by Monica Ali
Gabriel found himself nodding, though he was sure he hadn’t said anything of the kind. But it was true enough, he supposed, and sensitive of Fairweather to pick it up.
‘Mancini’s called in the receivers,’ said Rolly. ‘The fish place in Tooley Street is about to close. Chez Nous won’t be far behind from what I hear.’
‘Dreadful,’ said Fairweather, ‘the poor things.’
‘Right. It breaks my heart. But restaurants are a cruel, hard world. And when I’ve finished crying for them I’ll be over there, to see what bargains I can pick up.’
‘Oh, he’s the greatest, isn’t he,’ said Fairweather, ‘he’s the best. Ding-a-ding. Round two.’
‘Anyway,’ said Rolly. He wiped a little sweat from his brow with his tie. He looked, Gabriel thought, like a children’s entertainer, down on his luck after a false accusation. Was he trying to be flamboyant? Was it Geraldine who dressed him like that? ‘Anyway, you know something, if Gabriel’s depressed then it’s a cross he has to bear. It’s the 5-HTT gene, read it in the papers today.’
‘I’m not depressed,’ said Gabe.
‘Aha,’ said Fairweather, ‘we always have this conversation. We could say it’s a predisposition, rather than, you know, written in the stars, as it were.’
‘It’s not in his horoscope,’ said Rolly. ‘I don’t believe in that.’
‘Of course not. I think you’re absolutely right.’ Fairweather beamed. He had a remarkable ability to agree and disagree at the same time. ‘And we all take responsibility, don’t we, for looking after ourselves. Quick tune-up needed sometimes. Nothing wrong with that.’
‘What you want is the short gene, the short version, transports serotonin. Hang on, no, that’s what you don’t want. You want the long 5-HTT.’
‘I’m actually not depressed.’
‘Well, I need my beauty sleep. Giving a speech in the House tomorrow. Shall we rendezvous next week?’
A woman touched Fairweather’s forearm. ‘Excuse me – hope you don’t mind me asking, but – are you somebody?’ she said.
* * *
Gabriel thought about it as he stepped on to a Juliet balcony to get a breath of air. The guests were dispersing now, collecting goodie bags and brushing cheeks to signify a kiss. Are you somebody? Fairweather had managed to blush and bumble about being a mere junior minister of state. He was delighted, of course. He was somebody. What was the alternative? A nobody. If you were more than your own self you were somebody, and if you weren’t ‘somebody’ perhaps being yourself amounted to nothing at all.
‘Hello, Romeo, isn’t this where I’m supposed to be?’ She was a little older than he’d realized, a few grey hairs in that slick French pleat. Good-looking, though, handsome, with a broad, compelling mouth.
‘Why’s that?’
‘Oh, you know, the girl stands on the balcony and looks down …’
‘And I clamber up with a rose between my teeth.’
She laughed. ‘Listen, shall we cut to the chase?’
‘Do you want me to chase you?’
‘You are funny. That’s exactly what you don’t have to do.’
‘If I were a free man,’ said Gabe.
She shivered. She waited a moment, considering perhaps her exit or giving him time to change his mind. ‘Well, Romeo, we’re only as free as we want to be. It’s your funeral. You enjoy it,’ she said. ‘Goodnight.’
Gabe looked down at the street and then looked up at the sky. It was his funeral, was it? Charming. If a man said that! He shook his head and laughed.
He was hardly burying himself with Charlie. They’d had that trip to Marrakech, a present that he’d organized, a little surprise. Maybe they needed something else like that, something spontaneous. He’d have to plan it in.
It was well past midnight and Gabe was at his desk. When he went home Lena would be there. Or maybe she had gone. It didn’t matter either way. But she’d be there, of course she would, waiting for the money that he didn’t find. Then what? He’d had it all worked out. It wasn’t complicated, it was simple, he would just …
Damn it, he wasn’t wasting any more time on this.
Benny was the last in the kitchen. Gabe went out to see what he was doing.
‘One gallon of court bouillon,’ said Benny, lifting a lid. ‘Two litres of demi-glace, nearly done.’
‘Good man,’ said Gabe. He watched as Benny skimmed the demi-glace. ‘We’ve got to get twenty-four-hour room service started,’ he said. ‘It’s to do with star ratings, now they’ve finished the refurb. We need to cover between midnight and six.’
