Chop Chop

by Simon Wroe

  Racist Dave moved into the flat above the restaurant that Bob and his terrible wife had shared. We climbed the stairs to look in wonder at the palace of the fallen emperor: the silver curtains still hanging in the living room, the portrait of a dog’s ear above the mantelpiece, the little reminders stuck to the fridge that made Bob seem almost human, and the mirror on the ceiling of the bedroom that sent a shiver through all who saw it. Ramilov also took a souvenir of the old tyrant: a pair of Bob’s wife’s knickers discarded beneath the bed.

  “Trowelface,” he said solemnly, clutching the knickers tightly in his hand.

  —

  Business was slow. Even Glen had tramped on, leaving the alleyway for pastures new. Word had got around about the restaurant inspector’s report and the pusbucket Gloriana. When a restaurant is “in,” diners swarm around it unquestioningly. They will tolerate fantastic rudeness and two-hour waits for food without a murmur. Mediocre signature dishes will send them into raptures. When that restaurant loses its sheen, however, they suddenly recall those waits, the rudeness, the mediocrity of that dish after all, and use it as grounds to trash it. It was always awful, they tell their friends. On top of all this it was winter—a lean time for any restaurant. When it is already dark at four P.M., snow and slush underfoot, when there is a sharpness about people that reflects the weather, few think of going out for dinner. The Swan was desperately quiet. Fish clouded over in the fridges. The perfume of the lemons became hoochy, illicit. This was a shame in The Swan’s case, as Racist Dave was cooking out of his skin, trying to prove that the brewery had not made a mistake in reopening the place, or in promoting him.

  Without Dibden the pastry section was disbanded, with just a few ice creams left on for Ramilov or me to put up. And though I remained the bitch in all senses, as Ramilov had promised, I found myself taking care in my work for the first time. I began to clean up my section as I went along, to save the scraps for the stockpot, to label containers correctly. I tidied up when I was not busy. If we were low on something I made a note of it. And more than that, I started to notice the food. Real food, which had been so scarce at The Brewer’s. The dry skins of the onions crackling as I handled them, the scent rising from a crate of oranges, the bouquets of herbs releasing their essence between forefinger and thumb. I marveled at the darkness of the meat hanging in the walk-in, at the brightness of a fish eye, at the flavor a few bones could impart to water. I noticed how the vine of the tomato had a stronger smell than the fruit and saw the wisdom of leaving it in soups and sauces as they cooked. I learned the language of food: how you “gorged” onions and “tempered” chocolate, how pasta became “claggy” unless you “let it down,” how “brunoise” was a French specification of size referring to the head of a match.

  It seemed there had never been time to see these things when Bob was in charge. In those days there was only ever the service, blind and unquestioning. Now I saw the greater purpose, and the greater purpose was food. How it looked and smelled and felt and tasted, the excitement and luxury and abundance of it . . . Once, when ordered to add white wine and herbs to a fish soup, I caught a smack of aroma so good I was compelled to stick my head into the pot to keep on smelling it. Harmony caught me doing this, my whole head obscured from view, my eyes closed, savoring the aroma, and asked me what the fuck I was doing. How I’d missed that sharpness! “What the fuck are you doing?” Wasn’t that an eloquent way of putting it? No fat on that statement, nothing wasted. A Hemingway statement. Literature when it came from her mouth, not so much when it came from Racist Dave’s. Embarrassed that I had nothing smarter to say to her, I mumbled that I loved the smell of it.

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s all right, then.” She looked surprised—another expression, like happiness, that she wore agonizingly well.

  I tasted everything. I watched everything. When I was given a long and monotonous job to do such as chipping potatoes or chopping carrots I would pretend to be Ramilov or Dave and stand with my legs wide apart, sharpening my knife until it sang, my section spotless. Then I would slice with brisk, precise movements as I had been shown, the first set of knuckles against the blade, the fingertips always behind, rocking the steel on its curve in a bowing motion, letting the weight of the knife do the work. Ramilov noticed my new enthusiasm and commended me.

