Chop Chop

by Simon Wroe

  “Well, if you did it,” she said quietly, “he must have deserved it.”

  “You don’t understand,” I blurted. And then it all came out—Sam’s last hours, the bowl of soup too far away, the tangled limbs, the thin impossible blood. The inadequacy of the second son. All the blame and uncertainty I had nurtured ever since spilled out of me in one long torrent, things I had never told a soul, that I had vowed I never would. Still she did not move away.

  “You can never do enough for the people you love,” she replied at last. “You can never be enough. You can never say enough. . . .”

  I looked at her.

  “It took my dad weeks to die,” she went on. “I cried every night, but I never went to the hospital. Not once. We weren’t close. I couldn’t do all the things I should have done earlier, not then, with him barely there. That would have been worse. Sometimes you have to accept you can never do enough. . . . Then you leave that thought behind, in the past, where it belongs. And you start from where you are.”

  Without another word she put her arm through mine. We stood in silence for a while and my mind was silent also, for once not trying to augur great omens from the small and humble details. Gradually conversation resumed on safer ground. Yet it was surer, as we were, for the perils encountered and survived. In the trees above us the monkeys flitted from branch to branch, with one ear out, I’d like to think, for our words. They were the first real words we spoke to each other, and those creatures were the only witnesses to this historic moment. What else we talked about is between us and them.

  —

  Life at The Swan started to settle. The customers returned, and the food was the best it had ever been. Confidence among the chefs was growing. Harmony had mastered larder while Dibden, to his and everyone else’s surprise, had emerged as a competent, even skilled, pastry chef. It turned out that the solitude and precision of the section—and time, lots of it—had been what he needed. In the plonge, Shahram and Darik powered through the dishes, gabbling happily in their nonsense tongue. Dave, though still dense and out of tune, was proving himself a fair and just leader. Even Bob, our unmissed former tyrant, seemed to bear no ill feelings: a card arrived, postmarked Bradford, with the message “Whoever did it, thank you.” New and wonderful produce was coming in every day: nashi pears and yuzus from Japan, pillowy buffalo mozzarellas from Campania, beautiful packages of Iberico ham. Midweek lunches were booked out and a flock of new waitresses, “an ogle,” was drafted in to cater for the growing demand.

  Yet it was all a little too quiet. No coarse shouting, no obscure rap lyrics, no sudden and alarming violations. Less laughter too. Without Ramilov, things could never be quite the same. The innuendos of Camp Charles sounded hollow without his filthy laughter. Dibden had no reason to protest, the waitresses no cause to scream. All the success and happiness The Swan was enjoying carried a tinge of sadness for our fallen comrade. Often the conversation would turn to Ramilov and the outrageous things he had said or done (I made no mention of our conversation in the cells, of the girl in Leeds), then to how his case was progressing and whether he would be out soon. Each day we hoped he would return. When the yard gate squeaked open there was a collective pause in chopping and mixing, an anxious listening out for those next words. . . .

  Hello, bitches, did you miss me?

  I hoped to end this story with those words, but I knew better than anyone that this was not to be. The days rolled by and those words never came.

  Every now and then I receive a letter from Ramilov. He has been having peculiar dreams in prison, he says. In one he is stuck in the monkey enclosure at London Zoo and Bob is his keeper, prodding him with a stick and trying to make him sing “Cage of Pure Emotion.” In another, Bob’s dog, Booboo, visits him from the great beyond, dressed in a satin frock coat and walking on its hind legs. It tells him that his Parmesan tuiles are burning. Ramilov says he continues to feel awful about his sabotage of The Swan. He says it was a selfish act that betrayed everyone close to him. It was, he says, like masturbating over the memory of a dear friend—not as much fun as you might think. We don’t talk about the other stuff.

  More often, however, his letters are brief affairs, at odds with the garrulous man I know. The conditions of prison he describes in plain, unemotional prose. Only the food raises his passions; he complains it is consistently overcooked and underseasoned. How fucking difficult is it to grill a burger, he often wonders. I struggle to reply to these letters, for they are weighted with such different concerns from mine. I want to talk about his survival, his wrongful imprisonment, his chances of acquittal. But on these matters Ramilov cannot be drawn. He wants to talk about the burgers. This is what means something in his world.

  He will talk, however, about the book. I have sent him all but the last four chapters, up to just before The Fat’s Man’s last supper, and Ramilov has been very encouraging in his response, much more so than that philistine Racist Dave. He says, knowing it will infuriate me, that it is almost as good as Tod Brightman’s latest book, which he has read in prison. He has a few quibbles, however: he says he never changed for love, he thinks there is not enough about Dibden being shit (there is almost a whole chapter) and he reminds me of my promise. I have been working up to sending him the final chapters. As yet, I have not stumped up the courage. Like I said, I don’t condone what he did, but I can’t forget that he saved me either.

