This Time Next Year

by Sophie Cousens

  “Right, ad break, what are we ordering? I got a hankering for a vanilla and pistachio mille-feuille with crème anglaise,” said Minnie’s dad, chuckling to himself as he came through to the kitchen. “It doesn’t half whet your appetite, that show! Oh, you’re cooking, are you, Con?”

  He pulled out a kitchen chair and sank his weight down onto it. He looked back and forth between his wife and daughter, then started tapping the broken pan-handle against the wooden kitchen table. “What you both looking so gloomy about?”

  “Nothing, stuff and nonsense,” said her mother briskly. “Right, someone get the cheese out of the fridge. Can’t have pasta without cheese, can we?”

  Over dinner, Minnie broke the news about her business. She asked if she could move home for a while. Her dad kicked back in his chair, balancing it precariously on two legs.

  “That’s a real shame, love, I always loved your cooking, thought you were onto a real winner there.”

  He reached out and patted Minnie’s back. When her dad said something nice to her, it made Minnie want to curl up on his lap like she had as a girl. They used to watch endless Star Wars films together, and her dad would do all the characters’ voices. Minnie turned to look at her mother, who was methodically chewing a mouthful of pasta. She swallowed loudly, then without looking at Minnie started twirling another forkful of pasta.

  “You’re not going to say anything, Mum?”

  “I think I’m getting déjà vu,” she said, reaching for a glass of water.

  “Come on, love, that’s not fair,” said her dad. “She’s not had a business fail before. There might have been other things gone wrong, but it’s not the same.”

  Minnie’s mother stared wordlessly at her husband.

  “I think she means you, Dad, your business,” Minnie said quietly.

  “Oh.” Once he’d said the word, Dad held his lips locked in an awkward O shape, and he lowered the chair slowly back onto all four legs.

  “I said it was a mistake,” her mum went on, “I said it was a disaster waiting to happen. You didn’t even go to college, Minnie, how are you supposed to know about money and bookkeeping?”

  “Leila did the books, Mum, and just because I didn’t go to university doesn’t mean I haven’t got a brain for business. It’s all been going fine for the last few years, we’ve worked our arses off, we just hit a . . . a rough patch.”

  “I said all this to your father. Why will no one ever listen to me?” her mother said, shaking her head.

  “Look, I know you’re disappointed,” said Minnie, feeling her voice catch in her throat. “I’m disappointed too. You think at thirty I wanted to be broke, unemployed, and moving home? You think this is how I planned my life to pan out, Mum?” She paused. “At least I gave it a go.”

  “Your dad gave it a go too. Gambled all our savings on that property he was doing up. Cooper Development Company might have sounded grand, but a fancy name’s not much use to you when the bottom falls out of the market.”

  “Bad luck, wasn’t it. I would have done a great job on that house,” said her dad wistfully.

  “Some things aren’t worth the risk. You risk, you lose, that’s what I’ve learned. Best to keep your head down and play the hand you’re dealt.”

  Minnie pressed her fingernails into the underside of her chair. She felt the familiar grooves in the wood from where she’d done this before.

  “Well, if you’re coming home, there’s not much room upstairs,” said her mother flatly. “The loft room’s full of all your dad’s clock bits now.”

  “I can clear that out in half a jiffy,” said her dad, “or she could stay in Will’s room?”

  “And what is Will supposed to do when he comes to visit?” said her mum.

  “He hasn’t been home in two years, Mum,” said Minnie.

  “Give her a break, Connie. You can stay as long as you need, Minnie Moo. I’ll clear out space in your old room this afternoon,” said her dad, reaching out to squeeze Minnie’s shoulder.

  Her mother took another mouthful of food. The crushing feeling of inadequacy broke over Minnie like a wave. How could her parents spend so much of their lives fixing things and fail to see what was broken right in front of them?

  New Year’s Eve 2010

  “Don’t touch that plate before it’s garnished,” Rob the pastry chef screamed across the kitchen.

