by Paul Torday
‘He tried to put it in his mouth,’ said Sergeant Hawkes, breathing hard.
After a while a medic came and gave Samuelson a shot of something. A little later he was taken away to Ibn Sina Hospital. Or so they said. We never saw or heard from him again. But someone must have decided that the rot had set in. A few days after this incident, I was called to headquarters and told that our tour in Baghdad was over.
The next day, as we loaded our gear into the transport that Green Park was providing to take us back to Baghdad International Airport, Mr Harris came into the yard and strolled over to us.
‘I hear you’ve done good work, boys,’ he said. ‘If ever you feel like coming to work full time in the private sector, just let me know. Six hundred bucks a day. Beats working for the regular army, don’t you think, Captain Gaunt?’
‘Thank you, Mr Harris,’ I told him. ‘I think I’ve had enough of Baghdad for now.’
‘Well, we’ll get you back as far as Basra safe and sound, and then you can all sit in the airport until they send you home. Just one thing, boys?’
We all looked at him.
‘What goes on at Green Park stays here,’ said Mr Harris. He wasn’t smiling now. ‘You don’t ever talk about it. Not to anyone. Not to your colonel, not to your comrades, not to your wife, not to your sister. We don’t like people talking about us. Isn’t that right, Sergeant Hawkes?’
‘Of course, sir,’ said Sergeant Hawkes politely.
On the trip to the airport Sergeant Hawkes was very nervous every time the Humvees slowed down in the traffic. The highway was busy that day.
‘I wouldn’t put it past that bastard Harris to blow up one of his own cars as long as we were in it,’ he said. ‘He won’t want us to talk to anyone about what goes on in that villa.’
‘He knows we can’t talk about it,’ I said. ‘He knows we wouldn’t want the grief of spending the next two years of our lives mixed up in some sort of inquiry. Anyway, they’re Americans. It’s up to the US Army to keep their contractors under control. It’s not our problem, Sergeant Hawkes.’
‘If you say so, sir,’ said the sergeant, in his most wooden voice.
We reached the airport without incident. From Baghdad we flew to Basra, expecting to be put on the next flight back to Brize Norton. That was not what happened. Our commanding officer was waiting for us. He had news.
‘We’re all very pleased with the work you did. I’m sorry about your losses.’
‘Any news of Samuelson?’ I asked.
‘Samuelson? Oh yes, Samuelson. He’s been shipped back to a specialist hospital in the UK. He’s not very well, I’m afraid.’
‘Perhaps we can go and visit him when we get home,’ I suggested.
‘Perhaps you can. But that won’t be for some time yet. You’re off to Helmand tomorrow, via Camp Bastion. We’ve been rather caught out by operational requirements and we’re under strength there until the next rota comes in from home, so I’ve had to scratch together what I can from here. There’s a C-17 leaving tomorrow at six in the morning, and you’re on it.’
Fourteen
Talking about kippers with Ed Hartlepool had reminded me that it had been a very long time since food had passed my lips. It was all very well sitting around in my flat, but it wouldn’t do anyone any good if I starved to death. It wouldn’t do me any good, at any rate.
I put on my jacket, left the flat and started looking for somewhere to eat. After five minutes I came to the little Indian restaurant that I sometimes favoured. But that was where I had intended to take Adeena for supper and I didn’t feel like going in there now. I walked on. Next came a short row of restaurants: a Chinese; then a Thai; then a Greek café offering all-day breakfast. Instead of making me feel hungry the smell of food that wafted out from these places made me feel sick. I hurried on.
Presently, as had happened before, my footsteps led me down a familiar road. It was as if I had no will of my own, but was programmed to return to this place. After twenty minutes I found myself outside the empty glass windows of Emma’s restaurant. ‘Emma’s’ was what we had called it, after many arguments. After all, it had been her idea, her planning, and mostly her money that had made it all happen. The name of the place had been painted out on the fascia board, and ‘To Let’ signs were plastered across the windows, with an estate agent’s board fixed above the door. I pressed my face against the glass. Inside was just an empty room with concrete floors and a few bits of rubbish. Two years ago these windows had blazed with light on our opening night. Now it was hard to see inside.
After I came home from Afghanistan, I had stayed for only three days at home, then I moved in with Emma. Emma would make everything all right. She had been expecting me to come to her after I had stayed with my parents for a few weeks. Then we were going to look for a bigger flat to live in together.
The speed of my arrival took her by surprise. I was at her door just as she was leaving. She was beside herself with excitement at seeing me again. She rang her work, which was cooking boardroom lunches for various banks in the City, and told them she was sick. I could tell she felt bad about letting them down, but she wanted to show me she would drop everything for my sake. We went to bed five minutes later. Then we spent the rest of the day talking and catching up. In the evening we went out to dinner and celebrated my return, then came back to Emma’s flat in Parliament Hill. In the middle of the night I got out of bed feeling restless and suddenly I was violently sick. I just managed to get to the bathroom in time. I did not wake Emma. The next morning we breakfasted together before she went off to work.
‘So what are your plans now you’re in London?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’ I looked at her. She was smiling, but a faint worry crease had appeared between her brows. ‘Spend time with you, mainly.’
