by Simon Wroe
“Are you aware there is a fox in your meat freezer?” he asked.
Bob’s grin fell. He blinked stupidly a few times.
“I can explain that,” he stammered.
“You had better.” The little man looked up at Bob with disapproval. “That’s a serious risk of foreign-body contamination.”
“The thing is,” said Bob weakly, “it’s got moths.”
“I see,” said the inspector curtly. “Well, I think I’ve seen and heard enough. You will be hearing from me very shortly.” He glared at Bob and stepped out through the chain screen.
“Mr. Inspector, wait . . .” said Bob, following him out. I felt obliged to go with him.
It was a cold and miserable night, the rain falling in heavy sheets. The inspector, paying small heed to Bob’s implorations, fought briefly with the back gate, got it open at last and walked full pelt into Glen, who was taking a shit in the alley as was his custom. The inspector was not at all keen on this latest development and shouted at the tramp, his muted voice trembling with rage and indignation, that this was a restaurant premises and did he mind.
“Do you mind?” Glen soggily replied. “This is a personal matter if you had not noticed. Tell the chef I’m going to need a lot of napkins today. This one is turning out a little tricky.”
“Napkins?” the inspector mumbled in shock. “They give you napkins for this?”
That seemed to make up his mind and he squeezed quickly past the squatting Glen and bolted out of the alleyway in a stiff, jogging walk.
“Mr. Inspector,” Bob shouted, running after him into the street. “Wait! I’ve never seen that man before, I swear! Mr. Inspector—”
The inspector spun around to face Bob. They were standing on the pavement a few yards from the entrance, where the last of the dismissed guests huddled under the awnings waiting for their cabs.
“This is The Swan on top of its game, is it?” the inspector shouted through the downpour. “A turkey full of pus? A fox with moths? Human feces? It’s the single worst inspection I’ve ever conducted. This place is closed, effective immediately, as of now!”
With that he turned and strode away from the restaurant as fast as he could. And Bob, instead of following or trying to shout after him again, fell back against the wall in despair, deflating in front of my eyes. Personally I expected him to stomp back into the kitchen and give us all seven shades of hell for what had happened that night. But he just stood there in the pissing night, in the utter damnation of it all, rain or tears coursing down his massive fleshy face, mumbling softly to himself, “I’m finished. I’m finished.” Here were the nails in the wall, here the hanging man.
—
Plenty of times in the course of my employment at The Swan I had dreamed of hearing this news, of seeing Bob broken. But when it happened I found I was not so happy after all. Bob’s downfall killed The Swan. It finished every one of us. In hushed tones that evening Racist Dave told the other chefs that the restaurant was bound to reopen sooner or later, but how long might that be? I couldn’t wait forever. Without a job I would be on a train north within the month. I had not forgotten the finality of my mother’s last e-mail, or those frequent missed calls from my father. There was a reason he kept ringing, and deprived of a kitchen to hide in I feared I would soon know it. And I thought of what The Fat Man had shouted as he left The Swan: how we all owed him now. This debacle would come at a price. With Bob gone, who would pay the debt?
That night the extractor fans were silenced, the burners extinguished. The chef’s whites were thrown pointedly into the laundry basket. Then—terror of terrors—the large, glowing switch that said IF THIS IS OFF THEN WE ARE ALL FUCKED was flicked to off. There were no earthquakes when this happened, no planes falling out of the sky or lakes of blood cascading through the ceiling. Nothing. The kitchen was silent.
INTERLUDE
1. AFTER BOB
So I was free once more. Monocle the fly, at liberty to buzz wherever I pleased. To sit in the armchair that smelled of hand lotion and read “The Waste Land,” complete with annotations. To pick my zits all day if I wished. To discuss the state of the neighborhood with Mrs. Molina in patchy Latinate. To trawl through the charity shop downstairs in search of bargains, nose averted from the smell of death. And to think, often, of the kitchen I had come from and the service that Bob had demanded, of the burning and mind games and long, thankless hours, where the choice to stay or quit had existed only in theory. That was no type of freedom, surely.
