'Thanks! Anyway, he told me you would say that!'
Jake leaned back in the chair, eyes narrowed. He was so angry he was almost detached from the whole thing. Which was good, but he knew the pain would come later.
'Let me see, I suppose he took you for a drink and it just sort of escalated from there. You can spare me the details.'
She had intended to do that anyway. It would be impossibly hurtful to Jake to explain how much fun she had had that first afternoon. They hadn't done anything wrong either, just listened to some music, which neither of them had liked, and talked, a lot. It turned out that they had plenty in common, so much that it seemed imperative and entirely natural to arrange to meet again. OK, this time it was in the sort of cocktail bar she'd always longed to be taken to (what woman didn't?) and yes, they had drunk Bollinger, which she'd only ever heard about on Ab Fab, but it was really to do with their personalities seeming to mesh together. That and the fact that when his hot blue gaze looked down at her (he was so tall!), being with him was like basking in a Mediterranean sun. And it was certainly unthinkable to describe how Harry's huge bed was made for the sort of inventive sex that would result in serious injury if they tried it on Jake's lumpy single mattress.
Jill concentrated instead on saying how sorry she was. She said it in so many ways Jake half wondered if she'd consulted a thesaurus before coming out. Eventually he could listen no longer.
'Enough! Is that the gist of what you have to say?' She nodded miserably.
'Then you might as well just fuck off.'
When she'd gone, Jake lay down on his bed, watching the thirty-two candles dripping wax on the carpet and trying not to think about the fact that she had probably gone to see Harry, who was most likely even now enjoying the sex that he had planned for his own evening. Jake was awake for most of the night, thinking about little else.
Jill certainly had gone round to see Harry, but was shocked when his door was opened by a very beautiful girl wearing one of the bath towels she herself had enjoyed using. As she stood there in horror, Harry himself appeared, flagrantly, insultingly, wearing nothing at all and not giving a shit about it either.
'Oops,' was all he said, but it was enough.
Jill stared at him silently for a minute, while it slowly dawned on her what a fool she had been. 'You are such a loser, Harry. For some reason your personality is permanently in negative equity. I don't know why you feel the need to steal from Jake to make up the shortfall, but it will never be enough.'
For a second, Harry's mask dropped to show a face twisted in anger, then he smirked. 'Loser? With all this? I don't think so, babe!'
The swirling cauldron of emotions in the kitchen the next day was about as appealing as one of Mrs Goldman's casseroles – a dish she inflicted on her family from time to time and which was based on the simple premise that if you bunged roughly equal measures of the pantry and the fridge into the oven, something edible would emerge. It almost never did.
Jake was sad and furious at the same time, which made his head feel quite curdled. He tried very hard to leave all this personal stuff at the kitchen door, so to speak, and stay professional, but he wore a permanent scowl and spoke only in monosyllables. An equally unappetising combination of shame and despair made Jill clumsier than ever, while Harry's glee made him simply insufferable. He waited until the kitchen was full of people before holding out his hand and saying in a loud voice: 'I hope there are no hard feelings, mate? Please don't take this personally.'
'Why not? We both know it is,' said Jake acidly and stalked off, giving Harry all the time in the world to tell everyone how it wasn't really Jake's fault he was such a bad loser.
To all this was added the chef's hangover, which, even by his standards, was of monumental proportions.
It was a morning of curdled sauces, dropped crockery and knives sliding smoothly into fingers instead of vegetables. The third plate that Jill dropped echoed round the chef's throbbing head and sent him staggering to the first-aid box.
'Fucking hell! There isn't even one aspirin left in here!' He glared at everyone, holding his head and his bloodshot gaze came to rest on Jill, whose eyes were so swollen with crying she couldn't see she was putting all the knives in the forks tray.
'Stop messing up my kitchen, you stupid woman, and go and get me some aspirin, the extra strong sort,' he roared, and threw his wallet at her.
