by Simon Wroe
The only thing Dave liked as much as the North was musicals. He loved the swirling, seamless orchestration, which was how a kitchen should work but never quite did. He loved the colors and the razzmatazz, the voices poised at the edge of flight waiting for the soaring strings to lift them off the ground (my words, not his). He loved the outpouring of emotions, for he was a pretty phlegmatic sort himself and constantly amazed at how much feeling could be wrung from a simple lyric or a basic chord progression. Only a handful of occasions in life had the passion or the honesty of musicals: football matches, kitchens, certain “political” rallies. Dave loved them all. Being tuneless was no hindrance to him: he sang along to all the big numbers in his low Mancunian drawl no matter how busy the service. He knew he wasn’t a poofter, so there. In Manchester his mates had struggled with the idea of a skinhead who quoted Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; in the South he had no mates to curb his enjoyment of song and dance. Even Bob tolerated it, and had made Dave’s CD of the Broadway musical Wicked the mandatory soundtrack for Sunday lunches. It was generally agreed that it possessed the right spirit of triumph over adversity. Yet Bob’s moods were mercurial, and too much musical grandstanding could make him suddenly furious. To make Dave furious you only had to mention foreigners or get him drunk.
The fucking Pakis are coming through the Channel Tunnel, he would announce over the third or fourth pint in O’Reillys. We’ve got to close it now before we’re overrun.
Dave had a problem with Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, with African people and Chinese people, with Muslims and Jews and Indians and Eastern Europeans and French. He had been water-cannoned while trying to destroy a Turkish kebab shop at Euro 96, and had put a brick through the window of the Salford branch of Blacks before he realized it was a camping store. He did not read newspapers as that meant entering a corner shop and that meant giving money to terrorism. He wore his ignorance with pride and could get touchy if people tried to divest him of it. I know what I know, he would say if he suspected attempts were being made to educate him. Prove me wrong, he’d say, and then not listen. He was conscientious to a fault in his bigotry and inclusive of all minorities in his hatred. It was for these reasons, and others too numerous to mention, that he was known as Racist Dave.
He might have been an idiot (Dave, confused by this construction, says there is no “might” about it; for once we agree), but he could cook. That Neanderthal forehead held the secret to beautiful, light-as-air brioche and silky risotto. He created immaculate, complicated curries while propounding his theory of compulsory deportation for darkies. He prepared sublime turbot and lobster dishes for a hundred people, then went home, ate Pot Noodle, scratched his balls and watched Mary Poppins. Dave was a bundle of contradictions. Bob said he should see a shrink when he got a day off, but it was a throwaway statement since Bob did the rota and did not like giving Dave days off. It meant he had to work more hours himself. When Dave was off the whole place fell apart. Bob destroyed the walk-in looking for things and disappeared upstairs to visit his terrible wife when he should have been doing the mise.
Apart from his visit to Gourmet Burger when he had silently picked holes in every single aspect of their operation, Dave had not had a day off in three weeks by the time I arrived. Dibden, all nerves and Anglepoise articulation, was little help. Ramilov was yet to join us. Dave was, in effect, a slave, albeit one who swaggered into work in sunglasses and a gilet and considered slavery to be a good thing. He worked slave hours because people kept leaving. Bob said it was because these deserters were not true chefs, they couldn’t hack it in a real kitchen. Dave, who was a true chef, was inclined to agree. But people kept leaving because Bob was a horrendous arsehole and only Dave was stupid enough (or “talented enough,” as Dave calmly suggests) not to notice it.