  “The person who abuses the vegetables is the arsehole of the kitchen,” he explained. “You’re still the bitch, but you’re not an arsehole anymore.”

  This distinction made me uncommonly proud.

  “Of course,” Ramilov went on sadly, “Dibden will always be the true arsehole of this kitchen. No one could hold a candle to him.”

  This was undoubtedly true. Dibden was much missed by everyone.

  With my new hunger came new responsibility. Twice a week, on busy nights when no one else had the time, I was given the duty of preparing the staff meal. I am sure this doesn’t sound like much, and perhaps it wasn’t, but I fell upon it with zeal. I would plan my menus days in advance, thumbing through the kitchen’s cookbooks and sauntering in a self-important manner around the fridge and the dry store. Scallops wrapped in Parma ham could be nice. A leg of lamb slow-roasted with vadouvan spices until the marbled fat around it was a hard gold and the meat fell apart with the gentlest insistence of a spoon. Great bowls of crisp French beans and toasted hazelnuts in a light, sharp vinaigrette. Grilled sea bass, their skins blistered with salt and heat, on a bed of garlicky greens. The slick, unctuous richness of an oxtail stew. The seductive wobble of a lemon pie. I dreamed of food, dreamed with my eyes open, and everywhere I looked the dream seemed to be real.

  Not that my lavish schemes ever got off the ground. There was no time or money for such luxuries. Staff dinner was usually constrained to whatever mise Dave had decided could no longer be fed to the customers. Rubbery roasted potatoes that tasted of the fridge. Limp salad. Cucumbers that were all seeds. Pork with a metallic undertow. Anonymous sauce. Still, I loved more than anything else those moments when I stood at the solid top, Harmony on my right, Dave to my left, mimicking the professional ease of my fellow chefs, their casual flicks, their fluidity, their gestures I had watched a million times. I liked to see myself cooking, part of the machine. For the first time I could see the joy of assemblage.

  “Well done,” said Ramilov. “You’ve finally earned a promotion to a job no one else wants.”

  Ramilov was right on this point. It was a lowly and thankless task, but I did not care. It was mine, and in this new operation I took immense pride. I was forever asking people what they thought of my food, pestering the eternally hungry dishwashers who would have eaten anything, inquiring of the waitresses who hid their food distrustfully beneath the condiment station until they were less busy. Had they enjoyed it? Did they think there was too much tarragon? But the harried waitresses had not tried it and Darik and Shahram did not care, did not know what tarragon was. I did not dare ask Ramilov or Harmony or Dave, they were still not in my orbit; yet I felt that I had taken a step closer to them all the same. Thus began a new era, the era of flies.

  It should have been an era of greater freedoms—yet always the past was at our backs. We were barely up and running again before history poked its face in at the door. One afternoon, as I attempted to tunnel-bone a leg of lamb (a recent addition to my tasks, which Dave had reluctantly allowed me), my concentration was broken by the silky touch of Camp Charles’s hand against my buttocks.

  “Having a little perv?” he asked. A strange question, when it was his hand on my arse. I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “I saw you,” he whispered, “looking at her.”

  Was it that obvious? I suppose I had been staring at her a bit. Only to break the monotony of the mise, you understand, for the benefit of my eyes, as such. I didn’t think anyone had noticed.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “Your dad is at the bar, Monocle,”
he said coyly. “He says you’ll pay for his beer.”

  Ramilov overheard this and began cackling, asking was my father called Glen, did he shit in the alley, et cetera, and Dave was of course delighted to join in, adding a few thoughtful interjections of his own. Bum. Crapper. Gash dad. If their suggestions had been a little further from the mark, perhaps we could have laughed about it together. But they did not see him as I did, the well-thumbed betting slips that fluttered from him every time a pocket was turned out, the pronounced disgust for the dirt and desperation and loose virtues of the city, in perfect counterpoise with the hopeful packet of Blue Zeus beneath his pillow . . . Did he think I hadn’t noticed? Even then, in the singular confinement of Mrs. Molina’s guest bedroom, I tolerated his ways; but this intrusion at work, the one place I was able to forget him, was not a laughing matter.