‘Yes, Chef,’ said Benny. ‘It’s a long time to go without food.’
Benny stirred the bouillon. The scar across his cheek was faintly silvery. It was a big ugly scar but it didn’t make him look ugly. In an odd way it suited him, if it was possible to suit such a wound.
‘Problem is, it’s the thought of having it rather than actually having it and that’s why the numbers don’t add up. It’s why I haven’t sorted it out before now. Mr Maddox wants every new initiative to show a profit. Insists on it, in fact.’ Gabriel hitched himself up to sit on the worktop. ‘But with the extra staff costs, waiters as well, remember, we’re not coming out ahead.’
‘So, Chef, what will you do?’
‘You a bit of a night owl, Benny? Fancy the graveyard shift? It’ll be soups and salads, fries and burgers, no real chance to cook, but I need a reliable man.’
‘What about the profits? What will Mr Maddox say?’
Gabe shrugged. ‘I’ll punch in some different numbers. It’ll look OK.’
‘Yes, Chef.’
‘Look,’ said Gabe. ‘This is the way it’ll work. I put in some numbers to give the right projection, so Maddox can sign it off. His nose is clean. Then the orders don’t come in at the projected rate, it’s nobody’s fault, we’ve got the extra star which is what we want. We fold the night-service profit and loss in with the rest of room service, which is what is going to happen anyway. We’ve made the problem disappear.’
Benny was quiet. He seemed to be loaded with questions, which he would now refuse to ask.
‘What?’ said Gabriel. ‘What?’
‘Nothing, Chef. I was just wondering, would it be easier to tell the truth?’
Remember, Gabriel, a lie is as worthless as the feller what’s told it.
It was all very well. But at work, these days, truth and lies didn’t come into it. What you had to think about was what ‘they’ did or didn’t need to hear and how to make yourself heard.
‘Truth is, Benny, it’s going to work fine. All I’m doing is de-risking it for Mr Maddox so the worry is mine alone.’
Benny smiled again, showing his salt-white teeth. ‘Let me work some doubles, Chef. I can sleep until the afternoon, come in and work until six.’
Gabe nodded. ‘I’ll pour this bouillon for you. Let’s stick it straight in the fridge. There’s one that’s empty. No, I’m OK, you strain the demi-glace. Then we can both get home.’
They worked and cleared in silence. The night porter came in and made a start on the grease traps. They exchanged nods, one apiece.
‘Right,’ said Gabe. ‘We’re done.’ He wiped his hands with an unnecessary flourish and smacked them together a few times. ‘Home,’ he said, and then, more weakly, ‘home.’
‘I have to go down and get my things from the locker,’ said Benny.
‘Right. Of course. Right.’ Gabriel folded his towel. He picked it up again and scrunched it, then lobbed it at the laundry bin. ‘OK.’
Benny started to move.
‘Wait,’ called Gabriel. ‘Wait. Do you want to go for a drink? Do you need to get home? I’m not in a hurry myself, I mean, it’s not that late really and – come on, let’s do it – I know a nice little bar.’
Dusty’s was a cook-infested basement dive in Heddon Street. The eponymous Dusty was a Geordie with a legendary CV including working the rigs in Saudi, bootlegging whisky, also in Saudi, gunr
unning in unspecified southern African states, managing a fairground attraction in Mexico City as a front for some hinted-at nefarious activity, and ‘bodyguarding’, as he put it, for celebrities. ‘Yeah, they were cunts,’ he liked to say, ‘but no more than the other cunts. No more than you cunts in here. Come down to it, I’ve travelled the world and it’s the same all over, it’s what you get everywhere, and everyone, basically – I’m talking brass tacks, behind the scenes, boil it down – is more or less of a cunt.’
The cooks didn’t give him any grief. They took their fights outside. The bar was like a warm, dark mouth which held them while they wet their troubles or joys, or rinsed off the boredom with Jack Daniel’s and Bruce Springsteen.
Tonight there was no sign of Dusty. A girl in a ripped black T-shirt, sporting a ring through her lip and a cold sore besides, guarded the bar with a belligerence that must have taken months of training to perfect. She raised her chin a millimetre, an economical way of saying, yes, what can I get for you?
