by Simon Wroe
—
Money, or the lack of it, was how I ended up at The Swan. For a while there is a pleasure in economy—stealing toilet paper and ketchup packets from pubs, traveling the city on foot, obsessively tracking down the cheapest portion of chips, the most basic cup of coffee—but it soon becomes miserable trying to resist every tickling urge. By evening you are exhausted. You lie on your bed like a man with smallpox, aware of all the spots of want and desire about your body, listening to the cries of the city outside your window as other people realize those desires, unable to move because the slightest motion will inflame those itches a hundred times over. . . . It is a horrible condition. Not a pure form of poverty, but certainly its suburbs. Otherwise I believe I might have frittered away the rest of my existence in that overstuffed armchair. Given time the human creature can get used to just about anything, and my natural laziness had allowed me to adapt quickly. Even the pentelho and threats of polícia and pussyclot had started to take on a reassuring familiarity. But I needed money, needed it to avoid going home, so I put on my secondhand overcoat and went looking for a job.
What would I do? I was not against work. That was not my position at all. I considered work a very fine and noble endeavor. I just didn’t want to do it myself. And under no circumstances would I do a McJob, because that’s where he always said I’d end up. I toyed briefly with the idea of being a street cleaner. They earned good money, apparently. I could sweep the city and watch the people and let my mind wander. But a council gig would take an age to process: my scant savings were already gone and the hock money for my hi-fi was running out quicker than I had expected. Moreover, I could hear his mocking voice as my mother relayed the news that his youngest was sweeping the streets. A cleaner? In a pinny or mopping turds? I did not care too much for hospitality either. My poor brother had taken the sociable genes. But I reckoned, up against it, that I could stomach a few months behind a bar.
So I papered the public houses of Camden with my brief but thoughtful CV (three weeks as a script prompt for a university production of Julius Caesar; hobbies include walking and “being in nature”), and I waited. The Swan was the only place to reply, which made me immediately suspicious of it as an establishment. Why would anyone want to hire me? I had no bar experience, no kitchen experience, no waitering experience, no silver service training. I could not pull a pint. I could not serve a roast potato. I had a dissertation about modernist discourses between the individual and the city that a tutor had said was a good attempt. I had an A-level in medieval history and a hole in my trousers I couldn’t afford to get patched. Any business that needed me had it pretty rough. In truth, I was already a little disappointed in The Swan before I got the job.
—
The Swan is on a street immediately parallel with Camden High Street that gets none of its big sister’s traffic. Unless you have business on that street, or you take a wrong turn, you would never visit it. The market in Camden attracts the crowds of Italian tourists with Day-Glo backpacks, the teenage drug dealers and indie stragglers; the high street draws in the local shoppers and the area’s more discerning bums. The Swan’s street attracts a different type of pedestrian. The people you find on this street are guests at the boardinghouses at its far end, semirespectable places with names like The Star of Alexandria or Regency Court. You might see the odd door-to-door salesman in blazer and brown shoes still pounding the pavement, a foot-sore dinosaur in a digital age. Or you might spot a vagrant looking for a quiet place to shit or shoot up. With a favorable wind, this last kind might stumble upon an alleyway between a car park and a shabby terraced house halfway up to Mornington Crescent. When it is not being used as a toilet, this is the trade entrance to The Swan.
Here I arrived one morning in October, my hiking boots swinging by my side in a plastic bag, unsure what the hell I was doing. On the phone the man had told me to bring sensible footwear and knives if I had them. I didn’t. My landlady did not permit me to use her kitchen because I was a pentelho good for nahting, but I wouldn’t have even if I could. I was quite busy enough with all my street watching and novel reading and blackhead squeezing without worrying myself with cooking. Furthermore, some of Camden’s kebab shops are very well regarded.
There was no answer to my knocking at the back gate in the alley. I found it was open, and wandering through into the yard I saw trays of stew and sauce and carcasses of mysterious meat covering every inch of a wooden picnic table. Deliveries of vegetables were stacked as tall as a man on the ground. Huge stockpots steamed like restive volcanoes. In front of me, sounds of music and conversation carried from an open doorway covered by a chain screen. I stuck my hand through this portal and stepped inside.
