushing – him into one of the weaving sheds, a firm hand pressed to his back to steady him against the unholy din.
Gabriel had looked up with fear and reverence at the cast-iron columns, the rolled steel beams, which seemed to him more beautiful than the pillars of any church. Dad squeezed his shoulder and steered him between the thundering machines into the tacklers’ room.
‘Happen you’ll get used to it. First day in the mill, you come out, you can’t hear a thing. After a bit you don’t even notice – unless there’s a machine what’s making a worrying sound.’
Mr Howarth was there, reading the racing pages. ‘I fancy a flutter today.’
One of the weavers came in, picking lint out of her hair. ‘Tom,’ she said, ‘there’s a mash on number nine. Some silly so-and-so’s gone and left her scissors in the back.’
Gabriel did an impression of her later, stretching his mouth to the corners of his face. Mum doubled over with laughter, she was in one of those times. Had you not noticed before, she said, my little poppet, that’s what all those women do. If you want to carry on gossiping while you’re standing across on different looms, there’s only one way it’s possible, you’ve got to read each other’s lips.
‘Rita, Rita, Rita,’ said Mr Howarth, looking her up and down. ‘What silly so-and-so would that be? It wouldn’t be you, my love?’
‘It wouldn’t,’ said Rita, primping her curls. ‘Anyhow, it wants tackling. I’ve wrote it on the board.’
They watched her go and Dad said, ‘Gabe, did I ever tell you, back in the old days, a weaver would kiss her shuttle in the morning. Kiss it for good luck. That’s an old Lancashire tradition, something what was traditionally done.’
Mr Howarth sighed and made a show of rattling his paper. ‘Ay,’ he said, ‘that Rita, she can kiss my shuttle any time.’
The first lesson was yarn. Ted left Gabe on the bench for a bit, picking his scabs and kicking his heels. When he came back from his rounds he had a bobbin in his hand.
‘Now this – is what we call a pirn. Can you tell me what’s on the pirn?’
‘Thread, Dad.’
‘You’d call it thread if it was in your mum’s sewing basket. Here we say—’
Gabe shot his hand up and yelled out at the same time. ‘Cotton!’
Ted laughed. ‘We call it yarn. Can you say that, Gabe – yarn.’ He had a fresh oil-spot on the leg of his boilersuit, screwdrivers in his top pocket, an infinite manliness to the steely cut of his nose that made Gabe faintly ashamed of the way that he had said ‘thread’.
‘To produce the yarn, there’s a process, to get it from cotton balls to this. First you’ve got to untangle it, that’s called carding. You straighten the fibres down into long strings and you’ve got roving, that’s right, roving, and that’s about an inch or so thick, light and fluffy and you couldn’t be weaving, not even for string vests, with that. So then it’s got to be spun. I’ll take you to a spinning mill one day, so you can see for yerself, but it’s basically drawing and twisting it and turning it into the yarn.’
Gabriel looked at Ted’s hands, which kept moving, as if moulding his words into shape. They were scarred along the knuckles, hairy, and missing the left little fingertip. It was brilliant, this, thought Gabe, wagging a day off school.
Ted pulled some yarn off the bobbin, the pirn, and gave it to Gabriel who pretended to study it hard. ‘The sizing’s a kind of coating that goes on next …’
Gabe became aware of his mouth hanging open; it happened sometimes when he tried to concentrate. He felt the saliva pooling, smelt the changing-room smells of the bench, watched the dust motes spiral in a shaft of sunlight like a fairyland tornado, shifted his weight a little closer to Dad.
‘I’m trying to give you the big picture here. You’re not too young, are you – no – good lad. You’re wanting to get on to the weaving, but there’s a lot of stuff comes before. Now, look at you. Put them tonsils away.’ He put his thumb briefly to Gabe’s chin. ‘Blimmin ’eck, that reminds me – is that the time – your mother’ll be stood at the gates b’ now, calling for my head.’
‘Dad,’ said Gabe, ‘can you tell me that bit again?’
‘What bit?’
Gabriel shrugged. ‘Well, sort of … like … all of it, I suppose.’
‘Aye,’ said Ted. ‘There’s a lot to teck in.’ He stood up and stretched his arms. His arms were that long, thought Gabe, he could reach right to the tops of the looms.
‘Look sharp,’ said Ted, ‘you’ve a dentist appointment. That’s why your mum said you cou
ld stop off school.’
He hadn’t thought of it in a long time. It wasn’t like remembering another time and place, but another world. Can you tell me again, Dad? He needn’t have worried. Dad kept dragging him along there until he hated the sight of the mill.