Racist Dave, if he hears me talking like this, will no doubt tell me to stop feeling so sorry for myself and crack on, but it occurs to me now that we tolerated it because we had no wish to be free. It was the same reason why I had spent four months at home after university, hating every minute of it, trying to clear the brambles and splintery green alkanet from the garden, my father asking me every day why hadn’t I got a job, when was I going to cut my hair, why were my arms so scrawny. Freedom was terrifying. For the most part we put the yoke around our necks ourselves. Kitchens were merely an extension of our natural sense of burden. If not exactly slavery, certainly a modern shade of servitude: to work every waking hour for those with deeper pockets; to never answer back; to still, in this age of greater freedoms, have no rights of which to speak. We had all, each one of us, chained ourselves to the kitchen. Perhaps none of us felt that we deserved freedom. Perhaps our histories whispered too strongly in our ears. They will whisper louder before this story is through.
In the kitchen Bob’s great shadow had contained us all. And yet, sitting in my bolt-hole room observing the days drag by, unrushed and idle, watching the street theater of One-Eyed Bruce and his motley players below, I did not feel any freer. The world was in the palm of my hand, it was my oyster and so forth, but I did not want the whole world, it was too much for one man. I wanted only a small part of it. I had seen what had happened to my father when he had tried to eat the world; what that hunger, that sense of entitlement, had done to him.
When I stood apart from others—doing odd jobs around the house that miserable summer after university, watching the Camden bustle from my rented room—my value was undefined. Was I passing through this life because I was supple, pragmatic, elastic of self—or simply because I was small: small of character, small of self? Did I, as a writer, have any thoughts worth having? But in the kitchen these questions did not arise. I knew my value at any single moment of the day. I could measure it against every item on my prep list, every order that came in. For insecure and maladjusted human beings there was no greater prize. And I saw how the kitchen had been a fine window onto the world after all, and I realized that I missed it. I greeted each morning with disappointment now, knowing there were no deliveries to unpack, no leaves to wash. Around seven in the evening I became agitated, preparing myself mentally for a dinner rush that never came. The nights were long and turbulent, the days drained of flavor. I thought of my fellow chefs, lying on their own beds, also sliding into debt. Often in those first dark and jobless days I felt worse for them than I did for myself.
I had enough money left over from The Swan to pay December’s rent. After that I wasn’t sure what I would do. There was the threat that I would have to quit London, to give up the whole charade and return home. It was almost too appalling to consider. Very soon I would be on the sofa next to my sunken father, watching reruns of Classic Sports, or between them at table as they took their meals in silence. Just silence in that marriage, and the weekly trip to Lindy Hop, now deceased. They made no attempt to fill in the gaps. Or perhaps it was just the one gap, a Sam-sized void, which could never be filled. I had not realized, until that last trip back, quite how far apart from each other they had grown. It was only a matter of time before the whole thing caved in completely. I did not want to be there when it did. That is something a child, however grown up, should not see.
—
Time became a thi
ng to kill. I went for long walks, or I sat on the lock, where the canal runs through Camden, and stared into the water, letting my eyes climb over the junk below the surface. Occasionally, having nothing better to do, I went to the park with Ramilov. I should stress that this was not a picnic and bicycles sort of excursion, nor did we wander the gardens discussing the vicissitudes of life. It was not me Ramilov wished to talk to, but the monkeys in London Zoo. At first, since neither of us had any money, we could only stare mournfully at the animal houses from the other side of the fence, but Ramilov soon discovered that if you stood in a certain bush in a particular corner of Regent’s Park you could see into the back of the primate enclosure, which was good enough for him.
