Chop Chop

by Simon Wroe

  “Hang on,” he said suspiciously. “Where’s the TV?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “What?” he cried in utter indignation. “My own son, without a telly!”

  Floorboards creaked on the stairs outside. The pink slippers of Mrs. Molina were on the prowl.

  “Shhh!” I hissed.

  My father cut short his objections. We waited in silence for the threat to pass. Further creaking came from the corridor, then fell quiet. There was scratching at the keyhole, followed by a lengthy burst of aerosol spray into the room. The ghostly smell of artificial roses descended around us. My father’s face was a mask of consternation and disgust—well worth seeing. I glared at him before he said anything. The creaks began again, moving down the corridor, and we relaxed.

  “Jesus Christ!” My father exhaled loudly. “What was that?”

  “The landlady.”

  “She’s a bloody maniac!” he said crossly.

  And though he was probably right, and god knows I harbored no great love for Mrs. Molina, I felt suddenly angry that he should pitch up here so casually and begin throwing stones at things he knew nothing about, things that had nothing to do with him. How dare he criticize my landlady? What gall he had to swear at my chipped sink! I had not asked him to come. He was not paying for the service. He had sneaked into the party uninvited and was now complaining about the canapés. (Racist Dave, who has seen my room, says this last sentence is a stretch.)

  “Dad,” I asked with growing impatience, “what the hell are you doing here?”

  He sighed and laid his head back on the pillow. Straightening his legs, he knocked a pile of books into a glass of water, upsetting it over the carpet. Without interest he looked down the length of his body at the sprawled books and the upended glass.

  “Stupid place to put stuff,” he said sleepily.

  “Why are you here?” I asked again.

  “She won’t talk to me until I explain the watch,” he mumbled, eyes closed.

  “So explain it.”

  “You give your heart to an idea,” he said in little more than a whisper. “But when you wake, it’s not there anymore . . .”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I told him.

  “In the morning,” he murmured. “Okay, son?”

  The “son” was almost affectionate, which threw me. Stretched out on the floor he looked old, careworn, strangely undeserving of the blame I attributed to him. Was that what he meant by this talk of an idea? I stepped over his low breathing and put a towel over the water at his feet. Then I switched off the light and climbed quietly back into bed. His breathing soon deepened into snores, and I lay there in the darkness, struck by how personal the sound was, imagining how my mother must have felt on the other side of that marital bed. Joined across the country, she and I, by our shared experience of this man. Perhaps we did deserve to be called a family after all. Lulled by this thought, I too drifted off.

  But early the next morning I was rudely woken by a punch to the leg and my father’s voice saying he needed my help with my mother.

  “The watch,” he explained. “Tell her I found it in the charity shop in town. Save the Wotsits. That I bought it for her.”

  “Tell her?”

  “You’d do that for your old dad, wouldn’t you?” The night’s suggestion of another, more thoughtful version of the man was gone, broken as quickly as it had been formed. This was the father I knew: wheedling, sly, on the make.

  “Last night, Dad, you were talking about how you gave your heart to an idea. . . .”

  “Was I?” he said blankly. “Probably sleep talk. All bollocks, isn’t it? Now help me with your mother—let’s work out what you’re going to tell her.”

  “But is it true?” I asked.

  “Of course it’s true.” Bridling now, he lifted himself to a sitting position. “Are you saying I’m a liar?”

  “So why say ‘tell her’?”

  “It’s a figure of speech, Wordsworth. I’m asking you to tell her, is all.”

  —

  Thus my father moved his stealth and bitterness in and reminded me afresh of the perils family could hold: the regrettable but unstoppable habits, the sexual theories of a father that a son should never hear, the candor and obscurity, the guilt. By that afternoon I was embroiled. Shoulder to shoulder with bored minicab drivers in the Chalk Farm Internet café, surrounded by heady, foreign smells of meat and boiled grain, I wrote to my mother, telling her about his unexpected visit, asking her (it was too early to tell her) about the watch. Almost immediately, she called me back.

  “I thought the miserable git might end up with you,” she announced when I answered. “It was the only way he could avoid spending money.”