She scuttled off. On her way to get her coat she saw Harry laughing with one of the other waitresses and trying to pinch her bum. When she got to the shop she couldn't remember why she was there and had to wander up and down the aisles for ages. The supermarket had a help desk and she was very tempted to lay her head on the counter and ask for some but she didn't think they would be up to dealing with emotional fuck-ups. When she got back she was so late the chef had got tired of waiting and had sloped off home.
With difficulty she staggered through to the end of the shift, giving everyone the wrong orders and looking totally blank when they complained. No one left a tip that lunchtime. She was bringing the last plate back to the kitchen when Jake looked up briefly. His eyes were dark and sad, and she suddenly remembered all the fun they'd had. She couldn't possibly go on working with him. She was crap at her job anyway. She would go home to her mum. She would do it right now. There was no point in waiting for her wages because she probably owed more than that in broken crockery anyway.
Putting her hand into her pocket for her phone she found she still had the chef's wallet. She groaned. Jake was the only one left, wiping surfaces with a furious energy.
'Look, I'm going home for a while, could you give this back?'
'Whatever,' he said with studied indifference. She tossed it over to him and it landed in his tool box.
He forgot about the wallet almost instantly. It was his evening off, which he spent with two bottles of appalling red wine no one else in the supermarket had wanted. The only CDs he hadn't sold were Coldplay and Leonard Cohen, but they suited his mood perfectly.
After listening to three and half hours of angst-ridden musings on the bleakness of life, perversely he decided that things weren't that bad. He had lost a woman – well, so had plenty of others before him. More importantly, he still had cooking. To lose that would be the real tragedy.
Meanwhile, back at work, the chef was having a small temper tantrum at being one waitress down. Taking into account the fact that she was the worst waitress they'd ever had, it was probably no bad thing, but she seemed to have gone off with his wallet.
'I'm sure she put it in your office, Chef,' said Harry, always helpful.
'Well, it's not there now.'
Harry knew where the wallet was because he had seen it and covered it up with a tea towel, but was taking his time, waiting for the right moment.
It was a busy night. When the chef's knife snapped under the pressure, Harry offered him one of his. 'Mind you, I think Jake's left his.'
'Silly bastard. He knows he shouldn't do that. I'll have one of his; it serves him right for not taking them home.'
Harry bent down and schooled his face into a careful controlled look of surprise and confusion. He was practically salivating at the thought of revenge. The chef glanced over impatiently, then stopped.
'Fuck – what's he doing with my wallet?' he exploded.
'Well, I'm sure there's some sort of explanation,' Harry said, pretending to sound placating.
'You bet there is – he's a bloody thief!' The chef was a man of simple emotions and massive grudges. He always gave in to them.
When Jake walked into work on Monday he was sacked on the spot. What could he do, sue? Yeah, like he had plenty of spare cash for a court case. To make things worse, he then found himself the object of press attention, all of it unwelcome. 'College Star's Theft from Top Eatery' was the worst headline, from hacks seizing a double opportunity to sully both Jake's college and the restaurant. By the time he finally managed to get hold of Jill to try to clear his name, two weeks had passed
and the chef had moved on, with his wallet, to a new job somewhere in the Med. This gave the press another field day when they blamed Jake for his departure. Things got so bad, he had to invest in a pair of dark glasses. During his enforced and poverty-stricken time off, Jake had ample time to sit around and fantasise. These dreams were:
That the Mediterranean was full of sharks.
That the chef got drunk one night and fell overboard, where his fat white bottom would provide a tasty snack.
That Jill fell into a decline and became a nun, because she had lost the one true love of her life.
That all journalists would spend the afterlife being spit-roasted in some sort of hell dimension.
While he was waiting for these things to happen and applying for hundreds of jobs, he spent his days stacking shelves for Mr Patel, who didn't really need anyone to do this and could only afford to pay Jake in the various goods that had reached their sell-by date. But no one else wanted to give him a job. Despite references from his lecturers at college saying he was superbly talented and totally honest, the Capital had given him a bad reputation. Which stuck, like grease round a fryer. In the frantic world he wanted to work in, no one had time to listen to the full story.
