by Will Storr
She gave me a look of baffled concern. “You think?”
“But everybody – ” I began, and then stopped at an unwelcome memory – Patrick walking down the corridor. Let the games begin.
She turned and began clearing away my basil leaves which, by now, were torn and blackening. “Thanks, but Patrick said I had to finish them,” I said.
She ignored me, scrunching the herbs into a damp ball.
“Fuck Patrick. He’ll have forgotten all about this in the morning.”
“But he’s the boss.”
“Well, the boss has left me with the keys and I have stuff to do for my mum and if I don’t – ”
She trailed off as she threw the leaves into an empty bin liner and the pots into the sink, ready for cleaning tomorrow. She walked off, leaving me alone, and I followed her into the changing room.
“Your mum,” I said, as I let myself into my locker. “Does she live nearby?”
Kathryn lifted her home clothes into her arms and held them there in a slipping bundle.
“My mum?” Kathryn said. “Yeah, well, if you take a left out of here, keep going for about a hundred yards, then take a right, follow that through the city, take a left there, and you’ll arrive at Number 3, None-of-your-Fucking-Business Avenue.”
She disappeared into the toilet and closed the door behind her. The lock bolted. She said, “Let yourself out, will you?”
And as I slept, I heard the flies in all their gathering. I felt the Hunger rising. I heard the howling of the dogs.
And I saw him, from my place in the grass outside Dor. I saw the wise man, the finder man. He turned to look towards the garden. I pulled my head down and closed my eyes. I could feel it. The air was filthy with it. The old trouble. The held trouble. The trouble in the ground and in the attic and in the mortar. All of it stirred as I slept. All of it moved towards me.
And the finder man looked in my direction.
His eyes searched the grass with great Hunger.
19
Early one morning a week or so into my time at King, a photographer from The Face magazine arrived to take pictures of the brigade, which would accompany an article about Max. When the chefs gathered for the shoot, I took the opportunity to study them closely and became transfixed. Their hair and faces were coated in a uniform layer of dimly shining grease; their chins and eye-sockets grew in unnatural directions; their noses were red and asymmetrical; their skin had turned the same lifeless green as the fluorescent lighting strips which they spent almost their entire waking lives beneath; and there were nicks and cuts and leery, random outcrops of beard-hair, the result of shaving hung-over at five a.m. every morning. They looked as if they’d just staggered in from some nuclear wilderness; a band of outlaws arrived to commit dark acts upon the trembling villagers.
Their appearance spoke of their utter commitment; they were giving everything for their calling. Their sacrifices were so deep that they had come to define the architecture of their appearance. The photographer was a lanky New Romantic with a pirate-costume jacket who couldn’t pronounce his w’s. He was visibly terrified and soon lost the nerve to actually direct his subjects, leaving them to lean threateningly against the counter and insult him in ways he could barely understand. As he blushed and snapped and quivered, all he knew was that these were swaggering bastards of the like he had not previously encountered, and he would never be allowed into the warm prison of their comradeship.
I knew this because it was precisely how all of us apprentices felt, every single day.
The brigade was more relaxed in the hours before Max arrived – there would be manly banter and occasional horseplay. But that all changed the moment Max appeared at the pass, as if we were trapped inside a held breath that would only be released at the end of the double shift – an unimaginably distant time in the future.
I’m sure that the chefs feared him equally, but he seemed to truly value their friendship. I noticed that, when a particularly brutal round of punishment had been meted out to one of us, he’d return to the pass with a whip-like smile and he’d sort of bounce around his strip of ground for a minute or two, enjoying the approval he’d glean from them all.
On my fourth shift, Max appeared looking five years older than he had the day before; paler, thinner, and yet more concentrated; honed somehow by the darkness. We didn’t yet know it, but the Evening Standard’s weekly gossip column had run a piece that day about a “posh chef, famous for his gentlemanly nature, who doesn’t welcome mention of his mother’s tragic suicide. Rumours abound that her naturally gloomy demeanour was compounded by a secret addiction to barbiturates”.