Since Ramilov cannot be with us, he has kindly written down his instructions for seeing the monkeys without paying:
With the zoo on the right-hand side, walk up the avenue almost as far as the spiked drinking fountain. There will no doubt be some joggers about, or speed walkers working their arms like pistons, looking proper miserable. A Misery of Joggers. You may also encounter women in sunglasses looking like they expect to be recognized, or men who might be homeless sitting with their backs against the trees. An Expectation of Celebrities. A Romance of the Unemployed. Curiously, both species are native to this habitat. Wait until the coast is clear, then step over the small fence into the flower bed and pick your way through the undergrowth to the zoo fence. When you’re all the way in you can see the howler monkeys sitting in the trees or swinging on their ropes. You can talk to them about all matters. Primates are the most intelligent of all creatures, especially apes, which is why their collective noun is “A Wisdom.”
Ramilov’s favorite topic was the inferiority of man when stood up alongside the rest of nature. Compare Dibden to an ape, it always began. The ape is stronger and faster. In many ways, it is smarter. As an animal, Dibden is pathetic. Man is pathetic. How do we survive? Without medicines or machines we are nothing. We cannot fight diseases or predators. We cannot hunt anymore. We cannot fend for ourselves, or for our young. We cannot live in harmony with any natural habitat on earth. Every beast trumps us, et cetera, et cetera . . .
Rarely, if ever, did Ramilov speak of his past. On the subject of why he became a chef, or why he had ended up in Camden, I could never get a straight answer. He’d moved around a lot—Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds—and that was as much as he’d say on the matter. He was here and what had come before was past. I have never met a man who cared, or appeared to care, so little about his own history. At a certain stage of the evening in O’Reillys, Racist Dave would often get onto the subject of his lovely mam who made the best fucking shepherd’s pie in Manchester or his ex-girlfriend who he was pretty sure still loved him but somehow never had the time to visit. Even Dibden, at times, had been known to lament his privileged and cloistered upbringing. But Ramilov’s loved ones or memories were never mentioned. He had locked that part of himself away completely. Of course now I can understand why. I do not condone what Ramilov did, but I have not forgotten how he saved me either.
The closest Ramilov came to discussing his past was his Albanian heritage, of which he was uncommonly proud. His grandfather had come to Liverpool after the Second World War, and from his armchair he had lectured the family men on the customary laws of the motherland, known as the Kanun. The Kanun required you to kill any man who had killed your closest relative, Ramilov told the monkeys. If someone had killed a guest in your house, they too must get it in the neck. Once the man was dead you had to roll his body over to face the sky. This, he informed the preening chimps, was a code of honor, as old as killing itself. A brutally successful code, for the cycle of blood never ended. Revenge nurtured revenge. In Albania’s mountainous north there were some villages with almost as many promised killings as there were people. Now and then the chimps looked back at him and raised their heavy brows, but their charcoal eyes and small, wizened faces gave nothing away. Ramilov insisted that they could hear him and were taking it all in. I did not share his hope for primates but I could see that, such as times were, hope was at a premium, and we each had to find it wherever we could.
—
Mrs. Molina soon took to worrying about my rent again. The blasts of air freshener through my keyhole increased. Sweet old Mrs. Molina, with her fluffy pink slippers and her filthy mouth. From her cries of “filho de puta” and “pentelho,” I hid. From One-Eyed Bruce and his shipwrecked Shakespeareans, from their cries of “pussyclot” and “please mister,” I hid. And I had come to London in the first place only to hide from my father and his variations on the Mr. Useless Streak of Piss theme.
I was a stranger in the city. My few months at The Swan had made my return to solitude even more intense. Was it my imagination, or did the crowds of people turn their backs away from me as I approached? This was not a loneliness I had chosen. Strange coincidences implied that the rest of London functioned as one hive organism in conspiracy against me. That pale girl in the doorway one night whom I could have sworn called my name. A new lodger downstairs with the same northern drone as Racist Dave. Bob’s voice in the next supermarket aisle across, complaining about corned beef. One-Eyed Bruce stooping to talk to a passenger in a dark, expensive car that pulled up alongside him, a passenger that looked, through the glass, distinctly like The Fat Man. He of great and joyless appetite. Around them the faceless crowds flowed.