Almost the worst thing about this experience was the boredom. Because he didn't have any money, he couldn't even cook for himself at home, and after a while he had to stop going into bookshops because the assistants at Waterstone's were starting to give him nasty looks for riffling through the cooking section and then wearing out the cushions on the sofas, but never buying anything. He couldn't even become a busker on the London Underground because he couldn't sing.
He spent so much time hanging around places, people watching, he half thought of setting up his own food stall, which would also offer culinary counselling. For twenty quid he could tell people what a terrible diet they had and then offer them some decent grub instead. It was astonishing how much crap people bought: garishly coloured sweets; chocolate-flavoured things; health bars full of sugar and sandwiches containing what the manufacturer called cheese, but Jake reckoned was possibly only one molecule away from plastic.
There were far too many people in this world shoving food into their mouths without thinking. None of it seemed to make them any happier, even for a minute. They rushed from one place to another, barely even aware that they were eating. Jake knew that when he was allowed to be a chef he was often too busy to sit down for a proper meal, but when he did put food in his mouth he was always intensely aware of its flavour and texture. He couldn't imagine living without such sublime experiences.
Maybe he should become a food bandit, a culinary pirate. He would kidnap people, force them to give him money so he could cook for them and show them what they were missing. He would rob those starved of real food and make them rich in eating experiences. They would start to insist, like the French, that they had a decent breakfast in the morning and a two-hour lunch break so they could enjoy a proper meal served on a plate, not in a piece of cardboard. The country would grind to a halt but he would be a national hero. Oh crap, if he didn't get a job soon, he would go completely bonkers. He seemed to be halfway there already.
Eventually, when he was beginning to think he would have to give up and apply his new-found shelf-stacking experience at Sainsbury's, where at least they paid in money, he found work at a seedy hotel near Waterloo. After a couple of days it was quite obvious some people used it, not as an eating place, but to close mysterious and deeply illegal deals. The only reason he didn't get mugged on the way home was that he was cooking the muggers' dinners.
One day Jill came to see him. She wasn't wearing a habit, but he was shamefully pleased to see she was looking pale and unhappy.
'This is so unfair and it's all Harry's fault. You can't let him get away with it!' she cried.
'Right. I'll take him to a tribunal then. No problem, except that I've got no money, and it could take years and there's no guarantee the truth will come out anyway.'
'Well, what are you going to do?'
Jake shrugged. 'Nothing. Keep trying to find decent work, I suppose.'
She hung around for a while, looking like she was waiting for him to ask her out for a drink, but he didn't. She had screwed him over and he was as stubborn as hell. You only got one chance with him and she had blown it.
And so it continued for about two years.
Jake's family had been through more ups and downs than a yo-yo. When you were down, you picked yourself up, and started again. So that's what he did, but in a more wary, less innocent way. But there was no denying he seemed to camp out permanently at Rock Bottom.
He went on to do some really terrible jobs, which made the hotel at Waterloo look like the Ritz. But he had to: if there wasn't cooking, there was nothing. When things got really bad he would clench his teeth, until he remembered he didn't have enough money to go to the dentist. Still, looking back, he might not have made it in the end if Louis hadn't come to his rescue.
Louis Challon had learned his trade in the bistros of Paris that are now just a distant memory in the minds of those lucky enough to have eaten there – where the floors were covered with sawdust, the chef wore a beret and rows of enormous salamis hung from the ceiling. Sometimes the only food on offer was a plat du jour, but of such sublime quality people would queue halfway down the street to get in.