I wasn’t aware of Max speaking at all until the tickets started coming in at the beginning of service. In the preceding hours, you could tell by the behaviour of the others that a new set of rules had silently clicked into place. Patrick kept a wide circle around him, assuming all of Max’s usual responsibilities. Max himself seemed to just hang there, staring at the same page in a folder, then at the fingers of Carlo in the fish station (Carlo losing several shades of colour as he did so). You immediately thought, “That man should be in bed,” but, of course, you knew that the best place for him was the kitchen.
But then came service. That was when he plugged himself in. Everything was double speed on Max’s bad days and everything was worse. If some pastry was too dry, some sauce under-seasoned, some timing out by even a few seconds, it would start. First, of course, came the silence that always made you feel as if you had fallen through a hole in time. Then the climax, as he tried to remain composed, the muscles in his face tensed, and he began to stutter “N-n-n-n-n-n-no!”, his lips tense and blueish; syrupy white balls of spittle in the corners of his mouth; veins in the backs of his hands like throbbing worms. You’d be desperate for him to erupt – just to explode and get it all over with – but he’d suck it all back inside himself. It was awful, like watching a balloon being inflated long past its popping point. And when it did come – that was when we were most at risk from getting hurt. Whilst he’d always leave the physical abuse to Patrick, his verbal attacks could inflict a violence that was far worse. Sometimes he’d hiss and whisper things that seemed designed to break you from the inside. On other occasions, he’d simply stare at you, assaulting you with his grotesque silence, the only clue to the rages within him his unyielding stare and a pale, sinewy look about his eyes, as if they’d been glued open.
Of course, even on his good days, Max actually cooked nothing. His role was to stand at the pass at the top of the kitchen, calling orders in this strange squeaky voice, operating the machine that clanked and hissed and steamed beneath him. Patrick would plate up and Max would stand there, inspecting everything, perhaps adjusting a flower petal here or wiping at finger marks with his torchon. He’d prowl around the same square metre, sipping peppermint tea from his personal silver pot, continually running a comb through his sweat-sopping hair and issuing newly delivered orders to the brigade’s “Oui, Chef’ before inspecting the food whose constituent parts had made their way from disparate corners of the kitchen to their final triumphal coming-together on the plate in front of him. He’d also insist on seeing what came back from the dining room – each waitress would stand at the top of the pass with the dirty crockery, and if anything substantial had been left, he’d send her away with a disgusted flick of the arm. Not that his fury would ever be taken out on the girls or the maître d’. Even when he did become cross with them, he was never intimidating, merely resorting to an “Oh come on, come on, come on, you can do better than this…”. The glutinous fondness he had for his “girls” was undisguised. Indeed, the only time he ever seemed distracted was when his eyes followed one of his “terrifyingly beautiful” waitresses as she glided from the kitchen.
But if he didn’t prepare any actual food, Max did cook one thing with the skill of a grand master: loyalty. I saw it happen on the first night. It was incredible; a kind of elemental magic. Unusually, there was a separate station for the cooking of f
ish, and the chef de partie who worked it was, aside from Max, the oldest worker in the kitchen. Carlo was a melancholy Italian divorcee – still heartbroken after the discovery of his ex-wife’s various infidelities – who walked around as if he was still bent over his stove. His head was the shape of an upturned light bulb; his face bulging out from where his hat stopped, as if he’d been wearing it so long it had dictated the growth of his bones. From my place at the bottom of the kitchen, I could just about see Max admonishing him for overcooking four pieces of salmon.
“Are you trying to test me?” he said.
“Non, Chef.”
“Are you trying to see whether I’m worth three stars?”
“Non, Chef.”
“Don’t you think I’m worth three stars?”
“Oui, Chef.”
“I don’t think you do. You think I’m lucky to have two.”
“Non, Chef.”
“Do you know what happens to cooks I dismiss from here?”
