by Simon Wroe
Before Ramilov, Bob was unruffled and unconquerable. Untouchable. He pulled the wings off flies like us for fun. When Ramilov arrived Bob tortured him too, as was his custom, but Ramilov made him do it to keep order, not for recreation. Ramilov got under his skin. (This, Ramilov writes, is one thing I’ve not messed up in the telling so far. He is keen for the world to know his gift for chaos and dissent.)
I had been at The Swan only a week when Ramilov came for his trial. My salad washing was not much improved. I was holding my hands under the hot tap to bring the feeling back when who should appear at the back door but this dark and stocky stranger, our hero. He slid seedily through the fly chain and stood watching us with a grin pasted across his face, like he had just transgressed in some way and greatly enjoyed it. Without doubt he was a strange-looking creature. His bulbous head flared outward at his shaved temples and bulged off the back. His arms hung limply at his sides like a decommissioned robot. His jaw jutted in some secret mischief. He looked like a skull. He said nothing.
“You must be Ramilov,” said Dave.
The stranger kept up his silent grinning act. An optimist might have said he seemed “engaged in contemplation.” Crazy was more like it.
“You all right?” asked Dave.
The stranger looked at him with pinprick pupils set in eyes that never blinked.
“I’m all right,” he said finally. “It’s the others, isn’t it?”
“What others?” said Dave.
“Yeah,” said Ramilov. “What others. Good one.”
Racist Dave looked confused.
“I’m Dibden,” said Dibden, leaning over to shake his hand.
“You look a bit like the bloke from Coldplay,” said Ramilov.
“Really?” said Dibden, flattered.
“Yeah,” said Ramilov. “You’ve got the same kind of dickhead face.”
“I like him already,” Bob announced from the pass. And he liked Ramilov even more when he saw his hands.
“Fucking horrible,” he told the rest of the kitchen later. “And his eyes? He looked as if he was going to kick off any minute.”
Ramilov was the chef Bob had been waiting for: a dyed-in-the-wool psycho, a universal soldier. At this stage in my recounting Dave thinks I’m building Ramilov up too much. Perhaps—the man had his faults, and I’m not condoning what he did—but it’s true that at the time Bob thought Ramilov was the answer to his prayers. He should have been more careful what he wished for.
—
Actually, the storm took a while to muster. Ramilov was the great white hope when he started at The Swan in the second week of October and it wasn’t until he was locked in the walk-in with the lobsters in late November that his fall from grace was complete. In those intervening weeks I did not see much of our new champion. The kitchen was too small for a five-man brigade to do mise en place, there were only four work surfaces, so on busy shifts when there was a full team I was sent to work in the plonge until I was needed for service.
The plonge, or dish pit, is the twilight hovel of the kitchen porters. It is a small square grotto of pots and pans and plastic containers. Its ceiling is dark with grease and elaborate blossoms of mold. Its walls are lachrymose. In the middle of this cave, cloaked in a swelter of steam and spray, one or both of the KPs work tirelessly, hacking at the caked char on the bottom of the pans, scraping the stockpot sump, blasting cutlery with the high-powered jet that hangs in coils above the two stainless steel sinks, hauling great trays of washing up to and from the industrial cleaner, sorting plates into giddy, groaning stacks. The Swan plonge adjoins the kitchen, down two steps that are usually taken in a single frantic bound, with no door or screen between. Everything that happens in the plonge can be heard in the kitchen. It is obvious when Shahram is chanting or when the enormous Polish KP laughs his unnerving piggy laugh. But in the plonge the noise of the kitchen is a muddle. The KPs know only that for every moment they breathe there are dirty pans and plates building up and that they must work faster, always faster.