So the kitchen struggled on, carried by Dave and the enormous Polish KP and the quiet dark-eyed girl on fryer whom Bob patronized for being a woman but did not bully for the same reason. Other chefs had come and gone with the seasons, I learned. The good ones never stayed once they saw how the place was run, and so the place was left with the rest. Dave has often told me what sorts these chefs were. Scruffy chefs, alcoholic chefs, agency chefs, arrogant chefs, flamboyant chefs, dull chefs, nervous chefs, troubled chefs, idle chefs, bored chefs, bullshitter chefs, young chefs who didn’t know, old chefs who couldn’t learn, chefs who spoke only French, chefs who played with knives, chefs who spent all their time trying to diddle the girls or boys behind the bar, chefs who dealt drugs, chefs who stole from the petty cash and sneaked steaks. Dave said that most of them didn’t deserve to be called chefs. They were what you would call cooks.
A kitchen always got the workforce it deserved and The Swan, with its dim view of life and food and people, got only Dibdens, sincere but ill-suited, or the journeymen: haggard faces at the back gate inquiring about an ad in the classifieds or a boardinghouse window, oddballs who had come from nowhere and would go to nowhere, who had worked in thirty different places but never more than a couple of months in any one, telling the same war stories and the same old jokes each time, making the same enemies and the same mistakes and leaving in the same huff over some miscommunication or unfair accusation or murky rumor.
These men—the hopeless, slack-jawed cases are always men—form the backbone of the catering industry, though you will never see them on television or grinning from the cover of a cookbook. They are not champions of local produce or heroes of a certain gastronomic movement. They do not believe strongly in freshly ground black pepper or artisan bread. They are guided only by their indifference toward cooking and their antipathy toward everything else. Every year or so they will move to another town or city to “make a new start,” telling anyone who will listen that this time will be different, that they have always wanted to live in _____ and never liked _____ anyway. You may see this type of chef smoking outside a cheap but still overpriced restaurant in, say, Victoria on any given day. A broken individual, leaning against the wall with ugly, lightless eyes and a miserable face that long ago stopped wondering where it all went wrong.
Dave, who has somewhat sniffily approved the chapter thus far (it fell off after the first couple of sentences, in his opinion), claims I had the attitude, if not the experience, of these chefs when I started at The Swan. In those first few months I was ready to quit every day. I hadn’t known much about kitchens, and I was shocked that people could treat one another in such a way. From the moment the working day began the abuse was constant. The only way you learned anything in a kitchen, it seemed, was through humiliation, and the only way you asserted yourself was through sniping. The bitching knew no bounds. Not toward the customers, as people imagine—it’s not as if anyone came into the kitchen and said, Those people are a nightmare, spit in their food for me. That never happened. It was all among the staff: everyone was constantly carping about everyone else. A snatched roll of the eyes when someone wasn’t looking, a muttering under the breath when they stuck their heads into their fridges for something. Insults were thrown around openly too, at everyone except Bob and the quiet dark-eyed girl. It was no secret who hated whom.
A special brand of malice, however, had been earmarked for me, the new boy. In French, this position is called the commis. The English do not have their own word for it—“bitch chef” would be the most accurate translation. I was the person at the very bottom who did all the jobs no one else wanted to do. The onion chopping, the lemon squeezing, the garlic peeling, the cheese grating, the mopping, the labeling, the herb picking, the cleaning, the lugging, the repacking, the fetching, the shit. This chef at the bottom has no rights, no independent thought. I was a machine, turned to whatever use the other chefs wished. Today I was a cheese grater. Tomorrow I would be a potato peeler. Whole days passed when I did nothing except clean the fridges or wash mushrooms. Once, weevils were discovered in the dry store, and I had to go through every container, several hundred of them, sifting through the different flours and g
rains in search of these microscopic pests. If we received an order of game birds, the chances were that I would be the one sent out to pluck them, the feathers catching in my eyelids, the coldness of the yard impinging on my delicate health.
By the law of the kitchen, all blame lay with the commis. It filtered down: the chef shouted at a section leader who shouted at me and I, having no one beneath me to shout at, was forced to absorb it. And once I had acquired that scapegoat reputation I could do nothing right. Worse, I think I began acting up to their expectations. I made stupid, clumsy mistakes. I became paranoid. When I came back into the kitchen from elsewhere it felt like the other chefs had just finished talking about me—a crazy suspicion, because there was nothing they couldn’t, and didn’t, say to my face. Not that I ever said anything back. That was the first rule I learned at The Swan: never challenge the person in charge. They could make your life more hellish than you could imagine. This, incidentally, is true of families as well as kitchens.