“Oui, Chef.”
He moved in closer, his voice becoming quieter.
“Oui Chef, oui Chef, they end up working in hotel restaurants in Redcar making prawn cocktails for slum landlords. They become nothing. Do you know why? Because I make sure they become nothing. Do you really think you’ll be able to stroll out of here and into the arms of Nico or Albert? It won’t happen. I won’t allow it. Do you want me to prove it, you amateur? You moron can’t-cook-a-fucking-piece-of-f-f-fucking-salmon-fucking-schoolboy?”
“Non, Chef.”
He smiled emptily. The corners of his eyes twitched with rage.
“No wonder Jacqueline took your boy. No wonder she tried to f-fuck every chef in here. You didn’t know that, did you? She wanted a man who could take care of her, who could cook a simple piece of fish and she got lumbered with you, you Italian streak of piss, you fucking limp dick. You’re pathetic, do you know that?”
“Oui, Chef.”
I wasn’t in a position to get a clear view of Carlo’s face when all this was happening, but I saw it the next morning when Max gathered his men for their usual conference. Overnight, everything had changed. He put a hand on Carlo’s shoulder and announced with a grin that crackled, hearth-like, with warmth and brotherhood, “And Carlo’s given me his personal guarantee that he’ll treat today’s salmon with the precision for which he’s so justly admired, haven’t you, old boy?” And in that moment an alchemy took place that was as miraculous as anything that occurred in any pot, pan or oven. Carlo might have been up all night, cursing Max for his ingratitude, disloyalty and for stamping so hard on his already ruined heart. He might have sworn to himself he wouldn’t tolerate the vile bastard for a second longer and that, as soon as the sun was up, he’d begin making enquiries about positions in Nico’s kitchen. Every mote of pride in him – every small achievement he’d accrued in his three decades of kitchen work – might have collapsed under the impossible weight of Max’s disapproval. And yet in that instant, as the king of King welcomed him back inside the cocoon of the brigade, you could tell that Carlo had done more than merely forgive him. Max had saved the banished Italian from everything he feared and you knew his gratitude felt endless.
Nothing like this happened with the apprentices. During one shift, I watched the trainee on the other side of Kathryn have perhaps the worst day of his life. At twenty-seven, Gregory was the oldest of all of us and it showed in all the good ways. He was more than six feet tall with long and delicate watchmaker’s fingers. He was easily the best amongst us, his powerful, expressive hands working the blades and fragile ingredients seemingly of their own volition.
One of Gregory’s responsibilities was cutting the fat from veal sweetbreads. As Max was passing behind him that afternoon, Gregory accidentally cut himself.
“Ach!” he said. “Shit.”
Max stopped. He squinted over Gregory’s shoulder.
“What have you done?”
“Pardon, Chef.”
In the steel tub in front of him, two or three little drips of red were visible on the shining glands.
“You’re bleeding on my sweetbreads.” Max stared down the apprentice in all his wintery silence. Gregory pushed a thick squeeze of blood from his finger. Max didn’t move.
“Give me your tunic,” he said eventually.
“You want my… ?”
“Take it off. Give it to me. You will work the rest of this shift with your chest bare. During service you will assist Patrick on the sauté station. There’s a lot of hot fat over there. There’s a lot of fire. You will learn to be careful. You will learn. And if you make any more mistakes, I will have the rest of your uniform. Now give it to me.”
Gregory glanced down the line, to see who was watching. Guiltily, I looked away. I could hear his poppers undoing and the small commotion of his disrobing. As he handed his top to Max, I could see the humiliation of his spotty back, his thick armpit hair and the domey paunch that sat above his trousers.
He worked like that all morning, before disappearing into the fires of Patrick’s domain. At the start of evening service, we heard Max hiss at him again.
“You,” Max squealed.
We all turned around to see him staring directly at Gregory.
“Here.”
The apprentice, his shoulders filmy with sweat, put his knife down, ran his beautiful hands down his torchon and walked to the pass. He was blinking madly with the tension as Max glowered coldly at him.