The enormous Polish KP was called Darik. His biceps were bigger than a man’s head. He had a trick of crushing a potato while he looked at you that gave everyone the willies except Shahram, who was terrified and confused by everybody in the kitchen except Darik. The two men communicated via some pidgin language only they understood, Shahram jiving around the bigger man with his goggling eyes and skittish, edgy dance while Darik threw his massive head back and squealed, huge and delighted like a hippo being cleaned by an oxpecker bird. The chefs believed that Darik harbored an awful secret. He had never mentioned he had a secret, and the kitchen had decided, collectively, that this proved he had one. Dibden, who trumped everyone else for sheer terror of life, said Darik had murdered a man in Poland. This rumor quickly spread, with accessories. Bob heard he had killed a drunk in a bar brawl by breaking his skull with his bare hands like it was a potato. Dave was certain he had pushed the woman he loved from a bridge when he found out she was sleeping with a black man. Ramilov claimed Darik was a pastry boy who murdered nothing except Gloria Gaynor songs.
“Can you give me this wishywashyback, Darik,” he’d singsong in a lousy Baltic accent as he slung pots into the plonge, “or are you maybe too much gay?”
Ramilov, we would learn, was very much taken with homosexuality and its abuses. He fondled everyone in the kitchen except the quiet dark-eyed girl, whom he judged correctly was not a man and would stab him if he tried. He cupped his hand to each man’s arse as he passed or rubbed their earlobes between his thumb and forefinger when they were trying to tell him what to do. The ultimate prize for Ramilov, however, was “the gooch,” the line of folded skin between a man’s balls and his anus, and he would sneak up behind the working chefs and porters and try to reach in between the forest of legs to stroke this rare treasure whenever he could.
“Its medical name is the perineum,” he informed Dibden as Dibden shied away from his molesting hand. “Its sensuality is renowned in many cultures.”
Dibden was not interested in its sensual renown.
“He’s trying to violate my bum hole,” he complained to Bob.
“You whine like a little fag, Dibden,” replied Bob, who at this stage was still in love with Ramilov.
Poor Dibden, the lowest of the low before I arrived, recipient of all abuse. My appearance had moved him up in the world—away from drab commis tasks, to the glamour of pastry and larder—though it had done little to change people’s attitudes toward him.
Every day Ramilov was in the kitchen his confidence grew. He was a Molotov cocktail of filth and kink who was actually from Albania, via Birmingham, and not Russian at all. There was no man in the brigade with whom he would not simulate buggery, no waitress he did not try to flash. His hoarse, delirious crowing carried over the hubbub into the plonge where I labored; an excitable bragging about what ladyboys could do with their cervixes and the collective term for waitresses and how many drugs you had to take to shit yourself. His motto was “It is easier to ask forgiveness than permission.” His speech was peppered with strange slang and snatches of rap.
Man dun’ know, I’m straight cake.
Bitch give brain, work hard at the ramp shop.
This was what I knew of Ramilov in the first few weeks. Tall claims and short bursts of obscenity, grammatical anomalies and promises of sodomy.
No doubt this confession will delight Ramilov, but here it is: in those early days I resented him. No one questioned his place in the kitchen. He had the swagger and bluster of a chef. I worked hard, I stroked no gooches, yet my approval rating was a solid zero. And though I had been there longer and could spell pigeon correctly on the prep labels, Ramilov instantly asserted himself as my superior and tormentor. He called me “Bumfuck” even after I had explained that that was not my name. When I prepped vegetables he made jokes about a family reunion. Once he sent me to the dry store for “a long wai
t” and would have had me looking in there all night if Bob had not needed me to grate horseradish. Worst of all, he accused me of being useless on purpose.
“Just leave if you don’t give a shit,” he told me in the walk-in one morning, less than a month after his arrival.
That I, who had sweated so much for this place, should be told I didn’t care by a clown who spent his days groping arses: it was almost more than I could stomach. And the other chefs would chuckle as he ordered me to chop flour and fillet whitebait. Would they be laughing, I wondered, if I suffered some hideous accident? If I lost my hand in the meat slicer, that would shut them up. Then they would be sorry for all the things they had said and done to me. They would have to cut their own chips and work overtime and they would see how much I had done for them and they would say, “That Monocle, he really was something after all, and we were too blind to see it.” And the tears would run down their faces at the injustice of life.