  I stuck my head round the corner of the pass and took him in. Squinting closely at the Racing Post, in anticipation of gratuities. Checking dentures of gift horses. Memory, reaching forward, always threatening to derail me. Yes, officer. That’s the man. Already known to you, is he? You do surprise me.

  “Just one,” I told Camp Charles. “But that’s all.”

  “Aren’t you going to come out?” he said. The man was a veritable factory of innuendo.

  “No.”

  Ramilov and Dave, when they saw I wouldn’t go out to greet my father, stopped laughing and tried to take me out into the yard for a man-to-man talk about “family shit” and how they all had it. So keen to dispense their dubious wisdoms, those two. For once I believed their intentions were good, but I didn’t want advice on the subject; it had kept me company all my life. No thoughtful chat was going to make the man at the bar, with his great appetites and empty pockets, disappear.

  But as my gruesome editorial duo remind me today, my father was far from the worst thing at our backs. London was full of people looking to take advantage, as my mother had warned. Other, darker forces were beginning to circle us, forces that would threaten all our freedoms in ways we had never imagined.

  2. SHOW HOME

  Food never meant anything to me. There are no Proustian trip wires in my past. Mother was a lousy cook and father ate what was put in front of him. The man could argue with his shadow, but as far as food went he had no complaints. My mother, back from the day shift at the care home, would always serve. Beans and chips. Sausage and mash. Egg and hash browns. This chore caused the lines about her mouth to deepen, her classical beauty giving way to a barmaid’s hatchet face. Protean is the word. Her eyes trained on the plates. In her pale blue work tunic, she shoveled potato derivatives for my father and me. I have quiet memories of those days, the sound turned right down. I wish I could turn these recollections off altogether, but if I have learned anything from the later events of this story—the blood, the confessions, the police holding cell—it is that history has a way of seeping through the gaps.

  After Sam, I remember expecting change. Steps would have to be taken so the same thing did not happen to me. There would be commands to stay away from roads and bigger boys, rules enforced. Perhaps Mother would suggest I play only in the garden from now on and panic if I made the slightest sniffle. Good. I was scared of the traffic and tired of being pushed around by the bigger boys. But instead, to my great outrage, I was left to roam free. My thoughtless parents let me do whatever I pleased—even encouraged me to go out and play with my “friends.” Appalled by their negligence, I contrived various ways (that reckless inclination toward fantasy even then!) that I might endanger myself: to run away, to climb the huge garden oak, to stand out on the ring road, to find another wasps’ nest. Then we would see what they held dear. I never went through with it, however. What if they did not try to save me? Greater than my outrage was the fear it might be justified.

  My father’s attitude could be even more extreme. His face darkened if I came back in clean or carrying a book—I should have been grubby from roughhousing and adventure. He wondered pointedly why I didn’t have any friends, why I couldn’t fix my own bike. Time and again he implied, in a variety of sly and petty ways, that I had failed to meet his expectations. He wanted me to lead the neighborhood boys through the backwaters, to take my brother’s risks. But I was not that person. I did not understand the roughhousing, when it was serious and when it was play. I am sure my father knew, on some level, that I could never be like my brother, but he was a proud man, never accountable for his errors of judgment. Caught in that pride, he raged against his callous and uncaring family, against his straggling son.

  Father made me a substitute, mother made me a ghost. Her love for me I could not question, but after Sam she seemed to pull some part of it away, to abstract it in order to protect it from further harm. Children had proved they could not be trusted with love. They were too fragile, and their fragility broke hearts. And though she slipped me sweets and told me not to worry about my father, though she held me every night in her arms, she performed these acts with a new sense of caution. Despite my best efforts I could not get her to commit the same focus to me anymore. When she pressed me to her it was tentative, as if I were a life form fallen from the sky, who at any time might choose to go back.