  “He’s been talking about a watch.”

  She sighed.

  “I’m sorry to put you through all this, dear,” she said, “but the watch was the final straw.”

  “Mum, what happened?”

  “You work yourself raw, and they fuck some whore,” she informed me bluntly. It was lovely to hear her voice again after so long, though I did wish she wouldn’t use such language. “In your bedroom, while you’re out slaving,” she added.

  I wish I could say this news shocked me.

  That evening in my room my father shook his head at this account. He had never cheated on my mother, he said, but—and here he paused, considering whether to tell me—only pretended he had.

  “What?” I couldn’t believe my ears.

  “I had to give her the impetus to hate me fully or forgive me fully,” he explained sadly, “though I did expect her to forgive me. . . . But I put the watch in the bathroom. Even got a barmaid at the pub to call the house a few times. You don’t know what it’s like, living off someone. It broke my heart to lie to your mother about it, but I had to let her make a clean break of me. I’ve been a burden on her too long.”

  “If you felt that way,” I said, “why didn’t you just leave?”

  “Because I love her,” my father replied. “I don’t want to leave her. I just couldn’t stand being in the gray area. I thought a nudge might push it back. Everything out in the open. Acceptance, you know?”

  A wild, tragic gesture, if it were true. But my mother did say the watch in the bathroom had the name “Kirsty” written on the back of the strap, and that those sheets had not stained themselves. What was the truth? What was the lie? Perhaps a man like my father could never exist with both feet in either. Even when I was arrested, a whole grim chapter we have yet to tell, his appearance at the police station was marked by ambiguity. “It should’ve been me in there—not you,” he told me. A touching sentiment on the surface, and most probably accurate. But had it come from the heart or the spleen? Was this, even now, another dig, another put-down, for his second-favorite son? Like I had made a hash of being in prison. Like I couldn’t get arrested of my own accord.

  —

  My father was a deeply frustrating man, and trying to organize his truths from his fictions threatened, in that first week, to become a full-time job. It might have been my fate—the pauper and his grubby son, cheating the Camden gentry—if she had not appeared before me again, reminding me of what life could be. My crutch, with none of her kitchen trappings, yet unmistakably her. One evening, as my father snored beside me, I saw her again. It was late and I was at my window, putting off sleep. I heard her voice first, coming from the stretch of road directly beneath me. Craning my neck against the glass, there she was, a vision in the Camden mire, still fearless even without the kitchen around her. I had forgotten how beautiful she was. She stood at the bus stop in conversation with one of the shuffling street faces, one familiar to me though not yet christened. Thanks to the snoring lump next to me I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the gist of it was apparent from the series of mournful, imploring expre
ssions on the street face. Poor devil, I thought, he doesn’t know what he’s up against. Once upon a time I had made the same mistake. Throw yourself under the bus, you poor fool! There’s more chance of finding sympathy there than with beautiful, hard-hearted Harmony!

  Harmony said something to the man that was lost beneath my father’s snores, then walked across the road to the supermarket. The man just stood there, not bothering to beseech other passersby, as if all the fight had gone out of him. I recognized that look. We shared the same heartache, he and I. She returned with two sandwiches, which she handed to the man. He looked somewhat confused, and perhaps momentarily a little disappointed, but soon his face cracked into a smile. He thanked her profusely and moved on. Harmony boarded a bus and was swept away. And I went to bed and lay there for a time, I could not say exactly how long, thinking how I might have been wrong about her after all. Even her sharpness, of which I had so often borne the brunt—That’s not good enough . . . I need it now . . . You’re taking too long . . . Don’t just stand there, do something—seemed suddenly clear and to the point, a blessing after all this familial murkiness. Certainly I remembered the sharpness more fondly than I had experienced it. For the first time in months I tried to hold the thought of her again: the arch of her back, the cool olive skin. It felt good. And she took my hand in hers and guided it across her slender body, smiling gently, and, looking straight at me with those quiet dark eyes, she said—

  At this moment in the reverie my dozing father let out an almighty snore that shattered all to smithereens. So I dropped my foot heavily onto his chest, causing him to cry out with the pain and fury of a newborn babe.