  Minnie whipped her hand back from the service counter as though she’d been scalded. She hadn’t even planned on picking it up; she had just been straightening the plate. In any other environment she would have talked back, defended herself, but in this kitchen she’d quickly learned you said, “Yes, chef,” and took whatever criticism was dished out.

  Minnie had been working in Le Lieu de Rencontre for six months. It was a Michelin-starred restaurant in Mayfair and a very different experience to the place she’d worked before. Victor’s, where she’d got a job straight out of school, had been a family-run restaurant in Kentish Town. There had been only three chefs in a cramped kitchen, whereas here there were usually over twenty people cooking at any one time. The clientele at Victor’s had been families and young foodies, whereas Rencontre was stuffed with City suits with expense accounts who liked to be seen in expensive places. At Victor’s she’d been allowed to cook. Here she was barely allowed to turn on the oven.

  Minnie had left school with no clear career plan or vocation. It had been Leila who’d suggested she learn to cook.

  “You’ve got a natural taste for food, you always know what’s going to work well together,” Leila said.

  “What bangers and mash, spag and Bol, cereal and milk?” Minnie laughed.

  “I’m serious, Min, you’ve got a natural flair. If you got trained up in a proper kitchen, you could be really good.”

  She’d been amazed when they’d offered her the job at Victor’s; she had no experience and barely a CV. Paul, the head chef, had asked her to cook him a Spanish omelet and hired her on the spot as he watched her make it. She’d loved working with Paul, the atmosphere of the cozy family-run restaurant, the regulars who came in, learning about food, improving her skills week on week. It was Victor himself, the elderly French owner, who had told her to leave.

  “Minnie, you have a gift, but you can’t learn everything from Paul. You need to work in more kitchens, see how other chefs work. Only then will you grow.”

  “But I love it here; I’ve still got so much to learn,” Minnie protested.

  “We have a saying in France, ‘À chaque oiseau son nid est beau’—the bird loves his own nest. You don’t know any other nest, Minnie. You must spread your wings and learn to fly.”

  As Victor spoke, a slow smile spread across his leathery lined face. It was the face of a man who’d lived well, who’d spent a lot of time in the sun and drunk red wine every day of his adult life.

  So she’d spread her wings and landed at Rencontre. She’d been there six months and she hated it. It was a huge team and every commis chef around her had sharp elbows and even sharper tongues. She was on rotation, working beneath various specialist chefs. This month she was assigned to the pastry chef, and he was the worst yet. Rob had taken against Minnie from her very first day. There was a dish on the menu served with a saffron butter sauce. Minnie had mentioned how at Victor’s they’d made a similar sauce but with a squeeze of lime rather than lemon. Rob humiliated her in front of everyone, asking if she wanted to rewrite the whole menu that had been designed by a Michelin-starred chef. She’d quickly learned to keep her thoughts on the food to herself.

  She wanted to stick it out for a year, try and move up from second commis to first. This place would look great on her CV if she could leave with a good reference. But the hours were grueling, the pace exhausting, and she didn’t even feel she was learning much.

  Tonight was New Year’s Eve and the place was packed. She didn’t want to wor
k tonight, but she’d been rota’d on all week without a break. She’d missed Christmas with her family and worked fifteen-hour days; her whole body ached with fatigue. All week she’d been charged with the monotonous job of piping brandy crème pâtissière into miniature Christmas puddings. They were to be served as mignardises—or petits fours—after the dessert course. The puddings were the size of walnuts and they had to be delicately holed out then filled in such a way that not a drop of filling was visible.

  “No.”

  “Again.”

  “Not right.”

  “Sloppy!”

  “Minnie, you’re a fucking disgrace of a pastry chef. Where did you learn to bake again? Greggs?”

  Rob had been screaming at her all afternoon. Her piping was good and she knew it; he was just making her do it again and again because he could. She’d just finished a perfect sheet of twenty when he’d loomed over her, inspected one, then tossed the whole batch on the floor.