‘Kronenbourg,’ said Gabriel. ‘Benny, what do you want?’
‘Good evening,’ said Benny to the girl, who had merely to slacken her jaw muscles to tell him what she thought of that. ‘Do you have Blue Curaçao?’
The girl touched the tip of her tongue to her lip ring but disappeared down behind the bar and then rose again as if from the grave holding a bottle of the glowing blue spirit.
Gabe and Benny took their drinks and sat close to Spunker’s Corner where Dave Hill, at that time Garde Manger at the Connaught, was said to have come in his pants while recounting the contents of a pornographic film. If you drank at Dusty’s for long enough you learned a legend about everyone in the game.
‘Where the fuck have you been?’ Nathan Tyler came out of the gents, zipping, and spoke as if Gabriel had stood him up. In a sense, Gabriel supposed, he had. Since he’d got together with Charlie, he either went to the Penguin or went home.
‘I’ve got to split, mate,’ said Nathan, in a tone that suggested Gabe had begged him to stay. ‘Listen, give us a call, yeah, you little fucker, give us a call.’
‘We were at the Dorchester together,’ Gabe told Benny. He smiled to himself. Ten hours a day ‘turning’ potatoes, carving them into a roundness that nature did not see fit to provide. Doing that shit forged a bond between you, somehow, like living in a trench. Yeah, he’d give Nathan a call.
‘Cheers,’ said Benny. He lifted his glass. The contents looked radioactive. Benny cocked his little finger daintily as he drank.
‘It’s good to … you know, wind down after work,’ said Gabe. ‘Have a couple of drinks.’
‘Yes, Chef,’ said Benny. He had changed into stone-washed jeans with neatly pressed creases, a black leather jacket with a tiger embroidered on the back, and traded his work clogs for a pair of grey slip-ons so shiny they could easily be employed to look up a skirt.
‘So,’ said Gabe, glancing around. ‘I used to come here sometimes.’
‘Yes, Chef.’
Neither one of them, it seemed, was winding down. ‘You don’t have to call me Chef now. Gabe will be fine.’
‘OK, Gabe.’
‘Did you come that night we went to the Penguin? Place with the jazz singer, my girlfriend? Night Damian got legless and puked down his shirt.’ The detail was extraneous; there hadn’t been any other nights.
‘No, Chef. I was not in that day.’
Soon after he’d started at the Imperial, Gabriel had taken the crew out, his first and so far only initiative in the building of team spirit.
‘We’ll do it again some time soon,’ said Gabe, without meaning it. He wanted to ask Benny where he was from. Benny’s English was excellent but deeply accented, each syllable a heavy mouthful, formed – so it seemed – with a degree of physical effort at the back of the throat, and released with an audible exhale. Gabe had been working with Benny for nearly six months now. It seemed a little awkward to be asking him where he was from. He decided to come at it from the side. ‘Salim,’ he said, naming one of the night porters. ‘He’s Somali, isn’t he? Do you know much about it? Somalia, I mean?’
‘I know a little,’ said Benny with an enigmatic smile. He lifted his drink. ‘You know this is made with oranges. How does it end up blue?’
Gabe had only ever seen one person drink Blue Curaçao before and that was Nana. She liked the green stuff too, crème de menthe, which tasted like medicine as far as Gabe was concerned. ‘Search me. He looks quite sad, Salim. I wonder what his story is.’
Benny shrugged. ‘He is from Somalia. That is a story, for true.’
‘What about you, Benny?’
‘Chef?’
‘Well,’ said Gabe. ‘I don’t know. I guess we’re just having a bit of a chat here. What about your family? Have you got someone waiting for you at home?’
‘It depends,’ said Benny, slowly, ‘on what you mean by home. You have your lady friend waiting for you?’
Lena was waiting for him. Gabe shivered. The thought of her drew and repelled him, like an image of an atrocity at which he could not look and from which he could not turn away. ‘Not tonight,’ he said, ‘she’s working abroad for a while. What do you call home, then? You tell me.’
‘Ah,’ said Benny. He shook his large head and gazed at Gabriel with his yellowy eyes. Head aside, Benny was compact, undersized even, but there was nothing stunted about his physique. He made Gabriel feel his extra inches as something superfluous, extra blood and bone and tissue which could be removed without taking anything essential away.