The church next to the bookie’s on Camden Road hung a new sign above its front door. Making a family out of strangers, it said. Very good, but I was now in the opposite business, trying to make strangers out of a family. It was not proving so easy. I had to keep my distance, to get money from somewhere. Yet I could not stop thinking about my parents. I would find myself in the Chalk Farm Internet café constructing e-mails to my mother—lies, mostly, about my burgeoning career—which I never sent. The thought of her in that cold study, her index fingers making hesitant stabs at the keys in reply, my father in the next room with the volume right up, made me too sad to go through with it. And though I often wondered if I had made a mistake coming to London, I knew it was better than the alternative. However much of a stranger I was here, it was somehow less than I was at home.
Books failed to soothe, tweezering brought no relief. I had to shake myself out of this malaise, get a job, earn some money, keep my fate at bay. I kept telling myself: You cannot go back. And yet the days rolled on without improvement. A gushing newspaper review of Tod Brightman’s latest book, A Corduroy Nothingness, did not help matters. In fact it made me want to tear out my own eyes.
But even at my lowest ebb, life managed to wring one more joke out of me. Returning from my wanderings one night, I saw a shadow pull itself from the doorway of my lodgings as I approached. For a second I thought it was One-Eyed Bruce, at last about to murder me, but the shape was wrong, its movements too leaden, the expression of the shoulders altogether too miserable for a drug dealer in Camden Town. And as I got closer I saw the keen, testing eyes and the final gracelessness of the neck and hands, the worn spot on his jeans where he kept his keys. Deflating is the word for such a sight, such a visitation. In a town of crooks and deadbeats, where your soul is pretty used to getting kicked around, this man in front of me could still dampen my spirit.
“Hello, son,” he said.
At first I elected not to reply.
“Saw your e-mail,” he went on. “London is full of interest, eh? Looks like a shithole to me.”
That was the old man to a tee. No how are you, just straight into the griping.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded. I was in no mood to play the dutiful son.
“Your mother and I are going through a patch. Thought you could put me up for a few days. What a treat—a visit from your dear old dad.”
To this I did not respond.
2. OTHER WORLDS
You can’t stay here,” I said, fumbling with the key.
“Can you believ
e your mother?” he said.
“The landlady will kick me out,” I said.
“All over a poxy watch,” my father puffed, barreling up the narrow stairs behind me.
“There’s no space,” I said.
“Course there is.” He took in the room without turning his head.
“I’m very busy,” I said.
“Did someone murder a goat?” he asked, pointing to the umber stain beside the armchair.
“Several pans in the fire,” I explained.
He was seen to eye the bed discreetly. I walked over and lay on it to stake my claim. Two minutes with the man and already this was my frame of mind.
“You should get a hotel,” I said, looking up at the moldering ceiling with an expression that I suppose, to the outside observer, might have come across as pious. “You’d be more comfortable.”
“No cash,” he said. He kicked off his shoes, unfurled his sleeping bag and cast it out into the wedge between bed and door. “Good thing you’ve got that job,” he added.
Was that a trace of slyness in my father’s tone? Did he know? I could not bear to tell him I had lost it.
“See?” Crouching, he edged his head gingerly beneath the sink and slid down. “Loads of space.”
“Your feet are in my face,” I pointed out.
He grumbled, raised his head, smashed it on the U-bend of the sink and swore with enthusiasm, then shifted to face the other way.
“There we go,” he proclaimed, opening his arms in an expansive what-I-have-accomplished gesture, whacking his right hand against the door. He swore again, with a note of exhaustion this time, and said he couldn’t understand what I was making a fuss about. Then he paused, propped himself on his elbow and looked around.