  “The crème pât is warm, you’ve overworked it.”

  Rob’s face darted forward, inches from hers. His gray skin and stinking breath made her want to gag. He had eye bags that stretched down to his cheeks, giving the impression that his face was melting. “Do you even taste your food, or are you trying to watch your figure?”

  Minnie composed a blank expression, trying not to react. A few of the other commis chefs looked on sympathetically; they knew Rob went too far with Minnie. The first week she’d worked there, a few of them had gone for a drink after their shift. Rob had made a pass at Minnie after a few too many beers. She’d pushed him away as politely as possible, but Rob wasn’t the kind of guy who could brush off a perceived slight. He acted as though any woman working in his kitchen was another ingredient in his pantry, to be used as he saw fit.

  “If you’re packing on a few extra pounds, it’s not my problem, Minnie,” Rob hissed. “If you’re going to overwork the crème like an amateur, you’d better taste every batch before it leaves this station.”

  Minnie had tasted it; it wasn’t overworked. She cleared up the mess and picked up a new piping bag. If she could endure one more week she’d move out from Rob’s rotation; maybe then life at the restaurant would get easier.

  “Don’t let him get to you,” whispered Danna, giving Minnie’s elbow a squeeze as she walked past. Danna worked in the fish section and hardly ever spoke to Minnie. She was Norwegian, aloof, and as ambitious as the rest of them. If she was being sympathetic then it must have looked bad.

  At ten to midnight, Minnie had just plated up two miniature puddings for table fifteen. Rob breathed down her neck as she added the final garnish, a delicate holly leaf and a sprinkle of edible gold glitter. He glared at them and made a low growling noise. Even he couldn’t find anything to fault and they were now too busy for him to be inventing problems.

  “Service!” Rob called to the serving staff on the other side of the line.

  Minnie was almost done, her shift ended at one o’clock. She needed a shower, she needed to sleep, she needed to not see another miniature crème-pâtissière-filled Christmas pudding for a very long time.

  She started cleaning up her station, wiping down the surfaces and collecting utensils when she heard Rob’s voice screaming across the kitchen.

  “Minnie, did you send a pudding to table fifteen?” Rob strode across the room toward her, holding his hand—balled into a fist—out in front of him.

  “Yes . . .” she said nervously.

  He opened his hand, pointing at the remains of a pudding in his palm. Inside was a tiny, chewed piece of clear plastic.

  “Just been sent back. Plastic in your piped filling.” He spoke slowly, relishing every syllable.

  Minnie looked down at his hand and her face went pale. It looked like a piece of the plastic from the piping bag she’d been using. How could that even have come off, let alone got in the filling? Then she remembered she’d started a new one, cutting the end off to let the crème run out. Had she definitely cut off the end properly?

  A grin spread across Rob’s face as he waved the tiny piece of plastic in her face.

  “I’ve just been waiting for a reason to fire you,” he said quietly, his crooked front tooth snagging on his bottom lip.

  Minnie felt numb for a second. If she got fired, she wouldn’t get a reference; it would all have been for nothing. Every mean thing Rob had ever said flashed through her mind and she didn’t feel numb anymore, she felt angry.

  In her mind, she visualized picking up the piping bag from the counter next to her, aiming it at Rob’s face, and squeezing it as hard as she could. The crème pât would spray out in a perfect consistency, covering his face. He would freeze in shock, or rage, rooted to the spot. The kitchen staff would all turn to see what was happening; a few brave people would whoop and cheer.

  “Go, Minnie!” Danna would yell from the back.

  Minnie’s heart raced. She would reach out for a handful of holly leaves and add them to Rob’s head as a garnish.

  “And don’t forget the glitter,” she would say, picking up a handful of gold and adding it with a flourish to his crème-covered face. “Service!” Minnie would shout.