‘Only making conversation,’ said Gabriel. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’
‘A friend of mine,’ said Benny, ‘is Somali, like Salim. He lived in Mogadishu and he was a driver. If you heard his story … eh, heh, heh.’ Benny’s laugh was deep-throated, laden with a meaning that was not clear to Gabe.
‘Go on,’ said Gabe, ‘what happened to your friend?’
‘Too many things,’ said Benny. ‘Chef, is there anything about work you are wanting to discuss with me?’
Gabe had considered asking Benny about Victor and Ivan, what lay behind the flare-up today, but Benny had a diplomat’s gift for deflection, was a master at smoothing things over. They could talk but nothing, he knew, would be said. ‘We’re off duty, Benny, let’s give ourselves a break. I’d rather listen to a story about your friend.’
‘Do you know,’ said Benny, ‘you can buy a national insurance number, you can buy a passport, an identity, and also you can buy a story. If you think your own story is not strong enough, if you worry that your own suffering is not sufficient to gain permission to stay in this country, you can buy a story and take it with you to this government office in Croydon. Somali stories can get a high price.’
‘I suppose,’ said Gabe, ‘that everything is for sale.’
‘And if you tell your own story, you may not be believed. “Lack of credibility.” That is the stamp they use. I know somebody that this happened to.’
Gabe yawned comfortably. He knew the type of thing that was coming, but he didn’t mind. ‘Where was he from?’
‘The Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was a professor of economics at the University of Kinshasa, a very clever man.’ Benny chuckled, as if to say, well, there is the problem, right there.
‘And? He got put in prison?’ Benny, he could see, was hesitating, not knowing how much to say. After-work drinks meant bitching, ribbing, gossiping, not telling tales of woe.
‘He was involved in opposition politics. The first time he was arrested, they extracted most of his teeth.’ Benny looked at Gabriel, checking, it seemed, whether he had gone too far. Gabe nodded, as if this detail was only to be expected. ‘The next time,’ said Benny, speaking quickly, ‘that they locked him up they did not torture him, but when he was released he went home and discovered that they had killed his wife and children. With the help of a colleague he fled to Zambia and from there he came to the UK. A happy end, you think?’
‘I’m gues
sing no,’ said Gabe. Benny, who had antique good manners, had got the story over with as fast as possible, not wanting to be a bore.
Benny lifted his glass with his peculiar one-finger salute. ‘No,’ he said, and took a gulp. ‘Lack of credibility. They asked him all sorts of questions. They asked how many children he had and how many had been killed. Eleven, he told them. And how many, they asked again, have died? Eleven, he said again. He should have said two or three. That was his mistake. We do not believe your story, they told him. It lacks cred-i-bil-ity.’ He made the word go on for ever, a long indictment, a litany of crime.
‘After all that, they turned him away?’
‘They were right. But also wrong. It is not credible but it is true. What is a man to do?’
Gabriel bought more drinks. He went to the jukebox and scanned it. Nothing had changed. Dylan, the Stones, Springsteen, Neil Young, Deep Purple, Meat Loaf and the Pogues. Dusty had been known to ban people who had the temerity to ask for new tunes. ‘What’s the point of having my own place,’ he’d say, ‘some cunt comes along, tells me what to do?’ The jukebox was vintage, a ’73 Wurlitzer that played 45s, with a design aesthetic that hovered somewhere between spaceship and Tiffany lamp. Gabriel punched in the number for ‘Southern Man’ and gave the old beast a slap on the flank as if it were a pit pony on its way to the knacker’s yard.
‘I have talked too much,’ said Benny, when Gabe sat down again. He rearranged the table, straightening the napkins, the bowl of peanuts, the cardboard coasters, the drinks, his fingers working deftly, flying over the objects and moving them as if by magnetic force or magic, displaying the dextrous touch of an able chef.
‘No,’ said Gabe, ‘not at all.’
‘If I had a woman,’ said Benny, ‘I would not bring her here.’ A couple at the bar had locked mouths. ‘This is killing romance. Romance is better than sex.’
‘Ideally you get both,’ said Gabe, thinking about Lena’s offer. He’d have to go and face her soon. ‘Did you say you were from Congo as well?’
‘Liberia,’ said Benny. ‘Small country, big troubles.’ He shook his head.