That’s what would happen: I would be cutting ham one day and one of them—Ramilov, no doubt—would come by with a shout of “Behind you with a knife!” and prod me with his finger, another favorite joke of his, and I would leap forward in shock and somehow bring my wrist into contact with the exposed whirling blade and it would slice clean through, squealing as it found the bone. My poor hand would be hanging on by a flap of skin, blood spurting everywhere, the gray tendons inside pulsing and flailing like headless snakes. Such senseless tragedy. And I so young and promising. Rachel Parker, the girl who had spurned me at university (who had by chance walked into The Swan that very moment) would see the error of her ways and throw herself upon me in grief. Dibden would faint. Ramilov would for once be silent, and as white as a sheet. I would be stoic, of course, and refuse to blame anyone for the misfortune. In certain versions of this fantasy I finished slicing the ham one-handed, to rounds of rapturous applause.
These were the noble tragedies I dreamed of when I was sent to chop carrot batons and blitz parsnips in the plonge where the walls wept and the air was muggy with bad spores and the floorboards of the first-floor restaurant buckled above your head as fat full diners shuffled in their seats, where there was no quiet dark-eyed girl to look at, where the pipes kept on with an almighty whistling like they were about to explode while Darik and Shahram cooed at each other in their strange nonsense tongue. Backpleez. No you backs. Backpleez. No you backs.
Ramilov was invincible in those early days, and if he had limited himself to tormenting me and Dibden and the KPs he might have remained so. But Ramilov had no notion of the lines he should not cross. This was demonstrated by his shameless carry-on with Bob’s terrible wife and his friendship with the tramp who was Bob’s sworn enemy.
If Ramilov were here now he would tell you that a restaurant’s regulars are its best customers. If Bob were here, however, he would say a fellow can show up at a restaurant with straw in his pockets and a powerful urge to release his bowels as often as he pleases but until he buys something he is not a customer. (The Fat Man, with his “give me one of everything” attitude, was Bob’s idea of a model customer, extravagant in his tastes, generous with his tips, ceaseless in his appetite. Though ill rumors surrounded him, and all who had served him shuddered at his name, his money was the right color.) But the tramp came every day to groom his reflection with a gap-toothed plastic pocket comb in the darkened glass of the restaurant windows while the diners inside tried to ignore him, and he liked to use the public alleyway at the back of the premises as his personal toilet. Bob had been chasing the tramp away since the restaurant opened. Ramilov committed the cardinal sin of supplying him with napkins.
Bob’s wife, who lived with Bob above The Swan, was another matter. She didn’t have a job because she had enough things to worry about, like why did the Internet sometimes not work in their flat and when was Bob, whom she called Booboo, going to come upstairs and cuddle and where had her yappy Chihuahua, which she also called Booboo, got to now. Several times a day she would clomp into the kitchen in her heels to ask the whereabouts of her Booboo, meaning either the dog or her husband. The dog was an evil-tempered midget that sowed misery far and wide in its relentless pursuit of food. It broke out of the flat at any opportunity and made its way down the stairs on its stubby little legs to snap at scraps in the plonge or nibble at the edges of trays left out in the yard. It destroyed the mise and snarled most ungraciously when anyone except Bob’s terrible wife came close to it. It was a pest and every chef in the place wished for its demise. “The rude fiend who so yells on souls,” Dante said of a similar hound. “Someone should shoot the fucking thing,” said Racist Dave.
Each time it got out, Booboo’s reign of terror ended only when Bob’s wife found it and pressed it to her enormous breasts and administered a blithe, affectionate scolding in the middle of the kitchen while the chefs desperately ducked and twisted around her trying to keep the whole show afloat.
“I envy that dog,” Ramilov told her the first time he saw her burying the dog’s face in her cleavage. “I can get lost too you know.”
Bob’s wife flushed and arched her neck indignantly. Her eyes, however, flashed with excitement. She did not come down to the kitchen in boob tubes and wedges just to catch dogs. Bob’s wife had a face like a garden trowel, a stupid mouth and spongy, necrotic skin. She was vain and whingeing and fiercely possessive of Bob, and her jealousy toward the waitresses was magisterial and absolute. Bob was her Booboo, her meal ticket, and she would claw out the bright little eyes of anyone who thought Bob could be their Booboo. And yet she saw no irony in coming down to the kitchen in her tiny Lycra outfits and flaunting herself in front of every other man there. Whenever she appeared, Ramilov would howl and paw at the floor and generally act up in a way that was shameful to witness. When she asked if Booboo was ready to come upstairs Ramilov would say yes, thank you, he was always ready for a fine creature like her.