  She would hear laughter all around her, people with hands clasped over their mouths—she would be a hero! Rob would wipe the crème from his eyes, his gray skin now puce, his mouth hanging open in shock. Minnie would pull off her hairnet, turn, and walk out of the kitchen with her head held high, a soundtrack belting out Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” at full volume as she danced from the room and everyone watched her go.

  In reality, there was no soundtrack, no spraying of crème pât, Minnie would not dare. She simply picked up her apron and left with her hat in her hand. No one watched her go and the sea of the kitchen closed around her, like water filling the space where a small fish used to swim.

  January 6, 2020

  “It sounds like Leila’s fucked this up royally,” said Greg.

  Greg and Minnie were having breakfast in Greg’s Islington flat. After dinner with her parents, Minnie had gone back to Greg’s for the night. He’d been busy most of the weekend with a deadline for an article on offshore fishing titled, “Mussel-ing in on Salmon Else’s Water: This Whaley Needs to Stop.” Sometimes Minnie wondered whether Greg didn’t just think up titles first and then decide what news needed writing. She didn’t know if he was still sulking about New Year’s Eve, but when she’d turned up on his doorstep he’d given her a much-needed hug.

  Greg asked her not to go into the details of why she was upset last night; he found it hard to sleep after “emotional downloads” from other people. So they’d gone straight to bed and now, over breakfast, she was explaining the bleak situation the business was in.

  “Leila hasn’t done anything wrong,” Minnie said. She was perched on the bar stool at Greg’s narrow kitchen counter, brushing her wet hair after a shower. “We’ve probably only survived as long as we have because of her.”

  “I don’t agree. You were in charge of cooking—you delivered. She was in charge of funding and finance—she’s the one who failed.” Greg reached out and took the brush from her hand. “Please don’t do that in the kitchen. I find your hair everywhere.”

  Minnie shook her head. She felt a vertical line crease between her eyebrows.

  “You’re not being very helpful, Greg. It’s not Leila’s fault. We were doing fine; we’re just being suffocated by loan repayments.”

  “Not that well if you’re calling around to borrow cars at the last minute.”

  “And it’s so nice to know I can rely on you in an emergency.”

  “Everything’s an emergency, Min. Life’s an emergency. Do you know how many fish there are left in the sea? That’s a fucking emergency. We’re going to have to stop using the expression ‘plenty more fish in the sea’ because it’s factually inaccurate.”

  Greg took his gla
sses off and pulled a lens wipe from the kitchen drawer. Minnie sat watching him. It had been comforting to see him last night, to cushion herself in his familiar bed, his familiar body, and his familiar smell. This morning, nothing about Greg felt comforting or familiar; he felt alien and unknowable. As he cleaned his lenses she realized he’d hardly looked at her, barely made eye contact over breakfast, yet he was examining his lens with such fastidious attention. She stared straight at him, willing him to look up and really see her.

  “Anyway, all you need is a rich benefactor, or go back to working in restaurants like most chefs.”

  He turned to his coffee machine and started sifting through the different-colored capsules in the metal basket next to it.

  “Fucking Clive never replaces these, I mean hello, this isn’t a Travelodge, the coffee doesn’t come free with the room.”

  Clive was Greg’s flatmate. He was forty-two and married. He split his time between London three nights a week, and his family home in Kent the rest of the time. From Minnie’s perspective it looked like an ideal situation for Greg—he got half his rent paid, yet Clive was hardly there.

  “If you break down the cost per pod and the number of pods he uses a month, do you know how much that works out as?” Greg jabbed a finger against the kitchen counter.

  Minnie nodded sympathetically, then realized he was waiting for an answer.

  “A tenner?”

  “Seven pounds twenty. I swear he wouldn’t even know where to buy replacements. You think they have coffee capsule shops in Kent? They do not.”

  Greg picked up two green pods and shook them at Minnie. He slammed them both down on the counter and started scratching his short beard. “There’s only Fortissio Lungo left. I hate Fortissio Lungo—Clive knows that. If you’re going to drink a man’s coffee, at least have the decency to drink the ones you know he doesn’t like. Right?”