It was a small room packed to the gunwales with food and equipment and containers and cutlery of every imaginable kind and shape. Alien species of sieve and colander hung from the hooks in the ceiling next to gigantic ladles and slotted spoons and what looked like instruments of medieval torture. There were strange metal trays wrapped so many times in plastic wrap that the contents were opaque. On a long buckled shelf that ran the length of the left-hand wall, cookbooks and recipe cards sat beside a hi-fi of such age and decrepitude it seemed unkind to use it. A sign next to a large, glowing switch said, IF THIS IS OFF THEN WE ARE ALL FUCKED. A pair of stainless steel work surfaces stretched away from me, with stainless steel fridges beneath them, and where they ended another began, running across the top of them to form a giant π symbol. Behind that, at the far end of the room, a line of metal stoves pumped out a wall of heat I could feel from where I stood.
Two men were standing side by side in front of these stoves, prodding at pans on the burners and then turning to their work sections to chop and weigh and mix.
“I went to that Gourmet Burger the other day,” one man was telling the other in flat northern tones. “All right, but what’s gourmet about it? I still say you can’t beat a Nando’s.”
“Nando’s?” said the other man, stooping to read the measuring scales on account of his gangliness. “It’s not chicken.”
“Of course it is,” said the first chef. “What is it, then? It’s not fucking Poulet de Bresse, but it is chicken.”
“Hello,” I said. “I’m here about the job.”
Both chefs looked up in unison. Their eyes were ringed with shadows, their faces gray and hollowed. I thought I saw, just possibly, the tiniest hint of amusement somewhere in their features, a dark and unknown joke slowly tickling them.
“You need to see the chef,” said the northerner hereafter known as Racist Dave. “Have a look in the bar.”
The taller man, who would later introduce himself as Dibden, nodded in sympathy or agreement.
They did not stop working, but their eyes followed me past the walk-in fridge and out of the room. The bar and restaurant area was at the end of a narrow corridor. To the left was a small box room stacked with rice and flour and pulses, the dry store. To the right were stairs leading to the cellar. Down there, I would soon learn, was the office where Bob reviewed the closed-circuit television system to see if his chefs were stealing from him; also the alcohol reserves, and the enormous chest freezers for storing meat and occasionally less reputable items.
The main room was a handsome old-fashioned saloon bar with frosted windows, dark chocolate wood and a sad, lingering smell of old beer and spilled coffee. Small taxidermied animals—a pheasant, an otter, a mangy-looking fox—sat around the room on high plinths. Above the till was a silver statue of a swan that looked expensive. In the middle of this room, his great bulk balanced ridiculously on a stool at the bar, Bob, my future tormentor, surveyed a sheaf of bills. He looked glum. His head, part bald, part shaved, stuck out of him like a bollard. Gravity had gathered the fat on his face into folds around his jowls and throat but left his cheeks and nose sheer. Eyes fell fast from that face, but they got a soft landing. His own eyes were large and liquid-dark, feminine. He regarded me
unhappily as I explained why I was there.
“There’s no bar work going,” he said, “but I need more bodies in the kitchen. People keep leaving.”
He looked at me as if daring me to say something about it. I remained silent.
“What do you know about The Swan?” he asked.
I knew it was a poem by Baudelaire. We had studied it in my modernism class.
. . . its feet
With finny palms on the harsh pavement scraped,
Trailing white plumage on the stony street,
In the dry gutter for fresh water gaped.
But something told me Bob would not appreciate the allusion.
“Not a lot,” I said instead.
Bob dug about in the sheaf of papers and drew up my CV.
“This says you’ve got an English degree,” he said, studying it briefly, “but it doesn’t say anything about kitchen work.”
I agreed. Bob looked at me. He was still unhappy, possibly bored.
“Let me see your hands,” he said.
“Sorry?”
“Your hands. Let me see them.”