Gabriel logged on to email, it was the first chance he’d had. Thirty-six since last night, mostly junk. He opened the one from Gareth James because it was marked with a red flag. There was going to be a meeting for ‘team leaders’ about ‘human capital’ and ‘leading from the middle’. Gabe had been to that kind of meeting plenty of times before, and his aim – like everyone else’s – was to get out of there having agreed to nothing, while seeming to be ‘on board’ and ‘part of the team’.
He looked up and checked the kitchen floor. Victor was over with Ivan, the two of them with their arms folded, facing each other, as if they both had something they were unwilling to say. Ivan adjusted his bandanna, put his hand to his crotch and shifted his balls as though they were lead weights. Despite his cauliflower ear and powerful build, you didn’t look at Ivan and think boxer, rugby player. Somehow there was nothing sporting about him, but his physical presence would be ideal in a prison, either as a con or a screw, and maybe it was the way he held himself that made him seem built for the giving or taking of grief. He was a worker, though, Ivan, a proper Trojan, no messing. Gabriel had seen him sustain – it made him wince to think of it – a severe burn on the arm, the kind that writes a sick note for a week. Three hours later he was back from Accident & Emergency, working one-handed at the grill.
Gabe filleted out the emails that he’d need to attend to and dragged the others into the bin. If a kitchen were as wasteful as emails, he’d be permanently surrounded by stinking mounds of crud.
Victor and Ivan were talking now, Victor circling, moving nervously, a yipping terrier to Ivan’s unmoving pug. Victor was a troublemaker, Gabriel could see clearly the way he was trying to wind Ivan up.
Let them sort it out. There had to be a pecking order, cooks like wild dogs raised their hackles now and then, testing out their position in the pack. Gabe looked back at the screen.
Now they were yelling at each other and could probably be heard in the penthouse. He was going to have to break it up. He kicked back his chair, left his cubicle and rounded the corner in time to see Ivan pick up the bottle. For one long, hovering moment it looked as if he would smash it into Victor’s face. Instead he flung the contents on the stove-top behind Victor’s back, sending a wall of flame, red, gold and blue, to the ceiling with a force that sucked the oxygen from the room and sent Victor leaping with a scream.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SHE WAS SIX FOOT TWO IN HER HEELS AND APPEARED TO BE spray-painted in gold. Several versions of her circulated around the ballroom like some complicated mirror trick, balancing trays of Chef Albert’s beloved confectionery on upturned palms. The models had been provided by the Sirovsky PR people and seemingly selected for the load-bearing strength of their earlobes, on which a tonne of Sirovsky silver crystal swung, and for the length of their femurs, guaranteed to excite any palaeontologist if suddenly exhumed on a dig.
Gabriel declined a miniature meringue and reappraised the spray paint as catsuit as he watched the sway of her back and traced the line of the zip. The ballroom, ‘dressed’ for the occasion, was a scandal of fur throws, floor-standing candelabras and a ceiling of billowing silk. In the alcoves, little crystal deities lolled on dark velvet beds. These, Gabe had been informed, were the launch products, 16cm sculptures of reindeer, puppies, lions, a bird at a bath, priced at ‘upwards of two thousand pounds’. At the centre of the room was a life-size Sirovsky cherry tree complete with glass blossom and a carpet of turf. And from behind a bowling-lane-sized perspex table, lit from within, agency waiters served flavoured vodka shots while front and centre an ice swan glowed magnificently and began, at this late hour, to drip.
He’d catered for three hundred and it looked like they’d all turned up. Gabriel assessed the crowd. Among the women there was a predominance of jutting hip bones and big, expensive hair. The younger ones worked a pout or smile and looked pleased with their handbag brand, while the more mature generation had no doubt discovered tennis, joined a book group and raised funds for a cause, which gave them plenty to talk about without needing to pause for thought. The men, to Gabe’s eye, were no more varied than the women. There was a sprinkling of pretty young things, at whom it was impossible to look without the vague accompanying sensation that you might have seen them somewhere before, who were or had been celebrities or who were confidently waiting for their birthright of fifteen minutes of fame. The older men, greying, balding, spreading, were glossed by success and the confidence with which they took up more space than was strictly necessary. As an ensemble the guests had one uniting feature, discerned by Gabe in the way that gazes slid over shoulders, feet pointed and tapped, a general air of mobility that made him think of quivering antennae, tuning in and tuning out.
He exchanged a glance with a woman who wore a diamond the size of an artichoke and her hair in a French pleat. He looked around. Champagne, inevitably, came his way and he drank it down. The woman still looked when he looked and he touched the tiny bald patch at the back of his head.