On bad days I felt as if one more thing would push me over the edge. Most of the time though it was merely a sense of confusion—about how I had ended up in this place, and how I could dig myself out. One thing I knew for certain: chefing was an awful job done by ingrates and arseholes, shit-out-of-luck people unqualified to do anything else. Every part of the job was awful, even the cooking, which was only about 2 percent of it. It was backbreaking, terribly paid, dangerous, bullying, stressful, ridiculously houred, freezing, scalding, finger-slicing work. Surely this wasn’t me. A man who had read the great works, who had spent time in the company of Shakespeare and Joyce. As I reminded Racist Dave, I had an English literature degree.
“Well, it’s not making you peel those spuds no faster,” he said.
Potatoes? Double negatives? It wasn’t me. I wasn’t me. My body smelled of the kitchen: a creamy, rotten vegetable matter smell. My sweat was spicier. Hours after I had left I could feel the heat of the ovens continuing to cook me. In the mornings I felt poisoned when I woke. The skin of my fingertips was so ringed with permanent dirt it looked like wood grain. No matter how much I scrubbed I could not get it clean. In the few waking hours between shifts I would stand at my washbasin in my little bolt-hole room and scrub and scrub like Lady bloody Macbeth. But of all the agonies of being a chef, none are so painful as the legs. You are standing the entire time, for sixteen or seventeen hours straight. I don’t know how beefeaters do it, or soldiers outside palaces, but I have never got used to it. When I was not scrubbing or asleep I lay in a torpor upon my bed, my legs buzzing bluntly, watching beadlets of rainwater gather on the electricity wires outside my window, slowly getting fatter until they fell.
The tiredness, and the stress of having to get up and go back regardless, soon eclipsed all else. I lost track of current affairs and the outside world. I barely even noticed the announcement of a new Tod Brightman book. Really, I barely noticed. Who cared that he’d already published his second book, at the age of twenty-three? I was too busy with work to think about that overhyped young nobody, that two-bit Amis whom I, at some unknown juncture, had made my literary nemesis. And those late-night missed calls from my father, they also somehow passed me by.
After two weeks of this I had tried to phone in sick.
“You don’t get sick days,” Bob informed me. “Get your fucking arse in here now.”
Many times I imagined telling him I was quitting.
Bob, I am leaving to take up another job offer.
Where? Who would take me?
Bob, I am leaving to concentrate on my blossoming writing career.
My last weeks would be unbearable.
Bob, I am leaving to look after my ailing mother.
But I didn’t want to talk about my mother. Let’s leave her out of it.
Bob, I am leaving to look after my ailing father.
As if I would. I’d rather stay here with Bob.
Sometimes, while shredding cabbage or cutting carrots into batons, I found myself tracing the corridors of my parents’ house in my mind without wishing to or knowing why, visiting each room in turn and looking in, testing little parts of my memory to see how faithful it was. I remembered there were hardly any pictures on the walls although they had lived there since before I was born, and I remembered the damp, unlived-in smell the house always had when you came back from anywhere, like it had been rotting quietly in your absence. I thought the glass on the front door might have been striated. I remembered the large oak tree that towered over the back garden and cast the living room in perpetual darkness. In the kitchen I saw the spot where I had dropped a pint of milk on the floor and he had chased me and cornered me with blows. I felt the carpet between my toes as I made my way up the stairs to the bedrooms. I was cold, remembering, because my father considered heating an unnecessary expense. Betting on the 3.30 horse race at Newmarket, apparently, was another matter.