  What else trickles in from that time? Thoughts of Grandmother, stirring trouble. She would bring news of my mother’s old suitors: how well so-and-so was doing in the steel business, what’s his name’s latest car. She recounted these details loudly, projecting them toward the sofa where my father lay. Her eyes milky, nearly blind, shifty despite their attempts at innocence. And Mother, though she said nothing, absorbed it all. She had been much admired. If she had not married my father, who could say where she might be now. One of those new villas with the columns on the other side of the ring road perhaps. No care home drudgery. Private health care when it might have made a difference. Grandmother hypothesizing, eyes sly.

  Slowly, I think, my mother came to see her marriage as a trap. She had been young and impressionable. She had been tricked. Now, between the care home and the show home, between the family she had and the family she’d lost, she was a prisoner. Her outward bitterness toward my father grew. He had known only one thing and now he did not even know that. When I think back I see her wiping those poor catatonic mouths and try to imagine how she felt. She did not do it, surely, to keep the family together, but perhaps to keep a dream intact, of a life she once had. Even though Silver Hills had lost its sheen and the bland quirk of the show home furnishings no longer comforted or amused, she was determined not to give these things up. They were links to a happier time. Thus principles will cloud a person’s mind, and part stands in for the whole, and folk will fight tooth and nail for something they did not really want in the first place.

  Not that it was ever as simple as that. She had fallen so heavily for my father, once upon a time. I’ll admit I don’t know much about romance—I have never burned a letter or argued tearfully in a railway station—but I imagine those feelings don’t disappear overnight. What had happened with my brother, that was a tragedy for both of them. She knew how much it had torn my father up. She appreciated also the personal catastrophe he had suffered with his golf. Like him, she mourned for the personality she had first met; she looked with sorrow on the couch-bound figure before her, the toothless crocodile, the clean rat, its impulses denied. Was she really going to pull away from him now, after he had already lost so much? Because he had lost so much?

  Yes, I think this was my mother’s dilemma. She felt for the man she loved . . . had loved. Her dramatic face, prone to its sudden weather pattern shifts, was impossible to read. Wars came and went in our house. Battle lines changed fast. There was the night I stumbled upon her and my father’s tangled limbs, their half-secret lovemaking. I was not trying to look, but the door was ajar and I could not sleep. At the time my nine-year-old brain could not understand it. Not the physics, but the narrative arc. They’d been frosty with each other for weeks. Another time I
found the blond woman’s picture that had come with the house, the picture my father used to kiss good night, in the kitchen bin. What did it mean, after more than a decade of looking at that photo of another woman, laughing about it, to throw it away now? Certainly my mother was conflicted.

  The truth is I do not know exactly how my parents felt back then. It was not one of those homes where everyone was constantly weeping and flinching at revelations. The arguments, when they happened, were mostly hushed affairs, considerately started after I was supposed to be asleep. And though my father could be cruel, and sensitive to any perceived slight (certain topics—gambling, golf, employment—were off-limits), he still displayed fleeting moments of charm. An unexpected gift for my mother that we could not afford, a roguish smile, a trip to the bookie’s for his awkward young son—don’t tell Mum. Even as I resented him I craved his attention. Even as my mother toiled and fretted she let him whittle away the days polishing his silverware.

  Nor is it fair to say it was only a time of turmoil. There were times when our three-wheeled vehicle was happy, and no one was left out. That whole week before the camping holiday, for instance, when my father bristled with excitement, telling us what to do in a hurricane, what berries you could eat and how to make smoke signals. Beneath the oak tree in the back garden the three of us pitched a tent and drank soup from kitchen cups, laughing at the impracticality of it all, at the pretense of survival. My father’s enthusiasm was infectious right up until we got to the Lake District proper and he failed to get the fire lit on the first night and drove off to the pub in a huff.