This place wasn’t so bad. For an instant he thought about staying on at the Imperial, blowing Rolly and Fairweather out, but he knew that it was madness to allow a momentary gratification to deflect him from his path. In truth, he liked this party, liked this vibe. He could look at it and not be fooled by it, but he liked the flow and buzz. Sometimes he had to get out of the kitchen to appreciate what it was that he did.
He lifted another glass and made a silent toast of welcome to one and all, because he needed this sometimes, to be some small part of this and get out of the cauldron below. Victor and Ivan had said nothing about the blow-up, sticking to some Slavic criminal code.
‘Nothing dangerous, Chef,’ said Ivan. ‘All big show.’
‘All show, man,’ said Victor. ‘Yeah, all show is right.’
Victor, Gabriel suspected, had been cut out of some deal and was hustling for his share. Ivan and Gleeson, was that it? Doing what, though? What?
Victor had squawked like a hen but he was still strutting, nothing injured apart from his pride.
‘Seen what the buggers are charging for those glorified paperweights?’ said Mr Maddox, over his shoulder. The GM had sent for Gabe to come up.
‘Community outreach programme,’ said Gabriel, turning, ‘providing relief to those unfortunates burdened with excess cash.’
Mr Maddox snorted. He held up a hand to block a waiter who made the mistake of trying to slip through between Maddox and Gabe. ‘See that girl – there – the one stroking the swan. Look at the tart factor on that. Is she a hooker or a filthy rich Russian? Even I can’t tell them apart.’
‘I’ve no experience of either,’ said Gabe.
‘Is that right, my friend? Is that right? Then you’ve clearly no hotel experience. I should fire you on the spot.’ Maddox gave his malfunctioning laugh. ‘Never too busy to enjoy a joke. Now, I wanted to get you up here before this lot buggers off. We want this crowd, Chef, we want to please them, we want them to come back and bring their friends. What did they think of the food, eh? Asked them? No, me neither, didn’t need to, because know what they did, they ate it, there’s more food gone in their bellies than the bin and that’s what you call a minor miracle, some of these girls wetting themselves over the calories, be a few fingers down throats tonight.’
Mr Maddox, being as affectionate as his nature allowed, punched Gabe on the arm as he departed. Gabriel imagined him with Mrs Maddox, lovingly exchanging blows.
Left alone once more, Gabe insinuated himself deeper into the room, gathering fragments of conversation, bright useless things, which were all that he needed right now. When he saw Rolly and Fairweather for a moment he wished he could disappear, but Fairweather smiled at him with such boundless enthusiasm that Gabriel
said good to see you and found that he meant it; they were partners and surely friends.
‘My wife collects this stuff,’ said Fairweather, pushing his fringe out of his eyes. ‘We’re not checking up on you.’
‘I am,’ said Rolly, ‘speak for yourself. There’s a function room at the Pimlico site, we need to make it pay.’ He was wearing a suit tonight, of a rather violent blue. His tie, which bore a daisy motif, had been loosened, the knot pulled down to the point on his chest from which his belly swelled.
‘Fabulous,’ said Fairweather, making an inclusive gesture. ‘Wonderful. And the wives are over there, getting to know each other. They’ll get along famously. Lucinda gets along with anyone, all part of the job, like being a vicar’s wife.’
‘Tell you what Geraldine’s good at – spending,’ said Rolly. ‘Used to be amateur, when I met her, now she’s turned into a pro. I have to have it. What does that mean? I say to her, Geraldine, if you can’t buy it are you going to go up in a puff of smoke?’
‘Women.’ Fairweather ruffled the top of his head, petting himself to mark his own incorrigibility which nobody, least of all Fairweather, could resist.
‘I sent the revised business plan,’ said Gabriel. ‘Think it’s looking good.’
Rolly blinked rapidly. ‘It’s getting serious. Getting down to the serious stuff.’
‘What pretty girls,’ said Fairweather, accepting a crystallized fruit from a golden Sirovsky specimen. ‘Where in the world do you get them from?’
‘Keep them in my desk drawer,’ said Gabriel, ‘one or two in my locker as spares.’
‘What do you say?’ began Fairweather. ‘Let’s take a little boys’ trip, just a couple of days. We could go to France, look at some hand-built ovens I’ve been told about, do a bit of the old male bonding as well.’
‘Hand-built ovens?’ said Rolly.
‘Weren’t you just saying, Gabriel, that you could do with a bit of a rest, a bit of a boost?’