‘But I work all day, Dick. Or do you want me to give up my job? Then we’ll have no money at all coming in.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said again. I stood up and went and stared out of the window of her flat. You could see Hampstead Heath from there, and the green space called to me. I wanted to go and walk in the sunshine with her. I wanted to go to bed with her. I didn’t know what I wanted. She came and put her arms around me.
‘What are we going to do with you?’ she asked.
‘I’ll be all right,’ I told her. ‘I just need a bit of time to get used to life outside the army.’
‘And now I have to go to work,’ she said. ‘Or I’ll get the sack.’
For the next couple of days I hung around Emma’s flat and read the newspapers. I bought a notepad in order to write down ideas for how I would conduct my life now that I had left the army. Its pages remained a complete blank. The fact was I had never given the slightest thought to what I would do with my life. At school I had rarely looked farther ahead than the end of the week. Then my father had told me I was going to go into the army, which was fine by me. It was what he had done when he was my age, and what his own father had done. I knew I didn’t want to go to university. And once I was in the army, my life was mainly organised by other people. Now I was out, I had to think for myself for the first time in my life. It gave me a headache.
It was Emma who cut through my doubt and confusion. She came home one evening with an air of excitement.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘Tell you later. I’m going to have a bath.’
I went and sat on the edge of the bath while she lay in it.
‘Did you have a good day?’ I asked.
‘Mmm. Very. And you?’
‘Don’t know where the time has gone,’ I said. ‘One minute it was breakfast, the next minute you were back here again.’
‘Didn’t you go out for a walk or anything? Did you do the shopping I asked you to do?’
‘Oh God, sorry. I forgot. I’ll take you out to dinner instead.’
It was true. I had sat in a chair all day and my mind had gone blank. I suppose I must have been thinking about something. I
don’t believe I slept. I just stared at the wall, nagged by a feeling that I ought to go outside and take some exercise, or that there was something Emma had asked me to do. Now I remembered what it was: buy stuff for supper.
We went out to a little restaurant about four streets away. It had the merit of being cheap, and when you ate the food you could forgive its shortcomings because you knew you weren’t being overcharged. I was fussy about food. I was even quite interested in it, interested enough sometimes to ask Emma what she had prepared for her boardroom lunch. But when Emma told me what was on her mind, it still took me by surprise.
‘I’ve been talking to one of the other girls at work,’ she announced, as we chewed our way through overcooked steak. ‘There’s a restaurant not far from here called Chez Angela. I don’t think you’ve ever been. I have, once or twice. It wasn’t very good.’
‘Wasn’t? Has it closed?’
‘That’s just it. Angela Bright is the girl who owns it, and the girl I know, Mary, has been doing temporary work for her in the evenings. Angela offered her the business. She says her heart’s not in it any more. I think her husband left her, or something.’
I didn’t see what was coming.
‘My friend Mary says she could never take it on and she doesn’t have the money. Angela doesn’t want much, just someone to take over the lease and pay a nominal amount for the catering equipment and whatever else she’s leaving behind. So I told her to tell Angela that I might be interested.’
‘You might be interested, Em? What about your job?’
‘Well, what I was hoping, Dick, was that we might be interested.’
I looked at her for a moment. Her eyes were bright with enthusiasm and she was smiling, her lips parted, as if she couldn’t wait to hear what I would say.
My first instinct was to say, ‘Not in a million years.’ It would never work. I knew nothing about running a restaurant. But as I looked at Emma’s face and realised how very hard she was trying to think of something that would make me wake up and take an interest in life, I hadn’t the heart to discourage her. Looking back at that moment, I wish it had been otherwise.
We left the restaurant we had been eating in and walked through the streets to Chez Angela. As we walked Emma explained that she had some money her parents had given her which might be enough to buy the business and put it back on its feet. She wasn’t sure whether Chez Angela was still making money, but it had done at one time. The staff were good, according to her friend Mary, and Mary herself would come and help out if she was needed. Emma also thought the bank would give us a loan for working capital. She had it all worked out.
‘What would I do?’ I asked her. ‘I’m not going to put on a white jacket and become a waiter.’
‘You have to put on a suit and tie every night, look nice, greet the customers, and make sure everyone’s happy. You can help take orders and serve drinks when we’re busy. Which we will be.’
‘OK, I’ve got the picture – I’m a waiter in a suit. What will you do?’
‘Plan the menus, order the food, help with the cooking, recruit the staff and tell them what to do, count the stock, do the accounts and fill in the VAT returns.’
‘Sounds fair,’ I said. ‘I can help with the paperwork. I don’t mind that.’
Emma stopped in the middle of the street and looked at me.
‘Do you think we really might do it, Dick?’
‘Hang on, I haven’t even seen the place yet.’
We walked on. I could feel Emma almost vibrating with enthusiasm, as she hung on my arm. When we got to Chez Angela, it wasn’t very exciting. Inside it was dull and badly lit, with that slightly run-down feeling that places sometimes get when they are no longer loved. The menus looked a bit dog-eared. The tablecloths had been washed too often and the glasses and cutlery didn’t sparkle the way they should have done. We ordered a couple of glasses of wine and sat in the bar area, watching the ebb and flow of business. It was more ebb than flow.