  “Stop snoring,” I said.

  “I wasn’t!” he insisted groggily. “I was awake. You were the one snoring. You must have dreamed it was me.”

  —

  Seeing Harmony again reminded me of how serious my situation was. I was unemployed. I was hungry. And I was bored of these feelings and longed for new sensations. Day by day I was slipping closer to the shipwrecked Shakespeareans. Mrs. Molina’s pink slippers at the top of the stairs generated an unreasonable amount of panic in my soul. A week of my father’s conversation was making me homicidal. His eventual discovery of my unemployment, a truth I could no longer hide, had not improved our relations. I could not become like him, I had no more money for rent—I had to get back into work. Knowing nothing else except kitchens, I took to the streets of Camden, looking for another Swan.

  It was far easier than I had expected to find a pub hiring staff: The Brewer’s Tap needed a kitchen assistant to start right away. Two days after my sighting of Harmony I was back in an apron, poised for service, while Kevin, the kitchen’s only chef (overly firm handshake, one earphone still in) gave me my instructions.

  “It’s a piece of piss, mate. Chips are frozen, you drop them in the fryer. Pasta’s already cooked, sauce is bought in, microwave four minutes. Chicken sandwich, straightforward. Soup is bought in. Burger is cooked but frozen, you microwave. Fish cakes are bought in and frozen, you drop them in the fryer. It sounds complicated but you’ll get the hang of it. Salad is in a bag in the fridge. Don’t use more than three leaves per plate, no one eats it. Hummus and mayonnaise are in the big pots over there. Monday to Thursday you’ll be lucky to get any orders for lunch, a couple for dinner, people aren’t drinking enough. Friday and Saturday it gets busy, Sunday everyone wants roasts. We do roasts a special way. . . . I’ve done a hundred Sunday lunches by myself before with just this and this”—he slapped the microwave and the fryer affectionately—“and you will too. As for prep . . . You mix ketchup and mayo for the special sauce, roast the chicken breasts for chicken sandwiches, check nothing’s gone off in the fridges, er . . . There’s other stuff too. Just make sure you’re here when lunch and dinner start. In between, do what you like. I play online poker in the office. Rolling in the Benjamins. Won’t need this job in a few weeks. . . . Any questions?”

  “There’s no grill,” I said. “Do you cook the steaks in a pan?”

  “Deep fryer,” smiled Kevin. “You’d be amazed what it can do.”

  The Brewer’s was a dismal barn of a pub that caught the high street workers as they spilled out at six o’clock. People arranged themselves on roomy sofas or in large armchairs opposite, and once the house music reached its evening volume it was impossible for anyone to hear a word anyone else was saying. You could not help but admire the sleekness of the long marble bar while you waited indefinitely to be served. To drink in The Brewer’s made you need a drink; to socialize in The Brewer’s made you want to scream. Yet the place had no such effect on hunger. Mostly alone in the tiny basement kitchen, I watched the hours pass. A burger here, a suspect chicken sandwich there. I thought often of The Swan, of its handmade pastas and freshly baked breads that I had taken for granted. There, we had controlled everything that went on the plate; it was all, more or less, from scratch. Here, we controlled nothing. It was all out of a packet. Gray mince patties shipped in icy blocks. Frozen roasted potatoes reheated in the fryer. A barrel of cheese sauce. How had it come to this? And Tod Brightman, man of letters, my age, flew around the world giving talks to aspiring authors.

  I fumed over the ascension of this young writer whom I hated, this tawdry scribbler who spent life at lunch with his publisher or explaining Maupassant to beautiful women, who had no scars on his hands or bags under his eyes, who woke late and counted his lie-in as contemplation, had no vegetables thrust against his rectum unless requested, no sapping father, no unrequited passions, no One-Eyed Bruce. I prayed he might destroy himself with a novel of staggeringly poor judgment or a tell-all memoir. Oh Lord, for another Answered Prayers! And I would be there at his end, as Gore had been for Truman, to proclaim his death “a good career move.” Yes, they were bitter thoughts—the boredom of my new job reviving bad old habits—though I cannot pretend I did not take pleasure in them.