On the landing I could see the rest of the cul-de-sac, with other cars parked in front of other drives. Cul-de-sac sounds fancy, but it is actually a medical word for a cavity near the rectum. Then I am at the top of the stairs and there is the bathroom off to the left and my brother’s room directly in front, untouched ever since. My fingers, reaching for the door handle, feel metal—it is the cool blade of the knife, the face of the mandoline, and I am back in the kitchen once more.
—
However lousy and tired I felt, Racist Dave had it worse. Dibden was barely able to look after his own responsibilities, so Dave had been working seven-day weeks since the last chef de partie’s breakdown. Christof had been a decent chef, competent and quick on the checks, and Dave had hoped he was going to last. But something in him was blown: his nerves were shot by years of services and close calls; he coiled in fear every time Bob spoke. He would stand mournfully at the fryer, looking out into the restaurant with such profound sorrow that a few diners complained he was putting them off their food. He was thirty-four, which was too old for a jobbing chef de partie in a pub kitchen. Dave said if you weren’t sous or head chef or in a place with a star by the time you hit thirty, something had gone wrong. Maybe it was drugs or prison or that journeyman transience, maybe you just weren’t up to scratch. Whatever it had been in Christof’s case, he was marked from the start. I didn’t meet the man, he was gone three weeks before I arrived, but Bob’s hatred of him was well documented.
I never trusted him, he would say. Did you see his hands?
Dave had seen Christof’s hands, and they were beautiful. Lilac white, with carefully manicured cuticles, as unblemished as Italian meringue. They were, as Mary Poppins would have put it, practically perfect in every way. They were impossible. How could a chef, in and out of ovens and freezers and brine, in daily commune with knives and graters and mandolines, keep his hands like that? It was witchcraft. Bob could not conceal his disgust. He tried to burn them every chance he got, brushing past him with hot pans or trying to push his hands into the lamps when he was plating up. He covered the inside of Christof’s service fridge with pictures, torn from his terrible wife’s magazines, of painted nails and feminine fingers. He urged him to chop faster, hoping to push him into an accident with a blade. He worked him like a dog, yet Christof’s hands remained annoyingly, agonizingly perfect. Christof’s mind was not made of the same stuff, however, and he flipped halfway through a Sunday lunch, storming out of the kitchen when Bob poured boiling gravy on his knuckles in an apparent slip of the hand. Dave found him sitting on the curb halfway down the road, sawing back and forth, glassy-eyed, oblivious to the traffic.
“Don’t worry about that fat prick,” he told Christof. “Just push on.”
But Christof did worry. He would work no more at The Swan.
Before Christof there was Nick from the agency who never cleaned down and talked more than he chopped. Before Nick there was Leon, who turned up late and took three sick days in two weeks and had an excuse for everything. Before Leon there w
as Pavul, who had poured the old fryer oil into the pumpkin soup in an act of either immense stupidity or brilliant sabotage. Before him, no one could remember. There had been so many. And before and after every one there had been Dave pulling hundred-hour weeks, a cart horse, a machine. He acted like a superstar, but he felt like a heel. No matter how mad or bad the soon-to-arrive chef with the Russian name was, Dave had already decided to hire him. Bob wouldn’t care. He would run them into the ground regardless. Besides, after The Swan’s run of chefs, how much trouble could this new guy be?
4. RAMILOV
Things were grim before Ramilov arrived, but it took his turning up for the rest of the kitchen to realize just how grim they were. Ramilov rode in on a storm and brought a reckoning. He welcomed wolves in sheep’s clothing and bit sleeping dogs. He picked roses by their thorns. He washed his dirty linen in public. He let butter melt in his mouth. He taught grandmothers to suck eggs and thought it proper. He danced all night but paid no fiddlers. He lay down with beasts and got up with fleas. He dug his own grave. He foamed at the mouth when anyone said “organic.” He built a house for virtue and vice and made them live together. He praised his own broth. He was at war with everybody and everything. And it is now a matter of recorded fact that he was the instigator, if not the architect, of Bob’s demise. Ramilov, in those letters where he seeks to alter and correct these pages, has confirmed as much to me.