Slowly I raised my hands to Bob. He looked and I looked with him. And I saw for the first time the soft frowning palms and feckless fingers, the creamy, pampered complexion of the skin. I felt ashamed and a little cheated. Could these really be mine? Bob grunted and held up his hands. They were huge misshapen clods, scorched and scarred by every blade and element known to man. Around the thumb and forefinger of each hand the skin was calloused and dead, the color and texture of pumice. On his left hand, a livid gash that ran the length of his heart line winked beneath a soggy blue Band-Aid. The tip of the middle finger had been sliced clean off. He turned his hands over leisurely, continuing the show. On the back of his other hand, a purple scar the size of an egg marked some old traumatic burn.
“These are the hands of a chef,” he said. “The hands say everything.”
I was to learn that Bob did not give a spit about a person’s accomplishments or curriculum bloody vitae. His preferences were altogether more violent and arcane. Bob wanted soldiers, psychopaths and masochists. He wanted people who would do and suffer anything for him. To each new recruit he would raise his enormous fists, slowly twisting them open and closed, and show off the throng of welts and bruises and scars, scars within scars, that ran across them, as if each one were a medal. As if each wound made him a better man.
Bob had seen my hands and he knew what I was not, but if I could hack it in the kitchen, he said, I could still be of use to him. Fifteen minutes later I stood before him in a knackered T-shirt and a pair of Bob’s enormous checkered chef’s trousers, the elastic exhausted totally, held up with a plastic wrap belt. The ensemble was completed with a dusty black chef’s cap and my hiking boots, last worn for a camping holiday in the Lake District where he (the other arsehole, not Bob) couldn’t get the fire lit and drove off to the pub in a strop and we sat there for hours in the cold damp dark, waiting for him to return.
“Just the basics,” Bob told Racist Dave. “He’s green.”
Dave looked at me. As if, in that outfit, there could have been any doubt.
“Fucking hell,” he said. “I need backup. I need a chef de partie.”
“I’ve got one coming in on trial next week,” said Bob. “Russian name. Ramadov or something.”
“So I’m on seven doubles,” said Dave.
“Looks that way,” Bob grinned. “I’ll be in the office.”
“You,” Dave turned to me. “Do you know how to wash salad?”
I thought I did. I didn’t. I removed too much of the dandelion leaves and too little of the watercress stalks. My hands kept going numb in the water. The salad came out of the spinner too wet and had to be put through again. I thought I knew how to chop onions too. Again, it turned out I did not.
“No,” said Dave, already losing patience. “This is how.”
He cut the onion in half and pulled out the root, then cut through it lengthways, in five-millimeter intervals, without cutting all the way, then drew the blade through horizontally, again not cutting all the way, then turned the onion half ninety degrees and brought the knife down in five-millimeter intervals once more, reducing the onion to a dice. He scrapped the cut onion deftly into a container and returned to his section.
It looked easy enough. I put the knife to the onion and cut downward in intervals. So far, so good. Growing in confidence, I turned the blade on its side and, holding the onion tightly, drew the knife decisively across the onion and straight into my waiting thumb. Dave’s knife was very sharp. It sung through my flesh so cleanly that for a moment I thought I had got away with it. Just a nick after all. But then the blood began and no amount of persuasion would stop it. And as the blood drained out of me, the panic poured in. It was the day my brother found the wasps’ nest all over again.
“I didn’t ask for red onions,” said Dave, looking over. This, I now realize, was very witty for him.
He sent me off to the dry store to look for a bandage, but the wound would not stop bleeding and the bandages kept slipping off. I have never been good with blood: since my brother, whenever I see the slightest cut I worry that it will not stop. I worry, and I am reminded of things I would rather forget. I was struggling with all of this when the quiet dark-eyed girl came in. She stood in the doorway, legs planted slightly apart, her eyes fixed upon me. They were extraordinarily clear and piercing, those eyes, possessed of a striking light up close. I noticed her nose had a strong Roman accent, not particularly ladylike, but certainly not ugly. The smells of the kitchen, the sweat and grease and smoke, seemed to part around her. She traveled with a lighter scent. Sighing, she extended a hand toward my huddled, bleeding form. I was feeling very wretched and thought this a great kindness.
“Thank you,” I told her.