  I imagined my own literary triumphs. Walking into a meeting with the bigwig publishers and throwing a single sheet of paper down in front of them. The first page of the book I would one day write, which they would read aloud with tremulous wonder. I would sit there casually, examining my fingernails for dirt, while they bid themselves into a frenzy. We would settle on a million, a nice round number. Out of modesty I wouldn’t let it go any higher. The publishers, overwhelmed with gratitude, would raise me up on their shoulders and carry me aloft from the meeting room, to cheers from the chief execs. Rachel Parker, who had managed to scrape an unpaid internship at the same publishing house, would look up from her photocopying to see me riding past, using her superiors as a divan. I would smile at her, graciously, to let her know I had forgiven her for the harsh and foolish things she had said to me on the university bus. Then I would buy a suit of the finest material, and a monkey for Ramilov, and stride purposefully into the kitchen and whisk Harmony away to the restaurant on Parkway I couldn’t afford where we would order everything on the menu and feed each other quail. When the bill arrived I would show the pretty waitress the first page of the book and she, with tears in her eyes, would insist I should not pay. She would try to kiss me, but I would politely refuse, explaining that Harmony was the only one for me. . . .

  Then, a few days into the job, a phone call out of the blue. The hoarse, hysterical voice of Ramilov, carrying the news I had been waiting for.

  “Is that the residence of An Extraordinary Cunt? The Swan is rising from the ashes and we need our trusty bitch.”

  “It’s reopening?”

  “Correct, numbnuts. We’re putting the band back together. All except that fat fuck Bob anyway. The brewery’s made Racist Dave head chef, and I’m sous.”

  “Are we all getting promoted?”

  “No, you’re still the bitch. But a loved bitch. I’m calling all the waitresses too.”

  “Everyone’s back in?” I did not mention Harmony, though I was thinking it.

  “Yeah. Bunch
of unemployable cunts apparently. Everyone except Dibden, believe it or not.”

  “Dibden said no?”

  “He’s got a job in an S&M café in Euston. He thought it stood for sausage and mash but it stood for S&M. They’ve got a torture dungeon downstairs. You can get whipped while you drink your coffee. If you want you can get your coffee poured on your nipples. They’ve got all the extras on the menu.”

  “That sounds awful.”

  “No shit. Dibden doesn’t know where to look. He hates it. Poor bastard craps his pants every time someone orders a jam doughnut. But he made his choice. What do you choose?”

  PART II

  TO

  FOLLOW

  1. RETURN

  The back gate is unlocked. The chain screen is reintroduced. The lights stutter and glare. The switch that says IF THIS IS OFF THEN WE ARE ALL FUCKED is flicked back on. The stoves are fired up. The fryers are filled. The steel-toed boots are unearthed. The laundry is found, unwashed. The accounts are reopened with the suppliers. The mats are laid out. The deliveries are put away. The fridge is restocked. The bins are lined with new bags. The fans whir. The hi-fi is resurrected. The knives are sharpened. The fox is brought back from its Siberian exile. The kitchen returns to life.

  Lovely bit of bream.

  You’re holding it the wrong way.

  They should put you on TV, middle of the night, for people who can’t get to sleep. They could just watch you chopping that carrot.

  Have they unlocked the doors out there?

  Took home a dyslexic bird last night. Got my sock cooked.

  Like all life, it was order in a system of disorder, a stumbling through, an ignorance until proven guilty. But compared to the reign of Bob, where we toiled in fear of everything, or The Brewer’s, where there was neither toil nor reward, those first few weeks back at The Swan were heaven. There was Racist Dave chopping and filleting with aplomb. Here was Harmony, still beautiful and unreadable. In the plonge, Shahram was doing his skittish dance and singing his Hindi songs while Darik squealed with laughter. There was no Bob to silence them. Rumor had it he was working as a line chef in the Leicester Square Garfunkel’s. As for Ramilov, the promotion to sous chef was a proud moment, and he announced to what remained of the kitchen staff that from now on there would be no more easy listening or “Cage of Pure Emotion.” We would subsist on a nutritious diet of musicals and rap.