He moved to London with his French wife, Maria, and set up Brie, which swiftly became one of the best restaurants in town. He named it not after the cheese, but because it was the old name for an ancient province of France, somewhere east of Paris, where he had grown up. Although everything he touched turned to manna he became famous for his oreiller de la belle Aurore – a dish containing pheasant, woodcock, hare, pork, veal, foie gras, truffles and chicken livers, named after Brillat-Savarin's mother, and shaped like a sublime but terribly fattening pillow. Louis spent eighteen hours a day in his kitchen, tasted everything, but burned off more calories than an Olympic sprinter, and shouted, cajoled and praised his staff until they became the best team in town.
Any commis who wanted to work there was put through a grilling ordeal that started something like this.
'I don't give a fig how old you are, what your middle name is or how many cooking qualifications you have!' Louis roared. 'Get in that kitchen and show me what you can actually do!' It was the day-long trial in his kitchen that counted, and whether you were still on your feet at the end of it. Some enormously talented chefs weren't and were shown the door, which they reached on their knees.
The only job on offer was for a kitchen porter. Jake had decided it was better to expire quickly in a good kitchen than this slow death of the spirit in an awful one. He washed up like a maniac, uncomplainingly, for three weeks, until one day, in the afternoon shift break, Louis came in to the staff room to find him asleep, using a cookbook as a pillow.
'Sorry,' he mumbled, getting up, ready to leave the great man in his domain, but Louis ignored him.
'I am going to make the mousse of fishes. Seeing as you are here you can help.'
Jake went to get his washing-up apron.
'No, no,' said Louis irritably, 'did I ask you to wash up?'
'Well, no, Chef.'
'So, show me what you can do with this,' and he passed Jake a tray of fish and a filleting knife.
It turned into a brilliant afternoon, even though Louis shouted, scolded and shook his head in despair at least every five minutes. When Jake proved more than proficient at simple tasks, Louis gave him more complicated things to do and even thanked him when they were finished.
'No, thank you, Chef – it was like being in a master class.' Jake went off to wash up, leaving Louis looking after him thoughtfully. He knew talent when he saw it and didn't intend to waste it.
Jake found he was being asked to do more cooking than washing-up, sometimes with Louis's nephew and second in command. Pierre was a huge and taciturn man of about thirty, with a luxuriant red beard that made him look pira
tical and which hid the fact that he was really quite shy. Then, more and more often, it seemed, Jake was working under the eagle eyes of the great man himself.
One night, at the end of service, he was getting ready to go home when Maria appeared. 'Come upstairs. I have cooked far too much casserole and you must help us finish it. You know how Louis hates waste.'
Bemused, he followed her upstairs to their flat. Louis was in his shirtsleeves, uncorking a bottle of red wine. 'First we eat. Then we discuss which rabbit dish we put on the menu next week.'
During the meal Louis listened attentively to Jake's suggestions and then disagreed with them all. But Jake didn't mind – he was having a wonderful time. When, at the end of the evening, he was hustled into the spare room on the grounds that the tube wasn't safe at that time of night, he didn't even try to argue. After a couple of weeks of this, he gave up resisting and moved in completely. This never stopped Louis from dishing out tons of criticism at work if he thought Jake needed it. Jake did protest, though, when Maria took his whites away for washing.
'I can do it myself.'
'Yes, but I have far more knowledge than you of the best ways of getting blood out of one's clothes.'
'Do me a favour and don't ever say that in public,' said Jake with a grin.
'I hope you don't mind that my wife fusses over you,' said Louis rather gruffly one day.
'Of course I don't – I love her,' said Jake simply. 'It's hard to explain, but before I met you I thought I had lost something very precious to me. But you gave it back. I owe you everything.'
'You certainly owe me the story of how a gifted young man like you came here to wash pots. But for now, that Jerusalem artichoke risotto will not make itself, so what are you waiting for?'
Chapter Seven
Nothing went right for Jake in the week before opening Cuisine. The hotel room cost a fortune; he had finally fallen asleep in the jacuzzi and woke up in cold water from a nightmare in which he was trying to cross the Channel in a pizza oven. Staggering into the bedroom, he found Georgia fast asleep on the bed with her mouth open, a position only she could make look adorable.
Recipe for Disaster Page 6