  In his most recent letter, Ramilov includes a list of collective nouns that he thinks are relevant to the story. He asks that I find space for them somewhere, as his contribution to the book. He expects some readers to have the same response to them that Nora had, O’Reillys’ cross-eyed landlady, but hopes there might be others more interested than she was. Though I have added them to the glossary earlier on, if I can do nothing else for Ramilov, I would like to repeat them here:

  A Band of Men

  An Ogle of Waitresses

  A Wince of Lobsters

  A Tirade of Chefs

  It is a Skein of Geese in flight, a Gaggle of Geese on water.

  A Buzz of Barflies

  A Blarney of Bartenders

  A Skulk of Foxes

  A Peep of Poultry

  A Business of Flies

  An Unholiness of Ortolans

  A Slaver of Gluttons

  A Snarl of Tigers

  A Fighting of Beggars

  A Colony of Ants

  A Horror of Apes

  In honor of my friend, I would also like to add a few of my own:

  An Embarrassment of Wasps

  A Snipe of Grandmothers

  A Flail of Golfers

  A Depreciation of Cul-de-Sacs

  A Conspiracy of Cornflakes

  A Frustration of Fathers

  A Concern of Mothers

  A Bowlful of Blame

  A Quandary of Morals

  A Singularity of Quiet Dark-Eyed Girls

  So it seems this story will end as it began, with dubious nouns of assemblage and Ramilov imprisoned. An obese tyrant is still angry with us. We remain overworked and underpaid. The dinner rush is no easier. Sunlight remains a stranger. Beneath my window, One-Eyed Bruce still crooks a finger in my direction and offers up patois curses. My father is once again an unsavory, beguiling memory. The moth-eaten fox continues to snarl above the bar. Almost nothing has changed.

  Almost nothing, but not quite. The supper club of the wicked is destroyed, while the restaurant of the upright flourishes. Our lawyer with the greasy tie says the detectives working on the case have provided more information on the shadowy Fat Man. In a previous and slimmer life he was a superintendent on the force, until he was thrown off it for attempting to extort money from a corrupt official. It seems when he left he took dirt on half the city, and kept a network of police contacts who passed him confidential records. The investigating team made a number of interesting finds at The Fat Ma
n’s home, the lawyer says. Names you wouldn’t believe, involved in acts you couldn’t imagine. The dinners he forced upon Bob and others in his debt were just one aspect of the man’s terrible appetites, a demonstration of his power. He made us all complicit in these sadistic acts, and I am sure that was part of the fun for him. Records of other pastimes were also found, linking him to gambling, money laundering, narcotics, and animal trafficking. Pretty damning stuff, according to the greasy scales of justice. He shall not be missed.

  What else has changed, besides The Fat Man’s circumstances? There are the greater freedoms of the kitchen without Bob, and my new responsibilities in front of the stove. There are Harmony’s smiles, and who knows where they may lead. Also, to celebrate a sudden decline in competition, Mr. Michael is now offering delicacies half price for a limited time only.

  And there was the morning, as I sorted the deliveries in the yard, when a knock sounded at the gate. I remember thinking the morning light was roseate, so Dave must have been off that day. I thought maybe it was Ramilov out there, a foolish hope, and I opened it a little quicker than normal with a joke on my tongue. But it wasn’t him. Instead it was a young guy, a kid really, standing there, looking up at me.

  “Is this the kitchen entrance?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m here for the commis post,” he said.

  This was the first I’d heard about it. For a terrible moment I thought I had been replaced, that Dave had employed someone else without bothering to mention that he was getting rid of me. Then I realized this was not the way things were done. Even weaselly Bob had the courtesy to fire someone face-to-face. I looked at the boy in front of me, as green as I had been when I arrived, what seemed like such a long time ago. I was not being replaced. I was being promoted.

  “Oh,” I said. “You better come in.”

  He dawdled on the threshold, uncertain. He looked at the dark rings under my eyes and my blotchy fryer skin, the scars across my arms and the greasy forelock poking out from beneath my chef’s hat. I saw him studying The Mark of Bob on the back of my right hand and the innumerable other cuts and burns that kept it company. I looked down with him and realized, with some surprise, that they were impressively fucked-up hands. His own hands were lilac white, practically perfect in every way. I noticed that he tried to hide them from my gaze. We stood on different sides of time, he and I, in different worlds. He still breathed air; in my nostrils there was only smoke. I knew he was wondering if this was right for him. . . .

  To be the lowest of all creatures. To see the seasons from a square of yard.

  No one has been known to return from Hades.

  Was this what he really wanted?

  Feast and famine. Faith and heartache. Love and violence. Dark mornings and late finishes. Savage acts and smart apologies. Death or glory every night. Those heads once squealing in your hands.

  So we slave the best years of our lives: a family of strangers, a business of flies. Our works consumed and soon forgotten. Our names chased away like clouds. Our dreams burned up, at last, in brilliant blazing heat.

  “Well, come on,” I said. “Chop chop.”