“Move,” she said curtly. She pushed me aside and pulled a tub of mustard off the shelf. Then she left. A dark moment for the ego. There would be some vigorous tweezering in the mirror later.
A ferocious-looking man came in carrying a stack of pots. He regarded me in silence. Clearly, the look on his face said, You are something that does not belong here, a large and useless thing taking up valuable space, a beach ball in a bomb shelter. He put the pans down in a corner and left. I was left alone again to wonder what I was doing in this kitchen full of hard and hateful people. I didn’t even like cooking. But a short while later the big silent man returned and threw me a plastic glove. It clung snugly to my damaged hand and, though it quickly filled with blood to resemble a set of diabolical udders, I found that if I angled my hand downward I could avoid bleeding all over the establishment. I thanked the kitchen porter, whose look had softened to a grim pity, pity for the useless object in the middle of a war.
Eventually I pulled myself together and returned to the kitchen where the half-chopped onion sat mocking. I finished chopping it and announced to Dave, with some pride, that the job was done. It had been touch and go for a minute, indeed that vegetable had almost destroyed me, but I had won in the end.
“I don’t want one onion chopped,” he said. “What am I going to do with one fucking onion? Do the whole bag.”
The whole bag? It was the size of a turkey. I struggled to lift it. No one in their right mind needed so many onions. That day I realized I knew nothing about food or cooking. Also, more worryingly, nothing about people or communication. Months of fiction in that armchair, and years of studying it before that, had left me dealing with life at reading speed. Conversations passed me by while I was still formulating a response. People here dealt with one another so firmly, with no concerns for the nuances of situation. Violent, ugly scenes were followed by swift resolves. A passage of action Dostoevsky might have covered in thirty pages was done and dusted in thirty seconds.
A strange and terrifying world. A world for my brother, not for me.
<
br /> —
Later, as I was peeling garlic on the back bench, Dave asked me to step into the yard with him. I was surprised to see it was dark out, and I realized I had lost track of time. While I had been inside, the day had drifted into a cool, starless night. The moment in the dry store aside, I had not thought once about tweezering the spot between my eyebrows until I made it raw. At some point it had rained. The bench and empty oil drums were damp with small archipelagos of water. There were still trays of stew and pots of sauce and boxes of vegetables sitting about, but they were different from the ones that had been there that morning.
“Smoke?” He held out a cigarette. “You will,” he said when I refused.
He lit his cigarette and tugged grimly at it. I had the job if I wanted it, he said. The commis post at The Swan was mine to turn down.
I felt the muscles in my back tightening as they cooled. I felt the arches of my feet dull as lead. I felt my hand on the frame of the kitchen door, gripping it tight, primed to pull myself through it or push myself from it and move in curt, decisive movements, to move like a chef. I looked down at my numbed and scarred hands. Not the same soft and feckless examples I had walked in with that morning. I thought of his face, sneering at the suggestion that I, Mr. Useless Streak of Piss, could get a job when he had never been able or willing to do likewise. I thought of that sneer falling clean off when he heard that not only had I got a job, but a man’s job: I was a chef. By he, of course, I do not mean Bob. I mean my father.
“I think I will have one of those cigarettes,” I said to Dave.
3. RACIST DAVE
Racist Dave was the best chef in the kitchen. He has insisted I mention this prominently in my recounting. In front of the stove he was a master: his sauces never boiled, his toast never burned, his steaks were always just so. He moved faster than the naked eye, and could remember twenty checks at a time. He knew the order in which every element of every dish of every check needed to hit the pan or the water or the oil or the grill for it to be cooked perfectly. All this is true. However—and I can picture his low brow falling even farther as he reads this—there are other things to mention if this is to be a proper introduction to the man. Yes, he worked twelve moves ahead, like a great chess player, but he could barely read or write. He had left school at fourteen to work in kitchens and left the North four years later when he boshed a lot of drugs he was supposed to sell and roused the ire of some unsavory types. They would kill him if he ever went back, he claimed, so he was stuck in the South with all the South’s overpriced lager and dry gash and faggy blokes. Dave hated the South and talked, gloomily and often, about how boss the North was by comparison. North till I die, he would say, which was true, but not in the way he meant it.