Bob was confused by Ramilov’s behavior at first, because his wife was anything but fine. No man had ever expressed an interest before—even Racist Dave, who was joyfully unburdened by standards when it came to women, secretly described her as “Predator with Tits”—and this made Bob suspicious. He began to think Ramilov was taking the piss.
“He should be a gentleman about it,” he told Dave gloomily, “and shag her or shut up.”
“You should be a gentleman about it and shag her,” Dave told Ramilov in O’Reillys, “or you should shut up.” It was early November and Ramilov’s tempestuous streak was becoming dangerously apparent.
“I can’t shag her,” said Ramilov, swilling his mouth with bitter. “She looks like a trowel.”
“Bob’s getting pissy about it,” said Dave. “He asked me for reasons to lock you in the fridge.”
“I’m not sexually aroused by garden implements,” said Ramilov. “Ask Dibden.”
“What?” said Dibden, who was trying to pat down a cowlick in his hair and was not listening.
“You’ve got to shag Bob’s missus,” Ramilov told him.
Dibden looked worried.
“Does Bob know about this?”
“It was his idea,” said Ramilov.
“Oh.”
Dibden looked as if he were trying to imagine it: what he and Bob’s terrible wife would do by way of small talk, how the seduction would unfold, whether there would be music playing or Bob standing over them and shouting for him to hurry up. He shuddered.
“I can’t,” he said.
“Go on.” Ramilov flicked bitter at him.
“Why me?” Dibden asked. “Why not Monocle?”
“Monocle would take too damn long,” said Ramilov, “and he might hurt his massive face. You look like Coldplay. You’ve got to take what you can get.”
“If you don’t want her, why do you keep fucking howling at her?” Dave asked Ramilov.
Ramilov shrugged without interest and looked around the pub. O’Reillys was the on
ly place open when the chefs finished work. It was an Irish bar that Nora, the cross-eyed matron of the house, ran like a hostel for inebriates, which was more or less what it was. At the back, where the chefs usually sat, there was a dartboard positioned to test the wits of those visiting the toilets, a few low tables and a jukebox full of folk music from the old country. The bar and Nora stood in the middle of the room where a cross-eye could be kept on the rowdier customers, which was most of them. Toward the front was a raggedy pool table that played to a slant on one corner pocket, beneath a chandelier no one could explain. The pictures, insofar as they fit that description, were covered with cellophane instead of glass so they could not be smashed over people’s heads satisfactorily. Every so often one of the regulars would stagger over to the jukebox and pick a song and start to dance and sing. Sometimes they would notice the tired bunch of chefs huddled in the corner and become incensed by the lack of patriotism on show.
Jig, you bastards! Jig! they would cry, or words to that effect, and Nora would tell them to hush the feck up.
“Whose round is it?” asked Ramilov.
“Yours,” said Dave.
“Same again?” Ramilov said. “Isn’t it past your bedtime, Monocle?”
I did not immediately reply. The talk of Bob’s wife had set my mind off in another direction, toward the quiet dark-eyed girl. In the kitchen I could not stop looking at her, out of it I could not stop thinking of her. I had not forgotten how she had pushed me aside in the dry store while I was bleeding, or the profile of her nose up close. No, there was nothing sophisticated about her. Yet something about the way she held herself in this world of men transfixed me. The gravity of bigger planets like Bob did not affect her. Ordinary, forgettable acts seemed important when she did them. Small details stayed with me. That brisk, high voice above the male grunt, so far beyond me, so removed from the earthly concerns of Ramilov and Racist Dave. The cool skin of an upper arm glimpsed beyond a rolled sleeve. (Well, I imagined it would be cool.) A slight sigh as she pulled a pan from the shelf above the stove. Minute feminine betrayals. I wondered how I could possibly approach her.