But after a few minutes I began to see what Emma had in mind. With new cutlery and glasses, and new white linen, and better lighting, and more cheerful staff, and a bit of bustle, it could be an inviting place. The location was good, a street with two or three smart dress shops in it and a hairdresser’s; we might get the ‘ladies who lunch’ crowd during the daytime and we could do even better in the evening. Suddenly it didn’t seem like such a mad idea after all.
And what else was I going to do? I didn’t think I was capable of mapping out a new career for myself. In any case, what was I good at? What I was good at would never appear on any résumé, and would likely horrify any prospective employer. Besides, I had heard that restaurants kept you busy and that it was a very demanding job. That, I thought, was what I wanted: to be kept too busy to think.
We didn’t buy the place straight away. Emma was more careful than that. It was her own capital she would be spending, a good part of the inheritance given to her by her parents plus her own savings, and I knew the idea made her nervous. If she lost the money, she wasn’t likely to get her hands on any more.
A few nights after our first visit, we had dinner at Chez Angela. We introduced ourselves to the owner, a tall, careworn woman who seemed to be close to the end of her tether. She welcomed our interest, and was disinclined to haggle when we named a very low price. A day or two later she sent us her accounts, and Emma employed her own accountant to help her put together a business plan.
I didn’t do much apart from looking through catering equipment catalogues with Emma, and helping her write lists of things she wanted to do. I didn’t bother myself too much with the details. It was her idea, and I was happy to come along for the ride. After a couple of weeks we had a plan, and the offer of a bank loan for our working capital. We called Angela Bright, and the deal was done. The restaurant was ours.
So now the idea had become reality and for a while I was as caught up in it as Emma was. She gave in her notice at work and for a week there was a whirlwind of planning: meetings with shopfitters, with catering equipment suppliers, with decorators, with electricians. Emma interviewed staff and sometimes I sat in, but after a while she discouraged it.
‘You make them too nervous, darling. It’s the way you sometimes look at people. Go and do some menu planning instead.’
But the menus I planned weren’t very good. They cost about twice as much to cook as we could possibly have charged for them, so Emma, who was more practical, took over that side of things as well.
In the end I became an odd-job man. But I was enjoying myself too: that is to say, the listless feeling that threatened to overwhelm me most days receded a little, and the days went past quickly enough. And of course, Emma couldn’t have been happier.
‘It’s perfect for both of us,’ she said to me one night just before we exchanged contracts with Angela Bright. ‘I love cooking, and you’re keen on food and wine too. The restaurant will be a hit. I’ve arranged for lots of press releases to go out before the opening night.’
‘I don’t know why you think I’m going to be any good at looking after customers,’ I said.
‘Please try. You can be so nice when you want to be. Remember, the customers are paying our wages. At least, I hope they will be.’
‘I’ll do my best to be nice to everyone. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
‘It will be wonderful to work together, won’t it?’ Emma looked at me, almost pleading. ‘It’s not as if we’ve seen that much of each other over the last few years. You won’t get bored of being with me all the time?’
‘I won’t get bored,’ I promised her. The truth was, I didn’t really know.
The plan was that for the first year Emma and I wouldn’t take any money out of the business. We could just about afford to do that, because we both had modest incomes from other sources and I had just qualified for my army pension plus a cash grant. But it would mean no holidays and no new flat. I didn’t mind. If Emma was happy, she could look after me, and then i
n time I felt sure I would be happy too. It’s just that I’d forgotten exactly what that word ‘happy’ meant.
Meanwhile the new restaurant took shape. Emma planned an entirely different table layout, which meant we could seat a few more people, yet had extra space between the tables so that you didn’t risk putting your elbow in your neighbour’s soup while you ate. New linen, glasses and cutlery were ordered and new menus were designed and printed. The wine list and the drink stock were changed and expanded so that the bar became a place where people might want to drop in for a drink rather than just a waiting area for diners. Emma was clever with the lighting, too. The whole place sparkled and there was a bright, cheerful feel to it.
Then came the opening-night party.
We served drinks and plates of tapas. Sample menus and wine lists were scattered around. The champagne flowed. I certainly wasn’t drunk – I don’t really drink that much – but I’d probably had more than I usually do. Everything was going swimmingly and I was working the crowd: ‘Hello, I’m Richard. What do you think of it all? Marvellous. Thank you for saying so. Hope we’ll see you here in the future.’
I thought I was doing quite well. Occasionally I caught glimpses of Emma through the crowd – it was amazing how many people we had crammed into a not very large space – and she gave me a brilliant smile. Once we found ourselves next to each other. She was talking to the restaurant critic from the Evening Standard so I thought I’d better leave her to it, but she reached behind her back, found my hand and squeezed it. I could see she was enjoying herself and I felt proud of her. I turned away and bumped into a girl standing behind me. I didn’t recognise her. I must have caused her to spill some wine, because she gave her glass to the man standing next to her and started wiping her hand with a tissue.