“Can you see this?” he said eventually.
Patrick was beside him, holding the nugget of offal.
“Oui, Chef.” said Gregory, with an efficient nod.
“Can you see what’s wrong with it?”
“Oui, Chef.”
“Are you absolutely sure?” he said.
“Oui, Chef.”
Patrick held it up to his eye, causing Gregory to pull his head back slightly.
“I’m not sure that you can,” he said. “Because if you can see it now, why couldn’t you see it earlier, when you were supposed to be trimming it?”
“Oui, Chef, I can see it, Chef.”
“Chef Patrick, will you allow him to see it more clearly?”
He punched the hot ball of offal into Gregory’s eye. The apprentice, trying not to make a cry, gasped horribly – it was an animal sound, more like a grunt – and slipped on the wet floor, banging his head on the counter with such force that the metal spoons on it clanked. I glanced at Kathryn to gauge her reaction. She looked as if she was very cold.
“Get up,” said Max.
Gregory fumbled for the side of the counter and pulled himself back up, his clogs slipping on the wet floor as they struggled for purchase.
“How long have you been cooking?” he asked.
“Ten years, Chef,” Gregory said, trying desperately not to cry.
Once he was up, the young chef rubbed the injured side of his head and, as he did so, his arm apparently roused Max’s curiosity.
“Show me your arms,” he said.
He held them dumbly in front of him.
“You don’t have enough burns to work in this kitchen,” he said, with a withering sigh. He turned to Patrick. “Make him presentable, will you?”
“Certainly, Chef.”
Using his torchon, Patrick picked up a set of metal tongs that had been resting in a hot pan and walked, grinning, towards Gregory, who now had terrible patches of drained white skin extending down from his eyes into his cheeks. It didn’t take much. Patrick only had to tap the scorching metal onto his arm for all six foot-plus of him to collapse back to the floor in a mess of snivelling and crying. He began wailing, “I don’t care what you do. I don’t care any more. Do what you like. I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care.”
Max stood over him.
“This,” he said, “is a defining moment. Now stand up. And cook.”
Gregory didn’t reply. He didn’t even look at Max. He just scrabbled up again and walked back to his station, his still-terrifie
d face running with tears and snot.
The next morning, something had changed in Gregory. There was no passion; no urgency; no life. The day after that, he didn’t come in at all. Nobody commented upon his absence.
20
After my first day, I was assigned yet again to basil duties. The moment Patrick handed me the crate, I felt an acute urge to run out of the door and back to my bedroom. But the work I did was unremarked upon and soon I was de-crusting bread and cutting it into squares for croutons; squeezing limes and lemons; peeling freshly boiled broad beans and then nicking-out the little cords that connected their two halves; filling beurriers for the tables and so on.
At the same time, I was busy going through the ancient retinue of pain that kitchen apprentices have known since the eighteenth century, when the first restaurants were opened after the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, which drove all the aristocrats from the country, leaving their newly discharged cooks to wonder how to go about making a living. The bending down and the hours of tiny repetitive movements cause a very specific pain, like a knuckle pressing into your vertebrae at a single concentrated spot between the shoulder blades. Slowly, it ripples out into two great angel’s wings of agony, spreading laterally and then down, down, as you go into your ninth hour, when it collects at the coccyx. It stays there, growing in pressure, as it begins to leak its leaden soreness into your legs. Soon, the hurt encompasses your entire frame.
Only once, during those first two weeks, was I asked to prepare Ambrose’s lunch again. As I was doing so, I became aware of Max observing me from a distance. Those great watery eyes examined me in a coolly fascinated way as I chopped my onions and leaned into the steam of my pan. My sauce was still five minutes away from being properly reduced when he finally approached and dipped a teaspoon into it.
“You’re thickening with tomato purée?” he said, taking a step back so that I could continue cooking.
“Oui, Chef,” I said. “And reducing. No roux.”